Month: April 2017

What really is innovative teaching?

There is a lot of myth about innovative new teaching approaches in innovative classroom spaces using innovative technology. As you may have gathered, the overuse of the word innovative in the previous sentence is suggestive of a degree of ‘fun-poking’ at anyone proclaiming to have an innovative teaching approach just because they use technology or a physical space that looks more like the bridge of the starship Enterprise than a lecture room. (That includes poking fun at the author of this blog by the way who has always rather fancied being a starship Captain as it happens).

For a start in terms of conceptual goals for a teacher, for teaching – not that much has really changed despite all the ‘innovative’ hype. The goals of teaching, of learning, that many lecturers had in 1980 or before are pretty much the same goals that we have now. The pressure to deliver those goals, mostly external, are of course greater. Life is not made easier when a Secretary of State refers to the ‘lamentable state of teaching in universities’ before the inevitable publication of another paper that’s supposed to be green but looked very white to me when I printed it off.

Of course, some of the tools (the props a teacher uses) to achieve the goals should be different today and they certainly provide new and exciting ways to present, collect and make use of information and to support harnessing the collective knowledge of a group. They also provide new options for engaging both small and large groups with information, ideas and concepts.

So much of the innovation is really about dwhat different tools might now be used in a classroom to help deliver the goals teachers have had for a long time. I am not sure there are very many new innovative teaching methods as such, are you?

Why it can be hard to stop lecturing so much

So the current demands on university teaching are a pretty all order. What makes it such a tall order to move to new, allegedly innovative ways of teaching that avoid @chalk and talk overkill’?

For a start, classes are large, students often don’t want to be that active or engage (it is less effort to just sit and listen, or browse the web or whatsApp), many of us are familiar with a lecture (during which I’ll throw out questions that no one wants to answer) + tutorial (rearrange yourselves to work in groups, “oh Lord I have to move and talk to other people, this is a pain”….) approach, because that is what we experienced when we learned at the feet of our university sage.

Then, you have the louder student voices, that can have a disproportionate impact, who will proclaim that being made to work in groups and not be lectured to is being cheated out of real teaching. (They need help). Students also complain a lot about assessment of course – here they may have a point, we’ll see.

Does that all sound a bit gloomy?

Some challenges for the University teacher

This site is about being a teacher in a university and practicing SMART teaching. It is aimed at helping the person responsible for orchestrating the student learning experience (in-class, out of class, around class) in times when the rhetoric is about changing the way teaching happens whilst at the same time better meeting our ‘customer’s’ expectations.

We are urged to do less ‘lecturing’ and get students to work together more, be more active participants in classroom sessions during which they collaborate and, if we are really lucky, create new knowledge and outputs. And alongside all of that, we are also pressured into using technology more to help achieve the change.

And as if that’s not enough alongside stuff, alongside that last that, we have to worry about assessing students, giving them good feedback, getting them to engage with that feedback and helping them to think, reflect, improve, develop their skills, become more employable, deliver world peace, solve poverty and hopefully not degenerate into too much populism.

Phew!! Tall order or what?