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Bezig met laden... The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You about College Teaching (editie 2019)door David Gooblar (Auteur)
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A generation of research has provided a new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. David Gooblar offers scholars at all levels a practical guide to the state of the art in teaching and learning. His insights about active learning and the student-centered classroom will be valuable to instructors in any discipline, right away. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)378.1Social sciences Education Higher education Organization and management; curriculumsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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It would be great if this book helped in this regard, but signs of trouble surface: “There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn.” A revolution in learning? I just described this revolution: it’s a revolution wherein anti-intellectual, unfocused and undisciplined plagiarists and cheaters take over the classroom, preventing their studious peers from being able to learn as well. But, no, this scholar perceives this as a positive revolution, apparently a new “brain” has been invented… No, a new “understanding of how the brain works”… What brain science is he going to attempt? What does brain chemistry have to do with teaching, unless he is going to talk about attention-deficit? He is hoping that those who buy this book will be too distracted themselves to ponder about all this by actually reading this book: “But most academics have neither the time nor the resources to catch up to the latest research or train themselves to be excellent teachers.” Why would these lazy academics buy this book, and if the more studious teachers buy this book, why do they need to be lectured about the lazy ones that did not buy this book? Finally, the summary explains these new brain-discoveries: “From active-learning strategies to course design to getting students talking,” it “walks you through the fundamentals of the student-centered classroom, one in which the measure of success is not how well you lecture but how much students learn.” A translation is needed for those outside of academia: professors are ranked in America based on the grades they give their students. A professor who gives easy-A’s to nearly all of their students, receives positive reviews from the students in return; these reviews are used to promote these easy graders, while also helping to fire the honest teachers who give the F’s their students deserve. Focusing on “success” means giving students A’s, and in an environment where the revolution has been for industrial-sized cheating and plagiarism, this easy-grader has to ignore these problems even if their entire class never comes to class, and submits their tests via a representative test-taker. “Active-learning” means that as students are tossing books or gums at the instructor, the nimble instructor has to avoid these obstacles, and ideally should stop coming to class him or herself, to allow students to go play sports or engage in recreational sex, or anything else that avoid “learning”. How else can students be “learning” if the professor is not “lecturing”? Administrators keep this anti-intellectual system going because they make ten-fold the salary of an average instructor; so, obviously, the author of this book belongs to this class: “David Gooblar is Associate Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching at Temple University.” Academia covers all this anti-intellectualism and academic fraud because it controls the few surviving newspapers and magazines discussing academia without being necessarily run from inside one of these universities, such as the Chronicle of Higher Education, which has chosen Gooblar to be a representative for “pedagogy”.
While I wish I was wrong about Gooblar’s intentions, the interior confirms what the previous few dozen books I read on this subject have solidified; Gooblar instructs instructors to: “Let Students Own the Course” (give easy A’s and let them stand on their heads if they wish) and that “Assessment Isn’t Just Assessment” (don’t give the grade they deserve, but rather the A administrators require for you to keep your job) in the titles of his chapters. Amazingly the “Introduction” opens by making an incredibly sexist statement: “The most knowledgeable and prepared teacher in the world is a failure if her students don’t learn” (1). Gooblar assumes that the teacher facing this “tumultuous” introductory class full of students incapable of learning must be a woman; whereas male teachers are more likely to enter academia as “assistant professors”, a role that does have research components, and that tends to put these professors in front of a more interested in learning upper level undergraduate or graduate audiences. The writing style throughout is devoid of citations, scholarship, or big words, relying primarily on the innate wisdom Gooblar has apparently gathered from all of his administering (and away from the pesky business of teaching). Here is a random example of this style: “When we construct our syllabi, we devote a higher percentage of the final grade to assignments we think are more important or difficult” (45). Who is this “we”? What might make an assignment “difficult”? What proof does Gooblar have that all syllabi are heavy on “difficult” assignments? This is all pure fiction and nonsense. From the administrator’s perspective, it is all about “Salesmanship”, as the next section is called; it starts with the question: “Why should students take your course?” (46). The answer, an instructor is programmed to give is, “because it is required”… But who are these dim students that pay up to $60,000 per year and don’t know why they have signed up for a course? Asking teachers to sell their courses like a salesman sells watches at the side of the road helps to demean instructors in the students’ eyes, helping to spread the notion that cheating is fitting if academia is made up of salesman who are just after the money, rather than out to impart knowledge. Later in the book, Gooblar offers a standard “Peer Review Worksheet” questions (he must have borrowed from one of his instructors) on one page (94) and on the next he summarizes an anti-intellectual philosophy from Cunningham and Helms: “one goal of a university-level science course should be to disrupt students’ assumptions about scientific knowledge as straightforwardly discovered and verified” (95). Inserting Dadaist absurdity or destructionist-nonsense-philosophy into an introductory science course is the most violent and destructive anti-intellectual act I can imagine. Try to picture a chemistry class, where the instructor insists on giving the wrong directions for a chemistry experiment to prove that scientific facts cannot be verified: the students mix the wrong ingredients, which leads to a giant explosion that takes out the building… I can’t continue reading Gooblar’s book, as if he sets the rest of academia aflame, I might have to agree that it is indeed a “revolution” that I am fighting against.