Recently, many students have shared with me their dissatisfaction with the quality of their education. While their professors may be experts in their subjects, their lack of pedagogical skills causes students to feel stressed when they have a hard time absorbing knowledge. Students think that they are wasting their time and money on the course.
Some students give feedback to their university but feel disappointed when their suggestions are not adequately addressed. It makes them feel discouraged and loses faith in the education system. It’s heartbreaking to know because the spirit of education is the self-motivation of students that want to learn well. That is why I want to propose a different approach to learning: rather than relying solely on system changes, which are sometimes beyond your control, you can create your own learning environment.
When you spend money for education, you view that university as education services. It like you go to high end restaurants, pay a lot of money and you expect the chef will give you amazing meals. Most of the time, restaurant give you delicious food but sometime is not. When it happens, you can reframe the problem. You can think that consuming delicious food will make your stomach happy, but cook your own meal give you a chance to become a chef.
You can imagine that your parents pay a lot of money for you to access learning resources to become a good chef, including the kitchen, with many raw materials and high-experience chefs as tutors. The way of learning is to collect the best materials you can, then ask for help and guidance from other so you can become really good chef. Only you know your favorite meals, and only you can cook your perfect meal for yourself.
Here are some suggestions so you can cook your own meal:
While it's easy to complain, finding ways to improve and providing constructive feedback is much harder. You can learn a lot from this process by reflecting on what and how you want to learn and then actively proposing your ideas for better class engagement and comprehension to your teacher. If the teacher is not proactive in making changes, you can take the initiative to organize these activities for the students in the class. If the teacher feels their workload is lighter in class, they are likely to accept your participation in the teaching process of the course. Teaching and organizing teaching, sometimes, is the best way to learn a subject, as you have to master that knowledge and explain it in an understandable way to your peer. Your engagement in class teaching makes you and all of your friends have a better learning experience.
For example, if you want to learn aspect X of the subject, the best way for you to learn is to teach it to others. You can email the teacher and propose to present the topic you are interested in front of the class. In addition, you can proactively send your own writing, research, and related materials about the aspect you are interested in and propose that the teacher can teach more about that aspect in lectures.
If your class curriculum isn't ideal, you can create your own curriculum by searching for similar programs on open online courses or looking at the curriculum of other universities to create an educational program for yourself. This way, it will help you build a systematic knowledge of the subject when you need to decide which foundational knowledge you want to learn and delve into.
Being proactive in creating learning opportunities will help you ensure that you create the best quality of education for yourself, regardless of whether your school's curriculum is good or not.
This semester, I implemented these ideas by becoming a teaching assistant and peer mentor to learn about the science of learning. This gives me a way to learn about this subject when my psychology department does not teach educational psychology. In some of my courses, I actively work with the teacher to design class activities and ask for the chance to present on topics that interest me (and relate to the course content). Most teachers are happy to accommodate these requests. And this activity-learning mindset helps me establish a teacher-student relationship, making me more interested in the course.
One drawback of this approach is that it may only be suitable for students who have a lot of foundational knowledge about the subject they are interested in. With such knowledge, students may be more capable of directing their own learning without supervision. For new and less knowledgeable students, I believe structured learning is still the best way to help them have the best learning experience by approaching knowledge systematically, from easy to difficult. If you are a newbie in the class, you can use the peer mentor or peer learning approach. You can find more experienced students to ask for help and make your own study group so you and your friend can help each other on the learning journey.
I would love to hear from you about your difficulties with the education system. What happened, and how it made you feel? And when you encounter those problems, how do you deal with them?
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