Basketball, course design, and giving up the ball

I had an epiphany in the shower today. You have to love showers. I might speculate that one of the reasons the Dark Ages were so dark has to do with the fact that people rarely bathed. But back to my epiphany. It has to do with something I noticed when I coached a lot of basketball players between the ages of about 8 and 12. Often the very talented kids knew very little about basketball. They didn't know how to play defense or pass or move without the ball, and it was very hard to teach them these things. They relied on their physical ability (they were just better athletes than the other kids they were playing with) and did quite well in their particular context, which was parks and rec basketball. I was always trying to teach them the things I knew they would need if they ever wanted to move on to a higher level of play. I knew that at the next level, everyone would be a good athlete, and they wouldn't be able to rely on just their athleticism.

This seems like a long-winded intro to what I really want to discuss, but I am starting to find similar issues with people who teach. Some instructors are very "engaging" (my whole engagement spiel is the topic of another post). They are good in front of a classroom, they're just funny enough, they have a knack for making things interesting, and students generally enjoy their classes. They get good teaching evaluations (you notice we haven't broached the subject of learning in their classes), and oftentimes it just seems to come naturally. Some of these instructors are relying on their "athleticism" as a speaker, but they don't really know much about teaching and learning. They are doing what they saw other professors do, and that seems to be working pretty well in their context, which is the college lecture hall.

How can I have the nerve to say some of these people don't know much about teaching and learning? First of all, why should they? Knowing anything about teaching, let alone learning, is rarely the most important prerequisite for securing a tenure-track position at a large Research-1 university. I'm not making any accusations here; I'm just telling it like it is. I work with many instructors on many aspects of teaching, but, just as I noticed with kids playing basketball, the holes in their preparation often surface when they have to move to another context. In my case, I have worked with many instructors as they have designed and implemented online courses. I used to say about basketball players that they didn't know what to do if the ball wasn't in their hands. This was about the worst thing I could say about a player. After all, considering that there are 9 other people on the court, 90% of the game goes on when you don't have the ball in your hands. For an instructor in a course with 200 students - well, you do the math.

Moving to any kind of a learner-centered context means giving up control - you don't have the ball in your hands all the time anymore. You need to know a lot more than just lecturing, no matter how good you are at it. What are the students doing while you are not talking to them, and how can they possibly be learning anything if you are not directly involved? And what about the students? Many times they think they would rather sit passively and be talked to (this has been referred to as the "bad bargain" we have with students - professors won't demand much of their students, and the students won't complain). The active learning and constructivist movements in education beg to differ.

In my profession, instructional technology consulting, it is my job to help teaching faculty members navigate this huge paradigm shift in higher education. Although I have "technology" in my title, I'm finding that we sometimes have to dig pretty deeply into basic course design principles before we get near the technology. The most gratifying thing I hear faculty members say when they are busy redesigning courses for online or blended environments is, "I'm going to use some of these tools and techniques in my face-to-face courses, too." We may find that the move to online learning in higher education has the  biggest impact on teaching and learning simply because it is necessitating the redesign of so many courses (Dzubian, Hartman, and Moskal, 2004).

Once again I'm enjoying teaching people what to do when the ball isn't in their hands.

Dzubian, C.D., Hartman, J.L., and Moskal, P.D. 2004. Blended Learning. ECAR Research Bulletin, V. 2004, Issue 7, pp 1-12.