Ideas for Improving Teaching at the College and K-12 Level

From the Marshall Memo #432

In this Chronicle of Higher Education article, Dan Berrett reports on a recent conference at Harvard on improving classroom instruction. Several points:

• The lecture method – “Lectures set up a dynamic in which students passively receive information that they quickly forget after the test,” says Berrett. “The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context.” Harvard professor Eric Mazur concurs: “They’re not confronted with their misconceptions. They walk out with a false sense of security.” 

• Teaching to learning styles – “There’s no evidence, zero, that teaching methods should be matched up with different learning styles,” says psychology professor Mahzarin Banaji. “It’s intuitively appealing, but not scientifically supported.” 

• The retrieval effect – Recall is greatly improved by being asked to remember something, says Henry Roediger of Washington University in St. Louis: “Taking a test on something is a very effective way to learn it.” But many teachers and professors – not to mention students – disdain tests and consider them something to be endured after learning has taken place. “There’s a kind of conspiracy in higher education that professors don’t like to give tests,” says Roediger. “We hate grading tests. Students don’t like taking them, so we don’t give them that much.”

• Other methods – Asking students to explain concepts or teach one another material they have just learned is highly effective. So is having them write short essays responding to readings and asking students to identify outstanding questions or important areas of the text that haven’t yet been explored. 

• The curse of knowledge – Much writing by professors (and sometimes students) is heavy with jargon, obscures rather than reveals the underlying ideas, and assumes knowledge the reader doesn’t have, says psychology professor Steven Pinker. “It’s hard to know what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know,” he says. “It’s the chief driver of bad writing and, I would argue, bad teaching.” 

“Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching” by Dan Berrett in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Apr. 14, 2012, http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Seeks-to-Jolt/130683/