The Teaching Trick – How to Improve Student Learning Without Spending More Time Teaching

April 10, 2018

When improvement of student learning is discussed, a common reaction is to assume that any new teaching methods require a higher teaching effort. And surely, anyone can improve a course by spending 100 hours more teaching time, but for apparent reasons this is not a sustainable strategy. So how can student learning be improved within a given level of teaching resources? The key principle is that teachers should spend more of their time doing things that lead to high quality learning, and less time on such things that do not lead to learning. Concrete examples will be used to illustrate the principle, challenge old ways of thinking and question some taken-for-granted practices in education.