Some time ago, I came across an oil painting featuring a classroom. Desks were lined up in rows, and students were sitting facing the blackboard, their papers scattered on their desks. Some concentrated on their notebooks, others were looking over someone else’s shoulder, one was daydreaming, and another was holding his head, immersed in his own worries, assuming from the expression on his face. The painting was titled The Children’s Class, by French artist Henri Jules Jean Geoffroy, dated 1889.
The image struck me as I was amazed at its similarity with many of today’s classrooms, particularly in higher education. Although some changes started especially in Masters and Executive Education in Europe, most higher education classrooms still have rows of tables lined up facing the white- or green-board, while some, more modern, are in a semicircle, amphitheater style. Of course, modern technology has entered the classroom, with projectors hanging somewhere from the ceiling, a Wi-Fi Internet connection, and button-operated screens that easily roll down and up. But other things remain very similar: some students are checking messages on their portable devices, while others are daydreaming or immersed in their own worries. “Nothing more challenging than undergrads,” observed a colleague recently, concerned with the difficulty of getting his audience engaged. “They are just not interested in learning,” another commented sadly and resignedly, while a third shared that he has a similar challenge even with graduates. He has taken to requiring them to switch off phones at the beginning of the class, in the attempt to get the students’ undivided attention. Possible? Does this sound familiar to you?
It is true that many things have evolved in the way we teach children— with classrooms being far more dynamic today than the one portrayed in the painting: in many schools, students gather around small group tables, real life is brought into the room through their stories and news, project work makes learning fun and experiential, and technology helps the technology-natives find resources in a self-directed learning approach. Unfortunately, change has come slower in the higher levels of education.1
One reason for this is the different type of preparation undergone by instructors working in higher education. While school teachers earn their qualifying degrees by extensively studying pedagogy, business schools and higher education institutions in general count on instructors who are expert professionals in their own domain, many of whom step into academia with the aim of enriching their professional knowledge or experience with scholarly research. This can be traced back to the origins of the business school in this country. The first MBA program was designed in the United States in 1900, at the Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, with instructors recruited from among practicing or retired corporate managers who were hired to share with students their experience in the workplace. By midcentury, one could discern a trend in institutions becoming more research focused and less work oriented. Not for long though, since there arose a new crisis in the 1970s, when a study by the Carnegie Commission reported that business schools lacked relevance in their research topics, had an overly quantitative orientation, and did not prepare the young for entrepreneurial careers. This brought some changes in the course contents, although the pedagogical approach continued its expert-driven stance, which focused on lecturing for assimilation by the students.2
Undoubtedly, the lecture-based approach was the preferred learning style for some students, those who like to learn from experts, take notes, and memorize facts or be entertained and inspired by the particular life experience or knowledge of the instructor. There are others who prefer to learn by doing; who are interested in questioning data but feel intimidated to ask the “expert”; who seek to identify patterns, to learn by discovery; or are pragmatic and want to understand how the information would relate to their world. These types of learner may have more challenges to stay engaged.
The question arises: Who is our audience when we are standing in the front of the room? Are they technology-natives, who have short attention spans, who grew up bombarded by multiple and rapidly changing stimuli? Are they used to find the information they need with a touch of their screens, to type half words, to browse and surf at a speed we cannot follow? Are they comfortable receiving 140 characters, rather than listening to a person talking for 14 minutes? Can they even stay focused that long on something that is not totally exciting for them? At the same time, aren’t they the ones who don’t calculate how much time they are investing in something they feel passionate about, the ones who can work throughout the night without thinking of sleep deprivation if they are engaged in their task, and interacting with friends? Are they the ones who don’t think of money, but of passion when it comes to work on a project they love?
At the turn of the millennium, Facebook didn’t exist—today it has 1.5 billion monthly active users; mobile cellular subscriptions phone users grew from 738 million globally in 2000 to more than 7 billion by the end of 2015, according to the International Communications Union, the Geneva-based United Nations agency for communications and the official source for global statistics; YouTube didn’t exist before 2005, and the first iPhone was invented in June 2007. Launched in 2006, Twitter accounted by the final quarter of 2016 an average of 307 million people actively microblogging monthly. The Chinese chat app Wechat grew in three years from zero to 639 million users, and the new chat and messaging Viber has close to 700 million registered users. How these technological changes transformed and shaped our lives is clearly seen in our day-to-day experiences. We all are journalists, moviemakers, and activists with just a “click”; we can learn what we are curious about with a screen touch, from anywhere. We share and disseminate information at the speed of light; we know we can reach almost anyone on this planet with a little research. Teenagers start nonprofits, school children launch campaigns for what they care about. It is then incomprehensible that we are spending hours and efforts3 to inculcate information from the front of the classroom, to rows of individuals invited to sit and listen, so they can memorize and recite it back in a test.
The traditional expert-driven approach tends to be one-directional, with the instructor presenting and answering occasional questions. This approach is however increasingly eroded by the widespread access to information by anyone with a portable device. In a matter of seconds, any single piece of information that the lecturer presents can be updated, corrected, or completed with richer details. This is changing the power structure in the classroom. It has happened to many of us—to pause in midsentence trying to recall the exact title of a book, only to be helped out by a student who typed three letters into her phone and gave the exact reference. Not that we asked for it—we were just pausing to remember … .
What is our role, then? What is the value that instructors are bringing, and from whose perspective is this judged? Has our hard-earned expertise built a pedestal from where we can talk and be respected? How tall is that pedestal? Is it so tall that we have difficulty hearing and seeing who is in the audience?