Dead Ideas in Teaching and Learning

Dead Ideas in Teach­ing and Learn­ing is a pod­cast host­ed by Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty’s CTL Exec­u­tive Direc­tor, Aman­da Irvin. Check out the URL to see all sea­sons list­ed, sum­maries, tran­scripts and top­ics! Dead ideas are per­sis­tent myths about teach­ing and learn­ing that instruc­tors believe and use! Check this great pod­cast series out. See more rec­om­mend­ed pod­casts on this page.

URL: https://ctl.columbia.edu/resources-and-technology/resources/podcast/

About: Our mis­sion is to encour­age instruc­tors, stu­dents, and lead­ers in high­er edu­ca­tion to reflect on what they believe about teach­ing and learn­ing. In each episode, guests are invit­ed to share their dis­cov­er­ies of “dead ideas”—ideas that are not true but that are often wide­ly believed and embed­ded in the ped­a­gog­i­cal choic­es we make. In Sea­son 9, we are explor­ing the dead idea that the world “out­side” of the class­room doesn’t or shouldn’t influ­ence the world “inside” the classroom—that stu­dents are exclu­sive­ly intel­lec­tu­al beings when they step across the thresh­old (phys­i­cal or vir­tu­al) of the class­room space.

Past con­ver­sa­tions have focused on dead ideas in top­ics such as grad­ing, teach­ing with tech­nol­o­gy, stu­dent moti­va­tion, assess­ment, and teach­ing and learn­ing sys­tems in the acad­e­my and how they need to be changed. Con­ver­sa­tions have also explored dead ideas exposed by the move to remote teach­ing due to the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. We hope these rad­i­cal­ly hon­est con­ver­sa­tions will inspire light­bulb moments for our lis­ten­ers as they seek to under­stand their own teach­ing and learn­ing. To lis­ten to an audio trail­er, click here.

The theme orig­i­nates from the arti­cle “The Tyran­ny of Dead Ideas in Teach­ing and Learn­ing” (The Soci­o­log­i­cal Quar­ter­ly, 2011) by Diane L. Pike, Pro­fes­sor of Soci­ol­o­gy at Augs­burg Uni­ver­si­ty. Pike writes, “Ideas are dead because they are no longer cor­rect, if they ever were. They are tyran­ny because we cling to them despite the evidence…Clinging to dead ideas about teach­ing and learn­ing lim­its our prac­tice as pro­fes­sors. The result­ing tyran­ny means we fail to edu­cate our stu­dents as effec­tive­ly as we might…The good news is that learned behav­iors, soci­o­log­i­cal­ly informed reflec­tion, and the appli­ca­tion of the research in the schol­ar­ship of teach­ing and learn­ing can lib­er­ate us and improve the expe­ri­ences of teach­ers and learn­ers alike.”