This will be a series of blog posts that I am writing to assist me in the work of developing my course in Learning Design. I’m trying to stay abreast of current research and writing in the field of learning design, instructional design and other, related fields. This will help inform my own practice, but also the curriculum and pedagogy of my course. .
This section is on Flower Darby’s (with James M. Lang) Small Teaching Online
This book was highly recommended on one of the technology-enhanced learning sites that I am following- I can’t remember which one, otherwise I would link to it here. I hadn’t heard of it before, but I’m glad I found out about it. This is actually a sequel of sorts -Lang has previously published Small Teaching, but this version is written by Darby for the most part, and focuses exclusively on teaching online which is, as you might expect, pretty popular at the moment. Having said that, I was a little wary – the subheading of the book is ‘Applying Learning Science in Online Classes’, and while there is a great deal that I agree with in this book, I am always a little hesitant when I see the term ‘learning science’ as I think that it privileges a positivist, context-free understanding of learning and therefore teaching. I did not see that at all in this book – rather, it is much more pragmatic, drawing on Darby’s significant experience in teaching online and linking it well with research in the field.
There are a couple of things that have stuck with me after my first reading of the book. Firstly, there is a great description comparing the average students’ online experience with a physical experience – like being in a classroom with the lights switched off, alone. I think that’s a powerful metaphor for what it feels like for students, especially if they’re in their first online class (as is likely for many in this COVID reality). The other point that they make that resonated was that, for many teachers, they don’t know what good online teaching looks like – because they’ve never done any online courses themselves. It’s very hard to teach well if you’re not sure what that looks like, and your students aren’t sure how to behave.
Fortunately, I’m not in this situation. I’ve done a lot of courses, from Treehouse to Duolingo to Hacking with Swift to LinkedIn Learning. More recently, I’ve looked at some of the FutureLearn courses, too. Along the way, I’ve seen the good and the bad – so I was curious to see if my thought about good teaching online matched up with Darby’s. I was pleased to see that it did.
At the heart of the book is what Darby and Lang call the small teaching approach. The can be summarised as paying attention to the small, everyday decisions teachers make in teaching. This represents the best route to successful learning for students, in almost every learning environment. This approach seeks to effect change by giving faculty small, actionable modifications that they can make without having to rework their teaching from the ground up. The second premise is that we should make our decisions based on the best research we have about how humans learn. This comes down to nine key principles, arranged in groups of three:
- Foundational knowledge and skills: prediction, retrieval, interleaving.
- Deepen understanding: connection, self-explanation, practice
- Motivation and mindset – keys to inspiring students