David Gooblar, assistant professor of English at the University of Iowa and author of The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching (Harvard UP, 2019), visited the College in September 2024 to speak with Gen Ed faculty and TFs/TAs about building trust in the classroom – an essential condition for intellectually vital conversations to occur. Over two separate lunches for Gen Ed faculty (offering the same content), David focused less on how to handle hot moments (a subject on which there is widely accessible advice), and more on a question that, he suggested, is at once harder to answer and more interesting: how do we foster difficult conversations in the first place? David argued that creating a classroom environment centered on trust was an essential part of the answer. If students trust each other (and their instructor), they are more likely to be vulnerable and take risks. David left faculty and TFs with some practical advice on how they might create an atmosphere of trust, which is critical in fostering engaging discussion in the classroom.
Prof. David Gooblar and Trust in the Classroom
