Retrograde (Part 1)

Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, but is what’s new always best?  We learn by reflecting on old mistakes, but re-tracing our steps also reveals hard-won wisdom from previous generations. How has teaching changed over the past 20 years?

If you’ve been a student or worked as a teacher any time in the last 2-3 years, you will be all too aware of how chaotic education has become. It’s precisely during these moments of instability though that we should look backwards to see how it will inform the future and what happens next.  My work is very much student-centred, but the next few posts are all about teachers. How all of us have adapted for different teaching approaches and delivery modes, and what we can learn from each of the 7 phases of university teaching over the past two decades.

PHASE 1: “If it ain’t broke” (1990 to 2000)

The lecture is the oldest tradition of university teaching that has stood the test of time.  In the early 1990s classes were just “chalk and talk” and textbook readings.  You had to be extraordinarily prepared as a teacher, walking in with nothing but your knowledge and memory of the order of topics and concepts.  Yes this was difficult, but most of your work is front-loaded.  Once the class was finished, that was it, no recording, no summaries, nothing. 

You rub off what you wrote on the blackboard and whiteboard, and everything starts from scratch again next time.  Sure this wasn’t that flexible for students who missed the class, but teachers weren’t expected to help with that part of the experience. The expectation was that students need to be there to learn, and teachers didn’t really have to worry about “putting on a good show”. It was up to the students to keep meticulous notes, and if they missed a class the onus was on them to go through the textbook in their own time.

I can see why some teachers think of this as the good old days, but not many students can succeed in this type of learning environment anymore.  The lesson that teachers can learn from the old chalk and talk though, is to be less reliant on audiovisual cues or technology.  The idea that we can be compelling just by ourselves, with our words and writing, is a very powerful idea. 

We can all be more effective communicators and sometimes going back to basics is the best way to learn, even for experienced teachers.  You could spend your time honing your classroom delivery, how to make the topic interesting through your words and writing alone.  Perhaps making one class a week a fully unscripted open dialogue, no slides, no AV, just you talking to your students.  Do you have the skills and knowledge to pull this together?  That sounds like a really scary proposition, but it’s when we’re out of our comfort zones that we learn the most.

PHASE 2: “The Tipping Point” (~2000 to 2005).

Starting in the early 2000s, learning management systems like Moodle and Blackboard began to take off.  There’s now a place for teachers to put stuff online, and the default resource was powerpoint slides.  Everyone started using powerpoint as the main way of communicating and there’s a lot of advantages for the student - less frantic note taking, more focus on what you’re saying and the higher-order thinking that accompanies genuine learning. 

But as a teacher this is a huge time sink.  Making powerpoint slides look “pretty” takes a long time, and I’m a scientist with no formal training in graphic or visual design.  The temptation is to load each slide full of text, but then you are just reading off the slides - a bad experience for both you and your students.  Keeping your slides detailed but with room for abstraction and open-ended questions is somewhat of an art-form, but in my experience it is the best balance.  Enough information to help guide your students’ thinking, but not scripted to an inch of its life and death by powerpoint.

I think more imagination is needed in how teachers can work with learning management systems.  Instead of just using it to store powerpoint slides and worksheets, what about pictures of hand-drawn diagrams?  Graphics and animations that you’ve made over the years trying to explain the concept in different ways?  Small audio snippets of your musings, or a video of you trying to work out a sample problem?  Being more creative and intentional with the multimedia resources we put online for our students is the direction the whole sector is moving, and as individual teachers we should be thinking about the skillsets we need to be effective in this space.

Prelude

The most disruptive changes to Higher Education followed shortly after the conclusion of Phase 2. Next time let’s talk about Phases 3 and 4, which accelerated the integration of online learning at scale across university and college campuses all over the world.

Jack.