Teaching Tip: Why students resist

June 23, 2015

You read an article or hear a story that inspires you to work a new type of assignment into your course. You decide on an idea and think your students will respond well to it. You spend hours researching and outlining your new exercise. You anticipate its implementation with excitement and hope. The day comes. You ask your students to follow the guidelines of the new exercise and they stare at you blankly in a face-to-face course, or instigate radio silence in an online course. What went wrong?

It may not be a matter of what’s “wrong.” Keep in mind that introducing new methods into a learning atmosphere in which students may have grown accustomed to passive, individual learning could take a while. Student resistance can exhibit in a number of ways:

Reluctant compliance: Students comply, but unwillingly

(Unproductive) disruption: Students are noisy, or they clown around

Prioritizing: Students consider your class less important than others, and treat it accordingly

Read the full Teaching Tip for more resistance behaviors.

These, of course, are not the only ways in which students resist. The reasons for any type of resistance can be complicated and have little to nothing to do with you or your specific exercise.

However, there are a few measures you can take to elicit the best possible response from students. Students have cited the following instructor behaviors as reasons for resistance. The instructor:

Does not show up for class or cancels class without notification.

Is not an enthusiastic lecturer, speaks in a monotone, rambles, is boring, repeats too much and/or uses no variety in lectures.

Does not encourage students to ask questions, does not answer questions or recognize raised hands and/or seems put out when asked to explain or repeat anything.

While seasoned instructors have grown adept at sifting useful critique from superficial, possibly vengeful complaining, it is still useful to take a step back and examine your teaching style holistically rather than focusing on one failed exercise.

Read the full Teaching Tip on iTeachU.

Teaching Tip by Brooke Sheridan, UAF eLearning instructional designer