Things I desparately need to avoid doing...

I had the chance to give a colloquium last week, and what was really neat was I had the chance too to talk with a number of (primarily grad student teaching assistants) about learner centered and active
teaching, both at a meeting but also (more importantly) at dinner. The main messages that I took away from the discussions were :

1. The importance of not forgetting about the diversity of learning styles,
2. How crucial it is to give students access to the depth and level of materials they need (and by need, I think I mean successfully complete the assessments of the course, AND are left with the skills and knowledge they need for the next course in the sequence or curriculum, if the latter is a relevant consideration for one's course). This is not to belittle the importance of giving them a sequence of opportunities to practice the skills they will need also (that just wasn't the point during this conversation).

The most important insights were those from the graduate student instructors who had both been through active learning courses, and now were seeing things from an instructor's perspective also.

Two stories stuck in my mind. In the first, the student expressed the opinion that they had benefitted greatly from an early-stage inquiry-based course (where much of the course was them undertaking and solving an authentic problem with the assistance of the instructor), and what they learned there they remembered well. The problem was that this course was a prerequisite for additional courses, and content that was required by the second course had been removed from the first to create the room to make the course inquiry-based. The student had to make this content up themselves from studying from books.

The second was more concerning still. A department had converted many of its courses to an active format. A number of things were described to have gone wrong in different cases. In some areas of the curriculum good books were inadequate/non-existent, and with an absence of good notes (which the student attributed to a lack of lectures, I don't see that this needs to be the case, good notes could have been provided in other ways) it was very hard to meaningfully learn. In other areas, assessment was lacking(!) or completely mis-matched (usually much too involved, and classes were going over simpler content). An argument that was made is that students by the time they are majoring in a field have constructed their own 'active learning' support group already for asking questions, doing homeworks, etc., and that in those circumstances using class time to communicate the professor's structured take on the field is the most important goal.

I am reminded of the section in McKeachie's Teaching Tips where the reasons to lecture are discussed:

• presenting the most up to date view
• summarizing/synthesizing materials from scattered sources
• adapting material to student needs
• helping students read more effectively by creating a conceptual framework
• focusing on key principles/concepts/ideas
• modeling how to solve a problem like an expert
• communicating enthusiasm

At least for me, all this is food for thought....