Why I'm doing very little frontal teaching?

In short: today's learners often prefer to explore learning material at their own pace at home and use the class time to do stuff together. It's the education version of "this could have been an email".

Lectures in class feel like moments when we could say: this could have been an email.

At work we often end a meeting grumpy looking at each other saying: "this could have been an email". I feel the same happens in education, where today's learners say or think : I could have read that at home.

I'm someone who loves frontal teaching. I like preparing talks for conferences and events. I love preparing with care the rhythm and delivery of my jokes and metaphors with slides. Yet I do only very little of that type of teaching. Because in my conversations with learners they often say they prefer the "together "or class time to be more about doing, exploring together than listening to a dude with slowly more and more gray hair.

The advantage of letting people explore the material at home is also that they can explore it at their own speed. It as a learner I have already explored this topic in previous studies I might go fast through it. But as a learner who is totally fresh to the material I might take a bit more time and maybe even read the translated stuff in my pretered language.

written and sketched by hand

This article was written and illustrated by hand on a refurbished Remarkable II tablet. The handwritten text was converted to typed text with the Connect Service by Remarkable. If you are curious you can download the original note below.

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