Some Thoughts on Teaching and Learning
Traditional Teacher-center Lecture Format
- "A heavy percentage of the work of the college is passing on
information or ideas from the teacher to the student. This kind
of education is a one-way street. Perhaps this is one of the most
serious difficulties with our education. . . . There is little
training in independent thinking.
- "We must reorient our teaching. Instead of orienting it to the
teacher and to the teacher's viewpoint, we should orient it to
the student and to the student's needs and interests."
- "The survey course which is run by lectures, even when the
lecture is supplemented by cases, is rarely successful. It cannot
be student-oriented. It is teacher-oriented." -- Wallace B.
Donham
- "An older man told me, when I began lecturing, to notice that the
class attends in waves, and that a wave cannot last more than
twenty minutes. At the end of that time, everyone relaxes, and if
you have picked the moment of relaxation for one of your high
points, it flops." --Elliott Perkins
Student-centered Critical Thinking Focus
- "Memorizing represents the first and most primitive dimension of
learning, specific research the second, the third dimension being
that which should be called 'comprehensive understanding.'"
--Robert Ulich
- "Teaching tactics ought to be directed almost entirely to posing
and analyzing the problem rather than to reaching any
conclusion." --John T. Dunlop
- "We have experimented on a considerable scale with methods of
tying theory into life experience by cases. . . . The 'cases' we
have developed are concrete situations, segments of actual life,
reported as closely as we can reproduce them."
- Students respond positively to a teacher who is "friendly,
helpful, informal, democratic, stressing student participation."
--Gordon W. Allport
- "It is the interaction between these four components--the
subject, the methods, the student and the teacher--that achieves
the results." --William H. Weston
- These rather unremarkable observations would probably be
acceptable to anyone who cares about teaching today. What makes
them remarkable, however, is that they appeared in print in
1950-- yes, more than 50 years ago. They come from A Handbook
for College Teachers, published by Harvard. As you can see, our ideas about inquiry-guided learning, active learning, case studies, and student participation are not exactly new. But it's still a struggle, because of strongly entrenched faculty and student resistance. [Now wasn't this a sneaky way to throw some history at
you??]
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