“What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.”
“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I remember, involve me and I learn.”
These phrases are inspired by a passage written by the Confucian philosopher Xunzi (Xun Kuang), and they are well-known within education. They emphasize the importance of a student’s engaged participation in their own education. Rather than simply watching someone else do something or listening to someone else explain something, practicing by doing is the most effective means of understanding. The relevancy of these ideas to education is clear. A goal of an educator is that, by the end of a course, their students have internalized and understood the material. Moreover, the goal is that the student can apply that understanding or those skills beyond the course. If these are the goals of educators, then it seems worthwhile to implement these ideas in one’s teaching.
When developing my own teaching philosophy, I have reflected on my own personal experiences as a student in the classroom. From the student perspective, I have always preferred classes which organically fostered student engagement. This level of engagement goes beyond sitting in my seat and raising my hand to answer questions. Over the years, my peers have expressed similar preferences as well. I have always found lectures to be more beneficial to my understanding when student participation was essential and expected. Therefore, these experiences have informed my approach to teaching when it came time to identify my teaching philosophy as an educator.
During my undergraduate and graduate careers, I have had the opportunity to be an educator (Supplemental Instruction Leader and Teaching Assistant respectively). Since then, I have consistently reflected upon my own teaching philosophy, especially as a teaching assistant beginning my career in higher education. As both a student and educator, I have reaped and seen reaped the benefits of a classroom that emphasizes meaningful student engagement in course instruction. Given the student success that has resulted from approaches that implement these ideas into their framework, I think it is important to explore methods of applying them in the classroom. I am not alone in this conclusion based off of my personal experiences. The effectiveness of approaches that encourage meaningful student engagement is supported by various studies in education. Therefore, I want to share a particular approach here which places meaningful student engagement at the center of instruction. I have called this the See-Do-Teach approach, and over the past few years, I have refined and continue to refine this approach. My hope is that sharing these experiences provides an opportunity for others to brainstorm applications of these ideas in their own lectures and courses for the benefit of their students.
“See-Do-Teach”
Reflecting upon my experiences as the student and the educator, I explored an approach that focuses on meaningful student engagement within the lecture. The See-Do-Teach approach combines visual, auditory, and kinesthetic forms of engagement. In addition, this approach also implements scaffolding by increasing the complexity and difficulty of material over time while simultaneously building off previous material.
In the past academic year, I was a teaching assistant for a course called Principles of Reasoning at Ohio University. This course focuses on formal and quantitative reasoning. The course varies depending on the professor, but it always includes propositional logic, some amount of either inductive or categorical logic, and additional subjects related to reasoning such as moral reasoning, psychology of reasoning, informal fallacies, etc. In my weekly discussion section, I adopted the See-Do-Teach approach in most of my lectures.
In both semesters, there came a time for students to learn proofs in propositional logic. First, I walked through the first proof on the board both writing and narrating my approach to the question and my reasoning. This is the See portion of the approach (I describe the use of only one question here. Depending on the students’ level of understanding at the beginning of the lecture, more of these types of problems may be necessary). This portion is, more or less, already in full bloom in logic courses. The See step helps to lay the foundation for the students, and this is important prior to any expectations of the student to demonstrate their understanding.
Next, the Do portion of the approach adds the kinesthetic form of involvement. I have found that this portion can be facilitated in a variety of ways, but I have found a combination of the following two different ways to be successful. In this portion, the professor’s level of assistance can vary depending on the material and proficiency of the students. (1) Group work; students work on the question together in groups. Once they feel confident in their answer, they check-in with the professor. In a lecture on proofs, this would mean the students complete a proof in the group and check their solution with me or sometimes with another group of their peers. (2) Alone and compare; students check their understanding by attempting to complete the question themselves (free to ask questions if they wish), and then they compare their answers with another student(s). This allows students to complete a self-assessment of their understanding of the material while also allowing students to check their work with a peer rather than the professor. In the past, students have reported to me that it is far less intimidating to check with their peers first. They have also reported that it boosts their level of confidence in their answer if they have checked their answer with a peer prior to sharing their answer out loud to the class or with the professor. Within this portion, students are now hearing explanations of the material from their peers in other words different than the professors, and the students now must justify their own approach based on their understanding. Additionally, the component of scaffolding comes into play here. I tend to make these problems more challenging than the See portion to prepare them for the level of complexity expected on assessments. Students rely on their understanding of previous, simpler questions to approach more challenging versions of the material.
Finally, the third portion is the most important and beneficial to the students in my opinion. The Teach portion, at its extreme, places the students in the role of the educator and the educator in the role of the student. This portion almost always involves an informal “presentation.” For this section, I place students in groups to limit the intimidation factor of speaking to the class. Students either write their solution on the board and explain it to the class, or, in a non-problem-based course, the group would lead the discussion of the question or passage being discussed. Continuing to adopt the method of scaffolding, these questions are the hardest or most complex. They are at the level of assessment difficulty or slightly more challenging. The students can now approach more complicated or difficult problems that may have seemed too difficult or daunting at the beginning of the class. This is the reasoning behind applying scaffolding within the See-Do-Teach approach. Additionally, as I now place myself in the role of the student, I would play up the role of the student depending on the group’s level of understanding: “Why can I not use modus ponens?”, “Why does disjunctive syllogism apply here?”. Although seemingly simple questions, the ability of the students to explain the question and solution in their own words and answer questions about the material demonstrates an internalization of the material and a level of understanding beyond “I saw it in the textbook. The textbook said X.” Aside from student success, an advantage of this approach is its adaptability and flexibility. The See, Do, and Teach portions can be stretched across an entire semester or over one lecture. The amount of time spent within the See, Do, and Teach portions of the approach can vary based on the material to be covered and the students’ level of understanding coming into the lecture.
Why adopt these ideas in the classroom?
Student retention tends to increase with repeated and meaningful exposure to the material. By meaningful, I mean active (reflecting and processing what is perceived) engagement as opposed to passive. Even though someone can engage passively and actively with visual, auditory, and kinesthetic forms of instruction, it is far easier to “zone out” with visual or auditory instruction as opposed to kinesthetic forms (doing the thing itself).
In my experience, the success of students has been evident in both class performance as well as based on student feedback. While working as a Supplemental Instruction Leader at my undergraduate university for Principles of Chemistry and Organic Chemistry and as a teaching assistant for Principles of Reasoning as a graduate student, I have had students report that they have left with a stronger understanding of the material than before they came to lecture. They felt confident in their ability to approach the problems even if their execution was still somewhat incorrect or mistaken. Some said that this eliminated some discouragement and frustration with learning the material. In less problem-based lectures, students felt that the approach to conversation built up their confidence when it came to speaking in the classroom. By the end of most of the courses, students reported that they felt not only more confident in their understanding of the ideas, but also more confident to share their answers, thoughts, and opinions.
Aside from its application in problem-based courses like a logic course, the See-Do-Teach approach can be applied in a more reading-heavy, conversational course too. Take, for example, a hypothetical course on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Assuming in all these cases that you have read the passage, you could watch the professor annotate and highlight key passages of the text. You could listen to the professor talk about the key concepts from these passages. Or, you can talk among your peers and the professor about the text and your understanding of the passages. Which scenario do you think would better equip you to explain the ideas from the passages in your own words after the class? I am inclined to think the last scenario. Why? Because you engaged more with your own ideas and the ideas in the passage. You had to actively engage with the material while reading it to make some sense of it, attempt to explain the passage and your thoughts about the passage in your own words, as well as listen to and reflect on the responses of your classmates. Regardless of if your understanding was correct or erroneous, you had to involve yourself in a discussion of the passage which required you to be able to explain the concept in your own words. This is an important skill not only within philosophy. I had a mentor of mine always emphasize the importance of using your own words to demonstrate your understanding. If you can’t explain it in your own words, then you don’t really have any understanding at all of what you learned.
For me personally, when I am teaching, I want to share the material in a way that interests and engages them. Ensuring their understanding has a two-fold purpose: they can achieve a certain level of performance in the class, but more importantly, it allows the students to take the knowledge they have gained in the course beyond the classroom. I consider this especially important with a course such as Principles of Reasoning, a class focused on logical reasoning and argument. What the students have the opportunity to do themselves, they understand better, and when the educator involves the student in the development of their own understanding of the material, they learn.
Ashley Labodda
Ashley Labodda is a M.A. student in philosophy at Ohio University. Her interests include moral philosophy, bioethics, and philosophy of science. Ashley is currently working on an essay concerning the requirement of consent for postmortem organ donation, and on her master’s thesis which will focus broadly on the value and significance of altruism. In conjunction with her passion for teaching, Ashley is also interested in pedagogical research on learning theory and different teaching modalities.
