Category: Students

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?

Partnership with Students

Partnership is key to the effectiveness of what happens in a university classroom. Partnership between teachers and students. The students need to understand why a teacher might choose to use a particular curriculum delivery approach, whether the approach uses technology extensively or not.

Without that partnership and understanding of the role played by both sides, it is highly likely that either the teacher or at least some of the students will be disappointed. That partnership component is especially important when a teacher uses techniques that are different to those the students experience regularly.

Using technology in different ways in a classroom (e.g. to get students to participate with their own internet enabled devices) is one common situation where things can go wrong, if the students have not been prepared for what is going to happen and why its going to happen that way.

People

The most important tools within a physical classroom are the people in it, the teachers and the students. Ultimately their attitudes, enthusiasm and desire are what will make something useful happen during a class.

It is fair to say that traditionally a teaching session would be led by a teacher and to some extent that should still be true today. However clearly there is a drive to engage students more, not just so that they are more attentive in class and respond when asked a question but so that they play a more co-creational role in learning.

One of the big changes that many teachers or lectures face is that shift from ‘sage on the stage’ to ‘guide on the side’.