Resources
Bowen, J. A. (2012). The naked classroom. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 8. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 185-214.
Friday 27 April 2018
teaching naked: the naked classroom
This 8th chapter continues the argument inside the classroom. Now that Bowen has explained the advantages of using technology to move content mastery outside of the classroom, he offers suggestions for how to use the time freed up in class to produce a more engaging learning environment inside the classroom. Many of these ideas I have heard before and some I have implemented. But it is worth thinking about the difficulty in designing these in-class activities. And I appreciate his supportive stance that developing the active learning classroom takes time. Just because it does not work as smoothly as your well-polished lectures does not mean that the attempt should be abandoned. It takes time to become an excellent teacher. And he makes a distinction between students complaining about the pedagogy when really what they are noticing is the quality of its implementation. This is something that I have experienced in my implementation of team-based learning. Many students complain about my use of TBL thinking that it is a poor pedagogy when the real issue is that I need to improve how I implement its use. Knowing when students need a guiding lecture vs when they need an activity to either wake them up or solidify conceptual understanding is a skill that I am still attempting to master. In addition, the skilful implementation of active learning requires that the instructor appropriately pitches the difficulty of the material because we are expecting students to engage the material first before coming to class. It is critical that that first contact not be too beyond their abilities. Most textbooks are not necessarily written with the understanding that this will be students' first contact with the material. Just as in the Star Trek universe where the Federation has established guidelines for first contact with an alien species, instructors (and textbooks) need to consider what is at stake and how to best manage first contact between students and the course material. This is the challenge I have with implementing active learning - knowing how to pitch the initial reading assignment (which pages? which figures? Are there sections that should be skipped?) and to what level should students be held accountable for their pre-reading? What I expect them to be able to do on a reading quiz is different from what I expect them to do on a MT or final exam. This will likely be different for every discipline, every cohort of students, and year level of course and student. Which means that a master teacher can never completely rely on what was prepared for the previous iteration of the course: a new instance of the course will require careful consideration of the course context in students’ real time. This is a difficult task.
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