Lecturing came first. It has always been with us. Active learning came later. It has been on the scene for a relatively short time. Right? To the contrary, while lecturing has a medieval history, active learning has an ancient one.
In a culture with few serious readers, professors belong to a privileged reading class. We are literate to nth degree. When we read the scholarship on teaching and learning, we put our high levels of literacy to use for immediate and practical good. Unfortunately, too often we do not do this as much as we might want or as much as we should, for a variety of legitimate and not-so-legitimate reasons. Why not? Obstacles abound.
That many of us read the scholarship on teaching and learning may largely be explained by its utilitarian value, i.e., we read because doing so may prove useful in improving our teaching. However, beyond its “use-value,” many of us read because doing so fits the ethos of professorship. To wit, we value reading, curiosity, lifelong learning, critical thinking, evidentiary reasoning, capacity for sustained effort, and quality.
This image from France over 100 years ago predicts what school will look like in the 21st century: Students still sitting in rows but literally plugged into a knowledge machine. Fascinating as a commentary on education, it also raises questions for us to ponder about teaching and learning today. In particular, where did the dream of “knowing without learning” come from and why does it persist today?
In their viral video Shift Happens, Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod describe the global, digital twenty-first century world as “exponential.” In other words, with connectivity, information, and global population growing exponentially, the world we live in has shifted drastically—and will continue to shift drastically in the near future. How can we prepare students for that?
In The Courage to Teach, Parker J. Palmer shares the following anecdote: I once led a faculty workshop where the conversation had turned toward students, and many participants were complaining about […]
Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed. 