He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless.
But he who understands also loves, notices, sees. ... The more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love. ...
Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as the strawberries knows nothing about grapes.
I subscribe to a constructivist understanding of learning in which students are active agents in the development of their mental models of the world (Hartle, Baviskar, & Smith, 2012). My classroom is therefore designed to nurture students' practice of their knowledge so that it is integrated with their lived experience. My teaching goal is to move students from ignorant certainty through intelligent confusion to reflective judgement (Tolman & Kremling, 2017). The only way I know how to do this is to have students talk to each other, actively engage with what they are learning, and reflect on how what they are learning is enabling them to become the person they aspire to be.
I became a biochemist because it was the first discipline I encountered that truly captured my imagination. Although it is a challenging discipline to master, it is worth the effort to understand how molecules and reactions enable us to live, think, and feel. This is what I aspire to teach my students: that although learning requires effort, the rewards are worthwhile because it allows us to see the beauty in our world and thus inspire its stewardship.
Fostering Independent Learners
In mid-career, I transitioned from seeing myself solely as a biochemist to someone who is also engaged in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The content that interests me remains biochemistry, but my scholarly curiosity now includes understanding how to best develop independent learners. We have a wealth of evidence in the 21st century on how learning works (Ambrose et al., 2010). I use this evidence to develop teaching strategies that I implement to promote deep learning in students. This revolves primarily around producing courses in which students become engaged participants in their learning rather than passive bystanders. For many students, this comes as a shock when they enter my classroom the first time. I place them in teams, have them speak to each other, encourage them to respond to my ideas whether out of confusion or curiosity and have them apply their pre-class preparation to solve problems or design experiments to provide answers to our questions. I design my courses so that class time is used to practise applying what they are learning. This is made possible when I assign for homework the rote learning in textbooks that can be accomplished by students before class. I use this instructional approach to circumvent the typical student learning cycle of memorizing and then immediately forgetting what they have memorized. By holding students accountable for their pre-class preparation through an assignment or reading quiz, my intent is that the active integration of students’ pre-existing knowledge with what they are learning in my course will produce deeper learning that sticks.
Creating Supportive Learning Environments
Students need nurturing to integrate their learning with their pre-existing understanding of how the universe works. This requires a supportive learning environment when my teaching reveals misconceptions in their worldview necessitating a reconstruction of their mental models. This is difficult for some students. However, I do not teach simply so that students may tick off a course requirement of their degree or professional program. I teach so that students have a richer, more nuanced understanding of how their world works. My objective as an educator is to nurture students that are ready to be enriched and open students who do not yet realize the possibilities for growth that occur when they become critically and actively self-reflective. My establishment of learning communities at the beginning of the term and starting each class by responding to student questions creates a learning environment that supports students’ active reconstruction of their knowledge structure.
Activating Active Learning
I attempt to achieve these educational goals in my courses by using various active learning strategies in my classroom and encouraging students to consider their reasons for learning and how they learn (Haave, 2016). Active learning engages students in the course material such that they have to actively process what they are learning rather than passively record or read it. Over the past few years, I have incorporated versions of team-based learning in my classes that encourage students to come to class prepared to discuss and apply the material in the reading assigned for a particular set of classes. For many students re-learning how to read for learning, rather than pleasure is difficult, but with practice and my guidance in the form of topic outlines and reading guides, many students achieve a level of learning independence they were not aware was possible for themselves.
Another teaching and learning strategy I use is a learning philosophy assignment in which I ask students to explain what, why, and how they are learning and to link this to their life goals (Haave, Keus, & Simpson, 2018). This is a two-stage assignment in which students provide me with a first draft at midterm, which I return after their midterm exam; I then ask them to provide evidence for why they think the way they are learning is successful. Strong learners have this well figured out using their own active reading and engaged study strategies. But I also ask students to explain how what they are learning is going to help them achieve their educational goals. This question helps students to link how what they are learning might be developing the skills they will need for whatever awaits them after graduation. These questions help less successful students to critically evaluate how and why they learn, which has been shown to improve learning outcomes. What I impress upon students with this assignment is that the most important skill to be learned at university is how to learn for themselves and become independent learners. Some students accustomed to being a passive bystander in their own learning can find this a frustrating experience writing on my student ratings of instructions (SRIs) that I didn’t teach them – they had to learn it for themselves (Brookfield, 2015; Weimer, 2013). But that is the point of my teaching – my ultimate goal as an instructor is to produce independent learners (Grow, 1991). Many students realize the transformative value of my instructional strategies and objectives. For example, one student wrote on their SRI for one of my courses that “At the beginning of the course I hated it, I was upset and off-put by the way it was being taught and I felt like I wasn't learning anything. As it progressed, I pushed myself and was able to apply myself better. I ultimately found everything I learned stick better, I wish I could do all course [sic] like this [...] I was able to teach my fellow teammates and also was able to converse during class discussions more freely. It started off very rough but by the end I loved the class.”
I have intentionally transitioned from my attempts in the 1990s and 2000s to become the best possible lecturer to instead in the 2010s developing into an instructor who creates educational environments in which students develop into independent learners. In addition to knowledge, my students develop some idea of who and what they want to be and thus know what sort of learning experiences they need to become the kind of person they want to be. Now when I go to class, instead of thinking about what I will lecture on, I try to consider what my students will experience in my class and how that will promote their intellectual development.
That may seem like a stretch for someone who teaches cell biology and biochemistry. Traditionally, my role as an undergraduate educator was to convey to students the foundations of these disciplines. That is still part of my role as my students’ teacher, but in addition, I now understand that these disciplinary foundations, concepts and content are a vehicle that facilitates my students’ intellectual development. It is through the challenge of learning biochemistry and molecular cell biology that students understand what is truly required to master a subject, rather than simply be able to perform well (i.e. regurgitate) on an exam. Rather than learning in order to show how intelligent one is, my goal is to instead inculcate in my students an understanding that what they are learning is developing in themselves the skills they need to become who they want to be when they graduate (Haave, 2014). This involves arguing collegially in a learning team, taking the solitary time to master the language of cells and biochemistry in order to investigate how this enables life, being able to apply knowledge to solve new rather than familiar problems, and a deep consideration of how students’ new-found understanding integrates with their prior understanding to produce a coherent view of how their world works.
Of course, these goals can also be attained within the other academic disciplines. But it is my passion for both biochemistry and the scholarship of teaching and learning that engages students to exert the necessary effort to master rather than simply perform. My hope is that this will enable them to see the beauty in our world and thus love it and care for it and each other.
References cited
Ambrose, S. A., Bridges, M. W., DiPietro, M., Lovett, M. C., Norman, M. K., & Mayer, R. E. (2010). How learning works: Seven research-based principles for smart teaching (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Brookfield, S. D. (2015). Understanding students’ resistance to learning. In The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom (3rd ed., pp. 213–225). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brand.
Grow, G. O. (1991). Teaching learners to be self-directed. Adult Education Quarterly, 41(3), 125–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/0001848191041003001
Haave, N. (2014). Developing students’ learning philosophies. The Teaching Professor, 28(4), 1,4. Retrieved from http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-and-learning/developing-students-learning-philosophies/
Haave, N. C. (2016). Practical tuning - achievable harmony. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 9, iii–x. https://doi.org/10.22329/celt.v9i0.4663
Haave, N. C., Keus, K., & Simpson, T. (2018). A learning philosophy assignment positively impacts student learning outcomes. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 11, 42–64. https://doi.org/10.22329/celt.v11i0.4969
Hartle, R. T., Baviskar, S., & Smith, R. (2012). A field guide to constructivism in the college science classroom: Four essential criteria and a guide to their usage. Bioscene: Journal of College Biology Teaching, 38(2), 31–34. Retrieved from http://www.acube.org/files/7513/6692/2474/Bioscene_December_2012_FINAL.pdf.
Tolman, A. O., & Kremling, J. (Eds.). (2017). Why students resist learning: A practical model for understanding and helping students. Sterling,VA: Stylus Publishing, LLC.
Weimer, M. (2013). Responding to resistance. In Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed., pp. 199–217). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.