Teach less Learn more

This is the latest ‘catch phrase’ that the Poly's Teaching and Learning Centre is using to advertise the ‘new’ approach to teaching. After going though their induction day for International Fellows, I felt rather confident, as what they consider as ‘new’ is very much the same way tutorials are run at the unimelb. In a nutshell, what TLC is advocating, is a move from an Oracle, know-it-all, type of a teacher, to a more human facilitator who is more concerned with students’ wellbeing ant not in love with the subject material.

Back in Melbourne my (very) low power, friendly, facilitating approach to teaching worked very well, so I decided to start of with it here as well, and adjust things as needed. So far there hasn't been much need for adjustments, and things are going rather well, but we’re about to start only 4th of 16 teaching weeks, so better leave evaluation for later.

The reason why I mentioned extra effort for appreciation of different style of teaching is two fold (not to just put it due to the socio-political circumstances). One, as evident by TLC’s new campaign for ‘less teaching...’, is that it seems that students are quite comfortable with teacher running though all the slides while most of them are engaged in their own world via their laptops.

And second, as I’ve heard a lot about before arriving here, the students are less mature then the ones I’ve got accustom to. The difference in age is small, but the one in their attitude towards the studies is rather significant. So for the example, an obstacle to efficient lessons is a laptop. As the School does not have a typical computer lab setting, the students are required to bring their laptops. By having their own laptops, there is no regulation on what kind of software can be installed. This means that lecture time is games, games, and more games for guys and as many Korean TV soaps for girls. And, of course everybody’s into on-line chat, chat, chat… (Helping a student last week to debug a Java program, I was laughing at the frequency of msn chat’s notification popping up in the system tray… easily 1 in 5 seconds.)

Ideally, I would get all my students to:
a) take more responsibility for their studies (unlike some lecturers, I'm not going to be giving them a call to a mobile to remind them about their exam the night before - an extreme and isolated example, I hope).
b) think for themselves, it seems that they are not used to questions such as 'what do you think' n 'why'...
c) actively participate by asking questions and commenting on each others answers.

Thanks to circumstances, it will be hard to achieve the above, as I’ll have to get them to realise it for themselves without (explictitly) telling it to them.

And by the way, a thing that I’ll have to get accustom to is being referred to as MrZoran/Sir/Teacher/Cher, as quite a number of students cannot seem to get over the power barrier and refer to me by the 1st name only, without any prefixes or titles.