This article informs the struggle many faculty have with the ultimate goal of helping students take responsibility for their own learning. I especially like the “remove crutches” section which emphasizes our role in the PROCESS of helping students become independent learners.
From Faculty Focus – Higher Ed Teaching Strategies from Magna Publications
If you’ve read the latest of the Teaching Professor circulated to many faculty, you already know this: Where learning is concerned, active learning beats lecturing. A recent meta-analysis of 225 studies published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS) provided overwhelming evidence that active learning (of many kinds) both increases exam scores and lowers failure rates. For more details, read the article below, the piece it references in the Teaching Professor, or the study itself. (Note: If you are an instructor at Tech and don’t currently get a copy of the Teaching Professor, just let us know…we can fix that!)