The impact of innovations in teaching

When we go to education conferences or write educational blogs about some latest innovation, we are usually speaking to an open-minded, generally accepting audience. Then we go back to our departments and proclaim the innovation and its benefits to our colleagues, and it can be frustrating when the response is a polite dismissal. And so we stop proclaiming, secure in the knowledge that an innovation is beneficial to our teaching. We stop talking to the people we want to convince, but continue talking to the people who attend the conferences and read the blogs.

In my darker moments I wonder about the benefits of all these different teaching innovations. I would love to get an enormous grant to address the research question: “does throwing oranges at an audience increase their attention span and hence enhance their learning?” I’d vary the rate of orange flow and garner some student comments on the improved attention and publish it in a prestigious journal. It’s a novel method and I know it works, so I’d want to make sure the journal article conveys this, implicitly at least.