ABSTRACT
THIS CHAPTER TAKES YOU through a part of the design process that is perhaps the most familiar to you: learning experiences (see Figure 7.1). If you are like many college faculty, you have planned your classes using particular teaching techniques or methods, such as lectures, class discussions, collaborative learning activities, demonstrations, or laboratory experiments. In our experience, an emphasis on using a specific teaching technique leads faculty to look at these activities from a teaching-centered perspective. They ask themselves what they will do, what topics they will cover, how they will organize the course material. Everything is focused on what the teacher will do. This mind-set leads them to emphasize what they do to students and reinforces the misconception that the way to improve student learning is through the use of a particular technique alone. Decades of learning research and our own experience tell us that student learning is very complex, and how we teach, while important, is only one of several factors involved in determining what students ultimately learn.
