Pedagogy courses have a mixed reputation among physicists, and for once I don’t just mean “mixed” as a euphemism for “bad”. I’ve met people who found them very helpful, and I’ve been told that attending a Scandinavian pedagogy course looks really good on a CV. On the other hand, I’ve heard plenty of horror stories of classes that push a jumble of dogmatic requirements and faddish gimmicks, all based on research that if anything has more of a replication crisis going than psychology does.

With that reputation in mind, I went into the pedagogy course last week hopeful, but skeptical. In part, I wasn’t sure whether pedagogy was the kind of thing that could be taught. Each class is different, and so much of what makes a bad or good teacher seems to be due to experience, which one can’t get much of in a one-week course. I couldn’t imagine what facts a pedagogy course could tell me that would actually improve my teaching, and wouldn’t just be ill-justified dogma.

The answer, it turned out, would be precisely the message of the course. A pedagogy course that drills you in “pedagogy facts” would indeed be annoying. But one of those “pedagogy facts” is that teaching isn’t just drilling students in facts. And because this course practiced what it preached, it ended up much less annoying than I worried it would be.

There were hints of that dogmatic approach in the course materials, but only hints. An early slide had a stark quote calling pure lecturing irresponsible. The teacher immediately and awkwardly distanced himself from it, almost literally saying “well that is a thing someone could say”. Instead, most of the class was made up of example lessons and student discussions. We’d be assembled into groups to discuss something, then watch a lesson intended to show off a particular technique. Only then would we get a brief lecture about the technique, giving a name and some justification, before being thrown into yet more discussion about it.

In the terminology we were taught, this made the course dialogical rather than authoritative, and inductive rather than deductive. We learned by reflecting on examples rather than deriving general truths, and discussed various perspectives rather than learning one canonical one.

Did we learn anything from that, besides the terms?

One criticism of both dialogical and inductive approaches to teaching is that students can only get out what they put in. If you learn by discussing and solving examples by yourself, you’d expect the only things you’ll learn are things you already know.

We weren’t given the evidence to refute this criticism in general, and honestly I wouldn’t have trusted it if we had (see above: replication crisis). But in this context, that criticism does miss something. Yes, pretty much every method I learned in this course was something I could come up with on my own in the right situation. But I wouldn’t be thinking of the methods systematically. I’d notice a good idea for one lesson or another, but miss others because I wouldn’t be thinking of the ideas as part of a larger pattern. With the patterns in mind, with terms to “hook” the methods on to, I can be more aware of when opportunities come up. I don’t have to think of dialogical as better than authoritative, or inductive as better than deductive, in general. All I have to do is keep an eye out for when a dialogical or inductive approach might prove useful. And that’s something I feel genuinely better at after taking this course.

Beyond that core, we got some extremely topical tips about online teaching and way too many readings (I think the teachers overestimated how easy it is to read papers from a different discipline…and a “theory paper” in education is about as far from a “theory paper” in physics as you can get). At times the dialogue aspect felt a little too open, we heard “do what works for you” often enough that it felt like the teachers were apologizing for their own field. But overall, the course worked, and I expect to teach better going forward because of it.