The End of Lectures?
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
--
***************************************** "We set sail on this new sea
* Dr. Bernhard Michael Jatzeck, P. Eng. * because there is new knowledge
* * to be gained and new rights to
* jat...@freenet.edmonton.ab.ca * be won, and they must be won
***************************************** and used for the progress of
all people."
John F. Kennedy at Rice
University, Houston, Texas,
September 12, 1962
Harry Haller
<jat...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote in message news:hIA69.251$i%.39676@localhost...
> In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
>
>
I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
department).
L Smith
> In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
Are you saying this is a bad development?
The traditional lecture is actually one of the least effective ways available
of imparting knowledge to students. They are passive receptacles transferring
information from their ears to their notes with no involvement from any organs
(i.e. the brain) in between.
(For more on effective teaching, see "Teaching Engineering" by Phil Wankat -
published by McGraw-Hill.)
Rich Lemert
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
: the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
: it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
: them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
: students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
: courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
: department).
This is particularly true in institutions where space of any kind is at a
premium. It would be nice to give personal attention to each and every
student, but a course of, say, 200 students would need to be divided into
smaller groups. Each group, then, would require someone to teach them and
a place where they can be taught. That's not always a practical option.
At the same time, I see the death-of-the-lecture movement as part of the
policy of making the teacher/instructor/professor *completely* responsible
for the students learning something. The students don't have to so
anything, don't have to take any initiative, and aren't held accountable
for any failures. This policy claims to reform an ineffective method of
teaching while, at the same time, actually making it worse.
I don't think the lecture was ever intended to be the sole means by which
a student learns. Instead, I believe it was meant to be the starting
point, supplemented by other sources, such as course textbooks and library
references.
Arthur E. Sowers
Actually there may be one good trend in medical schools: the replacement
of so-called "lecture-based-learning" by "problem-based-learning." About
mid way through my 5 years at UMAB, they were making this conversion. The
new system was to have 4-5-6 medical students sit around a table with a
faculty and they start with a problem. A clinical problem. A real clinical
problem. Then tell the small group to go research it out however they want
to do it, come back the next day and everone presents "what to do" and
"why" and "what references they used." This "reform" finally took place
after what x00s years with the guys at the top finally asking
practitioners of what they studied, what did they use, what did they not
use, and what they needed more of. I think its a good experiment to try.
We might know in another 10-20 years if it works.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>
>
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
: jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
: > In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
: > university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
: Are you saying this is a bad development?
What's being suggested to replace it is far worse. It removes the
responsiblity for learning from the student and dumps it on the lecturer.
It also removes the element of clear and rational thought from the
process.
Teaching nowadays has less to do with imparting knowledge and more with
"fun".
: The traditional lecture is actually one of the least effective ways
available
: of imparting knowledge to students. They are passive receptacles transferring
: information from their ears to their notes with no involvement from any organs
: (i.e. the brain) in between.
When I was an undegraduate in engineering, I often didn't have time to
ponder what was being taught. I did the best I could with the time and
resources available to me and got on with the job.
Through all the years, the number of profs that I considered completely
useless as lecturers I can count off on one hand. Some weren't stellar in
their presentation while others were excellent, but I made an effort to
learn something from each one. In almost every case, I succeeded.
Often, I had weekly assignments to complete and submit, in addition to
any lab work. The lecture notes provided a starting point from which I
could do that work, but I often made use of other material as well.
: (For more on effective teaching, see "Teaching Engineering" by Phil Wankat -
: published by McGraw-Hill.)
I'll keep an eye out for that as I've been in and out of engineering
schools for nearly 30 years. I can't say that the lecture method has done
me any lasting damage both as a student and as an engineer. I'm
registered as a professional engineer in 3 Canadian provinces and I've got
graduate degrees in two engineering disciplines.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: Actually there may be one good trend in medical schools: the replacement
: of so-called "lecture-based-learning" by "problem-based-learning." About
: mid way through my 5 years at UMAB, they were making this conversion. The
: new system was to have 4-5-6 medical students sit around a table with a
: faculty and they start with a problem. A clinical problem. A real clinical
: problem. Then tell the small group to go research it out however they want
: to do it, come back the next day and everone presents "what to do" and
: "why" and "what references they used." This "reform" finally took place
: after what x00s years with the guys at the top finally asking
: practitioners of what they studied, what did they use, what did they not
: use, and what they needed more of. I think its a good experiment to try.
: We might know in another 10-20 years if it works.
<snip>
I've long advocated engineering design courses based on in-depth case
studies. These courses would not only analyse a design's physical
principles and parameters, but also why certain things were done the way
they were. In addition, examining other alternatives that may have been
considered would be useful.
Unfortunately, a lot of institutions might not have the time and/or money
for them.
L Smith
> Harry Haller (hal...@spamouflage.com) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
> : the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
> : it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
> : them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
> : students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
> : courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
> : department).
>
> This is particularly true in institutions where space of any kind is at a
> premium. It would be nice to give personal attention to each and every
> student, but a course of, say, 200 students would need to be divided into
> smaller groups. Each group, then, would require someone to teach them and
> a place where they can be taught. That's not always a practical option.
There are techniques for applying active learning techniques in large lecture
settings. You can, for example, tell the students "turn to your neighbor, and the
two of you have two minutes to figure out you would measure the centroid
of xxx shape." At the end of those two minutes, get a couple of groups to
tell you what they came up with.
This exercise does several things. First, it breaks them out of their stupor
(most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
> At the same time, I see the death-of-the-lecture movement as part of the
> policy of making the teacher/instructor/professor *completely* responsible
> for the students learning something. The students don't have to so
> anything, don't have to take any initiative, and aren't held accountable
> for any failures. This policy claims to reform an ineffective method of
> teaching while, at the same time, actually making it worse.
There's actually a fairly substantial body of literature showing that the
traditional lecture is an ineffective way to accomplish student learning. You
can find references in the book "Teaching Engineering" (by Wankat) that
I've mentioned in another post, and also in just about anything written by
Rich Felder (you can get a link to his web page on effective teaching by
going to the chemical engineering department link on the NCSU - North
Carolina State University - web page).
> I don't think the lecture was ever intended to be the sole means by which
> a student learns. Instead, I believe it was meant to be the starting
> point, supplemented by other sources, such as course textbooks and library
> references.
All any of these resources do is make the information available to the
student - none of them provides any "learning" without the ACTIVE participation
of the student. If the student doesn't do something ACTIVE - discuss the
material with someone else, solve homework problems, paraphrase the
material, etc. - they are going to retain very little. Effective teaching
techniques
enforce this active learning process. That's the primary reason the Socratic
method is so effective.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
the replacement
> of so-called "lecture-based-learning" by "problem-based-learning." About
> mid way through my 5 years at UMAB, they were making this conversion. The
> new system was to have 4-5-6 medical students sit around a table with a
> faculty and they start with a problem. A clinical problem. A real clinical
> problem. Then tell the small group to go research it out however they want
> to do it, come back the next day and everone presents "what to do" and
> "why" and "what references they used." This "reform" finally took place
> after what x00s years with the guys at the top finally asking
> practitioners of what they studied, what did they use, what did they not
> use, and what they needed more of. I think its a good experiment to try.
> We might know in another 10-20 years if it works.
Actually, the literature already shows very clearly that active learning
techniques, which this is, are much more effective than the traditional
lecture at enhancing student learning. Check out the references to Felder
and Wankat that I've given in other posts. The nice thing about these guys
is that they've gone into the education literature as outsiders - both are
chemical engineering professors - and weeded out the 90% of the education
literature that is crap. I've seen both of them in action, and I've applied
their techniques in my own teaching, and their methods work.
Rich Lemert
Jeffrey J. Potoff
Harry Haller wrote:
While this may be true for general ed, social science, freshmen chem, etc.,
I've never been a student or taught an engineering course that had
anywhere near that number of students. The largest may have been 70
students, but these days I'm teaching classes closer to 20 students.
With the class sizes I'm dealing with, I can easily do a lot of much
more interesting things than ramble endlessly from the podium in one
boring lecture after another.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
Arthur E. Sowers wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, Harry Haller wrote:
>
>
>><jat...@ecn.ab.ca> wrote in message news:hIA69.251$i%.39676@localhost...
>>
>>>In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
>>>university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
>>the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
>>it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
>>them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
>>students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
>>courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
>>department).
>>
>>
>
> Actually there may be one good trend in medical schools: the replacement
> of so-called "lecture-based-learning" by "problem-based-learning." About
> mid way through my 5 years at UMAB, they were making this conversion. The
> new system was to have 4-5-6 medical students sit around a table with a
> faculty and they start with a problem. A clinical problem. A real clinical
> problem. Then tell the small group to go research it out however they want
> to do it, come back the next day and everone presents "what to do" and
> "why" and "what references they used." This "reform" finally took place
> after what x00s years with the guys at the top finally asking
> practitioners of what they studied, what did they use, what did they not
> use, and what they needed more of. I think its a good experiment to try.
> We might know in another 10-20 years if it works.
>
It's a good method, but takes a lot more effort and prep time on the part of
the instructor to prepare for teaching a course in this way. This is
the most likely reason you don't see it in more widespread use.
Preparing a decent lecture is, in my experience, the least time
consuming educational activity, which I suspect has something to do with
why it is the standard for university instruction.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
> : jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>
> : > In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> : > university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
>
> : Are you saying this is a bad development?
>
> What's being suggested to replace it is far worse. It removes the
> responsiblity for learning from the student and dumps it on the lecturer.
> It also removes the element of clear and rational thought from the
> process.
>
> Teaching nowadays has less to do with imparting knowledge and more with
> "fun".
>
The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. I find that students learn
more if they enjoy or have an interest in what they are learning. And
even if they don't like the material, they will still learn more if the
class is interesting in some way to them. It doesn't kill us to digress
for a few minutes to talk about Ozzfest, sports, roads, etc. Not
everyone has a true love for whatever subject they are taking, but that
doesn't mean the rest are immune from inspiration, either.
J.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
: > I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
: > the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
: > it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
: > them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
: > students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
: > courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
: > department).
: While this may be true for general ed, social science, freshmen chem, etc.,
: I've never been a student or taught an engineering course that had
: anywhere near that number of students. The largest may have been 70
: students, but these days I'm teaching classes closer to 20 students.
I've taken engineering courses where there were upwards of 200 people in
attendance. I made it a point to either get acquainted with the prof if I
had any problems or do it myself. Under those circumstances, one learns
how to be quite resourceful.
: With the class sizes I'm dealing with, I can easily do a lot of much
: more interesting things than ramble endlessly from the podium in one
: boring lecture after another.
One of the problems with education nowadays is that the instructor or
professor has to be more of a performer. When I was a student, I was
there to learn, not to be entertained.
A few years ago, I read of a prof at an Ontario university who was
*enormously* popular with his students. He managed to do so by turning
his lectures into rock concerts, complete with music and fancy lighting.
That's not teaching--that's show business.
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Arthur E. Sowers (arth...@magpage.com) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : Actually there may be one good trend in medical schools: the replacement
> : of so-called "lecture-based-learning" by "problem-based-learning." About
> : mid way through my 5 years at UMAB, they were making this conversion. The
> : new system was to have 4-5-6 medical students sit around a table with a
> : faculty and they start with a problem. A clinical problem. A real clinical
> : problem. Then tell the small group to go research it out however they want
> : to do it, come back the next day and everone presents "what to do" and
> : "why" and "what references they used." This "reform" finally took place
> : after what x00s years with the guys at the top finally asking
> : practitioners of what they studied, what did they use, what did they not
> : use, and what they needed more of. I think its a good experiment to try.
> : We might know in another 10-20 years if it works.
>
> <snip>
>
> I've long advocated engineering design courses based on in-depth case
> studies. These courses would not only analyse a design's physical
> principles and parameters, but also why certain things were done the way
> they were. In addition, examining other alternatives that may have been
> considered would be useful.
>
> Unfortunately, a lot of institutions might not have the time and/or money
> for them.
From what I have seen in the teaching of laboratory courses (which are
going out, by the way, all across the country), the projects/experiments
are often trivial and often the experiments (biology) don't work.
My chemistry labs were decent, but there were problems there too. Physics
was OK, too, but the grading was arbitrary. I favored that more "real
life" problems be studied instead of the "cookbook" approach. However,
that would mean maybe one or two experiments per semester instead of one
per week. It would be more expensive, too. But, that is just ONE of the
bad trends in the evolution of our educational system: cut the cost of
education by cutting the quality. The rest of the bad trends includes the
watering down of the curriculum, grade inflation, and emphasis on
credentials over content.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
Arthur E. Sowers
I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
> > At the same time, I see the death-of-the-lecture movement as part of the
> > policy of making the teacher/instructor/professor *completely* responsible
> > for the students learning something. The students don't have to so
> > anything, don't have to take any initiative, and aren't held accountable
> > for any failures. This policy claims to reform an ineffective method of
> > teaching while, at the same time, actually making it worse.
>
> There's actually a fairly substantial body of literature showing that the
> traditional lecture is an ineffective way to accomplish student learning.
I gave the medical school reform as an example, but it was not defined in
terms of _learning_ but rather to address the descrepancy between what
practitioners were actually using compared to what they were taught and to
address anything they needed but did not get from formal school.
You
> can find references in the book "Teaching Engineering" (by Wankat) that
> I've mentioned in another post, and also in just about anything written by
> Rich Felder (you can get a link to his web page on effective teaching by
> going to the chemical engineering department link on the NCSU - North
> Carolina State University - web page).
I'd have to look at how 'effective teaching' was being measured.
> > I don't think the lecture was ever intended to be the sole means by which
> > a student learns. Instead, I believe it was meant to be the starting
> > point, supplemented by other sources, such as course textbooks and library
> > references.
>
> All any of these resources do is make the information available to the
> student - none of them provides any "learning" without the ACTIVE participation
> of the student. If the student doesn't do something ACTIVE - discuss the
> material with someone else, solve homework problems, paraphrase the
> material, etc. - they are going to retain very little. Effective teaching
> techniques
> enforce this active learning process.
I can go along with this.
That's the primary reason the Socratic
> method is so effective.
OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
> Rich Lemert
>
>
>
>
Arthur E. Sowers
Reminds me of a Scientific American article I read some 40 years ago about
a branch of psychology dealing with learning a task. The terms afference,
efference, and refference (IIRC) were applied. Essentially, learning comes
fastest and most accurately when people "do it themselves."
For a lot of my own education, I'd still say over my life spent in formal
coursework, I've still learned more by reading books on my own than going
to lectures and reading the associated textbook. The only exception might
be mathematics.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
> Rich Lemert
>
>
>
Arthur E. Sowers
You're probably right, partly. But I can see problem-based-learning as
just as easy for the prof. The prof already knows this stuff, the student
doesn't but its the student who 'presents' and gets critiqued not only by
the prof but his peers, and of course he gets to critique his peers when
they 'present'.
L Smith
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
>
> > There are techniques for applying active learning techniques in large lecture
> > settings. You can, for example, tell the students "turn to your neighbor, and the
> >
> > two of you have two minutes to figure out you would measure the centroid
> > of xxx shape." At the end of those two minutes, get a couple of groups to
> > tell you what they came up with.
> >
> > This exercise does several things. First, it breaks them out of their stupor
> > (most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
> > before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
> > stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
> > describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
> > more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
>
> I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
> need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
> lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
> that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
And you are a valid representation of all students? Baloney. By definition
(since you have a PhD) you are in the upper 10-20% of all students.
As for "needing to cover X material in Z time," I've never had a problem
with it. In the first place, you are NEVER going to be able to cover everything
you could in a course, so you pick what you think is important. EVERY
professor does this. Fortunately, if we choose wisely the students will later
be able to go back and "fill in the blanks." Besides, what are we trying
to accomplish? Is the amount of material that's presented more important,
or how much of it sticks with the students?
>
>
> > > At the same time, I see the death-of-the-lecture movement as part of the
> > > policy of making the teacher/instructor/professor *completely* responsible
> > > for the students learning something. The students don't have to so
> > > anything, don't have to take any initiative, and aren't held accountable
> > > for any failures. This policy claims to reform an ineffective method of
> > > teaching while, at the same time, actually making it worse.
> >
> > There's actually a fairly substantial body of literature showing that the
> > traditional lecture is an ineffective way to accomplish student learning.
>
> I gave the medical school reform as an example, but it was not defined in
> terms of _learning_ but rather to address the descrepancy between what
> practitioners were actually using compared to what they were taught and to
> address anything they needed but did not get from formal school.
In other words, they were not learning a skill they needed, and so a change
was made in the pedagogy to improve that learning.
>
>
> You
> > can find references in the book "Teaching Engineering" (by Wankat) that
> > I've mentioned in another post, and also in just about anything written by
> > Rich Felder (you can get a link to his web page on effective teaching by
> > going to the chemical engineering department link on the NCSU - North
> > Carolina State University - web page).
>
> I'd have to look at how 'effective teaching' was being measured.
Then do so! As I said, the information is published in the literature.
Everything is there, including how learning was measured. If you have
complaints with the methodology after you understand what it was, fine.
>
>
> > > I don't think the lecture was ever intended to be the sole means by which
> > > a student learns. Instead, I believe it was meant to be the starting
> > > point, supplemented by other sources, such as course textbooks and library
> > > references.
> >
> > All any of these resources do is make the information available to the
> > student - none of them provides any "learning" without the ACTIVE participation
> > of the student. If the student doesn't do something ACTIVE - discuss the
> > material with someone else, solve homework problems, paraphrase the
> > material, etc. - they are going to retain very little. Effective teaching
> > techniques
> > enforce this active learning process.
>
> I can go along with this.
>
> That's the primary reason the Socratic
> > method is so effective.
>
> OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
Talk to any lawyer, and I'm sure they can explain it to you. It is definitely
being used - where it is appropriate and does the best job of enhancing
learning. It is totally inappropriate, for example, for a lab course.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> From what I have seen in the teaching of laboratory courses (which are
> going out, by the way, all across the country), the projects/experiments
> are often trivial and often the experiments (biology) don't work.
> My chemistry labs were decent, but there were problems there too. Physics
> was OK, too, but the grading was arbitrary. I favored that more "real
> life" problems be studied instead of the "cookbook" approach. However,
> that would mean maybe one or two experiments per semester instead of one
> per week. It would be more expensive, too.
As I see it, lab courses have two different functions. One is to train the
students in the fundamental techniques of the field - i.e. weighing out
reagents, pipetting, use of glove boxes, etc. The other is to illustrate the
behavior being described in the rest of the curriculum. However, as long
as these two objectives are met, I don't see where it makes much difference
whether it's a lot of little experiments or a couple of big ones. Like you say,
though, the latter can be more difficult to implement.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
> : jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>
> : > In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> : > university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
>
> : Are you saying this is a bad development?
>
> What's being suggested to replace it is far worse. It removes the
> responsiblity for learning from the student and dumps it on the lecturer.
> It also removes the element of clear and rational thought from the
> process.
I'm curious - could you provide some examples of what you mean? I'm
wondering whether these are really bad ideas, or poor implementation of
good ideas. The techniques that I tried to use - and that are advocated by
Wankat and Felder (and others) do not transfer responsibility for learning
away from the student. Instead, they remove the professor as an impediment
to learning.
> I can't say that the lecture method has done
> me any lasting damage both as a student and as an engineer.
The one thing that saves our butts as faculty is the fact that students are
a very resourceful and resilient lot. They will do their damndest to figure out
how the instructor is going to grade and to give him what he wants.
Rich Lemert
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> "Arthur E. Sowers" wrote:
>
> > On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> >
> > > There are techniques for applying active learning techniques in large lecture
> > > settings. You can, for example, tell the students "turn to your neighbor, and the
> > >
> > > two of you have two minutes to figure out you would measure the centroid
> > > of xxx shape." At the end of those two minutes, get a couple of groups to
> > > tell you what they came up with.
> > >
> > > This exercise does several things. First, it breaks them out of their stupor
> > > (most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
> > > before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
> > > stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
> > > describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
> > > more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
> >
> > I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
> > need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
> > lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
> > that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
>
> And you are a valid representation of all students? Baloney. By definition
> (since you have a PhD) you are in the upper 10-20% of all students.
Maybe we should get rid of the other 80-90%?
> As for "needing to cover X material in Z time," I've never had a problem
> with it. In the first place, you are NEVER going to be able to cover everything
> you could in a course, so you pick what you think is important.
Ah, the Enronitis/Andersonitis rationalization: "Lets not and say we did"
or "lets say anything we want, forget what we did."
EVERY
> professor does this. Fortunately, if we choose wisely the students will later
> be able to go back and "fill in the blanks."
Ahahahahaha
> Besides, what are we trying
> to accomplish?
No, what are YOU trying to accomplish? Or, not accomplish?
Is the amount of material that's presented more important,
> or how much of it sticks with the students?
If it doesn't stick with the students, then it doesn't matter.
> >
> >
> > > > At the same time, I see the death-of-the-lecture movement as part of the
> > > > policy of making the teacher/instructor/professor *completely* responsible
> > > > for the students learning something. The students don't have to so
> > > > anything, don't have to take any initiative, and aren't held accountable
> > > > for any failures. This policy claims to reform an ineffective method of
> > > > teaching while, at the same time, actually making it worse.
> > >
> > > There's actually a fairly substantial body of literature showing that the
> > > traditional lecture is an ineffective way to accomplish student learning.
> >
> > I gave the medical school reform as an example, but it was not defined in
> > terms of _learning_ but rather to address the descrepancy between what
> > practitioners were actually using compared to what they were taught and to
> > address anything they needed but did not get from formal school.
>
> In other words, they were not learning a skill they needed, and so a change
> was made in the pedagogy to improve that learning.
And, to drop the stuff that they said they were not using. eg. Anatomy.
And, so, bad news for anatomy departments.
Don't forget, we need to examine the results 10-20 years from now, by some
measure which has some validity, too. Not just in questionaires handed to
practitioners 10-20 years from now.
> >
> >
> > You
> > > can find references in the book "Teaching Engineering" (by Wankat) that
> > > I've mentioned in another post, and also in just about anything written by
> > > Rich Felder (you can get a link to his web page on effective teaching by
> > > going to the chemical engineering department link on the NCSU - North
> > > Carolina State University - web page).
> >
> > I'd have to look at how 'effective teaching' was being measured.
>
> Then do so! As I said, the information is published in the literature.
> Everything is there, including how learning was measured. If you have
> complaints with the methodology after you understand what it was, fine.
Well, I cite my references to the PhD attrition phenomenon and you say "I
don't have to read that stuff" (like you did last year), and I'm going to
say I don't need to look at your references, either.
> >
> >
> > > > I don't think the lecture was ever intended to be the sole means by which
> > > > a student learns. Instead, I believe it was meant to be the starting
> > > > point, supplemented by other sources, such as course textbooks and library
> > > > references.
> > >
> > > All any of these resources do is make the information available to the
> > > student - none of them provides any "learning" without the ACTIVE participation
> > > of the student. If the student doesn't do something ACTIVE - discuss the
> > > material with someone else, solve homework problems, paraphrase the
> > > material, etc. - they are going to retain very little. Effective teaching
> > > techniques
> > > enforce this active learning process.
> >
> > I can go along with this.
> >
> > That's the primary reason the Socratic
> > > method is so effective.
> >
> > OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
>
> Talk to any lawyer, and I'm sure they can explain it to you.
You mean you can't explain it to me? You throw a term around like its a
big deal and you don't know what it means?
It is definitely
> being used - where it is appropriate and does the best job of enhancing
> learning.
Ah, "Computers are definitely being used, but I don't know how they work"
> It is totally inappropriate, for example, for a lab course.
Well, if you can't explain it, how do you know its totally inappropriate?
> Rich Lemert
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
There's more to a curriculum than books. People need to learn the lab
stuff, the field stuff. I just say make the stuff real instead of Sesame
Street.
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>
> > L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
> > : jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> >
> > : > In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> > : > university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
> >
> > : Are you saying this is a bad development?
> >
> > What's being suggested to replace it is far worse. It removes the
> > responsiblity for learning from the student and dumps it on the lecturer.
> > It also removes the element of clear and rational thought from the
> > process.
>
> I'm curious - could you provide some examples of what you mean? I'm
> wondering whether these are really bad ideas, or poor implementation of
> good ideas. The techniques that I tried to use - and that are advocated by
> Wankat and Felder (and others) do not transfer responsibility for learning
> away from the student. Instead, they remove the professor as an impediment
> to learning.
Mark Twain once said something like "Don't let schooling get in the way of
your education". Seems like we ought to remove the university, in
addition to the professor.
> > I can't say that the lecture method has done
> > me any lasting damage both as a student and as an engineer.
>
> The one thing that saves our butts as faculty
^^^^^^^^^
Like myself, aren't you _former_ faculty? Or is this another "Since I have
a PhD, I can _consider_ myself faculty." And "Since I have a PhD in ChE, I
can _consider_ myself a ChE?" And, in conversations with people, you talk
about a half full glass of water: "That's a glass of [implied as full]
water"!
is the fact that students are
> a very resourceful and resilient lot.
i.e. They can find beer and sex whenever they want to.
They will do their damndest to figure out
> how the instructor is going to grade and to give him what he wants.
i) Break into the instructor's office to get copies of exam distributed
before the exam, ii) cheat during the exam with Wi-Fi wireless
calculators, iii) bribe (*) or threaten the instructor, iv) petition the
dean, v) hire a lawyer.
> Rich Lemert
>
>
* - i.e. various sex acts
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: From what I have seen in the teaching of laboratory courses (which are
: going out, by the way, all across the country), the projects/experiments
: are often trivial and often the experiments (biology) don't work.
Many of them are being converted to computerized simulations. I don't
think they're anywhere near as effective as actually getting one's hands
dirty. Let the students set up a chemical reaction and figure out why it
doesn't work. It'll give them a good sense of what actually happens "out
there".
: My chemistry labs were decent, but there were problems there too. Physics
: was OK, too, but the grading was arbitrary. I favored that more "real
: life" problems be studied instead of the "cookbook" approach. However,
: that would mean maybe one or two experiments per semester instead of one
: per week. It would be more expensive, too. But, that is just ONE of the
: bad trends in the evolution of our educational system: cut the cost of
: education by cutting the quality. The rest of the bad trends includes the
: watering down of the curriculum, grade inflation, and emphasis on
: credentials over content.
<snip>
One thing I've found while I was teaching is how many of my students
lacked a fundamental background. Things were being cut from preceding
courses because "they don't need to know that" or "where will we have the
time to put that in the course?". I ended up spending a good deal of *my*
course time teaching them material they should have known before starting
it. If I was teaching a course in dynamics, I shouldn't have spent time
allocated for it teaching basic physics in order that they could even
understand the material I was supposed to present to them.
rick++
I think it depends on the course involved- the material,
its structure, the delivery capability of the instructor.
I'd try it out for a week or too, then decide whether to attend
a lecture.
Post-school I look forward to couple times a month science
lectures I hear in the area. Then, this is a far cry from
being force-fed 15 hours a week in college, or 25 hours a
week in grade school.
At a quality school you may not have textbooks to fall back
on in the upper level courses because the material may be
so new. Then you need more face contact and good class notes.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > This exercise does several things. First, it breaks them out of their stupor
: > (most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
: > before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
: > stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
: > describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
: > more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
: I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
: need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
: lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
: that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
Before I started teaching at my ex-employer, I was required to take 3
weeks worth of how-to-teach sessions. Great emphasis was put on that sort
of approach and I tried it for the first 2 years. I gave up on it because
I found it disruptive and distracting. Eventually, I found I was able to
teach the material in an hour and use the remaining time for either
examples or exercises.
I remember during one of my first courses, one student asked me, while I
was discussing something, if I was going to take long because his
attention span was quite short.
Towards the end of my teaching, I found I had to give a break of 10
minutes or so in order that the students could go and get a cup of coffee
or have a smoke. When I was a student, lectures lasting nearly 90 minutes
were not uncommon.
I guess the problem is that we've had 20 years of rock videos and MTV and
MuchMusic (Canada's answer to that channel). Students are bombarded by
these images every time they turn on the TV. News broadcasts consist of
15-second sound bites. Is it any wonder that education has to be packaged
and presented in a similar manner?
<snip>
: > There's actually a fairly substantial body of literature showing that the
: > traditional lecture is an ineffective way to accomplish student learning.
: I gave the medical school reform as an example, but it was not defined in
: terms of _learning_ but rather to address the descrepancy between what
: practitioners were actually using compared to what they were taught and to
: address anything they needed but did not get from formal school.
: You
: > can find references in the book "Teaching Engineering" (by Wankat) that
: > I've mentioned in another post, and also in just about anything written by
: > Rich Felder (you can get a link to his web page on effective teaching by
: > going to the chemical engineering department link on the NCSU - North
: > Carolina State University - web page).
: I'd have to look at how 'effective teaching' was being measured.
The provincial government here uses "customer satisfaction" surveys, which
don't show whether or not Johnny can even read, let alone comprehend a
simple sentence.
<snip>
rick++
The per hour class rate of an instructor is expensive.
A gypsy adjunct prof (another recent thread) makes $30 to $100 per
classroom hour. A full professor at a research universary can
top a $1000 per hour of classroom time.
A college student averages about 360 hours of classroom a year,
which is $100 per hour at a top private school.
(You really have have to divide these numbers by three for
backup homework & study for students, prep & office hours for profs.)
For-profit educational institutions like Edison (elementary)
and Phoenix (masters degree) seek to reduce expensive
classroom time by multimedia technology. They'll try to find
a very effective speaker to videotape lectures, sort of what you'd
see on PBS classes. Then they either have low-paid class proctors
for children or internet-chat rooms for adults to supplement the
lectures with discussion and exercises.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: Reminds me of a Scientific American article I read some 40 years ago about
: a branch of psychology dealing with learning a task. The terms afference,
: efference, and refference (IIRC) were applied. Essentially, learning comes
: fastest and most accurately when people "do it themselves."
: For a lot of my own education, I'd still say over my life spent in formal
: coursework, I've still learned more by reading books on my own than going
: to lectures and reading the associated textbook. The only exception might
: be mathematics.
<snip>
Lectures are only part of the process. While I was a student, most of my
courses consisted of lectures with additional assigments. There was a
reason for that. One was to expose the student to the type of problems
and the manner for solving them that was typical in an engineering job.
Another was to reinforce what was presented in the lectures. Often, I'd
be going through a problem with both my lecture notes and the course text
on hand to see if I actually understood what was going on. Frequently,
I'd find myself saying "aha!" when I finally realized what the prof was
trying to explain in the lectures.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
: > need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
: > lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
: > that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
: And you are a valid representation of all students? Baloney. By definition
: (since you have a PhD) you are in the upper 10-20% of all students.
I found that disrupting to me both as a student, even as an undergrad, and
while I was teaching. Constant changes in pace did little to help me
understand the material because they would break my concentration.
: As for "needing to cover X material in Z time," I've never had a problem
: with it. In the first place, you are NEVER going to be able to cover everything
: you could in a course, so you pick what you think is important. EVERY
: professor does this. Fortunately, if we choose wisely the students will later
: be able to go back and "fill in the blanks." Besides, what are we trying
: to accomplish? Is the amount of material that's presented more important,
: or how much of it sticks with the students?
It depends on what's being taught and to whom. In engineering, there are
certain concepts that are required in order for someone to obtain a degree
and, later on, professional registration. Letting a prof decide what's
"important" is a dangerous course of action (no pun intended).
<snip>
Derek Oliver
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
I've seen a number of good points in this thread - rather than try and
tag multiple parts of the discussion, here are a few observations:
1) wrt large classes - some professional faculties "cap" the number of
students in their classes. For example, in my department we have a
target cap of 75-80 students per lecture class, partly as a reflection
of the number of large theatres available but partly for accreditation
reasons (i.e. student/staff ratios are an issue there). So in Intro
Circuits (which every eng student does) we have 4 lecture "sections" of
less than 90 students - not all in parallel (to help cogested timetables).
2) Lectures are not necessarily a good educational tool in themselves,
but their value is in the capacity for disseminating information to a
large group of people in a time-efficient manner.
3) A lecture course places a lot of responsibility on the student to
motivate themselves to be an "active" participant in the learning
process (by whatever means) simply because the person lecturing can't
necessarily provide that stimulus at an individual level.
4) PBL - I'm glad Art brought up problem-based learning, it's a very
interesting thing to consider. Flinders University, the last place I
worked at in Australia, has used PBL for the entire medical programme
for some 10 years now. They claim it is a great success both in the
effectiveness for academic performance but also in the professional
performance of MDs who graduate from the programme. An important point
to make though is that the academic staff who mentors each PBL team on
their projects (which can take anything from 1 to 13 weeks) is just that
- a mentor. The "orthodoxy" of PBL is that the student team acts in the
review panel/devil's advocate role and the academic's role in the room
is relatively limited unless the group is really going off the rails.
One thing that is clear to me from talking to people who have
implemented PBL is the huge amount of work that needs to be undertaken
to prepare the course structure. Not only do the "cases" or problems on
which the student teams work need to be developed and thought through,
it is hard to see how PBL can be implemented in only one course because
it's workload cycle is entirely different to "standard" courses (PBL
tends not to lead to written exams for example as the subject is dealt
with holistically). So from what I can see, PBL is most effectively
implemented in a very tightly-controlled programme with a relatively
small total enrolment (such as a medical programme). My reason for
suggesting this are bureaucratic - you need to have everyone working
within the same structure in the same fashion (academics are not great
at this). This is not like co-ordinating the syllabus between to
instructors teaching the same course in parallel, this is the
nightmarish prospect of haveing everyone agree to every nuance and
aspect of the entire faculty syllabus/programme - and allowing
themselves to contribute to every aspect of the programme (the logistics
of PBL mean just teaching your specialty can't happen).
Having just been a little negative about the prospects for implementing
PBL in isolated courses, I have seen it put into 2nd/3rd year
undergraduate biosci courses and chemistry courses (in isolation) with
some reasonable success, although the departments in question did have
to spend some time, money and effort "transforming" the course into this
structure - effort which would be well beyond the usual investment in
revision/renewal that occurs (say) when a new instructor takes over the
course.
5) Case-based and design-based (i.e. real-world challenges) tasks are
increasingly sought in engineering programmes. There certainly is (IMO)
a good argument for having PBL in engineering, because students to tend
to respond well and there is a lot of demand from the outside world for
our students to see the theory in context. However, tempering this
enthusiasm are the parity and accountability issues - i.e. making sure
that all students have done certain things to a certain depth and being
able to demonstrate this by some measure. This is a substantial part of
what accreditation means/attempts to achieve - and is the challenge for
a "large" (numberically) programme like engineering.
6) Showmanship. Giving an effective lecture does (IMO) involve a degree
of "performance skills". To be blunt, one has to try and hold the
attention of the class for the time, and convey a few "messages" (pieces
of information). Any speaker who is all fluff and no substance will lose
the respect of their audience pretty fast. There are many aspects to
what I term "performance skills", many are seemingly mundane (speaking
clearly, using visual aids that can be understood at the back of the
room) and there is a range right through to those that look more like
they owe their origin to the entertainment industry (lights, effects,
music, whatever). There is a balance, and it is an individual balance as
to what can work.
Speaking for myself, my "delivery" is pretty simple in structure, there
is variety in what I do/say and how I present things, but I am loath to
do things that are distracting. So cute animations and .ppt slides that
flick points in and out of bold/colour etc are not things I do often. If
you get them right, they are very powerful tools, but the first priority
is (and must remain) the message(s), and delivering the information clearly.
Derek
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Dr. Derek R. Oliver <de...@ee.umanitoba.ca>
Electrical & Computer Engineering
University of Manitoba, Winnipeg , Canada
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > What's being suggested to replace it is far worse. It removes the
: > responsiblity for learning from the student and dumps it on the lecturer.
: > It also removes the element of clear and rational thought from the
: > process.
: I'm curious - could you provide some examples of what you mean? I'm
: wondering whether these are really bad ideas, or poor implementation of
: good ideas. The techniques that I tried to use - and that are advocated by
: Wankat and Felder (and others) do not transfer responsibility for learning
: away from the student. Instead, they remove the professor as an impediment
: to learning.
I once sat through a 2-day course on "alternate" learning styles and found
it to be a complete waste of time. If nothing else, it pigeonholed
students into specific categories, with the implication that once they are
in one category, that's the only way they're going to learn. Never mind
the fact that human beings are enormously resourceful and there's more
than one way to skin a cat.
Unfortunately, there are educational policies that specifically dictate
what are official learning styles and that whoever is teaching must, at
all costs, accomodate them. None of them ever address the issue of the
student's responsibility for doing his or her job.
: > I can't say that the lecture method has done
: > me any lasting damage both as a student and as an engineer.
: The one thing that saves our butts as faculty is the fact that students are
: a very resourceful and resilient lot. They will do their damndest to figure out
: how the instructor is going to grade and to give him what he wants.
<snip>
That's true only to a certain extent. There are some of us who actually
wanted to have some lasting benefit from the courses we took.
Looking back on my undergrad days, I'm amazed by how much my profs
actually taught me and I have a greater appreciation for what they did for
me. While I was a student, I might not have thought so.
L Smith
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> > As for "needing to cover X material in Z time," I've never had a problem
> > with it. In the first place, you are NEVER going to be able to cover everything
> > you could in a course, so you pick what you think is important.
>
> Ah, the Enronitis/Andersonitis rationalization: "Lets not and say we did"
> or "lets say anything we want, forget what we did."
Actually, it's called intelligent analysis of what the students need and a
recognition of limited resources (especially time). For example, chemical
engineering thermodynamics does not spend a lot of time on power cycle
analysis (e.g. Otto and Diesel cycles), but does spend a lot of time on phase
equilibrium concepts. Mechanical engineering thermo barely mentions the
latter, but spends a great deal of time on the former. Why? Because each
field needs to select the topics that are important to it! To live up to your
standards would require students to study nothing but thermo for two solid
years.
(And if you claim you never edited material out of your courses I'll call
you a liar to your face. The act of selecting a text book for the course is
already editing the material. Now if you claim that you never used your
judgement to edit the material, that I'll believe.)
> > Besides, what are we trying
> > to accomplish?
>
> No, what are YOU trying to accomplish? Or, not accomplish?
Oh, you mean your objective was something other than imparting
knowledge to the students? Were you one of those professors whose
goal was to flunk the entire class? Or were you more concerned with
making sure you assigned more work than the entire rest of the university
combined? Actually, based on your behavior here, I'd say your goal
was probably to demonstrate how much you knew and how little your
students did.
> Is the amount of material that's presented more important,
> > or how much of it sticks with the students?
>
> If it doesn't stick with the students, then it doesn't matter.
Isn't that my point.
> > > That's the primary reason the Socratic
> > > > method is so effective.
> > >
> > > OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
> >
> > Talk to any lawyer, and I'm sure they can explain it to you.
>
> You mean you can't explain it to me? You throw a term around like its a
> big deal and you don't know what it means?
Sorry, you're assuming there's only two alternatives when actually there are
at least three. You're assuming that either I know what the Socratic method is
and must therefore spoon-feed you with that knowledge, or that I don't
know what it is. A third alternative is that I don't feel like wasting my time
explaining something to someone who has demonstrated a complete lack
of willingness to learn from others.
Rich Lemert
Arthur E. Sowers
At some point, if you are talking about really "new" stuff, you have to
get people around a table and have a real life _journal club_ where
everyone gets to beat the living shit out of a given paper. Even papers by
nose-in-the-air bigwig snobs. And, believe me, on my postdoc, this is
exactly how we did it. AND, I learned a LOT listening to the rest of they
guys on each side of me. It doesn't take long to learn how to be critical.
AND, it helps a lot because lots of times you HAVE TO write your own
manuscripts very carefully.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: Mark Twain once said something like "Don't let schooling get in the way of
: your education". Seems like we ought to remove the university, in
: addition to the professor.
Since the student is the "customer", he or she therefore not only knows
what needs to be taught and how it should be taught. Since that's the
case, why was I teaching such people? On the other hand, why were they
paying large sums of money and giving up significant portions of their
lives if, according to that logic, they know it all anyway?
<snip>
: is the fact that students are
: > a very resourceful and resilient lot.
: i.e. They can find beer and sex whenever they want to.
I once taught a class in which there were certain students frequently
absent because they were busy organizing fund-raising beer parties.
Therefore, I was expected to alter my schedule of exams and quizzes to
accomodate *them*.
: They will do their damndest to figure out
: > how the instructor is going to grade and to give him what he wants.
: i) Break into the instructor's office to get copies of exam distributed
: before the exam, ii) cheat during the exam with Wi-Fi wireless
: calculators, iii) bribe (*) or threaten the instructor, iv) petition the
: dean, v) hire a lawyer.
<snip>
: * - i.e. various sex acts
I've had students who expected me to tell them exactly what material I was
going to test them on in an exam because they didn't want to waste their
time studying the "wrong" material. When I answered in what they
considered vague terms, I paid for that in the student evaluations.
When I was an undergrad, there were a lot of things I wasn't happy with,
but I didn't go whining to the chairman or dean each and every time I felt
slighted. Even as a grad student, most of the profs were reasonable and I
rolled with the punches. Only once did I ever file a formal complaint and
that was because the prof in question was clearly negligent in how he
handled the course.
Nowadays, it's a different story.
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002 jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Arthur E. Sowers (arth...@magpage.com) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : Reminds me of a Scientific American article I read some 40 years ago about
> : a branch of psychology dealing with learning a task. The terms afference,
> : efference, and refference (IIRC) were applied. Essentially, learning comes
> : fastest and most accurately when people "do it themselves."
>
> : For a lot of my own education, I'd still say over my life spent in formal
> : coursework, I've still learned more by reading books on my own than going
> : to lectures and reading the associated textbook. The only exception might
> : be mathematics.
>
> <snip>
>
> Lectures are only part of the process. While I was a student, most of my
> courses consisted of lectures with additional assigments. There was a
> reason for that. One was to expose the student to the type of problems
> and the manner for solving them that was typical in an engineering job.
> Another was to reinforce what was presented in the lectures. Often, I'd
> be going through a problem with both my lecture notes and the course text
> on hand to see if I actually understood what was going on. Frequently,
> I'd find myself saying "aha!" when I finally realized what the prof was
> trying to explain in the lectures.
That's wonderful. I've had the 'light bulb go off over my head' quite a
few times, too.
Art
Arthur E. Sowers
On 15 Aug 2002, rick++ wrote:
> Another analysis is the economics.
> The per hour class rate of an instructor is expensive.
> A gypsy adjunct prof (another recent thread) makes $30 to $100 per
> classroom hour. A full professor at a research universary can
> top a $1000 per hour of classroom time.
Yeah, but a full prof at a research university is getting much if not most
of his salary from grants, not the teaching load. Its a bum relationship;
just as bad as faculty/student ratios. At UMAB there were faculty that
never taught anything. I was one of them. I wasn't the only research
professor, either. And, there were clinical professors who never taught,
either.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
=========== no change to below, included for ref. & context =====
L Smith
> One thing I've found while I was teaching is how many of my students
> lacked a fundamental background. Things were being cut from preceding
> courses because "they don't need to know that"
This argument suggests that there was either a lack of communication within
the institution or a difference of opinion as to what was really important.
If basic information needed for subsequent courses is not being presented
in a pre-requisite course, the people in charge of that pre-requisite need
to know about it. If it's an honest difference of opinion, you need to either
live with the situation, change what you do, or persuade others of the
validity of your views.
> or "where will we have the
> time to put that in the course?". I ended up spending a good deal of *my*
> course time teaching them material they should have known before starting
> it. If I was teaching a course in dynamics, I shouldn't have spent time
> allocated for it teaching basic physics in order that they could even
> understand the material I was supposed to present to them.
There are at least three factors at play, here. One is the unfortunate
need at all levels to provide remedial work to cover material that should have
been learned at a previous level. The second is the expansion in the amount
of material that is being considered essential to a "well-rounded, educated
individual." The third is the fact that science and math are often taught in
a way that is foreign to how engineering students learn. Engineering students
usually are more pragmatic than most - they want to know why they should
learn something (e.g. how to solve second-order differential equations).
Scientists, and especially mathematicians, are usually satisfied to know that
something can be done. The students therefore retain the information long
enough to regurgitate it on the final, then forget it. They're then shocked two
years later to discover that there was a reason they learned all that stuff
they
don't remember anymore.
Rich Lemert
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Derek Oliver wrote:
>
>
> jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>
> > In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
> > university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
>
>
> I've seen a number of good points in this thread - rather than try and
> tag multiple parts of the discussion, here are a few observations:
>
> 1) wrt large classes - some professional faculties "cap" the number of
> students in their classes. For example, in my department we have a
> target cap of 75-80 students per lecture class, partly as a reflection
> of the number of large theatres available but partly for accreditation
> reasons (i.e. student/staff ratios are an issue there). So in Intro
> Circuits (which every eng student does) we have 4 lecture "sections" of
> less than 90 students - not all in parallel (to help cogested timetables).
>
> 2) Lectures are not necessarily a good educational tool in themselves,
> but their value is in the capacity for disseminating information to a
> large group of people in a time-efficient manner.
Fairly well put. At the more introductory levels, someone has to drill the
hole, put in funnel, and pour into the noodles the dope.
> 3) A lecture course places a lot of responsibility on the student to
> motivate themselves to be an "active" participant in the learning
> process (by whatever means) simply because the person lecturing can't
> necessarily provide that stimulus at an individual level.
>
> 4) PBL - I'm glad Art brought up problem-based learning, it's a very
> interesting thing to consider. Flinders University, the last place I
> worked at in Australia, has used PBL for the entire medical programme
> for some 10 years now. They claim it is a great success both in the
> effectiveness for academic performance but also in the professional
> performance of MDs who graduate from the programme. An important point
> to make though is that the academic staff who mentors each PBL team on
> their projects (which can take anything from 1 to 13 weeks) is just that
> - a mentor. The "orthodoxy" of PBL is that the student team acts in the
> review panel/devil's advocate role and the academic's role in the room
> is relatively limited unless the group is really going off the rails.
i.e. the faculty is there not only as mentor,
knower-of-things-not-in-the-books, but also as chaperone.
> One thing that is clear to me from talking to people who have
> implemented PBL is the huge amount of work that needs to be undertaken
> to prepare the course structure. Not only do the "cases" or problems on
> which the student teams work need to be developed and thought through,
> it is hard to see how PBL can be implemented in only one course because
> it's workload cycle is entirely different to "standard" courses (PBL
> tends not to lead to written exams for example as the subject is dealt
> with holistically).
I had, believe it or not but its true, an english teacher for an advanced
writing course (where part of the goal was to 'break all the rules' and
change our writing style [this was difficult]) who argued for to hell with
sequential learning. Start with any one topic and spin outward from there.
He said eventually you hit on everything or almost everything anyway. This
was in 1963, by the way. Oh, yes, class participation was expected. We
turned in our essays and he projected all of them, one at a time, with an
opaque projector, for everone to read, critique, and discuss. It blew me
away. I eventually got a B in the course. (I got Bs in my Rhet 101, 102,
too, and that was back when it was known policy to hand out grades to
flunk half of the freshmen class).
So from what I can see, PBL is most effectively
> implemented in a very tightly-controlled programme with a relatively
> small total enrolment (such as a medical programme). My reason for
> suggesting this are bureaucratic - you need to have everyone working
> within the same structure in the same fashion (academics are not great
> at this). This is not like co-ordinating the syllabus between to
> instructors teaching the same course in parallel, this is the
> nightmarish prospect of haveing everyone agree to every nuance and
> aspect of the entire faculty syllabus/programme - and allowing
> themselves to contribute to every aspect of the programme (the logistics
> of PBL mean just teaching your specialty can't happen).
I'd say PBL might not be as desireable in the 1st & 2nd year of our
undergraduate college system, but more in the 3rd & 4th, and even more so
in graduate school.
> Having just been a little negative about the prospects for implementing
> PBL in isolated courses, I have seen it put into 2nd/3rd year
> undergraduate biosci courses and chemistry courses (in isolation) with
> some reasonable success, although the departments in question did have
> to spend some time, money and effort "transforming" the course into this
> structure - effort which would be well beyond the usual investment in
> revision/renewal that occurs (say) when a new instructor takes over the
> course.
OK
> 5) Case-based and design-based (i.e. real-world challenges) tasks are
> increasingly sought in engineering programmes. There certainly is (IMO)
> a good argument for having PBL in engineering, because students to tend
> to respond well and there is a lot of demand from the outside world for
> our students to see the theory in context. However, tempering this
> enthusiasm are the parity and accountability issues - i.e. making sure
> that all students have done certain things to a certain depth and being
> able to demonstrate this by some measure. This is a substantial part of
> what accreditation means/attempts to achieve - and is the challenge for
> a "large" (numberically) programme like engineering.
I think at least MIT has these robot-wars classes where the students build
robots and in the end have a big bash....literally. I've seen a few on TV.
Sure beats stock car races (and nobody gets hurt [at least physically]).
> 6) Showmanship. Giving an effective lecture does (IMO) involve a degree
> of "performance skills". To be blunt, one has to try and hold the
> attention of the class for the time, and convey a few "messages" (pieces
> of information). Any speaker who is all fluff and no substance will lose
> the respect of their audience pretty fast. There are many aspects to
> what I term "performance skills", many are seemingly mundane (speaking
> clearly, using visual aids that can be understood at the back of the
> room) and there is a range right through to those that look more like
> they owe their origin to the entertainment industry (lights, effects,
> music, whatever). There is a balance, and it is an individual balance as
> to what can work.
I've also seen low IQ, low attention, low motivation students. They
shouldn't have been in college.
> Speaking for myself, my "delivery" is pretty simple in structure, there
> is variety in what I do/say and how I present things, but I am loath to
> do things that are distracting. So cute animations and .ppt slides that
> flick points in and out of bold/colour etc are not things I do often. If
> you get them right, they are very powerful tools, but the first priority
> is (and must remain) the message(s), and delivering the information clearly.
Put a video camera on yourself yet?
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
> Derek
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: I've seen a number of good points in this thread - rather than try and
: tag multiple parts of the discussion, here are a few observations:
: 1) wrt large classes - some professional faculties "cap" the number of
: students in their classes. For example, in my department we have a
: target cap of 75-80 students per lecture class, partly as a reflection
: of the number of large theatres available but partly for accreditation
: reasons (i.e. student/staff ratios are an issue there). So in Intro
: Circuits (which every eng student does) we have 4 lecture "sections" of
: less than 90 students - not all in parallel (to help cogested timetables).
As I mentioned in another message, available space is also a
consideration. I took a microprocessor course several years ago. There
were about 100 students in my section crammed into a room designed for, I
think, 80. It made attending lecture there quite uncomfortable and
distracting when someone close by started yakking.
: 2) Lectures are not necessarily a good educational tool in themselves,
: but their value is in the capacity for disseminating information to a
: large group of people in a time-efficient manner.
It's not a recommended method for something like, say, CAD, where a lot of
individual attention is necessary.
: 3) A lecture course places a lot of responsibility on the student to
: motivate themselves to be an "active" participant in the learning
: process (by whatever means) simply because the person lecturing can't
: necessarily provide that stimulus at an individual level.
I took some electronic devices courses from one prof a few years ago. He
set a high standard and was demanding. My notes from his lectures filled
a large binder.
But because he was demanding, I had to spend a lot of time on my own to go
through the material. I'm glad he was because I learned a lot, probably
more than had he done it differently.
<snip>
: 5) Case-based and design-based (i.e. real-world challenges) tasks are
: increasingly sought in engineering programmes. There certainly is (IMO)
: a good argument for having PBL in engineering, because students to tend
: to respond well and there is a lot of demand from the outside world for
: our students to see the theory in context. However, tempering this
: enthusiasm are the parity and accountability issues - i.e. making sure
: that all students have done certain things to a certain depth and being
: able to demonstrate this by some measure. This is a substantial part of
: what accreditation means/attempts to achieve - and is the challenge for
: a "large" (numberically) programme like engineering.
In order to make this effective, one needs people teaching such courses to
be skilled and experienced in the field covered by them.
: 6) Showmanship. Giving an effective lecture does (IMO) involve a degree
: of "performance skills". To be blunt, one has to try and hold the
: attention of the class for the time, and convey a few "messages" (pieces
: of information). Any speaker who is all fluff and no substance will lose
: the respect of their audience pretty fast. There are many aspects to
: what I term "performance skills", many are seemingly mundane (speaking
: clearly, using visual aids that can be understood at the back of the
: room) and there is a range right through to those that look more like
: they owe their origin to the entertainment industry (lights, effects,
: music, whatever). There is a balance, and it is an individual balance as
: to what can work.
It isn't just respect for the lecturer but what that lecturer stands for.
My profs were representatives of the profession I wanted to become part
of. Had they made a mess of things, they would have brought that
profession into disrepute.
: Speaking for myself, my "delivery" is pretty simple in structure, there
: is variety in what I do/say and how I present things, but I am loath to
: do things that are distracting. So cute animations and .ppt slides that
: flick points in and out of bold/colour etc are not things I do often. If
: you get them right, they are very powerful tools, but the first priority
: is (and must remain) the message(s), and delivering the information clearly.
<snip>
I've found that a chalkboard (or, nowadays, whiteboard) as being far more
effective than fancy overhead slides.
L Smith
> I dont think you make a set rule.
> I think it depends on the course involved- the material,
> its structure, the delivery capability of the instructor.
> I'd try it out for a week or too, then decide whether to attend
> a lecture.
I'm not sure which post you're replying to, but you're right - the
instructional techniques used in a course have to reflect the needs
and objectives of the material and the abilities and learning styles of
the students. The Socratic method (illustrated so admirably by
John Houseman in "The Paper Chase") is popular in law schools
because lawyers must be ready to "think on their feet" in a courtroom.
Its not going to do a thing to help you disect a frog and identify the
organs you see.
As far as the instructors delivery is concerned, each instructor is
going
to have to find the techniques that work best for them and tailor those
techniques to their personalities. Fortunately, the effective techniques
can be used by anyone regardless of their personality. You don't have
to put on a show, for example, to use active learning in your class.
As for "trying it a week or two," Felder's rule of thumb for
introducing
any new technique into the classroom is that it must be tried for at
least
three times before you can expect to see any benefit from it. The first
time
you try it, the students will go "yeah, sure, whatever you say," and
won't
take you seriously. The second time you try it, they'll realize "hey, he
really
means it," but they probably won't understand what you want them to do
and they'll get it wrong. (This doesn't even take into account how it
will
probably take the instructor a couple of times before he/she figures out
how to get the technique to work for their teaching style.)
> At a quality school you may not have textbooks to fall back
> on in the upper level courses because the material may be
> so new. Then you need more face contact and good class notes.
Even here, the instructor can be "a talking textbook", or they can
help
the students be more effective learners.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : > I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
> : > need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
> : > lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
> : > that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
>
> : And you are a valid representation of all students? Baloney. By definition
> : (since you have a PhD) you are in the upper 10-20% of all students.
>
> I found that disrupting to me both as a student, even as an undergrad, and
> while I was teaching. Constant changes in pace did little to help me
> understand the material because they would break my concentration.
But what were you concentrating on - figuring out what the lecture material
meant, or making sure you got everything down?
You do raise a valid point, though. Every student learns in a different way.
Some need to sit quietly and think about the material. Others learn best by
bouncing their thoughts off of someone else. (I even had one student tell me
he had to pace around his apartment arguing with the material to figure it
out.) The traditional lecture is good for some students - the motivated
instructor tries to help as many of his students as he can learn the material.
> : As for "needing to cover X material in Z time," I've never had a problem
> : with it. In the first place, you are NEVER going to be able to cover everything
> : you could in a course, so you pick what you think is important. EVERY
> : professor does this. Fortunately, if we choose wisely the students will later
> : be able to go back and "fill in the blanks." Besides, what are we trying
> : to accomplish? Is the amount of material that's presented more important,
> : or how much of it sticks with the students?
>
> It depends on what's being taught and to whom. In engineering, there are
> certain concepts that are required in order for someone to obtain a degree
> and, later on, professional registration. Letting a prof decide what's
> "important" is a dangerous course of action (no pun intended).
There are the fundamentals that must be part of any course on a particular
subject. If these are not presented to the students, the instructor's colleagues
who have those students in later courses will probably be aware of it and
let that instructor know. And in the US, ABET accreditation serves as an
independent check to insure that the basics are being covered. (A further
check-and-balance is provided when the students try to get jobs. If
your graduates can't get jobs because they lack the basics word will get
around fairly quickly, and you can imagine what that will do to your
enrollment.)
Once the basics are covered, though, the instructor has a lot of leeway
in what he presents. He's not operating in a complete vacuum, though, able
to do whatever he wants. There will be pressure from his colleagues (and
from employers) to make sure the material is compatible with the department's
mission.
Rich Lemert
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> "Arthur E. Sowers" wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> > > As for "needing to cover X material in Z time," I've never had a problem
> > > with it. In the first place, you are NEVER going to be able to cover everything
> > > you could in a course, so you pick what you think is important.
> >
> > Ah, the Enronitis/Andersonitis rationalization: "Lets not and say we did"
> > or "lets say anything we want, forget what we did."
>
> Actually, it's called intelligent analysis of what the students need and a
> recognition of limited resources (especially time). For example, chemical
> engineering thermodynamics does not spend a lot of time on power cycle
> analysis (e.g. Otto and Diesel cycles), but does spend a lot of time on phase
> equilibrium concepts. Mechanical engineering thermo barely mentions the
> latter, but spends a great deal of time on the former. Why? Because each
> field needs to select the topics that are important to it! To live up to your
> standards would require students to study nothing but thermo for two solid
> years.
In the end, there can be no better validator than seeing how whatever you
do affects the quality of what the student does 10-20 years down the road;
to hell with the theoretical fuzzywuzzy.
> (And if you claim you never edited material out of your courses I'll call
> you a liar to your face.
What the hell, whole college catalogs "edit" the materials of their
disciplines. Faculty sometimes teach, for a given course, material that is
not even in the course description. Some don't even assign a text book.
I've had many. Then there are the profs that lie: they say the text book
material will be on the exams, and then I studied the textbook, and there
was never anything from the text book on the exam.
The act of selecting a text book for the course is
> already editing the material. Now if you claim that you never used your
> judgement to edit the material, that I'll believe.)
I never use my judgement to edit the material? Why would I want to claim
that?
> > > Besides, what are we trying
> > > to accomplish?
> >
> > No, what are YOU trying to accomplish? Or, not accomplish?
>
> Oh, you mean your objective was something other than imparting
> knowledge to the students?
No, not me, YOU. I asked about YOU, first. You asked about 'we' and I'd
like to know how you are defining 'we'. Especially since, over the last
five-six years, you have used 'we' to mean YOU, and sometimes you have
used 'we' to mean everyone on src except me.
Were you one of those professors whose
> goal was to flunk the entire class?
No, but I did flunk some students.
Now, were you one of those who passed everyone?
Or were you more concerned with
> making sure you assigned more work than the entire rest of the university
> combined?
Or, were you one who was bucking for good student evaluations so they
would renew your appointment?
Actually, based on your behavior here, I'd say your goal
> was probably to demonstrate how much you knew and how little your
> students did.
Based on your behavior here, you'd be the only one here to flunk my
course.
>
> > Is the amount of material that's presented more important,
> > > or how much of it sticks with the students?
> >
> > If it doesn't stick with the students, then it doesn't matter.
>
> Isn't that my point.
You gave a "Is....or...." question, literally. The first half has no
meaning or purpose if the second half doesn't apply.
> > > > That's the primary reason the Socratic
> > > > > method is so effective.
> > > >
> > > > OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
> > >
> > > Talk to any lawyer, and I'm sure they can explain it to you.
^^^^^^^^^
Talk to _any_ lawyer sounds like _one_ to me, then in the second phrase
you say _they_, which sounds like plural to me.
> > You mean you can't explain it to me? You throw a term around like its a
> > big deal and you don't know what it means?
>
> Sorry, you're assuming there's only two alternatives when actually there are
> at least three.
Oh, three answers but you don't know any of them, right?
You're assuming that either I know what the Socratic method is
> and must therefore spoon-feed you with that knowledge,
You brought it up, now "put up" or "shut up".
or that I don't
> know what it is.
I'm still waiting. AND, I'm calling your bluff.
> A third alternative is that I don't feel like wasting my time
You'd make a wonderful politician. Why don't you run against George Bush.
Or, 'you get cold feet' all of a sudden?
> explaining something to someone who has demonstrated a complete lack
> of willingness to learn from others.
Well, as far as I'm concerend, I was clearly willing to learn from you
what the Socratic method was and I even publicly asked you.
You sure sound like a first class cop-out to me. Or, are you really just a
tease?
L Smith
> I've had students who expected me to tell them exactly what material I was
> going to test them on in an exam because they didn't want to waste their
> time studying the "wrong" material. When I answered in what they
> considered vague terms, I paid for that in the student evaluations.
So what's wrong with telling them what you expect them to know? You
don't have tell them what problems are going to be on the test, but you
should tell them the topics that you think are important. For example, you
might have an instructional objective that says the students will need to
be able to use Bernoulli's equation to solve flow problems in simple pipe
networks. It tells them that you consider Bernoulli problems to be an
important part of the course, but they're still going to need to know how to
use the equation to pass the test. The advantage of using instructional
objectives like this is that it focusses the student's efforts on what you think
is important, and it also helps you focus your presentation.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
>
> : I'm curious - could you provide some examples of what you mean? I'm
> : wondering whether these are really bad ideas, or poor implementation of
> : good ideas. The techniques that I tried to use - and that are advocated by
> : Wankat and Felder (and others) do not transfer responsibility for learning
> : away from the student. Instead, they remove the professor as an impediment
> : to learning.
>
> I once sat through a 2-day course on "alternate" learning styles and found
> it to be a complete waste of time. If nothing else, it pigeonholed
> students into specific categories, with the implication that once they are
> in one category, that's the only way they're going to learn. Never mind
> the fact that human beings are enormously resourceful and there's more
> than one way to skin a cat.
My response to this would be that either the seminar wasn't presented
effectively or you missed the whole point of the exercise. Learning theory
does NOT say that students only have a single learning style - it says they
have a PREFERRED learning style. They can learn in other ways, it's just
going to be a lot harder for them. I, for example, have had to learn about
different theories by following their derivation - going from one boring
equation to the next. I can do it, but I hate it. Give me a problem where I
have to use that theory, though, and I'm all over it.
> Unfortunately, there are educational policies that specifically dictate
> what are official learning styles and that whoever is teaching must, at
> all costs, accomodate them. None of them ever address the issue of the
> student's responsibility for doing his or her job.
Again, I think you are missing the point. Learning style theory does NOT
remove the burden of learning the material from the student. No matter what
the instructor does, the only person that can learn the material is the student.
However, in the traditional approach to education, instructors teach in a
way that is compatible with their own learning style. As a result, maybe
25% of their students "get it" easily, while the majority of the class has a
real struggle to understand what's going on. If the instructor can make a few
simple changes to how the material is presented, though, suddenly 80% of
the class "get's it".
The question in my mind boils down to this: What is the instructor's job?
Is it to present the material (i.e. perform like a talking textbook), in which
case what do we need him for, or is it to help the students understand the
material?
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> Another analysis is the economics.
> The per hour class rate of an instructor is expensive.
> A gypsy adjunct prof (another recent thread) makes $30 to $100 per
> classroom hour. A full professor at a research universary can
> top a $1000 per hour of classroom time.
However, the full professor at a research university is not being paid
to
teach - he's being paid to perform research. The institution expects it
because that's where the big bucks are coming from, and the professor
buys into it because that's what he wants to do. Many of them consider
teaching to be the price they have to pay to do what they think is
important, and resent the time it takes away from what they really want
to do.
Rich Lemert
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
: jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
I might say that the material will cover Chapters A - F, but I end up
asking questions from Chapters A, C, and E. Afterwards, I'll get some
malcontent screaming like a stuck pig that he spent endless hours studying
material from Chapter D, so why did he do it when I didn't ask a question
on it.
If Mr. Whiner had paid attention to what I said the material was from A -
F, implying that anything I ask is fair game. Students have only a
limited amount of time in an exam, and the questions have to be of a
reasonable depth and complexity in order to be an effective test of how
much they learned. Mr. Whiner was only trying to weasel his way through
and fulfill the requirements of "student success". Sorry, but you pays
your money and you takes your chances.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > 2) Lectures are not necessarily a good educational tool in themselves,
: > but their value is in the capacity for disseminating information to a
: > large group of people in a time-efficient manner.
: Fairly well put. At the more introductory levels, someone has to drill the
: hole, put in funnel, and pour into the noodles the dope.
When I was an undergrad, some of the courses were not only introductory
but were also meant to weed out students who didn't measure up. Failure
rates of two-thirds in first-year statics were not unusual in those days,
and for good reason. That course introduced one to the rigorous
discipline of engineering, as well as the type of problems that one might
eventually encounter.
<snip>
: i.e. the faculty is there not only as mentor,
: knower-of-things-not-in-the-books, but also as chaperone.
At that stage, many of the students likely have a lot of growing up to do
and that environment is part of the maturing process.
<snip>
: I think at least MIT has these robot-wars classes where the students build
: robots and in the end have a big bash....literally. I've seen a few on TV.
: Sure beats stock car races (and nobody gets hurt [at least physically]).
One problem I have with courses like that is that some students may spend
far too much time on them and neglect their other courses as a result.
Also, I'm not terribly keen on giving out grades on how well the projects
place in the final competition. The winner may not necessarily have the
best design.
: > 6) Showmanship. Giving an effective lecture does (IMO) involve a degree
: > of "performance skills". To be blunt, one has to try and hold the
: > attention of the class for the time, and convey a few "messages" (pieces
: > of information). Any speaker who is all fluff and no substance will lose
: > the respect of their audience pretty fast. There are many aspects to
: > what I term "performance skills", many are seemingly mundane (speaking
: > clearly, using visual aids that can be understood at the back of the
: > room) and there is a range right through to those that look more like
: > they owe their origin to the entertainment industry (lights, effects,
: > music, whatever). There is a balance, and it is an individual balance as
: > to what can work.
: I've also seen low IQ, low attention, low motivation students. They
: shouldn't have been in college.
<SARCASM>
Nononononononono! Didn't you know that there are no *bad* students, only
*bad* instructors? If they're not motivated, it's because they're the
victims of a *bad* teaching method. The instructor/prof hasn't adapted to
the learning styles of the individual students. (I can see it now: "I
learn best when the prof dresses like a clown and barks like a seal. He
doesn't do either, so I'm not learning anything. Therefore, he is a bad
teacher.")
</SARCASM>
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > I once sat through a 2-day course on "alternate" learning styles and found
: > it to be a complete waste of time. If nothing else, it pigeonholed
: > students into specific categories, with the implication that once they are
: > in one category, that's the only way they're going to learn. Never mind
: > the fact that human beings are enormously resourceful and there's more
: > than one way to skin a cat.
: My response to this would be that either the seminar wasn't presented
: effectively or you missed the whole point of the exercise. Learning theory
: does NOT say that students only have a single learning style - it says they
: have a PREFERRED learning style. They can learn in other ways, it's just
: going to be a lot harder for them. I, for example, have had to learn about
: different theories by following their derivation - going from one boring
: equation to the next. I can do it, but I hate it. Give me a problem where I
: have to use that theory, though, and I'm all over it.
Hey, I sat through the course and I was fed a line of bull that a given
student will learn only in *one* way. If I have a "hands-on learning"
type, then I would have been wrong to expect him or her to use logic to
solve a problem.
One thing that's missed by that doctrine is that the workplace has rules
and regulations. Seldom are there employers that have "alternate" ways of
working. There's a saying which goes, if one doesn't want to salute the
captain, then one should serve on another ship.
Education not only teaches concepts, but is also preparation for the
working world. Present-day education policy/philosophy/ideology
completely ignores that.
: > Unfortunately, there are educational policies that specifically dictate
: > what are official learning styles and that whoever is teaching must, at
: > all costs, accomodate them. None of them ever address the issue of the
: > student's responsibility for doing his or her job.
: Again, I think you are missing the point. Learning style theory does NOT
: remove the burden of learning the material from the student. No matter what
: the instructor does, the only person that can learn the material is the student.
And if the student puts no effort into learning it, who gets blamed?
Certainly not the student.
: However, in the traditional approach to education, instructors teach in a
: way that is compatible with their own learning style. As a result, maybe
: 25% of their students "get it" easily, while the majority of the class has a
: real struggle to understand what's going on. If the instructor can make a few
: simple changes to how the material is presented, though, suddenly 80% of
: the class "get's it".
With that logic, I guess most athletes and musicians must be complete
idiots because they often do the same thing over and over again until
they've mastered it.
If a student doesn't "get it" the first time, it's up to the student to
work around it. I often saw my profs and TAs because I either didn't
understand what they expected of me or I ran into problems. But *I* made
the effort first.
And, no, I didn't always consider it a "struggle". I usually learned more
from not "getting it" the first time.
: The question in my mind boils down to this: What is the instructor's job?
: Is it to present the material (i.e. perform like a talking textbook), in which
: case what do we need him for, or is it to help the students understand the
: material?
Even if you give most students the course textbook, they wouldn't know
where to start in order to learn the material, let alone open it. If the
material is not presented in a manner that a student can immediately
understand, maybe it's the student who has to make the effort and adjust.
If I read an article and come across a passage I don't understand, I don't
always blame the author. I go over it again to see if I missed something.
More often than not, I didn't make a proper effort the first time.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > I found that disrupting to me both as a student, even as an undergrad, and
: > while I was teaching. Constant changes in pace did little to help me
: > understand the material because they would break my concentration.
: But what were you concentrating on - figuring out what the lecture material
: meant, or making sure you got everything down?
In most of my lectures, there simply wasn't time to try and fully
comprehend everything that was presented. That usually came later while
working on the assignments that I had to complete.
: You do raise a valid point, though. Every student learns in a different way.
: Some need to sit quietly and think about the material. Others learn best by
: bouncing their thoughts off of someone else. (I even had one student tell me
: he had to pace around his apartment arguing with the material to figure it
: out.) The traditional lecture is good for some students - the motivated
: instructor tries to help as many of his students as he can learn the material.
I always thought that the responsibility always lay with me to learn the
course material.
<snip>
: > It depends on what's being taught and to whom. In engineering, there are
: > certain concepts that are required in order for someone to obtain a degree
: > and, later on, professional registration. Letting a prof decide what's
: > "important" is a dangerous course of action (no pun intended).
: There are the fundamentals that must be part of any course on a particular
: subject. If these are not presented to the students, the instructor's colleagues
: who have those students in later courses will probably be aware of it and
: let that instructor know.
But will anything be done about it? I've been in the situation where I
raised the issue and I was told "how are we going to fit it in?" and the
status quo remained intact.
And in the US, ABET accreditation serves as an
: independent check to insure that the basics are being covered. (A further
: check-and-balance is provided when the students try to get jobs. If
: your graduates can't get jobs because they lack the basics word will get
: around fairly quickly, and you can imagine what that will do to your
: enrollment.)
And even accreditation can be based on fluff and flummery. What the
accreditation committee approves and what's actually taught can often be
two different things. I've seen it happen.
: Once the basics are covered, though, the instructor has a lot of leeway
: in what he presents. He's not operating in a complete vacuum, though, able
: to do whatever he wants. There will be pressure from his colleagues (and
: from employers) to make sure the material is compatible with the department's
: mission.
In most engineering courses I took, there wasn't much room for extra
material.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: In the end, there can be no better validator than seeing how whatever you
: do affects the quality of what the student does 10-20 years down the road;
: to hell with the theoretical fuzzywuzzy.
Unfortunately, that timeframe's not always acceptable to budget
committees.
<snip>
: What the hell, whole college catalogs "edit" the materials of their
: disciplines. Faculty sometimes teach, for a given course, material that is
: not even in the course description. Some don't even assign a text book.
I've seen that happen. I even took a course in which the description in
the calendar wasn't even remotely related to what I ended up studying. I
was annoyed at it, but, in the long run, I had no regrets things ended up
they way they did because the material that was presented was quite
valuable.
: I've had many. Then there are the profs that lie: they say the text book
: material will be on the exams, and then I studied the textbook, and there
: was never anything from the text book on the exam.
I've been accused of doing that.
<snip>
Derek Oliver
Arthur E. Sowers wrote:
Yes - and I'd recommend this to anyone serious about understanding some
of the differences between what they do and what they think they do when
presenting.
Footnote to that. Some lecture theatres which have the facility to video
the lecture also have a monitor screen on the front bench so that the
presenter can see the recorded feed as it happens (i.e. to double-check
that visual aids are being shown properly etc). Towards the end of a
lecture in one such theatre a tech came in to set the system up for the
following lecture. No problem with that, the control booth was up the
back and he didn't disturb anything. Unfortunatly, switching on the
system and generally setting up also remotely activated the monitor
screen, which gave me a hell of a jolt - it's one thing to steel
yourself to watch a video later on but, unprepared, the live thing is
altogether a different feedback loop....
L Smith
> L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
>
> : You do raise a valid point, though. Every student learns in a different way.
> : Some need to sit quietly and think about the material. Others learn best by
> : bouncing their thoughts off of someone else. (I even had one student tell me
> : he had to pace around his apartment arguing with the material to figure it
> : out.) The traditional lecture is good for some students - the motivated
> : instructor tries to help as many of his students as he can learn the material.
>
> I always thought that the responsibility always lay with me to learn the
> course material.
And I'm not disputing that in the slightest. My argument, though, is that
if you're paying someone to teach you want him to be as effective as
possible in helping the students understand the material. Otherwise all
you have is an expensive talking textbook.
Consider the following analogy. Let's say you're learning to play tennis.
Your tennis instructor can sit there all day lobbing balls at you, telling you
"keep your racket up" or whatever, but any learning that is accomplished
comes about by accident. Or, he can come up to you and help guide your
arms through the motions he wants, or demonstrate how the stroke should
be made, and you'll learn more in five minutes than you did in a week using
the other approach.
> : Once the basics are covered, though, the instructor has a lot of leeway
> : in what he presents. He's not operating in a complete vacuum, though, able
> : to do whatever he wants. There will be pressure from his colleagues (and
> : from employers) to make sure the material is compatible with the department's
> : mission.
>
> In most engineering courses I took, there wasn't much room for extra
> material.
Coming up with extra material is never a problem. The problem is deciding
what material you could present that you won't.
Rich Lemert
Russell Martin
When I first was a TA in grad school, we had to take a short course
in teaching techniques, which included us giving a simulated lecture
which was video taped for critique (yes, we had video tape back then
but the machine was powered by a dinosaur on a treadmill, like in the
"Flintstones" ;-) ).
Regards,
Russell
L Smith
I might quibble with the way you stated your educational objective, but I
know only too well the complaint you describe. It goes beyond just what's
on a test, too. I've had students complain about why they had to take a
particular course that they never expected to use. I'd just ask them to show
me the piece of paper that described what was going to happen in their
career.
For your whiner, you could always offer to provide him with a test over all
of the material in the relevent chapters - ask him which two-three days he
wanted to take it over.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> Hey, I sat through the course and I was fed a line of bull that a given
> student will learn only in *one* way. If I have a "hands-on learning"
> type, then I would have been wrong to expect him or her to use logic to
> solve a problem.
If that's what you were told, then I doubt the quality of the seminar.
However, you're mixing two different concepts in this comment. You're
comparing a learning style (hands on) with a problem solving skill/methodology.
Both "hands-on" and "reflective" learners are fully capable of solving
problems logically. The one has to think about the method, the other has to
actually use it.
> One thing that's missed by that doctrine is that the workplace has rules
> and regulations. Seldom are there employers that have "alternate" ways of
> working.
I have yet to work for a place that dictated how I solved a problem. All
that they cared about was that I did solve it.
I, for example, have to get up periodically to walk around and think about
the issue I'm working on. No one has ever told me to go back to me seat
and sit down. A lot of the programmers I work with, though, don't budge
for four hours straight.
> : However, in the traditional approach to education, instructors teach in a
> : way that is compatible with their own learning style. As a result, maybe
> : 25% of their students "get it" easily, while the majority of the class has a
> : real struggle to understand what's going on. If the instructor can make a few
> : simple changes to how the material is presented, though, suddenly 80% of
> : the class "get's it".
>
> With that logic, I guess most athletes and musicians must be complete
> idiots because they often do the same thing over and over again until
> they've mastered it.
Here you are confusing understanding with skill. An athlete may understand
the principles of what he's doing fairly quickly, but must practice the task to
become proficient. You're also mixing kinesthetic learning with "knowledge"
learning (I forget the term for this).
> If a student doesn't "get it" the first time, it's up to the student to
> work around it. I often saw my profs and TAs because I either didn't
> understand what they expected of me or I ran into problems. But *I* made
> the effort first.
Even when the material is presented in a student's preferred learning
style he still often must struggle with the material. When the material is
presented for a different learning style, now he must not only struggle with
the material but with how it's presented. Making a minimal modification in
your teaching style to remove this extra impediment puts more of the students
on an equal footing.
> : The question in my mind boils down to this: What is the instructor's job?
> : Is it to present the material (i.e. perform like a talking textbook), in which
> : case what do we need him for, or is it to help the students understand the
> : material?
>
> Even if you give most students the course textbook, they wouldn't know
> where to start in order to learn the material, let alone open it. If the
> material is not presented in a manner that a student can immediately
> understand, maybe it's the student who has to make the effort and adjust.
Why? You are being paid to make the material accessable to the student.
If you don't want to do that, don't teach. We can save a lot of money by
just having the students buy the textbooks and testing them now and then.
> If I read an article and come across a passage I don't understand, I don't
> always blame the author. I go over it again to see if I missed something.
> More often than not, I didn't make a proper effort the first time.
And I suppose in all those cases you've never thought that "gee, if the
author had explained it this way I would have seen it immediately." And, I'm
also willing to bet that other people often understood the passage with less
effort than you required because it meshed with their learning style and not
yours.
Rich Lemert
Arthur E. Sowers
On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Derek Oliver wrote:
>
>
> Arthur E. Sowers wrote:
>
> >
> > On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Derek Oliver wrote:
> >
> >>Speaking for myself, my "delivery" is pretty simple in structure, there
> >>is variety in what I do/say and how I present things, but I am loath to
> >>do things that are distracting. So cute animations and .ppt slides that
> >>flick points in and out of bold/colour etc are not things I do often. If
> >>you get them right, they are very powerful tools, but the first priority
> >>is (and must remain) the message(s), and delivering the information clearly.
> >>
> >
> > Put a video camera on yourself yet?
> >
>
>
> Yes - and I'd recommend this to anyone serious about understanding some
> of the differences between what they do and what they think they do when
> presenting.
Yeah, but you didn't tell us how much you liked what you saw about
yourself. By the way, I've done the same thing. And, I didn't think I came
off too bad, either.
> Footnote to that. Some lecture theatres which have the facility to video
> the lecture also have a monitor screen on the front bench so that the
> presenter can see the recorded feed as it happens (i.e. to double-check
> that visual aids are being shown properly etc). Towards the end of a
> lecture in one such theatre a tech came in to set the system up for the
> following lecture. No problem with that, the control booth was up the
> back and he didn't disturb anything. Unfortunatly, switching on the
> system and generally setting up also remotely activated the monitor
> screen, which gave me a hell of a jolt - it's one thing to steel
> yourself to watch a video later on but, unprepared, the live thing is
> altogether a different feedback loop....
Become a ham radio operator and see if you stay in the hobby because you
have to talk into that thing called a microphone and know its going all
over the world.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
> Derek
L Smith
> Become a ham radio operator and see if you stay in the hobby because you
> have to talk into that thing called a microphone and know its going all
> over the world.
I was on commercial radio once, and the one thing I didn't like was
the complete lack of feedback. You're talking into space, and you have
no way of knowing if there's anyone listening. Of course, I've also talked
to a local radio announcer who said that's what she likes about radio -
you don't have the audience right there, watching your every move, like
you would in e.g. theater.
Rich Lemert
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: And I'm not disputing that in the slightest. My argument, though, is that
: if you're paying someone to teach you want him to be as effective as
: possible in helping the students understand the material. Otherwise all
: you have is an expensive talking textbook.
Correction: you're paying for the *access* to that individual, not what's
in that person's head. Besides, what's wrong with a talking textbook? I
might learn something that I not have found out from any other source.
If I wanted to be babysat, a university is the wrong place for that.
: Consider the following analogy. Let's say you're learning to play tennis.
: Your tennis instructor can sit there all day lobbing balls at you, telling you
: "keep your racket up" or whatever, but any learning that is accomplished
: comes about by accident. Or, he can come up to you and help guide your
: arms through the motions he wants, or demonstrate how the stroke should
: be made, and you'll learn more in five minutes than you did in a week using
: the other approach.
Teaching at the post-secondary level is not like teaching a sport.
Most of my profs would first present typical examples of the types of
problems involving the concepts they had presented. Then they would
assign problems for me to work on, which I would attempt to solve, asking
for assistance when I ran into dead ends or brick walls. Are you telling
me that they were *all* lousy teachers because they didn't hold my hand
all the time? Many were legends in the Canadian engineering community and
my greatest regret is that I didn't learn more from them.
<snip>
: > In most engineering courses I took, there wasn't much room for extra
: > material.
: Coming up with extra material is never a problem. The problem is deciding
: what material you could present that you won't.
Read what I had written. I said that there wasn't much room for *extra*
material. In other words, almost the entire course would consist of
essential material.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: If that's what you were told, then I doubt the quality of the seminar.
I got the distinct impression that his brain was on a one-way trip to
Neptune. Unfortunately, a lot of people in attendance thought he was one
step short of a genius.
: However, you're mixing two different concepts in this comment. You're
: comparing a learning style (hands on) with a problem solving skill/methodology.
: Both "hands-on" and "reflective" learners are fully capable of solving
: problems logically. The one has to think about the method, the other has to
: actually use it.
Huh? Isn't that a contradiction? Most people I know who advocate
"hands-on" learning pooh-pooh the idea of thinking logically to solve a
problem.
: > One thing that's missed by that doctrine is that the workplace has rules
: > and regulations. Seldom are there employers that have "alternate" ways of
: > working.
: I have yet to work for a place that dictated how I solved a problem. All
: that they cared about was that I did solve it.
: I, for example, have to get up periodically to walk around and think about
: the issue I'm working on. No one has ever told me to go back to me seat
: and sit down. A lot of the programmers I work with, though, don't budge
: for four hours straight.
Some types of engineering problems can only be solved in a prescribed
manner. I once worked for a company which was more concerned with the
image that's portrayed by its workers, which meant no wandering around to
think.
<snip>
: Even when the material is presented in a student's preferred learning
: style he still often must struggle with the material. When the material is
: presented for a different learning style, now he must not only struggle with
: the material but with how it's presented. Making a minimal modification in
: your teaching style to remove this extra impediment puts more of the students
: on an equal footing.
Now tell me how a prof with a lecture section of, say, 100 students is
going to figure out what an individual student's learning style is
supposed to be? Isn't that rather impractical and a misuse of the prof's
time and abilities?
When I was an undergrad, back in the Cretaceous era, my profs would
present the material in *their* way. I didn't have to like it or agree
with it. It was *my* job to see if I understood what was presented and to
do something about it if I didn't. The question I have is this: would I
be further ahead if they had catered specifically to *my* learning style?
I frankly doubt it.
: > Even if you give most students the course textbook, they wouldn't know
: > where to start in order to learn the material, let alone open it. If the
: > material is not presented in a manner that a student can immediately
: > understand, maybe it's the student who has to make the effort and adjust.
: Why? You are being paid to make the material accessable to the student.
: If you don't want to do that, don't teach. We can save a lot of money by
: just having the students buy the textbooks and testing them now and then.
And you're saying that lectures *don't* make that material accessible?
: > If I read an article and come across a passage I don't understand, I don't
: > always blame the author. I go over it again to see if I missed something.
: > More often than not, I didn't make a proper effort the first time.
: And I suppose in all those cases you've never thought that "gee, if the
: author had explained it this way I would have seen it immediately." And, I'm
: also willing to bet that other people often understood the passage with less
: effort than you required because it meshed with their learning style and not
: yours.
Is every author going to be concerned with whether his or her writing
style is going to be agreeable with how I read and understand the written
word? I don't think so.
L Smith
> Most of my profs would first present typical examples of the types of
> problems involving the concepts they had presented. Then they would
> assign problems for me to work on, which I would attempt to solve, asking
> for assistance when I ran into dead ends or brick walls. Are you telling
> me that they were *all* lousy teachers because they didn't hold my hand
> all the time? Many were legends in the Canadian engineering community and
> my greatest regret is that I didn't learn more from them.
Without having observed them in action, I cannot say what the quality of
their teaching was. Nor is your success under them necessarily an indication
of their ability to teach. As you point out, you took near-total responsibility
for what you learned, so it's likely you would have learned something from
a rock. Among the questions I would ask is a) how many of your classmates
learned as much from these gentlemen as you in spite of equal or greater
effort on their parts, and b) how many potentially great engineers were chased
out of the field because the way the were taught doesn't mesh with the way
they learn.
Rich Lemert
Jeffrey J. Potoff
Arthur E. Sowers wrote:
>
> On Wed, 14 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
>
>
>>jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Harry Haller (hal...@spamouflage.com) wrote:
>>>
>>><snip>
>>>
>>>: I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
>>>: the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
>>>: it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
>>>: them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
>>>: students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
>>>: courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
>>>: department).
>>>
>>>This is particularly true in institutions where space of any kind is at a
>>>premium. It would be nice to give personal attention to each and every
>>>student, but a course of, say, 200 students would need to be divided into
>>>smaller groups. Each group, then, would require someone to teach them and
>>>a place where they can be taught. That's not always a practical option.
>>>
>> There are techniques for applying active learning techniques in large lecture
>>settings. You can, for example, tell the students "turn to your neighbor, and the
>>
>>two of you have two minutes to figure out you would measure the centroid
>>of xxx shape." At the end of those two minutes, get a couple of groups to
>>tell you what they came up with.
>>
>> This exercise does several things. First, it breaks them out of their stupor
>>(most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
>>before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
>>stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
>>describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
>>more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
>>
>
> I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
> need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
> lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
> that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
>
If it's integrated correctly into the lecture it is not distracting and
it enhances the amount of information X learned in time Z. How
effective is a lecture in covering X material if the students don't
actually learn the material? Just blowing through material in a lecture
to say you covered it doesn't mean that the students learned it, which
is the whole point of taking a course, isn't it?
> That's the primary reason the Socratic
>
>>method is so effective.
>>
>
> OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
Because the lecture requires the least amount of prep time.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
L Smith wrote:
> jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>
>
>>L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
>>: jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>>
>>: > In today's New York Times, there's an article about how the traditional
>>: > university lecture seems to have fallen in disfavour. Comments, anyone?
>>
>>: Are you saying this is a bad development?
>>
>>What's being suggested to replace it is far worse. It removes the
>>responsiblity for learning from the student and dumps it on the lecturer.
>>It also removes the element of clear and rational thought from the
>>process.
>>
>
> I'm curious - could you provide some examples of what you mean? I'm
> wondering whether these are really bad ideas, or poor implementation of
> good ideas. The techniques that I tried to use - and that are advocated by
> Wankat and Felder (and others) do not transfer responsibility for learning
> away from the student. Instead, they remove the professor as an impediment
> to learning.
>
Felder's methods actually transfer quite a bit of the responsibility for
learning material from the instructor to the student.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
Arthur E. Sowers wrote:
>
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, L Smith wrote:
> is the fact that students are
>
>>a very resourceful and resilient lot.
>>
>
> i.e. They can find beer and sex whenever they want to.
>
> They will do their damndest to figure out
>
>>how the instructor is going to grade and to give him what he wants.
>>
>
> i) Break into the instructor's office to get copies of exam distributed
> before the exam, ii) cheat during the exam with Wi-Fi wireless
> calculators, iii) bribe (*) or threaten the instructor, iv) petition the
> dean, v) hire a lawyer.
I design my exams and conduct classes such that none of the above
statements have any relavence.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
>
> One thing I've found while I was teaching is how many of my students
> lacked a fundamental background. Things were being cut from preceding
> courses because "they don't need to know that" or "where will we have the
> time to put that in the course?". I ended up spending a good deal of *my*
> course time teaching them material they should have known before starting
> it. If I was teaching a course in dynamics, I shouldn't have spent time
> allocated for it teaching basic physics in order that they could even
> understand the material I was supposed to present to them.
That a problem with modularized curriculums, where each prof gets a
class, develops a curriculum and goes on their merry way with little
consultation with anyone else. A team design of all courses in a
particular curriculum would eliminate this problem.
J.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: Without having observed them in action, I cannot say what the quality of
: their teaching was. Nor is your success under them necessarily an indication
: of their ability to teach. As you point out, you took near-total responsibility
: for what you learned, so it's likely you would have learned something from
: a rock. Among the questions I would ask is a) how many of your classmates
: learned as much from these gentlemen as you in spite of equal or greater
: effort on their parts, and b) how many potentially great engineers were chased
: out of the field because the way the were taught doesn't mesh with the way
: they learn.
<snip>
Most of my undergrad profs taught hundreds of engineering students over a
period of at least 20 years. Many went on to become quite successful in
their chosen careers. From my own graduating class, I know of several
managers, one company president, and a number who went on to graduate
studies. I'm the only one with a doctorate that I know of and I barely
finished in the upper third.
That speaks well of not only the men I graduated with, but also of the
professors who taught us. Last summer, I went back to my old department
and crossed paths with two of my former profs who are still there. I
thanked them for contributing to my eventually becoming Dr. Jatzeck, P.
Eng. and I mentioned to one of them that I received a *good* education in
that department as it certainly helped me with my thesis.
Engineering is a very demanding profession and it requires a certain way
of doing things. For example, anyone who has difficulty in thinking
logically may likely not be a good engineer.
L Smith
> L Smith (lls...@mindspring.com) wrote:
> : However, you're mixing two different concepts in this comment. You're
> : comparing a learning style (hands on) with a problem solving skill/methodology.
> : Both "hands-on" and "reflective" learners are fully capable of solving
> : problems logically. The one has to think about the method, the other has to
> : actually use it.
>
> Huh? Isn't that a contradiction? Most people I know who advocate
> "hands-on" learning pooh-pooh the idea of thinking logically to solve a
> problem.
First, I'm not necessarily advocating "hands-on" learning, although that is
a part of it. What I'm advocating is "active" learning. The students don't just
sit there in a lecture for an hour being spoon-fed data that may or may not
be processed later in their rooms. Instead, you force them to think about
your material when you still have an impact - while they're in front of you.
"What do you think will happen now?" "How would you approach this
problem?" "What assumption did I make in this derivation that I haven't
told you about?" However, you don't just ask these questions, wait three
seconds for the top two students to answer (if even they do), then go on.
You give _everyone_ a chance to work on the question. "Take two minutes
to talk this over - I may ask some of you to give me an answer!"
When done well, this method works wonders. You've given the students
a change so now they're more alert (addresses the problem of the "instant
gratification generation"), the active learners have had a chance to exercise
their primary learning style, and the lecture itself has already accomodated
the reflective learners. If someone figures out where you're going, they're
ahead of the game. If they haven't, they're now motivated to follow you.
And best of all, I've never had this cause a problem with covering all the
material I wanted to cover. But even if it did, I could always provide handouts
giving the details of the derivation - after all, do I really need to go through
every step on the board, or should the students be responsible for figuring
out the missing steps on their own?
> Some types of engineering problems can only be solved in a prescribed
> manner. I once worked for a company which was more concerned with the
> image that's portrayed by its workers, which meant no wandering around to
> think.
You are still mixing at least two, and probably three, phenomena. The
company you're describing wasn't concerned with how the problems were
solved, they were concerned with how their employees behaved. Second,
while there may be a "correct" way to carry out certain calculations, I've
never come across an engineering problem that had to be solved in a "correct"
way. Third, what you perceive as "solving the problem in a prescribed manner"
is probably more a case of "reporting the solution in a prescribed manner."
Even in the pharmaceutical industry's GMP standards, you're not being
told how to solve the problems but just how to perform the calculations
necessary to reach that solution. (Otherwise, why doesn't the company
just hire a bunch of technicians and save a lot of money?)
> : Even when the material is presented in a student's preferred learning
> : style he still often must struggle with the material. When the material is
> : presented for a different learning style, now he must not only struggle with
> : the material but with how it's presented. Making a minimal modification in
> : your teaching style to remove this extra impediment puts more of the students
> : on an equal footing.
>
> Now tell me how a prof with a lecture section of, say, 100 students is
> going to figure out what an individual student's learning style is
> supposed to be? Isn't that rather impractical and a misuse of the prof's
> time and abilities?
Why do you think he has to? In a class of 100 students it's a pretty safe
bet that several learning styles are present, so you don't have to go "figuring
out" who learns best how. Plus, there's enough overlap in learning styles
that a few simple changes to how you present the material will catch several
learning styles at once. To give an example, consider a lecture on electrical
currents. "The algebraic sum of the currents at a node is zero." (A typical
lecture statement that immediately appeals to "the geeks" but leaves most of
the class cold.) "It's just like what happens when water is flowing in a
set of pipes." (Now you've caught the people who learn best by relating new
information to something they already know.) "For example, if the current
in this wire is xx amps [said while drawing a simple circuit], and the current
in this one is yy amps, what must the current be in this wire?" (By drawing
the picture you've caught the visual learners - some of whom might also be
those who learn by analogy, and by stopping and giving them time to answer
your question, especially if you have them discuss it, you've caught the active
learners.) "Now, take a look at the ammeters on this circuit I have up here and
tell me what you see." (A demo is almost always going to be the most
powerful tool to get your point across. It's also going to be the most difficult
to accomplish, and not all concepts lend themselves to it.)
In this simple example you can see that most instructors are already
applying _some_ of the techniques intended to address multiple learning
styles, so it isn't going to take that much of an adjustment to reach the
others. You also don't have to go into such detail for every single point
in your lecture. Pick the key points and make sure the students get them,
and go ahead and use your native teaching style for the rest of the stuff.
And you don't have to catch all learning styles every time. One time you
might try addressing the visual learners - another time the analogy people.
> When I was an undergrad, back in the Cretaceous era, my profs would
> present the material in *their* way. I didn't have to like it or agree
> with it. It was *my* job to see if I understood what was presented and to
> do something about it if I didn't. The question I have is this: would I
> be further ahead if they had catered specifically to *my* learning style?
> I frankly doubt it.
From what you have described, they already were. You can use different
psychological tools to follow students as they progress through the curriculum
(my first Dean was big on the Hermann Brain Dominance instrument, but
Meiers-Briggs will also show it). As freshmen, the student's profiles are all
over the map. When they're seniors, their profiles are almost duplicates of
their faculty's. Two things are happening here. First, we're chasing out a lot
of good students simply because they don't learn the way we teach. Second,
the ones that remain are being molded by the teaching process into duplicates
of us. Both effects have been documented.
Rich Lemert
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: If it's integrated correctly into the lecture it is not distracting and
: it enhances the amount of information X learned in time Z. How
: effective is a lecture in covering X material if the students don't
: actually learn the material? Just blowing through material in a lecture
: to say you covered it doesn't mean that the students learned it, which
: is the whole point of taking a course, isn't it?
That's what labs and tutorial sessions are for. In that environment, the
pace is a bit slower and students are more likely to get any assistance
they may require.
<snip>
: > OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
: Because the lecture requires the least amount of prep time.
The Socratic method is also *very* time-consuming. Don't forget that
post-secondary educational programs sell themselves on, among other
things, the potential for completing them within a certain timeframe. How
much material can actually be covered when the presentation is constantly
being disrupted by changes in pace? That would mean that a 4-year program
could take far longer. With tuitions rising to stratospheric levels, how
many students would be prepared to spend that extra time and money under
the guise of "effective" learning? I'll wager that most want to get
things done as quickly, cheaply, and painlessly as possible.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Arthur E. Sowers (arth...@magpage.com) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : > This exercise does several things. First, it breaks them out of their stupor
> : > (most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
> : > before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
> : > stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
> : > describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
> : > more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
>
> : I've seen this done and its very distracting from the regimen that you
> : need to cover X material in Z time. And, I've lived through one hour
> : lectures easily in my life. What is it today, attention deficit disorder
> : that is the new disease sweeping throughout the population?
>
> Before I started teaching at my ex-employer, I was required to take 3
> weeks worth of how-to-teach sessions. Great emphasis was put on that sort
> of approach and I tried it for the first 2 years. I gave up on it because
> I found it disruptive and distracting. Eventually, I found I was able to
> teach the material in an hour and use the remaining time for either
> examples or exercises.
I haven't found it disruptive at all. It keeps students in tune with
what is going on in class. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes isn't
teaching students much of anything except how to be good stenographers.
>
> I remember during one of my first courses, one student asked me, while I
> was discussing something, if I was going to take long because his
> attention span was quite short.
>
> Towards the end of my teaching, I found I had to give a break of 10
> minutes or so in order that the students could go and get a cup of coffee
> or have a smoke. When I was a student, lectures lasting nearly 90 minutes
> were not uncommon.
>
I find it depends on the class. I've had some that wanted to pound
through material for hours, while others have enjoyed taking a 5 or 10
minute break in the middle.
> I guess the problem is that we've had 20 years of rock videos and MTV
Closer to 10. Not many people had MTV when if first came out.
> and
> MuchMusic (Canada's answer to that channel). Students are bombarded by
> these images every time they turn on the TV. News broadcasts consist of
> 15-second sound bites.
This isn't new. Baseball announcers have also been doing this for decades.
> Is it any wonder that education has to be packaged
> and presented in a similar manner?
The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no better
methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all be the
fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change, teaching
methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should we still be
teaching students about slide rules because at one time they were very
important?
J.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > One thing I've found while I was teaching is how many of my students
<snip>
How practical is that going to be? Do you think that university
departments can afford to suspend operations in order to do that?
Peter J. Kootsookos
>
> How practical is that going to be? Do you think that university
> departments can afford to suspend operations in order to do that?
>
Which ones can afford not to?
Ciao,
Peter K.
--
Peter J. Kootsookos
"Na, na na na na na na, na na na na"
- 'Hey Jude', Lennon/McCartney
Jeffrey J. Potoff
L Smith wrote:
I think the point here is that Rich isn't saying we should be bending
over backwards to spoonfeed information to substandard students, but
instead the question is, "what is the most effective method of teaching
engineering or science?" Instructors should be continuously evaulating
the effectiveness of their teaching methods and making changes as
needed. Many students will learn something from a lecture, but could
they have learned more from other teaching methods? If so, why is it
such a horrible thing to use them?
Straight lecture courses still exist in engineering for the simple
reason that they require the least amount of prep time and the least
amount of interaction between faculty in the deparment. All other
methods require cross-course coordination and significantly more
preparation time.
J.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: I haven't found it disruptive at all. It keeps students in tune with
: what is going on in class. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes isn't
: teaching students much of anything except how to be good stenographers.
And what's wrong with being a good stenographer and recording all the
information? Engineers have to do it out in the field and people who do
research experiments have to note what was done and what happened.
<snip>
: > I guess the problem is that we've had 20 years of rock videos and MTV
: Closer to 10. Not many people had MTV when if first came out.
Same difference. Most members of the present generation grew up with it.
: > and
: > MuchMusic (Canada's answer to that channel). Students are bombarded by
: > these images every time they turn on the TV. News broadcasts consist of
: > 15-second sound bites.
: This isn't new. Baseball announcers have also been doing this for decades.
The point I was trying to make is that a lot of vital information has to
be discarded when information is presented in such small amounts. The
result can be a complete misinterpretation of what actually happened.
<snip>
: The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
: better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
: creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no better
: methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all be the
: fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change, teaching
: methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should we still be
: teaching students about slide rules because at one time they were very
: important?
Some 40 years ago, when I was in elementary school, I was among those who
was used as a guinea pig to test all sorts of wacky theories on education.
There was the self-paced learning approach to reading comprehension. Most
of my classmates just went along with it because that's what the teacher
told us to do. I did it because it was something different.
Open/flexible classrooms was another bit of tampering which had dubious
merits. I'm sure the pupils really appreciated hearing every word which
was spoken in each other's classes.
I think mine was the first generation to be "taught" with those wonderful
audio-visual aids. Again, I got a kick out of them because they were
different, but I don't think I emerged any better educated and certainly
not a whole heck of a lot smarter because of them.
In educational policy, there is far too much "if it is old, it must be
bad" and "if it works, it must be fixed". Generations of teaching
students the 3 Rs served society well. Maybe someone in authority is
finally going to wise up and keep their hands off.
What's wrong with teaching slide rules? So what if they're not as
commonly used as they once were? There's a lot that can be learned from
using one, as there are a lot of important mathematical concepts and
techniques that are implemented with a slide rule. For example, it
teaches how logarithms can be applied. It teaches about orders of
magnitude and powers of ten. One can visualize trig tables.
More importantly, though, is that it would teach how to *reason* and to
*think*, two concepts which appear to have fallen out of favour. It
teaches how to break down a calculation into smaller steps, because one
usually has to keep a record of how that calculation progresses. Using a
calculator makes it tempting to blindly punch in numbers without much
thought.
What would be interesting is to have students do an entire design project
using slide rules. It could certainly give them a better appreciation of
just how much good engineering was done in the past without computers.
Examples of that are the space program, the Empire State building, and the
Hoover Dam.
While we're at it, I also believe it's a bad idea to abandon traditional
pencil-and-paper drafting. Drafting is primarily a thinking activity and
sitting in front of a computer doesn't quite do it. I know what I'm
talking about because I taught both drafting and CAD for several years.
Drafting not only teaches how to visualize something, often in three
dimensions, but also how and what to communicate, as often whoever reads
a drawing may never know the person who prepared it. Here's an example of
transferring an idea from one mind to another without distorting
information.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: I think the point here is that Rich isn't saying we should be bending
: over backwards to spoonfeed information to substandard students, but
: instead the question is, "what is the most effective method of teaching
: engineering or science?" Instructors should be continuously evaulating
: the effectiveness of their teaching methods and making changes as
: needed. Many students will learn something from a lecture, but could
: they have learned more from other teaching methods? If so, why is it
: such a horrible thing to use them?
Perhaps because other teaching methods are totally unsuitable for what the
objective of the course is. One can't, for example, teach a machinist how
to operate a CNC lathe by lecture alone. That would be completely
inappropriate because that machinist will eventually have to use that CNC
lathe to cut metal.
A subject like, for example, heat transfer can be effectively taught by
means of a lecture, supplemented by assigned problems or, perhaps, a lab.
: Straight lecture courses still exist in engineering for the simple
: reason that they require the least amount of prep time and the least
: amount of interaction between faculty in the deparment. All other
: methods require cross-course coordination and significantly more
: preparation time.
As well as being a greater burden on a department's budget.
L Smith
> Engineering is a very demanding profession and it requires a certain way
> of doing things. For example, anyone who has difficulty in thinking
> logically may likely not be a good engineer.
There is room for disagreement in this statement. Consider the "global"
learner. These people require a complete context within which to place
their knowledge. They struggle along mightely, seeming not to have the
slightest clue, until they receive that final "brick" that completes the structure
they're building in their mind. At this point everything clicks, and they often
leap ahead of their peers. They solve problems that their classmates will
continue to struggle with, and yet when you ask them how they did it they
don't know. The answer is correct, but they didn't go from A to B to C ....
In fact, as students they're often accused of cheating because they can't
tell the instructor how they figured out the problem.
You rarely see global learners in engineering, because the way engineering
is taught (i.e. every problem has to be approached logically) is very sequential.
These people can't do it that way, they struggle, and they go into more
receptive fields. And I believe it's a loss to engineering because global
learners are often our most creative people. (The way Mozart "saw" the
full score before he put a single note to paper suggests that he might have
been a global.) We sequential types are good at going from A to B to C.
Global learners often get from A to E without the intervening stops.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
> : I haven't found it disruptive at all. It keeps students in tune with
> : what is going on in class. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes isn't
> : teaching students much of anything except how to be good stenographers.
>
> And what's wrong with being a good stenographer and recording all the
> information? Engineers have to do it out in the field and people who do
> research experiments have to note what was done and what happened.
And yet in spite all of that good stenography practice, engineers keep
terrible lab notebooks until someone sits them down and forces them to
do it right. I saw it regularly in grad school, and I saw it again as an
engineering instructor. My notebooks were used by my PhD advisor and
my post-doc supervisor as models for the other students of how to keep
a notebook, but that was only because I'd already gone through all the
pain as a chemistry major.
> : The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
> : better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
> : creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no better
> : methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all be the
> : fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change, teaching
> : methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should we still be
> : teaching students about slide rules because at one time they were very
> : important?
> In educational policy, there is far too much "if it is old, it must be
> bad" and "if it works, it must be fixed". Generations of teaching
> students the 3 Rs served society well. Maybe someone in authority is
> finally going to wise up and keep their hands off.
Advancement in any field cannot come without risk, and risk implies
that mistakes will be made. This is true in engineering, and it's true in
education.
What I like about Felder's work and Wankat's work in the area is that
because they're engineers themselves, they have little patience for all of the
"fluff" that's part of educational theory. They want to know what works
so that they can get to the bottom line - a more effective system of imparting
knowledge to students. They have waded through the 90% of the education
literature that is either crap or irrelevent (elementary ed stuff, for example)
so that we only have to examine the 10% of the stuff that works. They've
documented the success of these methods, and I've seen it work in my own
teaching.
My opinion of the attitude that the old lecture system was good enough for
me so today's students must endure it is the same as my attitude about the
36-hour on-call rotations of medical interns (residents?). There are only two
reasons for it - it's cheap, and "by damn I had to suffer through this so you
have to too."
> What's wrong with teaching slide rules? So what if they're not as
> commonly used as they once were? There's a lot that can be learned from
> using one, as there are a lot of important mathematical concepts and
> techniques that are implemented with a slide rule. For example, it
> teaches how logarithms can be applied. It teaches about orders of
> magnitude and powers of ten. One can visualize trig tables.
There are many things with high pedagogical value that it would be great
to teach. Unfortunately technology has gotten to the point where there isn't
enough time just to give the students all the data they need, let alone impart
some information. As Isaac Asimov once put it," it's as important to know what
to forget as it is to know what to remember."
> While we're at it, I also believe it's a bad idea to abandon traditional
> pencil-and-paper drafting. Drafting is primarily a thinking activity and
> sitting in front of a computer doesn't quite do it.
You'll get no argument from me here. However, see my previous comment.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : If it's integrated correctly into the lecture it is not distracting and
> : it enhances the amount of information X learned in time Z. How
> : effective is a lecture in covering X material if the students don't
> : actually learn the material? Just blowing through material in a lecture
> : to say you covered it doesn't mean that the students learned it, which
> : is the whole point of taking a course, isn't it?
>
> That's what labs and tutorial sessions are for. In that environment, the
> pace is a bit slower and students are more likely to get any assistance
> they may require.
Then the question becomes why have the lecture. If the learning comes
in the tutorials sections, then the lecture has been a waste of time. I
certainly felt I had other things I could productively be doing in those
three hours a week I lectured in each course I was teaching. The
tutorial sessions should be used to enhance the learning that took place as
a result of the lecture, not replacing it.
> I'll wager that most want to get
> things done as quickly, cheaply, and painlessly as possible.
And yet when presented with techniques to improve teaching effectiveness
(i.e. efficiency), which would speed up the process, reduce costs, and
decrease student pain, you resist.
Rich Lemert
L Smith
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
> : That a problem with modularized curriculums, where each prof gets a
> : class, develops a curriculum and goes on their merry way with little
> : consultation with anyone else. A team design of all courses in a
> : particular curriculum would eliminate this problem.
>
> <snip>
>
> How practical is that going to be? Do you think that university
> departments can afford to suspend operations in order to do that?
There is no need to suspend operations to begin the process - which should
be a continuing process anyway. All it takes to start is for Prof. A to tell
Prof. B "here's what I'm planning on covering in my intro course, is there
something I'm not covering that you think I should?"
Rich Lemert
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
: jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
: > Engineering is a very demanding profession and it requires a certain way
: > of doing things. For example, anyone who has difficulty in thinking
: > logically may likely not be a good engineer.
: There is room for disagreement in this statement. Consider the "global"
: learner. These people require a complete context within which to place
: their knowledge. They struggle along mightely, seeming not to have the
: slightest clue, until they receive that final "brick" that completes the structure
: they're building in their mind. At this point everything clicks, and they often
: leap ahead of their peers.
Most of my employers didn't have any time or patience for engineers who
worked like that. In industry, time is money and answers are often
required yesterday. Anyone who gets the answer and is able to *support*
it often does well.
They solve problems that their classmates will
: continue to struggle with, and yet when you ask them how they did it they
: don't know. The answer is correct, but they didn't go from A to B to C ....
: In fact, as students they're often accused of cheating because they can't
: tell the instructor how they figured out the problem.
Being able to explain *how* one achieved an answer is as important as in
getting the correct one. In engineering, that's essential, particularly
when there's litigation.
: You rarely see global learners in engineering, because the way engineering
: is taught (i.e. every problem has to be approached logically) is very sequential.
: These people can't do it that way, they struggle, and they go into more
: receptive fields. And I believe it's a loss to engineering because global
: learners are often our most creative people. (The way Mozart "saw" the
: full score before he put a single note to paper suggests that he might have
: been a global.) We sequential types are good at going from A to B to C.
: Global learners often get from A to E without the intervening stops.
Read my previous comments. Often, project files are put in archives or
passed from one engineer to another. Being able to explain how one
arrived at an answer or how something was done scores a lot of points with
those who look at those files.
I speak from a lot of personal experience with this.
rick++
devoted to this technique. It was very labor intensive.
And such small LA colleges have probelems when the zeitgeist goes
through one of its periodic "college-is-job-training" phases.
rick++
gurgle with glee.
You take your Stanford or MIT full professor with a four course
obligation for the year (half of these graduate research seminars),
and figure out the per hour cost:
$200,000 salary / ( 4 course x 15 weeks x 3 hours a week) ~ $1000 / hour.
Even your public university prof with double the work load and half the
salary comes out well in this straw-man analysis:
$80,000 / (8 x 15 x 3) ~ $200.
And you know partly why private school tuition is $30,000 a year!
Russell Martin
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > : I skimmed it but didn't read it in depth. I think they may have overlooked
> > : the obvious economic incentive that departments have for doing it the way
> > : it's done now; if you have 400 people in a lecture hall, you're charging
> > : them for those course credits but only paying 1 instructor. To teach those
> > : students in group discussions, "socratic method," or some other alternative
> > : courses, you need a lot more instructors (ie, a lot less profit for the
> > : department).
> >
> > This is particularly true in institutions where space of any kind is at a
> > premium. It would be nice to give personal attention to each and every
> > student, but a course of, say, 200 students would need to be divided into
> > smaller groups. Each group, then, would require someone to teach them and
> > a place where they can be taught. That's not always a practical option.
>
> There are techniques for applying active learning techniques in large lecture
> settings. You can, for example, tell the students "turn to your neighbor, and the
>
> two of you have two minutes to figure out you would measure the centroid
> of xxx shape." At the end of those two minutes, get a couple of groups to
> tell you what they came up with.
>
> (most people can pay attention to a lecture for only about twenty minutes
> before their mind starts to wander). Second, it gets them thinking about the
> stuff you want them to think about. Third, they will be receptive when you
> describe how it's done, and since they've thought about the problem they're
> more apt to follow your arguments ("oh, yeah, we forgot about that!")
>
> > policy of making the teacher/instructor/professor *completely* responsible
> > for the students learning something. The students don't have to so
> > anything, don't have to take any initiative, and aren't held accountable
> > for any failures. This policy claims to reform an ineffective method of
> > teaching while, at the same time, actually making it worse.
>
> There's actually a fairly substantial body of literature showing that the
> traditional lecture is an ineffective way to accomplish student learning. You
> can find references in the book "Teaching Engineering" (by Wankat) that
> I've mentioned in another post, and also in just about anything written by
> Rich Felder (you can get a link to his web page on effective teaching by
> going to the chemical engineering department link on the NCSU - North
> Carolina State University - web page).
>
> > I don't think the lecture was ever intended to be the sole means by which
> > a student learns. Instead, I believe it was meant to be the starting
> > point, supplemented by other sources, such as course textbooks and library
> > references.
>
> All any of these resources do is make the information available to the
> student - none of them provides any "learning" without the ACTIVE participation
> of the student. If the student doesn't do something ACTIVE - discuss the
> material with someone else, solve homework problems, paraphrase the
> material, etc. - they are going to retain very little. Effective teaching
> techniques
> enforce this active learning process. That's the primary reason the Socratic
> method is so effective.
>
> Rich Lemert
Taken to its historic conclusion, the Socratic method ends in the teacher
drinking hemlock. This would open up more faculty positions and improve
job prospects, although not life expectancy, for PhDs. You may be onto
something, Rich. :-)
Regards,
Sisyphus
John H Palmieri
[snip]
> The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
> better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
> creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no
> better methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all
> be the fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change,
> teaching methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should
> we still be teaching students about slide rules because at one time
> they were very important?
I think "better" methods developed slowly because 50 years ago (say),
college students *were* more self-motivated. These days, what with
degree-inflation, a higher percentage of people go to college (at
least in the U.S.), and probably of the people in college, a higher
percentage aren't there for love of learning or great skill in
learning; they're there because lots of jobs (sometimes pointlessly)
require a BA. So it's reasonable that people looked into different
teaching methods to reach this different audience.
I could make an analogy with computers: the first personal computers
were hard to use, but then they were mainly used by hobbyists who
would happily struggle with whatever they had available. As more
people used them, ease of use became much more important, and hence we
got MS-DOS :)
--
J. H. Palmieri
Dept of Mathematics, Box 354350 mailto:palm...@math.washington.edu
University of Washington http://www.math.washington.edu/~palmieri/
Seattle, WA 98195-4350
Arthur E. Sowers
Its not right, rick++. You need to look at your Stanford or MIT full prof
group size and grant income and how much of that guy's salary comes from
the grant. Even at UMAB school of medicine with ~1000 faculty and a ~$350
million income from grants, contracts, and clinical services (based on
roughly mid '90s budgets [and I still get Alumni bulletins bragging about
10-12%/year income increases]) we're talking about a simple 350,000 income
per prof and I _know_ the average salaries (from the official budget that
was a matter of public record) were like 80-90K. MDs in surgery might be
125-175 but thats really rare. And, very few of all of these were really
invoved in teaching, except maybe in the new PBL system, the 700 or so
medical students and the 250 graduate students that were there. The
postdocs taught themselves unless you count group meetings and journal
clubs. State source funding was around 8-10% of the budget. Trivial. At
academic campuses (eg. UM-College Park) grant income was more like 80
million, much less other income and state source was more like 20-25%. The
profs surely spent more time in the classroom. But they were also involved
in research and grant writing. Congressmen that make those calculations
just don't know what else is going on in a department unless there is some
special situation where teaching duties have been slimmed down or split up
by "team teaching" and there's been changes in a number of states to make
it a rule that profs have to spend a minimum in class teaching. Some of
the drive to adjuncts may be to make money off their backs to help
"average out" the low load of the "regular" tenured profs who may have
lower teaching loads out of tradition. This sets up the "first class
citizen" profs vs. the "second class citizen" profs, the adjuncts (no
office, no benefits, no job security, etc), and I've been on one small
college campus where that is what is done and see it played out at several
others. Sometimes the division is between "day staff" and "night staff"
and that'n not new, either, as I've seen it back in the late 1960s at IIT
where I did go to night school. The number of night students was about
five times larger than the number of day students and the night teachers
were generally whatever the instution could drag off the streets. The day
teachers were first class, though. I met with a number of each.
I'm glad you called it (below) a straw-man analysis. I'd advise against
such analyses.
Art
Arthur E. Sowers
I recall the "Socratic dialogue" as being a type of argumentation (which
can be instructive, but I'm still waiting for his-God's-gift-to-the-NG,
i.e. Rich Lemert, to tell us what the "Socratic method" is. ;-)
I also recall in my high school class, after the teacher made us read
several chapters in "Plato's Republic", and after she made us write
critiques of what we read, she announced that she was surprized at how
handily virtually all the students panned Socrates.
However, I still think it was a good read. In the end, who was it,
Protagoras?, who argued that "justice was the interest of the stronger",
or was it Thrasymachus? And if I got it reversed, then what was the other
definition of "justice"? I've been meaning to re-read my Plato one of
these days, again, before I pass on to the 'great laboratory in the sky'.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
Arthur E. Sowers
On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, John H Palmieri wrote:
> "Jeffrey J. Potoff" <jpo...@earthlink.net> writes:
>
> [snip]
>
> > The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
> > better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
> > creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no
> > better methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all
> > be the fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change,
> > teaching methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should
> > we still be teaching students about slide rules because at one time
> > they were very important?
>
> I think "better" methods developed slowly because 50 years ago (say),
> college students *were* more self-motivated. These days, what with
> degree-inflation, a higher percentage of people go to college (at
> least in the U.S.), and probably of the people in college, a higher
> percentage aren't there for love of learning or great skill in
> learning; they're there because lots of jobs (sometimes pointlessly)
> require a BA. So it's reasonable that people looked into different
> teaching methods to reach this different audience.
I think you're forgetting todays dichotomy: i) the old theory of how/what
works best, vs. ii) new technical means (i.e. "distance learning" i.e.
over the internet, computer self-paced methods) that are beginning to
replace human teachers with machines.
> I could make an analogy with computers: the first personal computers
> were hard to use, but then they were mainly used by hobbyists who
> would happily struggle with whatever they had available. As more
> people used them, ease of use became much more important, and hence we
> got MS-DOS :)
Um...have you not heard of "Windows"? Or the OS X of Macs? And, I'd say
its not "ease of use" that became more important, but the formation of the
Microsoft monopoly that made things the way they are.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
> --
John H Palmieri
> On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, John H Palmieri wrote:
>
>> "Jeffrey J. Potoff" <jpo...@earthlink.net> writes:
>>
>> [snip]
>>
>> > The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
>> > better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
>> > creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no
>> > better methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all
>> > be the fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change,
>> > teaching methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should
>> > we still be teaching students about slide rules because at one time
>> > they were very important?
>>
>> I think "better" methods developed slowly because 50 years ago (say),
>> college students *were* more self-motivated. These days, what with
>> degree-inflation, a higher percentage of people go to college (at
>> least in the U.S.), and probably of the people in college, a higher
>> percentage aren't there for love of learning or great skill in
>> learning; they're there because lots of jobs (sometimes pointlessly)
>> require a BA. So it's reasonable that people looked into different
>> teaching methods to reach this different audience.
>
> I think you're forgetting todays dichotomy: i) the old theory of how/what
> works best,
"works best" for whom? That was my point: the audience today is
different now, and this ought to be considered when evaluating
teaching methods.
> vs. ii) new technical means (i.e. "distance learning" i.e.
> over the internet, computer self-paced methods) that are beginning to
> replace human teachers with machines.
I think distance learning is a stupid idea. On the other hand, I'm
not necessarily wedded to the "old theory of how/what works best".
>> I could make an analogy with computers: the first personal computers
>> were hard to use, but then they were mainly used by hobbyists who
>> would happily struggle with whatever they had available. As more
>> people used them, ease of use became much more important, and hence we
>> got MS-DOS :)
^^
> Um...have you not heard of "Windows"? Or the OS X of Macs?
No. What are they?
Have *you* not heard of ":)"? In this case, I meant that I was perhaps
joking about MS-DOS being the crowning achievement in user interface
development. If one wanted to extend the analogy I was making, one
could infer that I was saying that, whatever the response to changes
in the classroom population are, they may not have yielded the optimal
result. But that might be taking things too far...
> And, I'd say
> its not "ease of use" that became more important, but the formation of the
> Microsoft monopoly that made things the way they are.
The Microsoft monopoly has certainly made things the way they are, no
doubt about it. There are those who would say that the monopoly has
stifled innovation rather than spur it on. I think that if Microsoft
hadn't been so successful, many people today would still have
graphical user interfaces on their computers. The Macintosh pre-dated
Windows, and I think so did the X Window system. I've heard people
talk fondly of OS-2 (? or whatever it was called). If Microsoft
hadn't developed and marketed Windows so successfully, other companies
would have filled the gap.
This is a bit off-topic, though.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : If it's integrated correctly into the lecture it is not distracting and
> : it enhances the amount of information X learned in time Z. How
> : effective is a lecture in covering X material if the students don't
> : actually learn the material? Just blowing through material in a lecture
> : to say you covered it doesn't mean that the students learned it, which
> : is the whole point of taking a course, isn't it?
>
> That's what labs and tutorial sessions are for. In that environment, the
> pace is a bit slower and students are more likely to get any assistance
> they may require.
But why waste the time spent in lecture? If I can use the same
wall-clock time and have the students learn more material, isn't that
better than if they learn less? What really matters at the end of the
semester isn't how much material you think you covered, but what
knowledge your students have when they leave.
>
> <snip>
>
> : > OH yeah? What's that? And if we're not using it, why not?
>
>
> : Because the lecture requires the least amount of prep time.
>
> The Socratic method is also *very* time-consuming. Don't forget that
> post-secondary educational programs sell themselves on, among other
> things, the potential for completing them within a certain timeframe. How
> much material can actually be covered when the presentation is constantly
> being disrupted by changes in pace?
It is less than if you just did a straight lecture, but the end result
is that your students leave the course with greater knowledge.
> That would mean that a 4-year program
> could take far longer. With tuitions rising to stratospheric levels, how
> many students would be prepared to spend that extra time and money under
> the guise of "effective" learning?
This is a red herring. When done properly, active learning exercises
don't increase the length of time required to complete a degree program.
The whole idea is to improve the rate of learning, not lower it.
> I'll wager that most want to get things done as quickly, cheaply, and
painlessly as possible.
And that's the key, "painlessly as possible" Active learning requires
students participate in the class. It requires that students shoulder
more of the responsibility for their education. It is not painless. It
requires effort. It requires students be engaged in the class and not
daydreaming.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : > One thing I've found while I was teaching is how many of my students
> : > lacked a fundamental background. Things were being cut from preceding
> : > courses because "they don't need to know that" or "where will we have the
> : > time to put that in the course?". I ended up spending a good deal of *my*
> : > course time teaching them material they should have known before starting
> : > it. If I was teaching a course in dynamics, I shouldn't have spent time
> : > allocated for it teaching basic physics in order that they could even
> : > understand the material I was supposed to present to them.
>
>
> : That a problem with modularized curriculums, where each prof gets a
> : class, develops a curriculum and goes on their merry way with little
> : consultation with anyone else. A team design of all courses in a
> : particular curriculum would eliminate this problem.
>
> <snip>
>
> How practical is that going to be? Do you think that university
> departments can afford to suspend operations in order to do that?
Why on earth would a department need to suspend operations? Evaluation
of the current curriculum and the design of a new one can occur while
classes are taught as they always have been. The new program of study
can be phased in from introductory to senior level courses as student
move through the program so as not to disrupt their education.
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : I haven't found it disruptive at all. It keeps students in tune with
> : what is going on in class. Sitting in a lecture and taking notes isn't
> : teaching students much of anything except how to be good stenographers.
>
> And what's wrong with being a good stenographer and recording all the
> information? Engineers have to do it out in the field and people who do
> research experiments have to note what was done and what happened.
>
Are you telling me engineers sit for 1-2 hours and copy information off
of chalkboards out in the "real world"? When I was out in the working
world I never thought how fortunate I was to have learned all those
great note taking skills in college. Now that I do research I fill
notebooks with data and other information, but it is nothing like taking
notes in a classroom.
I have finite time to teach students, and no one uses one any more,
hence that material is dropped in favor of something more relavent to
modern engineers.
> So what if they're not as
> commonly used as they once were?
Try at all.
> There's a lot that can be learned from
> using one, as there are a lot of important mathematical concepts and
> techniques that are implemented with a slide rule. For example, it
> teaches how logarithms can be applied. It teaches about orders of
> magnitude and powers of ten. One can visualize trig tables.
Ok, so use it in a high school trigonometry class where students learn
about these things. Even then I don't see how it would be all that
useful. No one uses trig tables anymore. Any $5 calculator is going to
have log and trig functions on it.
>
> More importantly, though, is that it would teach how to *reason* and to
> *think*, two concepts which appear to have fallen out of favour.
Not in Chemical Engineering. I usually teach the Material and Energy
Balances course once a year, which entirely about problem solving
methods. It's a difficult course for certain students who are used to
"apply method X" to solve problems as they did in their math, physics
and chemistry courses.
> It
> teaches how to break down a calculation into smaller steps, because one
> usually has to keep a record of how that calculation progresses. Using a
> calculator makes it tempting to blindly punch in numbers without much
> thought.
A complex calculation will require one to write out all the equations
anyway. Plugging in numbers is simply the final, and usually trivial,
step in the solution to an engineering problem.
>
> What would be interesting is to have students do an entire design project
> using slide rules. It could certainly give them a better appreciation of
> just how much good engineering was done in the past without computers.
> Examples of that are the space program, the Empire State building, and the
> Hoover Dam.
>
> While we're at it, I also believe it's a bad idea to abandon traditional
> pencil-and-paper drafting. Drafting is primarily a thinking activity and
> sitting in front of a computer doesn't quite do it. I know what I'm
> talking about because I taught both drafting and CAD for several years.
>
I took a couple drafting courses. I can't say that I found it
particularly taxing of the mind.
> Drafting not only teaches how to visualize something, often in three
> dimensions, but also how and what to communicate, as often whoever reads
> a drawing may never know the person who prepared it. Here's an example of
> transferring an idea from one mind to another without distorting
> information.
And how is this different from what one does with CAD? Isn't the end
result the same, just done in a different way?
J.
Jeffrey J. Potoff
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
> : Straight lecture courses still exist in engineering for the simple
> : reason that they require the least amount of prep time and the least
> : amount of interaction between faculty in the deparment. All other
> : methods require cross-course coordination and significantly more
> : preparation time.
>
> As well as being a greater burden on a department's budget.
>
How? My 9 month salary is the same regardless of what teaching methods
I use. I don't get paid by the hour.
J.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: I think "better" methods developed slowly because 50 years ago (say),
: college students *were* more self-motivated. These days, what with
: degree-inflation, a higher percentage of people go to college (at
: least in the U.S.), and probably of the people in college, a higher
: percentage aren't there for love of learning or great skill in
: learning; they're there because lots of jobs (sometimes pointlessly)
: require a BA. So it's reasonable that people looked into different
: teaching methods to reach this different audience.
That's a good point. I started teaching in 1989 and recently quit.
During that time, I noticed a change not only in the type of student I was
having to teach, but the attitude and demeanor was different as well.
For example, when I made up my exams, I used to allow for a 1:3 ratio for
time. In other words, if it took me 20 minutes, it would take, typically,
my students an hour. Before I resigned, that had changed to 1:5, and I
often had at least half still writing when the time ran out. The
difficulty of the exams hadn't changed, so what did?
Earlier, when I went through the solutions, the students would often
realized that the questions weren't as hard as first thought and that they
should have seen the solution. Towards the end, the number of students
who claimed that the exams were excessively difficult increased. Along
with that, those who figured that since they received x% for their grade
average in high school they should get at least the same from me also grew
in number.
I think the change started in the mid-70s. When I graduated from high
school in British Columbia in 1973, provincial final exams were still
required for those whose grade average was below a certain level. Those
above it were exempted. I recall that the graduating class after mine was
the last to write them.
Moving ahead a few years, I convocated in 1977. I don't think there was
any in my graduating class who wasn't self-motivated. We knew the score
and we knew what was required to complete the job. I was a TA nearly 4
years later, and even then I noticed a distinct change in the attitude of
the students, ranging from poor discipline to sloppy work habits.
I guess I should have seen the writing on the wall back then....
The attitude of university-as-job-training started changing about that
time. My former university was originally designed for some 20000
students. When I finished my first master's degree, that had increased to
around 24000 or so. That was in 1982, and Alberta was hit hard by the
recession back then. A lot of people went to university for "something to
do".
When I convocated with my Ph. D. two years ago, that number was around
30000 with plans for increasing that further. In between time, tuition
had increased by a factor of at least 3. Enter the era of student-as-
revenue.
<snip>
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > How practical is that going to be? Do you think that university
: > departments can afford to suspend operations in order to do that?
: Why on earth would a department need to suspend operations? Evaluation
: of the current curriculum and the design of a new one can occur while
: classes are taught as they always have been. The new program of study
: can be phased in from introductory to senior level courses as student
: move through the program so as not to disrupt their education.
<snip>
I've been part of some accreditation processes during the last few years.
They are *very* time-consuming activities because virtually everything
about each and every course is evalutated and, sometimes, revised in order
to satisfy the committee. Those involved with them have little time for
much else. It would be better if those departments shut down until it's
finished.
I've also been involved with the situation in which a department changes
its emphasis, so that students graduating in one year do so under the old
system, while those that follow are studying under the new one. That can
be quite a messy procedure and it's confusing as the dickens to all and
sundry.
Before you want to overhaul a department's cirriculum, you may want to go
through something like what I've described first. Not a pretty sight.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: Are you telling me engineers sit for 1-2 hours and copy information off
: of chalkboards out in the "real world"? When I was out in the working
: world I never thought how fortunate I was to have learned all those
: great note taking skills in college. Now that I do research I fill
: notebooks with data and other information, but it is nothing like taking
: notes in a classroom.
A good stenographer pays attention to detail and records that information
in a proper manner. When I was out in the field, I often had to make
notes and sketches of things before heading back to my office. In one
case, in particular, I had to drive out of town to get to the plant, so I
had to make sure I had *everything* I needed before going back. Driving
half an hour one way because I "forgot to measure something" was not a
valid excuse.
Taking notes and recording that information in a clear manner *is* good
practice for the *real* world.
<snip>
: I have finite time to teach students, and no one uses one any more,
: hence that material is dropped in favor of something more relavent to
: modern engineers.
Teaching people to *think* and reason their way through a problem is not
relevant??
: > So what if they're not as
: > commonly used as they once were?
: Try at all.
There are a lot of engineering design tools that work on the same
principle as the common slide rule.
<snip>
: Ok, so use it in a high school trigonometry class where students learn
: about these things. Even then I don't see how it would be all that
: useful. No one uses trig tables anymore. Any $5 calculator is going to
: have log and trig functions on it.
I've had *university* students tell me that they didn't know what inverse
trig functions were for. All they knew was they saw the right button on
the calculator, punched in the number and then the button, and presto! out
came the number. Amazing what they can do without even thinking.
: >
: > More importantly, though, is that it would teach how to *reason* and to
: > *think*, two concepts which appear to have fallen out of favour.
: Not in Chemical Engineering. I usually teach the Material and Energy
: Balances course once a year, which entirely about problem solving
: methods. It's a difficult course for certain students who are used to
: "apply method X" to solve problems as they did in their math, physics
: and chemistry courses.
I've taught a variety of courses in mechanical engineering technology.
They weren't a whole lot different than what I took as a Mec E undergrad,
except the math is not as complicated. In those courses, I emphasized
more the logic behind the solution, as one can sometimes get the "right"
answer but the method and thinking behind it is totally wrong and
illogical.
One thing my generation of engineers learned was how to not only set up a
problem but to go through it in a logical, often methodical, manner. The
exact method could vary from one person to another, but the general
approach was usually very similar.
One thing we learned, at least those of us who plugged along with slide
rules, was to keep track of the powers of ten throughout the calculation.
Obviously, a slide rule generally won't do that for you. But at least we
knew what they were. I've had students who complained about why their
calculators didn't display the powers of ten in the same way as I wrote
them on the board. I've also had students write them as EEX x when they
meant to say 10^x.
Go figure.
<snip>
: A complex calculation will require one to write out all the equations
: anyway. Plugging in numbers is simply the final, and usually trivial,
: step in the solution to an engineering problem.
That's what I've emphasized as well. I've had students solve, for
example, quadratic equations without writing down how they did it. Why?
Their calculators could do it for them. When I penalized them for it
(because how was I to know *how* they got their answer?), some became more
than irritated with me. I figure that, if their calculators did their
work for them, perhaps I should give the marks to the machines and not
their owners or operators.
<snip>
: I took a couple drafting courses. I can't say that I found it
: particularly taxing of the mind.
I didn't either, but I'm glad I'm not teaching either subject any more.
Herding wildcats would be more pleasant! :-)
<snip>
: And how is this different from what one does with CAD? Isn't the end
: result the same, just done in a different way?
For somebody experienced at both, going directly from sketch to CAD
drawing won't be much of a problem.
In the drafting course, I emphasized technique and *standards* (such as
spacing of section lines and placement of dimensions), which can't be done
so readily with CAD.
I've also found that doing a drawing on paper gave me a more immediate
feeling of what I was portraying than by doing it with a computer. I can
look at drawing from different angles, which is not quite the same as
looking at a monitor.
One thing I should have mentioned about drafting that makes it worthwhile
teaching: neatness and self-discipline. I often returned drawings with
red marks all over them pointing out things such as pencil smudges,
inconsistent line widths (despite the fact that I showed them how to roll
the pencil with their fingers), and sloppy corners.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: > As well as being a greater burden on a department's budget.
: >
: How? My 9 month salary is the same regardless of what teaching methods
: I use. I don't get paid by the hour.
In another message, I commented about having participated in some
accreditations. These are very time-consuming and there a lot of other
vital things that can be left undone as a result, going into the "next
year" file. Then those "next year" actvities have to be included in next
year's budget.
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: But why waste the time spent in lecture? If I can use the same
: wall-clock time and have the students learn more material, isn't that
: better than if they learn less? What really matters at the end of the
: semester isn't how much material you think you covered, but what
: knowledge your students have when they leave.
When I was an undergrad, one question I asked myself was "let's see if I
understood what the prof said". If I didn't understand it, I accepted
responsibility for that.
<snip>
: It is less than if you just did a straight lecture, but the end result
: is that your students leave the course with greater knowledge.
Greater knowledge of less material? I don't think that a professional
association is going to accept that when it comes to evaluating someone's
application for registration.
<snip>
L Smith
> Jeffrey J. Potoff (jpo...@earthlink.net) wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> : Are you telling me engineers sit for 1-2 hours and copy information off
> : of chalkboards out in the "real world"? When I was out in the working
> : world I never thought how fortunate I was to have learned all those
> : great note taking skills in college. Now that I do research I fill
> : notebooks with data and other information, but it is nothing like taking
> : notes in a classroom.
>
> A good stenographer pays attention to detail and records that information
> in a proper manner. When I was out in the field, I often had to make
> notes and sketches of things before heading back to my office. In one
> case, in particular, I had to drive out of town to get to the plant, so I
> had to make sure I had *everything* I needed before going back. Driving
> half an hour one way because I "forgot to measure something" was not a
> valid excuse.
>
> Taking notes and recording that information in a clear manner *is* good
> practice for the *real* world.
Assumption check: You're assuming that the student has actually "learned"
how to take good notes. I never had a course in how to take lecture notes.
In fact, if it wasn't for the brutality shown to my notebook in my upper
division chemistry labs, I wouldn't have been as good in my lab notes as
I was. This is one of those things that we just assume students will pick up
by osmosis instead of taking twenty minutes at the start of their studies to
teach them learning skills.
> : I have finite time to teach students, and no one uses one any more,
> : hence that material is dropped in favor of something more relavent to
> : modern engineers.
>
> Teaching people to *think* and reason their way through a problem is not
> relevant??
The point is that you can "teach" thinking skills with a variety of tools, so
why not use the tools they'll be using.
Rich Lemert
jat...@ecn.ab.ca
<snip>
: Assumption check: You're assuming that the student has actually "learned"
: how to take good notes. I never had a course in how to take lecture notes.
: In fact, if it wasn't for the brutality shown to my notebook in my upper
: division chemistry labs, I wouldn't have been as good in my lab notes as
: I was. This is one of those things that we just assume students will pick up
: by osmosis instead of taking twenty minutes at the start of their studies to
: teach them learning skills.
Neither did I, but, by the time I got to university, I realized that I had
*better* take good notes or I'd pay for it eventually.
Students have to learn that on their own. It's called the School of Hard
Knocks. It's called "growing up". It's called *Real Life*.
<snip>
: The point is that you can "teach" thinking skills with a variety of
tools, so
: why not use the tools they'll be using.
<snip>
One reason is that I don't know of any teacher or professor who moonlights
as the Delphic oracle and can exactly foretell the future. Students
should learn some basic concepts and techniques which will allow them to
function out there. What exactly they will use they'll find out on their
own.
Modern educational theory doesn't seem to have grasped that hard fact.
Arthur E. Sowers
On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, John H Palmieri wrote:
> "Arthur E. Sowers" <arth...@magpage.com> writes:
>
> > On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, John H Palmieri wrote:
> >
> >> "Jeffrey J. Potoff" <jpo...@earthlink.net> writes:
> >>
> >> [snip]
> >>
> >> > The real wonder to me is why we (univesity faculty) have not developed
> >> > better teaching methods in all the time that has passed since the
> >> > creation of the first university, or why one would expect that no
> >> > better methods should be developed (ie. the lack of learning must all
> >> > be the fault of this rotten new generation of kids). Times change,
> >> > teaching methods must also change, curriculum must change. Or should
> >> > we still be teaching students about slide rules because at one time
> >> > they were very important?
> >>
> >> I think "better" methods developed slowly because 50 years ago (say),
> >> college students *were* more self-motivated. These days, what with
> >> degree-inflation, a higher percentage of people go to college (at
> >> least in the U.S.), and probably of the people in college, a higher
> >> percentage aren't there for love of learning or great skill in
> >> learning; they're there because lots of jobs (sometimes pointlessly)
> >> require a BA. So it's reasonable that people looked into different
> >> teaching methods to reach this different audience.
> >
> > I think you're forgetting todays dichotomy: i) the old theory of how/what
> > works best,
>
> "works best" for whom?
In the old days, nobody asked '"works best" for whom?'. Kids went to
school and learned stuff.
That was my point: the audience today is
> different now,
Would you care to go into any detail regarding _how_ they are different
today?
and this ought to be considered when evaluating
> teaching methods.
I still think the proof is in the pudding.
> > vs. ii) new technical means (i.e. "distance learning" i.e.
> > over the internet, computer self-paced methods) that are beginning to
> > replace human teachers with machines.
>
> I think distance learning is a stupid idea.
I think its a cheap way to a still expensive education and has no "class."
Who wants a degree from Phoenix University when Harvard University has
clout.
On the other hand, I'm
> not necessarily wedded to the "old theory of how/what works best".
Hey, do whatever you want....we're just arguing stuff here.
> >> I could make an analogy with computers: the first personal computers
> >> were hard to use, but then they were mainly used by hobbyists who
> >> would happily struggle with whatever they had available. As more
> >> people used them, ease of use became much more important, and hence we
> >> got MS-DOS :)
> ^^
>
> > Um...have you not heard of "Windows"? Or the OS X of Macs?
>
> No. What are they?
>
> Have *you* not heard of ":)"? In this case, I meant that I was perhaps
> joking about MS-DOS being the crowning achievement in user interface
> development.
You can laugh, but I think DOS was probably the best desktop OS, period.
Small, simple, fast, stable, easy to install. If you ever saw
NewDealOffice suite running under DOS, you would know that if they kept on
developing it, they would have beaten MS. (I also like OS/2 and Linux).
PD (=post DOS), it all turned into bloatware, slowed down, bugs, virus
vulnerabilities, hackability, etc.
If one wanted to extend the analogy I was making, one
> could infer that I was saying that, whatever the response to changes
> in the classroom population are, they may not have yielded the optimal
> result. But that might be taking things too far...
I think the arguments will never end.
> > And, I'd say
> > its not "ease of use" that became more important, but the formation of the
> > Microsoft monopoly that made things the way they are.
>
> The Microsoft monopoly has certainly made things the way they are, no
> doubt about it. There are those who would say that the monopoly has
> stifled innovation rather than spur it on. I think that if Microsoft
> hadn't been so successful, many people today would still have
> graphical user interfaces on their computers. The Macintosh pre-dated
> Windows, and I think so did the X Window system.
The history books say that it was Xerox that invented the GUI, not Apple.
I've heard people
> talk fondly of OS-2 (? or whatever it was called).
I've got it on several of my boxes.
If Microsoft
> hadn't developed and marketed Windows so successfully, other companies
> would have filled the gap.
Quite a large fraction of what they did was pure robber-barron, heavy
handed, tricks and tweaks, secrets, and dirty dealing. There's a book on
some of this; titled "Hard Drive" and I don't remember the author. There
are a few others plus all the snot that came out during the court case.
All the other big companies are falling all over each other promoting
Linux. Linux might actually succeed at putting a couple blisters and
cracks on the big "Great Wall of MS"
> This is a bit off-topic, though.
Nobody (at least not I) will complain about how off-topic you are. Oh,
excuse me, there are a few people who don't like certain subjects. Stick
around long enough and you'll get aquainted with the deeper significance
on this NG.
Arthur E. Sowers, PhD
-----------------------------------------
| Science career information website: |
| http://www.magpage.com/~arthures |
-----------------------------------------
> --
L Smith
> Students have to learn that on their own. It's called the School of Hard
> Knocks. It's called "growing up". It's called *Real Life*.
Experience is learning from your mistakes. Education is learning from
someone else's mistakes.
(Sorry, but I don't know who this quote is from.)
Rich Lemert
Josh Halpern
jat...@ecn.ab.ca wrote:
> Harry Haller (hal...@spamouflage.com) wrote:
> SNIP....
> This is particularly true in institutions where space of any kind is at a
> premium. It would be nice to give personal attention to each and every
> student, but a course of, say, 200 students would need to be divided into
> smaller groups. Each group, then, would require someone to teach them and
> a place where they can be taught. That's not always a practical option.
It sometimes runs the other way, ie it is harder to find an auditorium
where you can lecture 200, than say 5 rooms that hold 40. Remember
also that you need a bigger room to give tests if you want room between
the students.
josh halpern