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.)
- 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
What we learned is that when it comes to the brain and cooperation, the whole is definitely greater than the sum of its parts,” said Fortune, of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. “We found that the brain of each individual participant prefers the combined activity over his or her own part.
It takes two: Brains come wired for cooperation, neuroscientists discover (via wildcat2030)
If vertebrate “brains come wired for cooperation,” as reported in this research, why is it that students so often resist working in groups? The answer is simple: schooling and other mechanisms of our culture have taught us to prefer to behave independently rather than cooperatively. Most teachers reward individual effort and discourage cooperative behavior, and our students come to expect this as normal. So your cooperative activity is going against the conditioning your students have received for the past dozen years or so. It’s going to take a lot more than one activity in one course in one semester for students to unlearn what they have been taught, even if they originally may have been predisposed for cooperation.
(via infoneer-pulse)
Source: sciencedaily.com
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
:-)
“The NYC startup world needs more web product design talent. NYC has perhaps the best design community in the world, but most of the designers are trained in non-web design fields (e.g. print design). Most of the good design schools don’t emphasize web product design.”—
Over the past few years, Web Design and Motion Design have emerged as full fledged sub-industries to the traditional Branding and Print Design industry. Product/Service Design is a nascent discipline, but the curricula are being created, programs are being built, and communities (this very blog) are starting to form. It’s a huge opportunity for designers to set a career path early.
quote: Chris Dixon
(via logtransition)
I’ve been a graphic designer and design educator for over 25 years and I keep an eye on the employment ads for teaching positions at colleges and universities. Web design has been a staple for a decade, but there has been a clear shift in the last two or three years and now almost every ad I see for teaching positions requires motion design. I suspect this is because there is student demand for these courses, and partially input from employers.
But I think the main reason for this turn in hiring is that current faculty generally do not have these skills or experience in this area of design (I certainly don’t — everything I do has the good manners to sit still). Departments are looking to round out their lineup. This will probably even out eventually (programs still need folks to teach studio, print, prepress, typography, advertising, and general web skills) but for the foreseeable future, if you don’t also have motion in your portfolio, you are going to get quickly passed over for teaching jobs almost anywhere.
The same is about to be true of those with experience designing for the mobile web in their portfolio. The curriculum hasn’t yet caught up, but demand for “mobile first” thinking and responsive design is spiking very, very quickly.
Source: logtransition
(Photo: robotpolisher)
From a teacher in my course on authentic assessment of student learning:
The millennial generation is already inundated with technology and it’s up to the instructors to harness that and utilize it in the class.
My reply:
I think ultimately this may be the most important thing we can do — to carefully identify what kinds of technology our students are already familiar with (such as texting) and discover ways to leverage this prior knowledge for learning and assessment (such as texting collaboratively in Twitter).
Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development is a good model here — if we stretch our students a bit beyond their current use of technology, they will grow, but if we stretch them too far beyond where they are, they may not be able to make the leap.
Pew Internet collects a lot of data on what technologies are being used and how they are being used. This might be an excellent way to go about selecting the appropriate technology for our assessments.
Teachers have their own Zone of Proximal Development. A teacher who uses Skype to talk to faraway loved ones is probably more likely to use similar technology in the classroom.
Maybe faculty development efforts in technology start at the wrong place.
There is much greater risk for a teacher to try a new technology in the classroom without having already learned to use it in “real life.” Your family will be forgiving if your Skype video isn’t perfect. Your students might not be. Maybe we should be offering workshops for faculty (and students) to learn to use technology outside of the classroom where the stakes aren’t so high, and then let the technology migrate back into the classroom on its own. Adults need both safety and relevance for learning, and both are abundant when you have a video chat with your grandkids.
Assessment for online teaching and learning
Discussion post from a professional development course for online community college teachers on assessment, grading, and feedback:
The administrators want “data” they can show to their “stakeholders” (not my favorite word) to demonstrate the “effectiveness” of teaching and learning. As you know, I take a rather … ahem … non-traditional approach to this topic, which is one of the reasons I was asked to develop this course. My own personal view is that “data” that show that students scored 80 percent on a test before, and then 90 percent on a test later, doesn’t really say much about the effectiveness of teaching and learning, unless what you’re teaching your students to learn how to take multiple-choice tests.
There are a whole series of issues here involving test validity, levels of knowledge that can be assessed, learning domains, learning styles, expectations of the discipline, accreditation requirements, learner preparation and prior knowledge, and so forth. Most administrators are not “real” educators <grin> and come from the epistemological view that quantitative data from test scores are an objective measurement of real learning. I take the view that assessing through multiple choice tests — especially in areas such as the humanities — is never truly objective, and is probably not even measuring the learning that actually happening.
We have to play the hand we’re dealt. If they want multiple choice tests, give it to them. It is very unlikely you will persuade a committee to take an alternative approach, since these tests are cheap and easy to administer, and everyone can agree that 90 is a higher score than 80 (probably the real reasons they are used). So I give them all the spreadsheets they want. Then I go about subverting the system by focusing my efforts on authentic assessment models, such as student portfolios or whatever. A funny thing happens. The administrators who really lack the imagination to see assessment as anything but a spreadsheet get an opportunity to see what authentic assessment looks like, and they love it! They want to host portfolio shows and invite their “stakeholders,” and put student videos on the campus YouTube site, along with PowerPoint presentations and photographs of smiling students with their projects, and otherwise show the world what their students can actually DO!
So that’s my strategy. Give them what they ask for, then SHOW them what my students can actually DO. I don’t know if they ever really understand it as being “real” assessment, but they usually dig it and can see the benefit to the institution (whether or not they see the benefit for the learners). I’d rather work the fringe, wiggle through the gaps, and play within whatever sandbox they give me, than try to get them to imagine something about learning they’ve probably never experienced themselves.
The line for co-conspirators forms to the left. :-)
A vision of education in the year 2000 … as imagined in the year 1910.
Villemard, 1910, À l’ École, Visions de l’an 2000
Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
Chris Mooney, The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science, Mother Jones
Terrific research-based article with important implications for learning.
Source: Mother Jones
Creative students are teachers' "least favorite"
“Psychologists at Union College surveyed several dozen elementary school teachers in 1995. While every teacher said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they were mistaken. In fact, when the teachers were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures – the list included everything from “individualistic” to “risk-seeking” to “accepting of authority” – the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. As the researchers note, “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”
OECD: Train teachers to become education researchers
“The most successful countries educationally make teaching an attractive, high status profession, and provide training for teachers to become educational innovators and researchers who have responsibility for reform. These were among findings presented last week in New York at the International Summit on the Teaching Profession, the first of its kind, held to identify best practices for recruiting, training and supporting teachers.”
