Reflections on Teaching (about Learning)

Through this blog, and in various other ways, I spend a lot of time thinking, reading, writing, talking and tweeting about learning, teaching and pedagogy. But, as regular readers will know, due to illness, it's been a number of years since I've been able to teach in a professional capacity. 

However, last weekend I had the opportunity to teach a session at an event called Limmud. Even more exciting- I was talking, for the first time, about learning (the title of the talk was Jewish Approaches to Learning). So this was a fantastic opportunity for me to think about, and to reflect on, the process of teaching, it's relation to learning as well as to put into practice some of the things that I write about!

There were of course significant differences between teaching this one-off session and teaching a whole course in higher/further education; participants were there purely for fun/interest, and it wasn't a credit bearing course. Some things however, made it particularly challenging, for example I had no idea how many people would come to the session (mine was one of 8 parallel sessions), or the backgrounds, or level of knowledge of the participants. 

Nevertheless, the experience gave me insights into teaching in a way that might have been hard to achieve in any other way.  These are my thoughts:

Active learning

The evidence shows that students actively involved in their learning, learn more than students who sit passively and listen to a lecture. I know this in principle and I've written about it. But actually doing it is slightly more tricky. As I was partially talking about Vygotsky and value of social-learning, it was ofcourse essential that the participants experienced this type of learning! I was particularly concerned about how the timings would work. I guess this comes with experience, but I didn't know how much time to set aside for group discussions, compared to me talking. Or how I would know when it was time to bring a discussion to an end and to move on with the session.

Risk

I quickly realised it would be much easier, from my point of view to simply prepare a 1 hour lecture and to just talk for the whole session. Of course I didn't do that – but introducing peer-discussion and whole group discussion elements felt much more risky. What if the participants said something I didn't understand, or asked something I didn't know the answer to? What if they went off on a tangent?

Control

Related to risk is the idea of loosing control.  Introducing active learning means purposely handing (some) control to the students. You can't know in advance which direction they will take, which aspects they will find interesting/troublesome, how the discussions will develop.

Subject Knowledge

And related to this, was the realisation that I needed to really know the subject area as well as the central points that I wanted the students to understand. You might be able to get away with flaky knowledge if you are giving a lecture with no student interaction, but with active learning you need to be able to respond to the students' needs, to change direction as the discussion develops, or even to alter the focus of the lesson if required. Certainly I had to cut some things out, add in others that I hadn't really planned on talking about, and change the order of some section. Being able to take a fluid approach is essential with active learning.

Content

I also found that introducing active learning elements meant that I couldn't cover as much content as I could if I just talked for an hour - getting students to discuss in groups and then to feed back takes time, and in this circumstance there was no possibility of 'flipping the session'. Of course this doesn't matter if the goal is for the students to get a really deep understanding of the things that things that we did cover.

Fun

One thing I realised was that active learning is more fun for the students. And it was certainly more fun for me! I was really impressed with the quality of the ideas that the participants came up with, and it was a challenge at times to respond to their thoughts.

Power

Planning the session made me realise just how much power the teacher has. It was up to me to decide what to talk about, what to emphasise and what to leave out. There are things that I'm really interested in, that I want to tell people about. But are these the same things that the participants want to learn about? It was much harder to think about it from the students' perspective, and to reign in the rather more esoteric ideas that I find interesting, but which may not appeal to others! 

It also made me realise that student-centred teaching is about putting the needs of the student first, and that means thinking about what would interest, and be of benefit to them, and balancing that with my own expertise and interests.

Overall, I really enjoyed the session, and from the feedback I got, the participants did too. Teaching is certainly rewarding, if a little exhausting.

Image by Hege on Flickr (Creative Commons)

Reflections on Teaching (about Learning) by Anna Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.