I’ve never been much for spoon-fed learning: presenting material to students one pre-chewed nibble at a time, carefully paced. I’ve done a lot of self-guided learning over the years, and my modus operandi is pretty much the same regardless of whether I’m teaching myself a programming language (e.g., Perl), a web application framework (e.g., Ruby on Rails), a research methodology (e.g., grounded theory), or something else:
1. Read a book on the subject, cover to cover, to get my head around the “big picture”;
2. Try one or two little toy projects as a “proof of concept”, just to make sure I have all the pieces to at least get started; and
3. Throw myself into an ambitious, real project that is well beyond my skill level, and figure things out on the fly by frequently going to the text and other relevant documentation as needed.
I find that wrestling with the big project provides the motivation and the context to help me bring it all together.
This contrasts with the way that most academic subjects at most educational levels in most parts of the world are taught: leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time. My gut and my personal learning experiences tell me that we’d be better off “throwing students into the deep end”, as I argued in Travel, Teaching, and Intellectual Saturation. The problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of what this would look like in practice, and I don’t have any evidence that it would actually work. (Perhaps students would be too frustrated to persevere?)
Well, at a meeting today with several high school teachers participating in my current research project, one teacher gave me a glimpse of how it might be implemented, along with reason to believe that it can work.
Darcy (not her real name) is teaching 9th grade algebra, with heterogeneous (mixed achievement level) classes. Largely as a result of our project, she has been experimenting with her teaching style. Today she reported that with one class in particular, she’s been developing a class dynamic where she gives the students a problem to figure out, and then lets them spend perhaps 3/4 of the 90-minute class working together on it. The whole class works cooperatively, with small-group side conversations splitting off and rejoining the main discussion. Sometimes students go to the board to draw something, and sometimes another student will go to another board to disagree. When students look to Darcy for input, she puts on her best poker face and ignores them.
Remarkably, all but one or two students engage. I asked whether a few know-it-all students dominate the discussion, and she said no, all students’ contributions seem to be valued.
Eventually, when the class has reached a solution, Darcy will retake the helm, explore their solution, and often suggest alternative ways that they could have reached it.
Here’s the kicker: I asked Darcy whether she had trouble covering material at a sufficient pace when devoting so much time to student-directed discussion (cf. the myth of coverage). She said that quite the opposite happened: this class was ahead of every other 9th grade algebra class in the school. When my eyes widened, she explained that she’d rearranged the curriculum, starting off with the “hard topics” that were usually saved for later in the year. These provided the problems that students collaboratively wrestled with as described above. Then, later on in the course, she’d bring in the “easy” material that she’d skipped earlier, and the students could chew through that at a high rate—perhaps four sections per day.
Yes, it’s anecdotal evidence, but the story does illustrate one way of teaching by “throwing students into the deep end”. And it supports the rather counterintuitive idea that students learn faster when we put the hard stuff first.
I suspect that in addition, the learning skills they develop are more useful in the “real world”…