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We Never Said It Would Be Easy Richard M. Felder Department of Chemical Engineering OK, here's the scenario. You go to a teaching workshop presented by Woods or Wales or Stice or Smith or that joker from North Carolina who's always ranting about this stuff. The presenter instructs you to immerse your students in real-world problems without routinely providing all the requisite facts and formulas. He also tells you--repeatedly--to stop doing so much lecturing and instead get the students to work in teams and teach each other. Once they realize they can no longer count on you to tell them all they need to know, they'll start to rely on themselves to figure it out--which is to say, they will learn to learn. Whether the instructional approach being promoted in the workshop is called guided design, problem-based learning, cooperative learning, 4MAT, or whatever, it's based on the reasonable premise that students learn more by doing things than by watching lectures. The presenter cites hundreds of studies showing that compared to traditional lecturing, active/cooperative learning leads to deeper understanding, improved attitudes toward the subject, and greater self-confidence. It all sounds like just what you've been looking for to counter the apathy and poor performance that have characterized an uncomfortably high percentage of your students lately. You leave the workshop fired up and ready to switch to the new approach in your very next class. You may be in for a rude shock. It's not that the methods don't work--they do. I've had great success with some of them, particularly cooperative learning, and I do my fair share of missionary work on their behalf. The success is neither immediate nor automatic, however, and the awkwardness and frustration and student resistance and hostility you may experience before you get to the payoff can be formidable. It's tempting to give up in the face of all that, and many instructors unfortunately do. The problem is that doing anything new and nontrivial always involves a learning curve, and the curve may be particularly steep for both you and your students when you try an active learning approach for the first time. The students, whose teachers have been telling them everything they needed to know from the first grade on, don't appreciate having this support suddenly withdrawn, and complaints like "Meachley never teaches us anything--we have to do it all ourselves" start echoing through the corridors. It's even worse if you use cooperative (team-based) learning: students then gripe loudly and bitterly about other team members not pulling their weight or about being slowed down by having to explain everything to that lemon they've been forced to team with. Sometimes instructors who are effective lecturers get lower student ratings when they start using active and cooperative learning methods. My goal here is to assure you that these initial glitches are both common and natural, and that they may be a cause for concern but not for panic or discouragement. The trick is knowing how the process works, taking a few precautionary steps to smooth out the bumps, and waiting out the inevitable setbacks until the payoffs start emerging. Consider the students. Woods[1] observes that students forced to take major responsibility for their own learning go through some or all of the steps psychologists associate with trauma and grief:
Just as some people have an easier time than others in getting through the grieving process, some students may enthusiastically dive right into active learning and short-circuit many of the eight steps, while others may have difficulty getting past the negativity of Step 3. The point is to remember that the resistance you encounter from some students is a natural part of their journey from dependence to intellectual autonomy, and if you provide some help along the way, sooner or later most of them will make it. So what can you do to help them and your self get through the process? Out of painful necessity (and believe me, my observations about student resistance are neither theoretical nor speculative) I've developed an arsenal of strategies. For whatever they may be worth, here they are. SET THE STAGE. When I plan to use active or cooperative learning in a course, I explain on Day 1 exactly what I'm going to do and why. I assure the class, for example, that I'll be making them work in class not to make my life easier (quite the contrary), but because research shows that students learn by doing, not by just watching and listening. I reinforce the point by citing some of the research; as always, McKeachie [2] and Wankat and Oreovicz [3] provide good general summaries and Johnson, et al. [4] cite results specifically for cooperative learning. PROVIDE COACHING ON THE SKILLS YOU WANT THE STUDENTS TO DEVELOP. When students complain (or make evident in other ways) that they don't know how to set up problem solutions or prepare for tests or work effectively in teams, I try to offer some guidance during my office hours and occasionally hold a miniclinic in class. Woods, Wankat and Oreovicz, and Johnson, et al., are rich sources of methods for facilitating development of learning and teamwork skills. GET FEEDBACK AND TRY TO BE RESPONSIVE TO IT. Especially when many students in a class seem to be spending a great deal of their time hovering around Stages 3 and 4 of the trauma scale (loss of confidence, anger, and withdrawal), |
