In a challenge to the dominant pedagogical paradigm of active learning, Angelo Pirrone champions the power of the sage on the stage

Someone dear to me once told me that the best teacher they had at university was a deaf professor who would enter the classroom, close his eyes, speak for an hour without any interruption, and then leave. There were no slides, group discussions, arts-based pedagogy, simulations, game-based learning or object-based learning; none of these – just a speaker and an audience, as didactic a form of teaching and learning as it gets. He was, we could say, the personification of non-constructive alignment.

These professors were our anti-performativity anarchic heroes and they were, for the most part, improvising with just some basic structure in the background.

I also remember having a few teachers who were a bit eccentric according to current standards on how to conduct teaching activities. Their lectures were a unique (often pleasantly odd) mixture of anecdotes, humour and big questions, and they did not follow a predefined structure. Despite this, these teachers were highly regarded as the best teachers we had, and my peers and I looked forward to their lessons. I remember that, in one case, when the module finished, the teacher received a standing ovation. Their teaching had a profound impact on me, both personally and academically. These professors were our anti-performativity anarchic heroes and they were, for the most part, improvising with just some basic structure in the background. And when I write ‘improvising’ I don’t mean to say that they had no idea what they were doing; no, they were improvising as a jazz artist does while leaving the audience in awe. A type of knowledge and understanding was passed down from the teacher to the students – they were teaching, we were listening and learning. Something they all had in common was being elderly; most of them were emeritus professors. Maybe because of their age and prestige, no one in the department dared to ask them to conform to the rather boring, slides-based, we-do-the-content-of-the-book type of learning. Moreover, the evaluation of their teaching (through feedback reports and similar tools) was spotless. As we students were extremely supportive of their teaching style, it would have been rather counterproductive to ask them to teach differently. Something else they had in common was that they were very knowledgeable, articulate and confident; that is, they were excellent speakers and storytellers.

Teaching as a transfer of knowledge

Overall, based on my personal (anecdotal) experience and the impact those teachers had on me, I believe that didactic teaching should be given more prominence in contemporary higher education – I also like to believe that many of my peers would agree based on similar experiences. In particular, I think that both the social constructivist and didactic methods should have a common place in contemporary teaching and learning.

Most of the discussion on teaching and learning revolves around a specific constructivist view on teaching; students construct meaning from what they do to learn. In contrast, teaching as transfer of knowledge from a teacher to a student is regarded as an antiquated concept of the past in the light of more recent theories in which there’s no teacher, but rather a facilitator. I wonder whether, according to this view, there was no learning before the advent of constructive alignment?

The constructivist view has its own merits, it can be applied to many classroom scenarios, and it has opened interesting new ways of teaching and understanding teaching. However, I would say that this view greatly underestimates the importance that a teacher, here meant as teacher and not facilitator, can have in transferring knowledge in a unidirectional fashion. Recognising the importance of didactic teaching may be problematic for popular, critical views on teaching and learning and hard to reconcile from many political/ideological perspectives that drive the discourse about teaching and learning. For instance, the stereotype I described plays into the trope of the grey-haired, male professor. However, that is hardly a necessary requirement for didactic teaching, but rather a consequence of well-known inequalities and inequities in academia that have no relation with the type of teaching and learning employed.

In my experience as a student I have learned very little from anything other than didactic methods.

Furthermore, didactic teaching should be given more prominence in the way teachers are trained. Given that being a decent teacher means also being a capable speaker, one would expect that future teachers are trained in disciplines such as rhetoric or logic – which, incidentally, is the training that ‘speakers’ (teachers, lawyers, politicians, leaders etc) would have had in antiquity. Unfortunately, those ‘hard’ skills seem absent from any teacher’s training course, in favour of endless reflections on teaching and learning, and the focus on more ‘creative’ learning methodologies. While it is common practice to challenge didactic methods, claims regarding the effectiveness of more ‘creative’ methodologies seem universally accepted uncritically. Again, this is just my personal anecdotal opinion (biased and unsophisticated), but in my experience as a student I have learned very little from anything other than didactic methods, independent study (such as reading books/articles), independent activities (for example, data analysis and messing around with various programs) and one-to-one supervision. Conversely, I have always been particularly unimpressed with creative methodologies, group discussions among peers and other such activities as effective teaching methods. Is it possible that different teaching methods are more or less suited to different students, depending on their personal characteristics? I believe this may be the case, but a more convincing answer to this question should come from future studies investigating correlations between students’ characteristics and effectiveness of different teaching methods.

Finally, one could argue that for every teacher who employed the didactic approach well, it’s likely that there’s another who employed it poorly. Provided that this applies to virtually any approach, in the sense that any form of teaching has poor performers, I would say that it remains to be seen if and how academia would benefit if more teachers were trained appropriately in didactic teaching. As of now, the success of didactic teaching is left to natural-born performers with little to no formal training.

Note: A version of this post first appeared on 14 March 2022 on the Contemporary Issues in Teaching and Learning Blog, part of the PGCertHE programme at the LSE.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ This post is opinion-based and does not reflect the views of the London School of Economics and Political Science or any of its constituent departments and divisions.    _____________________________________________________________________________________________ 

Main image: Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash