Hello! I’m John Hilsdon, and I’m blogging my notes for a keynote talk I’m going to give at the University of Brighton in about ten days time. It is called, perhaps a bit presumptously, “Real Live Learning”! I’m addressing a group of academics and university teachers. Here is a part of what I am planning to say:
Of course we all want to engage our students – to get them to pay attention, to think and to take an active part in their learning - but do we act in ways which are sufficiently purposeful to have a good chance of success in this? I mean do we really think about how what we are doing in our classrooms and lecture theatres will actually ‘work’ towards that engagement? Sure, if we have something interesting to say and can say it without lapsing into a monotonous drone then content itself can be sufficient to hold people’s attention. But is ‘engagement’ the same as learning? It’s certainly an essential step. Yet we know from pedagogic research that many factors are important: we need students to be active, to learn by using relevant examples and to have opportunities to rehearse the language of the discipline and its concepts, rather than sitting as passive recipients of our wisdom. Educational developers and others interested in learning have been saying such things for years, and the phrases ‘active learning’ and ‘student centred learning’ are pretty familiar across the sector; yet I am not sure that they are well understood – and I suspect they may be seen as mere policy jargon or a form of political correctness – a way of justifying those hoops poor academics are expected to jump through in order to get their HE teaching certificate.
So I am going to take a risk and will ask the people listeing to my talk to do an exercise! In fact I don’t want to call it an exercise – but to insist that it is real live learning. What I am going to ask them to do is to speak, listen and observe – three crucial activities… and I am going to ask themto do this in a rather formalised way in order to get them to focus on each activity in terms of the role of speaker, listener and observer in an activity we call “triads”
There is real power in the phenomenon we call ’role’. It is a social concept and involves us occupying a position (customer, student, parent, blogger etc) and then following a set of more or less well defined rules or, more loosely, conventions of behaviour for someone in that postion. We are all familiar with that power – and it accounts for the popularity, as well as the dread, of activities called ‘role-play’ … I would not describe what we are gong to do as role play because the roles I am going to ask participants to take on are not synthetic but genuine: speaker, listener and observer.
One way to promote active learning, it is said, by Gibbs, Biggs and the other writers on teaching in HE that many of us know so well, is to set up ‘buzz groups’ or pair work – those activities often prefaced by a comment from the lecturer such as: “Now I want you to just talk about this to the person sitting next to you.” And indeed these activities are often very successful – at least on the face of it – there is always a ‘buzz’. Though of course what is being said may or may not be of relevance to the task … in fact many of us suspect that in fact what students are saying are things such as: “OMG did you see what she is wearing” or “What the **** are we supposed to be doing?” and “I dunn! Are you going out tonight?” and “Have you done the assignment yet?” and “Did you watch the match last night?” and of course “ … whoops, here he comes – we’d better humour him: what were we supposed to be talking about?”
Wheras in fact what we want them to be doing is really engaging with the task … And it is not just the task we want them to engage with – if we are honest, what we also want is for them to engage with the process – the educational process, the intellectual work and the social work – that of, in the first place listening in order to understand what is being said, to consider it carefully and to ask questions about it in order to understand – that also of being willing to express or attempt to express a view or an understanding, and that of observing to see what is going on – to attempt some objectivity or critical awareness of the process overall.
TO BE CONTINUED (Please note I have been drafting this as I blogged it, so am sure it is full of typos and overly wordy meanderings! Am going to polish it up and will re-post as I do so!)
