Plazas can reveal the secret to better teaching

“My best lesson ever didn’t happen in a classroom. It happened in a dusty storage space filled with broken projectors and outdated globes. My teacher handed me a box of junk and said, ”Figure out how long it takes for things to fall.” No formula. No textbook. No ”right” answer. I built a contraption: a sheet of paper taped to a spinning LP record, with a pencil by the needle. I’d drop an object from a height at the same time as I dropped the needle. When the object hit the needle arm, it would jerk the pencil, creating a jag in the line on the spinning paper. From the record player’s 33.3 RPM, I could then calculate the fall time. It was messy, flawed, and (in my humble sixth-grade opinion) absolutely brilliant. That day, my belief in my own abilities soared. We all have some memory like this. A teacher who didn’t just deliver facts, but who made us feel capable. Who saw our potential before we saw it ourselves. Who challenged us to grow, and who – in the way we all tell our own version of the same story – set us on the path that ultimately led to who we are today. A few decades before my experience, William H. Whyte set up a camera by Seagram Plaza in New York City and filmed people for hours on end. He watched where they sat, where they stood, where they lingered. He had noticed that some plazas teemed with chaotic, messy life, while others, despite prime locations, were abandoned and unloved. In his documentary The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces , he chronicled these contrasts, building a bottom-up understanding of why some places appeal to us more than others. Whyte was working against a backdrop of complex theories and lofty manifestos. These promised urban regeneration, but their ”perfect” designs often translated into dead spaces that people instinctively avoided. Whyte’s insight was that we didn’t need more theories, or more precise measurements of trivial details, but a return to the basics: urban planning based on what actually worked. For plazas, this was a combination of things like sun, water, greenery, and food, alongside seating that let people engage in one of our favorite pastimes: observing others. At this point you might be wondering what stories about great teaching have to do with successful urban planning. The answer is simple: in both cases, we all know it as soon as we see it. Some teaching just is great, much like some plazas just draw us in. We might not be able to explain the theory behind it, but we feel the truth in our gut. The fundamental purpose of all pedagogy research is, of course, to establish what makes for good teaching. Which makes it all the more frustrating to witness recurrent fruitless debates between qualitative and quantitative views of the topic. Like the current one convulsing Sweden, after a scathing report from the Swedish National Audit Office essentially stated that Swedish schooling is not based on a scientific foundation and proven experience: some defend the need for subjective descriptions, others request more hard data. Of course both sides are correct. And both are missing the point. Because the truth is we don’t need more complex theories or lofty manifestos about the nature of pedagogy. Just like we don’t need more precise measurements of trivial details in the classroom. What we need is a return to the basics. What we need is pedagogy researchers who go out and observe. Who spend countless hours watching the teachers whose students lean in, whose questions spark curiosity, whose lectures stick. Who help us build a bottom-up understanding of why some teaching just is so much better. As a student , I immediately recognize good teaching. But as a teacher, trying to engineer it for my students, I’m at a bit of a loss as to how to make it consistently happen. All I know is that the answers don’t seem to be found in existing theories and measurements. Instead, I suspect they’re hiding somewhere in a box of junk. Oskar MacGregor Senior Lecturer in Informatics Inlägget Plazas can reveal the secret to better teaching dök först upp på Universitetsläraren .

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