Preparing students to learn

I stopped on the second paragraph while reading the article — Small Changes in teaching: The First Five Minutes — by James Lang. In this paragraph, he recalls the message from the teaching guru, Ken Bain. Ken claims that the first sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude — Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice — makes readers continue reading the book. I agree with Ken.

Despite being a good start, I think there will be little impact on the coverage of a lot of materials without putting them in context. Recently, I asked students about their learning experiences in lectures where a lot of content was delivered in an hour lecture (assuming this is a short period of time). Their answers reveal that apart from aural learning and prepared-in-advance students, the rest will struggle to catch up with the information presented on slides (slides over slides).

That means making students engaged and developing their understanding are more important matters than delivering tons of core knowledge. However, how can the course content be delivered while there is little time to teach and a lot of materials to offer in particular when there is no additional (or appropriate) teaching time available? Similarly, a follow-up question would be how much time could students spare for a unit or two? The answer could be – there is no scientific way of making such decisions. Reducing the content may affect the quality of student learning, and adding hours may result in a lack of classroom attendance.

Going back to the first paragraph, where James sets the background of the situation. There are looming situations at the start of the semester – you do not know the students; you do not know how much they know; you do not know how much they should know. With many unknowns, it will be difficult to start and end any session.

Looking at both sides of the teaching and the administrative load, it is challenging to decide where to focus on making students learn effectively. Given the limitations of time and resources, the easier option in modern teaching could be adding slides over slides and texts over texts. This situation may go on until one day students will loudly say, “Stop adding more slides; you have enough slides; can you please help us to contextualise the knowledge?”