Felder, Richard, "We Never Said It Would Be Easy."
Chem.
Engr. Education, 29(1), 32-33 (Winter 1995).
Richard M. Felder
Department of Chemical Engineering
North Carolina
State University
Raleigh, NC 27695-7905
OK, here's the scenario. You go to a teaching workshop presented by Woods or
Wales or Stice or Smith or that joker from North Carolina who's always ranting
about this stuff. The presenter instructs you to immerse your students in
real-world problems without routinely providing all the requisite facts and
formulas. He also tells you-repeatedly-to stop doing so much lecturing and
instead get the students to work in teams and teach each other. Once they
realize they can no longer count on you to tell them all they need to know,
they'll start to rely on themselves to figure it out-which is to say, they will
learn to learn.
You may be in for a rude shock. It's not that the methods don't work-they do.
I've had great success with some of them, particularly cooperative learning, and
I do my fair share of missionary work on their behalf. The success is neither
immediate nor automatic, however, and the awkwardness and frustration and
student resistance and hostility you may experience before you get to the payoff
can be formidable. It's tempting to give up in the face of all that, and many
instructors unfortunately do.
The problem is that doing anything new and nontrivial always involves a
learning curve, and the curve may be particularly steep for both you and your
students when you try an active learning approach for the first time. The
students, whose teachers have been telling them everything they needed to know
from the first grade on, don't appreciate having this support suddenly
withdrawn, and complaints like "Meachley never teaches us anything-we have to do
it all ourselves" start echoing through the corridors. It's even worse if you
use cooperative (team-based) learning: students then gripe loudly and bitterly
about other team members not pulling their weight or about being slowed down by
having to explain everything to that lemon they've been forced to team with.
Sometimes instructors who are effective lecturers get lower student ratings when
they start using active and cooperative learning methods.
My goal here is to assure you that these initial glitches are both common and
natural, and that they may be a cause for concern but not for panic or
discouragement. The trick is knowing how the process works, taking a few
precautionary steps to smooth out the bumps, and waiting out the inevitable
setbacks until the payoffs start emerging.
Consider the students. Woods[1] observes that students forced to take major
responsibility for their own learning go through some or all of the steps
psychologists associate with trauma and grief:
Just as some people have an easier time than others in getting through the
grieving process, some students may enthusiastically dive right into active
learning and short-circuit many of the eight steps, while others may have
difficulty getting past the negativity of Step 3. The point is to remember that
the resistance you encounter from some students is a natural part of their
journey from dependence to intellectual autonomy, and if you provide some help
along the way, sooner or later most of them will make it.
So what can you do to help them and yourself get through the process? Out of
painful necessity(1)
I've developed an arsenal of strategies. For whatever they may be worth, here
they are.
Set the stage. When I plan to use active or cooperative learning in a
course, I explain on Day 1 exactly what I'm going to do and why. I assure the
class, for example, that I'll be making them work in class not to make my life
easier (quite the contrary), but because research shows that students learn by
doing, not by just watching and listening. I reinforce the point by citing some
of the research; as always, McKeachie[2] and Wankat and Oreovicz[3] provide good
general summaries and Johnson et al.[4] cite results specifically for
cooperative learning.
Provide coaching on the skills you want the students to develop. When
students complain (or make evident in other ways) that they don't know how to
set up problem solutions or prepare for tests or work effectively in teams, I
try to offer some guidance during my office hours and occasionally hold a
miniclinic in class. Woods[1], Wankat and Oreovicz, and Johnson et al.
are rich sources of methods for facilitating development of learning and
teamwork skills.
Get feedback and try to be responsive to it. Especially when many
students in a class seem to be spending a great deal of their time hovering
around Stages 3 and 4 of the trauma scale (loss of confidence, anger, and
withdrawal), I grit my teeth and conduct a midsemester evaluation, asking them
to list things they like about the class, things they dislike, and things that
would improve the class for them. The first list often surprises me: the
complaints I've been hearing tend to monopolize my attention, clouding my
awareness that what I'm doing is working well for many or most of the students.
The things they dislike are not exactly fun to read, but I learn from them and
the students seem to appreciate the opportunity to vent. The suggested
improvements may include some that are unacceptable to me ( "Stop assigning
problems that you haven't lectured on." "Cut out this group
garbage.") but I may be able to act on others without seriously disrupting
my plans or compromising my principles. When I respond positively to some of
their suggestions (like easing off on the length of the homework assignments, or
giving them the option of doing a few assignments individually), it usually goes
a long way toward getting them to meet me halfway.
Be patient. I expect many of my students (especially those I haven't
previously taught) to be frustrated and upset in the first few weeks of my
courses. I deal with it now better than I used to, knowing from experience that
most of them will turn around by the final exam.
Go back to the references periodically. When some of my cooperative
learning groups seem to be disintegrating halfway through the semester, I look
back at one of Karl Smith's monographs (or, for that matter, at my own workshop
notes). I'm usually reminded that I've been neglecting one or another of the
recommended CL practices, like having the groups regularly assess their
functioning and work out what they need to do differently in the future.
Don't expect to win them all. In the end, despite my best efforts,
some students fail and some who pass continue to resent my putting so much of
the burden of their learning on their shoulders. A student once wrote in a
course-end evaluation, "Felder really makes us think!" It was on the list
of things he disliked. On the other hand, for all their complaints about how
hard I am on them, my students on the average earn higher grades than they ever
did when I just lectured, and many more of them now tell me that after getting
through one of my courses they feel confident that they can do anything. So I
lose some, but I win a lot more. I can cheerfully live with the tradeoff.
References
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1. Believe me, my observations about student resistance are
neither theoretical nor speculative.
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