Level 3 Teaching for Deep Learning

In an increasingly competitive world, obtaining qualifications at any cost has come to be considered more important than gaining deep knowledge. A focus on getting a task over with in minimum time and with lowest possible effort characterizes surface learning. The skills thus practiced are the lower-end cognitive skills and do not usually have the effect of changing one’s behaviour at the end of the process.

The motivations for deep learning stem from a self-perceived desire to know something for ones self. A deep approach to learning is necessarily intrinsically motivated and results more often in some change in the behaviour pattern of the learner concerned.

McGregor’s (1960) categorization of human trustworthiness in the context of the enterprise can apply to the teaching-learning climate in the classroom. Teachers operating on the basis of Theory X assume that students are inherently lazy, they will always try to cheat at exams, they will not attend lectures, and they won’t make an effort at learning. So, strict attendance criteria, careful monitoring of examinations, deterrent punishments all become the modus operandi of the teaching process. Theory Y teachers on the other hand assume that students do their best when given freedom to take control of their own learning. As such more opportunities for self-learning, take-home assessments, peer-evaluation are provided in order to make them flourish.

John Biggs’ (2003) classification of 3 levels of teacher focus helps to clarify the different attitudes most commonly encountered in the teaching-learning environment. In this classification, a Level 1 teacher focuses on what the student is. In other words, the teacher sees him or herself as the transmitter of knowledge in a constant kind of way and leaves it up to the students to catch or miss what was meant to be transmitted. If learning does not happen, the reasons usually attributed to it are the students’ low Z-scores, lack of motivation, bad school background, and other innate weaknesses. This is fundamentally a blame-the-student theory of learning and is similar to the Theory X view in organizations described before.

The Level 2 teacher focuses on what the teacher does to achieve good learning in students. The responsibility of ‘getting through’ to the students in this view rests largely on the teacher. Hence the focus is to find better ways of performance in order to achieve better results. Plenty of preparation, variations of technique, use of multimedia, and in general a good management strategy of the teaching process characterize this kind of learning environment. In short this is a blame-the-teacher model. The results achieved through these means however often are not satisfactory enough to justify the effort and soon the teacher could be discouraged with the limited effect they have on learners.

A Biggs Level 3 teacher concentrates on what the student does rather than what the teacher does or what the student is. Here teaching is seen as supporting learning. So, like a level 2 teacher, a variety of techniques would be employed typically in this case too, but each with a specific purpose of engaging the student in learning. In level 3 teaching the fundamental epistemological questions are rephrased as “what does it mean to understand content the way we want it to be?” and “what kind of teaching-learning activities must the student be exposed to in order to achieve such understanding?”.