Excerpt form an article on 10 Rules of Teaching in this Century.
Main points are:
The below rules describe how to transform current teaching-centered practice to learning-centered practice, using the technologies of today.
Two basic 21st century laws frame these rules:
- First, the knowledge developed during the course does not pre-exist the course.
- Second, since the knowledge of the course does not exist before the course (because you and the students develop the knowledge during the course), your chief challenge is to manage the process of knowledge discovery.
Here are the rules for how to do this:
1. Re-examine and adopt the move from teaching to learning.
Before, it was hard to make the move because of the comparatively tiny resource set and the restricted learning opportunities compared to what is available today. Now, because learning resources and opportunities are infinite, make the move: Don’t just tell students the key knowledge in your field, but help them discover it through problem-based active learning.
2. Re-visit the accountability measures on your campus (usually called learning goals or learning outcomes) and re-structure them to fit the move you and others are making.
3. Make a corollary change in assessment, once this move from teaching to learning is underway in your course or course of study: Move most assessment activity away from testing and toward evaluation of student evidence of learning. Student evidence of learning is now easy to capture and store. In the new paradigm of active and varied learning, testing is less appropriate but assessing student evidence is more appropriate.
4. Insist on teaching only in technology-enabled classrooms. Information technology is the default learning technology of today.
5. Make sure your students have technology management tools of their own as they take on active learning challenges.But, as you and your campus make the move from teaching to learning, students must also have tools to manage their own resources and evidence, not just during a course, but 24/7 while they are enrolled, including between semesters.
6. Insist on faculty having management tools for their own professional development to support annual review or a request for promotion or tenure.You, as a faculty member, must be as adept as your students in using Web-based applications, and there is no better way to learn the new breed of applications than to use them yourself for important professional purposes.
7. Do not discard the lecture or class discussion approach when appropriate, but use it primarily for the purpose of helping students address the essential problems of the course: Use lectures and discussions to help students to make progress in their projects and therefore to build their course portfolios.
8. Make sure your students have a digital repository of some sort--a portfolio system, a wiki, a blog, a Web page builder, a place to store and manage the evidence of their active learning.
9. Require your students to interpret their collected online evidence at regular intervals and, finally, in capstone Web presentations.
10. Make the collection of evidence the primary work of the course. In other words, students should be graded largely or entirely on their final portfolio for the course. In a learning-centered course, the portfolio is thesine qua non.
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