Changes to teaching: Did we include the students?

Early last semester I attended a workshop on teaching and learning. I want to be a good teacher. Wow, there were some great ideas presented and I immediately rewrote my lesson plans for the rest of the semester - well actually developed some lesson plans! - and incorporated some quite different strategies into my teaching. No more of those 45-minute one-way conversations accompanied by some reasonable attempts at drawing diagrams on the board. Not me! I’m using PowerPoint with some whizbang computer graphics. I move all around the lecture theatre and I use ‘cooperative’ learning activities. I even throw in a couple of jokes! And then I post it all on the Web. Oh, the content I can cover now. My students must be loving this. Well at least I thought they were. And then along came my student feedback! What went wrong? Why are my ratings worse than before? One student wrote ‘what alien invaded your body?’ I thought they told me in the workshop to do things better, to do things differently, that students do not like the 45-minute ‘boring’ lecture.

Students come to university with expectations of what being a student entails and with established strategies for learning. They have to adjust these strategies as they realise they must assume a greater responsibility for their learning. Particularly in their first year, students are dealing with a host of issues including those related to their cognitive and social development and they may take considerable time in adapting to the many aspects of university life. As the semester gets under way they settle into a pattern of teaching and learning that is established through the teacher’s teaching style and personality. When the teacher suddenly appears to assume another personality and alters this established pattern in the classroom, dissonance is created for the students. Even with the best of intentions, changes to established patterns, whether they are slight modifications or changes that lead to a significantly different approach, can have quite different results in the classroom to what the teacher had expected. This is not to suggest that student reactions should discourage the teacher from doing it better or doing it differently. Far from it.

However as Meyers and Jones (1993) point out, there is ‘nothing more phoney-and more quickly rejected by students-than teachers trying on new teaching styles that fit uncomfortably with their personalities and abilities’ (p.15).

Stuart Lee and colleagues add that

one thing which is clear from observation of the ways students learn is that they strongly object to any idea that they are being used as guinea-pigs to simply test teaching methods for future generations. If they can see no benefit for themselves they will react unfavourably. <http://www.jtap.ac.uk/reports/htm/jtap-028.html>.

If students know why they are engaged in certain teaching and learning strategies and understand the benefits of using those strategies they are more likely to accept the change. Whether it be a small change or a more significant innovation, the teacher must prepare the students for that change.

Have you explained to the students why you are using a different approach or incorporating new strategies in your teaching and how it will benefit the teaching and learning environment? Have you provided support for the students as you challenge them with different approaches to teaching and learning? Have you considered student access to computers and software if they are a part of your new strategy? Have you provided training and technical support? Have you designed an assessment strategy that matches your new teaching strategy?

• Myers, C., & Jones, T. B. (1993). Promoting active learning: Strategies for the college classroom. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
• Lee, S., Groves, P., Stephens, C., & Armitage, S. Guide to online teaching: Existing tools & projects. <http://www.jtap.ac.uk/reports/htm/jtap-028.html>

Previously published in
Issues of Teaching and Learning. Vol 6 No 4 May 2000