by driftword

So what is the big deal about semester conversion anyway? Semesters, quarters, year-long programs…these are all just artifacts with no real inherent meaning at all. Isn’t it just another convenience? A pre-packaged collectable, consumable, ready-for-our-cost-consciousness consumption? What is this education system all about, really? And what are we asking our students to get from their educational experiences?

by Ruth Benander, PhD and Ruth Kletzander, PhD

We often hear complaints from colleagues that students want to be “spoon fed;”  clearly, we reason, if students would only carefully read the assignment, they would know what to do without our having to spoon feed them! However, what may be clear as day to us may be clear as mud to our students. To understand this, we may need a little refresher regarding compassion.  One way to refresh our compassion is to become a student again.  This cold-water bath of experiencing what it’s like to learn something new can be quite powerful.  When we professors, accustomed to the power and expertise of our position, re-experience the student condition of powerlessness and novice incompetence and ignorance, it forces us to a fresh perspective on the student experience. This experiment can help us think more creatively about how we can support our students’ learning. What professors might consider “spoon feeding,” students may actually perceive as helping them achieve what we’ve asked of them.

 We do not suggest, Gentle Reader, that you go out and enroll in one of your colleague’s classes. We are suggesting that you spend some time outside the box of your expertise.  What about signing up for that juggling class offered by the Communiversity?  By spending just three hours learning to juggle, you will experience a crash course in how novices feel when presented with an apparently impossible task that the instructor insists is easy. “Just watch me do it….” he says, effortlessly sending three balls into the air while you mutter under your breath to yourself, “Yeah, right,” and your juggling balls fly away in three directions across the room, pointedly not in the air, but inextricably earthbound.  This is an important wake-up call: Your students are trying to metaphorically juggle your discipline, your syllabus, and your expectations.  It is oddly refreshing to revisit learning from the learner’s point of view.