THE ADAPTABLE CLASS – LIKE A GOOD SOUP – DEPENDS ON THE QUALITY OF IT’S INGREDIENTS

Everyone wants to develop a simple solution to defeat a complex problem they routinely face. Generally speaking, this requires a deep understanding of the problem at hand. But every so often someone wins the lottery and a difficult problem is solved without a deep understanding of underlying principles; think of Fermat’s last theorem, or Darcy’s Law. The desire to win the lottery in education has generated many ideas, most recently in response to newly available technological tools driven by computing hardware and software; think of ZOOM, niche software packages such as flow models, and platforms such as Excel, Matlab, Python and R. The challenge at hand is in the complexity of human communication how to leverage it for the purposes of meaningful learning. The complexity scales up when one also considers the fact that student populations can vary widely between universities, between programs within a single university, and even between years in a single course in a single program in a single university. Also, instructors teach multiple courses with different styles, drawing on their personal, individual strengths and experience. A simplifying factor in our favor is that instructors share many common goals for their students, for example they want their students to learn enough in a course to use the material in future classes and their careers.

Lottery-winning, bandwagon ideas can consume a lot of resources and attention causing many to be unsustainable in their advertised form. Nonetheless, combined with ideas that arise organically from the instructor, adapted to their preferred teaching style (playing to strengths), the following two ‘teaching ingredients’ of a successful class, can be realized, as illustrated with examples from classes taught in the hydrogeology program at the University of Kansas.

The first ingredient is to bring students by setting clear goals, being fair in evaluations and making the course ‘story’ easy to follow. The second ingredient is to deliver the material in an understandable way. Here, leveraging the advantages of technology can help. Just as fine ingredients are essential for a fine soup, adapting bandwagon ideas in service of ‘teaching ingredients’ in courses, will ensure a future ‘cadre of creative thinkers’, well informed on the basics of hydrologeology.