Seven Principles for Effective Teaching in Undergraduate Education

Below are results of a survey that was sent out to 13,000 faculty across central and eastern Canada, which were synthesized to produce a new set of principles to help all members of the higher education community draw on common sense and practical knowledge to effectively educate undergraduate students. Results are awaiting publication, but a sneak preview is presented below:

1. Students prefer passivity – give it to them. No one expects sheep to be actively involved in their own shepherding, so how can we reasonably expect students to be actively involved in becoming educated? As it is for sheep, so it is for sheeple.

2. Feedback should be simple, and much can be coded in monosyllables. No one wants to read a lot of scribbling on their work - -and who among us wants to spend a lot of time scribbling words that others don’t wish to read. Develop a system of monosyllabic code words, each of which could represent an entire exclamation or proposition. “Good”, for example, could mean, “I didn’t enjoy reading this as much as I hoped I would, but then again, I wasn’t expecting much from you either. You’ve achieved what you can.” Speaking of which . . .

3. Match expectations to students’ levels of mediocrity. No matter what we do to them, some students just can’t learn. It’s really quite cruel of use to expect otherwise. We admit that we can’t “expect” a sheep into achieving flight, but we pretend we can “expect” a mediocre mind to recite the periodic table in under five minutes? Unreasonable.

4. Everyone is basically the same, and they learn the way you do. All sheeple are sheeple. They eat by chewing their food and swallowing, they walk by repeatedly placing one leg in front of the other, and they learn by listening to you talk and reading textbooks written by committees.

5. Public shaming motivates. After three hours of being humiliated in front of their classmates, enduring streams of invective with stiff upper lips, students will learn to finish their readings.

6. Extrinsic rewards motivate. See the following . . .

7. You’re not their friend, you’re their mature lover.

Although many of the seven seem plausible let me be the first to wish you a ...
Belated Happy April Fool’s Day!