Bizcuits | Hello, Mr Chips

Leanda Lee

It’s easy to blame massification of tertiary education for the fact that educators have now to consider maintaining discipline in the classroom. In the past, with engaged, clever students, a lecturer need not have great teaching skills. Teaching was something scholars did on the side, and it was called lecturing. They would be able to throw the content out to a class of hundreds without consideration for form, delivery or designing classroom activity to engage students or maintain discipline. Those students already had highly honed learning skills, were generally interested in what they were doing and could learn something from even the most stultifying of lecturers. The students were aware it was competitive to even get a place in an institution; it was a privilege and they knew if they didn’t pass muster, they wouldn’t get through and out they’d go with their place readily taken up by someone more deserving. “High risk” students were not detected early in a process of rounds and rounds of formative assessment throughout a semester. Responsibility for learning and meeting requirements were put squarely on the students’ shoulders.
For scholars who themselves believe such education is a privilege, it often takes a long process of shock, denial and anger before they begrudgingly accept that universities look more like high schools than elite institutions of higher learning. Many academics resent having to spend an inordinate percentage of their time devising incentives and class plans to ensure students turn up, participate and submit assignments when that time could be better spent diving into that gorgeous world of academic discourse.
In response to a seminar in Singapore on e-learning games used to engage students in universities, a mainland Chinese early-career academic piped up with questions to the presenter, “Why do we have to entertain our students? Why do we have to make it fun? Isn’t learning enough of a reward?” That’s the problem with academic staff; they’re usually pretty enthusiastic about learning. They are curious – we have no cure for that. To this young academic, using games demeaned the learning and her own role in the process.
Few tertiary academics are taught how to teach: it is no coincidence they are called lecturers for they were never expected to be teachers and so many of us balk at the teacher label. But somewhere along the line and without our consent, the requirements of our profession changed. Often academic staff are the least knowledgeable about classroom strategies. Teaching is not an easy gig. It is a profession unto itself but for some reason tertiary institutions have taken it for granted that academic staff can pick up those skills to get the best from today’s all-so-easily distracted student.
Lecturing to business students tends to make life a little easier. Most business and management students have a goal to be managers one day, or that’s what they say. So when students arrive late to class without apologising, interrupt others, sleep at their desks, talk on social networks or slurp noodles, it is easy to question their raison d’être. I put to my students a question a brilliant manager-mentor asked of me decades ago when I turned up to work with a formidable infection the third day running: “If you can’t manage yourself, how do you expect to be able to manage others?” From that point on it is about coaching students in self-discipline and impression management: getting them job ready.
Fewer university students are now motivated by acquisition of pure knowledge – in any case, knowledge is not so rare these days, not as valuable a currency. Part of an academic’s job, the challenge, is to determine what the drivers are and then to make that connection in the minds of students between daily student activity and their ultimate goals. Find those incentives, reinforce that connection frequently, and classroom management becomes a little easier.