Category: Teachers

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?

Teaching wirelessly in class

All too often classrooms are designed with a ‘front’ or main teaching wall. Associated with this is usually a lectern with and networked computer at which it is so tempting for the tutor to stand, protected from their audience and with their back carefully protected by having a wall behind them.

All joking aside how often have you seen that happen – how often do you do it yourself?

Wouldn’t it be more fun, more interesting to be free of the lectern and have a device in your hands with your materials on, be they slides or websites or an app, and just move around the room confident that whatever you are showing or doing on your device can be seen by everyone in the room on the main display screen? You can do that using Reflector as described briefly in a previous post.

Watch some videos about how staff are teaching wirelessly with tablets.

It’s a brave thing to try if you’ve never done it before and like all things new what you needs to be planned carefully. But if you try I think you will find some useful benefits for you teaching in class.

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’.