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.
Thoughts on Education – 2/2/2012
I was reviewing some articles that I thought I might write about here, but I really didn’t come across much that I found incredibly useful in the last couple of days. I had picked out a couple of articles on gaming in the classroom, thinking from the titles and blurbs that they would be interesting, but I didn’t come up with much. The best, probably, is this one from the New York Times. It’s ok, but it has the same flaws that I see in so many of these articles, namely that it says this would be a great idea but then fails to provide any resources or solid examples. So, the theory might be great, but what am I supposed to do with it? I feel that way about a lot of the educational “advancements” out there. They always sound great, but how do they actually work? That’s why I like the idea of the “flipped” classroom model, as I have seen more about how that works than anything else.
The interesting thing about the flipped classroom is that everyone starts off the article saying how it is an obvious fit for math and science, but they think it could probably work for the humanities and social sciences as well (see this one for example or this one that is even advertised as flipping a history class but uses a chemistry video to show how its done). But that doesn’t seem as obvious to me by any means. As this article from another blog here in WordPress shows, the real idea behind flipping is a pretty natural fit for teachers from all areas. As he says, “I think good teachers have been doing this sort of thing, well . . . forever.” I have to agree in general, as what else is a discussion section or anything like that anyway. Yet, making the next step and giving up the lecture is a much bigger one. Is a better model the one from my grad school days — the large lecture two days a week and then a discussion section the last day? Yet, I was never satisfied with those, as it never seemed like the students were all that prepared to discuss. They wanted the material delivered to them, not to have to interact with it in a meaningful way. The level of engagement was low, as it often is in my discussion classes today, where about a third of the class is actively participating, another third is paying attention, and the rest are completely tuned out. I just wonder what incentives would be needed to get a higher level of engagement. Because without students paying attention and participating, this will be a failure.
How about these ideas/questions?
- Would the students be more willing to do a serious amount of work outside of class if they only met one day a week?
- What sort of incentives would be needed to get the students to do the required work ahead of time? A required one-page response? Completion of a mastery quiz? Completion of a blog post?
- What do you do with students that have not, despite all incentives, done any of the required work? Do you have daily grades that they essentially don’t get? Do you kick them out? Do you let them stay on the assumption that it’s better for them to hear what’s going on even if they haven’t done the prior work?
Just some practical questions that I’ve had running through my head while I’ve been reading over things. I actually got some of these questions while wandering through an H-Net discussion over flipped classrooms. It is a bit hard to follow, as you’ve got to delve through the forums, but there were a lot of good pros and cons raised about the flipping idea, and I feel that it is really worth reading for anyone considering something like this. Even though H-Net is history focused, the ideas are mostly general and could apply to any discipline.
By the way, this one is the absolute best article on flipped classrooms for those of us in the humanities and social sciences. It covers the usual major criticisms of flipped classrooms and refutes each quite well. I’m not going to go back and repeat them here, but I will just recommend you go and see for yourself.
Thoughts on Education, 2/1/2012 – Digital Learning Day
So, Happy Digital Learning Day everyone. OK, so I had no idea it was that day either, but that’s what I found out as I started moving through the educational news that I read every morning. I guess it’s appropriate that I’m working on this project at this time then. I certainly envision any changes that I make to my class to include a significant digital element. In fact, I would like to go ahead and include more of it in my class now, although I am not sure how at this point. Thus, part of what I am doing is trying to figure out how to use all of these new tools out there and how to use the various ideas that I am trying to accumulate. I want to make something new and relevant, and I think that digital technology has to be at the center of it.
What is unfortunate about all of it is how hard it is to find good digital tools for higher education. If I was teaching K-12, there appear to be a lot of apps out there for use, although I, admittedly, have not evaluated them to see if there is real quality or just quantity. For higher ed, there’s a lot of stuff out there for organization, note-taking, and whiteboarding (did I just make up that word?). There’s not much that seems of actual use in a classroom outside of access to resources. in that category, there’s a ton of stuff out there. Simply get the Smithsonian, PBS, TED, or many other apps out there, and you have a ton of free content at your fingertips. If you’re not using Flipbook on an iPad, you are missing out on one of the most spectacular apps that I have ever come across. So, if I want content, I can get it, but that still puts the creation of assignments and linkages on me. I know that’s part of my job, but I kind of expected there to be some actual premade content out there for higher ed, and there just isn’t very much. There are things to show, but not much set up to do. I was talking with my Dean about this, and he suggested that it is because there’s more money in K-12 ed than in higher ed, and that when there is money in higher ed, it goes to research, not to teaching. Certainly, in teaching at a community college, I’m really at the low end of the totem pole for these types of things, but I just imagine what could be out there.
I guess if I was ever to consider a different career, I would love to go into the educational technology field. I’ve considered getting a second Masters in Instructional Design or something like that, but this lack of content seems to be a huge hole in the educational ecosystem. I don’t know if there’s any money to be made in it, but I’m just waiting around for someone to make it at this point.
In thinking about Digital Learning (caps intentional on this day), I have done some reading, and I’ll include a few of the interesting things I’ve looked at here:
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/02/on-digital-learning-day-7-golden-rules-of-using-technology/
MindShift is one of those programs I found through FlipBook. I like their discussion of education and technology and read it daily. Again, if you’re interested in the topic, check them out. Anyway, I like this article, as it evaluates the role that technology can play in the classroom. I’m going to have to think on it more deeply at another time. I like the first three points as some basic starting ideas on technology
- Don’t trap technology in a room. This is very true, as the computer lab is something that many of us (like me) have no access to, and so if I want to use technology, trapping it in a single room makes it useless unless you are one of the lucky ones to be able to schedule in that room.
- Technology is worthless without professional development. Completely agree. We don’t get any of this provided to us, and I remain so busy between my teaching life and home life that I don’t get a lot of opportunities to go out and participate in professional development either. I’d love it to be a more real part of my actual job, and I really am going to have to figure out how to make time for it, as it is never going to be just given to me.
- Mobile technology stretches a long way. Use the resources that you have. A good number of people are carrying around high-powered computers in their pocket. Give the students some reason to use them beyond texting.
Beyond that, I need to follow up on some of the links in the article, and I have it saved in Evernote (another great free app) to do just that later.
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/happy-digital-learning-day
Another thing I read every day is Inside Higher Ed. They have a number of educational technology resources, and this one celebrates Digital Learning Day as well. Interesting links off of the page mostly, although I like seeing the discussion generally in this blog.
Through the Inside Higher Ed site, I also found this resource. I will check out the video later (my internet connection at home is not cooperating for streaming video from my living room right now, and I don’t feel like moving to the bedroom for a stronger signal). But the broader site of Teachers Teaching Teachers sounds promising and worth checking out more.
Anyway, that’s a few links for today. I have some on gaming in the classroom that I’ll save for sometime in the next couple of days, so hang on for that.
Thoughts on Education, 1/31/2012
No links and articles today. Just some thinking.
I guess the thing on my mind more than anything else is how radical of a change is acceptable and/or appropriate if I am to do a total redesign of my class next semester. I’d like to jump in whole hog and change everything. However, there’s the question of how to do it and if it would be accepted by the students and my fellow faculty members if I am doing something completely different.
So, here’s a basic outline of what I would like to do for my hybrid classes: I would like to remove lecture from the class completely. They will still have access to my lecture materials, as they do now, ie. through the lecture notes, PowerPoints, and audio podcasts that they have at the moment. However, they would be material that the students would be responsible for working on outside of class, much like the textbook reading is now. I would like to move beyond the idea that I am presenting them with the material. There are two big reasons why I am unsatisfied with the lecture model:
- It puts me as an infallible authority on the material. The students hear me lecture and write it down. They then parrot those same things back to me on the assessments for the class, as if my interpretation and the things I cover were the only thing that was important out of all of the class. The relationship of me as the deliverer of information as if from on high is uncomfortable to me, and it just breeds the idea of the students as passive learners.
- It covers things the students should have had before. If I am echoing what the students were supposed to have learned in high school, then what am I doing. Yes, I might go into more depth. Yes, I might talk about different things with different emphases. Yet, at the heart, I am delivering a historical narrative that should be no different from what they have had before. The idea that a history class should be a chronological accounting of what has happened in history seems ridiculous to me. If that is what I have trained for and what I get paid for, then this is an easy job. Anybody can get up there and reread a textbook to them. But, what is that really teaching them?
So, what then takes the place of lecture, as that’s currently what I use 80% of my class time for? I would like to divide my class of 45 in half, with half meeting on one day a week and the other half meeting on the other day. Then I would like to have each day have a topic. The students would come in prepared with having covered the basic information that is necessary and prepared to discuss something in more depth. We would do history by actually talking about events, people, ideas, and such in history. I would not give them the narrative and have that stand in as the whole class. Instead, they would drive the class, through the topics that we would discuss. The topics would not be comprehensive in nature, and they would not purport to tell the students everything that happened.
This certainly falls into the “flipping the classroom” model, turning the standard class on its head. The thing I worry is that it is too radical. Could our community college students handle it? Would they come prepared? Would they do it? What resources would I need? Do I have time to recreate my class? Is this too ambitious?
An example of what I could do one day comes from what I am currently calling an in-class activity in my class. The subject is the Triangle Fire in New York in 1911. The students are responsible for watching a 2-hour video and reading some short biographies of the people involved. We will then discuss the event in class, talking about what happened, why it happened, what the result was, and how it fits into the history we have been studying.
Thoughts on Education, 1/30/2012
Continuing to think about education, using articles I have saved in Evernote.
http://www.eschoolnews.com/2012/01/07/tips-and-success-stories-for-effective-mobile-learning/
“Tips and success stories for effective mobile learning”
Mostly focused on K-12. It talks about “bring your own device” schools, much like the Weatherford ISD is trying. I’m curious how that will go. The question, of course, is what do you do with the students who do not have a device? That’s as far as I got though, as the second and third pages of the article require you to log in to read them. It was not particularly relevant, and so I didn’t think it worth logging into a random site I’d never heard of.
Click to access mobile_star.pdf
“Education‘s Guide to Mobile Devices: Everything You Need to Know About Mobile Tech and Your Schools”
OK, so I registered for this one. It is much more interesting, even though it is, again K-12 focused. I just wanted to note a couple of things here. I fully agree with the following: “To make the most of mobile technology, teachers must have proper training, and schools must go through a change management process, says Greaves. Technology-rich schools whose principals ―have formal training in change management far outperform the technology schools where [principals] don‘t have this formal training,‖ he says. ―At a lot of schools, they just provide the technology and think that, by itself, will carry the day. But if you don‘t actually give [educators] the training of what to do with it, nothing changes.‖ A change management leader looks at the students within a class and evaluates to what extent they are working on a fully personalized basis. ―If 30 kids in class are all doing the same thing,that‘s a clear sign that you haven‘t changed anything,‖ Greaves adds.” I totally agree, and I find that to be the hugely limiting thing for me with adopting new methods of teaching and integration of technology. I always feel that I am doing it all on my own. I feel that I am way out in front of where most people are, and I often feel lost in trying to decide what to do. I also feel limited in resources, although being part of the QEP this year has helped in that regard. Still, I feel like I’m wandering in the wilderness and could use a lot of help to develop the random ideas wandering through my head.
There is also an interesting resource there called PD360, which is, unfortunately aimed at K-12 only. There is no option to sign up as a college instructor, but it is apparently hundreds of hours of professional development online. Maybe I should check out Starlink, if that’s anything like it.
http://mindshift.kqed.org/2012/01/shifting-the-classroom-one-step-at-a-time/
“Shifting the Classroom, One Step at a Time”
OK, so this one has me pegged from the first paragraph: “Teachers who are interested in shifting their classrooms often don’t know where to start. It can be overwhelming, frightening, and even discouraging, especially when no one else around you seems to think the system is broken.” I feel like that all the time. So, of course, I’m going to read this closely.
The whole post is interesting, and I need to explore it in more detail. There are three links to talks here that I need to watch at some point when I can have some time at a desk with headphones rather than sitting in the living room with my computer as I am doing now. That’s always the thing, creation is hard. Doing something new is hard. I want to dive in and recreate very soon. Do I have the time/resources for this?
I highly recommend this as a starting point to rethinking the classroom!
- All administrators have worked as teachers
- They don’t focus on tests
- Teaching is a revered profession
- They trust teachers
Thoughts, Ideas, Ramblings, and Other Things 