Stages in the Teaching Process
The result of a Twitter exchange with students at US Universities, who go back to start term this week, and have some interesting expectations. Many courses have “Syllabus Week”, where the Professor is supposed to go through the syllabus, rather than actually teach anything. Naturally many students consider this as “party week”. So here are my attempts to describe the three phases of learning. I’m specifically thinking of Higher Education here, but really it should be generally applicable at all levels of education to varying degrees.
The “I’m waiting to be told what to learn” mindset.
This is, sadly, the end product of many high schools. In this mindset students have to be told exactly what to do. Exactly what to learn, exactly which questions in the book to try. They then do all this, and nothing more. They are waiting for input. This is really the “educational automaton” phase, which we need to discourage. We can encourage independent study so that we get to
“I need to learn this in order to accomplish that objective”
This is an improvement on the educational automaton, but is sadly often focussed on very short term goals such as “I want to be an engineer, so I need to study engineering”. This may also overlap strongly with the educational automaton phase, so you get the effect of students passively waiting to be told how to do engineering. But once you get the idea of independent study going, then this becomes a very powerful tool. Now we have empowered learners. They can see an objective and then go and find the necessary education. I really only developed this myself at the start of my PhD work, where I needed to program a computer to take data for my experiments. To do it required writing a program in assembly language. I found a book in the University library and taught myself to program in assembly language. I would prefer to instill this in my students right from the start. My own University teachers did not do this.
And then there’s the third stage:
This is a really cool thing to learn. It might not be immediately useful, but I’m going to learn about it anyway.
The sad thing is that this is the way that children learn. Our education system somehow stifles this love of learning for its own sake, and then at the Higher Education end we have to rekindle the enthusiasm. People who leave University with this enthusiam are going to be the creators. They are going to make the connections between the seemingly irrelevant things they have learned, and they are going to harness them to create something new and extraordinary.
As the teacher, I have no idea about what things they will find to study, or how they are going to connect them together. But the challenge is to help individuals find that path, so they can unlock their full potential.
