למידה, אינטרנט ... ומה שביניהם

our cultural notion of the pedagogical work that happens in a good lecture is pretty impoverished relative to the reality. We don’t have a clear understanding of all the things that a good lecture accomplishes, and therefore we often lose valuable elements of student support when we try to replace it.

This has pretty serious implications for MOOCs, flipped classrooms, personalized learning, and a wide array of pedagogical approaches that replace a traditional in-person lecture with something else.

We tend to think of a traditional “content-driven lesson” as a “lecture,” and we tend to think of a “lecture” as a professor droning on for an hour and twenty minutes with no student interaction. But most lectures are not that, and no lectures are only that.

The large number of questions suggests that in actual practice there is very little effort put forth to teach our boys and girls to be self-reliant, independent mental workers. The discrepancy between our theory and practice is nowhere more patent. With the tremendous pressure incident to the rehearsal of questions numbering from seven to one hundred and seventy, for the purpose of covering every conceivable issue expressed in the pages of a text assignment, the teacher loses sight of the fact that he has a youth to teach through the medium of his subject. There is no time to teach him how to study: how to organize subject matter, how to judge relative worths of facts studied, what to memorize.