Student Learning
Hi, I’m back after a long hiatus.
Professor Ruth Walden of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication (UNC-Chapel Hill) gave me a great opportunity today. She went to the Bahamas for her son’s wedding, and she asked me to be the substitute teacher for her Mass Communication Pedagory course. The scheduled topic was Student Learning, and I jumped at the chance.
This gave me an opportunity to read some excellent articles Ruth had assigned her students to read, and I recommend them.
- “The Case Against Teaching,” CHANGE, November/December 2001, pp. 11-19. Larry D. Spence of Penn State University argues that a 15th century teacher from the University of Paris would find himself at home in a modern day college classroom He makes other provocative points: “We haven’t improved teaching for 4,000 years because it works so well one-on-one that we believe we understand how it works in general.” Or, “Teachers practice a superstitious ritual aimed at the imaginary individuals they think they see out there.” Or, “Our testing practices assume that students’ brains are homogenous and that they all learn the same things.” Or, “A lot of technology in education looks like bolting an internal combustion engine on the back of a horse and buggy. We get something more exciting and noisy, but the rig can’t go any faster.” Spence proposes a solution however, saying “We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.” He says they need to create learning spaces and experiences where students can learn on their own and at their own pace.
- “Taking Learning Seriously,” CHANGE, July/August 1999. Noted teaching guru Lee Schulman describes learning as “an interplay of two challenging processes–getting knowledge that is inside to move out, and getting knowledge that is outside to move in.” The first influence on new learning, he says, is not what the teachers do but what the students already know. He promotes the scholarship of teaching, work that makes our work “public and thus susceptible to critique.”
- “Applying the Science of Learning,” CHANGE, July/August 2003, pp. 36-41. Diane Halpern and Milton Hakel argue that the primary goal of education should be long-term retention and transfer–that we should be teaching for the moment when we will not be present–and “preparing students for unpredictable real-world tests that we will not be giving.” They state emphatically that “the single most important variable in promoting long-term retention and transfer is practice at retreival.”
I told the students about my favorite book about learning: THE ART OF CHANGING THE BRAIN, by James Zull. In clear and useful prose, he explains what scientists have learned about physical changes in the brain when it is exposed to new information–it relates it to what we already know. I also described an article in the New York Times (January 13, 2009) that told how MIT has done away with its old freshmen lecture classes in physics and replaced them with student-centered collaborative learning experiences.
In our discussion, we focused on how to apply those principles to teaching–to relate new material to what students already know and to give them frequent and varied opportunities to practice retreiving that stored information. It was a great experience to be exposed again to the bright young people who will be teachers of the future.