If you think about students as future colleagues, your teaching will emphasize active engagement
Date created: 2022-11-04
A common mental model for teaching is that it’s about information transfer. I do my lecture to transmit some information over to you. But you should rather view students as future colleagues and treat them as such. They should be expected to discuss, engage with the material and disagree with you about things.
people learn best when they take ownership of and responsibility for their own education, when they become active agents rather than passive recipients
A typical session of EOV would go like this. I would walk into class, ask them what was important and what they had not understood in the reading, appoint a student to write the answers on the board, then step out for five minutes. When I returned, I would look at the two lists and add anything I thought they had missed. I would then pick a topic, asked who had mentioned it, got them to explain why they thought it was important or what it was that they did not understand, then picked another student at random and asked that person whether they agreed with the explanation of the topic’s importance or could explain what was not understood. We would continue until the lists were exhausted or until time ran out. In the course of a session every student could expect to be called on to explain something.