Monthly Archive for May, 2007
[This is the first of several reflections I wrote during the semester, but waited until it was over to post, since I didn't want my blog reflections to influence student behavior.]
After 2/3 of the semester, I’ve concluded that the approach I’ve taken to teach intermediate macro, while it has some merit, doesn’t work as well as my traditional approach.
Incorporating a wiki into the course in a substantive way is a powerful tool for engaging students, especially some who wouldn’t engage otherwise. Requiring the chapter analyzes is an effective way of getting students to read the text. More importantly, the chapter analyses are an efficient means for the teacher to identify what the students don’t understand. Just-In-Time Teaching works! I plan to incorporate this in my research methodology course next Fall.
But spending class time to merely respond to student questions isn’t the best use of that time. The problem is that one function of a good lecture is to organize the material in a way that makes sense, quite possibly a way that is different from the way the text does it. At times, spending class time exclusively to answer student questions seemed like a more or less random discussion of the topics.
What is necessary with this approach is for students to make a regular and serious effort to make meaning of the chapter. In the traditional approach students have two models to work from: the text and the lecture. With the approach I tried this semester, the course environment doesn’t necessarily encourage meaning making in the context of chapter-length chunks. Students don’t have to do it as a matter of course. The incentives are indirect at best. Yes, students should do this to be successful on the exams, but they won’t necessarily see this until late in the game, just before (or even after) the midterm exam.
This leads to another issue. The text is very much a practical guide to doing macroeconomics. It includes a great deal of very useful information that a journeyman macroeconomist should know. But at some level I wonder if that’s what an intermediate macrotheory course should be about. At least, it’s not the way I see my course. My course is designed to teach students a particular type of analytical thinking — the way economists use models to make predictions about how events/disturbances affect situations. For example, one question I asked last year was how, from the perspective of a particular economic model, did Hurricane Katrina affect wage rates in the Gulf Area. This type of analysis is not intuitive–students want to apply their own knowledge or intuition to answer the question, when they need to learn to let the model do the work. The reason for this is that if they continue to do real economics, they will encounter situations where their intuition fails them. So the focus of my course is on learning to use theories and models, whereas the focus of the text seems to be on questions (such as why does unemployment exist and persist) and what real world complications have a bearing on those questions. This is in no way a criticism of the text; it simply reflects my conclusion that the text doesn’t fit my course.
The students in my course did less well this year than typically on the midterm. At one level, I should have been able to predict this. My exam asks them to apply specific theories to analyze a given situation. But they had essentially no experience doing this. They wouldn’t have been able to really anticipate this based on the text. And in answering their questions (from the text), I spent little class time working those types of problems.
My immediate response to their performance was to assign problems to be done after each subsequent chapter. What I did was to select appropriate problems from those at the end of each chapter. I am fairly comfortable that for the rest of the term, students will have a better understanding of what I’m trying to accomplish with the course. But at another level, this reveals another tension. I would like to students to learn the practical tricks of the trade that the text reveals. And every text has some of those tricks. But I still feel that those are secondary to what the course is primarily about. If I’m not going to test students on the tricks, how will I convince students to learn them since grades are the currency of the realm. In the past students have learned pretty quickly what they do and don’t have to master to succeed in the course. As a result, the generally spend little time studying the “tricks of the trade.”
I’ve learned a great deal from this course about teaching in general and how to effectively employ a wiki. But is that enough to justify what I’ve done to this cohort of students? A colleague from another department whose opinions I respect said that she would never try something innovative in her courses unless she was certain it would be successful. I clearly have a different philosophy. Remember that on the first day of class, I warned the students that this course was highly experimental, and that they should seriously consider whether to take it this semester or to hold off for another time. Future students of mine will certainly benefit from what I learned this term.
I received an interesting heads-up from my teaching economics newsgroup about a list of pedagogical papers by the Physics Education Research at Colorado group. This group includes Carl Wieman, Nobel Laureate who I’ve blogged about before.
The archive includes a wide variety of papers most of which seem applicable to most if not all fields. The paper that caught my attention was “The surprising impact of seat location on student performance.” You can see the abstract and link to the full paper at http://scitation.aip.org/vsearch/servlet…
What’s your favorite?
Learning only occurs at the intersection between a text and a reader, or between a lecture and an audience. In a comment on an earlier post, Shannon notes,
[T]ext is sometimes seen as a time waster if it requires a close study, “why didn’t the author just make it simpler to understand?”. Students want key concepts pulled out for them so they can pass the test, why should they bother pulling it when a prof can do it much more easily?
This is something about students’ perceptions that I didn’t fully understand, so I’m really thankful that Shannon brought it to our attention.
Students need to understand that learning isn’t something that happens to you. It’s something you have to engage with to occur. Can you become a competent athlete by merely hearing about how to do the sport, or is it necessary to practice? Can you excel at a sport without practicing it?
Learning happens only as a function of the engagement between the student and the stimulus. The stimulus could be a text, a lecture, a video, a piece of art or music or other visual image. If there’s no engagement, there will be no learning. Think: the student who sleeps thru the lecture. If there’s little engagement, there will be little learning. Think: the lecture which fails to capture the student’s attention, as in the video snippet which Gardner showed at the FSEM Faculty Development workshop last week. Just as you have to chew a scholarly text or process your lecture notes, to really learn something you have to study it closely.
If students aren’t getting this message, and it seems that they’re not, what can instructors do to change this? Could it be as simple as stating it clearly in class, for example, in a first year seminar? Would students believe it? Can anyone suggest other ideas?
A couple of students, Joe and Shannon, attended this year’s Faculty Academy, and generally hung out with the DTLT ‘Team’ and our outside speakers.
Yesterday I heard that Joe was taking a course this summer with Angela, one of the faculty members of the team. It reminded me of something I’ve noticed over time. For about ten years, I have taken a group of students to present their research at a regional economics conference. That experience seems to change the dynamics of the subsequent student-teacher relationship.
The change begins when students commit to attending the conference. To be eligible, they submit a research paper. However ‘complete’ their research papers, we always revise them during the Spring semester prior to the conference. This work is done neither for grade nor credit, simply because it’s what is necessary to make the paper conference-ready. It seems to me that during this process, I become more a mentor than a (traditional) teacher. The relationship seems more collegial than hierarchical.
The conference is a tremendous experience in which we get to know each other far deeper than is typical with students and teachers. Part of this is spending several intense days together. But I think an important part is when students see the teacher acting as a professional in his or her field, and when the students are accepted as similar albeit journeyman professionals.
What is particularly interesting is to see the extent to which the changed relationship persists when we return from the conference Some of the students are in my courses–or they take one next semester. In those classes, the students seem less concerned by grades and more interested in learning. They seem to relate to me as a helpful expert, less as the person responsible for their grade.
Has anyone else had this experience with students? If so, how might we build this into our courses more generally?
The previous post was really a brief interlude. Let’s get back to the main thread.
One of the things I learned in researching for my book is that all reading is not equal. I suppose I knew that, but I never really thought about it. Think of a continuum from “light” to “heavy” reading. Light reading can be interesting, fun, even compelling, but it doesn’t require a heavy commitment of one’s attention or intellect—examples might include ‘beach books’ or US Today. Most scholarly reading is heavy—dense, complex ideas that you need to reflect on, think about before they make sense. Here’s a secret that we need to reveal to our students: When you read something scholarly, no one expects you to fully understand it the first time you read it.
When I give a reading assignment, I think many students imagine that reading the text (once) is good enough, is what is expected. I try to tell my students they need to differentiate between reading and studying a text. The objective should never be merely to complete the reading, but rather to assimilate the argument. To do this you need to ‘chew over’ and digest the text, little chunks at a time. One of the dozen or so books I’m currently reading is Soul Feast. In it Marjorie Thompson, the author, says:
[Critical reading] is concerned not with speed or volume but with depth and receptivity. That is because the purpose … is to open ourselves to how [the author] may be speaking to us in and through any particular text.
Of course, it’s also possible to read over a complex text again after an absence and get a different message, but that’s another story.
In the first post of this series I argued that learning is not merely the content of a text, lecture or other stimulus, but rather, what the student makes of that content. Here is perhaps a better example than the one I explored last time: Suppose the student is confronted with a piece of art. What is the content here and what is the student’s interpretation of the content? Certainly there are some facts associated with the artwork, but what is really interesting, what is really educational about it is how it is interpreted.
It’s little more than a week past graduation, but two of my senior seminar students have recently posted on their respective blogs. Both posts were quite thoughtful and reflective.
The first was from my star blogger of the semester. At a pre-commencement reception, she admitted to me that while she started blogging just for the grade, she eventually found it compelling.
The second post was from a student who blogged very little, or at least very lightly, during the semester.
I guess something stuck with these students. If you want to do a good turn, leave them a comment for encouragement. 
I am very, very behind in my blogging. Hopefully, I’ll get caught up over the next few weeks. I haven’t been able to reflect yet on last week’s Faculty Academy. I’m too afraid I’ll forget something if I do it right now. I need a few days off, and then I’ll start.
For now, I want to blog about the incredible ronco discussion I was party to yesterday over at DTLT. I think I’ve mentioned before that presentations tend to stimulate my mind towards thinking that isn’t exactly in line with what the presenter is doing. In other words, while the presenter is talking about X, my mind starts thinking about Y which probably has some subconscious connection to X in my head, though I may or may not be aware of what it is. To understand complex things, I tend to reduce them down to simple pieces that make sense to me, though admittedly some people call me reductionist. So if you participated in the ronco discussion and don’t see the relation with what I’m talking about here, the problem is me not you.
This is a long preamble to justify what I began thinking about as soon as I left the meeting yesterday. The question that confronted me is hard to articulate. It was richer than either (1) Is education about content versus skills? Or (2), Is it about process versus product? The question also has to do with the difference between education and the artifacts of education.
Education involves confronting a student with a stimulus of some sort. The stimulus could be a written text, a lecture, a class discussion, a piece of art, a video or audio recording, or something else. Consider a lecture. Is the education the lecture content or what a student makes of it? What does a student make of it? He listens (to greater or lesser extent). He takes notes, perhaps. Is that it? Shouldn’t he reflect subsequently about what it means?
When I was an undergraduate, I found that my raw class notes didn’t make too much sense, so I tended to go back and process them—rewrite them, and sometimes review appropriate parts of the text to create a revised set of notes that did make sense. No doubt I lost some of the content, thru the process of revision/reduction. (No doubt I also missed some of what the lecturer presented.)
Wouldn’t it be interesting/useful if students could pool their class notes prior to processing/revising them? Perhaps that way, less of the lecture content would be lost since for every point that I missed or misinterpreted there’s a chance some classmate would get it. I’m not arguing here that the bright kid would get more of the lecture and the dumb kid less, so the dumb kid could benefit from the bright kid’s work. Rather, following the Wisdom of Crowds argument, I think it’s likely that different students would “get†different pieces best. That’s certainly what I learned with my groupware experiments during the 1990s, and more recently with blogs and wikis. Pooling the raw notes would enable the group to get more of the meaning. Could this be a successor to the bigwiki experiment of last semester? I have an inkling of an idea. Students would have to revise their notes, and hopefully learn from each other. Now if I can just figure out how to create the right incentive structure for students to participate, and if I can choose the right course. …
Very intriguing introduction to a range of recent technologies, most of which I’d heard of but none of which I’m really familiar with. The best quote of the presentation (Thanks, Laura.) was:
Alan: You can’t figure this stuff out from the outside.
Gardner has tried to talk me into trying twitter, but it was only when I saw the posts popping up on the screen during the presentation that I felt compelled to give it a try, and in fact I signed up before the session was over.
Alan reiterated a point he made yesterday, that teaching is (or can be) a type of mashup or remix when we provide our interpretation of existing material.
One quibble: I didn’t take enough notes, so I’d love to see a list of the links he used in his presentation.
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