In the April 30 1999 issue of CDTL Brief (Vol. 2 No. 3), Prof Chong Chi Tat raised a number of concerns about small group teaching in NUS that he argued had not been resolved. He also invited discussion. Despite the danger for an outsider to join this discussion, I do so partly because I believe that these issues are common to many academic cultures, including that in Britain, and partly because I have tried with some success to introduce accepted British solutions in many staff development workshops that I have conducted in Southeast Asia. So here are Prof Chong’s five issues and my reactions to them.

1. Asian culture: British students are not all that different from Asian ones in generally preferring to remain quiet.
2. Discipline dependent: True, it is generally easier to express views and opinions in the humanities. But in the sciences where answers to problems are often simply right or wrong, the processes of getting to the answers are often eminently discussable. How can a student arrive at an understanding of, say, the concept of limits in mathematics, except through discussion?
3. Student quality: Yes, even good students often do not have good reading habits. But do we as teachers encourage such habits?
4. Lecturers’ attitudes: How can lecturers encourage students to participate in discussions? How can we prevent becoming unpopular if we try to do this?
5. How can we overcome operational issues, like small teaching rooms and the need not to make teaching more expensive?

My approach to tackling these points constructively is based on the following theses:

1. If teachers are dissatisfied with the achievements of the majority of their students, then the fault must lie primarily with them and not with their students.
2. Teaching methods must be designed to achieve desired learning objectives.
3. Assessment must be such as to test for the achievement of these desired learning objectives.

The most common university teaching method consists of lecturing and associated teacher-dominated group work. This method is good for the deposition of knowledge in the students’ memory, from which it is retrieved in examinations; but if students are to learn with understanding, they must somehow make such knowledge their own. This is done through reflection and discussion, neither of which is encouraged by the traditional teaching methods. Perversely, what is required is for teachers to teach less, in order that students may learn more. Teachers must cease being preachers and become facilitators of the students’ learning. However, if they do this without changing their assessment methods to ones that devalue mere memory knowledge and encourage thinking and understanding, they will deservedly become unpopular with students because there is no greater crime in teaching than to teach towards one set of learning objectives and to assess for another. Nevertheless, university teachers have been doing this for a very long time.

But how do we facilitate reflective learning that leads to understanding?

1. Give students time to think within the lecture, which is not possible if the lecturer talks continuously. Such lecturers expect students to do their thinking after the lecture, but they then have to do it on the basis of their usually inadequate lecture notes. So I replace lectures by prepared learning materials and, if I do lecture, I make my lectures interactive through quizzes and buzz groups within the lecture.
2. Organise tutorless small groups, with teacher-initiated tasks. I usually break up a large group into a number of smaller ones, all in the same room, with the groups reporting their findings back to a plenary where I then discuss the outcomes. Or I give them projects to be completed in, say, a week or a term. Both methods are effective and cost efficient.
3. Avoid getting students discouraged. Thus, I try never to say that a student has got something wrong; instead, I ask the other students to discuss the point.
   All these measures encourage deeper learning, but they lead to less absorption of superficial knowledge. Hence,
4. Reduce the syllabus to manageable proportions. One can never in any case teach everything.
   

Getting students to talk in small groups, largely to each other but sometimes also to their teacher, is not something that can be achieved in isolation within a system that actively discourages such activity. What is required is a change of the whole teaching, learning and assessment system. Such facilitative teaching, which encourages students to ‘own’ their learning, can be uncomfortable for teachers. It is both harder and riskier than traditional teaching. But it is hugely worthwhile.