I was having an interesting discussion with a colleague about our role as educators, and what was expected of that role. Basically the discussion focused on the importance of material. Is it that material that makes a good subject, or the way it is presented? This lead to two versions of an educators' role.
1: The text selector: The educators' role is to choose an appropriate textbook. To determine what will be covered from the text, and outline this to the students.
2: Guide or mentor: The educators' role is to provide a learning environment in which the students are able to learn the required material.
From a university perspective they would prefer that teaching staff fit in category 1. A text selector is easy to replace, and move. A great educator would then be able to quickly and easily select texts, moving them from subject to subject would result very quickly an improvement across the board.
I prefer to think of my role as more than just selecting a text, or even developing material. I hope that I bring more than some slides and books to the subjects that I deliver. I see my role as the development of a environment in which capable and willing students can learn. I aim to inspire students to learn, and then to be there to support their efforts. Lecture provide a means to inspire and inform (support). Laboratories give you the ability to directly assist them practice the material.
Raj has a great quote for this from his agile material:
"Software is built by people (not processes)
Good people are needed to build good software
Poor quality resources WILL build poor quality software
A process does not build software
A good process will aim to reduce variability (in other words will increase consistency)
Simply put: “A bad team with a great process will consistently
generate garbage”
If you are in the software game, focus on people"
I think this also applies to education.
So what is the role of the material that we develop? Contact time for a subject is very small, not enough to actually learn much at all. I see the material (otherwise know as content) as playing a supporting role. With the lectures providing a few key "take home points", additional material is needed to provide the missing details. Without the material students will be on their own... Providing them with access to good material is still important, and can come from links to sites, textbooks, or custom material.
So basically both are important, but I feel that presence and delivery are more important. Good delivery of the material will help students with the central points of the material, and give them the enthusiasm to put in the extra work that is needed to succeed.
My 2c. Comments welcome. Have you done a subject were you feel you learnt more than others? What do you feel contributed to this?
Friday, October 06, 2006
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7 comments:
I agree.
An example right now is my Computer Systems subject as opposed to my Object Oriented Programming or Internet Technologies subjects.
In CS it's quite clear my lecturer knows alot about the subject, but that doesn't necessarily make him a good teacher at all. What good is having the information if you're spraying it all over the place?
Teachers who know how to present information in a way which gets it into the students heads effectively is what makes a good teacher IMO.
I could be wrong.
I completely agree. The teachers of the subject, be they lecturers or tutors, are very important parts of the subject. Without a good teacher, a subject becomes a drag and a pain. The teacher drives the subject: he injects enthusiasm into the students. If the teachers can't even be enthused about the subject then how can we expect students to be? Teachers must also be good teachers. Even though a teacher may be a really nice guy, enthusiastic about his subject and know a lot, he still may be unable to pace his subject well, or explain things in an easy to understand way (my Computer Systems subject is like this, although its getting better).
Material is also very important. Good material is essential in a university environment where there is very little contact with teachers. The students need to be able to progress and learn (to an extent) without the teacher's guiding hand.
This example emphasises the need for quality teaching and material: last semester I did Database Analysis and Design. It was a good subject with a good lecturer. However, my tutor wasn't great. But that was OK because the material (the lecture slides) were a brilliant source of information. You could have (mostly) done that subject simply by reading the lecture slides. However, the lack of a good tutor did mean that when problems were encountered that stopped my learning it was difficult to get them solved.
An example of bad material: this semester I am doing Usability. The lecture slides for this subject are not very good. They are your basic lecture slides with simple dot points for items and no detail. There are no notes pages provided with the slides. This makes learning the theory difficult because you have to go hunting around in the really bad and boring textbook. Everything takes so long to do because of this and puts people off the subject. There are no exercises that directly support the theory learning process (multiple-choice questions don't count since they are a marked test) so any reading of the textbook simply results in information going "in one ear and our the other".
This is contrary to Object Oriented Design. Although reading the textbook can be arduous because of its extreme abstraction (its hard to conceptualise what they are talking about and hence the reading goes in one ear (ear? eye.) and out the other), there are exercises provided that help you learn the theory by writing it out. The assignments support the broad theory that the textbook explains, which also helps hammer in the theory (especially patterns). The lecture slides have notes pages so more detail can be discovered on a topic if its wanted.
I definitely think the presentation and delivery is clearly the most important. Even if someone has all the knowledge in the world, but can't communicate it to you effectively, then it is useless to everyone else.
I actually started a reply but because it peeked some thoughts from my own experiences with good and bad lectures I decided I had an opinion :p. It got far to long for a reply so it ended up as a blog post on my blog :p
I've really enjoyed your 'multi threaded role playing scenarios' and interactive demos Andrew. Its so nice to get something extra that isn't a cut/copy/paste of the lecture slides in verbal form :)
Beyond bullet points is really cool too. One of the worst lectures I had I think was DBMS. The lecturer was good but the slides were terrible. Every slide was literally 50 lines of SQL where a lecture comprised of no joke, about 60-70 slides.
in the dark old days, when i was back at uni, i remember that the some of the most frustrating lecturers i had were some of the most brilliant. one lecturer was like some expert in telecommunications network engineering but his thought processes were always about two steps ahead of everyone else. so when he wrote a formula on the board, he would be jumping all over the place from one variable to another without any explanation or without much logical sense, talking at about a million miles an hour.
once i sat down and went through the formula myself, step by step, i realised what he was trying to communicate to us, so i was able to keep up, but he ended up frustrating so many students that he ended up being replaced the next semester due to the mass of complaints.
a shame really, cause while his subjects were hard, and he had a crazy, haphazard, scatterbrained way of teaching, i ended up learning a lot because i had to go back and teach myself the work he went through. and he was one of those lecturers who was always happy to meet up after class to go through a particularly difficult problem, which i think makes the biggest difference.
lecture material is good for preparing for exams, lectures are good for learning new material, but the lecturers themselves are often the fount of all information, and it's usually the advice they give outside of class that is most memorable.
"lecture material is good for preparing for exams, lectures are good for learning new material, but the lecturers themselves are often the fount of all information, and it's usually the advice they give outside of class that is most memorable."
That's so true.
I think feedback is the No. 1 priority in teaching, but it is also the aspect receiving the least attention in my opinion. Some subjects such as AMD are highly feedback focused, but in my experience most programming subjects are not.
Every student learns differently. Rather than teaching in an objective manner (I give you the assignment, you do it, you give it back to me, I mark it based on *set criteria* ), it is more effective to teach in a constructive way as opposed to objective. This means challenging the assumptions of the students, and asking them questions to purposely break their mental model of how they *think* something works.
I have found at least one paper on Objective Vs. Constructive teaching and lots of info on it can be googled up.
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