<p>I definitely agree with @ThatOneWeirdGuy. Majority of the kids in china have far more pressure to succeed than the majority of kids in most other places. My friend moved from China while she was young, however she still visits yearly and catches up with old friends. She tells me horror stories of how parents threaten to disown their child if they don’t get into the best of the elite schools. I have never heard of an American child being disowned because of getting denied from Harvard (however I’m not denying that there is probably parents that do threaten it here - just not as prominent). </p>
<p>On a more personal note though, last year in honors precalc and trig, my teacher had it as a sorta “flipped” classroom. She gave us random YouTube videos to watch, then would have us do homework in class. I had a B- almost all year in that class (and before that class I’d only ever had 1 B, which was in Spanish 3). During “work time” my teacher would disappear from the room and the students would end up distracted and goofing off. This year for AP Calc AB, my teacher teaches at the board for half the class and then the second half of class he walks around and helps us while we work on our homework for the night. For me, that’s far more efficient and helpful - I have an A this year. </p>
<p>I don’t believe that having a teacher stand in front of the board and drone on about the topic is a good teaching method for many, especially the younger students, because people begin to zone out. But I don’t think having a self taught classroom is a good method for many either, purely because of distraction and, in my opinion, learning things through videos and textbooks is far more difficult than having a teacher talk to you about it (especially in advanced science classes, IMO). A little bit of both these teaching styles would probably be the best. </p>
<p>I think the group self-taught thing is really the way to go. Taking a cue from successful coaches in all sports, they all have in common that they just lay out general principles and materials, and let their athletes figure it out for themselves.</p>
<p>Seriously, I’m not surprised at this recommendation. I have never liked the combination of abdication of teacher responsibilty and the diffusion of effort that group learning leads to. It does lead to fewer “projects to grade”, and it also effectively obscures what the individual stages of progress of the kids are. </p>
<p>There have been studies in recent years that credit elementary/highschool “team learning” and “work groups” with the death of creativity among the U.S.'s new engineers.</p>
<p>Look up the percentage of kids in China who go to high school. It’s in the low single digits. And that’s what we are comparing ALL our kids to, their best and brightest.</p>
<p>I teach with Powerpoint slides and chalk and talk. In large classes, I don’t interact too much because we usually have more material than we have time to cover. In recitations, students do worksheets. In upper level classes, I try to have some kind of hands on activity, usually a worksheet, to break up the lecture.</p>
<p>I think mixing things up is important. And I think finding out early who is having trouble, and which kids are what types of learners, can be helpful. </p>
<p>As for the work world - you do realize that “group think” is a time-waster in that anyone below a manager, even senior tech people, will meet and brainstorm, BUT they will separate and work alone a lot of the time. On some occasions, there can be “mini-teams” of 2 or 3, but I have never heard of circumstances where even that is handled other than a few emails a day or chats. No one sits in a room and works together.</p>
<p>However, teaching kids to work together needs to be more active, and turn-based. Real-life is not turn-based, unless you want to go into fast food. We teach them the simple aspects of teamwork, not to fight, to listen to others, but we also have to educate them to be individual innovators.</p>
<p>Perhaps my point is that those dreaded “group projects” which are supposed to be “group” really are divvied up by kids into subprojects that they each do individually, or nothing gets done, by the time they get to HS anyway.</p>