The more you’re taught, the less you know | Stephen Baldridge | TEDxACU

it was the summer of 2008 when I learned to teach I guess that's what I thought I was learning I was a PhD student in Dallas and before you I mean how they teach you to teach as they pair you with a mentor tenured master teacher faculty member before they turn you loose in the classroom so I I got paired with a master tenured faculty member to teach this class and it was a summer class and so it was from 1:00 to 4:00 every afternoon in July and it was a room about oh I don't know 1000 degrees and so we would lecture and lecture and finally after like two or three days of lecturing I pulled my professor aside and as respectfully as I could have said so dr. so-and-so I said we've been doing a lot of lecturing do we ever do any like active learning activities that I have heard about and he said Steven my rule about teaching is I've never done an active learning activity that's not really bleeping impressive and he said he puts his hand on my shoulder he says and there's no activity that's bleeping impressive and so we lectured for four hours a day every day and that's how I learned to teach and I was very proud of that so for the first few classes that I taught I would lecture and I perfected my lecture and I got really good at it and really good powerpoints until we ended up with something that looks a lot like this which you've probably seen before the authors of the great book presentations in affectionately refer to this is death by bullet point and so I would kill my students with bullet point because there's so much content that we have to have up on the screen and we just read this and I was what I considered a really good lecturer and so I didn't started wondering as I'm trying to keep my students awake is is this the best way to do things why are we lecturing why is this the gold standard of Education and so if you will let's take a quick journey through the evolution of the lecture let's rewind the clock to the 15th century this is the 15th century classroom this may or may not look familiar to you if you just want to kind of make some casual observations about what's going on in this painting you can see the guy up in the top corners talking to his friend next to him the guy down below is kind of creeping on the cute girl next to him the guy at the bottom of the screen has probably had a late night he's catching a nap and then in the front of the classroom is the professor the bearded I know it all purveyor of knowledge professor and he's standing there and he has this book and the book is the birthplace of lecture because that's why we lecture because back in the fifteenth century there was one book and the professor had the book meaning he had the power and he had the knowledge and the way that he would teach you is he would read to you from his book and you as the student would open your blank book and you would write down every word he would say and you would create your own book and so after you have created a somewhat accurate version of his book you would have your book and now you had some knowledge and you had some power and you could go out and you could be mobile and take this knowledge everywhere and that's why we lectured I mean if you look at the very definition of the word lecture it means to read I am going to read and you are going to listen or recreate what I am saying and so that's what we've done and that's why we lecture but then something really scary for us fickle group of educators came along something known as the printing press and so we no longer had one book no we had hundreds of books we have thousands of books we had millions of books we have so many books that we had to start building these things we called libraries to hold all of these books that we have created but educators we love tradition and we love doing things the way that we have always done them so we lectured and we lectured and we lectured in the 1600s we lectured in the 1700s fast forward and we are lecturing today just like I am lecturing to you and so we lectured and we have this love of lecture and that has led us to the modern classroom so the modern classroom you know looks a lot like the classroom used to look like but then in the 90s something really exciting came along we had the internet and everybody had these computers and so educators begin to think what can we do with this Internet we can educate the masses there's no longer a need to be in physical proximity with one another to learn we can take learning and educate everyone but what what did us educators who love tradition what did we do we recreated the modern classroom on online learning I'm going to record my lecture over a PowerPoint I've done this and so you can listen to it and then you can react to it you can read my lecture and then react to it and so this is online education and so we're left with this no matter what kind of advances we have in medicine no matter what kind of advances we have in technology in transportation we do not have that many advances in education we teach today like we have taught 100 years ago 200 years ago and before that but do we ever really stop and think why is this our signature pedagogy isn't that a fun word to say signature pedagogy just it's just exciting to hear if you're a student isn't it but why is this what we do well there is some literature that tells us about lecture one of one of the studies that I love to refer to is done by Cleveland State University and they said in a study of a lecture based course those who tab the course had no significant difference in knowledge than those who never took the course of all after three years and so now according to John Medina it becomes not an issue of feasibility and practicality it becomes an issue of ethics we're charging students thousands and thousands of dollars to take these courses that a lot of them my course is included in the catalog say lecture based and we're charging in thousands of dollars are they really learning what we hope that they learn why isn't the brain doing what US us professors and US educators hope that it's doing well John Medina one of the experts and how the brain works he's got some things to say about why maybe the brain is not translating this lecture based curriculum as much he says the brain science community has this thing called the evolutionary performance envelope and he said we know that the brain is hardwired to learn and survive an outdoor unstable per diet in environments in near constant motion I'll repeat the brain is hardwired to learn an unstable outdoor environments and near constant motion and dr. Medina continues so if you wanted to create something that is in direct opposition to how the brain is meant to learn you would create the modern classroom and so here we are and so I'm being a heretic I'm up here saying we're doing it wrong is there an answer well I think there might be an answer you all have it in your pocket ok some of you are on it right now not an iPhone not an Android but what this represents it represents mobility it represents community and it represents content just think of the communities that you're all in right now because of your availability to be connected with one another as learners as family members as friends as strangers around the world think of the connections that you've made look at the content that you have on your phone look at the content that you literally have at your fingertips right now within the next 30 seconds all of you could have access to millions of pages of books in every language ever written in any period of time all at the tip at the tip of your finger but let's look at maybe some more fun content what kind of content are we creating a community with one another let's just look at YouTube for instance since I have started talking about the phone 60 seconds ago 100 hours of YouTube content have been posted if you want to take a broader bird's-eye view of look at things in the last 60 days there has been more content posted to YouTube that all three major TV networks have posted combined in the last 60 years but let's look at pictures because we love to look at pictures on our phone all right for years the biggest collection of photos in human history has been the Library of Congress millions of photos it's hard to get your mind wrapped around that but let's just put it in perspective we love Instagram I mean I hash tagged this on Instagram yesterday we're posting pictures we're connecting with one another I am able to show people all over the world my worldview I'm able to see people's world view from here in this auditorium from this stage this red dot right now I'm able to see someone's point of view anywhere in the world I'm able to learn from them that's nothing in comparison to Flickr but we're ignoring the behemoths aren't we Facebook approximately right now 140 billion pictures are on Facebook right now in the next year it's estimated that 375 billion digital pictures will be taken across the world of those 375 billion pictures 70 billion 20% of them will end up on Facebook that makes Facebook ten thousand times bigger than the Library of Congress and that's content and that's scary for us educators because as educators I think how can i leverage this how can I use this to help my students learn the good news for us educators is we don't have to because students have been doing it for years what if I told you that there was a system based platform over social media online where students where people don't even have to meet each other can learn in community with one another overcoming problems in unstable environments that are unpredictable they've been doing it since 1999 well the Warcraft but maybe this picture is a little too intimidating maybe you should talk to my six in my 8 year old about how they like to learn with kids from all over the world that don't speak their language that they've never meet and will never meet but they're on this rewards-based system learning overcoming obstacles learning in a safe community with Minecraft and there are no professors on here students are doing this on their own that's terrifying so what does that do for me as a professor what does that do to the modern classroom it blows the four walls of the modern classroom away so what can we do with this thing what's so cool about this how can I access students well I teach social work and one of the things in social work that we love to talk about is social justice social justice the idea of equality of equity of doing away with the class isms of doing away with all of the isms of making sure society is just I'm supposed to teach my students about this look at me I am a white male in 2015 in the United States of America I am part of a group that is the most privileged group in human history I teach about 85% females 50% of which are females of color what do I know about social justice how can I in my right mind stand up there in lecture from a PowerPoint and tell these people social justice when they know ten times more than me what it's like to be a victim of injustice well that's what the power of the phone is that's what the power of mobility and community is as I can tell them you know more about these issues than I do why don't I challenge you to go out into the community to take pictures of your everyday life things that are unjust and then let's post them all together and let's talk about them maybe you end up with something that looks a lot like this it's dirt that does look like social injustice does it it's abilene one thing you might know about Abilene if you've ever been here is that we don't have a lot of sidewalks in Abilene that in and of itself is not a social injustice until you put this into context that this picture was taken by a student who has spent their life in a wheelchair that brings a whole lot of context to it something that I could never ever realize something that I couldn't lecture about but something that now that student has taught me and has taught other students about what it's like to live with regular social injustice or let's look at poverty for instance again never missed a meal in my life because of poverty I've never been poor so what do i how can I communicate to my students what it's like to be on food stamps how can I communicate what it's like to have to take public transportation oh but wait what's the modern classroom now how do you know what it's like to take public transportation let's go take public transportation let's sing students all around Abilene to every bus route that there is and then let's engage in a meaningful dialogue over group texts about what it's like to ride the bus and communicate with these people who have to do this and maybe take away some of the stigma of some of those scary poor people and realize that these are real people too when you just sit beside them on the bus and you can communicate about that or maybe we talk about an issue as volatile as gun control in Texas we talk about that you know for it against it why that's important well then that night I'm flipping through the channels and I see the movie Bowling for Columbine you like Bowling for Columbine you don't like Bowling for Columbine it is a thought-provoking polarizing movie but it's late at night I'm not in class so what do we do we utilize our mobility we utilize our community post a tweet hey I'm going to be watching this movie if anyone wants to join me for the next hour and a half let's have a live Twitter chat about this and engage in dialogue with one another about these important issues because that's what we're doing that's what we're doing with our students that's the importance of this we see real dialog from students students that are digital natives when we as educators can overcome our fear and go into the atmosphere and go into the realm that students have been communicating their whole life there's really nothing that we can't do and no way that we cannot access each other and the knowledge that all of us gain when we realize that maybe the professor doesn't know as much as we think that we do and we rely on the knowledge of the students is it scary yes it's terrifying for me but that's okay if you're scared you're in good company the teachers in 1703 were scared to students today cannot prepare bark to calculate their problems they depend on their slates which are much more expensive what will we do when their slate is dropped and breaks they will be unable to write but you know they overcame but a hundred years later another catastrophe and educational advances students depend on paper too much they do not know how to write on a slate without getting chalk dust all over themselves they cannot clean a slate properly what will they do when they run out of paper but they overcame a new set of problems students today depend on store-bought ink they do not even know how to make their own when they run out of ink they will be unable to write words or cypher until their next trip to the settlement this is a sad commentary on modern education but let's look at a quote that I didn't find on the Internet this is a quote that I really heard at a real conference these mobile devices are going to be the death of me in higher education how can we engage students if they are always looking down at their phone I have a shoebox that I require all phones to go in before class starts because yes we're scared we're scared of distraction but I'm going to challenge myself and my fellow educators that if a student is able to Facebook and text and tweet and Instagram during your class and still make an A maybe that says more about me as a teacher than it does about them as a student so here we are the 90s the 90s were on the right track education anywhere anytime but I don't think we're thinking far enough in advance I don't think we're thinking outside of the box or outside of the classroom enough I'm going to challenge us as educators to leverage the power that we have of mobility of community and of content and truly educate our students everywhere all the time thank

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 103,357

Rating: 4.7382684 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, United States, Education, Higher education, Learning, Technology

Id: CztomeFzNoQ

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Mon May 11 2015