How I made a student-driven classroom (and what I learnt in the process)

Every time a new semester at my university starts, I see the same thing. Teachers prepare slides — most likely recycle the leftovers from the previous years — and present them to a class of students. This is the normal, accepted way in modern education. It is also pretty much accepted that the students struggle through the lectures and remember very little afterwards. Apparently studies have shown that within 40 minutes of attending the lecture, students almost can't recall anything at all. To me, this never felt like education.

Last year I was a TA on a Masters course, replacing the actual teacher for a few of the lessons. It was a bad time slot for learning or teaching, Friday afternoon. No matter how motivated and dedicated the students are — and computer science students at this level certainly are — it was going to be difficult to keep their attention at the end of the week. But a more important challenge I was faced with was the fact that the programming language I was about to teach was also new to me. Such are the realities of higher education — sometimes you have to learn while teaching. But as I discovered, this wasn’t at all a bad thing. In fact, my lack of knowledge and this unfortunate time slot meant that I had to reconsider the content, the teaching method and my role in general.

I knew a typical presentation wouldn’t work — looking at it from the students’ perspective, I could think of better ways to spend a Friday afternoon. Neither would hands-on exercises since I probably knew less about the intricacies of this language than some of my students did. Unsettling as the prospect of teaching something I knew so little about was, it seemed to me that this was a perfect opportunity to try out a different kind of classroom. So, I decided to simply mediate their learning, to spark up their curiosity about the subject, and to let them be the stars of the show. Partly because I was curious about what would happen, partly because I had no choice. Since none of this was rehearsed or prepared but was instead emerging in an organic way in front of me, I had to become inventive, have an endless supply of ideas, pay attention to where my students' interests were going and go along with them. Here are some things that helped me create my lessons and things I learnt in the process.

Understand your students

At the beginning of the first class, I asked each student to spend a few minutes writing about themselves, their background, their interests, their skills. I wanted to get a more honest reflection of their personalities (as opposed to making them do incredibly awkward introductions in front of the group), as well as to get a sense of their writing skills (for some reason it’s very common that Masters students still cannot write). Now I knew what my students found interesting, and what programming experience they had so I could use this information for setting projects and finding relevant talks for them to watch (more on these later). If you want to create a personalised classroom, you have to know your students.

Assign parts

Then I assigned each student a part of the lesson to read for 10–15 minutes and then explain to the others. Kind of like a poetry reading group. One student got functions, another, variables and so on. Together they dissected the programming language and gave each other a much-needed basic overview of its key concepts. And now that they had the task of explaining something to their classmates (rather than simply consuming information), they actually had to pay attention to the material.

Let the students be presenters

With the teacher always at center stage, students end up relying on an authority figure to deliver the lessons, to present information and to decide exactly what they should learn. I believed the students should be given the opportunity to shine and to take control of their own knowledge. So I stepped aside. At the end of each lesson I assigned a small project in the area of their interests as homework. How they did it was left entirely up to them, the only criteria being that it had to be done in the language that we were learning. Then each new class would start with students presenting and explaining their projects to the classmates. They would prepare their own slides and explain their ideas, the design process, the execution. They would ask the others for feedback on the code. I was really amazed how creatively they approached the task, making clustering algorithms based on the way that galaxy and stars are formed. This was student-driven education. They were presenting their own interests and passions, beginning to look at themselves and each other for support.

Teach them to discover information

One of the most valuable learning skills you can pass onto someone. Again, because of the way in which lectures are normally delivered, with one central figure who apparently holds all the answers, students have come to expect the teacher to "feed" information to them. I wanted to show my students that it could be done differently, that they needn’t rely on me, that they could do their own research and only ask me if advice was needed in the process, but not for the information itself. When they know how to search for their own information, they can discover things that interest them and their education will really flourish. So instead of giving them the answers to the questions they asked in class, I asked them to do some googling and tell the class what they discovered.

An online forum for questions

As another way to reduce their reliance on authority, I set up a forum on the university system and encouraged the students to use it to communicate with one another about project ideas or problems they encountered. Now if there was a problem, students would post a message. This also drastically reduced the number of emails they sent me, since they were now able to help each other. And I could track their activity and monitor the kind of problems they were having, and how well they were solving them. This was especially useful when installing the software in the initial lessons. The only problem was that the size of my group was too small and eventually, past the software questions, interactions got boring. Or perhaps, the students got to know each other in real life and no longer needed the board.

Problem finding not problem solving

I asked them to work together on a programming project, which was entirely open-ended. The whole process, from spotting a problem, to finding and designing a solution, communicating their approach and project managing the task was left up to them. To complete this task, they had to get to know each other, each other’s strengths, interests and characters. They had to identify the best person for programming the assignment, the best person for managing it, for presenting it. The ability to notice problems (and not just to provide solutions to the problems I point out) was central to this task. The first skill these engineers and computer scientists need is the ability to see not only how to fix broken things but how to make things better. And to dream up things that don’t yet exist. This is something that the education system just doesn’t tend to encourage.

Ted talks and other videos

None of the students in my — admittedly small — group had ever even heard of Ted Talks. I knew that these bright young people could do with inspiring stories and experiences. I could never give it to them as well as Ted speakers, so I decided to end each lesson with a Ted Talk. Now we had Chris Adami and Dan Dennett finishing the lessons. (I knew the kind of speakers my students would be interested in from those written introductions in the beginning.) And for me it took care of the last 20 minutes of the class, when my own concentration was way past its peak, letting the class finish on a high note.

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All in all, I did very little teaching myself — my students and our “guest speakers” did the most. Instead, I found myself immersed in the whole process along with them. This process was no longer about the students or the teacher, it was about all of us. We were feeding off each other, sparking each other’s creativity and making our own learning path in real time. This flexibility blurred the boundaries between teaching and learning; teachers and learners. I was a student on that course, too.

Of course, I have no idea how it would have turned out had I followed the standard path that we all take for granted. But I know that putting the standard curriculum — or your own academic agenda — in front of the students and making them into passive consumers of information is not that hard. It is much harder to keep them interested, to encourage, to help them discover, and to remain inventive as a teacher in the process. What I hoped to have accomplished was very different from the goals of a standard class. I hoped to have opened a new perspective for the students, to have opened their eyes to the fact that they themselves could define what they wanted to learn, make their own decisions, discover and follow their own passions and ultimately, in the process, learn not only about the subject but also about themselves. I hoped to have sown seeds of possibility. And for this opportunity, I am incredibly grateful.