Guest Column: An Invitation to ‘Think Like an Instructor’

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Guest Column: An Invitation to ‘Think Like an Instructor’

2/23/2005

By Steve Ehrmann

Same technology in “A” and “B” but the learning outcomes are likely to be different because debating conceptually difficult questions can foster deeper learning more readily than can lectures alone. The faculty member’s choice of activity, the movable chairs, and the energy the students then choose to put into the discussion: all those factors influence learning outcomes.

Today many faculty realize that learning outcomes are mainly influenced by what students do. Let’s call this perspective “active learning.” Learning benefits when students debate important questions with one another, create projects, work in teams, test their ideas and work against the compelling reality of the real world, and so on.

Here’s where I need your help. Students discussing images together: this is something that ought to happen a lot when students are learning actively. Maybe each image is a painting, or a student sketch of the relationship of several ideas, or an X-ray, or a Web page, or a page from a novel. If the students are really engaging, each student needs to be able to talk about, and point to elements of, images while the other students watch and listen. “Look at this element of the X-ray, this word on the page, this arrow that should go here instead of there.”

Now imagine that you, the instructor, have a class of 30 students. You’d like to divide them into 10 groups of three students each to discuss images that the students have been working on. Then you’d like to call on one student from each of several of those groups to show the whole class what she and others in her group just saw in the images they were just discussing.

How would you do that? In a classroom? Of what sort? Or would you find it easier to do online? In a course management system? In a real-time conferencing system with application sharing and a shared whiteboard? Or would this be too difficult to do in any learning space at your institution? Do you do this? D'es a colleague? Please send your observations to me at ehrmann@tltgroup.org .

I’m going to add the best of these observations to this web page: http://www.tltgroup.org/Facilities/Facilities_and_Activities/information.htm As you’ll see this page is part of a larger list of activities. Each such page describes an activity, plus physical and virtual learning spaces that make that activity relatively easy to do. I’d like your help in rewriting and adding to this web page. If I get enough good ideas, and Terry is willing, I’ll write another column later with links to what you’ve shown me.

Meanwhile, just to show you progress is possible, let me go back to the beginning: my undergraduate major. My old department at MIT has completely renovated its building in the last few years. The classrooms are not longer the focus of student activity. Now students have 24x7 access to facilities to create, design, implement and test their designs. To learn more about what MIT has done, start on this page: http://www.tltgroup.org/Facilities/Facilities_and_Activities/Work_Learning.htm

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