What do you want from a teacher?

[pmb]

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education. I'm pretty sure that having a teacher is essential to the learning process, but the contents of a lecture/class/lab/whatever now have to be ... what? Certainly different in some way - slowly dealing out facts in dribs and drabs is old school (hah!) and boring, ignoring those facts and zooming in to discuss implications and intuition is nice, but lends itself too readily to surface-level-only understanding.

The middle path seems like a nice compromise, with facts dashed across the board quickly and then intuition discussed aloud followed by homework assignments that require a solid understanding of the facts, but my own intuition is screaming at me that I am looking at things on the wrong axis somehow. Like I have divided everything into left/right and ignored some crucial up/down aspect that will simplify the whole matter.

What's the missing axis? What do you want from a class? Facts? Intuition? A bit of both? A check mark on your transcript? Are online classes consisting of prerecorded lectures a good idea? Would you go to school via podcast? Why or why not? What would the podcast be missing that more traditional schooling provides?

Answers that include how class should change in light of emerging technologies and trends like MIT's Open Courseware initiative will be given double bonus extra credit.

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Get your letters today! Many are still unclaimed! I may forgotten to link to someone who already did it; if so, please let me know. This is taking a while, so I think I will start stealing the answers that others have already provided...

Comments

[conform.livejournal.com]

i am a huge, huge, tremendous fan of the socratic method. my high school math teacher, a brilliant and totally bipolar man, spent the first two or three weeks of my calculus class gradually nudging us toward solving a simple problem involving a car accelerating. we didn't open a book or use the word "derivative" in class until at least the second month. can you do that with online course work? maybe, sort of... but it's challenging to do with a live teacher (nobody said teaching was easy) and my suspicion is that you almost always need a live teacher to moderate the impulse, when frustrated, to skip ahead and look up the answer, when what you're really trying to overcome is often a conceptual, not factual, block.

((longer rant impared by consumption of 2^-1 bottles champagne))

[clairebaxter.livejournal.com]

I think what I most want is the interaction -- the ability to have my questions answered, with quick clarifications if necessary. That's what I've found lacking in online classes (I presume the same would be true in a podcast).

[agthorr.livejournal.com]

What's the missing axis? What do you want from a class?

Peers.

[auranja.livejournal.com]

This is the model I've been working in (and loving) lately, although it's maybe not applicable to your field.

I make up a performance, and show it to one of my advisers - either my choreography adviser, or my director, or my weekly rehearsal mates.

They respond to what I do thusly: What you're doing reminds me of this and this and this. It also raises this question and this question and this question. It makes me want to see this and this and this.

Then I go work on my own to revise and refine what I've done, or to make something else completely new.

I go back to show them, and after a while, they begin to respond this way: I'm beginning to see this and this and this pattern in what you're doing.

Then I go work on my own and decide how much of those patterns I actually want to keep in my finished product.

So the learning is self directed, and I get lots of one-on-one time with different advisers, who are experts in their own diverse fields.

And the "class" is mostly me being active and them observing. They don't prepare the lesson; I do. They're just able to offer insight at the end of the session because of their years of experience.

[akjdg.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Well, to me as a student, education would serve the following purposes:

1) to learn facts
2) to understand processes, theories, methodologies, philosophies.
3) to learn how to learn, think, and do.

Helplessly, educational methods are irrelevant, just so long as they are effective.

Also, this horse wants to drink. Just getting that far can raise a whole different host of issues, problems, and discussions.

[auranja.livejournal.com]

Sometimes, within this model, I'll realize that I won't be able to have the performance I want without acquiring some specific skill. So I'll have to search out a teacher who will lead me through the necessary drills to get the skill.

For a lot of years I did drill and assignment-based skill-building, with no sense of how I might put those skills to interesting use.

I do use some of those skills now, and they did help orient me to the fundamentals of my field, but I don't use a lot of those skills now.

I find my current way - letting the bigger project dictate which skill-drills I'll devote myself to - much more satisfying.

I wonder if this would work for most students? It requires having a passion for a project. Maybe that's not a common thing to have.

[clipdude.livejournal.com]

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education.

Was this ever a vibrant model of education? I could always get facts out of a book, and most classes have always had assigned textbooks with most of the facts in them. I don't think a teacher's job has ever been to merely restate facts for the students. Rather, teachers have always been putting this information into perspective, providing feedback, interacting with students, facilitating class discussion, and so on.

[pants-of-doom.livejournal.com]

It depends on what I'm learning.

From a language teacher, I want them to speak the target language all the time, just kind of babble at me, and challenge me to put things together.

In law school I want teachers who can help me get the theory, and the parts of the theory that I miss on my own. I want help drawing connections between cases. I want discussion of implications and what's going on behind the scenes with policy issues. Socratic method can be good, drill sargent approach is bad.

I also want teachers who can make a class feel comfortable enough to actually participate instead of acting like deer in headlights.

[dragonmudd.livejournal.com]

Yes.

[mary919.livejournal.com]

What would be missing? A dedicated environment in which to practice without distractions. I don't think education is just about retrieving information or being able to retrieve information. Getting your beginning chops in any field is going to be... boring! But you've got to have them, even if it's just to have a sense of belonging to the tradition of the discipline and knowing the history.

So I guess that's what I think would be missing-- context.

[cabanasloth.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting question. After some thought, I'm going to have to disagree with your premise:

Nowadays, there is so much information available at everyone's fingertips that teachers giving students facts is a dead and dying model of education.

While this may be true in some fields (e.g. computer science), it remains far from true in others. What information there is readily available and packaged at an instructional level in neuroscience (to take one arbitrary example) is typically both superficial and ~10 years out of date. In this respect, the internet is really little different from a second textbook. Thus it hasn't had a fundamental impact on the relationship of a teacher to their class.

I'll skip over the "what should teachers teach" aspect of your question, since far smarter people than I have tackled this one, and get on to "how class should change in light of emerging technologies":

What *would* make a difference would be widely available and high-quality instructional animations. The difficult aspects of what I teach aren't the static "facts" as such, as my kids can do a fine job rattling those off back at me, but gaining an understanding of the underlying dynamic processes that we're trying to describe. Here's an example: the most difficult thing we've taught so far this semester is basically "how your eye builds a bandpass filter" (keep in mind these are sophomore psychology students, so using the words "bandpass" or "filter" is right out). To try to get this across, I end up jumping around in front of the class and waving my arms a lot, but what I'm *really* trying to do is to convey a sense of the dynamics in the eye ("light *here* makes this cell want to fire more, but at the same time light over *here* makes the cell fire less..."). You could replace me with a nice instructional video and everyone would be both happier and less embarrassed.

But, those things are both difficult and time consuming to make, and I'd argue they require a level of specialized knowledge of the subject matter that is actually *beyond* that required to teach in front of a class - if the details of a certain part of this process aren't clear to me, I can just gloss over it as I'm presenting it, but if you're constructing something for widespread use, you'd better get it right. The set of people who have both the skills to create an animation *and* the level of subject knowledge to make it accurate is not only finite and small, but those people have lots of other things to be doing with their time.

This isn't something that can be solved by an increase in bandwidth. It *could* be greatly helped by a freely available and easy to use animation tool - Flash might actually suffice for this.

(In a similar vein, I'd argue that Powerpoint (etc) has actually greatly *helped* the quality of instruction in my field, since it allows complicated diagrams to be easily reproduced on screen in front of a lecture hall. This helps immensely when you're trying to convey static information (e.g. parts of the eye, what goes where...) but doesn't do a hell of a lot for dynamics. Now, where are the static diagrams we're showing on Powerpoint coming from? Well, they're coming from the interweb, and so this particular widespread availability of information has been quite helpful - but fundamentally you aren't getting anything different from a really nice powerpoint slide than you could get from a similar quality page in a textbook.)

So there.

[invisibor.livejournal.com]

Note: The MIT Open Courseware Initiative is cool.
Note 2: The MIT Open Courseware Initiative has no section on Education.

I've decided that the problem with schooling is the lack of an understood goal.

Schooling is the method by which we are differentiated into social class based on cognitive skill.
Schooling is the transfer of facts from one brain to another.
Schooling is designed to make people employable.
Schooling is designed to make people moral.
Schooling is a method for keeping teens and pre-teens out of their parents' hair until they move out.
Schooling is meant to instill proper social behaviour into students.
Schooling is meant to make great thinkers out of students.
Schooling is a means to combat racism.
Schooling is a place to eat lunch.

So, depending on what your student, teacher and society want, you use different techniques. Some work better than others for each of the goals listed.

[steuard.livejournal.com]

You're probably already entirely aware of this, but there's an enormous amount of research being done on teaching methods (with and without reference to new technologies). The field of "Physics Education Research", for example, is becoming a respectable specialty for a professional physicist (though I think still less respected by the general community as one's primary specialty).

The big message that I've seen coming out of those efforts can be summed up in the single phrase "active learning". The research that I've seen cited claims that student learning in any of the zillion active learning approaches out there is more successful than with a traditional course. That's apparently true even when you control for how "good" or experienced a given professor is (there have even been studies where the same professors taught the same class first one way and then another).

Essentially, the research seems to show that students learn surprisingly little from lecture-style courses (except for a "lucky" few, who not coincidentally end up being the majority of people who continue in academia and become professors). Courses where the students are actively involved during class, in practically any way, just work better. The cute summary of the active learning concept is that the professor should be "a guide on the side, not a sage on the stage". (I've tried to incorporate some of that into my classes, but it's hard work! And it always seems to take more time than I have, though I'm assured that it doesn't have to.)

I have no idea how one could be a "guide on the side" in an online course. I guess if the whole course were run as a newsgroup-style discussion or something... but I think it would be harder to get the students to participate actively than in a classroom. Other technologies (like "electronic response systems", aka "clickers") can be immensely valuable for getting students to participate (and letting them know that their participation is being monitored); I'd like to give them a spin one of these days, but my current school doesn't have that technology in place.

[freyley.livejournal.com]

a different point of view, often with an eye toward intent and a good knowledge of how structure supports intent, is the defining characteristic of a good editor, and I suspect that the term editor could be widened to include teaching any creative endeavor.

I think teaching is probably very different based on what you're trying to teach, but I think the important generalities are methodological, not subject: teaching someone scientific inquiry is pretty similar regardless of biology, psychology, or physics. Teaching them creative endeavor or mathematics is very different. There are probably other useful areas.

[esmesquall.livejournal.com]

It depends on the subject I'm studying, but there are a few answers.

- Peers. This is easily the number one reason I went to college, and the reason I stuck it out to the end. Notice that the coursework I got high-centered on, and dragged my ass through last summer, was lower-division, not-in-my-major work. I went to college partly because I didn't know anybody who liked to read and write as much as I did, and liked to have foaming-at-the-mouth geeky conversations about books and writing. While such people are actually fairly rare even in college English departments, I succeeded in finding them, and then worked hard to try to keep up with them conversation-wise.
- Feedback. This comes closer to answering your question about what I want in a teacher. Some of this comes down to Wanting to Impress Smart People, but a good teacher can also be like a border collie -- herding students along and making sure they don't get too far off course. (This does not mean students are sheep. If you've spent any time with border collies, you know they herd absolutely everything that's moving and plural.) This is also crucial if I'm learning a new skill, like a language or a new set of mathematical concepts or a craft skill or whatever. I'm a pretty decent autodidact, up to a point, but tend to plateau unless I have someone to help me get to the next level. Often, the problem lies my weakness as a reader of technical insturctions -- when I have a knitting problem, I'll sometimes show the pattern to Laurel and have her decipher a seemingly-cryptic bit of instruction for me.
- A critical framework. This is part of the answer to the question, "Why would anyone want to study literary criticism?" which has been idly raised in our circle in the past. The fact is that many students, for whatever reason, do not think critically; even those declaring an English major know that they like to read, and they know that they like some books more than others, but they don't necessarily know why. (I would say that many humanities majors declare such majors because they can't hack critical thought, but I'm not sure it's fair to ignore all the dumb engineering majors I've encountered. There's a startling number of educated adults who can hack neither a five-paragraph essay nor a geometric proof.) These students, as you can well imagine, are a huge pain in the ass to deal with in a lit class: "Um, this book was just, like, really really dumb! I do not get it, like, at all!" It's a bit like refusing to show your work in a math class -- but these students can't be blamed for it, because they probably haven't been taught how to show their work. Giving them a critical vocabulary helps them approach these problems in a more evenhanded, articulate and informed way. So that "This book is fucking dumb" can at least become, "The author's attempt to rewrite Shakespeare's King Lear from a twntieth-century, rural, middle-class feminist perspective is intriguing, but if the reader doesn't catch the references, the book is flat, soap operatic and trivial." (Yes, I'm talking about a real book here. I enjoyed reading it, but it didn't really survive under the critical microscope.)

[pearmeson.livejournal.com]

No answers precisely, but I've been thinking about the same stuff a lot -- you and I seem to hit on similar issues at the same time. Probably if I wait a few months you will have written a python app to solve the problem. :)

As for the big picture, as several people have noted, methods should be secondary to goals. A clear idea of what you as a teacher want for the students, an understanding of what the students themselves actually want, and what the institution, family, society and other "stakeholders" want should be the first step (or at least concurrent with figuring out the methods). I'm into social constructivism, being a "guide on the side" as Steuard says. I do think the facts, inasmuch as there are facts, are out there and available (at least in the areas I would be teaching, .

For those that see education as fact-centered, or certification driven, it is probably pretty obvious how to take advantage of new technologies. It is probably less obvious to most people how to use the new technologies in that constructivist kind of way -- though to be frank, it is probably less obvious to most people how to do constructivism at all. The fallback position of every teaching strategy I've ever seen is the instructor standing in front of the class and talking -- because we all understand how to do that, have seen many examples of it, and have very little positive feedback on changing that (I had a student eval. this past semester that said "I shouldn't have to pay $30,000 a year to be made to feel uncomfortable while doing something the instructor should have been doing himself." -- after I had them work problems in groups for half of each discussion section, rather than show them how to do them myself )

I've been playing with moodle and .lrn a bit. I'm intrigued by moodle and its social constructivist philosophy of education -- but not as a standalone "content vehicle." I most want to play with stuff like that to help me develop curricula, course formatting, etc., and have it available for comment and feedback, and possibly advertising. When a class starts, I'd probably want to keep some of it available for student reference, and to ease some of the communication -- kind of like Martin has been doing with his wiki. So I know the students can find helpful material that is formatted to work with the classroom goals.

I'd also want to take advantage of discussion forums, wikis, and the like to have students create some of the material, discuss the work, figure out how to present it to others, etc. This may actually help some students feel more enagaged than being physically present in a classroom would -- some of the studies on online learning have found that students are _more_ likely to feel engaged through online discussions, because they don't have fear-of-speaking-in-public issues.

I think is right that one of the clearest uses of technology is in visualization, animations, interactive tutorials and the like. MIT has been playing with a particularly expensive form of that (http://icampus.mit.edu/TEAL/).

I'm encouraged that a lot of people are thinking about this -- there's been a group recently started here at BU in the physics and astronomy departments, discussing different aspects of education. We're bringing in a couple of speakers to talk about the "clickers", about TEAL, about book writing and course development, and we're all bringing in different issues that we want to learn more about. Good times. It reminds me of Professor White's class back at Mudd.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

While this may be true in some fields (e.g. computer science), it remains far from true in others. What information there is readily available and packaged at an instructional level in neuroscience (to take one arbitrary example) is typically both superficial and ~10 years out of date. In this respect, the internet is really little different from a second textbook. Thus it hasn't had a fundamental impact on the relationship of a teacher to their class.

Perhaps a good rule of thumb might be that people should try and gravitate towards fields with the crappiest and most out-of-date textbooks, because those are the fields where research and progress is the most active....

The most interesting parts of CS (to me) are also those that have almost no textbook, and it sounds like ALL of neuroscience is like that.

[pmb.livejournal.com]

Nice.

So you are saying that, in order to ask the question of "what is the best way to teach", we need to first settle on what we want the students to do/be/have. As a K-12 teacher these multiple conflicting implicitly-stated goals must be a source of great frustration.

[ouro.livejournal.com]

A person telling me to produce.

[amoken.livejournal.com]

Whoa. I always thought the point of schooling was to learn about processes and questions, not facts. How to find facts, how to use facts in varying contexts, how to form opinions, why there are so many of them, and more.