What makes an instructor or class excellent?

[boulderjohn]

Research has clearly shown that the worst way to communicate critical information to students is through a lecture. It is inefficient, taking loads of time, there is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding, and students forget a lot of it.

When I was one of the editors of a technology in education journal, someone posted an article about the benefit of getting videos of lectures delivered by professors at major colleges. The writer raved about getting the lectures of the best teachers in America. I responded that was like raving about the corndogs made by the best chefs in America. The best chefs in America aren't making corndogs, and the best teachers in America aren't making lectures.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

One of the problems with teaching instructors to use good instructional skills is that a lot of people don't agree with what are the best instructional skills. Here are two examples.

1. When I was a young English teacher, I transferred to a new high school in our district, and as usually happens, I was assigned some classes that the veterans did not want to teach--two sections of a 10th grade writing class for students who hd previously failed it. With the first assignment, I saw that nearly no one in the class could write in complete, understandable sentences. So I pretested them on sentence structure, taught formal grammar sentence structure for two weeks, and post tested. No difference. They still couldn't write in complete sentences. I concluded the obvious--they were incapable of learning that.​

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Years later I was a department chair and a different teacher. I created a new program to do essentially the same thing--intervene with 10th graders with writing problems. I sat down to work with a student and saw a mess of fragments and run-ons. I looked at him and realized he was on the verge of dropping out of school, and he was not going to get a thing out of introductory adverbial clause punctuation exercises. Instead, I simply read aloud what he had written exactly as he had written it. He protested that I wasn't reading it right, and I explained that I was reading according to his punctuation. He left and came back with the same piece of writing, with no sentence structure errors. Within two weeks, no student in the class had a sentence structure problem.​

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2. One day at the end of a class period, a colleague came into the office and flopped into her chair with a look of wonder on her face. She announced that in one day she had successfully taught a skill that had always taken her two weeks to teach before, and her present students were better after that first day than her students in the past. She had used a radically different approach, and it had worked wonders.​

Both stories illustrate examples of teachers using standard instructional practices and failing, and then succeeding with different approaches. It is not that those different approaches are not known--it's just that they are not the ones typically taught to teachers.

I don't know about others, but I feel this is one of your best comments on ScubaBoard. It really drives the point home. To me at least.

We can talk about adapting to the student, but that takes time and/or ingenuity, and sometimes a bit of luck. My attitude has always been if the student doesn't quit, I don't quit. However, if the student isn't getting it, that's on me (with the exception of people who are completely uncoachable - I've had the misfortune of only one student like that).

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

Research has clearly shown that the worst way to communicate critical information to students is through a lecture. It is inefficient, taking loads of time, there is a lot of miscommunication and misunderstanding, and students forget a lot of it.

When I was one of the editors of a technology in education journal, someone posted an article about the benefit of getting videos of lectures delivered by professors at major colleges. The writer raved about getting the lectures of the best teachers in America. I responded that was like raving about the corndogs made by the best chefs in America. The best chefs in America aren't making corndogs, and the best teachers in America aren't making lectures.

I think it depends on the one giving the lecture.
Some people are excellent communicators who are very interesting. They have a skill to keep people engaged and fascinated by what they are conveying. Some of them are great story tellers that can illustrate a point and this forms a mental image and sparks imagination in the students mind that they can grasp and hold onto. I noticed you tell a lot of stories to illustrate points John, so I may not be too far off.
I had a few teachers in high school that had a lifelong impact on my life. I still think about how good they were and how they helped shape me.
My OW instructor was pretty great too. He was a Navy diver and I loved the stories.
I'm so glad there was no elearning then.

 

[The Chairman]

if the student doesn't quit, I don't quit.

Good on you. I've heard too many instructors babble on about their "loser" students. Their instructor is the problem. I've heard too many instructors go on and on about them rescuing their students. A veritable bitch-fest about unsafe students. Their instructor is the problem. I've rescued a number of divers and a few students. None of them were mine. I'm proud of that. Good instructors produce good divers who are in no need to be saved.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

"loser" students.

No such thing

 

[NothingClever]

I nominate @Rilelen for President of ScubaBoard.

 

[sinidive]

One thing that could be better is that there is that there is very little (public) information on the teaching style of various instructors/centers. Of course there are rumors and certain agencies tend to have more standardized approaches.

So lets say half the students want an "easy" course, and half the students want to have a "demanding" course.

Some instructors want to teach extra stuff inside the time frame, and some just want to give easy certifications with minimum fuss...

So matching expectations and students to teachers tends to be suboptimal.

Of course this is less of a problem if one has a wide circle of friends who know lots of instructors.

 

[boulderjohn]

My attitude has always been if the student doesn't quit, I don't quit. However, if the student isn't getting it, that's on me (with the exception of people who are completely uncoachable - I've had the misfortune of only one student like that).

In my training for becoming an instructor, I had to read a number of historical documents related to the development of instructional technique. One of them showed that a major impetus was the realization that a large percentage of instructors were bragging about their really high percentage of failing students. "I must be a great instructor--look at how many students fail my courses!"

As a classroom teacher and administrator, I always compared that to a plumber bragging about the high percentage of joints he or she worked on that still leaked.

What many people fail to understand is that a good teacher creates a high success rate by skillfully intervening in the learning process so that the student rises to meet high standards rather than by lowering the standards to meet poor performance.

 

[boulderjohn]

There were some posts on ScubaBoard about a decade ago about a certain scuba instructor, considered a star in his agency. In the thread, it was said it was because he was so demanding. The common saying was that "[Instructor name] teaches a [course name] that [instructor name] cannot pass."

As the former Executive Director of curriculum for a curriculum development company, I do not see that as any sort of ideal. In a well designed course, a student with the proper prerequisite skills who applies himself or herself should pass the class in the time allotted for instruction. A high failure rate with motivated students is a sign of a serious problem. It could be the students lack the necessary prerequisite skills, the course demands too much for the allotted time, the course is poorly designed, or the instructor is not doing a good job. It is definitely not something to brag about.

 

[The Chairman]

No such thing

Agreed. There are some loser instructors, though.