The EdTech Revolution Has Failed

The teaching method I find best is a teacher explaining and writing with chalk on the blackboard, and the students taking handwritten notes on paper, asking whenever something is not clear. In other words, the most boring classical setup possible. Of course all the nuances and little details make all the difference: board picture, structure, teacher personality, pacing, choice of topic, interaction, motivation, excitement, etc.. It is not guaranteed to work, but as a format it is workable, and I found nothing so far that is better either as a student (long time ago) or as a prof at a top university (for some time now).

A distant second is the format we used during COVID: writing with a tablet using xournal, and streaming it via zoom (loosely like Khan academy). This is of course only my personal experience/opinion, but also informed by vast amounts of student feedback.

EDIT: I agree with the different perspectives from the responses, and should have qualified that I meant it for subjects one typically learns at a university, like calculus or linear algebra. One-on-one tutoring, self-learning can work even better or complement the above and skills, e.g. playing a musical instrument should be approached totally differently.

I find chalk on a blackboard one of the worst ways to learn. This isn't 1890 anymore. Much better are more modern prepared lectures with much more complex and interesting slides than what a teacher can draw with chalk in the time of a class, and with a lot more detail and scale with the magic of a modern projector. this also lets the notes and videos be reviewable before and after the fact. Very helpful. Hell even overhead projectors were a lot better than most chalk on board classes I went to pre electricity.

Beyond that, I find I learn infinitely better by doing than by being lectured to. By being challenged by a set of problems that grow over time.

Beyond that tutoring blows lectures out of the water. I was failing calc e in normal semester, I dropped. My moms bit the bullet and bought me 3 weeks of tutoring over the summer (much shorter semester). I then aced summer calc 3 which is generally much harder. It was amazing how well me being able to guide the lesson to where I was having trouble versus the lecturer keeping on track worked for me. I've learned this lesson as a mentor as well, teaching is for the student, not the teacher.

tl;dr what works for you sucks for me, don't tell me how I learn.

So tech bros have become experts in pedagogy.

What if a teacher starts telling what the best way to write software for a large codebase that 1000s of engineer contribute to is, based on their experience of writing ten lines of code to some toy problem that teacher once faced.

Think about it. That’s what you just did here. The better thing to do is state your experience as your experience and leave opining on optimal teaching pedagogy to those best equipped to study and understand it, which sure is as well isn’t you

this is all my opinion and what works for me... sorry if that wasn't explicitly stated at the top

That part was clear. It was when you started opining on “what’s better” that I felt you stepped way way out of your area of expertise. You really have no grounds to say what’s better

I have 100% grounds to say what's been better for me over the 30 or so years of school I've taken, I'm sorry if you're reading more into what I'm saying than what I'm saying.

Just like I'll say that spaced repetition seems like a good theory that I'm having trouble (with adhd) putting into practice esp while taking classes and holding down a job. Or that I liked the approach the class took during lectures by talking with a small peer group, but could see that it didn't work for many shy people and seemed to take a lot of lecture time. Overall they were interesting and I'd try them again.

These are my own observations I am not professing to be an expert in education.