The Case for Leaving Things Out

Transcription

1 We reprint the following article for two reasons. Many of you will recognize the author's name--linc. Fisch visited UBC during the fall term and conducted three successful workshops for faculty. His writings are always reflective, amusing, and useful. This particular article addresses a problem which is often articulated in our TAG seminars--the constant battle between content and process. The Case for Leaving Things Out How will I ever get it all into a 50-minute lecture? How can I cover everything in a 14-week term? How can we squeeze all that a major needs to know into just four years of university? Sound familiar? These questions are likely to be easily recognized by almost every teacher with a little bit of experience (say, a week or two). The ubiquitous rule is: Jam Everything In! I call it the Medfac Syndrome: nearly every medical school professor I have known lives in fear that a physician ten years into practice will encounter something that the professor neglected to teach way back in medical school. It can cause a lot of stress on faculty, not to mention a lot of stress on students. As pervasive as the questions are, I suggest that often they are the wrong questions for faculty members to ask. When designing instruction, we might better ask ourselves: How much can I or should I leave out? Now, that's a rather unconventional assertion and I know you'll insist that I defend it. Suppose that you are trying to direct a driver from Lexington to Indianapolis. Do you provide a series of aerial photographs, carefully taped together and marked with the route? Of course not; that much detail severely detracts from your purpose. Instead, you provide a map that represents the route in a schematic way. Better still you take a sheet of paper, sketch on it two lines at right angles to each other, label them I- 64 and I-65, and add a couple of arrows, along with circles identified as Shelbyville, Louisville and Columbus to help orient the driver. You make it simple, a guide, at just the right level of abstraction. Consider that you are making a videotape to trigger discussion in a course. Do you lay out 15 to 20 minutes of dialogue, starting with an establishing scene and moving carefully step by step to the logical conclusion of the situation? Definitely not! For one thing, 20 minutes of taping costs a bundle. The better strategy is to determine the ideal ending for triggering response in the students, then think backward to the latest point in the situation with which you can open, and put as little as possible in between to link the two. You ought to be able to do it in considerably less than three minutes. Think of the money you save! But more important, the incompleteness forces the viewers to speculate about the missing data and to become personally involved in the ensuing discussion--which is the prime objective of your videotape. If you want students to learn problem solving, it doesn't serve your purpose well to present them every last datum of a case. That's not realistic. Samuel Butler was on target when he said, "Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises." Students have to learn to identify what additional information they need to gather in order to reach a valid solution. Or, they might hypothesize various alternatives, assess the probabilities of these, carry each alternative to a solution, and then make a decision that optimizes the expected value of the outcome. That's what real life usually requires of people; why not let students get some practice doing it? Students aren't likely to become independent learners if you give them all the information on a topic and then interpret and analyze it for them; you've done their thinking for them. It would be better for you to carefully determine how much you can deliberately leave out--for them to do on their own. Get the idea? Once I caught onto the basic concept represented above, I found another handful of reasons for focusing on how much I dare leave out of my teaching, rather than on how much I can jam in. And it works wonders in practice!

2 So, why haven't I listed the other reasons? Perhaps you've guessed it; I don't want to preclude the educational value of your discovering them for yourself and gaining the pride of ownership. Come to think of it, that's yet another good reason for leaving things out! Linc. Fisch, an educational consultant based in Lexington, Kentucky.

3 New Books on Teaching in Higher Education The Faculty Development office has obtained multiple copies of two useful manuals. To borrow one, or both, call Classroom Communication - Collected Readings for Effective Discussion and Questioning 2. First Steps to Excellence in College Teaching (includes material on setting course objectives, enhancing the lecture, increasing student involvement, using case studies, evaluating students, and more) Pia Christensen, from the Humanities and Social Sciences division of the Main Library, sends along the following list of new acquisitions: Title: Learning to Teach in Higher Education Author: Ramsden, Paul Call Number: LB 2331 R (editor's note: this book links research on learning to research and applications for teaching, is well-written and informative) Title: Teaching large classes in higher education: how to maintain quality with reduced resources Authors: Gibbs, Graham, Alan Jenkins (ed.) Call Number: LB 2331 T Title: Teaching for diversity Authors: Border, Laura and Chism, Nancy (ed.) Call Number: LB 2331 T Title: Instructing and evaluating in higher education: a guidebook for planning learning outcomes Author: McBeath, Ron J. (ed.) Call Number: LB 2331 I

4 Thoughts on the Lecture Method From Plato's Academy to the modern university, knowledge has been transmitted orally for over 2000 years. Although the original "Socratic method" required a dialogue between teacher and student, the lecture (as it was developed in the medieval university) did not. Originally, lecturing was the only way that the knowledge stored in books could be transmitted to a large number of students (the word "lecture" is derived from the Latin legere, "to read"). Many centuries after the invention of movable type (and other significant advances in technology), lectures continue to be the primary mode of instruction in higher education. The reasons for their popularity are not hard to adduce: lectures are cheap (since a single teacher can lecture to an auditorium full of students), they are easily changed and updated, and they are efficient in covering material quickly. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the method is familiar to students and teachers alike, and their roles are clearly defined. I can't imagine teaching without the lecture method. There are certain things that I must cover in class; I organize the lecture material in a way that provides a conceptual overview that allows us then to ask for the implications of a bit of knowledge. - a Speech Communications professor Lectures are appropriate for presenting material not otherwise available to students, or material that is simply too complex for students to grasp on their own. They are also an excellent way to provide overviews or summarizations of course material, to draw together diverse elements and to show connections between concepts. If the teacher is an effective speaker, lectures can also communicate the teacher's enthusiasm and interest in the subject matter and thereby stimulate students to want to learn more. However, the "traditional" lecture method (in which the instructor does all or most of the talking) has a number of drawbacks. Lectures of this sort are based on "learning by listening," which is a disadvantage for students who prefer to learn by reading, or by doing, or by some other method. Although the traditional lecture conveys factual information very well, it is not well-suited to the higher levels of learning; critical thinking, analysis, and problem-solving must be learned by doing. In a traditional lecture class, the student is passive, has little control over the flow of information, and is reduced to playing a stenographic role. Moreover, research has shown rather that students frequently forget, or never learn, much of the material taught through lectures. How can we exploit the strengths of the lecture method and avoid its weaknesses? Effective teachers seem to share many of the same lecture techniques (even though their styles may differ considerably), and these techniques reflect principles grounded in cognitive psychology. By paying attention to a few of these basic principles, we can refine our lecture techniques and make our lectures as effective as possible. Don't talk uninterruptedly longer than 15 minutes at a time--provide for changes of rhythm during the period by shifting from lecture to other teaching formats. Try to involve students in the lecture, by questioning or interacting with them to keep two-way communication alive. Provide students with ample cues to help them discriminate between more important and less important material--lecture outlines and handouts can supply many cues. Constantly verify, through eye contact and questions, that students accurately perceive and understand the information in the lecture. Provide links, using metaphors or other associative devices, between new ideas and previous learning or experience.

5 Use many concrete examples to illustrate new concepts--experiment with visual representations of complex ideas. Provide "blank time," through internal summaries, anecdotes, and illustrative material during a lecture to allow students to process new information. Center for Teaching and Learning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill