Making Our Own Learning Explicit and What That Means About Our Teaching
Lanny Arvan CIO and Assoc Dean for eLearning, College of Business
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
How does a faculty member develop a sympathetic view of the students in her class and come to grip with the issues entailed in learning the course content that those students face? Suppose the faculty member is teaching a subject that she knows inside and out and hence the content doesn't pose intellectual challenges for her, but the subject is difficult for the students who have not had prior experience with the content. What should the instructor do to place herself in the shoes of her students and thereby develop an approach to instruction that makes sense for them? These were the core questions that motivated Lanny Arvan's presentation.
He began by making an argument that while common shared experience can make for a good bond between teacher and student when it arises naturally, it is unusual to expect common shared experience. Hence, it is necessary to find another mechanism. Lanny suggested that the instructor consider herself as a learner in the present tense, and not with regard to her memories of how she once learned the subject matter of the course she is teaching. For example, she may be learning to use some technology that is new to her, she may be trying a different approach to teaching that she hasn't tried before, or she may be learning something informally in her time away from the office. Lanny encouraged any such instructor to spend some time reflecting on that learning and making it explicit in some way, such as in a blog that is publicly available or in a private journal. By observing how she herself learns, the instructor can then try to teach to that, emphasizing what is appealing to herself as a learner.
He then went on to make another point. Most of us understand learning by immersion and some may feel that is the only way to learn. But it may not always be possible to design a captivating learning environment and there are courses – for example, required courses that are not in the student's major – where it is unreasonable to expect the students to engage fully and completely in the subject. Lanny argued that by reflecting on one's own learning, it becomes apparent that much learning happens en passant, while doing something else, and that once one becomes aware of this possibility an instructor can design situations that encourage en passant learning.
Lanny's third point on instructor self-reflection about their own learning is that if the instructor is to encourage meta-cognition in the students then the instructor must model that behavior. Indeed, for any performance that an instructor expects of the student, whether that is done in writing or during a live class session, it is good practice for the instructor to first model the behavior for the students. The students learn initially by imitating the instructor, and in that way they can get a reasonable expectation of what the instructor wants from them.
After a brief intermission, Lanny took a different tack and talked about teaching from several different perspectives. He reported that he has learned more about teaching from those who teach Writing than from other instructors in his discipline (Economics) and he encouraged those in the audience who haven't yet done so to take the Writing Across the Curriculum Seminar. He provided a critique of economics textbooks (and implicitly of other hard social science and even science instruction) that go from theory first to example second. He argued that this is not the way most of us come to understand things, especially at first. Instead, it is better to appeal to student curiosity first through examples, then to fully develop and explicate those, and lastly to abstract the theory from there.
Lanny concluded by arguing that instructors should deliberately experiment in the classroom with their teaching, while sometimes failing in the process, in part to show students that there are benefits to getting stuck and subsequently struggling to get unstuck, and in part to break the cycle where students come to class so the instructor can "pour truth into their heads". The experimentation should help create a sense of surprise in the students, and this surprise is an essential ingredient of deep learning.
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