Education & Reseach

I recently attended the McMaster Symposium on Education & Cognition. One of the organizers, Dr. Joe Kim, told a very interesting story. He was with colleagues who were discussing the over-haul of a medical program at another Ontario university from its current incarnation to a more evidence-based program. Everyone joked, "What were they basing their medical training on before??!"

Hahahaha...right?! Seriously, what are you teaching medical students, if not what research has to say about the practice of medicine?!

After the jokes were over, Dr. Kim asked the faculty members he was with, "How many of you use evidence-based teaching practices?" No one laughed. There was mostly an uncomfortable silence.

This very much echos my own experience. When I started teaching, it was trial-and-error. I tried to emulate the instructors that I admired when I was an undergraduate, and I threw in a few things that I thought were interesting and innovative but had no reason to believe would work. I did not consult the literature.

There is a whole world of research on best practices for instructional design in high education, but far too few university-level instructors take advantage of it. It comes naturally to most researchers to go to the literature when they have a discipline-specific question, but for some reason, it doesn't occur to us to do the same thing when we have a teaching question. My own teaching practice has evolved to rely quite heavily on relevant educational and cognitive research, and I think I can genuinely call my practice evidence-based. I also think there is a move among instructors and educational developers at universities to make educational research more prominent in professional development.

I get a few students every year who challenge me on my teaching practice. They question my slides, or my evaluation rubric, or my exam questions, etc. I appreciate that students want to understand my motivation (it's part and parcel why I started this blog). I think students should challenge more of their instructors to produce evidence to support their teaching practice. At the very least, it will keep us on our toes! And it could very well motivate more instructors to migrate to evidence-based practice.

I wrote more about my experiences at the EdCog Symposium for the Centre for Teaching Innovation & Support (CTSI) blog. If you're interested in finding out about some of the research presented and some ideas about how I might implement practical applications of the research, click here to read on.