The document discusses challenges that professors face in getting students to adopt a deeper approach to learning. The professor finds that students in Costa Rica are used to more surface-level memorization from high school and resist moving to higher-order thinking in college. Some specific challenges mentioned are students' reluctance to take responsibility for their own learning, distractions from technology and social media, lack of participation, and expectations of being spoon-fed information rather than developing skills themselves. The professor argues that students must learn new competencies, like dealing with distractions, to succeed in further education and careers.

1. Sharing Challenges: What we Probably Find in our F2F or Hybrid Teaching
By Prof. Jonathan Acuña Solano
Thursday, September 4, 2014
Twitter: @jonacuso
Post 144
Reflecting upon my challenges as a college professor over here in Costa Rica, I must confess that a deep change in students’ mind set is needed. This is stated because there are many factors that can influence learners’ success at the university level or a drastic failure for students majoring in any study program. Let us review some of these challenges we all face –from time to time- at our higher level education institutions.
Though I have more than 15 years of experience teaching at the university level, and over 20 years teaching English as a foreign language, it is difficult to change students’ mind set. I cannot say that I am encouraging a “surface” approach to learning among my learners, but this is what I sometimes get to see as their response in class or in the papers they have to write as part of their English Language Teaching major. Because I mostly work with technology in education and literature now, I insist on the importance of reaching higher hierarchical thinking process among my pupils, but some of them are still resilient to accept that learning is in their hands and not in mine.

2. Students’ mind set is the one challenge I get to face and that prevents them to access deep learning in any college subject. It does take some time for pupils in college to transition from their high school way of studying (surface learning), -at least in my country (Costa Rica)-, which prevents them from moving from a merely memorization-oriented way of studying to a more deeper understanding and reflective way of learning the subject-mattered for each course. When confronted with moving away from that comfort zone, you experience lots of complaints from their part, but in the end, they set their feet out of their comfort zones that –professionally speaking- will not make them succeed in higher education or in ELT.
Some other teaching challenges I face while trying to encourage deep learning with my students can be summarized as follows: 1) Indecision on the part of my students which makes me wonder if they really want to become ELT professionals because teaching is a competency that needs to be developed; 2) Concentration problems due to the Internet and social media, which commonly distract them from the core subject of a lesson; 3) the lack of higher level of concentration due to multiple distractors that students cannot cope with and that makes them shift their attention towards something else; 4) the absence of some sort of participation willingness since learners just expect to be spoon-fed with the info they just need to digest; and 5) their child-raising backgrounds in which the spoon-fed way of studying was strengthened.
These are just immediate challenges for the teacher and for the learner, but how about the professional threats they will eventually face? Let us take a look at the following issue: The need to learn new competencies to excel in this new world full of distraction and distractors. If learners do not learn how to cope with this problem, they are bound to have difficulty to adapt to the demands and needs of the ELT profession (or any other profession) because the learning of new competences is intrinsically connected to the dealing with distractors that can affect performance at work.

3. Best Teachers Institut. (2010, Sept. 29). What Promotes Deep Learning. Retrieved on 2014, Sept. 16 from http://youtu.be/XvJqNxPwbFM?list=PLaLDibSuk5T7- 0wR66byWmA5RDo04koe6
Laureate Education Inc. (2010). Learner Approaches to Learning. [Document included as part of Certificate in Higher Education, Week 1, on their Blackboard LMS]
Learning Teaching. (Atherton, J. S. (2013). Learning and Teaching; Deep and Surface learning [On-line: UK] retrieved 16 September 2014 from http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/deepsurf.htm
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