Student-Centered Learning : Subversive Teachers and Standardized Worlds

1. H2O is not water2. Can Student-Centred Learning Be the Key to Improving Patient Care?3. Shifting our Value System: Using Student-Centred Learning to Battle the Standards-Based World4. Designing Activities and Assessing Student Learning in the Flipped Classroom5. Student-Centred Learning6. Can One Truly Promote Student-Centred Learning in a Standards-Based World?7. Student-Directed Learning�Central to a Medical Student Education8. Problem-Based Learning and Student-Centred Learning�a Perfect Match!9. Student-Centred Learning: Possibilities and Challenges10. Student-Centred Does Not Mean You Do Not Have to Put on Clothes11. Self Direction Amid a Poverty of Attention: Beyond Satisficing and Feigned Expertise12. Semper Discens13. A Love Story of Twenty Years with Problem-Based Learning14. My Undergraduate Journey � Upon Reflection15. Reflecting on the Metaphor and Practice of Reflection in Education16. Circular Pedagogy: Teaching and Learning as Improvisational Performance17. The Subversive Teacher: A Declining Species18. Subversive LearningThe essays in this volume that pay tribute to an outstanding educator, Delsworth Harnish from McMaster University deal with the problems and prospects of fostering student-centred learning in a standards-based world through subversive teaching. The essays are riffs on a theme mooted by Postman and Weingartner in their now classic book “Teaching as a Subversive Activity” The contributions from retired professors, senior educators to younger active instructors, educational researchers, medical and graduate students who provide a broad spectrum of opinions on those contentious issues. Though much has changed since the heady sixties and the tensions of the Vietnam War when the book was published, much abides. The enemies within and without have taken newer guise, but the tensions remain—the desires of teachers to spark individuality and the demands of society to straitjacket them in the guise of promoting efficiency

Adopting an active learning approach to teaching in a research-intensive higher education context transformed staff teaching attitudes and behaviours

The conventional lecture has significant limitations in the higher education context, often leading to a passive learning experience for students. This paper reports a process of transforming teaching and learning with active learning strategies in a research-intensive educational context across a faculty of 45 academic staff and more than 1000 students. A phased approach was used, involving nine staff in a pilot phase during which a common vision and principles were developed. In short, our approach was to mandate a move away from didactic lectures to classes that involved students interacting with content, with each other and with instructors in order to attain domain-specific learning outcomes and generic skills. After refinement, an implementation phase commenced within all first-year subjects, involving 12 staff including three from the pilot group. The staff use of active learning methods in classes increased by sixfold and sevenfold in the pilot and implementation phases, respectively. An analysis of implementation phase exam questions indicated that staff increased their use of questions addressing higher order cognitive skills by 51%. Results of a staff survey indicated that this change in practice was caused by the involvement of staff in the active learning approach. Fifty-six percent of staff respondents indicated that they had maintained constructive alignment as they introduced active learning. After the pilot, only three out of nine staff agreed that they understood what makes for an effective active learning exercise. This rose to seven out of nine staff at the completion of the implementation phase. The development of a common approach with explicit vision and principles and the evaluation and refinement of active learning were effective elements of our transformational change management strategy. Future efforts will focus on ensuring that all staff have the time, skills and pedagogical understanding required to embed constructively aligned active learning within the approach