What would it take?

I understand resistance to change. Embracing new ways of doing things can sometimes suggest a lot of collateral meaning, the most complicated of which might be the implication that if the change you are looking at is a good change, then they way you have been doing things wasn’t the best way. That’s a lot to swallow and admit all in one go. No one likes to be in that place. That’s part of the reason that growth of every sort is painful. You have to let go to grow and often the things we must let go of have meaning for us. Comfort. Growth takes work and renders old work no longer valid. It feels wasted. No one wants to see hard work go to waste. None of it is easy.

This weekend a friend on Facebook posted this article. It talks about the difference in teaching methods and their effectiveness regardless of who is delivering the content. There is a lot here to chew on. There are a lot of reasons that I could easily dismiss it. Physics is not my field. My content is a different sort of content. We assess student learning differently in my subject area.

It got me to wondering. What would it take? If you are a lecture delivery based professor, what would it take to change your mind about teaching methods? What evidence would someone have to bring you? A study like this one? In your field? In your college? More classes? Long term outcomes? And if someone could put that exact thing in your hands, what would you do? What might you do differently? And perhaps most importantly, what is keeping you from trying it now?

The lecture-based delivery system worked during a time when the media that students interacted with was a one-way model. I watched tv, I watched movies, I read books, I consumed. Video games, smart phones, the internet changed a lot of things. No argument. But what we often fail to even consider is how much it has changed the way today’s students interact with life, fundamentally. The one-way model of information consumption has been destroyed in favor of an interactive one. Students create as much as they consume. They communicate more than any generation ever has. This is a problem. This is a windfall.

Place this student into a traditional lecture-based course and they get lost. It’s easy to argue that this is a problem rather than potential. That they are just getting dumber rather than different. But as most professors know, the easy obvious answer is usually wrong. That’s called a set-up. The question we lob at students to get them to think more deeply about a subject.

I have found faculty though, everywhere I have worked, that are quick to declare that this push to change is nothing more than a push to create dumbed down edutainment. But they don’t try it. Done right, interactive, experiential learning is much more engaging and collaborative than lecture based learning. The activities and assignments get to the heart of how students learn, not just what they learn. Because they are experiential and interactive, they also reinforce crucial skills that all of our students need to be successful, particularly communication, planning, and collaboration.

Change is scary. No one likes to fail. But “good enough” just isn’t when it comes to education. What would it take, for someone to begin the shift from lecture/consumer based student interaction and something more organic? What magical day is it decided that you have learned everything there is to learn about being a teacher? What if it’s wrong? If a person is truly teaching for the right reasons, that alone should be enough.