Recovering the Lost Process
Last year another semester ended with large numbers of students either failing or dong significantly well, but with no students in the middle. I began again to think about the problems of teaching and wondering if there was a solution. There are several problems really: the first was best articulated by friend who described teaching as twice removed from reality, something like a synopsis of an abridgment. The second problem is that students focus on the singular moment of the exam where they will learn and regurgitate the only the essential material as needed. Any topic in a class is merely a subject they need to prove they know enough at one particular moment. Never mind tomorrow. The disparity in the success of the students was largely due to each students ability to cram for an exam. Good students had mastered this but bad one’s were deluded into thinking they could somehow pull it off. Almost no one was putting in a sustained effort.
To return to the idea of a process I began developing a radical new way to teach where the students were not called on to learn what I lectured on directly, but instead had to apply the information given in the lectures to a set of materials that were unidentified. Each class after 50 minutes of lecture I would give 20 minutes of time to allow them to methodically go through the materials. They were charged with not only learning the identity of the materials but also the relationships between them. I explained that they were to solve a giant puzzle, one where they were going to have to learn by observing and recording what they knew without always knowing what was important and only later going back and making connections. The random access to the materials created a sense of discovery in the students and reinforced a sense that the content in the lectures had a larger meaning and significance. It has so far been a great success. I see fewer students failing and the level of information that the students are learning is deeper and more sustained than in the past. Gone is the feeling of futility and I and the students are enjoying the process of discovery. I especially like those moments in class when they show me things they have found that I have never seen before. Because I do not limit what they can learn from the materials I am often surprised by the keen observations students achieve.
