The disadvantages of an elite education
An elite education not only ushers you into the upper classes; it trains you for the life you will lead once you get there. I didn’t understand this until I began comparing my experience, and even more, my students’ experience, with the experience of a friend of mine who went to Cleveland State. There are due dates and attendance requirements at places like Yale, but no one takes them very seriously. Extensions are available for the asking; threats to deduct credit for missed classes are rarely, if ever, carried out. In other words, students at places like Yale get an endless string of second chances. Not so at places like Cleveland State. My friend once got a D in a class in which she’d been running an A because she was coming off a waitressing shift and had to hand in her term paper an hour late.
That may be an extreme example, but it is unthinkable at an elite school. Just as unthinkably, she had no one to appeal to. Students at places like Cleveland State, unlike those at places like Yale, don’t have a platoon of advisers and tutors and deans to write out excuses for late work, give them extra help when they need it, pick them up when they fall down. They get their education wholesale, from an indifferent bureaucracy; it’s not handed to them in individually wrapped packages by smiling clerks.
— William Deresiewicz
Why teaching is hard
One of the hardest things for an expert in any field to remember is how it feels to be a novice in that field. Once you’ve gained enough experience that you start seeing the world in a different way, the world simply doesn’t look the same anymore.
This is a short clip from the WNYC Radiolab podcast. Host Jad Abumrad is interviewing pianist Jeffrey Swann about Richard Wagner’s epic four-opera cycle, The Ring of the Nibelung. Listen as Swann tries to demonstrate Wagner’s use of leitmotif by playing two variations of the spear motif from Die Walküre.
Jad gives a small sigh of frustration before he bravely admits, “See, I can’t hear the difference there.” Swann offers to deconstruct it for him, and we go from bewilderment to an “aha!” moment in less than 30 seconds.
This whole Radiolab podcast (“The Ring and I”) is pretty cool, but Jad’s “aha!” moment really jumped out at me as a teacher because, even though I know a bit about the concept of leitmotif (and I’ve seen the Ring live and listened to it on the radio and CD), I did not quite grasp right away what Swann was trying to demonstrate either. I had the same “aha!” moment right along with Jad.
Swann had to turn off his “expert” ears, and present the spear motif in a way that “novice” ears could “hear” it. That’s why teaching is hard, but why those “aha!” moments with learners can be so awesome!
Source: radiolab.org
Ensuring student success – Students are not to blame
Many students may appear to be unqualified, unprepared and uninterested. But if you believe, as I do, that each one of them has a talent, each of one them has a capacity to develop – intellectually and emotionally – then it follows that each one should be given a fair chance to succeed.
— Arshad Ahmad, president, Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, Canada
New Horizons for Learning EdTech Database
The venerable New Horizons for Learning journal, now hosted at Johns Hopkins University, has announced the addition of a database of educational technology tools reviewed by educators.
Why student success is such a radical idea
MIT recently announced its plans to offer its free online course materials with the opportunity to earn certificates of completion through its new MITx platform.
Sebastian Thrun recently announced he is leaving Stanford to offer free online courses through a platform called Udacity.com, which also will offer certificates of completion.
Both MITx and Udacity are experiments in offering online learning to large numbers of students for free, along with some kind of “official” recognition of achievement. One way they differ is in their orientation toward student success and completion.
MIT emphasized the rigor of its courses by pointing out that not all students will be successful:
“Reif emphasizes that the [MITx] courses will be built with MIT-grade difficulty. Not everyone will be able to pass them. But, he says, ‘we believe strongly that anyone in the world who can dedicate themselves and learn this material should be given a credential.’”
Chronicle: MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
Thrun reflected on his own realization that weeding out students does not promote learning:
“In all my life of teaching, my 20 years of teaching at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford, I had always been a tough teacher. I had always given students really hard questions, I had always let them fail, and would come to their rescue, making myself look really smart. Here was no purpose of ‘weeding.’ This was an open university. There was no reason to reduce class size. There was no certificate to be earned. And here I was teaching a ‘weeder’ class. Then I started to realize that we set up students not for success but for failure. We really empowered the professors by looking smart, and we don’t really help the students to become smart.”
MIT starts out with the traditional assumption that only a limited number of students should be successful. Thrun is instead starting out with the assumption that all students should be successful, provided enough support and opportunity to learn.
It’s no surprise that Thrun is leaving Stanford to pursue his vision on his own terms. Institutions and the academics within them are heavily invested in their own prestige and exclusivity. Even as they experiment with new learning formats, they measure the quality of their program by guaranteeing failure for some and success for others. Thrun takes the view that the success of his program is vested in the success of his students. This radical idea simply isn’t compatible with the mission of an institution like Stanford.
Of course it is the prestige of Thrun’s status as a now-former Stanford professor that enables him to be taken seriously, as is his role as a Google Fellow and the connections that brings (Google founder Sergey Brin is featured in a Udacity.com video). He’s not just some guy recording math lessons on YouTube, though Sal Khan and the Khan Academy have been part of his inspiration. The difference, though, is in how Thrun is using that prestige to create a platform that promotes successful learners.
The future will bring many more experiments and many more radical ideas designed to bring online learning and higher education to vast numbers of students. If you’re going to teach the world, maybe you should start out by expecting success. It will be quite a different world when education is no longer a zero-sum game.
Sebastian Thrun resigned as a tenured professor at Stanford to pursue his own vision of online learning at udacity.com. He made his decision after 160,000 students from around the world signed up for the artificial intelligence class he offered online for free this fall.
Watch today’s announcement as he shares some really remarkable insights about the power of online teaching and learning. Really inspiring!
(Hint: skip the inane introduction and jump to Thrun’s talk at 2:20.)
I used to think that technology could help education. I’ve probably spearheaded giving away more computer equipment to schools than anybody else on the planet. But I’ve had to come to the inevitable conclusion that the problem is not one that technology can hope to solve. What’s wrong with education cannot be fixed with technology. No amount of technology will make a dent. It’s a political problem.
Source: Wired
UK universities earn millions collecting overdue library fines
Universities have raised almost £50m (US $77 million) from fining students for overdue library books in the past six years.… With fines as little as 10p for each day a book is overdue, it shows that students are returning thousands of books late each year.
— The Guardian
So what will they do when “books” are no longer “returnable”?
I have recently argued that the one useful response to today’s teacher shortage is to expand sites of recruitment to places as yet untouched by teacher recruitment drives: state prisons, homeless shelters, gay bars, and blighted urban neighborhoods. At first I made this suggestion ironically, but as I had time to reflect on the challenges we face in recruiting teachers committed to social change rather than in reproducing the status quo, I have come to consider this strategy more seriously. If we are trying to shift our system of public education away from its role as a reproducer of social inequities, then we need teachers who are willing to challenge the status quo. Better yet, we need teachers with experience in challenging the status quo. Those who survive on the margins of society acquire an intense experience of being the outsider. These outlaws and social misfits may be more likely to advocate for the radical transformation of ideologies and for the dramatic restructuring of systems of education than are the traditional pool of people whom we cycle through teacher preparation programs.
What would our schools look like if their faculties were comprised of ex-cons, queers, and street people? How might the life chances of all children be different were there more welfare mothers working as elementary educators? If we filled our classrooms with people with heightened experiences of resisting and countering abuse, victimization, marginalization, and approbation, would we succeed at moving school closer to our social justice aims than if we continued to hire all the Miss Jean Brodys and Jaime Escalantes of the world?
- Students are drawn to hot technologies, but they rely on more traditional devices
- Students report technology delivers major academic benefits
- Students report uneven perceptions of institutions’ and instructors’ use of technology
- Facebook generation students juggle personal and academic interactions
- Students prefer, and say they learn more in, classes with online components
— ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 Report
When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids
A school board member takes versions of his state’s standardized tests in math and reading, and realizes something is really wrong with these high-stakes exams.
— Washington Post
Source: Washington Post
Citation Obsession? Get Over It!
Bibliographic citation has apparently eclipsed perfect grammar and the five-paragraph theme as the preoccupation of persnickety professors.
What a colossal waste. Citation style remains the most arbitrary, formulaic, and prescriptive element of academic writing taught in American high schools and colleges. Now a sacred academic shibboleth, citation persists despite the incredibly high cost-benefit ratio of trying to teach students something they (and we should also) recognize as relatively useless to them as developing writers.
—Kurt Schick
Your request has been received
Dear Student:
Thank you for contacting me by email. This is an acknowledgement to let you know I have received your request. I make every effort to respond personally to every student email within 36 hours (excluding weekends and official holidays). There is no need to send multiple requests for assistance.
I am very sorry to hear about the challenge you are currently facing. If you have an urgent technical problem, please contact the helpdesk at helpdesk@xyz.edu. You may also use the course Q&A forum where your classmates may be able to help you out. Many problems can also be resolved easily by doing a simple Google search. If you are encountering a problem, you may be surprised to discover that someone somewhere on the Internet has had the same problem and posted a solution. In the meantime, you may also want to consider that there are millions of other computers in the world, and you may know someone who will let you borrow one in order to complete your assignment. Computer labs and libraries seem especially generous with their computers.
When I send my prompt reply to your request, I will want to know a very detailed description of the problem, and a detailed list of the multiple steps you took to resolve the issue on your own other than your frantic email to me in the middle of the night. So please expect my response soon, and use your time until then productively. I hope you will consider the next 36 hours as an opportunity for individual learning and personal growth. By the end of your academic career, you may even look back on this moment and see it as a pivotal step on your path toward self-reliance and genuine independence that set you on a journey to success a learner and as an adult with aspirations of gainful employment after graduation. It is exactly that kind of personal enrichment I have dedicated myself to in my teaching career, and try to provide such opportunities to all of my students. Not all of them are as appreciative as I had hoped, but I know you are a truly exceptional student who looks for every opportunity to develop your skills and become a multi-faceted individual.
We will both be very happy if you have already resolved your issue by the time you receive my response, so that we can spend our time instead discussing all the things you have learned from this course. I look forward to our exchange at some time in the near future.
Sincerely
Your dedicated instructor
:-)
Changing education isn’t quite as simple as starting a company, because we already hold beliefs about education. Before Airbnb, did you know that you needed to rent out your spare bedroom? Before Pandora did you know that you needed to stream personalized radio? Before Dropbox did you know that you needed to sync your files? The answer, in all cases, is no. However, if I asked you, “Did you know you need to get an education?” you’d be insulted. You’d also have very clear ideas about how to get an education.
Those preexisting ideas mean that changing education required more than building a technology company—it requires shifting our paradigm. I’m writing a book as the first step in shifting that paradigm and changing education. Surely technology will build solutions that help solve our educational problems, but efforts will be fruitless until we stop worshipping the SAT.
Whether you are sitting for an important test or sinking a winning golf putt, your brain can get in the way when you need to perform at your very best. Ginger Campbell, MD, of the Brain Science Podcast interviews psychology researcher Sian Beilock about her book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To.
This excellent interview regarding research conducted at Beilock’s Human Performance Lab at the University of Chicago provides some great insights into how the brains of high performers can interfere with delivering an expert performance when it matters most. Beilock doesn’t stop at explaining the many different reasons why someone might choke on a test, a job interview, a speech, or an athletic game. She offers many practical suggestions for how to overcome the memory overload that can impede top performance.
This is really valuable information for students and their teachers. Beilock says high performers are more likely to choke on a test than students with lesser skills. This seems counter-intuitive until she explains that these higher performers generally have greater working memory to help them perform highly complex cognitive tasks, but this working memory can become flooded by anxiety and worry, significantly limiting the amount of working memory available for the task, resulting in a less than optimal performance.
Beilock describes research that shows that 10 minutes of free writing about these feelings and anxieties can relieve the worries enough to free up that valuable working memory for the cognitive tasks and performance can return to normal.
The interview is filled with interesting research findings and concrete suggestions about mitigating performance problems. Brain Science Podcast host Ginger Cambell does a nice job leading Beilock through many different aspects of her research in a presentation that is easy to follow and full of practical advice. Be sure to take a look at previous episodes of the Brain Science Podcast for some fascinating interviews with many of the world’s leading neuroscience researchers.
Source: brainsciencepodcast.com
