Thank you for your thoughts. It was really helpful. I may share your opinion that traditional way of teaching may still be necessary. Students should still know facts and theories, but why do they need to memorize it? I don’t really see any reason for this except to spit it in an exam. Accordingly, a better way to do that may be by first letting the students themselves learn the basics and facts and then come to class in which we as instructors can discuss it with them and then students should be required to “apply” these facts in real projects. And no memorization because there is no need for exams!! This reminds me of a quote by Albert Einstein “Never memorize something that you can look up”.

Thank you for the example provided. It is really interesting result. This results aligns with one of the hypothesis in computer science education (mainly when applying visualizations to learning but I believe that this can be generalized) that when students act like an instructor and discuss some topic to their peers, the student engagement in the course as well as their learning gain will be improved for all of them. This is named the “presentation” level of engagement.

I totally agree with you Milad. In my undergraduate studies, there were a lot of dry engineering courses that were really stressful and boring. For this reason, in our department they introduced some courses from other disciplines such as law, organizational behavior, business administration, and English language just to make some balance.

Thank you for the post. I totally agree with you that students’ prior knowledge should be respected and may be also taken as a scaffold that you can utilize. Prior knowledge can be also important in directing the course content. You may emphasize new topics to the students and just pass by topics they already know. You can measure and quantify students’ prior knowledge by giving a pre-test during the first week of class.

Thank you for the post!
I really liked this circles metaphor. I want just to add something, Even if the circles don’t overlap they have to recognize that they both share the same type of geometric properties. They both have radius, circumference, area, …. Even if their properties are different, they should coexist so that they can be used to create a beautiful drawing (i.e. two small circles can represent eyes, and one bug circle can represent head!). The same should hold for humans. They are all sons of Adam and Eve. They have different colors, tongues, beliefs, … but they all should coexists to better know and learn from each other.

Yes of course all of us have faced bad lectures. Personally, I faced a lot. All the bad lectures I faced were sharing one main common factor which is “reading from the slides”. The professor having his own slides and he is just reading them for us! Most of the time I slept during those lectures.

I believe that planting curiosity and motivation for learning in our kids nowadays is really a challenge. I am sure if you give ipads or laptops to kids, most of them will spend more than half of their time playing games and listening to music. Accordingly, education through games has enjoyed a great attention from education researchers. The idea here is to provide kids with useful games that convey the required concepts in a way that kids like.

Yes I know

Yes I agree with you that grades don’t give the complete picture and I really liked the health example. I believe that assessment and grades are inevitable in education. Accordingly, the instructor is responsible of designing good assessments so that the grades at the end can have a meaning and can be interpreted in terms of the student ability.

Thank you for this information. Yes, some people in Egypt believe that the play has destroyed several student generations as wells as the teachers’ reputation. However, I completely disagree with this. Of course you remember this play “Shahed Mashafsh haga” or “The witness who didn’t see anything”. You remember also the court scene. The protagonist (Adel Imam) made a lot of jokes with the Judge and the prosecutor. Also in many Egyptian films and serials, police and army officers were insulted for people to laugh (Of course you remember Ismaeil Yassin movies). But do you think Judges and officers are not reputable in Egypt? Of course not!!! They are taking the highest wages in the country and they are enjoying a lot of virtues that other poor Egyptians are deprived from. Education in Egypt is bad not because of a play or a film but because of the wrong foolish policies of the military based leadership over 60 years that is putting education at the very bottom of its priorities list!!!!