Teaching Kids to Walk and Talk 37
4; Clear goals and intellectual challenge 5: Independence, control, and active engagement 6: Learning from students
The second is from a Michigan State website and was taken from a book by Arthur W. Chickering and Zelda F. Gamson entitled Seven Principles for Good Practice in Undergraduate Education.’
Principle 1: Good practice encourages student-faculty contact
Principle 2: Good practice encourages cooperation among students
Principle 3: Good practice encourages active learning
Principle 4: Good practice gives prompt feedback
Principle 5: Good practice emphasizes time on task
Principle 6: Good practice communicates high expectations
Principle 7: Good practice respects diverse talents and ways of learning?
Whenever I see phrases like diverse talents or ways of learning or ac- tive learning or active engagement | am very distrustful of the advice being offered. Active learning should mean learning by doing, but it never does because learning by doing is very difficult to implement in the university context (which is where this advice comes from). It is easier to do it in Ist grade, but after a while the class has to sit still and listen and that is not active learning no matter what the teaching guides say. Different learning styles is usually a way of saying, “some people are dumber than others,” which no one wants to say. What bothers me most about these kinds of lists is that they avoid saying what really needs to be said. It is nearly impossible to measure your success as an effective teacher because the performance expectations of students are almost always about test scores and very rarely about actual production.
With this idea in mind, that effective teaching means helping stu- dents do what it is they wanted to do and not what it is that you want- ed them to do, I will list the suggestions I have been scattering about in this chapter. Bear in mind that this is not meant to be a complete list. I got this list the way you saw, by interpreting things written by students and former employees about their own experiences.
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