When We’re Too Busy to Change Our Teaching
June 22, 2020
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Time constraints—that’s what faculty consistently report as the reason they don’t implement changes in their teaching. It’s the barrier identified by almost 67 percent of 3,000 geosciences faculty (Riihimaki & Viskupic, 2020) and what 8 percent of faculty in a collection of departments at a single institution reported (Shadle et. al, 2017). Both of these survey analyses contain references to studies reporting similar findings, and these consistently high percentages got me thinking about time pressures and instructional change.
Our fixation with “covering the material” fascinates me – as though there is a limited body of “material” that can be “covered”. In a world with rapidly expanding and easily accessed “material” (much of which is garbage) surely our time would be better spent training our students in learning how to access and evaluate the “material” rather than spoon-feeding the “material” to them?
Less content and more focus on developing thinking and evaluation skills.