Village of Oia, Santorini, Greece
This is where I was a year ago. You may not want to read any further than this.
You may have noticed that I haven’t included very many images in this blog. That’s because I didn’t really know how until today. So this is just at attempt to put some photos in.
Thanks for your forebearance. 
Sunset from Firastephani, Santorini, Greece
A couple of weeks ago, in the context of my experimental principles course, I wondered if I was enabling students to avoid the metacognitive activities that I believe lead to deep learning. I’ve given this a fair amount of thought and have reached a tentative conclusion that I’d like your feedback on. In other words, not only are comments welcome; they are encouraged.
The fundamental question I’m wrestling with is the extent to which I should force students to do the work in my course. As an economist, I believe that students respond in predictable ways to incentives. But as an academic, I want them to do the right thing for the right reasons–in this case, I want them to do the meta activities because they want to learn.
I could construct a course environment that encourages them to do the activities and penalizes them if they do not. This would involve making the meta activities “required,” with credit given or withheld as appropriate. The advantage of this option is that more students would complete the activities, albeit grudgingly.
Alternatively, I could tell them “I assume you’re taking this course to learn the most you can, not just for the grade or the credits. If you don’t do what my professional expertise says will maximize your learning, then (to quote my good friend Bob) it’s your funeral!” I would continue to give extra credit for completing the assignments, but there would be no explicit penalty for not doing them–except less learning. The advantage of this approach is that I would have more time to give personalized feedback to the smaller number of students who did the assignments.
I am leaning towards a more incentive-driven version of option 2. I would make the meta exercises “recommended” rather than required. I would give extra credit for those who do them. At the same time, I would stop curving the exam grades. This is the stick. I noted in my earlier post that the average raw exam score on these exams is less than a C, which I assume is lower than even the satisfycing students consider acceptable. This should cause students to work harder and hopefully do the metas. (I plan to explain all this to the students.)
To this basic model, I will add a carrot: I plan to determine the course grade as a weighted average of two midterm exams (25% each), the final exam (40% ), and class participation (10%). But if a student’s grade on the final exam exceeds the average of their midterm grades, I will replace the midterm grades with the final exam, which will count 90% towards the final grade. This will provide a realistic opportunity for students who need to bring up their grades, assuming they put in the work (hopefully including the meta activities), later in the course.
So, what do you think? What’s your reaction to this plan?
A couple months ago, The Washington Post ran a fascinating series of articles On Being a Black Man. There was one article I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. The article was the story of two African-American males, Wayne and Jachin, who just graduated from Balou High School, both star athletes, but also outstanding scholars. The article relates their journey through high school, and especially their efforts to promote good scholarship.
One of the things they did during their four years was work with fellow football team members to improve their grades. The result was that the grades of many football players increased, some to the point of earning membership into the National Honor Society.
Several were football players. And one was Jachin, who will always remember what some of the football players had said in heartbreaking sincerity to the coaches when, three years before, Wayne and Jachin were first introduced as examples:
“They smart. We dumb. We can’t get better.”
And Jachin’s reply: “That’s crazy. Anybody can get good grades. Just go to class and do your work.”
One of the points made by Postman and Weingartner in their powerful book, Teaching as a Subversive Activity is that teacher expectations matter for student performance.
Now the students at our institution are much stronger than those on the football team at Balou (aside from the two principals), but this article made me wonder about students at UMW who’ve been labeled C students or even B students. Do they think “we can’t get better?” And what does that mean–they can’t get better grades? They can’t learn more?
If so, how much of that is their fault, and how much of it is ours as instructors?
In my previous posting I began reflecting on Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. I pointed out that P&W argue for adopting the inquiry method of teaching and learning. What is the inquiry method and how does it differ from more traditional pedagogy?
Let’s start with what it’s not. The inquiry method is not what Postman & Weingartner term the seductive method of teaching: “a set of questions posed by the teacher, text or machine, which is intended to lead the student to produce the right answers.†This describes one of my long time teaching strategies. Ouch!
Rather than generating answers, the inquiry method is fundamentally about asking and refining questions. The implication is that by thinking about questioning, learning will occur at a higher cognitive level than merely memorizing content. The objective is not to determine the answer to a problem, but to teach students to think critically and independently.
Indeed, Postman and Weingartner emphasize what they call the “power of pluralizing:†The class seeks answers, not the answer, or reasons, not the reason. “[G]ood learners do not need to have an absolute, final irrevocable resolution to every problem.†All answers are provisional and conditional on new information.
Moreover, there is no expectation that each student’s answers will be the same, since “[W]e do not ‘get’ meanings from our environment. We assign meanings.†Because “what we perceive is largely a function of our previous experiences, … each individual will perceive what is ‘out there’ in a unique way.†And that is perfectly acceptable.
As P&W observe:
[T]he meaning-maker metaphor … makes both possible and acceptable a plurality of meanings, for the environment does not exist only to impose standardized meanings but rather to help students improve their unique meaning-making capabilities.
A key element of the inquiry approach is engaging the students, getting them to take their learning seriously. How is this accomplished? By focusing on questions of interest to the students, questions that they genuinely care about. An inquiry course is not about covering the content; indeed, there is no static syllabus of topics to be covered. Rather, course content is dynamically driven by the questions posed and answers discovered by the students. Postman & Weingartner emphasize “unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place.†While this sounds like academic anarchy, the authors present evidence that “the curriculum that emerge[s] in the classes ha[s] a curious but compelling unity.â€
Another element of the inquiry approach is to minimize the role of grades. The objective is not so much to evaluate what students know or what they have learned but to improve their reasoning skills. Summative evaluation, they argue, gets in the way of the goal.
Negative judgments are, not surprisingly, impediments to good learning, particularly if they have the effect of causing the learner to judge himself negatively.
What we need to do then, if we are seriously interested in helping students to become good learners, is to suspend or delay judgments about them.
If you think that doing away with grades is impossible, consider this:
If you are thinking that students, given such conditions, will not do any work, you are wrong. Most will. But, of course, not all. There are always a few who will view the situation as an opportunity to ‘goof off.’ So what? It is a small price to pay for providing the others with perhaps the only decent intellectual experience they will ever have in school.
Postman & Weingartner raise many serious issues worth thinking about:
• Doesn’t content matter? Aren’t there some things students need to know just because they are necessary for understanding subsequent, perhaps more relevant concepts? For example, in my first year seminar, I will need to teach some basic principles of economics, whether the students want that or not, prior to discussing more interesting topics in globalization. To paraphrase P&W, before you can think like an economist, you need to learn the basic concepts.
• What about factual courses, like French 101, or Calculus? Surely courses such as these are necessary for a university education, even if students would prefer to avoid them. Is the answer that the inquiry method simply isn’t applicable to these?
• Are students always the best judge of what they should be learning? Should we teach only what students know they want to learn?
• Does “learning a subject†then mean that one’s perceptions merely match the teacher’s? Or that one’s perceptions match a consensus of practitioners in the discipline? Is grading merely evaluating how closely student interpretations match “expert†interpretations?
• Can we realistically teach without assigning grades?
Is the inquiry approach to teaching and learning the “silver bullet” for what ails U.S. higher education? I doubt it, but I do think this could be an important part of the reform effort.
I fear I haven’t done justice to this powerful book. I strongly recommend this book to anyone who cares about their teaching. Read it and make up your own mind.
I’ve just finished reading a powerful and provocative book, Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity. (Inside joke: The book was recommended by one of the speakers at the First Year Seminar Teaching workshop. Can you guess which speaker it was?) The book was written nearly 40 years ago (1969) and yet, most of it is still relevant today. At least it speaks to me.
Postman and Weingartner make a scathing indictment of the U.S. education system and argue for radical changes, while recognizing that such changes won’t come easily. They call specifically for adoption of the inquiry method of teaching. Much of what they propose seems to have been more formally developed subsequently as concepts such as student centered-learning, active learning, metacognition, just-in-time teaching, and context-rich or ill-structured problems. More on these points later.
Postman & Weingartner make a damning description of school as a game called “Let’s Pretendâ€.
The game is based on a series of pretenses which include: Let’s pretend that you are not what you are and that this sort of work makes a difference to your lives; let’s pretend that what bores you is important, and that the more you are bored, the more important it is; let’s pretend that there are certain things everyone must know, and that both the questions and answers about them have been fixed for all time; let’s pretend that your intellectual competence can be judged on the basis of how well you can play Let’s Pretend.
Does this characterize higher education today? It certainly resonates with me, at least in part. In thinking about higher education, I’ve wondered if academia doesn’t have an implicit contract with students, in which we pretend to teach and they pretend to work. If they follow the “rules,†we give them decent grades and a diploma. There does seem to be a sense in which (many/most?) students are playing a role , nominally doing what we ask while not really engaging themselves.
Is formal education merely a screening device—people that succeed in school tend to succeed in life even if they don’t learn very much, so schooling helps to identify the winners? If so, this begs the real question: how much richer would life be for students if school was done better?
There’s much more to this book. It’s not possible to discuss it all in one posting, so stay tuned for the next installment.
Today, I was having a conversation via email with Charlotte Houtchens, one of UMW’s excellent reference librarians, and one of the “adjunct faculty” for our group teaching First Year Seminars next year. (Adjunct faculty are individuals with expertise of some type relevant to first year seminars, and who have committed to helping in an extended way those of us teaching the courses.)
In this conversation, we were discussing the workshop Charlotte is going to moderate among FYS faculty on evaluating electronic and print resources. After several iterations, it occurred to me that we ought to make the conversation more public so that other interested parties could contribute. Charlotte agreed to the suggestion–Here’s how the discussion went.
I would prefer to present less and facilitate more. I hope that if we all began talking together about the criteria we use to evaluate content in different kinds of formats and in our different disciplines we might find
1) that many of the criteria we use are so ingrained that we apply them at a subconscious level: Let’s bring them to our consciousness and identify them.
2) that our criteria have attributes in common: Let’s group them and see if we aren’t all taking a few of the same steps to evaluate information.
3) that our common criteria are actually applicable across a number of formats–including the Web: Let’s see if we can come up with a draft of a document (a Web page? a checklist? a what?) that might help students evaluate content regardless of format.I’ll bring some ideas and examples to start stirring the pot. What do you think?
[ Here is how I responded: ]
I think the notion of evaluating resources and appropriate giving of credit is going to be critical for my course.
Here’s an excerpt from an article by Ferris and Wilder in the latest issue of Innovate, that strikes a chord:
The question of the accuracy or truthfulness of information is certainly not a new one for students; however, new technologies make it exponentially easier for anyone to publish inaccurate or untruthful information (as seen in the libel posted in Wikipedia mentioned above). … The question then becomes one of educators either continuing to try to steer their students clear of any untrustworthy information or, instead, recognizing the imperative for a new paradigm-one that focuses on helping students gain information literacy skills which would allow them to differentiate and make their own judgements regarding the accuracy of infomation [emphasis added]. If we accept Plato’s definition that knowledge is justifiable, believed truth, then our students, in order to be effective 21st century citizens, will have to be able to ask themselves if they believe in the truthfulness of a particular piece of information, and if they can justify that belief beyond simply saying “because the teacher said so.” To simply advise students to ignore any readily editable or unrefereed source, such as a wiki, runs the risk that they will not access information that may be of value to them, as more and more of this information is moved into wikis. Furthermore, it runs the risk of sending the message to the student that anything that might be easily published is not to be trusted, including anything published by the student.
[ Charlotte responds: This is terrific. This is just what I want us to talk about. ]
This ties in with the different conventions about borrowing ideas in online writing compared with traditional writing. To quote Brian Lamb’s Educause Review article: Content cloning across wikis-sometimes referred to in non-wiki circles as plagiarism-is sometimes acceptable.
[ At this point, Charlotte interjects: ]
Whoa. I’ll have to get back to you on this one. For me, personally and professionally, Brian is on VERY shaky ground. Call it what you will: “content cloning,” “sampling,” “lifting,” even “plagiarism” are NOT in the scholarly tradition. Let the people content clone all they like. In the academy, we give credit where credit is due. Have you seen the motto for Google Scholar? http://scholar.google.com ? Stand on the shoulders of giants.
My students are going to be looking at resources from Day 1 and need to know how to evaluate their credibility, but also that ideas that are not their own need to be credited. I don’t intend this to be negative or punitive, just the appropriate convention that we will follow.
[ Charlotte: ]
This requirement that students evaluate the credibility of resources and give credit where credit is due is not AT ALL negative or punitive. I don’t even think it is as lightweight as an “appropriate convention.” In fact, it is one of the behaviors that identifies a student as belonging to our community of scholars. We stand on the shoulders of giants and acknowledge the work of the giants that went before us. I say “community of scholars” because I’m not crazy about the term “community of learners”: that sounds like a kindergarten.
What does this mean for the first year seminar? From day one, I would love to see us think of our role as that of initiating students into our community. At every step, I want to explain to students WHY we do things the way we do them, in the context of the traditions and values of scholarship and/or academia. When I had the “a ha” moment at the meeting last Thursday, and blurted, “It doesn’t matter whether we are using the tool of class discussion, or blogs, or wikis, or the next great technology, we are simply continuing the scholarly tradition of respectful conversation about things that matter.” and Gardner, said, “Exactly!” I didn’t get to finish what my real epiphany was. It wasn’t that the tools don’t matter . . . so all hail the newest tools. It was that the tools don’t matter . . . so let’s be sure to talk with our first year seminar students constantly about what DOES matter: our longstanding values as scholars and as members of the academy.
I hear a former teacher saying she wants my original work, not just my reporting what the experts think–as if, the expert opinions are less valuable. I understand that notion, but there is a new view of knowledge in Web 2.0 that suggests one’s knowledge is less about what you know and more about who you know, or more precisely, it’s about knowing how to find the answer. This is George Siemens’ idea of Connectivism.
[ Charlotte: ]
Perhaps she wasn’t suggesting that the expert opinions were less valuable than your opinion. Perhaps she was addressing the question of “reporting” and saying that what is valuable is the ability to critically analyze, synthesize, and build on what earlier experts were saying. “Standing on the shoulders” again?
I believe I hear what you’re saying here about Web 2.0. Knowing how to query, and navigate, and how the thing is put together is very important in the location of information. Finding THE answer implies that locating information is enough. But as your Platonist article writer suggests above, information is just the raw data of knowledge.
This is clearly a new paradigm, but I think it will fit a first year seminar well.
[ Charlotte: ]
Well, you’ve now heard my paradigm. Our role as teachers and guides in the academy is to initiate students into our community of scholars. They won’t all buy in TOTALLY . They won’t all become professors or researchers. But maybe they will have a lifelong understanding of our values and affinity for the important work that we do in the world.
[ My response to hers: ]
My point in quoting Brian is not to suggest that plagiarism is okay. I don’t even think that Brian is suggesting that. I think I was trying to say crudely just what you expressed more elegantly. Let me try again:
1. Writing in blogs and wikis tends to be less formal than formal essays. One result is that bloggers and wikiers are more casual about citing sources. This is common practice.
2. My class is designed to be a journey of discovery. I intend my students to read and think widely and to bring back to class the ideas they find interesting. Some of these ideas, especially early on, will be the ideas of others. That’s okay, in fact, it’s expected.
3. Even though we may be presenting the ideas we discover in wikis and blogs, I want them to know that I will “give them credit†for the quality of the ideas they present, whether they are original or not. (As if anything could be completely original.) But, what is important is that they credit the originator, if it’s not them.
4. In other words, I’m trying to get them to do a type of scholarly writing using the forms of blogs and wikis. Since it’s scholarly writing, I expect them to follow the conventions of scholarly writing which include citing sources.
5. I am not arguing for one citation style over another. To me that is a very minor issue, but I suspect that students see it differently. I worry that students see crediting sources as a technical issue, like proper grammar, which doesn’t affect the “content” of one’s writing. It’s something negative that should be avoided, rather than something positive that enhances your work.
Here are some initial ideas for a discussion on this topic:
You’ve been taught that plagiarism is a no-no. But acknowledging sources, particularly in a web environment is really a positive, good thing—it’s something you’ll want to do (rather than a no-no). Here’s why: What is a web (of connections)? Every time you acknowledge a source, especially if you link electronically, you create another connection making the web richer.
Additionally, contrary to what you might think, when you acknowledge a source you make your work stronger. Why? By citing the experts, you show that you’re familiar with their points of view, and as a result you give your work more credibility than it would have without the citations.
Martha’s been blogging about writer’s block with respect to her blog. Here is my comment on her second installment:
First off, I have nothing to say that you don’t already know. But let me ignore that point. The way to become a better writer is to write. The way to become a more comfortable blogger is to write blog postings. It’s as simple (or as hard) as that. You don’t need to agonize over it. Just do it.
Okay, so let me respond to your specific points: I think you’re working from some faulty premises. On the one hand you suggest that a blog posting has to be a magnum opus. “[S]truggling for breath on a mountain trail and then suddenly finding myself at the top. ” Great metaphor and I agree that sometimes writing can be like that, but blogging? For me, rarely. Later you say that blogging should be spontaneous. I don’t think blogging can be both.
I wonder if you’re trying too hard or maybe thinking too hard. Blogging should be like breathing –something you just do without too much conscious effort. Sure, you want to express your point correctly and well. So just do the best you can and let it go. Blog postings aren’t intended to be finished publications. You think your ideas may be half cooked? Why don’t you let your readers decide? I’ve never thought that about any of your posts. The worst reaction I’ve ever had is, “This doesn’t really interest me,” but even that, rarely.
Personally, I don’t worry too much about getting posts published. I tend to write them in three steps: First, when I first get an idea for a posting, I open a new post and jot my notes down. Next, I come back, usually at least 24 hours later, and write a first draft of the post. This is for me the hardest step, and I often do it in several sessions. Finally, I come back a third time and polish the post. I almost never write an post in one try. In fact, at this moment I have 9 posts in various stages of construction, some going back months. It is true that sometimes a partially finished posting gets dated and I delete it. But I don’t worry about that. There’s always something else to write about. Something that someone might find interesting.
Ever since reading Rebekah Nathan’s book, I’ve been thinking about Pogo’s famous line: We have met the enemy and he is us! One of Nathan’s observations was that despite little effort students get decent grades, Bs or better. This wasn’t just her finding; she cites a similar point from the 2003 NSSE study. Could it be that one reason why intellectual pursuits play such a limited role in our students’ university experience is that we don’t require more than that? Are faculty enabling bad behavior on the part of our students?
I’ve never worried much about grade inflation. The grades in our department tend to average about C+, and the grades I give fit that pattern, so at first glance I don’t seem to be guilty of enabling. But perhaps that conclusion deserves a second glance.
In thinking about the results of my principles of economics experiment, I realized something. I typically curve the exam grades in that course. I originally thought that curving the grades wouldn’t have an adverse impact on incentives to participate in the metacognitive activities, since if those activities enhanced student learning and exam grades, as I believe they do, then those students who completed the activities would do well on the exams relative to the rest of the students, and curving the grades wouldn’t affect that. The overall average wouldn’t be affected very much. But given how few students participated, curving the grades may have been a strong disincentive for the others to do so. Since most students didn’t do the meta activities, the class average on the exams was depressed. This could have been an incentive for students to do the meta activities, but then I took that incentive away–my curving brought those grades up. The result may have been to convince students they didn’t need to do the meta activities to do “well enough.”
The solution to this would be to stop curving the exam grades. This would likely cause major angst since the average grade would likely be less than a C. Hopefully, this might induce students to do the meta activities from that point on.
Something to think about.
I had an amazing experience yesterday, a “consultation†with Gardner and his staff of IT Specialists: Jerry, Martha, Andy, Jim and Patrick. Also present was Charlotte Houtchens, one of our reference librarians. The purpose of the consultation was to think about the design of the first year seminar I plan to teach this Fall.
Now I have spoken with individual IT staff before on how to accomplish discrete technology things for a course, like setting up a discussion board or a blog or wiki, but I’ve never done it in the context of scaffolding a whole course. In this case, I gave the IT specialists carte blanche to design a digital environment in support of my course to help me achieve its potential. Charlotte was there to provide the library perspective since the course will involve a great deal of research and evaluation of sources.
To prepare for the meeting, I thought about what I hoped to accomplish in the course and how I thought we would go about it. I drafted some tentative assignments. What was novel (for me at least) about this course was the focus that John Udell might describe as asking students to narrate their work. I sent my ideas to the group a few days ago so they could think about them in the context of their respective areas of expertise.
Yesterday, after a very brief introduction where I basically said, you read my ideas; where do we go from here?, they went into brainstorm mode for the better part of an hour. It was like the fantastico presentation all over again—each ITS taking the floor for a while to toss their ideas into the ring, to raise objections, to suggest solutions. It was like a symphony being composed, cacophonous at times, beautiful music at others.
The dynamics of the session were very interesting. For example, who was in charge? The answer: No one, and everyone as they passed the baton from one to another. Each time when I thought the discussion was about to go off the rails, someone brought it back to focus. What an amazing team! But don’t take my word for it: you can ask John Udell or Brian Lamb.
Some issues that came up:
• How do we aggregate multiple content sources into a blog or a wiki? A class superglu site?
• Should this be the “professional blog†for their life as a student? YES.
• How do we make students see this as their blog?
• How do we get students to speak to each other? To comment on each other’s blogs in a substantive way?
• Answer: The instructor needs to model the behavior, commenting, trackbacking, and aggressively linking to their blogs.
At one level, I felt strange—as if I was a fly on the wall since I had very little to contribute. Indeed, I didn’t understand everything that was said, though I think I got the jist of it. I realized that my speaking was not important any more than it would be to a discussion between two electricians discussing a plan to wire an addition to my house. I told them what I needed and I left it up to their expertise to develop the plan.
I found myself thinking: This is really wild! I’ve got a half dozen “staff†working for me, or at least on my behalf, to design the digital infrastructure for my course. The way the course will turn out will depend in large part on what they come up with. This isn’t my class anymore; it’s a real collaboration. As recently as a few years ago, I never could have imagined this. Is this part of the new course design process for U2.0?
To think that there are still faculty who see the IT Staff as no more than desktop support. Anyone who doesn’t take advantage of their expertise is wasting an opportunity.
I just finished reading Will Richardson’s book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms.
As you might expect, it’s an excellent entry-level primer for incorporating Web 2.0 tools into the classroom, including both why you would want to use blogs, wikis, rss, social bookmarking, etc, in your teaching, how you might use them, and practical guidance for how to get started with each.
For me, the most interesting chapter was the last one, What It All Means, which presents Richardson’s view of University 2.0 or at least School 2.0.
I highly recommend the book for anyone wanting to learn about these tools.
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