If Professor Keating Had to Teach Remotely

THE EDITORIAL BY RECTOR GIANMARIO VERONA WHICH INTRODUCES THE NEW ISSUE OF VIA SARFATTI 25, THE BOCCONI MAGAZINE

"It is precisely when you think you know something that you have to look at it from another perspective (..) Look around you! Dare to change. Look for new ways.” This is one of the many teachings that Professor John Keating (Robin Williams) imparts to his students in the film Dead Poets Society.

In this year of distance learning as a professor and as a parent I have repeatedly thought about what Professor Keating would do or say to his students about Zoom and how they would react.

The relationship that is created between teacher and student is part of the learning process, a fundamental part that can influence choices and fields of interests (the same thing happens in the working world between leaders and their co-workers). What student hasn’t had the experience of saying that they like a certain subject because of the way the teacher explains it?

The problem of online teaching is not the means itself but the ability to use it and integrate it into the teacher-student relationship. Returning to Keating's words, for years as teachers and students we believed we knew how to teach and how to learn. Now that conditions have changed, it is time to look around us and find a new path.

We already know that the new path does not imply the abandonment of the old one at all. Physical classrooms will not disappear but rather will be enhanced and made free and more suitable for dialogue and exchange between professor and students and among students.
Today, you could say we are in the middle ground, laying the foundations for an epochal change. We are pioneers, builders of a new paradigm. We innovate and in doing so we make mistakes and then make improvements and continue to innovate. Professors and students do it together, and we must all be proud of this.

We do it in our university classrooms, but we also look for solutions to help the youngest and most vulnerable students in Italian schools. This is the case of TOP - Tutoring Online Program which, starting from a research project by Eliana La Ferrara (Bocconi) and Michela Carlana (Harvard Kennedy School), has created a tutoring system that today involves 800 university students (mostly Bocconi students) who work alongside the same number of junior high school kids. The experiment conducted during the first lockdown returned exceptional results: three hours of online tutoring per week proved to be sufficient to produce significant effects on students' academic results (+ 4.7%), well-being (+ 26%) and on socio-emotional skills (+ 21.1%). An intensive six-hour-a-week program doubled the improvement in academic achievement. The project has also been adopted in some countries of South America and we hope its success will also be a stimulus in Italy to extend it nationally and help students and families in difficulty.

The short-term goal for everyone is to return to attending school and university classrooms regularly and without interruption, to regain the aspects of socializing and exchange that have characterized the learning process since the times of Socrates and Plato. But in the meantime, we must not give up on "creating new paths".

And to our students who recently graduated online or are starting to attend classes again, I say “Carpe diem, seize the moment guys! Make your lives extraordinary.”
 

by Gianmario Verona