5 We Have to Go Deeper
How to Facilitate Deep Learning
Read, Regurgitate, and Repeat, Right? NOPE! How to facilitate deep learning with help from UDL principles
by Joanna Hodge and Laura Gibson, Fleming College
You don’t need to wonder if that glazed look from some of your students in the middle of a lecture means that they are absorbing every single riveting word you utter. It doesn’t. And it can be pretty disheartening. After I experienced this I decided to try to figure out what was going wrong, and how I could improve retention and understanding of fundamental concepts.
Back in the early nineties, when I was at university, lectures were delivered to 300 students in a giant lecture theatre, with content on the blackboard or overhead projectors. There was no LMS, no Google, and no Internet for students. So I went to class, wrote notes, read the textbook and churned out the memorized information back to the examiners. Read, regurgitate, repeat. I was fortunate to have a good memory, so I passed, graduated, and then forgot most of what I had learnt. Fifteen years later after a career in industry, and some more time at university, I found myself at Fleming College, about to teach a course that I knew nothing about, and with no teaching background upon which to draw. Holy cow! What was I to do?
I turned to what I did know about teaching; the way I had been taught – chalk and talk. I rapidly discovered at exam time that it wasn’t working. Despite putting considerable effort into creating content and assessment, the students were not retaining the material, and at the end of the semester had a very poor grasp of fundamental concepts that were critical to advancement in their chosen careers. I needed a new approach, so I reflected upon the ways that I learnt about concepts with which I was unfamiliar, but more importantly, how I came to understand those concepts, and not just memorize them. This was what I wanted for my students – comprehension, the ability to observe, describe and connect concepts and processes – deep learning.
I went back to basics and reviewed the course outline. What were the learning outcomes? Were the students meeting those outcomes? I was providing them with the content, (teaching? Not teaching?) but they were not learning it. So how to fix the disconnection? One of the advantages I had when considering this was that I was completely unfamiliar with the material myself when I started teaching the course. My background and education is in mineral exploration geology; I was teaching surfical geology – basically the stuff you scrape off the top to get to the gold. It was a steep learning curve. So I took myself on field trips, looked at photographs, read a bunch of reference material, and summarized it to reinforce the learning. And I was learning, not just memorizing. I found that I could answer student questions on concepts, landforms and processes. It really was deep learning. Now all I needed to do was figure out how to conver