Teaching for Today's Students

More Personal Teaching Methods

As we celebrate the New Year 2009, we can also look back on the first decade of the 21st century and see that some enlightened teachers are realizing that there's a better way to teach students in smaller classes and more personal attention from the professor assigned to the course rather than substitutes or graduate assistants.

The following quote was in Forbes magazine in January 2009:

"The great art of learning is to understand but little at a time." -- John Locke

Coincidentally, The New York Times on Tuesday, January 13, 2009, wrote the following under the headline:

"At M.I.T., Large Lectures Are Going the Way of the Blackboard"

"The physics department has replaced the traditional large introductory lecture with smaller classes that emphasize hands-on, interactive, collaborative learning. . . . with research showing
that most students learn fundamental concepts more successfully and are better able to apply them."

"In an article in the education journal Change last year, Dr. Carl Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at the University of British Columbia, noted that the human brain can hold a maximum of about seven different items in its short-term working memory and can process no more than about four ideas at once. . . .we should not be surprised that that students are able to take away only a small fraction of what is presented to them (in a typical hour-long science lecture).