A Little Dreaming
Sometimes, with other educator friends, I will get into one of those converstations: If you could create a school any way you want, what would it be like? Recently, I saw that an educator that I so admire is leaving the confines of the academy–maybe to pursue such a dream? I only know that higher ed is losing someone special when we lose Barbara Ganley. But because of her and Middlebury, I was looking at colleges in Vermont with my son who has never quite been happy in the K-12 world, and we came across Bennington. I have to say, if I were designing a school, I think it would be a lot like Bennington.
The school is very small, but has big, complex ideals. When I first read this presidential speech, I was sure of that. It is well worth reading the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:
Bennington is designed to move in the direction where things need to be done, where the stakes are high, where its flexibility, its unusual diversity of faculty resources (as rich in the arts as in the traditional academic disciplines) combined with its small size, and its fascination with what matters, are the drivers.
What fascinates me is the “HOW” of all of this. Students don’t “choose” a major”–they design one for themselves with the guidance of a group of faculty who mentor them. They don’t only study in the classroom, but also in the community when they work at an internship every January. They don’t make “art” or “new knowledge” in an ivory tower, but they explore the relationships between art and democracy, between creativity and logic. Students are active co-creators of the education at Bennington, and they are not only “allowed” to be active, they are expected to be! My son’s phone interview with Bennington was a conversation with a student. On the windows in the admissions building, there were hand painted portrait/sketches of people who work in admissions–done by a student for a class project. Students barged into the d-hall and made a big announcement like town criers about a lecture from a visiting expert on giant moths.
For my son, who was sometimes chastised in school for “asking too many questions” and reading too much that wasn’t in the text book, this could be just the place to make friends again with education. Heck, I wish I could go there! But at least it has given me a lot to think about, and to talk about the next time I am in educational dreaming mode.
on faculty development and small colleges
Michael Reder is leader of the Small College group at POD, and a wonderful colleague. He was one of the first people to help me see the particular challenges of talking about teaching at a liberal arts institution that values teaching. I know, that sounds like I have left out a word or made a mistake or something, but, no, that is exactly what I mean. Here is Reder’s description of the problem:
However, because [good teaching] is assumed, there is often the collective illusion that good teaching happens “naturally” (which is bad) (Reder and Gallagher 2007.) The false logic goes something like this: “We all value teaching; that is why we are here; therefore, we must be good at it.” Not surprisingly, most administrators are complicit with the idea that good teaching always happens on their campuses, without the need for support or intervention. And, as a whole, faculty members do care about their teaching and improving student learning, but caring is not enough.
(Read the wholearticle here.
How do we get past that? There are many different ways, but they have one thing in common. Again, I will let Reder speak for me:
Our work provides faculty with the opportunity to overcome what Lee Shulman, the president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, terms “pedagogical solitude.” Faculty from different departments, some on the opposite ends of our campus, many with differing levels of teaching experience, work together and learn from each other. By providing occasions during which faculty may talk about their teaching, we create the opportunities for them to learn: from each other, from the literature about teaching and learning, from reflective practice.
One interesting tension in my own work is that I find that I can help faculty well one on one, to identify their own goals, to reflect on their own teaching, and to facilitate their learning. But that doesn’t help create the kind of community that talks about and values teaching. Well, it doesn’t directly create that community, but it creates individuals who will be LOOKING for that kind of community. Maybe it is the first step. Patience is not one of my strongest virtues.
As if the universe heard my angst…
of the last several days, this article appeared in Inside Higher Ed (or if not the universe, at least my pal Libby who alerted me to the article!) Now, I know, most people don’t get excited by articles with “Assessment” in the title. But listen to this:
The problem is not that we don’t value good teaching, as our critics still often charge, but that we often share our culture’s romanticized picture of teaching as a virtuoso performance by soloists, as seen in films like Dead Poets Society, Dangerous Minds, and Freedom Writers. According to this individualist conception of teaching — call it the Great-Teacher Fetish, the counterpart of the Best-Student Fetish — good education simply equals good teaching. This equation is pervasive in current discussions of school reform, where it is taken as a given that the main factor in improving schooling is recruiting more good teachers.
In fact, this way of thinking is a recipe for bad education. According to Richard F. Elmore’s research on primary and secondary education, in failing schools the governing philosophy is often, Find the most talented teachers and liberate them “from the bonds of bureaucracy,” which are often seen as infringements on academic freedom. (In the movies, the great teacher always works her classroom magic against the background of an inept, venal, or corrupt school bureaucracy.) Elmore reports that the pattern of teachers “working in isolated classrooms” is common in unsuccessful schools, where everything depends on the teachers’ individual talents “with little guidance or support from the organizations that surround them.” Conversely, as Elmore argues, successful schools tend to stress cooperation among teachers over individual teaching brilliance, though cooperation itself enhances individual teaching.
(emphasis mine)
I am so relieved that he is articulating well what I have been struggling to put into words! When teachers reflect on their teaching with a focus on student learning, students benefit. Graff is looking primarily at the benefits that come because of creating a more coherent curriculum and of articulating our own goals.
But he may be missing the richest part: when faculty focus on student learning and ask themselves “What did they learn?” and “What can I do that might improve their learning?” And then, when they talk to each other they are creating a culture that says “Teaching is something that we are always learning more about, and helping each other to learn.” Then, you get a good faculty development person in the mix to faciltate communication, gather more information, bring in outside experts, even help with gathering feedback from students… Wow. Imagine what that university would be like! Who wouldn’t want to teach there? Better yet: who wouldn’t want to be a student there?
The Measure of a Teacher
Almost a month ago now, Tricia wrote a post that has remained on the edges of my thoughts. She says:
I guess it all depends upon the “lens” through which we choose to look at these things. The numbers can be helpful to an extent, but seeing candidates in action is really the most telling piece of evidence we have. I DO know a good teacher when I see one, and so do you.
I think I have been stuck on this one because, in the words of an old college friend “I feel strongly both ways!” On the one hand, it is true that the very things that make for good teaching can be the hardest things to quantify. The things that don’t really matter so much, (like getting forms in on time…or like getting students to memorize facts and then measuring how well they spit them back) are a lot easier to represent in some numerical fashion. So, that hand says that it is stupid to try to measure good teaching.
But the other hand holds some wisdom as well. Clearly there ARE people who make a difference in students lives, who create a spark, who move students from assumptions to questioning to discovery. Yes, there is a difference between gifted teaching and ho hum teaching, and if there is a difference, we should be able to quantify it in some way. In fact, it is crucial that we quantify it in some way, or else we end up saying “Either you ARE a teacher or you AREN”T a teacher” which implies that learning and improving are not part of the process of great teaching. And I don’t believe that is true.
Today I heard a fascinating discussion between 2 nationally recognized, award winning teachers. Hoyle teaches Accounting and Ayers teaches history (when he is not president-ing that is!) I hear from them what I heard from Ken Bain last spring: great teachers capture the attention of their students, get them invested in big questions (or puzzles, as Joe likes to say) and then coach, question, and cheerlead as the students learn.
What I have learned in my work in faculty development is: there are ways to do this, techniques. Just having techniques is not enough, but just having passion and no techniques is not so effective either. Most great teachers I know have horror stories of their first times teaching. Part of what makes them great is they didn’t give up, or decide “well, that’s good enough.” Some teachers go out and find information on their own (dare I say this tends to be the “traditional masculine model?”) I think both Ayers and Hoyle described something like that, saying they thought about their teaching and their students’ learning, and then consciously made changes, searching for new strategies. Perhaps what I am tuned into was that my search for a better way to teach led me to a group (for me it was the National Writing Project) and to a community of teachers who cared deeply about learning.
In higher ed, we haven’t done such a great job making the academy friendly for females, and most of the time what I hear people say is “yes, we need more flexible tracks to tenure and a day care center on campus.” Agreed. But I also think we need to support teaching in a more community-oriented way if we want to support the growth of teachers who are more suited to a community approach. Some of those people will also be men! The point is that we teach the way we were taught until we experience something different. When we talk to other teachers and read about other ways to teach, and go to conferences and see different methods, we can get to the style which will work for us. But I also believe that we must continually be about this process. (Hoyle likes to say “trying to improve every semester by 5%, but he is an accountant : ) ) And getting conversations going on campus that will help people find new ways and reach their 5% is not easy! And nothing makes it more threatening to talk about your struggles than the idea that great teachers are born, not made. If that is the case, then admitting you want to improve your teaching is the same as saying you are a failure and always will be.
So I don’t disagree with Tricia, but I fear a slippery slope, one which I think has held back educators for a long time.
Favorite things from ELI 2008
At the last minute, I signed up to attend Bryan Alexander’s pre-conference workshop. Looking back on my time at ELI this year, I have to say that I couldn’t possibly have gotten off to a better start. Why? It was such fun. We played with different ways to tell stories, and one picture set off an interesting story that took on a life of its own, with people not even assigned to our group jumping in to play.
(And, I heard a great quote about what a story should do: “Make em cry, make em laugh, make em wait.” Wilkie Collins)
Amazing conversations grew out of that session. Brian Lamb made me think about the conflict between inclusive community and “individual excellence.” And I am still thinking about that. Notes for another day…
I knew the session on Fear 2.0 was going to be amazing and it was. The presentations were the more affecting for being powerful digital stories in their own rights. What a blessedly long way we have come from the Death by Power Point model of sessions. Somehow talking about the fact that there are lots of different kinds of fear in the academy made me feel less afraid of my own fears. I wanted to talk to people about “imposter syndrome” but we ran out of time.
I convened a session for my friends from VCU that was really interesting, but not for the obvious reasons. They presented the research their faculty learning community did on technology adoption by students and professors. The results were interesting, particulary the info on HOW people like to learn new technologies, and the fact that less than 60% of students expected to use the internet in the classroom–and fewer than that say they WANT to use it in the classroom! But the really interesting thing to me was the way this FLC worked together to implement this large scale project. Many conversations errupted at this conference about “faculty development” and for the first time I saw a mass of people from POD there saying: hey! there is a literature about this and a professional group rich with knowledge we need, and it is POD.
VCU and Jeff Nugent are really on to something here that has to do with deep learning for faculty, and they learned it from Milt Cox and POD (see Jeff’s discussion of FLC’s on his new blog). I’m now on a personal mission to find ways to mold faculty learning communities at UR.
I am thinking still of that first workshop, though, and how much fun it was, and how, in that relaxed atmosphere I was both able to use new tools and talk about the big ideas, and make new friends, all at the same time. And it was “just a workshop.” Could it be that a little fun and creative play goes a long way in combatting the dreaded fear we were hearing about?
Martin Luther King Day
Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies. This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men…. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. –MLK
A tall order. But in some ways my downfall is that I believe this with my whole heart. And I also believe that education is key to getting there. Not education as in standards and tests and rhetoric, but the kind I hope to support: communities where conversation about ideas can happen in safety, where people grow into their potential by asking daring questions and tapping into their passions to fuel discovery, and where all members of the community value one another and listen to one another. I think that is what love looks like in a classroom, and I think that is our calling as educators: to create such spaces.
It is slow work and important work, and the only way I know of to prepare people to wake up to The Dream.
A Way Out of No Way
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Let us realize that William Cullen Bryant is right: “Truth crushed to earth will rise again.” Let us go out realizing that the Bible is right: “Be not deceived, God is not mocked. Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” This is for hope for the future, and with this faith we will be able to sing in some not too distant tomorrow with a cosmic past tense, “We have overcome, we have overcome, deep in my heart, I did believe we would overcome.”
Source: Final speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, August 16, 1967, in I Have A Dream, edited by James Washington
(thanks to Inward/Outward for posting these quotes)
blogsnobbery?
So there I was last fall, idealistic and righteous and inspired by the best. I was going to have my students do “real” blogging, the kind where they take off on their own and find themselves writing everyday and transforming their lives. I wrote this in a draft post that I never posted:
I am thinking a lot about learning and technology, as usual. The Core blogs have been slow to take off with my students and I have been trying to figure out why. I guess I should say first what I mean by “take off.” I had 2 goals for them: that the blogs would be a place where they write informally so as to better understand these hard books we read AND that they would read each others’ blogs and so increase the community, facilitating in-class discussion. And then I had a third, secret ninja goal: I hoped they would get creative, use visuals, explore the internet… Instead, they only started really writing at all when I finally agreed to quantify a “grade” for posting–something I am absolutely against. I made it part of their class participation grade and advised that 3-4 short posts/week would be “A-Level.” They seem to read each others but don’t comment very often. And a few of them are linking to the occasional video on the internet.
At that point in the semester, all I could see was that it wasn’t working. By the end of the semester when the students wrote about which blog posts were good illustrations of “learning happening” I felt better about the blogs. I also really liked the class covnersation we had when they said “how do we know when learning happened?” A good question for us all! So they showed me their connections being made, and their struggles and, most impressively, times when they changed their minds. They also wrote about things they read on other students blogs that helped them see things differently, to understand more fully how 2 people could read the same passage and come up with equally logical but differing interpretations.
I always love reading blog reflection portfolios: )
But then I read their end of semester requests for how we would change the class next semester (it is a 2 semester class). Most of them said the blogging requirements were too high and that they wished more things from the blogs had been brought up in class. It was a hard pill for me to swallow at first. I wrote in the class blog:
Blogs: you seem to want to post less frequently and/or to bring the blog writings into class more. I think this means that not all of you found the blogs to be as useful for personal reflections on the texts and for making connections on your own. No–I think that is not accurate. I think maybe what you mean is that the blogging felt like a lot of work, and you didn’t see how it counted much in the grade. (Although–it did, as part of that blog paper which really helped the grades of many people–have your opinions changed about that since you did the reflection paper?)
Many of you said that you would like to perhaps have 3 required blog entries per week, due 24 hours or so before class, and that would then be used in class. It does seem to me that the writing is a useful way for people to get prepared for class. YOu could write about the topic that is your group’s topic, but then some of that nice freedom to explore on your own is lost…hmmmm…
But then I had to ask myself: Am I just being a blogsnob? Do I have some preconceived notion of what “good blogging” is, and is it keeping me from using this web 2.0 phenomenon to its full potential for this class? Um, yeah. I think I was.
I did some more thinking, this time about what the biggest challenges of this class are: long, hard to read texts, preparing well for class discussion, development of an intellectual community that matters to the students. And then I listened to them. Here is what I came up with (from the class syllabus):
“…This semester, you can use your blog as a way to prepare for class. Post at least twice a week on any of the 3 readings for the week. You should post by Wednesday’s class time each week. You can post more than 2x.
Post of the Week (POW) award: You will also be reading the blogs of your classmates. Each week you should leave a comment in one of your fellow students’ blogs, telling WHY you want to nominate this particular post. I’ll count the votes on Friday, and we will feature this post in class. Winning POW awards will give you more points toward your Community Contributions grade…”
So–we’ll just see where this leads. I am framing the blogs more as a blogging community where they share their thoughts-in-progress with each other. It is only a subtle difference, but I think it could be profound. It places more emphasis on reading and responding to other blogs. It also gives them a way to respond, since many of them said they just didn’t know how to “write on someone else’s blog.” And I think the effect of getting positive feedback from their peers will have a great effect on the community. It also is a way to reward excellence of many different kinds. I am excited about this!
But to get to this place, I had to give up my notion of the genius blog writer, giving expression to her most profound thoughts and pusing the limits of what Blogger could do! The students remind me that they are just that: students. Blogging is new to them. Even if I want to pretend that they are doing it for themselves, on their own, they aren’t! They are doing it for our class. And now I see that that’s ok. In fact, it is great. They want to use the blogs to the service of the class, not the other way around. Once again, the students are the teachers…
Training vs. Deep Learning for Faculty
I want to ask a question: is faculty development in information technology the same as faculty development in general?
Here is the unnamed pachyderm: university faculty are not trained as educators. As Ken Bain wrote in his book, great educators do exist in higher ed, but they have found their own way there through instinct and hard work, often without much support.
What is it we do when we work with faculty in relation to technology? I find that most programs assume that faculty have more pedagogical knowledge than they do. I don’t find that much of ELI’s materials on faculty development go very deep. I looked at Virginia Tech’s award winning program and here is what I saw: in 2007 they offered 170 sessions for faculty. Of those, 46 were about teaching and technology (others were web development training, research and technology, etc.) OF those 46, 9 were Blackboard training, 4 were training on other VT systems. That leaves about 33 ( or less than 20%) that were on topics that I think of as faculty development , topics like “Motivating Your Students: Strategies for Design and Implementation.” So, about 80% were actually training, focussed on the tool and not on students and learning.
Training is a neccessary and good thing. It can be done poorly or well, and I think Tech does it very well. In fact, it is in the title of their group who does this important work:
Faculty Development Institute: Year-round technology training
But the issue is: how deep can you go with faculty when you are training them on a new system or software? It turns out, this is not the only placec on Tech’s campus where there is development for teaching. I had to search the site to find it, but indeed there is a traditional teaching center . I don’t know anything about how these two campus units relate to one another, but presumably, faculty on that campus do have a place to go to more in-depth formative work.
I just want to focus on what I mean by “in-depth formative work” and problematize ELI’s statement about the Tech program:
“Overall, this exemplary set of activities at Virginia Tech has expanded the university’s leadership role in the effective integration of instructional technology with pedagogy and enabled the university to serve as a model and a resource for other institutions across the state and the nation.”
I want to find out more about what exactly that means. How do they do integration of the two, especially if the faculty don’t bring much pedagogical background to the table?
Let me explain what I mean by “going deep.”
The way I work with faculty is a slow process. First, I have to develop a relationship with the faculty member so that she trusts me. Part of this is that I make clear that I am NOT going to tell her there is a right way to teach. Instead, my goal is to help the faculty member reflect on her own experiences and create her own goals. One way to do this is by taking the TGI Then we look at a syllabus and try to see where the syllabus matches her stated values and goals. This is a lightbulb opportunity and it is so cool to see! Then the teacher is ready: she wants to know how she can teach more in line with her values. I help her by showing her lots of options and opportunities that match up with her needs. In the process, I get her to think about the students: what are they learning? how do you know what they are learning? what do you want them to learn? This is a new way of considering the classroom for many in postsecondary ed. But I have seen the power of thinking of the classroom this way. It improves learning and it also makes for more satisfied faculty and students. (Anyone interested in learning more about this should check out Angelo and Cross’s outstanding text.)
The new area that I have been working in this year has been SOTL. I didn’t realize that it is a natural piece of this process, but it really can be. For SOTL, the teacher identifies a specific problem to study, lays out a change they want to make in their class as an experiment to see how it affects the “problem” and then gathers information about the results. This has two nice results: one is that it forces us to not try too many changes all at once, and this is crucial for successful classes. Second, it produces results that are ready to turn into something presentable or publishable. I believe that this raises the status of working on your teaching because this model of scholarship is something faculty understand and respect. Math and sciences and social sciences especially seem to respond to this. For Humanities people, the text-and-big-idea people, the reflection parts that we do early on are often the most satisfying pieces, and that can often be enough.
And here is, to me, the final piece in this puzzle: creating communities that support this. I now think that this doesn’t happen at an institutional level, but in the small group model of Faculty Learning Communities. I have come to realize that organizations are not moral or immoral, they just are about their goal of surviving. If part of the university’s survival is happy teachers, happy students, then I might be able to get institutional support for what I do. Creating rules and “Centers” is not the end in and of itself. The magic happens with human interaction, and that happens in small groups. It just does. There have to be relationships that make people feel secure enough to face change, and there has to be give and take participation, and there has to be the accountabilitiy that a group of peers can provide and still maintain a sense of saftey (as opposed to mandated workshops or departmental functions or the participation of anyone who controls your paycheck!)
So–organizations are not moral beings, but moral things– good, happy and life-giving things — can happen in them–IF the institution will let it happen. And institutions will only let it happen if it sees them as in the best interest of the survival of the institution.
I challenge my ELI friends, then: is this the same thing you mean when you talk about “faculty development”?
Where Have You Been, Composter?
If you read this blog occassionally, you may have noticed that I have been “away.” That may partly be because my RSS feed was not working but I think that is fixed now (thanks to Tom and his amazingly helpful videos!) . The other reason is that I am blogging with my Core class right now at another blog: CoreCownexions. More on blogging and grading in my next post, but for now I just want to note a funny juxtaposition.
Last Sunday, the Parade Magazine that comes with my Richmond Times Dispatch featured Drew Cary on the front, all wired up. I think of Parade as the Sunday Mag of Middle America. And if it is, then I do believe we have reached a “tipping point.” Look at the article about meeting people on the internet, and it is not about creepy predators. Instead it is an optimistic look at the positive things that many of us know can come from these electronic communities. It even quotes on of my favorite resources, the
Pew Project for the Internet and American Life found that the Internet builds rather than decreases friendships by broadening users’ geographic networks, giving people more contacts to communicate with about health issues, hobbies or other interests.
The day after I read this, I went to a class at Godwin High School, where kids have had laptops in a one to one initiative since they were in middle school. I wanted to show them things about digital storytelling, but all the sites I wanted to show were blocked! Everytime I get involved at our schools I get mad. I get aggravated that many teachers don’t utilize the computers we fought so hard to keep available to our students and then I find out just how tightly their hands are tied. This is ridiculous! Our kids should be out front, creating multimedia projects among other cool kinds of projects where they can be creative and self motivated and really engaged… Let’s face it–those kids should have been teaching ME about digital storytelling. Instead, they had never heard of it.
My message to Henrico County Schools is: come on now! Even Parade Magazine is dropping the “fear factor” ! When will we untie the hands of our teachers and students to use these fabulous tools as more than a word processor??
visual aids
One of the things I see really changing because of the internet is our ability to think visually. Today I tried out Vizuwords. I think this may be on of the first Web 3.0 applications that I have used. I am definitely a word person, but I also find that I use visuals a lot to understand complex ideas. Vizuwords is a dictionary that uses a moving visual interface to show not jsut the word, but other words closely related to it and the nature of those relationships. I could spend lots of time there… I am thinking of ways to use it with my students. This article from Edutopia first pointed me to it, and there are other sites mentioned there that I am looking forward to playing with.
It occurs to me that it matters a lot HOW we explain things. It is more than just moving thoughts from inside the head to outside; it is interpreting and making sense of things in a particular way. I noticed that many people are put off by the kinds of “drive-by” display of new technologies that we tech enthusiasts tend to want to produce. I think we really have to start to care about getting our message out to people who are afraid of learning new technology. Thanks again to Jeff who introduced me to one of my new favorite reources: the CommonCraft Show. These guys do explanations that are very visually savvy and also audience savvy–they couldn’t be less intimidating! I was going to link to one of the ones I’ll use with my faculty, like the one on wikis or the one on social bookmarking, but first you should check out this one that contains potentially life-saving information?