Hahaha! Scientific televangelists is a hilarious thought!

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I believe that we, as educators, have to spark the interest in children. There could be many ways of doing that. One that is particularly popular in literature is the use of problem-based learning activity before project works (for example, http://tinyurl.com/doingWithUnderstanding). I feel that without interest, learning may not be entirely fruitful. I do not remember, and certainly cannot make use of, the things that I had learnt in classes where I was not interested. Learning should help learners get a better sense of the world – either by providing learners with the opportunities to use their knowledge in a way they find meaningful or use it for future (further) learning. Both of these require learners to be interested in the topic/content.

As you might have felt reading the post, I actually do not have a practical answer to solving the problem that you mention. I do have an ideal situation in mind where we let students negotiate learning goals, content coverage, and assessment criteria with the instructor. This is an ideal case and may not be practical (revolution, anyone?). Altschool is a good example (https://www.altschool.com/education#our-approach) but I do not know how good the implementation is. Because of the idea of “these are topics that all science undergraduates should know in the four years”, we have created situations where students do not know even the few topics which they could have mastered. In the future, I do see the possibility of a personalized, adaptive learning experience for all students.

What Jyotsana said! I still get butterflies and I’ve been doing this for a LONG time. And yes, the classroom is a collaborative endeavor. Yours will definitely defy gravity!

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I find the concept of a recitation session fascinating. I had to go back and re-look what subject area you are in. I wonder, what is the intent of a recitation session in fluid mechanics? I also wonder if the name of such a session lends itself to a one way transfer of information or performance.

I think we have a similar teaching style and philosophy. I believe the single most important thing I can do as a teaching is inspire students to take ownership of their own learning and nurture their confidence to do so. I also do not like to just give students the correct information. I think its a far more valuable experience for them to discover something for themselves by working together and relying on me to help them formulate good questions when they get stuck.

I agree that teachers should be co-learning along side their students but in my experience teaching has very much been a performance. I tend to exaggerate my enthusiasm and underplay my knowledge of the material when I teach. Sometimes if I ask a question and give the impression that I really don’t know the answer, students seem to feel more confident in offering their ideas. This tends to get a discussion going and then I can guide them to correctly formulate their solutions. In some ways, this is me teaching them. But I really think its my performance that makes students feel like they are part of a learning team with me as simply a more experienced investigator.

So my “teaching” experience is not in the traditional college setting, but I completely agree with the get up and move approach. Most of my experience comes from teaching a diverse audience classes on disaster response for the American Red Cross. When I started out, I was a very serious presenter, dutifully clicked through slide after slide and at the end of the three hour session, I was bored, exhausted and less than inspired. I can only imagine the pain my “students” felt. Unhappy with the experience, I decided to try a more interactive approach that brought the “disaster” to the classroom. For example, when I teach the class on how to run a shelter, I start by giving the students a pile of materials and tell them to follow their instinct and set up a shelter with no instruction. Watching them I can see what they instinctively know that is correct and what areas would cause confusion or safety issues. Then we can walk through the space they have created and instead of flipping slides, we can talk about methods and reasons for setting up the shelter or policies and procedures that are important. Tuesday, I had the great experience of facilitating an exercise for a Tribal government that I have been working with over the past two years. Not only did they address a lot issues that had been discussed in various classes over the past two years, but they had adapted policies and processes that worked better given their Native culture. At the end, one of the social workers who was attending came to me and said that even though she hasn’t been able to attend all of our training sessions, she still remembers the shelter class because it was the first and only time she has had any experience like that. So thinking of authentic teaching, I hope I can take this experience and turn that into something I can use in the academic environment.

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I like the idea that we let students pursue the topics that interest them, but I have two concerns. First, what if some students aren’t really interested in any of them, or not in enough of them to gain an acceptable level of coverage of the topic? You might ask why that student is in the class in the first place, but an example would be calculus or statistics for a student in the sciences. These courses are usually taught in the Math department, not the department of the specific sciences where the content could be put into the appropriate and more motivating contexts. Second, shouldn’t we teach students how to learn things that they really aren’t that interested in? It seems like this is a necessary life skill.

I am many things, but funny is not one of them. Without wanting to sound like I am jumping on the bandwagon, I also support everyone’s comments about finding other ways to engage the students and material. The degree of difficulty in coming up with active learning strategies, I think depends a bit on the subject matter and your audience. If you teaching to a beginning (100 or 200 level) audience, I would look for ways to apply the concepts to the world around them. Where could they experience the theories or ideas that you are trying to teach them about. I think this goes back to our earlier discussions about using imagination and play to encourage students to explore the ideas themselves and then bring it back to a discussion of what they experienced. Then you can work with them to construct the ideas and concepts based on that experience.

Given that many great researchers are not great teachers and that good teaching is very time consuming, it seems like in an ideal scenario, we’d have teachers that mostly teach and researchers that mostly research so that individuals in both roles can be more successful. There is likely some benefit of doing both, but it seems like it wouldn’t outweigh the benefit of being able to devote 100% of your time to either research or teaching.