Facilitate Learning?

[kpih]

It has been a long time since I was an undergrad. Got a question for you guys. What does 'facilitate learning' it mean to you? Recently I finished teaching a statistics course and I was quite shocked to find I scored pretty low in that item on the teaching evaluation.

My philosophy, in particular with a course like statistics, is that one has to completely understand the mechanics and underlying logic of the method. It is more conceptual than procedural. Therefore I typically don't just provide the formulae. I explain why certain pieces of information are needed for the procedure, then I require my students to try working out problems on their own after the lecture, finally I provide the answers.

Well then again I am dealing with a student population that is quite unprepared for higher education. Most of them are unmotivated and have no curiosity. Even more amazing is that the text has pretty extensive and detail examples for students to follow, but only a minority of them actually care enough to read the text...

[nola]

College students may not understand or be motivated to understand macro concepts because our public school system discourages independent thought. If you have to teach it again you may have to facilitate their learning by emphasizing the mechanics of statistics.

Hey, you got through teaching your first statistics course as a professor!

Congratulations. You can enjoy your summer now. Stay cool down there.

[moJo]

to me, it means...how well does this professor really motivate me to learn? are his methods of teaching effective for me?

[lethal]

Does a professor make it easier for me to learn things than if I had to teach them to myself?

[kpih]

Does a professor make it easier for me to learn things than if I had to teach them to myself?

To what degree? What does it mean making it easier for you to learn? Using many examples and demonstrate the process?

[lethal]

Well, its different for me in law school. Professors use the socratic method and generally people here are motivated to learn the material and also are resigned to learning it through the case method (ie teaching to themselves through example).

Undergrads, I think, may be more lazy and expect you to spoon feed them what they're supposed to learn.

[kpih]

Undergrads, I think, may be more lazy and expect you to spoon feed them what they're supposed to learn.

Spoon feeding is the one thing I am working so hard to avoid. Then again it is quite impossible to undo 15-16 years of damage from our uncritical education system?

[lethal]

Its stats, right? I remember when I took stats in college, one or 2 of the chapters covered probability.

One thing you can do it take advantage of the poker craze sweeping the nation to get your students attention. Teach them how to calculate probabilities of getting different poker hands. Cards are a perfect dependent operation.

The odds of getting an inside straight on the river in this situation is...? Anyone know?

Do enough of them and I guarantee that the half of your class that is addicted to poker will really pay attention.

Start with that and then they'll probably be interested in the t-tests and z-tests and chi squared tests and regression analysis that you cover later.

[kpih]

One thing you can do it take advantage of the poker craze sweeping the nation to get your students attention.

Ha ha that's a good point. Then again I don't gamble and I don't know poker... Sad.

Wow I am impressed. Sounds like you really paid attention!

[A.R.A.M.]

I think you got some good answers. Lethal is right: you have to relate what you are teaching to the students and their own interests. I've heard of professors teaching introductory philosophy classes that use "The Matrix" as a teaching device on the first day. Students then begin eagerly reading shit like Plato on their own. "Facilitate learning" is often code for taking the drudge work out of learning. You can do that by simply giving them all the answers, or you can inspire them to do the learning on their own.

[hooligan]

paulo friere.

[deez nuts]

i berate and verbally abuse the first year residents when they mess up. nothing motivates a newbie to learn more than fear and humiliation.

[lethal]

Ha ha that's a good point. Then again I don't gamble and I don't know poker... Sad.

Wow I am impressed. Sounds like you really paid attention!

Hmm...I took Stats my first semster of college before I really slacked off, so maybe I did pay attention, but its only surface memory.

But seriously. Get your students attention with something they can use or something they feel is important.

Gambling is all about probabilities and odds. You should make the entire probability about learning the odds of gambling. If you have to, learn how to play poker. Watch the World Series of Poker on ESPN or any of the other 845 channels that broadcast poker on TV. On every draw they say player X has a 45% chance of winning and player Y has a 55% chance of winning. I bet your students would love to learn how they calculate those numbers so they can do it themselves while they play poker so they can win.

I'm dead serious. You'd have the most popular class on campus if you taught kids how to gamble better.

[hooligan]

paulo friere.

paolo. dialogue and praxis.

[nola]

More education systems should be based on ideas from Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In other words, Kay, break down the walls between educational institutions and real life, student and teacher, but you already know about this.


Wikipedia: Paulo Freire contributes a philosophy of education that comes not only from the more classical approaches stemming from Plato, but also from modern Marxist and anti-colonialist thinkers. In fact, in many ways his Pedagogy of the Oppressed may best be read as an extension of or reply to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, which laid strong emphasis on the need to provide native populations with an education which was simultaneously new and modern (rather than traditional) and anti-colonial (that is, that was not simply an extension of the culture of the colonizer).

Freire is best-known for his attack on what he called the banking concept of education, in which the student was viewed as an empty account to be filled by the teacher. Of course, this is not really a new move — Rousseau's conception of the child as an active learner was already a step away from the tabula rasa (which is basically the same as the "banking concept"), and thinkers like John Dewey and Alfred North Whitehead were strongly critical of the transmission of mere "facts" as the goal of education. Freire's work is one of the foundations of critical pedagogy.

More challenging, however, is Freire's strong aversion to the teacher-student dichotomy. This dichotomy is admitted in Rousseau and constrained in Dewey, but Freire comes close to insisting that it should be completely abolished. This is hard to imagine in absolute terms (there must be some enactment of the teacher-student relationship in the parent-child relationship), but what Freire suggests is that a deep reciprocality be inserted into our notions of teacher and student. Freire wants us to think in terms of teacher-student and student-teacher, that is, a teacher who learns and a learner who teaches, as the basic roles of classroom participation.

This is one of the few attempts anywhere to implement something like democracy as an educational method and not merely a goal of democratic education. Even Dewey, for whom democracy was a touchstone, did not integrate democratic practices fully into his methods. (Though this was in part a function of Dewey's attitudes toward individuality.) However, in its early, strong form this kind of classroom has sometimes been criticized on the grounds that it can mask rather than overcome the teacher's authority.