Thoughts on a Good Class – 2/14/2012 – A gratifying discussion
This week was my first experiment in something different in my classes. I have had discussion days before, so that was not the real difference here. What was different is that I had a day designed purely to explore a single topic in great detail with the students doing all of the preparation work outside of class and coming in simply to discuss that issue. In this case, I set up the material for the discussion by covering the three main tendrils of history that led into the topic — immigration, unionization, and Progressivism. Each of those had been covered in lecture in the days before this class, and so each student should have had a general idea of the historical context in which the incident took place.
In designing my “In-Class Activity” day, I had gone on the web to look at what resources were out there, as I wanted to give the students something that they would not access in a normal class. I did not want a traditional discussion where you have the students go out and read some primary sources and then come back and talk about them. I wanted something different, something that would engage the students in a different way, and yet accomplish the very goals that I always try to reach, having them connect the historical events to the modern age. As well, I wanted them to be confronted with an event that happened to people like them but 100 years earlier so that they could relate to them. Traditional “great man” history does not speak to them in many ways, but getting down to average Americans working hard just to get by speaks well to students, especially the non-traditional ones you find in a community college setting who have been out and worked in the real world.
What I had the students do was go out to the PBS website and watch the American Experience program on The Triangle Fire of 1911. They also were to access a couple of the other resources there, including an introductory essay, biographies of some of the participants, and a few informative pictures in a slideshow. The combination of that material was what they had to do before class, and it was open and available from the first day of class. To get into class on the day of the discussion, the students were required to bring a 1-2 page response to the material. I did not guide them in what they were to write specifically, but left it open to them as far as what they wrote.
It was an experiment in something new, and I really had no idea how it would go. Would they do the work ahead of time? Well, about 80-85% of the students who showed up brought a 1-2 page response. I did not let the rest stay in the class and told them to leave with a 0 for the day. Of those who had a response, I would estimate that about 10-15% of them really didn’t do much of the assigned work. On the other end, about 10-15% went well beyond the required viewings and did their own research. And, another 10-15% couldn’t get all of the resources to work for one reason or another. Of those, a gratifying few did go out and research on their own to find the information. One even told me that the same video was on Netflix streaming, which tells me I should check next time to offer that as a place for students to check.
The next question is, would they engage the material and have something to say about it? I say it was an unmitigated success in this regard. I began the discussion with the most general question possible, “What did you think about the video?” In both of the discussions I’ve had so far, people stopped having a response to that question after about 30 minutes. So, we had 30 minutes of discussion, with me saying quite little except for guiding who would speak next, on just a response to the video. I took notes during that time and did the rest of the discussion off of the topics that they brought up the most. We easily filled the rest of the class period (75 minutes total) with no problems and very few gaps where nobody had anything to say. Of course, some of that is because they were being graded on the discussion, but they really were responding well to the material and had a lot to say at all parts of the discussion. In both classes, I have the feeling that we could have filled much more time if we had it, but that we really did dissect the issues at the time well, while also relating the experiences from that time to the modern day well. I also get the feeling from the responses that I heard that they will remember this event and the discussion we had about it much longer than they probably will the individual things that I lecture on each day.
What do I take away from this? I consider it an overwhelming success on a thing that I wasn’t sure would work. The response was excellent, and students did the work ahead of time, which was something I was very worried about. But why did it work so well? I think some of it has to do with the form of media. There’s something about watching a documentary, especially when you can watch it on your own time rather than being forced to sit there in class and watch it that can be quite engaging. This was a very well done one, which does help as well. Also, it is not “traditional” history. One of the first responses I got, before I even really started the discussion was that almost all of the students had no knowledge of the incident before. They had never heard of it, but they were interested in it. The subject reflects on topics that are relevant in the lives of people who would be at a community college, in that it is primarily about working-age people, mostly women, who are struggling in a system that seems set up against them. The students brought up personal experiences a number of times as they attempted to relate what they had seen there to their own lives, and I did not have to guide them to do this. In fact, I like that word guide, as I felt much more like I was just a guide in the discussion then that I was a leader of the discussion.
I have one more section that will do the discussion tomorrow, and I hope it goes just as well. It’s days and assignments like this that energize me as a teacher and keep me going as an educator.
Thoughts on History – 2/13/2012 – State of the Field
Two articles were delivered into my email yesterday on the state of the field of history. So, I thought I would write about them, having gone through the dissertation process myself (without completing it) and teaching history now. I certainly have my own opinions, and I’m sure that will come through here.
What’s Been Lost in History (As a note, I got this off of some place that allows me to read the full article. You have to have a subscription to read it on the Chronicle’s site.)
This is a fairly common-sense recounting of the problems with the job market for people pursuing a Ph.D. in history. He notes that the typical history department prepares students for a single profession, that of being a professor in a tenure-track job, doing research and a bit of teaching as necessary. If you do not aspire to that, the current state of history graduate education is not designed for you. While I did not go through the program looking for a nonacademic job, as this article focuses on, I still was an outsider, as I quickly discovered that I was much more interested in teaching than research. In fact, I spent 5 1/2 years in a Ph.D. program trying to convince myself that I could do enough of the research side of things to get through with the Ph.D. and hopefully get a teaching job somewhere. In the end, I left with a good amount of teaching experience, so I am thankful for that, but the emphasis on producing researchers was undoubtedly the only acceptable focus in my experience, just as this article discusses. As he says, “I do not have solid evidence on this point, but I think the notion of academe as the only suitable outcome of doctoral education is a myth generated by the highly untypical period from the mid-1950s to about 1970. My sense is that the historical profession (and the human sciences generally) became much narrower and more academic in the decades after World War II.” I think it is stuck in a rut, just as I’ve been talking about with other aspects of teaching in this blog so far. Why do we get taught this way in doctoral programs, because that’s the way they were taught. We even talked about the comprehensive exams as an archaic hazing ritual, done because that’s what our professors had to do.
His solution is to make the history degree more of a “pre-professional degree” than just one that leads to an academic research career. Acknowledge that many people who go into history will get a law degree or a museum placement or (like me) a teaching job. He advocates linking up history with “public affairs, business administration, international relations, social work, and journalism” as well, which would strengthen historical thinking and reasoning across the professions. Make it into something that people have more options with. When I left my undergraduate institution with a degree in history, I never got any real guidance on what I could do outside of going to grad school. Nobody ever talked about other options, and I went to grad school largely because I really didn’t know what else to do. There were no real connections to other fields, outside of one class that was only tangentially connected to the history department that looked at public history. I also got an internship at a museum in the summer before my senior year, but it also never really led to anything. All paths pointed to grad school, with no real alternatives given. So, there I went. And there was a very focused program with little ideas outside of research.
As he says, “Doctoral training in history as it developed in the 19th century included a commitment to civic life and leadership; in the first half of the 20th century, history was at the core of civic professionalism, partly because the social sciences generally were then historicist.” I will go even further to say that it is not just doctoral history, but history at all levels. This is something that I have been struggling with here in this blog because it has to do with the relevance of the subject that I teach directly. Is history just the memorization of facts at the undergraduate level or the research of some minutia that somebody else hasn’t found yet at the graduate level? I hope that it is more than that, and I like the civic aspects and the preparation for other careers that are discussed as alternatives in this article.
I guess that the more I look back on it, the more disappointed I am in my undergraduate and graduate education in preparing me for what I am actually doing now. Perhaps that means I was not suited to do history as I did, but I love teaching it, and I’m not sure how else I could have gone through the process without getting the teaching experience ahead of time to be able to get the job I did get. It just seems somewhat hollow when I look back on it. One of my friends in grad school said it best — everything he wanted to do in history you could do without a Ph.D., while everything you did to get a Ph.D. in history was not anything he wanted to do. Yet, idealistic people keep going in, with the hope that they will be the ones to buck the system. Hopefully one of them succeeds, but for now, I will try to do my best from a lower rung in the academic ladder.
Coming out of the American Historical Association (I should probably join this again at some point) is apparently a new effort to define what it means to get a history degree at the “associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral” levels. Right now, there is no definition of that at all, and each institution’s degree is fundamentally different from each other one (I might even argue that each student’s experience in each program is fundamentally different). Of course, at my community college, you can’t even get an associate degree in history at all, so that’s a fascinating concept in and of itself. And, most importantly, this effort will not be about what is taught (the specifics), but about the competencies that one would expect to come out of a degree in history. In other words, this is another in the line of the assessment push now. It will be interesting to see how this turns out. Is it going to be a hollow change that ends up not meaning much, or will it provide some legitimacy and direction, much as was discussed in the previous article.
I don’t know that anything that I saw here will fundamentally change what I’m doing in the classroom, and it was interesting to see that the competencies here were basically the exact things that I already try to emphasize. But some commonalities would be good, especially if you could combine what was in this article with the previous one. I do think it would be even more valuable at the higher levels, as the graduate level is often even more amorphous. Some structure and variety in instructional ideas and techniques could have the potential to bring about changes. I guess I’m less optimistic there, but you would hope that things would change at some point to open up a field that is so singularly focused.
Thoughts on Education – 2/12/2012 – Is Technology the Solution?
I haven’t had much time to sit down and think about education since Thursday. It’s funny how the weekends slip away from you. I do have a big backlog of articles after having not done them on either Thursday or Friday, so I’m going to stick with more reviews today. I haven’t quite figured out what’s a good mix here, more of my own stuff or more article reviews. Of course, even in the article reviews, I am including a lot of my own thoughts as well. Right now, I’m doing article reviews when I get 4-5 articles I want to look at. However, I do look at so many places for information through the week, that it is honestly quite hard not to have that many articles to examine.
Using Technology to Learn More Efficiently
OK, so to start, just ignore the large Jessica Simpson lookalike on the page there, as distracting as her stare is there. I was interested in the article from the title, which is what gets me to save most of them for review later. So, often as I’m sitting down here to write about them, I am reading them for the first time as well. Sometimes they are so irrelevant or don’t do what I want that I simply don’t do anything with them at all, such as this one today. This one almost got a delete as well, but the concept is at least interesting, even if it links up to an older style of learning that I don’t want to encourage in my own classroom — flash cards. The article profiles a company that is digitizing flash cards and remaking them to encourage better retention and more honest use of flash cards. The more compelling idea is the creation of a schedule and the push for accountability to the students to complete their work. As the article notes, this is really an attempt to reduce the unproductive cramming before an exam and open up a broader studying schedule. However, the ultimate limitation here is the students. They are the ones who have to make the decision not to cram at the last minute, and I have a feeling that the students who would do this with this program would be the same ones who would be least likely to put off all of their learning to the last minute anyway. Still, I’m all for accountability, especially if it could be integrated with that idea from yesterday on using Google Docs to gauge student progress. So, maybe as a tool that an instructor could put together and release to the student, this could work.
The Gamified Classroom (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4)
“Today, students are expected to pay attention and learn in an environment that is completely foreign to them. In their personal time they are active participants with the information they consume; whether it be video games or working on their Facebook profile, students spend their free time contributing to, and feeling engaged by, a larger system. Yet in the classroom setting, the majority of teachers will still expect students to sit there and listen attentively, occasionally answering a question after quietly raising their hand. Is it any wonder that students don’t feel engaged by their classwork?”
This, again, goes back to the issues I’ve talked about in several other posts, especially the last one. If we are talking about student engagement, then I think we are failing with the lecture model, especially to the most current generation of students, which is who this article series concerns. I just have to look out at my own classes on lecture days to see the problems, with maybe 1/3 paying active attention, 1/3 paying occasional attention, and 1/3 completely disengaged from the material. Of course, is gamification the answer? Of course not. But can we learn something from this educational trend? Very likely. Perhaps it can bring in greater engagement and even foster creativity rather than rote learning.
The role of technology can both help and hinder learning. The article refers to a number of ways that technology can help engagement, through having the students involved in project based learning and higher levels of engagement, using both apps and clickers. What is interesting is what the author sees as one way that technology is reducing that engagement as well, the smartboard. I’ve not seen that criticism before, as the smartboard is often held up as one of the prime ways to engage students. “Unfortunately, our classroom is often filled with technology that only exists to better enable old styles of teaching, the biggest culprit being the smartboard. Though it has a veneer of interactivity, smartboards serve only as a conduit for lecture based learning. They sit in front of an entire classroom and allow a teacher to present un-differentiated material to the entire group. Even their “interactive” capabilities serve only the student called upon to represent the class at the board.” I have been suspicious of smartboards as a save-all, but I had never really been able to figure out why I didn’t like them. I find this argument compelling. From my own point of view, they seem to just be a new version of the chalk board, offering nothing more than you can find with the method.
“In schools, our students should be using technology to collaborate together on projects, present their ideas to their peers, research information quickly, or to hone the countless other skills that they will need in the 21st century workplace–regardless of the hardware they will be using in the future. If we’re just using tech to teach them the same old lessons. . . we’re wasting its potential. Students are already using these skills when they blog, post a video to YouTube, or edit a wiki about their favorite video game. They already have these skills; we have to show them how to use them productively and not just for entertainment. This is where Gamification comes in. Games are an important piece of the puzzle–they are how we get students interested in using these tools in the classroom environment.” I agree. Ha! What I always tell my students not to do, present a big quotation and say they agree, but I guess I’ll hold myself to a lower standard than them. Still, I think this is an insightful look at the problems with just throwing technology at the problem. You can’t just hand teachers technology and expect them to transform everything. Technology is not the solution, although effective teaching with effective technology could be part of the solution.
The last two Parts of the series deal with how this might take place in practice. I’m not going to go through all of that here, as the information is diverse and hard to summarize. So, check it out if you’re interested. I think what is most interesting is the push for self-pacing and self-motivation for students. Tying completion to rewards beyond simple grades and pushing the students to do more. This is an interesting idea, but I do wonder if our students are ready for this. That is always the problem with these articles, that they project these things into an ideal world where students are not motivated because we aren’t motivating them. Yet, the real problem is often much more complex. Our students are as varied as can be, and the reasons for motivation or lack of motivation are varied in the same way. How do you motivate students who are working two jobs, taking care of kids, sick, taking care of sick family members, in school only because their parents think they should, in school only because they think the should, and so forth. In other words, when students aren’t required to be there, such as at college, how does this push differ? Something to think about.
The loss of solitude in schools
And, I’ll close for today with an opposite view. Here, the author is warning against the push for project-centered education, one where we emphasize interaction and group work over individual absorption of material. She makes the case that education is inherently a solitary process, where we engage with and absorb difficult material until we learn it. As she says, the emphasis on group work and interaction produces students that “become dependent on small-group activity and intolerant of extended presentations, quiet work, or whole-class discussions.” In other words, they forget how to learn on their own.
She also notes that the push away from the “sage on the stage” can be just as damaging for students. “Students need their sages; they need teachers who actually teach, and they need something to take in. A teacher who knows the subject and presents it well can give students something to carry in their minds.” I have never done much with small group work, so I can’t say one way or another how this works. I have generally done either lecture or discussions. I don’t know how to evaluate small group work, and so I have not done it. Perhaps this is short-sighted of me, but I just don’t know how to give a grade for group work that is not just on the end project. In other words, how do you hold everyone accountable? I know, from talking with my wife and remembering my own experiences, that group work is inherently unequal and very frustrating for those who want to do a good job, as they generally end up doing most of it. I don’t want to put students in that position, and have never been much for this idea. I could be convinced otherwise, but I am skeptical on the idea of small group work. I know that many of the changes I’m looking at making involve small group work, but I just don’t know what to do with it.
Anyway, enough for today. Please let me know what you think or if you have any responses to the ideas I’m presenting, as I don’t want to be working in a vacuum on this.
Thoughts on Education – 2/11/2012 – A revolution in the classroom?
Here’s a breakdown of the articles on education I’ve come across recently.
We’re ripe for a great disruption in higher education
The core of her argument is here: “But the real disruption comes when you stop measuring academic accomplishment in terms of seat time and hours logged, and start measuring it by competency. As all employers know, the average BA doesn’t certify that the degree-holder actually knows anything. It merely certifies that she had the perseverance to pass the required number of courses.” She is projecting a time when everything is going to be overturned. Where it’s not just the point where online courses take the place of face-to-face courses, but where the whole model of how we teach gets overturned. Who knows if she is right that this is going to happen anytime soon or in our lifetime, as revolutions are predicted all the time, but the argument is certainly compelling. Alternatives to the 4-year, sit-down degree have been growing, and at some point, it is easy to see us reaching a point at some time where we have fewer and fewer “traditional” students. Even now, I know that we could fill as many online classes as we could offer at my community college. My history ones always fill in a day or two after they open, and we could keep going. Of course, then there becomes the question of who is going to take the traditional classes if we just have more and more online classes? Right now, we limit the alternatives, forcing most students to take a traditional, face-to-face class. And, right now, there is a distinct population that wants that. However, at some point we are going to stop being able to keep that gate closed, and students will start going to places that offer more flexibility. The other thing that occurs to me on reading the article is that even our most “non-traditional” offering at my community college, the online course, is still strapped into the traditional course calendar. It starts and ends at the same time, and the guidelines we are given have the students not able to work ahead but instead completing the course like a traditional course. Breaking those boundaries will become necessary I think. We should be moving to classes that are self-paced, classes that work outside of a semester schedule, classes that can be completed in 4-, 8-, 12-, 16-, 20-, 24-weeks or whatever. Classes that start at odd times and classes that end at odd times. I can see the day, at some point, where we have rolling enrollment and completion on a student’s schedule. The student registers and starts, finishing up when he or she finishes, with assignments graded as they come in. We create the content, monitor the course, are available for consultation, feedback, and assessment. In other words, the day where a lot more places look like Western Governors University. And, the scary thing is, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
Using Google Docs to Check In On Students’ Reading
And, if we are going to move to this more self-paced model, then we need to have better tools to check in on our students as they are doing their work. So, this article’s title certainly seems to go along with that. This is a quite interesting use of Google Docs. He details how to create a spreadsheet to keep track of where students are and what they are doing. As it is shared among all students, everyone can then see whatever common dimension you are looking for. In his case, he was having common reading and having the students post up before each class on how far they had read. That way he knew roughly where all students were, including a class average that gave a decent idea of how far most students were. I could see this used in a lot of different cases for common assignments in a traditional class or with a self-paced class, you have to post up to that in order to keep track of each individual student’s progress as they make their way through a self-paced course. I could see something like this really working well at tracking students on those types of assignments that they do outside of class that don’t have specific end points/assessments (like textbook reading and the like). That gives you another way to check progress rather than just waiting on them to complete a chapter test. The only thing this relies on is the students accurately and honestly recording their progress. I do think this would matter less if you were thinking about a self-paced course than one where it would be embarrassing for a student to show up to class not having read the required reading. With a self-paced course, this tool could also serve to remind the students at regular points that they should be working on some piece of the course.
Harvard Looks Beyond Lectures to Keep Students Engaged
This article was a bit shorter and lighter on substance than I thought when I posted it up to Evernote to read later. Still, it does cover some of these same ideas that something needs to change, as I think many of us can agree. In this case, Harvard is dealing with the problem that “researchers already know what works to promote deeper thinking and learning and it’s not sitting in lectures, taking tests, and then moving on to the next topic. Instead, students need the opportunity to make meaning of what they’ve learned and apply it to real-world challenges.” I can certainly agree with that. What I don’t buy is the last section, which implicitly tells us to wait for Harvard to make its decision on how we should change things, and then we can all rely on their expertise and change afterwards. I’m not waiting for them, and I don’t think the field is either.
Resistance to the inverted classroom can show up anywhere
I’ll close today with this one, which goes back to a concern I raised in the first article. “Many students simply want to be lectured to. When I taught the MATLAB course inverted, all of the students were initially uncomfortable with the course design, some vocally so.” Challenging the way things have always been done is going to lead to resistance. The student in a lecture class is in a passive role. Little is asked of that student, and they can just go through and do the minimum and do fine. Show up, take a few notes, and we will consider you to be learning. I hear that all the time from my colleagues (not going to name any names here), that the students they have won’t even take notes in class. I wonder two things about this.
First, is taking notes the thing we are seeing as the highest level of learning? I hear that more than anything else, that if you aren’t lecturing and the students aren’t taking notes, then learning isn’t happening. I go the route where I give all of my students my lecture notes ahead of time, which they are welcome to bring to class or use a laptop/tablet to access in class. I have had a number of students comment positively about that, saying that it allows them to actually pay attention to what is said in class rather than furiously trying to take notes on it. I’m not sure when it happened, but we seem to have elevated taking notes on a heard lecture to the highest form of academic achievement. Yet, I have plenty of students who don’t take any notes who do well and students who take a lot of notes who struggle.
Second, listening to a lecture and taking notes on it is the most passive of activities for a student. It might seem active to watch the pencils flying out there in class, but, at its heart, this exchange requires very little of the student beyond paying attention. There are not a lot of jobs out there where the ability to listen to 75-minute lectures and take notes about them is going to be a regular part of what they are asked to do. Yet, that seems to me to be the primary skill that we ask of the students. And while it is, why would a student want to change it. All they have to be is a listener and a note-taker.
Of course changing out of the model is going to breed resistance. If you told me that instead of sitting and listening to a lecture, I had to actively participate, presenting my opinions, engaging the material, and thinking and doing, I would have resisted as well. I can’t say it a lot better than this author did: “What I think this illustrates is that there is a cultural expectation about how college classes ought to go that is very hard to change. Many students — and faculty! — in higher education are sold on what I called the renters’ model, which is basically transactional. I pay my money and inhabit this space while you take care of my needs, and when I’m done I’ll move on. The inverted classroom is one style of teaching that insists on ownership. There will be some friction when two fundamental conceptions of class time are in such disagreement with each other, no matter how much sense it might make in your content area.” It is something I worry about on a regular basis about making change to my class. The question is, do we let expectations hold us back or do we move forward anyway and try to change those expectations?
Thoughts on Teaching History – 2/9/2012
We had a presentation today from one of the major publishers, and in the process, we had an impromptu conversation about teaching history as well. It got me thinking about my own assumptions about teaching history, so I thought I needed to sit down and work out some things here.
What got me going was something that I have already encountered before and that really irks me, that history teachers at the college level can’t manage to cover the material that is in the assigned history course. We split up our American history course at 1877, but I seem to be the only instructor that actually tries to cover the time period of the course. As far as I can tell, the rest of the department usually gets to around 1850 in the first half of the course and to about 1950-60 in the second half. To me, that is outrageous, but I seemed to come off as some sort of traditionalist fuddy-duddy (if that’s really a word) for raising the idea that we ought to teach the period that we are assigned to teach. I cover the first half of American history to 1877 and get to 2001 in the second half of the course, and I just assumed that should be what everyone should be aiming for. Instead, everyone else seemed to be perfectly comfortable with the fact that teaching American history that covers a certain period of time does not mean that you have to actually cover that period. And the easy acceptance of that has me thinking if I’m somehow wrong in my own thinking. I remember having surveys that didn’t complete the time period going all the way back to jr high/high school, when we ended in around 1850 and started up in 1877, meaning that I did not have anything on the Civil War or Reconstruction. In fact, since I didn’t have to take the surveys, I didn’t actually take a course that covered that period until I took the actual Civil War and Reconstruction course at Rice. To me and my fellow history majors, this always seemed like a big joke that a person couldn’t cover the finite ground of American history and bother to actually complete the course, and I made that a priority in my own teaching that I would always make sure that the students got the full coverage. And this is not just because I feel that they should hear about everything, although that is something that I do believe, but that I think that if students are going to understand how history is relevant to their lives, you can’t just take a few bits here and there and leave out the rest and expect them to get a full picture of how the history of the country has affected how their own world is today. Yet, I seem to come off as naive in my department for believing that actually covering the Civil War and Reconstruction period or the period after 1960 is somehow relevant and something that the students should have as part of their course sequence. Some of them do argue that they cover all of it because they do assign all parts of the textbook and quiz them over the chapters that are not covered in class, but that seems to be a quite limited argument at best.
I was reminded that the current state standards for history don’t actually say anything about the subjects we are supposed to cover, but instead look at communication, social relations, and other aspects. So, maybe I am the one that is backward. If nobody but me believes that you should actually cover the material, then maybe I am the one who is wrong here. So, as I said to start here, I’m trying to think about why it is that I believe in full coverage in the survey. To me, it is just what you do, so it is hard for me to get my mind around not completing the course, so I am having quite a bit of trouble here. I especially am troubled by the fact that when others don’t complete the course, and I then get them, I am referring to material that they are then unfamiliar with, as they didn’t get that coverage in another course. But that is a fairly irrelevant argument really, as we all teach the class in different ways, so the emphases will always be different from one class to another. There’s also the argument that if we are more concerned with teaching critical thinking, writing ability, and the like, then the actual specifics of the subject we teach is irrelevant. But then, what am I doing teaching history at that point. I’ll just teach a critical writing and thinking course with a few historical examples instead and call it a history class. Is that where I’m supposed to be going? If that’s the implication, that the actual history we study is irrelevant to the teaching process, then I have really been doing it wrong over the years. When I say that I want to move beyond the lecture and flip my class, I am not talking about ditching the history all together, but that seemed to be the implication today, that you should just do your best to cover the material, but that the intention of turning the students into thinking people afterwards was more important than covering the material. I don’t know if I’m characterizing what I heard incorrectly, but I am just troubled by the implications of it.
Here’s an illustration of what I find a problem. This is from my syllabus, where I lay out the course objectives for my first half of American history course:
Course Objectives for HIST 1301
- Students will understand the following historical themes:
- colonization of the New World
- formation of the English colonies
- development of a unified colonial America
- creation of a revolutionary ideology
- development of a slave system
- creation of a national identity
- development and changes in religious, cultural, and social identity
- development of a divide between the North and South
- causes of the Civil War
- consequences of Reconstruction
- Students will understand the development of an American nation and how it is relevant to the world they live in today.
- Students will learn how to analyze historical evidence for validity, reliability, and bias.
- Students will understand how to use evidence to prove an argument.
- Students will understand the concept of historical significance, allowing them to put an event, idea, or person into historical context.
- Students will learn how to write coherent, well-thought-out material that presents their ideas and evidence in an organized manner.
- Students will be encouraged to question the standard assumptions of American history and use the history studied in this course to evaluate the place of the United States in the world today.
So, in what I understand about what I am trying to do in teaching American history would remain largely the same. I’d just lose 9 and 10 from the first learning objective (and pieces of the others as well). Is my course lesser because I don’t cover that material? Am I doing my job if I don’t cover those parts? I think so, personally, but, again, I seem to be in the minority. This whole thing makes me very uncomfortable. As one of the instructors in the room today said, there may be 17 chapters in the first half survey, but he only does 13 of them because he spends the first month going through the idea of “what is history” with the students, and that the time he has left over only allows him to get through Chapter 13 out of 17. When I objected to this, I felt like I was belittled because I found it important that the instructors cover all 17 chapters. But that’s really not it, it’s not that I think all 17 chapters are important, and I leave out a hell of a lot when I do teach a survey, as we all do. But, when these are things that I have identified as fundamental to what the students should do in the course, then I can’t help but question whether I’m wrong or what.
I’ll have to come back to this when I have had more time to think about it, as I’m still a bit bewildered at the moment.
Thoughts on Education – 2/8/2012 – Articles, including a crazy one from 9gag
I’ve saved up a couple of days worth of information on education here. I can’t say there’s a strong theme here, although several do have to do with games in education, which continues to be something that interests me. Here are some of the highlights of what I’ve been reading:
Khan Academy: It’s Different This Time
I’ve read a lot about the Khan Academy, and the overall direction of the coverage is generally quite positive. It is generally talked about as revolutionary to the current state of education. This is a rare piece that offers criticism. I have only explored Khan Academy a bit myself, mostly looking at topics covered without really engaging the material. Thus, I’m really relying mostly on what I have read elsewhere about the Khan Academy more than my personal experience. Also, as a note, the Khan Academy has a lot more math and science than it does humanities, so it usually gets evaluated in terms of these offerings. Still, this is a good counterpoint: “Khan Academy’s style of teaching is identical to what students have seen — and rejected — for generations: do this, then do this, then do this. Today, thousands of American students are performing poorly in math, in large part because they weren’t taught it correctly in the first place.” From what I have seen, there is definitely a point here. As the article says, the real problem is that the students are taught that all they need to do is memorize how to complete the task and not understand why completing it is important to know. The article also goes into a bit on skepticism of “new” breakthroughs that I can take or leave. It also notes the general positive reviews regarding “engagement” among students and the gamification aspects. Yet, I think that first critique is the most cogent and relevant. It is along the lines of what I have been worried about here. Is it more important in history to memorize what happened or to understand why what happened is important? I would certainly argue the latter, but I can’t speak for math in general. I’d love to hear from someone about the math side of things to see if this is a good argument or not.
Despite Focus on Data, Standards for Diploma May Still Lack Rigor
I do have to be honest here that I was linked to this article from another (Reeding and Riting That XPlane Why Stoodents Are Not College Ready), which is obviously a more eye-catching title. However, it quickly got into minutia about the New York area that seemed irrelevant here. So, I went to the original article. It discusses the problems with a single test being presented for all students as what they need to pass. As the writer argues, “If the standard is set too high, so many will fail — including children with special education needs and students for whom English is a second language — that there will be a public outcry. But if the standard is set too low, the result is a diploma that has little meaning.” What this means, in his estimation is that the tests have erred on the latter side, with multiple examples given of passing essays that use barely passable English. His basic conclusion is that testing-based evaluations have failed to increase the actual abilities of the students and just result in watered down tests to get students through who have not improved. The relevance for me is that these are the students (in TX rather than NY, of course) that I get. Somebody made an interesting comment to me two years ago that we are now seeing the students who have been raised through most of their formative years in a testing-focused school environment before college. I certainly see the limitations and largely agree with the article. Of course, the problem here is that it offers no actual solutions, outside of stopping doing what we’re doing now. From my perspective, I need to know how to deal with these students when they get to me.
Are you ready for a revolution in education?
I know, a 9gag link is not exactly scholarly, but then you have to get ideas where they come from, and I do search the linking sites, especially reddit. I don’t know if I can recommend that people get on reddit, as it has a lot of junk and is mostly amusing. However, I have found the education, teaching, and higher education sub-reddits to be a great source for articles. Honestly, I get about 60% of my links from there. This one is an example of something completely off the wall, namely the reorganization of a class around experience points (XP) such as you would earn in an actual game. It sets up a system where students earn XP for completing tasks. They can then use that XP to level up in the class while also using the points to gain advantages (like extra time on a test). It’s interesting and got my mind working. I was halfway through creating a way to use XP in my own classes before I even realized it. So, the idea is compelling. Realistic? I have no idea, but certainly compelling.
Using Role Play Simulations to Promote Active Learning
Along the same lines of gaming came this article. It talks about bringing in concepts from role-playing to substitute for the traditional lecture and offers three pieces of advice. The first and last are good, and if you’re interested in role-playing projects, then you should definitely check them out. The middle one is the one that caught my eye, because it encapsulates one of my biggest fears in making dramatic changes. The author notes that you have to assure the students that doing something different is ok and that they will be assessed fairly. Here’s the relevant part: “Most students are used to their teachers feeding them the information, so this will be a new experience for them. Addressing student anxieties about this way of learning is particularly important in disciplines or universities where the lecture-essay-exam model is the most common. I’ve found it helps to provide students with examples of work produced by students in previous courses. You also want to be clear in communicating your expectations. Write out the rules and requirements, and enforce them so the process is predictable. Make sure the teams are small enough that everyone participates and spot check to see that everyone actually does what they are supposed to – the free-rider problem isn’t going to go away. Also, take into account that, depending on their personality or culture of origin, some students may need extra encouragement to participate.” I will definitely take those ideas in mind when working on recreating my course.
7 Strategies to Make Your Online Teaching Better
- Let the technology help you, not hinder you – expect things to go wrong when you do new things. Don’t get flustered and help the students through the rough parts. The author recommends making tutorial videos and the like, but I think the biggest thing, which I have found to be true, is expect to be troubleshooting through your first week or two. This is something I certainly need to remember, as I get frustrated easily and often take it out on students through overly-sarcastic responses.
- Anticipate the difficulties – know that online students will be distracted, will get bored, will not spend the time you think is adequate, and all together approach the class in a way that you do not expect. The author suggests providing much “scaffolding” to keep students from getting lost and keep them moving in the right direction.
- Incorporate synchronous opportunities – online office hours and the ability of students to get a hold of you when they are likely to be doing the work and encountering problems. In other words, not in normal, traditional office hours.
- Give extra feedback. Then give more – I was going to write that I think I do this poorly, but then I read the advice here and see that I do all of it. I guess it’s the nature of online classes, that I always feel like I need to do more since I don’t see them in person. Yet, I guess I do ok here. I just always feel that I need to be providing more personal feedback to each student. But, as I teach 90 students online right now (a little less than half my load), and will have that probably go up even more next year, I’m not sure how realistic extensive individual feedback is. Still, I do need to think about this one.
- Prove you are not a dog – make sure the students know you are a real person with real issues, real problems, real experiences, and such. Don’t be a robotic responder. Have some personality, and the students will appreciate it.
- Provide support for self-regulation – encourage the students to take charge of their pace of work and requirements each week. We can only hold their hands so much and must rely on them to get things in on time. As I see it, you can only be so flexible, again with 90 students, there’s not a ton of leeway on getting things done and providing individual exceptions.
- Encourage play – While I have thought of this one, this is well put and something I certainly fail at. I will leave it with a quotation here: “Online courses often have a reputation of being dry and boring: lots of reading and lots of lectures. Adding in other elements can make all the difference in the world: add pictures when you can, consider design principles in your CMS, record your lectures in front of a small, live audience (I once recorded a weekly email from my campsite, replete with kids shouting in the background and a fly buzzing around my head). The point is, recognize both how you want to teach the information and how it might be received. I try really hard not to be boring.” I fear my class is boring. I get compliments organization and the like, but I think it is fundamentally not all that interesting of a course. This is something I should really work on.
I’m going to close here, as I’m approaching 1750 words. I have one more article on my list, but this is probably enough for a single post. Give me any feedback that you have. I’d love to hear what you have to say, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Thoughts on Education – 2/7/2012 – Evaluation and Assessment
Sorry for yesterday’s lack of a post. I decided to take the evening off and watch some shows with my wife and then go to bed early. We were watching In Search of Myths & Heroes from the BBC on Netflix. We watched 2 of the 4 episodes last night, one on Shangri-La and one on King Arthur. Not the most groundbreaking show in the world, but I did enjoy it. We had watched an earlier episode on The Queen of Sheba, but I didn’t really pay enough attention to that one to saymuch one way or another. The fourth myth is going to be Jason and the Argonauts.
On to education. I had another conversation with my Dean today regarding the future of the educational system. I had remarked that I have seen a larger number of students already skipping class than normal at this time of the semester. Informally, I have heard the same from other colleagues as well. It is always an interesting phenomenon, as to when students stop coming. I’ve had about 1/4 not showing up already, which is a bit early, as that level of absence usually doesn’t come until after the first major graded assignment, which is still over a week away for me. What is also interesting, as I’m thinking about it here, is that my highest level of attendance is always in my smallest section. I get 1/4-1/3 loss in attendance over the course of the semester in a 40-person class, but I will have perfect or near-perfect attendance in my two-way video section that only features 15 students directly in front of me. I wonder if that’s another advantage of smaller classes, in that there are fewer places to hide, so more people come. Just a theory. Anyway, from there, our conversation turned to hybrid classes and the problem of evaluation/assessment. He presented a compelling idea that we have discussed before, namely simplifying down the grading standards. Right now, we use a 5-point system, A-F to determine a person’s grade in the class. Yet, some of those grades are basically useless. The D is a grade that means nothing. You don’t fail if you get one and have to appear in front of the Academic Appeals committee, but you don’t get any real credit for the D and have to repeat the class. There’s also a case to be made that a B or C aren’t all that different. That does not mean that they aren’t different now, but that, in reality, both basically mean satisfactory completion and mastery of the material. Then, an A is excellent. So, what if we went to a model where instead of A-F, we just had three grades — Excellent, Satisfactory/Mastery, Failure. As my Dean said, those are the real grades that matter to the students. Most are just looking for satisfactory, while a few really want to push it the extra mile into Excellent. The rest will Fail. Any thoughts on that?
Another interesting idea that we discussed is how you would evaluate on that scale. Actually, we talked about the whole evaluation/assessment process. The problem with any class that moves beyond just a standard model for assessment (quizzes, tests, essays, etc.) is that the grading automatically becomes more subjective at that point. Instead of being able to point to a number that the student earned, you have to look instead at a feeling about the student from the performance of the student in the class. I can’t take credit for this, as my Dean is the one to give this example, but I like it, so I am repeating it here. The example is that if I go through a semester with a group of students, doing primarily discussion and class work as the fundamental assessment, then I will, at the end of the semester, be asked to assign a grade. It will be a grade that will be hard to justify, as I would not be able to tell someone coming in a specific number grade that the student earned. Yet, I would be able to evaluate the progress and aptitude of the student well, as I interacted with that student over the course of an entire semester, having that student talk, discuss, evaluate, participate, and create different projects, discussion, and writing. I would be very confident in the grade that I gave the student, but I would not be able to justify it in the traditional manner. However, if I was to give a student a B or Satisfactory, I would be confident in that evaluation. My Dean also pointed out that I could probably ask colleagues to come in and evaluate that student or ask how that student presented him or herself in their classes, and they would probably come to a similar conclusion. And, what is my justification, really? Ten years of teaching experience certainly is a part of it. Ten years of evaluating students works as well. A further discussion we had as part of this dealt with the new state standards coming down the pipeline. Again, they are meant to be evaluated quantitatively, but the essence of them is qualitative and subjective. Making the students jump through hoops to get the right number grade is one way to do it, but if you had some system that was more subjective yet acceptable would be interesting as well.
I don’t know really. It was a long, productive talk that we had, and my mind is still processing some of it. I was going to do some article reviews as well here, but I’ve gotten so caught up in thinking about this that I think I’m going to go ahead and close here for the day. I have articles and can talk about them tomorrow.
Thoughts on Education – 2/5/2012
Just try to find any actual news on educational topics on Super Bowl Sunday. I dare you. There’s not much out there, so I really don’t have any articles to bring forward here. Today, I will just put in a brief word on what I’m thinking about these days.
I am unsatisfied with the status quo in education. I seek change. The problem that I have is getting to that change. I have so many ideas but I do not know what will work and what won’t. I have taught in many different ways over the time that I’ve been teaching, and the one constant has been change. I do something different every semester just about, trying things out and seeing what works. If it works, I keep it. If it works sort of, I make changes. If it doesn’t work, I drop it.
I started my teaching career in the most traditional way, working with discussion sections as a graduate student. I did that for five years, working under numerous different professors. My first was a several-hundred-person section under Jackson Spielvogel doing a Nazism and Fascism class. That one was great, as we also had undergrad TAs in the mix, so we were all being taught how to be an effective TA. After finishing up my comprehensive exams, I was put out there as a graduate lecturer. What is interesting about that is that the only guidance I was given for how to teach my own sections was what I had done as a TA. I don’t think the first teaching experiences went badly, but it was certainly a case of learning on the job. And, as my only real model was teaching through lecture, that’s what I did. Lecture and overhead projector images to start, with a move to PowerPoint not too long after that. I taught multiple different classes at grad school, eventually leaving to get a job teaching at the community college where I am now.
Since being here, I have tried to adapt and change. I became an online teacher as that was a requirement of the job. I have moved to other things because I want to reach the students. You know, “engagement” and all of that. I just am not satisfied with passive delivery of information to the students, but finding other options are hard to work with and find. I always feel like I’m on my own with this process. So, I try something, test it out, see how it works, and move on in one way or another. I have slowly moved to a greater online presence, regardless of the delivery format. I now have an extensive online class and supplemental classroom for my in-class students. In fact, I am mostly hybrid now, with all of the quizzing, homework and exams taking place outside of the classroom. The only thing that’s left in class right now are the lectures, and, if you’ve been reading my other blogs here, you know how interested I am in the idea of “flipping” the classroom. I would like to stop being the so-called “sage on the stage” and turn into the class into a more interactive experience for the students, where they learn real skills rather than memorize the material.
The problems with this are many. For one, I still feel like I’m going to be doing this largely on my own. Second, how do you hold the students responsible for doing the work outside of class that has them ready to discuss or work on more specific topics in class? Third, when you are moving away from the traditional ways of assessment, how do you hold to the state standards at that point? These are all things I’m going to be thinking about as time goes by here. I can’t promise I’ll come to solutions, but that’s what’s on my mind.
Now, as I am distracted by the Super Bowl streaming in the window next to me here, I will close for today.
Thoughts on Education – 2/4/12
I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and think about education. Not because I’ve been doing other important things but because I have exactly not been doing other important things. I tend to try and take some time off when I get the chance during the week, and the last 24 hours or so was that. The time off will vanish as I get closer to my first big set of assignments due in about a week and a half, but right now, there’s time to take a break in the week every once in a while. So, I’m blogging now with regard to the articles that I have saved up over the last couple of days.
I liked this blog post a lot regarding the tempering of optimism that initially comes from teaching as you realize how difficult it is to retain that feeling that you are going to change the world. William was warned by a professor of his in grad school that each year “the students seemed lazier, the job of teaching them harder. And much less rewarding.” He, like so many of us thought that we could make that difference and be different as well, but then, he was confronted with the reality of the situation, captured well in this paragraph:
“The pedagogue in me gently corrects students’ misconceptions. The educated person in me shakes his head and laughs at such fundamental misunderstandings. But sometimes, the part of me who has to grade the papers — the part of me who is conscious of the 14-hour workdays, the amount of effort I’m putting into this job of educating these students — wonders ‘Is this really what I ought to be doing with my life? Is it possible to really make a difference in these lives?'” I would imagine that any of us in teaching has come across that many, many times. We get astounded at the ways that students can mess something up, at the base ignorance that is out there. We share the funny stories with each other, and we shake our heads. I do it all the time, it seems. And, as we say, it seems to get worse year by year.
Again to return to the post here, he says, “‘I had so much respect for my own professors,’ I tell myself. ‘Yet these students seem to be mocking my efforts.'” But then he actually goes back and remembers what he did in classes, skipping, not paying attention, scraping by at the last minute on papers, not really studying for tests, etc. and thinks that maybe we just see it differently because we are in the position of authority and that it was just a situation of us forgetting or willfully ignoring what our fellow students (and us) were really like back then. I think I was good, but I can remember slacking off and doing things I shouldn’t do in class. It’s just that those things are obvious in a different way now, with technology, etc. Back then, if you doodled on your page or something like that, it wasn’t as obvious you were doing things you shouldn’t be doing. Now, we see a laptop or cell phone and we automatically assume that they are not paying attention.
So, what am I trying to say about the article? I’m not exactly sure. I liked reading it and could easily identify with it. Does it help explain anything? I don’t know. I always try to avoid saying the students get worse every year because I fundamentally don’t think that’s true. In the historical sense, I think that the real issue is that we always have that glow looking back through rose-colored glasses that things were better in the past (even if only last semester!) than they are now, and we willingly forget what things were like when we were in their seats.
I think, also, that we are too willing to blame technology for the problems today. The methods of slacking and not paying attention and not doing work have changed, but I’m not sure that the amount of those things have changed all that much. I think that’s the point of the post more than anything else, and I have to say that I agree. I invite technology in my classroom, with the full expectation that students will use it and abuse it. I do this because I also think that it can enhance the classroom, although I’m still working on ways to ensure that it does more of the latter than the former. I just think that outright bans on technology are wrong-headed and punishing in ways that may not be intentional or expected. My wire, for example, has been using her laptop in class to record her teachers’ lectures so that she can listen to them later. And she really does listen to them later. Yet, she has a teacher now that keeps her from doing that by banning technology. So, here’s a student who not only is going to listen and take notes but will even go back and listen several times more to the material, and she can’t at this point. Just a single example, but I think blanket bans end up hurting as much as they help. (And, cue stepping off of the soapbox . . .)
Difference Engine: Let the Games Begin
Interactive Textbooks. OK. I want to see one. Where can I find a true interactive textbook? One designed for college students, whether in my subject area or not? This is the big promise of iBooks and all of the stuff Apple is doing. Now I want to see it. Do I lack patience in this, yes! I want change and I want it now!
Here’s what The Economist says about it: “Done properly, interactive textbooks offer not only video tutorials, more personalised instruction, just-in-time hints and homework help, but also instant access to assessment tools, teaching resources and the ability to network socially with students elsewhere. Using tools for highlighting and annotating virtual flash-cards, students can select information within the text and store it for later revision. Searching public databases, direct from within the textbook, is also possible. At school, students can sync with their teachers’ computers, to hand in their quiz results and homework for marking.” Of course, the question is, will it be “done properly?” And, if you provide those options, will students use them? That’s the big question that always comes up with new technology.
So, again, I want an interactive textbook now. I want one set up for college history. I’ll run a class test on it tomorrow. Let’s get this moving, as I think it has a lot of potential, but if we just screw around, that potential will be lost.
By the way, since it is mentioned in this article (and just about everywhere else), has anyone tried using the Khan Academy? With college students?
What Higher Education Can Learn from Video Games
I like the idea here, but the article is a bit shallow on ideas. I like the idea of “gamification,” one of those ideas floating around now of including games in the learning process to make students more engaged. This is probably because I like playing games so much myself. I like the idea of using something that a lot of people already enjoy doing, playing games, and harnessing that energy to a learning environment. How this could be done for a more ethereal subject realm like the humanities and social sciences is not all that obvious, and how you would assess learning in a gaming environment is even less obvious, but I am intrigued by the idea.
To me, this is the most interesting reason for it: “Compared to traditional, lecture approaches learning where students sit passively either in a classroom or training boardroom to learn the workplace procedures by memory without any real-life interaction; game-based learning lets individuals learn the facts by testing (via practice and failure) until we commit it, not only memory, but also understand the howís and whys of our success in a real-life situation.”
5 Foundational Principles for Course Design
Two very interesting ideas out of this one, ironically enough, neither of them is at the center of the article.
First comes from the first paragraph, which grabbed me immediately. “The big secret amongst many of us who work in online learning is that we are not all that wild about online courses. Sure, we think online courses can be great, and can fill an important need, but what really gets us excited is learning.” Undoubtedly true. I did not get started teaching online because I thought it would solve all of the world’s problems or bring a real new and different way to my teaching. I did it because that’s what was required of my job. I think I’m pretty decent at teaching online, but I will be the first to admit that there’s a lot I don’t know at all about it. I always feel like my online courses are experimental, and I am never very satisfied with them. Of course, I feel that about my regular courses as well, so that’s not a very good comparison.
I then found the end of the article to raise an interesting point along this very line. The article goes through how you put some principles together as you try to create a new online course. It advocates 5 principles, as stated in the title of the article. They’re nothing spectacular and woefully under-explained in the article, but I found the final paragraph to raise an interesting point that I have talked with others about: “To my knowledge, this sort of detailed course proposal and course delivery review and support methodology is not standard in most of our on-ground classes. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could somehow diffuse these resources and methods throughout our curriculum?” Yes, exactly. We think all the time about online classes, and we have a whole evaluation setup for them at my community college. Yet nobody evaluates the content and presentation of our face-to-face classes in the same way. We see much more scrutiny in online courses, and the question raised about why is one that doesn’t get asked often enough.
Anyway, I think that’s good for today. I’ll see what crosses my computer in the next day or so to see if I have more articles to talk about or if I will move on to another subject tomorrow.
Frankie
This gallery contains 14 photos.
So, not doing any education stuff today, so I thought I would upload pictures of our parrot. Her name is Frankie, and she is a 24-year-old blue-fronted Amazon parrot. She was bought in 1988, and has lived mostly with my wife’s family until we adopted her last year. She doesn’t speak a whole lot, outside […]
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 