Thomas's posting is a courageous posting; it brings back memories of
that sinking feeling probably
most of us have felt at some time when first lecturing - that there is a
bottomless pit between us and the students, and that our words,
however well chosen, may be
making no impact whatever!
Whether one subscribes to the full philosophy or not, I think that
this is one of the strengths of many of the tools in the
constructivist armoury, for example:
- pretesting students to work out a baseline on prior knowledge &
conceptual understanding (& expectations) in a lecture group,
so that the lecturer has the confidence to know that what is
being taught is "impedance matched" to the students, and
- and teaching styles which enables one to be "the guide on the side"
instead of the would-be "sage on the stage" (& target for everyone's
frustrations!)
Wouldn't it be nice to think that our teaching institutions would
help novice instructors in practical ways to feel their way into the
teaching role, instead of being thrown to the lions in the way Thomas
obviously felt he was.
Margaret
Dr. Margaret Mazzolini
School of Biophysical Sciences and Electrical Engineering
Swinburne University of Technology
P.O. Box 218,
Hawthorn VIC 3122 Australia
email: mmazzolini@swin.edu.au
phone: (61 3) 9214 8084 fax: (61 3) 9819 0856
"What do we want? - gradual change
When do we want it? - all in good time"
(Rallying call from "Uni", ABC Television, Nov 1997)