Yet by doing the majority of students' thinking and rushing to solve their problems, we reinforce that idea. From a neuroscience perspective, that's just wrong. Only they can do that, and yet we fall victim to the idea that if the student isn't learning or isn’t paying attention, it's the teacher's fault. No matter how entertaining you make your lectures, you can't make your students pay attention. And that's a huge problem because, ultimately, no one else can be responsible for our learning. At its core, that translates to the idea that the person in charge of their learning is someone other than them. After years of classroom lectures, students everywhere - regardless of cultural or socioeconomic background - had internalized the idea that students are supposed to get answers from teachers. They have the collected knowledge of the world available at the click of a mouse, but they never use it to look up things they don't know. They have brand new textbooks that they never crack open. Today's students have incredible resources - and a troubling lack of resourcefulness. After enough of those sessions, our students stopped bothering to ask us for the answers - they already knew all the behaviors that would lead to understanding.Ĭurious whether this shift in our students was just a fluke, we began working our way through the scientific literature, and the picture quickly became clear. How can we find that out?" Again, the student would go to the book. We should probably look it up." The student would look it up, ask another question, and we'd say, "Hmmm. When a student asked how something was done, we'd play dumb and say, "I don't know. Eventually, we turned our tutoring sessions around. They knew we'd do everything we could, so they stopped doing things for themselves. Pretty soon, we realized that our desire to help was exactly what was hurting our students the most. It was our job to make sure that they understood and succeeded. Ten years ago, when we started tutoring full time, we did everything we could to help our students. We've seen this tactic succeed on a personal level. We want our students to do as much thinking as possible, and that's why the world's greatest teachers actively avoid teaching. No wonder! Flipping the classroom shifts the metacognitive balance toward the students. His peer instruction approach has since grown into the flipped classroom movement, and research shows that it consistently produces better results than traditional lecture-based classrooms. Mazur decided he needed to force his students to think more, so he made them teach each other. As a professor of physics at Harvard, Mazur was working with some of the most educated undergraduates in the world and yet, as he discovered, their lack of understanding was truly shocking. That's exactly what Eric Mazur decided to do. So share the wealth! If you really want your students to be better learners, then let them walk a mile in your shoes. That's exactly what makes an expert learner. Now sit back and watch me lift all the weight." Teaching is hard work - you have to be constantly engaged and aware of your process and how to improve it. You're like a personal trainer who says, "I'm going to help you meet all your fitness goals. However, it's far too easy for your students to kick back, disengage, and wait for you to simplify the material for them. To succeed, you need to think about your own thinking (How did I learn this? How have I taught this before? What worked and didn't work?) as well as your students' thinking (What do they know? What will keep them engaged?). The only problem is that most classrooms are set up to promote metacognition in the teachers, not the students. If you want your students to learn as much as possible, then you want to maximize the amount of metacognition they're doing. Metacognition (or thinking about thinking) is the secret to and driving force behind all effective learning. In this report, 600 pages of research culminate in a single word, which the NAS identifies as the key to effective learning: metacognition. In 2005, the National Academy of Sciences reviewed everything we know about learning in a paper called How Students Learn.
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