Teachers, It’s not about You
We can be more than dispensers of information
Eighty-three slides!
If you’ve ever been in an Army class, that number might trigger some post-traumatic stress. It’s a phenomenon that results from a counter-productive and flawed view of teaching — that the goal is to dispense knowledge.
It’s flawed because it assumes that the instructor is the source of the knowledge, and the more efficiently it can be dispensed, the more learning will occur.
The dispensing model of teaching is counter-productive because it often incentivizes students to do things that inhibit learning.
The goal of instruction is to cause learning to occur, not to merely dispense information.
Learning is about changing behavior
I recently attended a course that comprised 30 distinct lessons. A typical one lasted an hour and mainly involved the recitation of material on PowerPoint slides. Eighty-three was not even the longest one.
Information was important but densely packed into the lessons. Because there was so much of it, and because the instructors were experts in their respective subject areas, each class became a contest to dump as much knowledge into our heads.
