TEACHING TO STUDY VS JUST TEACHING THE MATERIAL

Abstract

With the ever changing world, many state-of-the-art skills taught at a university become obsolete fast. To succeed, students need to continue learning all their lives. Because of this, the emphasis of college education is shifting more and more from teaching the material to teaching how to study. However, many teaching techniques are still optimized for teaching the material: colleges try their best to make their faculty better and better teachers, to use clearer textbooks - everything to make teaching easier and more efficient. As a result, students get accustomed to almost perfect teaching. However, when a few years after graduation, they will need to learn the new ideas, these ideas will not come in the form of a clear textbook taught by experienced faculty - these ideas will come as raw imperfect texts taught by inventors with not much teaching experience. We therefore need to better prepare out students for imperfect learning. One way to achieve this is to have more classes taught by doctoral students, students who are enthusiastic but still imperfect teachers. As a result, not only will students be exposed to imperfect teaching, but doctoral student will gain more teaching experience and thus, upon their own graduation, become better-teaching as faculty.