Due to twitter and my graduate class I recently came across two articles from a few years ago that really made me start to think about active learning versus lecturing. The fact that we have the data and evidence to show how ineffective a method that lecturing is and it still happens in our high schools and colleges is astounding. In a meta-analysis of 225 studies the evidence was so heavily weighted in favor of active learning that it was stated “If the experiments analyzed here had been conducted as randomized controlled trials of medical interventions, they may have been stopped for benefit—meaning that enrolling patients in the control condition might be discontinued because the treatment being tested was clearly more beneficial.” However, in education we keep doing it that way because that is the way that we were taught and it is the way that education has worked for 600 years.
In a second article I read from Eric Mazur, Harvard Professor, he summarizes the shift that needs to happen from “teaching” to “helping students learn.” However, when students have access to all of the information that they need and watch at their speed and at their time we need to rethink the way that we teach them in class. Eric is a pioneer of the flipped classroom, giving students access to the content at home and then having them discuss and learn from each other in the classroom.
Due to these 600 years of teaching it is going to take time to retrain our teachers and our students for another, better way to learn. As Eric Mazur found in his class “Even now, if I give my students a problem on an exam that they have not seen before, there will be complaints: ‘We’ve never done a problem of this kind.’ I tell them, ‘If you had done a problem of this kind, then by definition, this would not be a problem.’” Students need to leverage the technology that they have in their pockets to access the information that will allow them to solve these problems.
Thanks for your thinking on this and I really enjoyed your wondering about the ways that data and teachers diving into their own work with research questions can affect the way that they go about teaching. I like that you dove into Eric's experience, I found his work compelling and he has the data to back up the difference it is made when you read deeply into his methodologies. At 350 words, I feel that there is a bit more depth you can go into here in exploring either the researcher reading into your work, or find ways to explore the margins around where these things fit in. For example, when you talk about the meta analysis, what are ways you see this year playing out in your own work and school?
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