What If Teachers Were Invisible?

Recently, I have been auditing an online philosophy class on death (located here if you’re interested), and I stumbled upon an interesting phenomenon when my normal watching routine was interrupted. I had suddenly forgotten that I had to do laundry, but Shelly Kagan had just brought up an exciting point about why death should not be feared.

Argh. Clean sheets can wait.

And then I heard my mother scolding me from thousands of miles away to never jeopardize my health (clean sheets are good for you though: proof).

Okay, then resolving my lifelong angst about death would have to wait.

Why can I never win?

But then, a solution so embarrassingly simple struck me — in fact, I’m pretty sure you, the reader, already saw this coming from the first sentence of this article.

So yeah…I noted the timestamp of the video lecture, downloaded the audio, synced the file to my phone, and went off to make my mom happy conduct my weekly cleanse of soiled garments and cloths.

And here’s when the slightly-too-long introductory anecdote gets to the point:

When I got back from the laundry room, I did not want to be rude and interrupt Shelly Kagan to go through the process of switching back to the video format — so I just sat down and listened, listened while staring at a paused video and doing nothing else. And it just felt weird.

Every day, people listen to music while working out. People listen to audiobooks while driving back home from work. People listen to podcasts while doing chores. The artist in the recording studio is not singing to a focused fan but instead a female splitting her attention between humming lyrics and doing body squats. The narrator is not speaking to a student at a classroom but instead a commuter trying to merge right. The storytellers are not talking to a diligent listener but instead to a father scrubbing the oil off a frying pan.

I could sit still and watch a professor talk about the distinction between dying and death for an hour, but as soon as that professor becomes invisible, as soon as my sense of vision is not engaged, I become restless. I think about the chores I could be doing. I think about ab exercises I could be doing. I think about doing something or rather anything else that can be done while continuing to listen on…

Why do humans have an existential need to only listen while doing other things? I have a few guesses (1, 2), but that is not what I want to discuss. Instead, I want to focus on how knowledge of this behavioral phenomenon affects the decisions for an educator, specifically teachers who offer audio of their own lectures. That is, when the teacher becomes invisible and the students continue to listen to the audio lecture while performing other tasks, what should the teacher do?

I do not have the answer, but I can offer some immediate thoughts.

1. Focus on information dumping instead of problem solving

Research has shown that divided attention negatively impacts problem solving. According to Bloom’s taxonomy of learning objectives based on complexity levels, any level of problem-solving — whether that be creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, or understanding — is more complex than simply memorizing and remembering information. Thus, given the compromised potential of problem solving with a divided attention, perhaps invisible teachers should solely focus on information dumping facts and background knowledge.

2. Supplement audio lecture with additional descriptive language

In almost every lecture there are diagrams, charts, graphs, and pictures which are used to support and augment what the teacher is speaking about. However, because listeners do not have the visual aids, invisible teachers can make the extra effort to add more details when describing what is going on in the visual aids.

3. Selectively offer different lecture versions catering towards different attentional spans

Lastly, with audio-editing software, teachers can utilize the previous two suggestions by selectively removing portions of audio which are not suitable for audio-listeners while also adding extra portions of audio which are — problem solving and supplemental descriptive language, respectively. Then, the teacher can advertise the original lecture video and audio for those who want to sit down and only focus on the lecture and also the edited version for those who want to listen to the lecture while doing other things.

Or maybe the benefits of these actions would not be worth the time spent implementing them. Either way, in the pursuit of best teaching practices for students, the constraints and affordances of audio-only lectures should definitely be considered, especially as more and more people listen to podcasts and lectures (1, 2).

So what do you think teachers should do when they become invisible?