Why students want you to be strict, but administration do not

Research shows that strict teaching styles are more likely to favor students’ success, especially for vulnerable student populations. Privileged families can somehow mimic a school environment in home, and even hire qualified professionals to support child care, which sets students ready to explore open-ended, experiential, project-based classroom styles. Students with absent, abusive or neglectful families need to supply the home environment in a compassionate, yet highly structured environment. Highly-structured classroom environments support student success in a more inclusive manner than open-ended classroom styles.

The failure of the flipped-classroom

During the Internet revolution, information became readily available to everybody. By the 2000’s, when knowledge became readily available for free on the Web, many teachers asked themselves: then why should students keep coming to schools, if they can find information by themselves? In order to compete against Google, the response was: students can read everything in home, and come to the classroom to practice what they learned. This is the idea of the flipped classroom: students lecture themselves by reading info, and come to the classroom to enact that learning with discussions, experiments, real-life tasks, art and crafts, and projects.

The reality of all that is: the model assumes that 100% of students will read the material prior to coming to class. If even a couple of students do not read the material, the flipped classroom fails miserably at the hands of the instructor. Because in the current ideological environment, yes, everything is the instructor’s fault. The students who do not read will choose to miss class, and after multiple absences, will stop coming to class. The instructor feels the shame of not knowing what to do with the classroom. The flipped classroom leaves both the instructor and students with unfair feelings of shame and grudge.

You can force students read

The teacher needs to FORCE students do things, such as reading and writing. In the AI era, where students can access information on their own, they choose to come to College with one main purpose: have someone nag them into reading and doing things they don’t want. I know this first hand because my students often complained that I did not force them to read. They complained that I was too nice and too flexible in my student evaluations. I am sure teachers have been receiving those evaluations too. And students have a point here: they want you to be strict.

It is wrong to ASSUME that 100% students will read the material prior to coming to class. Lesson design based on that assumption is going to fail, AND is going to exclude some students. You can even do pop quizzes every class in order to force students read, and at least two students will fail the quiz because they did not read. And those two students who did not read are the main reason Colleges exist. Those decided to come to College so someone else made them read, but getting to that point is a longer process for some students.

The solution is still trying to make students read, but not designing lessons based on the assumption that all of them read. I would still do the traditional lecture. Students who read the material would benefit from your perspective on the reading, and that levels up students who did not read, or did an incomplete reading. That provides a common ground for all students to start a project with the information needed.

Lectures are fine

You were told lectures are bad, and you feel ashamed of doing lectures. That makes you feel in the Middle Ages of teaching (some professors may feel comfortable with being in the Middle Ages). But here’s the reality: lectures are antiques for a reason. They are antiques because they work! If you read Plato, you’ll see how the Socratic method works. Socrates’ supposed questions are so long that are, in fact, lectures. Socrates does a several pages-long question where the student respond only yes or not. So the Socratic question is not Socratic at all. It is just a lecture with lots of tag questions to expose disengaged students to public shame.

Lectures are good. The students want to hear your perspective, your story, your voice. They want to hear someone who did a Ph.D. talk about the topic they registered for. I know this because I also tried the experiential classroom where only students talk, and have them discover knowledge on their own, and I got negative evaluations saying: I want to hear you, professor. We came here to hear YOU, not to hear the voice of an ignorant classmate (yes, that’s how they view their classmates). I know my voice needs someone else’s voice in order to gain structure.

And in the classroom, whenever I tried to flip it, they looked disengaged in group work. Then whenever I talked for more than one minute, even informally to a certain group of classmates, everybody would keep quiet and started listening to me. That means: lectures are good. Add them some story telling, balance them out with group discussion, and real-life applications, and the students will be more engaged than ever.

The student’s complaint

Yes, that happens eventually. That one single student who did not measure up with the class standards tries to take the administrative shortcut into passing the course. Or this student is just trying to prove something to themselves, and they can harm you a lot with a complaint. The administration will make a big deal against you because, as I said in the title, the administration do not want students to read. They want higher education fail because upper upper administration told them to lead the College to failure. Upper upper administration offered them a position outside academia once College closes.

They are scared of the dangerous formula: vulnerable population + access to all kinds of information + critical thinking = revolution!!!

The online education failure

Research shows that students learn the same or even more through online, distant education. At one point administration wanted to move everything online: make education cheaper, do not pay for buildings, outsource teaching force, and still train the labor of the future. After the COVID experiment forced everybody into online education, a massive learning loss cost the educational industry millions of dollars.

If students learn the same in online environments, why the online experiment failed? Because only those who are already equipped to being independent learners succeed in online environments. And when independent learners are forced to being even more independent, they thrive!!! They may be independent for a variety of factors: their families provide adequate learning structures to guide their own learning journey, they have personality traits connected to autonomy and self-driven discipline, or they are well-established adults who know how support themselves. In my experience, it works well in graduate classes for the same reason.

…But those are only a small fraction of the population. Humans have thousands of years of evolution relying on the oral to pass down knowledge. Elders tell youngsters about the herbs of healing, or when to harvest crops. That only happens through verbal teachings. Oral communication is the most refined form of communication embedded in our DNA after years of evolution. Those who communicated orally with their elders had a greater chance to survive than those who did not.

The fraction of the population that thrive as independent learners may do even better with an online education. And we can anticipate these types of people will also do better during the AI revolution. However, sooner than later, the AI experiment will cost industry another fair of millions. As of right now, they think they will save themselves millions by replacing teachers with robots. This idea of saving those millions sets their eyes with the $$$ symbol. In preparing to get those savings, they are laying off teachers, closing institution and programs, and defunding research.

Why humans do not learn well through computers?

Because computers are treated as threats by our animal brains. Try a short experiment: you play a video to a kitty cat, and the cat will try to hunt it. You set the printer machine to print, and the cat will try to hunt it. My kitty cats wanted to hunt an athlete doing gymnastics on the Olympics. You set the vacuum machine to clean, the cat will not try to hunt it, they will escape and hide as if their lives depended on it. Your dogs start barking when they hear the telephone ringing. The animal brain processes computers as unknown predators, and will do what the kitty cats in my story: hunt it, or escape from it. The fiercer hunters (like the online successful learners) will be highly motivated to hunt it. But that will exclude a mass of population who will just keep escaping from it. Others will try to hunt it, get tired, hunt it, get tired, hunt it… That’s the scrolling through TikTok videos. They’re becoming like cats trying to hunt a laser light, leading to anxiety of unknown origing. The target will be constantly elusive. Students want you to provide comfort with your voice in the classroom. Yes, any voice. They may learn more during 10 minutes hearing you talking than 6 hours reading something on a sophisticated app.

Predictable environments provide a sense of safety

Stricter teaching styles tend to follow in-class stable routines: lecture, practice, short quiz, discussion. They also follow stable timelines along curriculum: three weeks class, essay, exam, three week class, essay, exam. Any type of stable routine sets the environment as safe. Quizzes and exams (instead of open-ended projects) provide a sense of simulated anger that students need to conquer in a safe environment.

Accountability matters

You let the students do as they please, they get confused. They think you do not care about them. Accountability includes: doing exams, earning grades, having deadlines, and recording attendance. In my opinion, however, there should be a pre-arranged system that allows from some flexibility, but within the same predictable environment. For example, if a student misses a deadline, then all students have one week longer to complete the work. If a student misses class occasionally for any reason (yes, students have difficult lives), they must do something to keep up with their learning. And even when a student misses too many classes for legitimate reasons, honesty involves telling them they must repeat the course.

I remember during a course where I was not forced to read Madame Bovary, and I still passed the course. Not having read Madame Bovary hunts me for life, and as I missed the College opportunity to read it, I won’t read it anyway. Passing a course without attendance will haunt the future professional with shame, hindering self-confidence to improve themselves into a earning more money.

The customer service model

Yes, you need to treat the student as a customer. They are customers!!! All students need to be treated with respect, kindness, and compassion. And they need to receive the product they paid for. Again, they paid to learn, and to earn a degree that proved their learning. There’s a bunch of independent learners and entrepreneurs that trusted their abilities to learn and succeed without going to College, and yes, they succeeded. Those who need someone else to tell them how to learn, those come to College, and expect to be told how to learn. They expect exams, quizzes, lectures, attendance points, and professorial things happening with professors. They are smart enough to realize that they are not receiving the product they paid for, even when they were able to graduate, and they won’t send their children to the College they attended. They get disappointed by easy As where the professor did not read their essays. They get extremely disappointed when their classmate who finished the essay with AI earned the same grade as them who bleed their soul into that essay.

Yes, the customer service model is necessary. Having student pass a course without effort is poor customer service, and they know it. It might solve a situation in the short term, but in the long term a mass of students will realize they are receiving a poor product. The administrator wants to be popular among students in order to get the next promotion, and will advocate for the easy passing grade against your policies. This is like a fast-food chain making money out of unhealthy food, and customers need to eat cheap, but at the same time experience some minimums in terms of quality. Eventually the same fast-food restaurant start offering salads, and take better care on how they source their ingredients.

The poor want to be well-educated too

This seems like obvious, but in depth, privileged administrators may forget that poor people want to have high-quality education and not just earned a degree. Some even prefer to move through the coursework slowly and take longer the finish their careers to ensure they are learning properly. Their families want well-educated children. Going back to the fast-food metaphor, poor people want to eat healthy food too, and they will try to do so. As any human being, the poor also wants tasty food even when not super healthy. The same happens with College students. Even when coming from low economic backgrounds, they are looking for the same high-quality education as their middle-class peers. They may enjoy easy courses that they can pass with no coming to class, but when all classes are like that, they are going to look elsewhere.

The future failure of AI-driven education

In the same way online education proved to be a blatant failure, the same will happen with AI-driven education. Soon students will WANT the instructor to catch and penalize their AI-generated essay. They will secretly feel glad that you enforced an anti AI policy. AI-professors will not deliver the education they expect. Signing into College is a socially-motivated decision. Attaining a degree is valuable as a social recognition of effort, knowledge, and skills. Having an AI replacing such accountability will deteriorate motivation. Sooner than later, it will become boring to students read AI-generated content, and produce AI-generated essays. Behind every cheating and misbehaving student there’s a student desperate for recognition. They are teasing the instructor in order to be noticed. Their cheating is a deep message they are conveying towards an instructor who’s losing the spark for education. And AI is another mask to that secret voice hungry for learning and dialogue.