If a lecture is about you and your PowerPoint slides, you control the scene. We are often tempted to treat the structure of the class as a drama: we lead the student audience along with us in a kind of treasure hunt, keeping the prize to ourselves until the end. It lends suspense and builds up tension, involving the students in a guessing game, playing them along. My sense is that often this style is unconscious rather than on purpose. For example, I have observed case classes where the professors’ questions lead through their logic. The questions
are designed to elicit certain answers to lead toward the professor’s big surprise at the end, often a kind of ‘gotcha’, designed to show the professor’s superior knowledge. The students are at best involved in a question and answer format and, at worst, involved in guessing what is in the professor’s mind. The result of that experience is that the students are getting a fill in- the-blanks lecture. It tests their preparation and offers a type of modeling of thinking and a rehearsal of material. But is it an effective method to develop students’ critical thinking? Retaining control of pacing and logic privileges the professor’s thinking rather than the students’ thinking. We reinforce the passive role of student. Not only is the whole constrained by their ability to guess answers, the student who is not inclined to think like the professor is often frustrated.
On this end of the spectrum, the professor controls the material and invites the student to follow along with them as they present material in a lecture. We know that there are advantages to lecturing: basically, the lecture format is most useful to the student when the professor can link disparate source material and/or present material that is new, too new to be readily available in their readings. The skillful lecturer creates the allusion that you are thinking along with them—and learning how to think like the expert is one of the major lessons. The locus of learning is on the ‘stage’ controlled by the professor.
Somewhere in the middle spectrum is a case presentation. At the other end of the spectrum, the student controls the material. In the facilitated class, the action moves out into the classroom with students. For example, in one kind of active learning, the student solves the problem either alone or in a group and teaches it to others. Here learning occurs in the control of the students.
Ideally, the more neurons fi re within the students’ heads and within connection with the professor where there is a mutual creation of energy, a mutual exchange, the deeper and richer the possibilities. In the media lab at MIT, the researchers hook up electrodes to the heads of audience members to test the ‘credibility of the speaker’. They find that when the speaker is more credible is when the whole parts of the audience’s brains are firing. Literally, we talk about connection and how that is discharged by our ability to provoke sparks in
the audience. By making the students a part of the field of energy, as it were, through eye contact and the physical focus caused by your stance and relationship to the students, you will change the locus of learning from you to the students. Move the locus of learning into the ‘audience’.
‘Following the lead of the learner’ is a phrase created by faculty attending an international business school seminar on teaching. While observing other professors teach in the ITP—they themselves having returned to the classroom as ‘students’ for this seminar—and from talking about and researching teaching, these business faculty came to the conclusion that enabling learning requires following the learner—in other words, knowing what the learner needs to learn. To be at the head of that class, we are more than the presenters of content, we are the keepers of the process that follows the lead of the learners as well. To touch that edge means
reaching out to the learner.
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