Teaching and learning innovations for the future
In an era where internet technology is disrupting traditional teaching methods, there is an urgent need for teachers to reinvent education based on the skills that students will need in their future learning and life.
In order to promote university teachers to create future-oriented teaching innovation, XJTLU ilead has set up a special column entitled "Future-oriented Teaching Innovation", which will systematically introduce the essential issues, basic models and main directions of future-oriented teaching innovation, and share how the school can promote the teaching innovation of teachers through reform. Welcome the attention of all education colleagues.
Teaching innovation needs to be implemented by teachers, but it is often difficult to achieve results by teachers alone, bottom-up innovation can promote the diversity of innovation, but it is often full of risks and uncertainties, and even encounters many resistances. In order to truly form a systematic teaching reform and innovation of a school or institution, top-down forces are indispensable. Although it is difficult to motivate schools to participate in the process of teaching innovation, how to give more space to innovators through policy support has become an urgent problem to be solved in the current practice of teaching innovation.
This section lists ten measures that teaching managers can take to promote teaching innovation through their own efforts, of which 5 are to "loosen" teaching innovation, 3 are to provide systematic support for teaching innovation, and 2 are to optimize the cultural atmosphere of teaching innovation through reform.
Reduce class time and give students and teachers more autonomy
Nowadays, students are in class almost from morning to night, there is little time for independent learning, and teachers also focus a lot of energy on in-class teaching, which leads to very limited space for teaching innovation. We recommend significantly reducing the number of hours a student spends, for example, to no more than 15 hours a week in class, so as to ensure that students have a lot of time for self-directed learning outside of the classroom, time to pursue their own interests, and it is also conducive to breaking the students' inherent sense of learning from teachers in school, as well as passive learning habits and environments.
For teachers, when there is less time to teach, they need to consider how to use other methods to support students' self-directed learning outside of class, and at this time, good teaching innovations will also emerge.
Lower the focus on the teaching content in the syllabus
For a long time in the past, a standard course syllabus was full of knowledge points, and even what knowledge points to be covered in each class were clearly written.
In the new era, we should pay more attention to the cultivation of morality and the improvement of students' ability and quality. Therefore, gradually relaxing the focus on knowledge and content can "loosen the constraints" for teachers, so that teachers have more time and energy to improve students' higher-order abilities and literacy through teaching innovation.
Reducing the focus on the content of the syllabus can be achieved by revising the syllabus, and of course, at the same time revising the relevant teaching system, such as removing the requirement that the teacher must finish the course.
Removal of mandatory requirements for final exams
The assessment method of a course is a factor that affects the whole body, and it is also the root cause behind the current large number of teaching chaos. Although in recent years, there have been calls for reform of assessment methods, paying more attention to process assessment and weakening final assessment, but in practice, many schools have not kept up with the policy, and many schools have rigid requirements for the proportion of final exams in course assessments, and some schools even stipulate that the proportion of final exams is not less than 70%.
Under such regulations, it is not easy for teachers to be innovative, because students are used to concentrating on the final exams for a period of time before the exam, and it is difficult to devote themselves to the whole semester of the course. In addition, the final exam is not a good way to measure higher-level competencies and quality goals. Therefore, it is imperative to remove the mandatory requirement for final exams.
Reduce the dependence of a course on one textbook
Traditional textbooks are the core elements of the "teacher-centered" teaching system and the reference books in knowledge-oriented education. The essence of textbooks is a system of knowledge and theories in a field, which can provide students with a direct guide to the learning of a course, and is also an important reference for teachers to teach a course well.
However, when we change the goal of the curriculum from teaching students a knowledge system to cultivating students' abilities and literacy, we can no longer rely solely on a traditional textbook to organize teaching, but should guide students not to focus on how much knowledge they have learned, but to whether they can learn the knowledge they need independently.
Reduce the "supervision" of teaching and strengthen the "guidance".
Teaching innovation often breaks through the norm and the existing experience. The supervisors of some schools do not recognize the teacher's teaching innovation, thinking that it will affect the normal teaching, and sometimes the supervisor will reprimand the teacher in front of the students, which will undoubtedly discourage the teacher's motivation to make teaching innovation.
In the process of teaching reform in the new era, in order to let teachers make truly high-quality teaching, the important thing is not "supervision", but "guidance", that is, to guide teachers to the teaching concept of the new era, guide them how to be a good teacher, and guide teachers to make good teaching innovation.
Establish a system to support teachers' teaching innovation
Teaching innovation is not achieved overnight, nor is it easy to achieve, and the uncertainty, risks, challenges and setbacks in the process can only be experienced by the teachers themselves. Schools can establish a system to support teachers to break through challenges in teaching innovation, so as to help teachers overcome difficulties in teaching innovation.
Teachers who are engaged in teaching innovation may sometimes be limited by policies, sometimes they may need to change the original lesson plan, sometimes they may need to get expert guidance, sometimes they may need some kind of resources or technical support, etc. The ability of schools to provide strong support is important for teachers to carry out teaching innovation.
Establish a standardized reporting mechanism for teaching innovation
As an innovative activity, teaching innovation is no different from innovation in other fields, and is essentially a breakthrough in the past to achieve better results. Therefore, teaching innovation sometimes breaks through existing policies, and it is currently in the early stage of teaching innovation, and a large number of existing policies need to be reformed and adjusted.
Therefore, when teachers need to break through policies in the process of innovation, if the school can establish a channel for teachers to report, it can reduce the risk of teachers in the innovation process to a certain extent, reduce the pressure on teachers, and let teachers carry out innovation boldly and with peace of mind.
Establish a teaching quality assurance mechanism
The teaching quality assurance mechanism is a process mechanism to ensure that all teaching can meet the established standards. The systematic quality assurance mechanism includes setting the goal of assurance, the point of observation of the target, the standard of each target dimension, the collection of data, and the analysis and continuous improvement based on data (Zhang Xiaojun and Xi Youmin, 2021). A systematic quality assurance mechanism can give birth to good teaching innovation, because the fundamental purpose of teaching innovation is also to better meet the standards of the system (mainly the standards of student learning outcomes).
At the same time, a systematic quality assurance mechanism can avoid the views and biases of a certain person or a department, and can ensure that teaching peers objectively evaluate the value of teaching innovation, rather than the administrative department to determine the level of teaching innovation. From another point of view, a systematic teaching quality assurance mechanism is also a way for teaching managers to systematically support teaching innovation.
Reform the teaching evaluation methods and teacher teaching evaluation methods
The key to the reform is to clarify some fundamental issues in the evaluation of teaching quality: why to evaluate, what to evaluate, who to organize the evaluation, who to evaluate, what to evaluate, what to evaluate and how to evaluate, etc. Understanding these issues plays a crucial role in how to reform the teacher teaching evaluation system. In practice, there are three different orientations and paradigms for these issues (see Table 3-1).
Table 3-1 Three different orientations and paradigms of teacher teaching evaluation.
In order to truly motivate teachers to do a good job in teaching innovation, it is necessary to shift from the current performance-oriented assessment system to a quality-assurance-oriented evaluation system, and at the same time, we can also try to establish a career-oriented evaluation system.
Reform the way teaching is organized to encourage and promote interdisciplinary collaboration
Interdisciplinary curriculum cooperation has become an important direction of teaching innovation in the new era. But in many cases, interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty members is limited by organizational structures.
The key to the implementation of interdisciplinary education is to reform the way of teaching organization and establish a mechanism for front-line teachers to cooperate independently, so that front-line teachers can cooperate with teachers of other disciplines through networking rather than following hierarchical orders.