Pedablogy: Musings on the Art & Craft of Teaching

I just finished reading a phenomenal book, Mindset by Carol S. Dweck.  This book is a must-read for anyone who teaches at any level, or anyone who parents for that matter.

Dweck argues that traditionally, people view one’s ability, whether IQ or artistic ability, as fixed.  Dweck calls this view the “fixed mindset.”   Until you get close to your potential, work happens almost effortlessly.  If you have to put in effort, that’s bad news since it means you’re reaching the limit of your ability.   Students with the fixed mindset tend to avoid challenges because challenges by definition require effort, and effort implies the very real possibility (in their eyes) of failing.  Failing at something is bad because it means you’re a failure.  (Question: Does this sound like the “Imposter Syndrome” among academics.)  This is especially difficult for college students who have likely been successful for all of their academic careers.  Indeed, Dweck identifies the transition to college as one of the major stress points for learners.

Dweck proposes another view, the “growth mindset.”  According to this view, one’s ability is not fixed.  Rather, it’s like a muscle—the more you work at it, the greater your ability.  With this mindset, effort is a positive not a negative since it is through effort that you learn and your ability grows.  Failure is an opportunity for learning and improvement, not a judgment.   Many successful people have made this point:

• “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”   – Thomas A. Edison
• “There isn’t enough failure around here. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t trying. Science is developed through failures. That is how we learn.” – Edwin Land, CEO of Polaroid

But we usually write these people off as geniuses.  Dweck argues that we all have that potential, but that many or most of us are mired in the fixed mindset.

Dweck helped me better understand something I have witnessed over my teaching career.  Some students are very bright.  They never have to work at learning.  They simply look at the task and complete it with little or no effort.  This is analogous to the writer who when he writes, simply puts down on paper what he already knows.

Contrast this with another type of student.  The second type of student isn’t as bright as the first type.  She has always had to work hard to learn and to get good grades.  Using the same analogy: This student writes to find out what she knows.   She doesn’t start out knowing; she has to work at it.

The problem with the first type of student is that if they continue in school, eventually they reach a level where they can’t complete the work without effort.  Often, these students find they’ve never learned how to work through a problem to figure it out.  They don’t understand what ‘figure it out’ means since it’s never been a part of their experience.  Sometimes, these very bright students flunk out of school–they’ve always been A students and now they’re failing.   They don’t know how to learn, so when their existing model doesn’t work, they’re at a loss for how to proceed.  These students can be literally clueless.    What a waste of talent.

Of course, there are also bright students who work hard, but the system inhibits them because what’s the point of learning more if you have already earned an A?  There are also less bright students who don’t know how to work at learning.  Often, they don’t make it to university.

Are you frustrated that too many students play the grade game, that too many seem uninterested in real learning?  Perhaps the most important thing we can teach our students is the growth mindset.  It’s something I’m going to make a central part of my pre-major and major advising this year.

Last month, Josh Kim commented on a post of mine about the importance of course design and got me thinking.  I started to write a response but then got distracted.   The comment deserves a response so here goes.  Josh wrote:

We can have the best course design methods, the most advanced platforms and tools – but if we don’t have P&T incentives for course design then we will not see it diffused. Resources are key – today’s courses require more inputs. But resources can’t overcome basic structures.

I’d be curious to hear how you would balance the traditional and important benefits of scholarship and academic freedom with figuring out some incentive structure for faculty to build in course design (and whatever technologies that will follow) into their work?

I can only speak to the situation at Mary Washington, but I doubt there are many faculty at UMW don’t want to teach well.  That’s part of the culture of who we are, and that’s a huge advantage in improving teaching at our institution.  That said, our faculty do face constraints on good teaching.  The constraints seem to be:

• Lack of knowledge of best practice pedagogy; few Ph.D.s were trained to be teachers so new faculty tend to teach the way they were taught, which may not to embody best practices.
• Lack of experience teaching, which can help with the lack of knowledge.
• Lack of time to develop one’s teaching, to think carefully about course design for each course one teaches given the other significant demands on our time, and finally
• The implicit (and pernicious) assumption that faculty in general are good teachers already.

Josh asked about the importance of Promotion & Tenure incentives for promoting good course design.  P&T incentives don’t seem to be a useful part of the solution at my institution.  My sense, reinforced by conversations with members of the P&T committee over the years, is that P&T assesses teaching in a relatively blunt way, almost pass/fail.  This is not surprising given that the tools we have for assessing teaching are coarse rather than fine.  In short, P&T seems to assess teaching adequacy more than teaching excellence.   Would a candidate with otherwise good credentials be denied tenure or promotion because he or she was (only) a decent teacher, rather than an exceptional one?  I doubt it.  So where does teaching effectiveness matter?

In principle it should matter for annual reviews which determine pay raises.  However, given the low levels of raises in the last few years and the relatively small differences in raises between good and great performance, I’m not sure that’s very effective.

In his 2009 book Drive: The Surprising Truth about What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink summarizes the scientific literature on incentives which argues that for creative or intellectual tasks, explicit incentives like salary don’t motivate work particularly well.  I think teaching fits that category.  (Speaking as an economist, the responsiveness of teaching quality to, say a greater weight of teaching in one’s annual review, while positive is small.)

I also see only a weak connection between teaching effectiveness and academic freedom.  I think academic freedom gives faculty the right to think broadly about how to teach.  But does it give one the freedom to remain ignorant of best teaching practices, or to teach badly?  I don’t think so.  While I am a strong proponent of experimentation in one’s teaching, as professionals we have an obligation to adopt those teaching practices we know to be effective, and drop those practices which are not.

What is the answer?   The constraints I identified earlier suggest some possibilities.  First, faculty should be provided with opportunities to learn about the research on best teaching practices in their disciplines.  Working in an environment with a culture of good teaching should give faculty incentive to implement those practices that make sense in the context of their courses.

Second, I think we need to put some significant effort into developing better tools for assessing student learning.  I say this so that teachers can get a better sense of what is working and not working for them.  I recognize that such tools could be used to “punish” teachers whose students do poorly, but I think it too important not to do anyway.  I think that assessment needs to be developed in the context of departments/programs, not institution-wide, because only departments are in a position to identify what it is they are trying to teach, and only departments can identify disciplinary-appropriate means of assessment.  A one-size-fits-all assessment makes no sense.

Finally, to do these things well, faculty need time and resources to devote to them.  Adding more responsibilities (e.g. learning best practices pedagogy and developing authentic assessment mechanisms) without recognizing and addressing the resources needed to accomplish them will be a non-starter.  Our institution currently has a substantial teaching load: four courses per semester; eight per year.  At present, like the restaurant that serves poor food, but gives you a lot of it, we emphasize quantity over quality.   Our current teaching load makes it extremely difficult for faculty to do any serious reflection about how well they are doing.   Teaching better requires a lower teaching load.

I’m trying to get my head around the notion of technology-focused versus non-technology-focused teaching.  I’m not sure this is a useful distinction.  I have heard faculty say, “Oh, I don’t teach with technology!”  Or, “You’re too focused on teaching with technology.”  What does ‘teaching with technology’ mean?

If you use your institution’s course/learning management system, is that teaching with technology?  What about if you put your course syllabus on a webpage?  What about if you use PowerPoint when you lecture?  What about if you use an overhead projector?  What about if you use a blackboard (the slate version) and chalk?

I just finished reading W. Brian Arthur’s The Nature of Technology: What it is and how it evolves (H.T. to Gardner).  According to Arthur, all of the examples in the previous paragraph are teaching with technology.   Technology, properly understood, is everything that is known about the process of teaching.  The word comes from the Greek techne for “craft or knowing in action.”  By this definition, it’s simply not possible to teach without technology.  This, I believe.

I suspect that when someone says “I don’t teach with technology,” what they mean is they don’t teach with computers, network-based tools, or the internet, as if those are foreign to their existence.  Can you teach well without these tools?  Of course, just as you can teach well with them.  Network-based tools are not a silver bullet.  They don’t work well for every course in every context, any more than discussion works well or lecture works well for every course in every context.   So where am I going with this?

Technology, any technology, can’t be an add-on to one’s course.  Let me loosely quote Arthur replacing mention of the word ‘economy’ with the word ‘course’.

The course is not a container for its technologies, but something constructed from its technologies.  The course is a set of activities and behaviors mediated by—draped over—its technologies.  It follows that the methods and processes form the course.  The course is an expression of its technologies. … The course forms an ecology for its technologies, it forms out of them, and this means they don’t exist separately.

In short, it doesn’t make sense to take an existing course, and then add a drop of technology to it, e.g. “How do I add blogging to my course?”  That, quite simply, is the wrong question.

The right question is about course design.  Course design means choosing technologies from technology.  The choices one makes about technologies define/structure the course environment.

In my view, students learn when they interact with course content, with the instructor and with other students.  The way these interactions occur in a course is determined by the technology choices made by the instructor.  Sometimes I think that faculty confuse the pedagogical approach with the tools or medium they use to implement that approach:

• Course texts can be read in print, in printed pdf form, online, or in e-Readers, like the Kindle,  the Nook, or the iPad.
• Writing can be done on paper, on a computer with word-processing software, on a blog.
• Discussion can be done face-to-face, synchronously in a chat room, or asynchronously using a discussion board or other media.
• Lecture can be done face-to-face in a large lecture hall, or in a small classroom.  It can also be streamed online or saved for later viewing as an audio or video capture.

Each of these options has pluses and minuses.  None of them are perfect in all contexts.

Clearly the physical characteristics of the course (e.g the classroom and number of students) constrain what the teacher can do, but I suspect that too often faculty take some of those choices as given.  If so, then a primary reason for course design is to make explicit, decisions about teaching that are otherwise implicit.  Good course design starts from one’s learning objectives:  What are you trying to accomplish with a course?  What do you want students to learn or to be able to do by the end of the term?  From all the ways of getting there, what subset of pedagogies, tools & technologies should you select in designing the course environment?  These are the real choices.  Sometimes ‘traditional’ pedagogies are the most effective.  Sometimes ‘network-based’ pedagogies are the best.  Sometimes, a combination is best.  Good course design considers all the possibilities.

While this message may come across as self-serving, I’m posting this because I think it may help some colleagues at other schools.

This past spring I heard from a number of users of my book Doing Economics that the current publisher CENGAGE Learning had let it go out of print.  (The book was originally published by Houghton-Mifflin which in the great publisher consolidation was purchased by CENGAGE.)

While there were a variety of rumors floating around about the status of the book, I finally have definitive word from the publisher.

CENGAGE Learning has decided to continue publishing the book, but they are doing so using a Print-on-Demand approach.  You can either have your bookstore order the book or you or your students can order it directly.  The way you do this is to call CENGAGE customer service @ 1-800-354-9706 and use the ISBN 0618379835 .

I’ve found myself haunted by something Martha said to me not long ago.  It was one of those things that when I first heard it, I thought “Yes, that’s a nice idea.” But then the idea wouldn’t let go as its profundity grew in my perception.

What if faculty stopped thinking of their job as teaching,  and started thinking of their job as helping students excel?

What if faculty committed to doing this for every student, no matter each student’s individual strengths and weaknesses?  What would it mean to pledge this to even the weakest students?  Would it change the way we think about our students?  Would it change the amount of respect we have for them?  Would it change the way we act towards them?   Most importantly, how would our students respond?

It wouldn’t surprise me if students perceive school as a series of hurdles to be overcome, where the hurdles have no redeeming qualities (such as learning); rather, they are manifestations of teachers’ and administrators’ efforts to prevent them from succeeding, from getting a “good” grade, or from graduating.  After all, the grade is the thing.  To be honest, I think that’s how some faculty and administrators approach grading.  Not that they try to prevent students from succeeding, but we have to “maintain standards” after all.  Everyone can’t earn an A, or what would an A mean?

In my view, the primary responsibility of a teacher shouldn’t be grading, shouldn’t be filtering the good/worthy students out from the poor ones.  Our primary responsibility should be to help students learn from wherever they start to the most they can achieve.  Of course, this requires that we think of students as individuals.  It also requires that we respect each student as a serious learner, even while recognizing that not everyone is.  If we treat each student as serious, we will get more serious students.  If we don’t, we will reinforce the perception that school is a game.

When we grade, we tend to ‘take away’ points when students fail to demonstrate what we expect to see in a perfect paper.  How often do we recognize and credit what students have done right, instead of judging their work (and indeed them) on the basis of where they’ve fallen short?   This isn’t mere semantics.  School shouldn’t be perceived primarily as a winnowing out process, where the emphasis is on how many people failed to make the cut where the cut is defined as excellence.   Oh, and when you make the cut you can stop learning!

I think the mindset that defines success in terms of grades is self-defeating.  It’s wrong-headed.  It implies that excellence is limited to the select few who demonstrate the highest scores on tests, papers and other assessment instruments.  But excel has a broader meeting as a verb.  It means “to do or be better than some standard.”  Can’t the standard be where one starts?  When the parents of a child who’s stuck in school, finds a teacher who engages the child and ignites their learning, isn’t it appropriate to describe the child as excelling?

As Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody,

The goal of getting better at something is different from the goal of being good at it; there is a pleasure in improving your abilities even if that doesn’t translate into absolute perfection.

Every student can’t be perfect, but every student can be better.  Shouldn’t that be our goal as teachers?

The students at my school have all excelled in the limited traditional sense of getting good grades in high school.  But many of them have not had to work very hard (some of them have never learned how to work), getting by instead on their intelligence.  A number have never found their studies engaging, and some have never taken their studies very seriously.

Higher education should be a radically different experience than 13^th grade, focusing on discovery and learning rather than grades and certification.  How do we make higher education what it ought to be?  How do we ignite a passion for learning in our students?  Changing the perception of our job as teachers may be a first step.

The knock against adjuncts has always been that they are with the school but not of it—they teach their classes and meet their office hours, but they lack a broader commitment to the institution.  Having too many adjuncts is bad for the institution, because there aren’t enough full-time staff to do the other important work of university.  I think this argument is oversold, but let’s go with it for now.

At the risk of over-simplifying, full-time faculty members see themselves in one of two ways.  Either they see themselves primarily as mathematicians,  sociologists or historians, who happen to work for a specific university (Type 1).  Or they see themselves primarily as faculty members of the university, who happen to teach in the mathematics, sociology or history department (Type 2).

Colleagues holding the first view see their job as consisting of teaching their courses well, doing their research well, and serving on enough committees to “satisfy” the requirement for service.  For many such faculty, one’s professional responsibilities can be summarized as a checklist.  Service is seen as an obligation, rather than something bigger.     I think this view is similar to that of  adjunct faculty members described above, albeit with a somewhat broader but still limited vision.

The second view holds that a major component of one’s job is responsibility to the institution, to do what one can, to do what is necessary to help the institution flourish.  This responsibility is not a ball & chain which keeps one from one’s real work—it is an essential part of the real work.  That doesn’t mean such faculty are not interested in teaching and research.  It just means they have a broader vision of the job.  It is a vision which comes with tenure and experience (I’m not criticizing junior faculty who don’t have this broader vision).

A university desperately needs faculty who think that their job is greater than the sum of teaching, research and service, narrowly defined.  Or putting it differently, a faculty member can satisfy the checklist (teaching, research, and adequate service) and still not satisfy what the university really needs.  Type 1 faculty are like the caricature of adjuncts I started this post with.  A university can afford to have some, but too many will prevent the university from flourishing.

.                                                                    .

For the record, I think that most adjuncts do a fine job given the constraints they work under.

This morning, Inside Higher Ed published an interview with Peter P. Smith to discuss his new book.   I began reading the article  in a pro-forma way since the “middle third” isn’t a strong interest of mine.  But I found possible gold near the end of the interview where Smith mentioned something that I’d heard before but which had never  really resonated.  Something about the way Smith described it clicked with me this time:

In the book, I devoted a chapter to the “End of Scarcity” and its impact on higher education. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this trend. Colleges are built and organized around scarcity – the expertise of faculty is in short supply, classrooms and labs are limited because they are expensive, and the authority to offer a course of study is limited. Additionally, reputation is built around who you exclude as much as it is who you include and who succeeds. In fact, the whole concept of meritocracy is built on the notion of scarcity because there is not enough room “at the top” for everyone.

People who follow Pedablogy know that I am suspicious of the filtering function of education, which often conflicts with the teaching/learning function.  Filtering makes sense in a world of limited jobs relative to the number of workers.  In such a world,  education is limited to those “who could best take advantage of it.” But filtering no longer makes sense when the number of (qualified) workers is limited relative to the number of jobs.  This is the world which Smith says is upon us.

One of the reasons people stop their (formal) education is the sense that they are not smart enough to learn more, that they have reached the limits of their ability.  But is there truly a limit to the learning that a person can achieve?  Could those filtered-out students perhaps learn with more time?  (What is sacrosanct about a 14 week semester?)  Could they learn under a different teaching/learning model?

If so, is there a social benefit to people/workers continuing to learn, and does that benefit extend beyond to need to fill those excess jobs?  Is there a social benefit if an individual (say) learns the classics on their own outside of school?   Does this social benefit exceed the social cost?

As I was reading this, I saw a connection with what macro economics call endogenous growth theory.  In traditional economic theory, effort is confounded by diminishing returns.  At some point, the benefits of additional effort fall below the cost.  Endogenous growth theory suggest that technology may be different—it may not suffer from diminishing returns.  (I’m using the term ‘technology’ the way economists do to refer to technique or knowledge of how to do something.)  Can you ‘use up’ an idea?  If numerous people adopt a good idea, is there any reason to expect that the idea won’t be as fruitful with the 10th adopter as with the first?  In many contexts, the answer is no.  I wonder if education could be one of those contexts.

The other day I was unable to attend my senior seminar.  I was prepared to let the class go on without me—we had planned a discussion that the students were well prepared to carry out (four students each gave a short presentation which spurred a somewhat longer discussion prior to moving on to the next short presentation; designated notetakers would summarize for the group).  The class was perfectly capable of doing this without my presence.

Then it occurred to me that we have access to Skype both in the seminar room and on my laptop (as well as that of many of the students).  We had prepared to use Skype during one of the snow days last week, but school ended up being open.  The students opened Skype in the seminar room, opened a conversation with me, and we carried on very well.  One student used Prezi for his presentation.  I was able to follow along by watching a copy of his prezi (which he had linked to from the course wiki) and clicking based on his verbal cues.  It was just like being there.  All four presentations took place very well along with the associated discussion.  I chimed in with questions and comments just as I would have in person.  The class session was very much a success.

What were the negatives?  We didn’t have full video, but that didn’t seem to matter.  I’ll need to compare the class notes with ‘normal’ sessions to see if there was any drop-off in the quality.  I couldn’t read the body language of the speakers which ordinarily helps me guide discussion.  And they couldn’t read mine.  The format for the day lent itself well to Skype participation.  Others wouldn’t.  Today I’m going to ask them to draw conclusions from the two days of presentations, which would be harder to do remotely since students could more easily evade my questions and I wouldn’t have the visual cues to help.  (I typically will just stare quietly at a person until they respond.)

Still, Skype took what could have been a lost day or a weak day and turned it into an all but normal class session.

For some time I’ve been musing about the role of the faculty member in the university of the 21st century.  In a world of open content, what is the value-added of the teacher?  A couple of my musings are here and here.

For readers interested in this topic, I’d like to call your attention to a recent post by Josh Kim.  Josh writes about how he applied to teach for the University of Phoenix, and despite being well qualified on objective grounds (experienced online course developer and instructor, Ph.D., etc.) his application was rejected.  He then goes on to speculate about why he was rejected.  (Bear in mind that we don’t know why Josh was rejected.)  The comment stream is also very interesting, despite having a number of predictable responses.   (The comment that particularly caught my attention was “the UoP approach is a business model predicated on an inexhaustible supply of instructors.”)

Based on Josh’s post and the comments, U of P seems to have adopted the approach I argued against here.  I don’t know much about U of P except that they enroll a huge number of students.  Josh states: “the U of P methodology for developing courses and training faculty is well known for creating consistently positive outcomes.”  I’d like to hear more about the evidence that this approach is effective.   I’m especially curious whether the assessments of student learning measure lower level or higher level thinking.  Anyone have some insights on this?