From content delivery
to facilitating learning:
the changing role of the educator
Isis Brook and Florence Dujardin
Why the change
• Better understanding of how students learn.
• Changing conception of what counts as
knowledge and who can create it.
• Greater focus on skill development.
• More complex demands (the increasing IQ
conundrum).
• Availability of learning resources for content
delivery.
Traditional model
• Content delivery by expert, students mainly
passive
• Expectation that students read more or
consolidate their knowledge in some way in own
time
• Task to prompt and test learning – essay
• Teaching to the test for exam preparation
• Exam tests memory
• Assessment allows surface learning to pass
Flipped classroom
Illustration from: http://campustechnology.com/articles/2013/01/23/6-expert-tips-forflipping-the-classroom.aspx
Supporting the flipped
classroom
Blooms taxonomy
Image from http://ileighanne.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/flipped-classroom-blooms.jpg
Easy transition – the interactive lecture
• Allow spaces for thinking, responding, framing questions,
analysing, predicting, using what has been presented.
• More effective if collaborative as stuck students can catch up
by learning from others and all stretch their understanding .
• We know that even a gap with nothing is more effective
overall than a non-stop lecture
Johnson, A. H., and F. Percival. 1976. Attention
breaks in lectures. Education in Chemistry
13:49–50.
Polls and Quizzes
Problem-Based Learning (PBL)
• Began in 1960s
• Classic definition – “learning that results from
the process of working towards the
understanding of a resolution of a problem”.
(Barrows and Tamblyn 1980:1).
• Usually in student groups
• Problem design is crucial to success
Three key aspects of the problem
• Problem triggers understanding of threshold
concepts
• Problem provokes liminal space
• Problem is a stimulus for hard fun
Threshold Concepts
• Irreversible – once grasped can’t go back
• Integrative – enable integrated thinking, appreciate
complexity and relationships
• Usually bounded - concepts that bind a subject
together, key ways of thinking in that discipline, define
its edges.
• Transformative – change how we think, involves letting
go of prior assumptions or unexamined aspects of
one’s own understanding.
• Troublesome – inherently difficult, can involve
specialist language (jargon), counterintuitive, and can
be unstable
Examples
•
•
•
•
From economics – opportunity cost
From politics – hegemony
From history – history is written by the victors
Generic – knowledge is unstable and can be
overturned
Not just key important ideas in discipline but
concepts that change how we think in that
discipline (and beyond).
TCs as Jewels in the Curriculum
“Threshold concepts can be used to define
potentially powerful transformative points in the
student’s learning experience. In this sense they
may be viewed as ‘jewels in the curriculum’
inasmuch as they serve to identify crucial points in
the framework of engagement that teachers may
wish to construct in order to provide opportunities
for students to gain important conceptual
understandings and hence gain a richer and more
complex insights into aspects of the subject they
are studying” (Rust 2005:57).
Liminal space as an uncomfortable
portal in the learning journey
Safe in what I
know
Scary liminal
space where I
have to let go of
what I know
New more
sophisticated
understanding
Short exercise
• Think about your own discipline and identify
1-2 threshold concepts.
• Can be hard because you now think through
them, so remember what was hard for you as
a student, what changed your view, what do
your students struggle to grasp or seem to
grasp but struggle to apply.
Threshold Concepts
• Irreversible – once grasped can’t go back
• Integrative – enable integrated thinking, appreciate
complexity and relationships
• Usually bounded - concepts that bind a subject
together, key ways of thinking in that discipline, define
its edges.
• Transformative – change how we think, involves letting
go of prior assumptions or unexamined aspects of
one’s own understanding.
• Troublesome – inherently difficult, can involve
specialist language (jargon), counterintuitive, and can
be unstable
Sharing resources
PBL should be Hard Fun
• Expect laughter and joking
• Encourage freedom and creativity
• Allow playfulness
---------------------------------------------------------------• Expect intense activity
• Use difficult/complex problems
• Cope with resistance and tears
What does PLB look like
• Tutor provides prompt – something complex
that, when investigated fully, will need the
threshold concept(s) and is ‘ill-formed’ (no
right answer, or only one way to approach it)
• Students work in groups
• Could last one session or whole module
• Tutor meets groups to check on progress,
provide guidance.
Good quality problems are:
• Engaging and motivating
• Authentic, real-world, from professional/ social life
• Ill-structured, open to multiple ideas/hypotheses, sustain
discussion
• Multi-dimensional with physical, cognitive, social,
emotional, ethical dimensions
• Stimulate a web of collaborative enquiry
• Challenge students to achieve learning outcomes,
understand threshold concepts, work on problems
• Graduate attributes-focused: enhance teamwork, info.
Literacy, critical thinking, creative problem solving.
(Barrett and Moore 2011:18)
Think of an example you could possibly
use in your teaching
Prompts can be things like:
• a newspaper cutting
• an experience related
• a video
• a photograph
Pinboards
Is getting students involved in research another
way of flipping the classroom?
Students as participants
Emphasis on
research
processes and
problems
Emphasis on
research
content
Students as audience
Healey (2005a)
The research-teaching nexus
Students as participants
Researchtutored
Researchbased
Emphasis on
research
processes and
problems
Emphasis on
research
content
Researchled
Researchorientated
Students as audience
Students as participants
Students assist
tutor in
component of
their research or
discuss results
Students
undertake their
own inquirybased learning
Emphasis on
research
processes and
problems
Emphasis on
research
content
Curriculum
teaches (cuttingedge) subject
content including
tutor’s own
research
Curriculum
emphasises
teaching the
processes of
knowledge
production
Students as audience
Adapted from Healey 2005a
Example of ‘Hot’ Science
New problem from client
Tutor doesn’t know answer
(authentic problem)
Students engage in finding out: what it is, how it
happened, likely impact, future projections, means of
prevention.
And can even be involved in advising the client.
from John Cullum, Post Harvest Technology, Writtle College
Position of the mouldy satsumas on the Healey Axis?
Students as participants
Emphasis on
research
content
Not here!
Students as audience
Emphasis on
research
processes and
problems
Is the literature right?
Few academic staff would
fully understand the
learning, employability,
student satisfaction,
dispositional, and research
gains from moving to here
Visser-Wijnveen, et al 2012
Many academic staff, if
asked to integrate
research and teaching,
would gravitate to
interpreting the meaning
here
Grant & Wakelin 2009
E-Portfolios
http://gettingsmart.com/2013/04/students-shine-through-digital-portfolios/
http://ileighanne.files.wordpress.com/2013/
01/flipped-classroom-blooms.jpg
What could ‘150’ traditional learning
hours look like?
• 13 x 3 hours of class time
= 39 hours
• 1-4 prep for class
= 02 av
• 5-32 on essay prep and writing = 20 av
• exam
= 03
• Revision 3-32
= 12 av
• Total
= 100 hours
With poor attendance, little prep, overnight essay
writing, last minute cramming for exam, could be as
low as 32 hours of surface learning
and still pass.