Volume 4,Issue 6
On the Tension and Balance Between “Change” and “Constancy” in University Classroom Teaching
University classroom teaching is shifting from a teaching-centered to a learning-centered paradigm, and with that shift an old tension has become harder to manage: a lesson is planned, yet what happens in the room is, by its nature, unpredictable. This paper takes that tension as its starting point and asks a narrower question, when an unplanned moment arises, on what grounds should a teacher decide whether to follow it or close it? The answer offered here takes the shape of three reference points, named Anchor, Load, and Cycle. The Anchor borrows from constructive alignment and ties the “constant” of any lesson to its intended learning outcomes (ILOs). The Load borrows from cognitive load theory and reads the impact of an emergent event on students’ working memory as a signal of whether the detour is bearable. The Cycle borrows from the First Principles of Instruction and asks, once the teacher has decided to follow the moment, where the discussion should be moved next. Taken together, the three points are meant less as a procedure than as a vocabulary, one that lets a teacher describe, after the lesson, why a particular detour was worth taking and why another was not.
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