Paul Quick February 4th, 2010
Why, after years of advances in understanding how humans learn and advances in technology enabling professors to teach student in innovative ways, is lecturing still the dominant form of instruction in higher education? Certainly, increased class sizes hasn’t helped break the habit of the sage-on-the-stage model, but I also think that failure has led many professors to resort back to the relatively safe and reliable teaching method of straight lecture.
I’ve had the experience of offering up a new idea, technique, or methodology to faculty interested in improving their teaching and being told, “I tried that. It didn’t work. I went back to lecturing.” My instinctive reply wants to be, “How did you try it? Why did you think it didn’t work? How do you know that it didn’t work?”
Just this week, watching an instructor implement a suggestion that I had offered for engaging students at the start of a class, I found my suggestion being implemented in a way that didn’t take into account the learning goals for that session. It made me feel like the woman in T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” who responds, “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all.” In the spirit of recursive feedback, I suggested that the technique be constructed in a way that leads to the topics being covered in the session. I’m eager to see how the instructor tweaks the technique next time.
In the latest edition of McKeachie’s Teaching Tips, the thirteenth to date (!), an expanded chapter on teaching with technology highlights the problem that some faculty have with integrating new ideas and technologies into their classrooms. While student response systems (“clickers”) have seen widespread adoption on campus, some students are reporting that they don’t like the devices because they are being used for attendance. For a faculty member, adopting a new technology and going through the process of learning how to use it is a major investment of time; when they get less than what they expected from a teaching innovation, some faculty are tempted to give up on it before experimenting with different, more intentional ways of using it. Though the immediate advantage of using clickers is to deal with every-increasing class sizes in terms of attendance and summative assessment, the burgeoning research indicates that clickers are most effective when used to “gauge students’ conceptual understanding when combined with strategies for active learning, such as peer instruction” (246) or think-pair-share. The answer to less-than-positive results with clickers is not to abandon them but to examine how you are asking students to use them to learn the material.
Intuitively, most of us now that teaching tricks or new gadgets aren’t going to improve teaching and learning. It takes reflective practice to understand how innovations in teaching will best serve the teaching and learning goals we have for our classes. Too often, though, we try something once and if it fails we blame the tool and not the user. I encourage folks to try something new in their classes and if it fails, try to figure out why. Or call CTL. Maybe we can help you figure it out.
