Total freedom but still going somewhere

When I started my job as a university teacher, my opinion was that student learning was fully dependent on the activities of the teacher. As a result, during my classes I was in charge, and students only have to listen and answer my questions when needed. But a couple of years ago, I totally changed my mind. The starting point of this transformation was a very special experience…..

I once met a teacher with an American teaching background. She invited me to join her Masterclass on Monday morning. She used an activity in her MA lectures (3 hours!) of which I was initially very skeptical. The group was large (too large) and consisted of 60-70 students. The entire first hour was filled in by about 9 students who were given complete freedom to devise learning activities that allowed all students to process the curriculum for that week.

The result was a large variety of activities, not always a substantial depth of content, a lot of laughter and sometimes substantive intervention was necessary.

It was very interesting what it did with the attitude of the students: the organizers of the week put a lot of time and thought into it, the other students were well prepared, almost everyone was very active and involved during the lesson.

Although the information density was not great, my view of the importance of autonomy in these learning processes did change. In particular, total freedom, instead of partial freedom, had an interesting effect on the group.

After this experience, my vision on teaching in higher education focusses nowadays on learning instead of attending, and on understanding and using instead of reproduction. It’s success has been proven by the highest NSE scores and the recent successful accreditation of our education program.