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?
SMART Teaching 