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Tag: teaching and learning
One of academia’s dirty little secrets is that few professors any receive any kind of educational training. The assumption is that since most professors have PhDs, and are experts in their topics, they are fully equipped to teach this information to others. I’m not entirely sure how this is supposed to work. This harkens back to older models of education where students went to university to hear scholars spout their wisdom. But as countless studies and articles have shown, “telling isn’t teaching.”
If you’re lucky, and you have extra time on your hands (HA!) you might want to take a workshop or a class taught by your institution’s learning and teaching centre. Most universities have them these days, and they provide services to professors (and sometimes to students) who wish to improve upon their teaching. Unfortunately, this isn’t an option for everyone because: workshops are often only offered at certain times of the year; you might not be able to find one that suits your needs; when you’re teaching four courses a semester while trying to finish your doctorate, your “free time” consists of sleep; you simply don’t have the time. Some of us also want to have much more comprehensive training than a workshop can offer, but don’t have the time or the resources to do a certificate in education.
Thankfully, there are options available for such individuals. While I did benefit from the learning and teaching centre at UVic, most of what I’ve learned since I’ve started teaching has come from research that I’ve conducted myself online. Since I’m doing a series of blog posts this month all about going back to school, I thought that it would be well worth the effort to put all of that research together into one convenient package. So in this blog post, I’m going to provide you with a guide to online pedagogical resources. This list is in no way comprehensive, since there are literally thousands of websites and blogs these days devoted to teaching and learning in higher education. Instead, these are some of the resources that I’ve come back to over and over again, and that I believe have helped me to become a better teacher.
When I was an undergrad at McGill (in the dark ages, before mobile devices…), one of the classes I dreaded the most was the pre-Confederation introductory survey class. It was like something out of my worst nightmare: an hour and a half lecture twice a week, with occasional tutorials. Those lectures were hellish. Not that there was anything really wrong with the professor. She was lovely. But she read her lecture out from a prepared text. I was usually asleep within about 20 minutes. Tutorials weren’t much better, since they usually involved the TA awkwardly asking everyone about their thoughts on the readings.
Like most professors, much of my teaching style is based on which classes I hated or enjoyed the most as an undergrad. That pre-Confed class has stayed with me as an example of what I wanted to avoid. Especially when I contrasted it with a course in English literature that I loved (confession, I have a minor in English lit. Don’t judge me too harshly.). I don’t remember much about the content, since it was also a survey class, but I remember looking forward to the tutorials, where the group of TAs gave us activities to do in small groups.
As I mentioned in my previous post, most professors receive little to no training in pedagogy. I certainly didn’t. The closest I got was a TA training course, complete with diploma from the UVic Learning and Teaching Centre (I probably still have it somewhere too…). While I believe that this should be a requirement, especially for those intended to try for a career in academia (try being the operative word here), there are a number of great resources available online. So in this blog post, I’m going to share my journey to make my introductory Canadian history classes better through active learning techniques. I’ll also include information about how you can develop the same kinds of activities for your classes. This blog post is a revised version of the talk that I gave at the 2016 Festival of Learning conference, which I wrote about last week.