Things I learned from teaching

A few things:

- Professors, even best in the field, may disagree. In the first lecture for my AI course I talk about how cognitive scientists still can't agree on a definition for what intelligence IS. Extend that to other domains and I'm willing to bet there'd be similar opinions in deciding "best"

- Not every domain can be distilled into a lecture. While I can (and have) recorded videos for martial art techniques, they still need to attend class to drill technique.

- This builds on the above point, but 'time on task' is still one of our most identifying features for determining student mastery. This doesn't mean we should revert to drilling endless worksheets, but rather 'learning' takes time to occur and can't be achieved via watching videos

- Building on the prior point, Mickie Chi's ICAP framework labels "watching lectures" as a passive activity. While learning can happen, more learning gains can be made with more engaging activities (drilling [active], self-explanation [constructive], and revising drafts [interactive]).

- I don't mean for this point to make me sound like a miser, but the majority of students just won't read or watch the material. Again, not an attack on 'the youths', none of us read TOS and user agreements. Even in flipped classrooms, if not well designed then you'll have students that need to review the material and miss out of the in-class discussion.

- "I believe each university should hire a powerpoint / slideshow person who can translate professors material into modern format to avoid repeating of work". That's sort of what some professors do with textbooks

I do agree that once you establish a student's foundational knowledge, then you can "play" (as I've described it). The issue is that establishing that foundation is hard and how do you do it in less motivated students? One option is to say they need more self-regulated learning, but how do you build THAT up?

However, here's a few things I'd be trying:

1) Stories. One of the best uni professors I had was always breaking up his lessons with Stories. The time some people exploded a whale with dynamite, the Lawnchair Larry flight, the time he was held at knife Point while travelling. It just made the lectures more fun and made you feel good for having showed up.

2) Inspiring examples. I'd be inclined to work to find people who had been in their situation and gotten out. Bring them to class, get them to tell their stories.

3) Relevance. Making teaching examples that are edgy and somewhat relevant to their interests. If you're teaching English, use street slang in your examples. If you're teaching math, make examples about making money etc, getting creative and meeting your world with theirs.

I'm not sure what examples you're looking for or would find convincing. I can speak about my own experiences of learning new things, where the speed of what I learned were always proportional the how interesting and accessible the material was made to be. In the cases where it was made enjoyable, I usually had more than enough motivation and curiosity to dig deeper using new materials that were less fun to learn (but could have been made fun too).

I can also speak of my experiences teaching young people with no knowledge about programming who had preconceptions about how boring and difficult it is, which illustrated the degree of how you teach something has an effect on the perception of struggling.

I assume you have your own examples as well, but if you can offer a counterexample I'll reconsider my opinion :)

There is another important thing I'd like to point out though. What makes something fun or accessible for one person is not always what will do it for another. Having to teach groups, and especially large groups of people will make it very challenging if not impossible to be the ideal teacher. I'm not judging anyone for not being to be an ideal teacher under these constraints. Just pointing out that this should be the objective - not saying it is always possible.

Another trick that worked for me: If there are high-quality lecture notes, download a note, set a timer for the length of the lecture, and aim to read through the entire note within the time period that it took to deliver the lecture. Being on the clock creates a little pressure that helps me focus. It's OK if I don't achieve 100% comprehension; I basically never achieve 100% comprehension during a live lecture anyways.

The only problem with these techniques is that it's easy to fall way behind if you don't discipline yourself to consume lectures at about the same rate they're being delivered. Cal Newport's book How to Become a Straight-A Student has good tips like blocking out chunks of time during your week in advance to do study specific topics or do specific assignments.