D-Lecturing versus Student Involvement.

"The lecturer is no more than a frustrated actor." This is an
assertion of instructors who have recognized ego involvement among
educators. These who recognize this personality characteristics have
changed their teaching techniques from instructor/subject centered
to student centered. They have rendered much more effective the
procedures for allowing students to learn faster and retain the
information longer. They recognize that the most effective learning
is a result of doing, participation and meaningful involvement. A
student's measure of his ability to retain is his ability to apply
what he learns; and through applying, he retains. Forgetting is a
consequence of disuse, but reapplication of the skills and concepts
bolsters retention. Simply, people learn (and remember) by doing.
Doing is relevant and meaningful. The traditional educational system
does not promote retention because its emphasis is on the
acquisition of, in most cases, meaningless isolated bits of
information in which the student has little or no interest. He is
expected to listen passively to lectures on subjects that make no
real difference to him except that the subjects have been imposed by
a curriculum committee or state mandate as a requirement for
graduation.

It is a real puzzle why the educational establishment, which
recognizes that students learn faster and more effectively by
reading than by listening, continues to support the teacher - slowly
- dispensing - information techniques of a preliterate society.
Students resent being required to read the very same information
that the instructor delivers in the class the students are required
to attend. Much more meaningful, following reading the assigned
material, is clarification and discussion of it. A student remembers
better what he says in contributing to a discussion than what a
teacher says. The student's involvement and participation are the
key factors in his remembering. Lecturing persists because it's the
instructor's simplest route to job security and it allows the "ham"
in him to be expressed.

Traditional educators consider electronic technology (television and
computer games) a bane to education. What they fail to realize is
that students are much more motivated by it than by drab traditional
classroom settings and lectures because it encourages participation.
No lecturer wants a student joining him in presenting a lecture any
more than a concert musician wants a member of the audience to
perform with him. If educators would take off their blinders, they
would recognize that education through entertainment is effective.

Jeff's sixth grade experience with his spiteful teacher was the
clincher for him that caused future formal education to be
distasteful. Jeff became so indifferent that, although he prepared
his arithmetic assignments, he would not turn them in for credit.
Needless to say, his grade left much to be desired. Nevertheless, he
demonstrated that he understood the mathematical concepts. He
surprised his teacher, who thought he was close to the bottom of the
class in arithmetic, when he did better classroom work in graph
design than any of the other pupils. He understood graphs before
they were introduced by the teacher. How? He enjoyed playing the
grid oriented computer game, Star Trek, with its sector mapping.
Graphics concepts were second nature to him as a consequence of his
involvement with this computer game.

There appears to be evidence that computer games stimulate thinking,
also. The daughter of one of my adult students was an average high
school freshman until she received a computer as a Christmas gift.
She did not use the computer as an instructional tool but as a game
playing machine. Nevertheless, the following semester she did so
much better in her classes than before that her average grade was
more than one full grade point higher. Electronic technology,
because it involves meaningful participation, is stressed here as an
educational medium. Its advantage as a deliverer of information will
be treated in a later chapter.

Educator Robert Caldwell, in an article, "Computer Learning Can
Begin at Home," in the May/June 1986 issue of Electronic Education,
cites how his eight year old nephew provides evidence that learning
problem solving can be effective with computer games:

     . . . It is fascinating to watch the problem- solving process
     he applies to learning a new game. He carefully experiments
     with various possible alternatives, uses information from his
     experiments to try new approaches, and comes to extraordinarily
     accurate conclusions. . . The games themselves reinforce this
     problem-solving skill because they require planning strategies,
     evaluating results, using information, and thinking quickly
     under pressure.

     . . I have observed the effects these games have on the
     motivation of children of all ages to read, solve problems and
     stay on task. Simulation and adventure games seem to touch
     higher cognitive levels than action games and seem to have even
     greater value in developing the thinking process.

Several years ago an experiment was conducted, the results of which
surprised the experimenters and the subjects. The same material was
presented to four groups of selected students through four media:
reading text, (2) hearing a lecturer, (3) listening to radio and (4)
watching television. Except for the text, the presentation was
delivered by the same person. The post-test results surprised the
experimenters because those subjects in the group receiving the
information via television scored significantly higher than those
who received it through other means. The reason was not apparent
until psychologists acknowledged that television is a participatory
medium. That is, watchers have to participate subconsciously in
order to reassemble the images that form on the screen through the
rapid succession of thousands of "dots" fired onto the cathode ray
tube screen by the electron gun. All one sees on the screen at any
given instant is one "dot," because the electron gun can fire no
more than one at a time. The eye's retina forms an image from these
successive firings. The motion picture operates similarly, but it
provides 24 complete images each second, which the mind/eye needs to
render meaningful, whereas television requires the reassembling of
thousands of separate successive stimuli per second. That's
involvement! Noted media expert Marshall Mcluhan appropriately
suggests that the medium, the manner of presenting the information,
is as important, possibly more so, than the essence of the message,
the content, in his succinct quip, "The medium is the message."

The perpetuation of an archaic system is difficult to break.
Traditional teachers learned from their traditional teachers who
learned from theirs, and so on back through several "generations" of
teachers. Teachers have been so "brain-washed" by tradition that
they accept many procedures that have no relationship to learning.
Their procedures are based upon objectives that have more to do with
crowd control, antithetical to learning, than to learning. And they
are probably unaware of the rationale behind the procedure much like
the young housewife who always cut the end off a ham before placing
it in the oven merely because that is what she had seen her mother
do. When asked why she did it, she did not know so she had to ask
her mother. Her mother responded that she did not know; she had done
it because her mother did it. When the two of them asked the
originator of the procedure why she cut the end off the ham before
placing it in the oven, they learned that it was necessary in order
to allow the ham to fit in grandmother's small oven.

Educational procedures still followed originated in the 19th century
to satisfy the needs of that century's hierarchical industrial
society. In our technological society we are producing modes of
conduct appropriate for a different era. Educators accept the notion
that the best environment for learning is in the classroom merely
because they know no other way. They retain the erroneous notion
that the best means of presenting information is through the
lecture, as though Gutenburg had never developed the printing press.
The practice of taking notes on information dispensed from a
lecturer has been found to be a nearly totally ineffective learning
process, yet it persists. Why? Probably because it's the tradition
and it keeps a student's mind (which thinks many times faster than
an instructor speaks) from wandering.

Although much has been written in recent years on the effectiveness
of learning through DOING, instructors are still the ones that do
most of the DOING, requiring the students to sit and listen
passively and do nothing. Research has found that what a student
learns depends on what he DOES with the information he receives, not
only in the educational institution but outside of it, where he,
even as a full-time university student, spends 90% of his time (152
of 168 hours per week). Formal education ought to allow immediate
application of concepts learned. Courses which do not permit
application of concepts perhaps ought not be included in the
curriculum. Educators should implement more on-the-job training
opportunities and allow the students to learn while doing, the most
effective means of retaining the information. Most of what occurs in
the traditional educational institution is a waste of students' time
and tax-payers' money.

Here is more on waste: The Hewitt Research Foundation
September/October 1987 Family Report cites a research report by
Richard Rossmiller of the University of Wisconsin. He provides
statistical evidence that "a typical public school student spends
more of his school years in non-instructional activities than in
actual classroom instruction." There are 36 30-hour weeks for 1080
hours in a typical school year. Of this, the following lists
non-instructional time and the reasons for it: --

367 hours: lunch, recess, attendance-taking and between class breaks.
108 hours: absenteeism.
 54 hours: bad weather, teacher strikes and conferences.
 66 hours: materials' distribution, discipline and answering questions.
121 hours: day-dreaming.
716 hours: TOTAL wasted hours, 66% of 1080 scheduled hours' time.

Students consequently receive instruction during only approximately
one-third of the time spent in school. This provides further
evidence that taxpayers are funding day-care more than education.
This waste of time may contribute to the development of poor work
habits that the students will eventually take into their vocational
employment.

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                     THE EFFECTIVE TEACHER:

George Bernard Shaw quipped, "He who can, does; he who cannot,
teaches." Students in teacher training universities add, "And he who
cannot teach, teaches teachers."

This presumes that teachers can be trained. There is still little
agreement about whether or not teachers can be trained. Many assert
that teachers, like artists, are born, not made. Teachers are born
with the necessary personality to have effective personality
interaction with students much as the artist is born with acute
visual imagery and a musician is born with above average aural
skills. An instructor cannot teach one who is color blind to
distinguish subtle nuances of color or one who is tone deaf to sing
in harmony. Likewise, teachers require certain personalities to be
effective. Not only should he enjoy his work, he should be able to
relate to students and demonstrate that he cares. Few do. Few, also,
have the patience and compassion that is required in order to
communicate caring. Most are content to go through the ineffective
motions of cramming information into masses of students in the
educational assembly line.

The most effective teachers are those that create an atmosphere of
acceptance, approval and free inquiry, without censorship. The
traditional school does just the opposite. The student is constantly
reminded that he just doesn't measure up to the expected standard of
excellence. Learning is associated with drudgery and punishment when
it should be a most exciting and enjoyable activity.

The ideal teacher is one who enters into an individual relationship
with a student in pursuit of understanding or skill development. He
somehow stimulates the student to take the initiative in learning
and then functions as a mentor, a "sounding-board" of the student's
ideas, one who draws ideas from the student in order to assist him
in discovering truths for and about himself. Socrates is the classic
representation of this technique. Plato suggests, in his dialogue
between Theaatetus and Socrates, that this sort of teacher resembles
a midwife who assists the labor of a student's mind in giving birth
to ideas. A good teacher rarely teaches anything; he creates the
environment and atmosphere under which learning takes place. He
guides the student in arriving at conclusions through the student's
own thought processes.

The effective teacher allows open communication in order that he can
respond non-judgmentally to student expressions of concern about
matters that he, the student, considers important, the only topics
he will remember.

But the educational structure is not designed to permit the ideal
teacher to function in this manner. Indeed, NEA published a
satirical commentary on administrator designed teacher evaluation
forms reflecting the concern:


                            TEACHER EVALUATION FORM

TEACHER           SOCRATES

                       (Rating high to low)
                        1   2   3   4   5     Comments
    A. Personal Qualifications

1. Personal appearance ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Dresses in old sheet
                                           draped about body.
2. Self-confidence     ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Not sure of himself.
                                           Always asks questions.
3. Use of English      ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Speaks with heavy
                                           Greek accent.
4. Adaptability        ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Prone to suicide by
                                           poison when under stress.
    B. Class Management

1. Organization        ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) No seating chart.  Does
                                           not issue proper passes.
2. Room appearance     ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Does not have eye catching
                                           bulletin board.
3. Use of Multi-Media  ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Does not use A-V equipment.
                                           Does not type tests.  Does
                                           not give tests!

    C. Teacher-Pupil Relationships

1. Tact/consideration  ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Embarrasses students by asking
                                           questions.  No Kleenex.
2. Attitude of class   ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Students respond without
                                           raising hand.

    D. Techniques of Teaching

1. Daily preparation   ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Does not keep daily
                                           lesson plans.
2. Attention to course ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Quite lax - allows students
                                           to wander to different topics.
3. Knowledge of subject( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Does not know material.
                                           Questions students to gain
                                           knowledge.

    E. Professional Attitude

1. Professional ethics ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Lacking - Questions current
                                           educational practices.
2. In-Service training ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Complete failure - has not
                                           bothered to attend college.
3. Parent relationships( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) (X) Parents are trying to get
                                           rid of him.


Due to the authoritarian personalities of some instructors, students
fear asking questions or volunteering opinions because of expected
ridicule from the instructors. Such instructors do not realize that
they are employed for the benefit of the students and should serve
them, rather than be served by them, as some expect. Teachers,
particularly those in higher education, should treat students as
clients. Businesses treat clients with respect and friendliness.
Teachers should treat students likewise. Patient teachers remind
students that the only stupid question is the one that is not asked.


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     THE STUDENT IS  .  .  .

     The most important person on the campus. Without students there
     would be no need for the institution.

     Not a cold enrollment statistic but a flesh and blood human
     being with feelings and emotions like our own.

     Not someone to be tolerated so that we can do our thing. They
     ARE our thing.

     Not dependent on us. Rather, we are dependent on them.

     Not an interruption of our work, but the purpose of it. We are
     not doing them a favor by seeing them. They are doing us a
     favor by giving us the opportunity to do so.

                    Author unknown.

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