Ever Doubt Yourself?

Critical self reflection ain't fun. No one really enjoys it. Teachers are in a unique position relative to many other professions because our feedback is always immediate. Only the most obtuse of us don't care or don't self-reflect. Quite often my inner narrative goes something like this... , " That lesson didn't go well" or "I could have handled that better".

I take a certain comfort in this article, which suggests that students actually aren't the best judges of their own learning. Maybe I'm doing better than I thought! This peer-reviewed study finds that students’ perception of their own learning can be anticorrelated with their actual learning under well-controlled implementations of active learning versus passive lectures.

Harvard prof Eric Mazur, featured here, realized that though his students could answer sophisticated questions by memorizing formulae, they actually knew very little even though he was seen by his students as a gifted and engaging teacher. Yet, 

[his] students had improved at handling equations and formulas, he explains, but when it came to understanding “what the real meanings of these things are, they basically reverted to Aristotelian logic—thousands of years back.” For example, they could recite Newton’s Third Law and apply it to numerical problems, but when asked about a real-world event like a collision between a heavy truck and a light car, many firmly declared that the heavy truck exerts a larger force. (Actually, an object’s weight is irrelevant to the force exerted.)

Mazur re-examined his practices and essentially flipped his classroom. Go back and check out the article and some of the videos accompanying the article. It's given me good food for thought. How can I do this more in my teaching.