Go to an art museum and you will frequently see art students sitting in front of a painting with an easel making a copy of the work to learn their craft. Similarly, a common photo out of an NFL training camp is a line of quarterbacks dropping back in unison to pass in unison, each looking at the one ahead of him. The young quarterbacks are learning the proper steps by copying what they see from the veteran quarterback at the front.
With higher education steeped in the Bloom’s Taxonomy tradition that targets the applied and creative levels of learning—synthesizing and evaluating—over the lower levels of rote memorization, it is easy to forget that simple copying is one of the most important ways in which we learn. We learn to swing a hammer by watching someone else do it and copying that person.
Some people might object that simple copying only works with physical skills, not the mental capacities that are the goal of higher education. But copying plays a big part in acquiring mental skills as well. Watch a math class and you will see students copying the steps to doing problems that the instructor writes up on the board. Even in a humanity or social science class the instructor is often writing notes on the board that students are dutifully copying down in hopes that by studying them later they will learn the material.
What the instructor is doing in these cases is modeling good work. By demonstrating correct examples, students copy the examples to memory in hopes of eventually abstracting the underlying and unifying principles to apply to new examples. The art student is copying a particular painting but acquiring an understanding of brush strokes that will be applied to new paintings. Students in my medical ethics class do much the same, as we go through multiple case studies so that they can eventually learn the principles for solving cases.
But the problem is that higher education often creates too wide a gap between example and application, causing some students to have trouble crossing the chasm. I was guilty of that as a young instructor. When I taught philosophy courses with the intention of teaching critical thinking skills, I would go over the arguments of the great philosophers like Plato, and then ask students to write essays and papers with their own arguments. But often I found that their own examples failed to apply the fundamental principles of reasoning that I thought I was teaching.
Eventually, I learned that I needed to do more to model the work I expected from them as the outcome. Instead of just giving first year students an assignment to write a paper or essay, I would present the students with an exemplary example and go through it to demonstrate what it was that I wanted and what made it an exemplary work.
This principle of teaching via copying can be applied to a variety of types of course content. An art history instructor looking to teach students to identify the elements that define different art genres can go beyond having students simply watch a video about the genres. The instructor can make screencasts using images of different styles while describing and circling those elements on the video, and then provide student with electronic copies of the images that they can circle and annotate on their own computer as they watch the video. Just as it has been shown that students who hand write notes tend to remember material better than those who type their notes because the kinetic movement helps inscribe the material into their minds, physically copying the movements of the instructor in the video on their own computer can help students learn to see those elements in the future.
This exercise can easily be done using free screencasting software such as Screencast-o-matic and a tablet or touch screen computer. Students without access to that hardware can still use their mouse or touchpad to circle the elements of the photos on their own computer.
Copying can also help struggling students. When a student fails an essay assignment, instructors usually provide the F and the student moves forward without learning much. A better alternative would be to have the student learn what he or she should have done by simply typing out an exemplary example of the assignment submission. The instructor can make an image file of the example to avoid having the student just do a copy and paste—the student would need to type out the example on their own. Students who do poorly can be offered a chance to engage in this exercise for minimal credit, such as a C on the assignment. It might sound funny but having the student type out an exemplary example will help inscribe in their mind what such an example looks like, and I have seen the exercise improve student performance on future work.
Another option is to provide students with examples of exemplary work and have them rewrite the examples in their own words. I have again used this with students who struggle in my medical ethics courses. They are given a case report and asked to paraphrase it to recover partial credit for an assignment that they did poorly on. This is preferable to simply sending the student a good example, which I found usually does not improve performance much. Actually forcing the student to copy the example in paraphrased form teaches them the structure and writing that they need to succeed. It is almost like a coach having a player practice their free throws.
Another version of this exercise is to have students copy an exemplary example of an assignment submission and then explain in the margin how the example fulfills the assignment requirements. The student can point out that the introduction outlined what the essay was going to cover, that the body developed the position, etc. Here again the exercise inscribes the principles of good work into the student’s mind through example and reflection.
Video can be used as a variation of this exercise. The University of Vancouver medical school films students in mock patient encounters to teach them bedside manners. These videos can be shown to students who are asked to write down what the instructor did right or wrong. Those same students can also be asked to record an audio track of themselves speaking to the patient in ways that they believe to be correct or incorrect. They can even be asked to make videos of themselves speaking to hypothetical patients using a webcam or a friend filming them with a cell phone. They can watch these videos to see how their facial expressions amplify or undermine their message and get feedback on their performance from the instructor as well.
Often struggling students don’t know where to even start to improve their performance. As instructors, we can easily give up on them due to the distance between where they are and where they need to be. An instructor can help the student cross that gap, as well as improve their motivation, by simply having them copy models of good work, often with revisions or other development. It’s surprising how much students can learn by just copying.
