Terry Doyle listens to a question from a workshop participant.
An F-plus in math class many years before forced Terry Doyle to think about the meaning of education. He’s thought about it significantly since then.
“When I was 15, Sister Rose Gerard gave me an F-plus in math,” said Doyle, a reading professor at Ferris State University (Big Rapids, Michigan) and an international authority on learner-centered teaching. “Do you know what an F-plus means? It means you’re a very nice boy but you don’t know any math.”
Doyle recently visited Broward College for several workshops to teach professors how to become better learners. When students leave high school, he said, they may well be great note takers and excel on multiple-choice tests, but they may not have many learning skills.
“Remember,” Doyle told his audience at his first workshop, “It’s the one who does the work that does the learning.
“American high schools are essentially the same as they were 40 years ago. They’re the same teacher-centered, authority-centered, control-centered places they were in the 60s. Our students come from an environment where most of the learning was done for them.”
Teaching students how to become learners requires that teachers reconsider what teaching means, and how they can better serve their students. Take the concept of lectures, Doyle suggested.
“Lecture means talking to students about things they can’t learn on their own,” he said.
Or the value of cumulative testing, he told them: “Remember this one thing,” he said. “Go toward cumulative testing. When you do that, you force them to go back and relearn, relearn, relearn. The way you learn is through repetition. You set up an environment for them to practice. If they don’t practice, then the learning isn’t taking place.”
Doyle, the author of “Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment,” gave four presentations at the Holcombe Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence: “Helping Students Learn in a Learner-Centered Environment,” “Learning in Harmony with Your Brain,” “Integrating ‘Learning How-to-Learn Strategies’ into Your Course,” and “The Changing Roles of Students in a Learner-Centered Classroom.”
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