As some people may have noticed there was briefly a bloggish thread about US high schools recently, which included the line "Less homework/busy work, and more lecture." This got me thinking, how should we actually approach the question of teaching pupils and, to an extent, students (they're not actually the same thing).
To my mind, lectures (in the sense of teachers or lecturers talking at people are not particularly useful). Universities will tell you that it's all about high-speed processing to pick up what's actually worth copying down. I find that this generally means that no-one has time to actually think about what is going until later. This is particularly noticeable for disciplines like history which can often be quite densely packed with information to support the primary concepts or themes that are the real meat of what is happening. This lecture-model, to my mind, can be improved by taking some elements of the flipped classroom approach whereby the learner first encounters the material and then turns up to the class. Naturally this allows the learner to actually process the information. Even so, I don't think that this is a particularly good approach.
I think that the best way of going about teaching (in terms of actual learning rather than getting through a lot of material in a short time frame) is to move through information reasonably quickly but with time to reflect on this (even if this manifests itself as off-topic discussion). In subjects like maths this typically means you go through the concept and then work through an example and then try it out for a few times. For things like history or classics this typically involves writing down quite a lot from slides and then having an irrelevant conversation (well, it worked for me). If you can find room for some sort of discussion that extends on the material that's great too.
Naturally, we can't divorce this too much from assessment. I don't think pupils learn much at all when everything is geared specifically at some sort of assessment process. The impression that I got from things like English is that people would come up with often very detailed plans or essays and then try to regurgitate them in the exams. Additionally, it felt like mindlessly repeating whatever was discussed in the classroom. I feel that assessment should be part of the learning process and reinforce what has been taught by putting the pupil or the student in a position to engage independently with what they've been doing.
So, what say ye NSG? Should we make better use of things I haven't really mentioned here like technology, flipped classrooms, tactile learning, streaming and a whole host of other things? Am I right in thinking that a talk at the learners approach isn't so useful?
