[quoting Viljoen, 2 Apr 96] How does one practice what is preached in this regard if you are faced in a lecture hall with classes of up to 200 students who are supposed to learn...
We have just received a directive from Those Up There to increase our "throughput" of students, i.e., our pass rates. All of us know that this is done simply to obtain more state funding for the institution.
Ah yes. Now we pass out of the realm of theory and move to the realm of practice. Real teaching takes place in a complex atmosphere of social and organizational demands. There are multiple pressures upon the system, one of the largest being cost: the desire to minimize the expense of education. Education is still one of the most costly of enterprises, primarily because it is so labor-intensive. Most industries have changed dramatically over the past 1000 years, using more and more technology to increase productivity. Teaching is still a person-to-person process, where the best teaching is still done with a low faculty-student ratio. Probably the most effective technologies in use in the classroom today are: books, paper and writing implements (pen, pencil, typewriter, word processor), and blackboard (which was introduced over wide controversy and debate about its utility).
I have done much more high-tech things in my classes, but without much impact and possibly even some detriment. On-line, live projection of computer-generated material. Videos. I have even taught several classes in England while sitting in various offices here at Apple (California). The Open University is doing the most interesting work on education at a distance (one of my classes was for the OU, and I will do another in a few weeks), but even for them it is a struggle.
Meanwhile, administrators do--and should--worry about the high costs of education. Of course, insisting on larger lectures and higher pass rates does bring down costs. It simultaneously brings down effectiveness.
How does one cope with the reality of education? I am not sure. My work has been to try to understand the learning process, the better to develop instructional methods. And to try to develop technologies that enhance learning and understanding (and all kinds of learning, with all kinds of students). But the technology I seek is not yet available. The computer technology of today is very primitive and not very effective--although there are clear exceptions to this statement.
Worse, in addition to the cost pressures, there are strong cultural pressures. In the United States, this gets translated into immense pressure by the thousands of individual school boards to make sure that subjects X, Y, and Z are taught and that subjects A, B, and C are not taught, and that subject R, S, and T are only taught in a well-defined manner. And then there are the social issues of dealing with students who do not want to be in school, and who have a dysfunctional home environment, and who may suffer from all kinds of ailments--from hunger, to crime, to disease, to drugs, to...
Not an easy problem to tackle.
I certainly do not want to proscribe a "solution" to the complexities of education.
My main approach has been to try to understand the cognition of education and then to try to understand how to take the educational theory and apply it in the realities of the world. In similar way, I have tried to take design principles from Cognitive science and try to get them into computers and products, subject to multiple constraints, such as cost, complexity, and the problem of consistency with the installed base.
At Apple, we have struggled with the difficulty of getting innovational instructional products in the marketplace. Products that are welcomed by our test teachers and that seem to us educational researchers to be just what is needed in particular settings have failed to get through the product process because the sales organization has--correctly--pointed out that school boards are not yet ready for the innovations: school boards want more traditional approaches.
As I travel the world (Most nations in Europe, Russia, Japan, China, Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, and, in a few weeks, India) I am stuck by the diversity of teaching methods, of cultural differences and yet one universal perception: every nation seems to think that their school system is failing and that some other school system is superior. Truth is, all produce some truly excellent students. All fail with some number of students. Which should give us all pause to think that there is any single method to succeed.
Indeed, I was trained by the very methods that I now resist and find inadequate, yet I--and my very skilled research staff--are clear success stories.
[quoting Reeves, 2 Apr 96] Later this week, I'll be starting the Spring '96 version of my Multimedia Design course, a graduate level course that I intend to be learner-centered. The fifteen students in the class are divided into three five-member teams with each member playing a different role (project manager, designer, evaluator, graphic artist/videographer, and programmer).
Fifteen students. These methods work well with small classes. How does one deal with hundreds. I know what I did at the University: I gave lectures. I would even give lectures explaining why lectures were not good methods of learning. They are easiest for the instructor, least satisfactory for the learner. But they are the most efficient way of conveying a large amount of knowledge quickly (surpassed only by the book).
Of course, having only 15 students, most of whom are highly motivated, is a luxury that makes this approach possible. It would be extremely difficult to scale this up to the scores or hundreds of students, many unmotivated or ill-prepared for self-directed learning, faced by Johan Viljoen and most other teachers around the globe.
With respect to Norman's second question, I think that the main reason learner-centered education hasn't taken hold is that it appears to threaten the established bureaucracies in education and training.
I would like not to believe this. But I have no evidence, one way or the other. I think one reason it does not take hold in Universities is that Professors are too lazy: it is far easier to give lectures than to do the hard work of preparing learner-centered material (remember how much structure is required if it is to be effective).
Stephenson, N. (1995). The diamond age, or a young lady's illustrated primer. New York: Bantam Books.
Yup, a most interesting book. Neil is an interesting person (Yes, I do know him).
[quoting Buckner, 2 Apr 96] ..but what exactly is learner-centered education? Is anything that isn't lecture, learner-centered?
No. And the Socratic method is learner-centered, even though it is a kind of lecture (dialog).
Or in addition to being a "constructive activity" does it mean that students get to have some control over what activities they do in class?
Yes, although as I said earlier, the clever instructor has structured the situation. But different students have different backgrounds and different conceptual approaches and learning styles. They have to be free to explore the material in the manner that works best for them. Note that students might not know what works bestÑthey need guidance on learning styles and methods.
[quoting Padgett, 2 Apr 96] When I first began to take smaller classes, here in the IT program at UGA, I recognized that there was a significant difference ... echoing Terri's question, is a mere lack of lecture enough? Now that I have taken a number of these courses, I've begun to look at the difference less as a paradigm shift, more of a room where it's still sorta hard to learn, if your learning style doesn't elide well with the instruction style. I'm wondering if this will always be a problem with groups. Some of us enjoy hearing the teacher talk, some of us itch to get on with playing with the ideas.
Yup.
[quoting Cassidy, 2 Apr 96] It seems to me that the evolution to learning-centered education follows the move from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. The skills needed in the Industrial Age were "assembly-line" skills. Most workers needed to follow orders and most organizations were top-down in structure. Information Age organizations are web-structured and need individuals who are more creative and self-motivated.
Well, I'm not sure I buy that. One difference, however, is that up to recently, only the elite were educated, Even in early America, a high school education was considered sufficient (and was not universal). The real difference over time is how much education is required just to keep up with the ever-expanding cultural knowledge of the world. Today it takes 20+ years to be educated. In 50 years it might take 30 years. Then 40. (And even an "educated" person knows remarkably little.)
[quoting Reardon, 2 Apr 96] Or, more to the point, is the "learning" and "retention" any different? It's singularly interesting to me that the generation (mine) who experienced the un-centered baby boom educational cycles, managed SAT and GRE scores higher than today's averages.
The problem is: why do we measure ability by grades and test scores?
You know, most work in the real world is done by groups of people, cooperatively, where asking for help and looking up information is encouraged. The only place where one has to work alone, without help, without being allowed to look things up is in school tests. So why do we think this is representative of anything? Answer: it isn't. (Yeah, test scores correlate sort-of with school performance. And how well does school performance correlate with real-world performance?
Retention is not a good measure. Understanding and the ability to apply knowledge to new situations, or the ability to discover what knowledge is needed, and then to apply it, these are better measures.
The best measure of performance of a person is performance itself, not retention, not artificial, abstract tests.
I hate tests. I would prefer an educational system in which there were no tests. Instead, the material would come packaged in large numbers of small modules. People would have to pass a performance evaluation after each module. This would be graded P/NP. And the person could take it as many times as necessary.
At graduation time--which would have some minimum number and assortment of modules as a requirement--one could evaluate people by what kinds and how many modules they finished. The good mathematician or scientist would have finished more modules of math or science than the person not so good in these topics. But everyone would have the same grade on the modules they did pass.
Finally, Kent Thomas [2 Apr 96] sent a long, thoughtful expansion of his earlier comments.
I really appreciate the time and energy he took to clarify his position, and I thought that we were in reasonable agreement with the issues. (But I still remain suspicious of how much he really got out of a year of diagramming sentences.)