On Minimalistic Teaching

First…

The education system today is experiencing a lot of challenges and has many issues around the world, and at all levels. That said, the “education problem” being a huge subject, we can only solve it by addressing small problems, one at a time, and the sum of all of these solutions may lead us to solving the bigger issue. For instance, one of the issues in higher education is that a teacher is either academic or professional; the former has a theoretical focus ― and does not teach students how to tackle real world problems based on what he teaches them ―, whereas the latter is more focused on practical applications ― and might not have the pedagogical tools or know-how. By tackling seemingly small problems like this one, we can hope to find small solutions; the sum of these puts us on the pathway to solving the bigger problem: how can we give tertiary students what they truly need to succeed in their post-graduation lives?

As a way of illustrating such effective small thinking, a project funded by the World Bank sought to help kids in rural towns in China who were having difficulty at school. As part of the project, researchers found out that many of the kids who were struggling had basic eyesight problems, and the solution was as simple as giving glasses to the children that needed them. The results were pretty impressive.

In this article, we take a small step and tackle the problems and challenges seen in higher education, as far as professors ― in their way of teaching ― and students ― in their way of learning ― are concerned. This article argues that in order for the students to become better professionals in the future, professors need a better way to deliver their content and let their students become more independent, and thus learn faster.

Then…

In countries like France or Morocco, university professors usually come with a set of slides with a huge amount of content that they need their students to learn, sometimes without knowing the why. One of the main issues with this approach is that the students end up overwhelmed by all the information that they need to ingest, with less chance of becoming independent and without the ability to go further, since they lack the fundamentals. Our role as teachers is to give students the scope of each module, not to limit their field of thinking, but to allow them to apprehend a concept without being overwhelmed by its immensity. Unfortunately, the methods used to limit the scope are often designed to format students to think in some specific way or another, which indeed limits their potential for out-of-the-box thinking.

One of the experiences that I encountered when I was a student is that, not only do some professors refuse to accept that we might have a critical approach as far as their teaching is concerned, they also believe that they are the true repository of knowledge, and that whatever it is they are teaching needs to be taken for a fact and should under no circumstances be questioned. This prevalent mentality has pushed me to go down a different pedagogical path to that taken by most of my professors.

We believe that students today can be equally intelligent and independent enough to learn by themselves. If we take the etymology of the word “professor”, we see that she’s considered as a “declarer, a person who claims knowledge”. In the past, this definition was literally correct and the professor was the way, the truth and the light, as she had access to resources 一 be they knowledgeable people, mentors or books 一 that the students didn’t have access to, due to linguistic capacities or societal status. The professor might also have had enough experience and awareness to get the most out of these resources;this situation remains the same today, even though we have a lot of resources (videos, tutorials, etc…) that can help anyone understand even the most difficult books or concepts.

Thus, in the current era of openly accessible knowledge and free quality resources, the role of a teacher in higher education today is no longer to be the source of knowledge or truth, but to give students pathways and the keys they need in order to explore the more complex areas by themselves; as opposed to the methods used today where students are so overwhelmed by so much information that they miss the basics, and thus, are not able to explore further areas by themselves.

Giving students the basics of a particular subject has better chances of helping them master those basics. Then if they do master them, they are more likely to look further and explore more complex areas by themselves. It’s only then that a teacher can give them the benefit of her experience and teach them how to tackle those areas and go even further; as opposed to a method whereby the teacher exposes the complex areas of the subject without piquing the students’ curiosity about them. The thesis here is that, if a student does not grasp the basics of a subject and have the curiosity to go further, the teacher has simply failed in her mission.

The issue with this outdated way of teaching is that Professors tend to want to make a fast impact and try to give their students as much information in as little time as possible so they have a sense of achievement as teachers. The opposite of this approach is to have a long-term vision and help students find their own way of learning and exploring things that is more beneficial for them in the long run.

Most often, teachers tend to want to achieve this fast impact by teaching a subject without its context: Why is it important to study the history of literature before reading Jane Austen? Or for my part, why is Functional Programming so important in working with Distributed Systems? These, among others, are questions that are often not answered but that are equally as important as the very subject being taught.

Also, one of the common mistakes that we, as teachers, make in higher education is that we want students to learn subjects by heart; while the human mind is more able to make connections between subjects when they are familiar, it is really made to process the information given to it, not to store it. Given a particular concept, students only need to know its basics and the general idea, then train their minds to be able to master the details of a given concept, and sharpen the saw of their capabilities to identify and apply patterns. Though Beethoven may have composed his 5th Symphony, no matter how hard scientists tried, they would never have found it in his mind, as it was never stored there.

One of the major challenges that many students face is a lack of methodology. I remember having a professor who used to write code live in front of us, without explaining any methodology about how to reason when it came to coding problems as we faced them; the problem with this method is that, once home alone, we faced errors and design problems that we were unable to solve because he didn’t give us pathways. As a way to illustrate such methodologies, let’s see some basic steps that one should follow when reading a book, a technical document or an essay:

In various references, they suggest going through these three phases:

1. Reading: In this phase, we forget ourselves, then we embrace the vision of the author; we seek first to understand what her thesis is, and what message she is trying to send us. We go through the writing without focusing on the details, we only want to get out with the general idea.
2. Analyzing: Here, we read again and ask ourselves a few questions: Why does the author express this idea then the other? What conclusion does she want to draw? Why here and not later in the book?
3. The idea here is to answer these few questions both from the point of view of the author, and from ours.
4. Appropriating: Finally, we go back to each main idea of the book and ask ourselves: from my point of view, and given my own experience and the way I learnt to see the world, do I agree with the author? If yes, we embrace the idea and make it our own, if not, we reject it and let it go.

These steps are very important in the process of learning. They allow students (and everyone for this matter) to learn how to draw conclusions, whereas the current way of teaching shows them which conclusions to draw.

Let’s take as an example the way we teach programming languages. Whenever anyone wants to write a program, they have to take two main characteristics into account:

1. The syntax: Here, the rules of the programming language of choice are to be followed, and the compiler’s rules need to be strictly respected.
2. The logic: This is the way we reason regarding our programs; it involves some kind of a recipe to tell what the program should do.

For instance, regarding syntax, when writing Scala code, we can declare an immutable variable using the keyword “val”; if we mistakenly use “Val”, even though it is semantically identical, the use of the capital letter is enough to result in a non-compilable program.

Concerning logic, imagine having a function F, that has an input and produces an output (a simple calculation, for example), if the syntax is correct, the program will compile, but if the implementation, a.k.a. logic, is wrong in some way, the output will be wrong, rendering program unusable. One way of dealing with this is to use so-called debuggers.One way of helping students master a subject and making them benefit from a Professor’s experience is through one-day-workshops. The idea is to pick up a subject, which can be exploratory (specific technology involving Blockchain, for example) and go through its technical documentation with the students, and show them the way we reason when faced with previously unknown technology: what are the patterns we use as professionals when we work with a tool for the first time? When facing a problem, how can we go about debugging it? What are the resources that we primarily use? How can we read the technical documentation of this particular technology / tool properly? These are questions that can be more beneficial to the students than just coming up with slides and showing them the conclusions that we drew while preparing the course.

“When forced to read technical documentation, we tend to skim the information for troubleshooting solutions and thus skip steps that we falsely assume are optional.”

Going back to our first example, the researchers were able to help kids get better grades, simply by giving them $15 glasses. In a sense, we as teachers shouldn’t simply show students where to look, but rather, give them the necessary glasses, paradigms and pathways to look through so that they might see the world through our more experienced eyes and make their own conclusions.

With love from Huw Ryan and I.

This article was originally published on Medium:

https://medium.com/@AyoubFakir/on-minimalistic-teaching-28d1f8abc8ba