There is a new paradigm in teaching and learning. Let's first have a look about the teaching.
It's not the teaching, it's the learning!
Since the nineties, studies on teaching styles
have broadly categorized teaching
in three educational approaches.
At one extreme, we have teachers who are centered
on transmitting their knowledge.
They think in terms of how
much time they have to deliver their knowledge.
Their main concern is about covering all the
required subjects in their field in order
to reach the expected learning outcomes.
I am not saying that this right or wrong,
but from what I’ve observed as
an educational developer, for the last fifteen years, this approach often engenders a sort of
“survival attitude” for new faculty, who have to put all their energy into their teaching
and cannot focus on the students’ learning perspective.
This approach may evolve to the next one,
in the centre of this scheme,
which focuses on organization.
How can I add activities
to my teaching plan
to force students to become
active in the classroom?
How can I engage them, so that they cannot
stay passive during my course?
Has it ever happened to you to attend a workshop
in which lots of activities were expected,
but in the end nothing much is left?
In a way, this is a transformational teaching
style, which hopefully leads the teacher
to the third possibility.
In the third category, teachers don’t focus
on transmitting knowledge or organizing activities
in the classroom.
Instead, they find ways to make sure that
learning happens.
These teachers ask themselves questions such
as “How can I check that my students are
learning what they are supposed to learn in
my class?” or “How will we evaluate and
assess their learning together?”
With this approach, a teacher who observes
that the students are lost after 15 minutes
will stop and try to find other ways to make
sure the learning happens.
Some similar studies, such as those conducted
by John Biggs, have been done to observe
students’ learning styles.
Here again, we can roughly make a distinction
between three categories of learning:
surface learning, strategic learning and deep learning.
At one extreme we have surface learning: it's mainly observed among students who tend
to minimize effort and personal investment or among students who don’t know
how to learn in any other way.
Indeed, this type of learning may be the result
of the student’s belief that this is
how learning happens.
Such students’ main objective is being able
to regurgitate the material through rote learning,
thinking that this is what is expected by
their professor!
Strategic learning is mainly observed
among students
who don't necessarily give meaning to 
their learning path.
Their main objective is above all to be successful,
even if passing exams implies adopting
a surface learning approach.
Deep learning, at the other hand,  is mainly observed among students who are motivated
and who try to give meaning to their learning path.
They aim at not only passing exams but also
gaining personal and intellectual developments!
In today’s rapidly changing world, the ability
to acquire deep knowledge and skills
is more important than compiling a static knowledge.
As faculty, our task, or even our jury,  is also to teach our
students how to learn, how to become efficient
in their learning and how to become 
self-regulated learners.
