reflections
These thoughts were written down at the end of the last school year, but I sent them to a number of people here and got a cool response from one person, so I thought I'd publish them and see if anyone else had any comments. They're more notes to myself than anything else, so some aren'tas clear as they perhaps should be and I noticed at least one has an ironic tone that might be missed (which, if it is, totally screws its point). Meh. (Which reminds me that I wrote "Meh" beside some of my math students' work a week or so ago and got some interesting looks. One person even asked, "Did you write "Meh" by my answer?" LOL )
OK, so for some reason I’m doing more end of the year thinking than usual-I mean, on-task, potentially productive thinking. And what I’m thinking about now is teaching. Here’s what’s been my basic thinking for the last few/many years on the subject, informed by a few postulates, all of which come from my own teaching and learning experience, and some of the broader applicability of which are borne out by research:
• People will forget most of the content they learn in a class within two or three years unless they continue to use it routinely (in future courses/job)-fairly recent research apparently sustains this and puts a number on it: 68% of the content is lost a year later.
• Course life-lessons are generally of more long-term importance than content-specific knowledge (examples: until I taught calculus, I used very little geometry in my life, but 10th-grade geometry gave me the striking insight that I am by inclination much more intuitive than sequentially logical; in second-year college physics, I learned that it’s a really poor idea to take a course you don’t really like and aren’t that good at in a self-paced format-it merely adds insult to injury that this insight seems obvious when written down this way).
• You can’t teach everything in a subject that it would be desirable for the students to know.
• Inducing boredom is rarely an effective teaching strategy
• Freeing students from the opportunity/burden of living with the consequences of their choices even if you choose to mitigate the consequences somewhat (especially for younger children) is not usually to their long-term benefit
• A productive classroom atmosphere is usually one in which teacher and students enjoy and respect one another-and if you have to choose (which you usually shouldn’t), respect should trump “fun.”
• Formative assessment improves instruction much more than does normative.
• Modeling is a better teaching technique than exhortation
• High expectations + assistance + compassion is better than any subset of the three.
• Students prioritize work to a significant extent based on grades-not just whether the work is graded, but how good their grades in a subject are.
• If work is not seen to be graded significantly, it tends to be devalued by the students. (Example: oral proficiency in a foreign language may be a stated goal, but many students won’t put in a great deal of extra work on achieving the goal unless it’s tested and graded significantly).
There are some provisos I’ve come to add partly because I’m compassionate (you could pick “soft-hearted” if you preferred) and partly from looking at the workload at st. john’s:
• When faced with a choice of means to achieve a goal, the way that involves less work for the students is generally better
• The large majority of the time (though not all the time) if you can achieve 90% of the “desired outcome” with 75% of the work, that’s a good trade-off to make for your students (this is just a way of phrasing the law of diminishing returns…)
• What’s clear to you after a number of years’ experience often needs to be made explicit to students every year-and usually, multiple times a year.
Here are a couple of caveats:
• Students here are very smart and can learn to repeat procedures for doing things much faster/better than they can learn how to do them effectively (my analogy is that you can understand physics flawlessly and still not be able to do lay-ups effectively until you practice enough to build the appropriate muscle memory). Hence, while I don’t like to take up students’ time unnecessarily, there’s a certain amount of practice necessary in order to learn to be effective at a reasonable pace even in material that they think they “know”. Too much practice, though, and they feel this is “busy work.”
• Students here tend to respond well, unfortunately, to being swamped with work
• Most people (though not all) would rather be shown how to do something and told specifically by a teacher “do this in this way” because it’s faster and less work (most of our students memorize better than they reason).
OK, so for some reason I’m doing more end of the year thinking than usual-I mean, on-task, potentially productive thinking. And what I’m thinking about now is teaching. Here’s what’s been my basic thinking for the last few/many years on the subject, informed by a few postulates, all of which come from my own teaching and learning experience, and some of the broader applicability of which are borne out by research:
• People will forget most of the content they learn in a class within two or three years unless they continue to use it routinely (in future courses/job)-fairly recent research apparently sustains this and puts a number on it: 68% of the content is lost a year later.
• Course life-lessons are generally of more long-term importance than content-specific knowledge (examples: until I taught calculus, I used very little geometry in my life, but 10th-grade geometry gave me the striking insight that I am by inclination much more intuitive than sequentially logical; in second-year college physics, I learned that it’s a really poor idea to take a course you don’t really like and aren’t that good at in a self-paced format-it merely adds insult to injury that this insight seems obvious when written down this way).
• You can’t teach everything in a subject that it would be desirable for the students to know.
• Inducing boredom is rarely an effective teaching strategy
• Freeing students from the opportunity/burden of living with the consequences of their choices even if you choose to mitigate the consequences somewhat (especially for younger children) is not usually to their long-term benefit
• A productive classroom atmosphere is usually one in which teacher and students enjoy and respect one another-and if you have to choose (which you usually shouldn’t), respect should trump “fun.”
• Formative assessment improves instruction much more than does normative.
• Modeling is a better teaching technique than exhortation
• High expectations + assistance + compassion is better than any subset of the three.
• Students prioritize work to a significant extent based on grades-not just whether the work is graded, but how good their grades in a subject are.
• If work is not seen to be graded significantly, it tends to be devalued by the students. (Example: oral proficiency in a foreign language may be a stated goal, but many students won’t put in a great deal of extra work on achieving the goal unless it’s tested and graded significantly).
There are some provisos I’ve come to add partly because I’m compassionate (you could pick “soft-hearted” if you preferred) and partly from looking at the workload at st. john’s:
• When faced with a choice of means to achieve a goal, the way that involves less work for the students is generally better
• The large majority of the time (though not all the time) if you can achieve 90% of the “desired outcome” with 75% of the work, that’s a good trade-off to make for your students (this is just a way of phrasing the law of diminishing returns…)
• What’s clear to you after a number of years’ experience often needs to be made explicit to students every year-and usually, multiple times a year.
Here are a couple of caveats:
• Students here are very smart and can learn to repeat procedures for doing things much faster/better than they can learn how to do them effectively (my analogy is that you can understand physics flawlessly and still not be able to do lay-ups effectively until you practice enough to build the appropriate muscle memory). Hence, while I don’t like to take up students’ time unnecessarily, there’s a certain amount of practice necessary in order to learn to be effective at a reasonable pace even in material that they think they “know”. Too much practice, though, and they feel this is “busy work.”
• Students here tend to respond well, unfortunately, to being swamped with work
• Most people (though not all) would rather be shown how to do something and told specifically by a teacher “do this in this way” because it’s faster and less work (most of our students memorize better than they reason).