Can you tell us a bit more about that collaborative learning? What it is, because it sort of changes the role of the teacher doesn't it? Cliche these days is that we're moving from the sage on the stage, the old an idea of the teacher centered learning where it was all about how good your performance was to a kind of a manager of the social event that while I still lecture, that's an important tool, I would never go through an entire class, very rarely, simply lecturing. Because the students can't stay focused or anyone stay focused there's nothing wrong with them. The human brain has trouble doing the same thing for more than 15 or 20 minutes. But beyond that, they're actively reproducing the learning in class. It’s going to mean that they'll keep it.

So I divide all my classes into permanent learning teams. I create a diverse group.

You mix them up?

I mix them up. I try to find students that have different levels of background and experience, put them together, and then part of their grade comes from that activity. And it's gotten much easier. At first you had to sell it to the students. Now the students are so accustomed to it they've been doing it since lower levels and so they do it automatically. And some of them don't like it, but some of them don't like anything. It's interesting to me how faculty tend to suddenly care about students reactions to techniques when they don't like them themselves. You know we don't say many students don't like lecturing, so we won't lecture.

No that's true.

So I thought it to be very helpful. I remember years ago I was talking to a friend about how tiring my classes were, with a big class, you know 120-30 students, going for an hour and 10-15 minutes. The internal energy was enormous. I would come out of that class just exhausted, because I had to expend so much. I had to sort of concentrate on keeping their attention, keeping them all focused on me. I said it was such effort, and he looked and he said there must be a better way. He comes from a tradition that says that effort is work badly done. And so isn't there better way to do this? And I said oh no no we have to do it this way.

And then I discovered a whole series of techniques which it made teaching so much easier for me. I'm not exhausted after the class any longer because they're doing a lot of the work. That’s what one of my close colleagues says when she goes to visit a class. The question she asks is who's doing the work because they're doing the learning. If I'm doing all the work up in front of them, and they're sitting there without any kind of response, they're not going to probably remember very much of what's happening. And it wears me out.

Yes, so collaborative learning is one of the methods that you use the kind of engage students. Are there any other methods that you found to be useful?

On my campus we have a very good community of scholars and from that we've developed a whole method that we call it decoding the disciplines for understanding what it is that we want to teach students that we don't know that we want to teach them. Any any expert in a field who's been doing a job for years, he's been trained for years, has all sorts of tacit implicit knowledge, all sorts of steps that you do. I think about it a lot like artificial intelligence, because initially it was assumed that tasks like playing chess would be very very hard to program into computers. They're relatively easy. Walking across a room, recognizing a face, recognizing a voice, doing things that humans learn by the age of three is extremely difficult. I think it's that way in most fields, that history is a field has all sorts of things we do so fast and so automatically that we don't know that we do them. In fact we need to do that that way it's like driving a car you don't want to be thinking about everything you do. You have a lot of automatic processes. And then we go into the classroom, and we teach the upper levels of that processing because the lower levels are invisible. And what we're trying to do is to take that apart, to deconstruct our own knowledge, and go back and see what steps there are that we're not teaching and see whether the students need to have those taught or whether it's automatic for them. The other difficulty is it the people in the field are using it in the field, because they're good at it. And so it takes effort to understand why someone isn't good at it. So we've got a team working on this. And it's been extremely helpful to have that feedback from other people and in that processing.

So I have a vision there of people actually observing and trying to break down what's actually happening. Is that right? Trying to articulate or write down what's actually happening? Okay and so you could use, the word you use is decode, it says can actually reflect on what's actually happening?

That's right.

Okay, now it's interesting, because did you hear Graham Gibbs yesterday?

Yes.

And he talked a little bit about when everything was described sometimes the learning goes down. What's your view on that?

There's some indication that setting goals with too much detail can actually get in the way of instruction. That may well be true. But we're doing something a little bit different. Right, we're trying to figure out what it is that we have to teach which is a little different than setting a goal because we try to stay flexible. In a particular class, you may not need to teach a lot of these things. So we get information early on as to what the students can do and what they can't do. So one of the most important things about teaching that I used to not realize at all and that's that we need constant information flow. The traditional form of standing up in front of a class and lecturing at them up means that there’s a one-way flow of information. The only information coming back is a few students looking interested or looking bored. And there's a real tendency to pick the wrong students to look at, because their giving different kinds of responses. And someone can look very interested and not be interested in a thing you're saying. They're just nice people, and they like to smile or something like that. So in class I want to get information back. Was this clear? Was this not clear? So I want small scale assignments. I want them to do group work. I want to be able to walk around and listen to the group's talking, so that I know what's happening. So if you get that kind of feedback constantly I don't think that the planning is a problem, because you don't have a fixed plan that you're going to do this no matter what. What you have is a general strategy. There’s a wonderful quote from President Eisenhower of all people, I guess it was General Eisenhower at the time, where he said that planning is absolutely essential and always irrelevant. I think that is a key part of teaching. You have to plan. You have to have an idea what you're going to do, and then when you go in there it's not what you expected, and you have to adjust. But the planning allows you to make the adjusting. If the planning becomes a rigid form that you have to follow and you can't change then you've got a problem.