New Teaching Strategy – How effective?

The form of collaborative learning that I have described in my previous post was triggered by the need of the students. In the theoretical courses, like MIS, using too much of the traditional teaching style would make the students less comfortable due to boredom. My students are mainly PM students, working in the morning, and taking care of a family. They arrive often to my evening classes very tired, which makes engaging them in the Teaching process essential. The described method, for which I’m still trying to find a nice name, transform the students’ role from passive to active, he gets fully involved in researching the topic and need to understand it really well to be ready for the class presentation. I encourage the students to follow my style in enhancing the lesson by relevant videos and exercises. I also invite the students to challenge my style by taking this as opportunity to try all the ideas that they must have crossed their mind as they are attending my classes. I tell them that you must though some/many times that my teacher should have done this or that to make the lesson more interesting or understandable. They usually feel motivated by the appreciation of their point of views while giving them a chance to demonstrate them, and very often they start feeling the constraints that their teachers are dealing with on daily basis and as a result give the overall class environment a much deeper dimension.

The use of this strategy in technical courses, like web development, helps in cases where some details are favorable to be explored by the students directly to simulate similar requirements at the future workplace. Spoon-feeding every topic is misleading students in this case and not preparing them for the reality of their future, where technology refreshes constantly and it’ll be very different the moment they leave us with their degree. They need to learn how to build on the fundamentals achieved in the class and complement it by using their own research to update themselves on whatever they’re expected to know. This is always the case in IT and no one can teach anyone everything, IT professionals need to always know how to find the information they need on the fly. Again the students learn the topics allocated to them much deeper to be able to explain it to the class. In technical courses they are required to develop demos to show the rest of the class how the technology works. They also prepare exercises for their classmates and support them with troubleshooting as they are practicing the assigned exercise. All this give a very rich learning opportunity to those students, in addition to the other motivational benefits mentioned above.