My teaching development has included formal courses on undergraduate education, learning program workshops, and mentored teaching experiences. I’ve taught laboratories, recitations, and lectures. I’ve taught students who weren’t prepared to do basic algebra and a class where almost all the students are smarter than I am. I’ve trained graduate, undergraduate, and high school students to do research. The most common and important theme I’ve taken from these experiences is “Learn by doingâ€.
While “doing†sounds generic it really is the first step. Think about the problem and then try. Many students view education as a passive activity; they sit, listen, and transcribe while the authority in the room sends knowledge their way. Worse is many students develop the illusion that this voyeuristic learning style is the best for them, though countless research in cognitive psychology and education has shown this to be false. When they come to college, they are entrenched in a learning style incompatible with what they are there to learn. Because of this most students I’ve worked with don’t yet know how much they are capable of accomplishing. They haven’t been put in situations where the expectations are high enough to force them to move out of their comfort zone. They haven’t realized that the best way for them to learn, and hopefully retain, knowledge is to try to do something with it.
My primary teaching goal alongside providing content is to change the way students view learning, and I accomplish this by creating an environment in which students must be active and responsible for their education. On the bright side, educational researchers seem to come up with a new way (or at least new name for an old way) to engage students all the time through technology, teaching style, content generation, etc. The most successful tools I’ve used to transform passive students into active ones are the Learning Assistant program, ALEKS, group-evaluation, and how I approach students in one-on-one times.
Implementing the Learning Assistant (LA) program at Boston University (BU) has probably been the highest impact change I have made to engage students. This program has high-performing students return to help teach the course. The LAs are trained both in content by meeting with faculty and pedagogically through a STEM education course. At BU the LAs assist in the recitation sections, which were transformed into group work problem sessions. The impact was immediate as the LAs are a relatable, unintimidating expert alongside the standard teaching assistant. The students ask questions more easily, they wait less time to be helped, and they are given a role model of how to be successful. All of this has translated into students more engaged in recitation and more likely to try working harder problems.
I’ve tried out a variety of technologies designed for undergraduate chemistry (e.g. WebAssign, OWL, Sapling, Odyssey, “clickersâ€), but none compete with ALEKS (Assessment and LEarning in Knowledge Spaces). While most online technology is just a way to grade homework automatically, ALEKS is a true tutoring system. The artificial intelligence individualizes itself by assessing the student, allowing it to focus on exactly what skills the student needs and is prepared for. It proceeds to teach those concepts and reassess to student for retention. ALEKS enforces mastery and retention of skills, not time spent. Bright students are not forced to work problems they know and weaker students are given topics appropriate for their ability. What I’ve learned from properly assigning ALEKS is that technology can be leveraged to make my time with the students more productive. Class time can be spent discussing connections between concepts and providing interesting, motivating examples when the basic skills are handled outside of class. Technology can be made available any time, so students are made responsible for their learning. Through ALEKS, I have become a strong believer in technology encouraging active students.
The fear of being wrong inhibits students from being active. We want students to think creatively and they never will if they are too paralyzed by fear to try. In office hours, I’ve started having students work on the board instead of their paper, because they seem less afraid to try on the board where mistakes are easily erased than on their pristine white handouts that must be turned in. In recitations, I have students work in groups so they can support each other with ideas. Similarly, while teaching physical chemistry lab at St. Thomas University, this fear was problematic because the labs were not recipes, instead they were given questions and supplies. They wouldn’t know how to start and they didn’t know how to write up their results. For weeks I tried talking with them both as a group and individually on how to improve and provided detailed comments on their reports, with no success. I finally broke through their fear by having them read each other’s lab reports. They learned what was missing from their own and found they were all making different mistakes. They also found strength as a group and started helping each other without prompting. In this way they became less fearful of trying on their own.
Changing how you learn is difficult, requiring metacognition of what you are doing. It is hard for many undergraduates to embrace an active role in their education, but if we never provide them opportunities to develop, they never will. Students need to understand that college is the time to try, even if they fail sometimes. I feel I best serve the students by encouraging, pushing, mandating, or anything else I can think of to get them to learn by doing.