Ways of seeing teaching.
Prof John Biggs describes three levels of teaching approach:
Level 1. Focus: What the student is
Teachers at Level 1 are struck by student differences, as most beginning teachers usually are. They focus on the fact that there are the good students, and the poor students. Their own responsibility as teachers is to know the content well, and to expound it clearly. Thereafter, it’s up to the student to attend lectures, to listen carefully, to take notes, to read the recommended readings, and to make sure it’s taken on board and unloaded on cue.
At Level 1, the purpose of teaching is to transmit information, usually by lecturing. The view of university teaching as transmitting information is so widely accepted that delivery and assessment systems the world over are based on it.
With teaching held constant, as it were, the variability in student learning is accounted for by individual differences between students, which makes this a blame-the-student theory of teaching. When students don’t learn (that is, when teaching breaks down), it is due to a deficit: ability, attitude, study skills, motivation, you name it. When teaching across cultures, ethnicity may be seen as the reason for a deficit.
Level 2. Focus: What the teacher does
The view of teaching at the next level is still based on transmission, but of concepts and understandings not just of information. The material to be "got across" includes complex understandings, which requires much more than chalk-and-talk, so the responsibility now rests to a significant extent on what the teacher does. The teacher who operates at Level 2 works at obtaining an armoury of teaching skills. Traditional approaches to staff development often worked on what the teacher does, as do "how to" courses and books that provide prescriptive advice on getting it across more effectively:
- establish clear procedural rules at the outset, such as signals for silence
- ensure clarity: project the voice, clear visual aids
- eye-contact students while talking
- don’t interrupt a large lecture with handouts: chaos is likely
This may be useful advice, but it is concerned with management , not with facilitating learning. Good management is important, but as a means of producing good learning, not as an end in itself.
Level 2 is also a deficit model, the "blame" this time on the teacher. It also carries strong quantitative overtones. It is a view of teaching often held by administrators, because it provides a convenient rationale for making personnel decisions. Teaching is seen as a bag of competencies; the more competencies you have, the better a teacher you are.
Level 3. Focus: What the student does
Level 3 sees teaching as supporting learning. No longer is it possible to say: "I taught them, but they didn’t learn." Expert teaching certainly includes mastery of a variety of teaching techniques, but unless learning takes place, they are not much use. The Level 3 teacher focuses on what the student does, on what learning is or is not going on. Level 3 teaching is systemic; it tries to orchestrate all components.
This implies a view of teaching that is not just about facts, concepts and principles to be covered and understood, but about:
- what it means to understand those concepts and principles in the way we want them to be understood.
- what kind of teaching/learning activities are required to reach those kinds of understandings.
It’s not what we do, it’s what students do that is the important thing.
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