18 posts tagged “teaching”

Teachings from the Worldly Philosophy

Robert Heilbroner

Over a year ago, a history instructor I know made a request that he be allowed to set up a bulletin board discussion group dedicated to the collaborative work of online General Education instructors. The main campus General Education faculty at his college are actually PAID to get together quite often and work collaboratively to improve their courses. It only made sense to do something similar for the online faculty who were all adjuncts. Ironically, despite all his efforts to do so, he could never get the clearance to do so. He was told that the initiative was supported but the money and technological support was never forthcoming. I suspect that the answer to the mystery lies in the following excerpt from Adam Smith.

"What are the common wages of labour, depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same. The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as little as possible. The former are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter in order to lower the wages of labour.

It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this combination is everywhere a most unpopular action, and a sort of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual, and one may say, the natural state of things, which nobody ever hears of.

Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost silence and secrecy, till the moment of execution, and when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do, without resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen; who sometimes too, without any provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to raise the price of their labour. Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of provisions; sometimes the great profit which their masters make by their work. But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands.

The masters upon these occasions are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combinations of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the necessity superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing, but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."

http://www.bibliomania.com/2/1/65/112/frameset.html

So what is Adam Smith saying? In a contemporary context, he is saying that those who hire adjunct faculty do not WANT them to gain access to the tools they need to organize and to communicate their story to one another and to the clients (students).  What has been the result of the lack of communication between the adjunct faculty at his college? Well, the following list is a start:

• Main campus full time faculty have full time contracts. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have health benefits. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have financial support for Professional Development. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have  sick days and personal days. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have pension benefits. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have life insurance. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have job security. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have voting rights in college decisions. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have paid collaborative training days. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty have promotion, raises, and merit pay. Online program adjuncts do not.

• Main campus full time faculty receive travel grants. Online program adjuncts do not.
  

The great irony of course is that this portion of Adam Smith quoted above is being assigned in the General Education curriculum of the main campus education program. 

Question for Comment: What would you do if you were my friend?

I am reminded that people are often more qualified than they are certified. Orson Scott Card for example has a blog in which he reviews "everything" and because he is an interesting writer, even though one doesn't agree with every review, they make for interesting reading. According to Wikipedia, Card "has won the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award, making Card the only author (as of 2007) to win both of science fiction's top prizes in consecutive years." The following comes from a 1999 Talk City Chat  interview with Orson Scott Card

<Alicia-G> I read somewhere that you were an early entrance student in college. Did that have a big effect on how you approach things? I know that all the early entrance students I have met find it easy to identify with your writing.

<OrsonCard> I didn't really enter "early" in the sense that I did have a high school diploma. I went to a private university lab school for my junior year. It was an individual progress school, so I finished two years in one and graduated a year early. I fit in just fine at college -- much better than high school. Less

social pressure toward conformity -- even at a Mormon university! <grin> You have to understand, though, that I have an innate arrogance that makes me assume that I'm ready for anything -- including college, when I was sixteen. And I did OK....

His bio at his HATRACK website reminds me again why I feel challenged by what I do as  aHistory teacher.

"Like many young artists in love with their art, Card resented all the hours that the university required him to "waste" on general education requirements; as a novelist, however, he found that those were the most useful parts of his college education."

Question for Comment: What do you assume you are ready for right now that you may or may not be?

Commanding Heights: The Battle for the World Economy

I just spent the last two or three hours evaluating the documentary Commanding Heights with the boys. I feel like they have a much better grasp of globalization, free-market capitalism, planned economies, socialism, and communism than I ever had. It has been really fun watching them struggle with economic ideas and their cause and effect relationships and watching how these ideas play out in the global marketplace.

What is even more interesting is to talk about the place they think they would like to play in that economy. Whether they want to make money off other people's work by organizing them? Or if they want to make money by acquiring some skill or knowledge that they can sell over and over again (like I do)? Or if they want to invent or create something that can be sold many times? Or if they want to perfect some process? ... etc. etc.

As I watched the movie, I was reminded of what Ken Bain said about people needing to see that their constructs of reality don't work.  Systems that have too many layers of people paid to manage too many people unmotivated to work by lack of reward simply cannot work indefinitely. Similarly, systems where too few people get ALL the profit because they have figured out how to eliminate middle management AND  relocate them into the exploited class ... and where they have figured out how to externalize costs onto the tax-payer will eventually fail too.

I find myself wondering how I managed to land where I have in the economy. And what choices I need to make to move ahead.

Yesterday's Faculty Collaborative had plenty to get me thinking in it. But briefly ...

1. Collin Ducalon's workshop on "Understanding by Design" reminded me of the importance of being clear about what the "Big Ideas" are in any class I teach.

2. Laurel Bongiorno's workshop on placement and structure in educational settings reminded me of how many messages are sent to students simply by the decision to set chairs and tables in a certain way or structure a discussion in a certain way. The Chalk Talk excercise was particularly useful and i hope to try it out this summer.

3. Michael Lang's presentation on multicultural-ization of a lesson was also stimulating. A number of creative ideas occurred to me in the course of our small group interactions. one of them was simply to ask students to take on a role and comment on other people's work  as though they were the person in the role.

4. Karen Klove's workshop on Gender in the educational context was a reminder that there is still a lot of pain around gender issues for many people and that one can never take enough pre-emptive action in creating a safe environment.

Influencer: The Power to Change Anything

Kerry Patterson

"Who shall setting a limit to the influence of a human being?" Ralph Waldo Emerson

The keynote adress by Dr. Bains the other day and the literature work I am doing on Iago's character in Othello has got me to thinking about the "science and art of influence". So I picked up a book on the subject at the Library today entitled Influencer: The Power to Change Anything by Kerry Patterson et. al.

The book cites numerous examples of influence and those who wield it. One study by Albert Bandura video-documents the responss of children exposed to violence. SEE HERE. The author cites work by Dr. Wiwat Rojanapithayakorn that suggests the importance of identifying vital behaviors that you want to change before trying to influence change. "It is not enough to do your best," said Edward Demming. "Yo must know what to do and THEN do your best."

Another sociological term I picked up from the book had to do with the study of "positive deviance" - that is the study of the rare case in a data set of bad news that goes right. Essentially, if you want to solve the problem of the Guinea Worm disease, find out which villags SHOULD have it but don't. And watch what they do differently.

"The methods for uncovering vital behaviors are available to everyone. Start by examining the exact population and the setting  you are interested in changing. Next look for people who are experiencing the problem but aren't. Then discover the unique behaviors that separate them from the rest."

 "There are three kinds of men," Will Rogers once said, "ons that learn by reading, a few who learn by observation, and the rest of them who have to pee on the electric fence themselves."

The authors talk about the vital importance of creating vicarious exprience for people who will not try something themselves until their constructs of reality change but will not change their concepts of reality without experience. Th problem with people is that if you use words, they do not hear the words you say but the words they hear. This is why good storytellers are powerful communicators.

"But why? Why do even the most educated people tend to set aside their well honed criticism and critical nature when listening to a story?  Because stories help individuals transport themselves away from the role of a listener who is rigorously applying rules of logic, analysis, and criticism and into the story itself. . . . Concrete and vivid stories exert extraordinary influence because they transport people out of the role of critic and into the role of participants. . . . Stories don't merely tromp verbal persuasion by disproving counter arguments; stories keep the listener from offering counter arguments in the first place." p. 61

In the chapter about motivation, the authors talk about the multiple sources of human motivation. Human beings need to know that they can do something and they need to know that it's worth it. "The most powerful incentive known to humankind," they write, "is our own evaluation of our behavior and accomplishments.  When people are able to meet their personal standards, they feel validated and for films.  They also feel as if they are living up to the image of who they want to be."

One of the more fascinating propositions in this book has to do with control. Often people believe that more control will give them more influence. Researcher William Miller and Ginger Graham have "learned that you can influence even a resistance group of people if you are willing to surrender control.  When you surrender control, you win the possibility of influencing even addictive and highly entrenched behaviors.  And you gain access to one of the most powerful human motivations -- the power of a committed heart."

I suppose the New Testament could have told them that.

I also found the author's discussion of the "hot and go" systems of the brain and the "cool and know" systems fascinating. "As terrific as it is to have two very different operating systems, each perfectly suited to its own unique tasks, you have two of anything, you always run the risk of employing the wrong one given your circumstances." p. 130

Question for Comment: who do you know that has the greatest powers of influence?  Is it you  

What the Best College Teachers Do

Ken Bain

Ken Bain, author of What the Best College Teachers Do, came and spoke to our faculty today.

 "We don’t learn from experience but from reflecting on experience" John Dewey once said and so I thought I would take a moment to reflect on what he had to say. "When we learn, we construct our sense of reality" Ken pointed out, "and then we begin to "use our models of reality to understand new sensory inputs."

We construct mental models or maps that enable us to know what to do in life. This practice serves us well but can be a problem if they are not accurate models or maps. As teachers, we want students to build new models of reality that we believe are more accurate than the ones they carry with them to the first class ... or to at least question existing constructs of reality. When we ask them to disbelieve their own maps and models, we are asking students to engage in an "unnatural act".

"Whether he is comparing how students and historians interpret documentary evidence or analyzing children's drawings, Wineburg's essays offer "rough maps of how ordinary people think about the past and use it to understand the present." Arguing that we all absorb lessons about history in many settings—in kitchen table conversations, at the movies, or on the world-wide web, for instance—these essays acknowledge the role of collective memory in filtering what we learn in school and shaping our historical thinking.

Pasted from <http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Thinking-Pb-Critical-Perspectives/dp/1566398568>

Two physicists asked "Do my Physics classes change the way my students conceive of motion?" (Does your course change the way your students think about History?) They devised a "force concept inventory" and gave it to 600 students. Virtually none changed their minds between the test they took before the class and the test they took a few months after. Neither was the degree of change predictable by grade. "A" students were better at looking like they had changed their minds. That was all. The human tendency is to wrap new learning around old learning, Ken noted.

So, how do you create an environment where people will change their thinking? Bains asked, The Answer: A Natural Critical Learning Environment. Bain says, that you have to put the learner in a situation where their existing mental model does not work. There has to be an “expectation failure.” Students have to expect one thing and not get it. Secondly, the learner has to CARE that their mental model does not work anymore.
  

Question for Comment: So, “What is a learning experience that you could design to provide almost guaranteed "expectation failure"? What are the fundamental paradigms that you believe that your students come with? Which ones do you want your class to challenge?

Bains also suggests that good teachers appealed not to grades but to outcomes they could promise when motivating students. "You take my class and here is what you will be able to do." Not, "Here's what grade you will get."

"This course will help you to learn to use your head. If you don't want to learn to use your head , go enroll  in a Barber College."

A few months ago, I was invited to present an introduction to the College's Global Module initiative at the FOSTERING GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN HIGHER EDUCATION Conference at the School for International Training in Brattleboro, VT. The workshops from the conference are available at the SIT Conference Website.  

The Presentation that N.C., L.H. and I did can be found HERE.

Naturally, there are things I wish I had said and had not said. For example, I refer to Jordan as an "Arab-Muslim country" a few times though I know as a matter of course that there are many Christians and non-Muslims and even non-Arabs in Jordan. Still, I think the video gives a snapshot of the sort of work I am doing in this global module initiative. It remains to be seen if I will get to continue.

Question for Comment: What part of the world would you like to link up with to discuss something? What would you like to discuss?

Comic Insights: The Art of Stand-up Comedy

Franklyn Ajaye

Today's read was a birthday present for my now 15 year old son. I thought it interesting because stand-up comedy is essentially like teaching. To be good at it, you have to find your personal voice. 

One has to decide how they will see the world differently, preferably better, or at least more insightful or interestingly than others. A comedian says "The world is funny, even crazy, if you look at it from a certain angle that most people never look at it from."  Comedians can challenge tradition or they can challenge the challengers of tradition. They can say to us all, "You are not looking at the world from the best angle and that is why you all act so silly."

Ultimately, we are the jokes in a good stand-up comedy act.

"The Four Levels of Comedy: Make your friends laugh, Make strangers laugh, Get paid to make strangers laugh, and Make people talk like you because it's so much fun." Jerry Seinfeld 

When Jerry Seinfeld says that the government is basically "parents for adults" he is looking at something we look at every day but looking at it differently. And fundamentally, when we look at something differently, we change. It is one of the reasons why I think I need to learn more from comedians and apply what I learn to my teaching. What is my point of view on it all? What is my attitude towards it all? What can I say that would cause a student to say "How did I get to be X years old and ignorant of the fact that all of this could be looked at from that angle?"

Question for Comment: Do you think good teachers have to be "funny"? Or do they simply have to have different ways of seeing to share with us?

To begin this discussion of Gen. Ed. Curriculum, it might be worth highlighting some of my assumptions:

1.       “No clever arrangement of bad eggs ever made a good omelet” which is to say, no matter what we do with the curriculum, finding good teachers will be essential. For that reason, it is worth asking, “What sort of curriculum is likely to attract and keep good teachers?” It’s as important a question to be asking as “what sort of curriculum will attract students?”

2.       “A good curriculum will be like a good computer system. It won’t need to be junked every two years because it wasn’t designed to be modified easily.

3.       Adult students have had time to get unbalanced and so they will need curricular time to get re-balanced. Some will have a decade of experience and reading in at least one of our core areas and no experience in others. I think they have to be allowed to make use of a certain amount of flexibility. I don’t think that this has to create administrative nightmares for course scheduling if it is set up right.

4.       “A curriculum should be a piece of art not a menu.” As Robert Henri says in the book Art Spirit, “We are not here to do what has already been done.”  If we ask someone to summarize the CPS Gen Ed curriculum and they start listing courses that are on it, as though it were a recipe for a graduation cake and not an inspiring idea, we have missed something important. If a curriculum is an idea, well expressed, about what is important, it will convey to students that the courses that they take are a PART of the education they need. Not the entire thing. The education is more than the sum of the classes.

By listing specific courses, the curriculum starts to drive the faculty recruitment. Let’s say next Fall, we have three faculty members who WANT to teach for us and have excellent qualifications for doing so. Lets say they are all Nobel Prize winners and they want to teach a course in 20^th Century World History, Climate Change, and Irish poetry … but we only have slots for someone to teach World Civilizations II, Environmental Science, and “The Novel” (I am making up an illustration here). Having specific courses chiseled out requires that we be constantly stuffing faculty into holes that they may not fit in. And the courses can suffer as a result (I think).

The other problem with having those courses listed is that we are in the market for students who come to us with academic transcripts that may not fit. Lets say that a student has had a course in Constitutional Law. Can he get credit for the required course on American government? What if he has had a course on the Civil Rights movement? Do we really think that a student HAS to have a course in American Government to graduate? Or is what we are really trying to say something more like “a student should be exposed to a course in political thought to graduate”? If the later is what we really think, lets say so in the Gen. Ed requirements.

It is my contention that with the prevalence of the internet, courses should focus less on pure subject information and more on thinking skills and communication skills. I am not saying that the subject content does not matter but the fact is that students have plenty of access to information without college. What they really need to learn is how to better evaluate information, solve problems with it, and make their case about it in memorable creative ways. I would propose moving from a subject-based curriculum to a skill based curriculum. Not entirely mind you but I think the presentation of our curriculum should reflect that Taoist shift in emphasis. I often like to think of my history classes as “critical thinking classes that use history as a medium.” They are not subject based classes about which some critical thinking is done. And I think that is why they are working.

This is what I mean when I say that a curriculum should be a piece of art. Sometimes, a great piece of art is a simple retelling of a common theme but the replacement of a few lines and the use of a few colors and the introduction of a new brush stroke makes all the difference. Somehow, with line, color, and composition, a new balance is created.

So, this is where I start to ask myself some questions that I don’t know the answers to. If every one of our Gen Ed. classes was teaching a set of three vital skills (with other skills spinning out of them like fractal paisleys), what would those skills be? For me, among the many possibilities, the following three keep coming back to me as vital: critical thinking, problem solving, and creative expression. For me, the curriculum of the future will target these skills in the context of different disciplines. If someone takes a history course from me, they should know that they are taking a critical thinking, problem solving, and creative expression course that happens to be using history as a means of teaching those things. They should also know that these skills are essential to their personal relationships as well as their careers. I think we all understand at some level that a good career is only part of the recipe for life happiness and these courses should stress that the skills they aim to sharpen are as essential to personal life as they are to occupational life.

It is my belief that if the curriculum reflects this focus on skills, it will make the recruitment, inspiration, training, and assessment of faculty all that much easier. It means that when we go looking for faculty, we know what exactly we are looking for (my idea would be to ask applicants to show us two weeks of their blog writing just so we can get a feel for their thinking and creative writing ability). It also means that we could target specific strengths and weaknesses to focus training on. As we all know, if you try to target everything, you hit nothing. I also think that focusing on a few vital skills makes it easier for the marketing people to sell the education to prospective students. Instead of outlining a grocery list of courses to take, they can sell the grand idea. “Come to Champlain and you will get to evaluate how you are out of balance and educate your way back to balance. You will know that we are teaching you skills in every class that will have direct bearing on your ability to think, solve problems, and get your message across. Other colleges will teach you subject matter that you can either get on your own with a $20 internet connection or that will be obsolete by the time you graduate. Champlain is about skills that do not rust, rot, or get moth eaten and our faculty is trained to teach them and don’t get asked back if they don’t teach them in relevant applicable ways.”

I was, I should note here, once a non-traditional student. I went to college for a few years but did not graduate. I went back after a few years to finish and I had to go through this whole process of covering missing gaps in a curriculum that made sense to someone. I had been coaching Jr. High and Highschool hockey and soccer for years. The year I went back to college, I was coaching a college soccer team. I had played college soccer and hockey for years but I still had to cover those P.E. credits. Sigh.

Anyway, those are my general thoughts. Part of me thinks that I should end this ramble here and take a breather. But I am “in the zone” so I figure I might as well get more specific.

When I was shopping for this computer, I was thinking to myself “What am I going to want this new computer to look like five years from now?” I think something similar needs to be done with this curriculum. I really think we need to have a picture of what we want the whole CPS division to look like five years or ten years from now before we start pouring cement and watching it dry. How big do we want it? How easily do we want it to be managed? What is the process we want to see faculty going through to be allowed to teach (We do want a line of faculty asking to teach, don’t we?)

Let’s just assume that we have 1000 students now and we want 5000 within ten years. What sort of Gen Ed. Curriculum can provide a structure that is consistent throughout so that it can be marketed in the same way every year and become a signature curriculum even while modifications are being made to it? What sort of curriculum can allow us the maximum amount of discretion in offering teaching opportunities without becoming a scheduling nightmare? How do we design a curriculum so that every course is a microcosm of the whole curriculum in the same way that every cell of an organism contains the blueprint of the whole? Those seem to be central questions to me. I know I don’t have the perfect answer but I can’t help but try.

The following was adapted from the a recent attempt I made to do this:

To reiterate, I am suggesting that students would need to take two courses that related to each of these ten broad categories. One course would have to be broad in scope (Macroeconomics, World Civ I, World Religions, Western Philosophy, etc.) and the other course would have to be narrow in scope (Irish Literature, Russian Literature, Economics of China, Abnormal Psychology, etc.). If you had ten broad subject areas and two courses were required for each, that would be 20 Gen Ed. courses or 60 credits.  The beauty of this is that you aren’t left having to find someone to teach an American Government class even though you have five people who you would LOVE to see teaching a class in Eastern Religion, a class in Science Fiction and Culture, a class in Art History, Mythology, or The Modern Middle East. The “sockets” would stay the same from semester to semester and year to year but the courses would follow the talents of the faculty you found.

Naturally, you could find dependable faculty to teach a great course over and over. It doesn’t have to be an earthquake of change every semester but it has flexibility, balance, and choice built into it. You could start out with fewer options but add the diversity in as the program grows, selecting those classes that students love and that best achieve the goals for permanence in the curriculum. You are never in the unenviable position of having to retain instructors that can’t deliver the goods because you have a slot to fill that they have taught before.

I am not totally committed to this set of ten subject areas or even to the three skills that I have listed as primary. But I still like the idea of not making specific courses mandatory. To me, that just locks administrators in and defeats their purpose when it comes to recruitment of faculty. It seems to me that the administrative ace in the hole when recruiting is the ability to give instructors the opportunity to teach something that they are really exceptionally qualified to teach in an environment that knows what it is doing and trains them to play a part in it.

Think of the possibilities. An Administrator or faculty member happens to see a lecture being given by someone in the newspaper, they attend and find it fascinating, and so ask the lecturer after if she might be interested in teaching an online course in the subject. An administrator or faculty member happens upon a blog by someone with a graduate degree in Physics and they make everything scientific understandable and relevant. They ask great questions and talk in normal speak but with obvious intelligence and competence. We contact them and ask if they want to take a course for a semester.

So much more enjoyable than sorting through a stack of resume’s looking for the elusive candidate who can teach two sections of American Government!

So … that’s my “Virginia Plan”

Looking forward to hearing what you think and completely aware that my lack of administrative experience may be leaving me with significant blind spots.  I confess, this idea is so significantly different from the one being proposed that I fear it must be way off.

Respectfully,

James Madison

 Question for Comment: What do you think of the idea? Would you be better at the job you do ... or in the relationships you are in if you could think more critically, express yourself more creatively, or solve problems more effectively?