Teaching Techniques

One of the students of an English professor, Alan Jacobs, once asked him:
“You mean that the stuff we learned last semester applies in this course, too?”
Isn’t that exactly how most of us went through college, semester by semester, never feeling there was any connection between any two things, never seeing any big picture to all the courses?

Even if we set aside a 3 or 4 years course as too long and having way too much content to come together, can individual college courses at least be taught better?

Harvard art history professor, Jennifer L. Roberts, thinks this is one way to go about it:
“During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?”
To summarize: Try and anticipate how students would think and process the material, and pace the course accordingly.

You’d think a guy like Richard Feynman would be the ideal guy to answer that question. His ability to explain anything is awesome (check out his lectures and YouTube videos). Despite that, this is what Feynman has to say about teaching techniques in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out:
“All those students are in the class: Now you ask me how should I best teach them? Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science, from the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it.

That’s the only way I can see to answer it, so as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, [so] that during the time when the fellow who’s interested in history’s being bored by the abstract mathematics, on the other hand the fellow who likes the abstractions is being bored another time by the history–if you can do it so you don’t bore them all, all the time, perhaps you’re better off.”
Feynman seems to advocate the “have a bit of something for everybody” approach to teaching.

I wonder which approach works better…

Comments

  1. KumarDecember 24, 2014 at 11:30 AM

    Yes, there are ways of define methodologies and application ways towards teaching. In a way, it is all about how to bring education into the confines of one of the "main systems" that a nation would or should have. Today, education system is follows the method brought out by the Hellenic culture, the culture of the West. For the commercial world that we live in today, that seems to be suitable.

    Both within that defined education system domain as well as outside it (both previous and other cultures' ways), how the teacher goes about it is entirely his/own. A good teacher comes out from something from within. As much as how good a good player, artist, litterateur, engineer, scientist etc. are get decided by that something within the person.

    As to semester system, I had moved to it when I came to do engineering post my graduation when it was non-semester type. In that sense I have fair idea about both approaches. Both systems have merits and demerits, but I am inclined to believe that the semester system is more suited for much of our requirements. Regarding defining what a chosen course should cover, it is forever an on-going process - an evolution that never ends. In that, trying to do "something for everybody" is OK as a policy but in practice there can never be a time when the teacher can feel, "I managed to achieve it".

    Like everything in life, we would only be somewhere looking for something better!

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