ISSUES IN EDUCATION

By Brad C. Meyer

If you are like me, you keep encountering pedagogical jargon that seems to imply that you need to change everything about the way you teach. We must engage students in “active learning,” using a “student-focused” approach that makes the “student responsible for her own learning.” But what does that mean and how much change is necessary? Here are three things I have concluded:

1. You are already using active learning to teach quantitative subjects.

Active learning is touted as the remedy for the lecture. The words of the “sage on the stage” are received passively by students, while activities, discussions and labs engage the student. Funny, I remember all too well the mental exertion I would experience in college during a lecture. I transcribed furiously, trying to capture all the substance the professor delivered. While he was speaking one sentence, my tightly clutched pencil recorded my abbreviated version of his previous sentence. Or I copied equations from the blackboard, but also added annotations to distill the essence of the various comments the professor made regarding those equations. Was I being passive? Far from it!

On the other hand, in the relatively few discussion-oriented classes I encountered to earn my degrees in industrial engineering, I found my mind would often wander lazily during student participation. Student comments made in class were often little more than common sense. I didn’t consider it educational to hear my peers offer their conjectures and feelings. I would much rather listen to the professor who had studied the subject at length. And when the instructor again began to speak, I returned to an engaged and active mode.

Maybe my thinking is skewed by my field of study. I took a psychology class in college. In that class I listened (and actively engaged to take notes), but I didn’t apply the material. I took multiple-choice tests to see if I could recall terms and do some reasoning, but I did not gain a skill. My engineering classes were much different. The subject, by nature, required engagement. And it was in doing the problem sets or the design work that the subject matter became a part of me. That’s active learning. If you teach quantitative subjects, you’re already using it. But then the question becomes, should you be doing active learning exercises during classroom time, or is that for the students to do outside of class?

It is a valuable skill to listen attentively to a talk that continues for 50, 60, 75 minutes. Complex problems find solutions through extended periods of focus, and remaining attentive to a lecture is good practice in concentration. Perhaps the attention span of students today is not as long as students of yesteryear, but I consider it part of my job to help lengthen that attention span rather than shield students from experiencing the consequences of their flitting. So go ahead, use your class time to explain and demonstrate the concepts (dare I say “lecture”), then let the students leave the building and apply it themselves. That’s an active learning approach!

2. The opposite of student-focused is not teacher-focused, but content-focused.

Here is my paradigm. In grade school, you do your work in the classroom and the teacher is the “guide on the side,” watching over your shoulder and helping you with difficulties as they arise. In middle and high school, you begin to be assigned homework and are weaned from the tutoring model. You develop initiative and self-discipline as you work independently. By the time you leave high school, you are able to take responsibility for your own learning.

Your college professors will explain terms, concepts and algorithms during class time; then you leave the lecture hall and apply yourself to the material. I call that a “student-focused” system, because it is up to the student to do what it takes to learn the material. That may mean outlining a chapter, doing end of chapter problems or extra research in the library, but it is not micromanaged by the professor.

What I am hearing is that “student-focused” is when the professor carefully crafts assignments and activities that force the student to apply concepts and employ critical thinking skills. The professor provides individualized and formative feedback to each student. This will ensure that the student learns. But if it is the professor’s actions that ensure learning rather than the student’s initiative, is that not better termed a “teacher-focused” system? Learning depends on the teacher. Of course, we all know how important feedback is to learning, but doesn’t extensive personalized feedback make the learner more dependent on the teacher instead of less?

I’ve learned that pedagogy experts use the focus term to describe the teacher. The teacher needs to be student-focused instead of content-focused. At the risk of over simplifying, their point is that educators have to think about their audience, not just their subject matter. They must see their task as not simply telling what they know but causing the student to learn. I don’t believe this is a new thought. Socrates could have said the same thing a long time ago. We all continue to grapple with maintaining a balance between our responsibility and that of the learner.

3. We do need to think carefully about pedagogy.

Lest you think I am saying that no changes are needed, let me conclude by identifying two important realities. First, from 1960 to the present the percentage of high school students continuing on to college has doubled. There is much less demographic filtering, and we face a student pool that is more diverse with respect to intellectual capability. Second, the dramatic advances in technology have both changed our students and provided us with new tools. Those realities are driving change in how I teach, but maybe that’s a subject for another day…

Brad C. Meyer (Bradley.Meyer@drake.edu) is an associate professor of management at Drake University.