Away in the Field

I know it’s been somewhat silent on the blog for a few days, because I’ve been traveling and busy making arrangements for more travel. The upcoming week I will be down at the Georgia coast doing field work, so unfortunately it will probably be quiet a little bit longer (but the good news is the only thing standing between me and a PhD will be a final chapter!). Your regularly scheduled musings on higher education will return around the middle of next week if all goes to plan.

In the meantime, let me direct your attention to a few interesting articles that I’ve read recently and will certainly provide food for thought.

This excellent article on the Chronicle deals in more detail with the subject of job training (see my own take on the issue here).

A very nice take on an important type of diversity that is, in my opinion, entirely under-discussed: socioeconomic diversity. It’s an important topic, to say the least.

A great and accessible take on setting fixed versus growth mindsets, something which every instructor should be aware of.

Learning Music to be a Better Teacher

Wanting to become a better teacher? While there are many excellent ways to improve your instruction, I’d like to offer one that may seem a little unusual: learn a new instrument.

I will grant that this seems at first a completely useless bit of advice; after all, what use does a biology instructor have for being able to play piano? On the surface of it, not much, though I’d also like to add that – in my mind at least – playing music is a reward on its own. There is of course a salient argument to be made that learning music makes it easier to make connections across disciplinary lines, and that alone is a huge benefit to being fluent in an instrument. As an example, I can say without a doubt that my love for music makes me a better instructor for my non-majors simply because it gives me another chance to connect with students outside of the course material. I’ve written enough about the importance of those student-teacher connections that I don’t think it needs much repetition here. Instead, I want to argue (and hopefully show) in this post that learning an instrument – more specifically, the process of learning one – provides distinct benefits derived from the insights it gives us into the process of learning.

Learning an Instrument is a Multi-faceted Process

When I first learned violin, it became very clear very quickly (and very noisily) that this is an extremely complicated instrument to master. Violin was the last of five or six instruments I play, so I already had the general knowledge of music down fairly solidly, but the actual mechanics of the instrument were completely mind-boggling. I had to learn how to properly hold the bow, how to hold the violin, proper posture, proper finger placement, and on through a very long list of skills. And of course, not only was each separate skill a challenge, but I also had to learn how they all fit together! And then there was the more musical side: emotions, timbres, dynamics and so on. The same can be said of many instruments, yet to a skilled musician, playing their instrument is simply one fluid act. We just do it, without thinking consciously about it. We can say the same thing about the skills that make up our field; truly doing ecology, for instance, requires knowing the basic foundational knowledge, understanding the extent and limitations of our knowledge, being able to produce and digest scientific research, and to place it in the context of the greater pool of human knowledge. Each of these is a distinct skill, yet to a distinguished scientist, it all makes up one thing. For many of us, our field is likely second nature (we are unconsciously competent), and so learning an instrument can potentially improve our teaching by making us consciously aware of the multi-faceted nature of learning. In a sense, it renews our sense of being incompetent, which can help us design better courses that reflect more aspects of our field than simply the foundational knowledge.

Being a Novice Learner Again

Let’s face it: learning comes naturally to the instructors. We are the embodiment of lifelong learners, and by the very nature of what we did to get there (particularly the dissertation or these process of advanced degrees) learning has become something we can do almost effortlessly. Many of us may have forgotten how extremely frustrating learning something new can be, and I have no doubt this colors not only our expectations for students, but also how we perceive and respond to that frustration when we see it in students. I have seen many a professor respond with “how do you not understand this?!” style shock when instead what we should be doing is offering encouragement and reassuring students they cannot be immediate experts. Learning an instrument is, frankly, a pain in the butt. Look at the long list of skills that went into the violin; the only way to master them is long hours of practice and self-criticism. It’s not a comfortable process, and after 7 years of playing I still have a lot of stuff to work on. Just as learning an instrument can make us more conscious of the multi-faceted nature of learning, it can also make us [painfully] aware of the frustration that comes with breaking down knowledge barriers. It might also highlight areas where our expectations for students are misguided; just as no one is an instant advanced musician, we cannot expect our students to be instant experts in our fields.

The Song of Learning

In many ways, I would argue that learning the totality of a field (i.e. the overarching goals of, say, a whole course) is almost perfectly analogized by the learning of a new song. Although we may spend days or weeks on particular parts of that song/field, it truly only comes into existence when we play the whole thing in context. This also highlights a very important learning strategy called interleaving, where students focus on individual aspects of a skill, interspersed with focusing on the whole context or message. Musicians learning a song do the same thing; our orchestra rehearsal seasons begin with a night where we just play through the entire concert to get a rough feel for the grand scheme of the works; subsequent rehearsals are spent focusing in much more detail on particularly troublesome spots. I’ve been slowly learning the opening to Bach’s violin partita No. 2, and there are times when – although I prefer to play the whole thing – I spend half an hour on one or two measures. It is not much of a stretch to see how this same approach is used in learning, and so going through the process as a novice a musician can potentially give us important insight that we might use to structure and plan a course.

To close, I must point out that the three main benefits above are absolutely not limited to learning an instrument; indeed, I’m fairly confident that most skills sufficiently far from our areas of expertise could yield similar insights. Of course, listening to and playing music has documented cognitive benefits as well, though that’s far outside my ken (perhaps it’s a new skill I should learn!), but I think it can also directly impact our teaching by reminding us what it feels like to be novices. And even if that weren’t true, is not music a worthy end undo itself?

Online Learning: a powerful [and misused] tool

When I think of the changes that have swept through academia in the decade I’ve been in it, it’s difficult for me to think of a bigger one than the advent of online education. I have “come of age” (both literally and figuratively) at the same time as IT forces have allowed large-scale online instruction, and it is now difficult for me to imagine an academic world without online instruction. Of course, distance education is not new, even if it has changed faces, but at no time before has online learning so deeply permeated undergraduate education. Although this can be a force for good, the advent (some would say “tyranny”) of online education has not always been a net positive; I have personally experienced dreadful online courses and found myself cursing their existence. The fact of the matter is that online learning is nothing more or less than a tool – not an end unto itself – and like all tools, the benefits or harms depend on how well it is used.

Despite all the negative press online learning gets, and despite the pushback from those who [usually justifiably] insist on face-to-face learning, online education can serve a very powerful purpose. Many students – particularly those nontraditional ones who are returning to school to find a new career – simply cannot be in a classroom all the time. Time demands from a part-time job or other concerns might make scheduling impossible, and transportation might be unfeasible or unaffordable. Other students might simply not work well in a traditional classroom for behavioral or other personal reasons. For all of these, online education can make the difference between getting an education or not getting one, and in those cases it becomes a hugely beneficial tool. Unfortunately, in practice, online education is not always used primarily as a way to increase accessibility. For many universities, online education can be a very attractive revenue stream at a time when traditional state support is dwindling; this is especially the case if the online courses are “farmed out” to junior faculty or even private companies that dramatically lower the front-end cost. Sadly, many junior faculty members – already a group that may not have specialized training in instruction – might have very little support in developing online courses, and the pitfalls of bad course design are dramatically inflated in online courses compared to their in-face counterparts. That said, online coursework does not have to be necessarily inferior in quality, but to prevent that, we have to know a few major things about designing/executing online courses.

Teaching a good online course is not easy

One reason that many universities might see online learning as an attractive revenue stream is the apparent notion that it can be done at much less cost and effort. Rather than having an expensive tenured faculty member, an online course can be executed by a part-time contingent instructor whose primary job is to develop, curate, and grade materials. Why pay for a full-time, fully supported professor to teach 20 students when you can get the same tuition and spend half the money? That’s a gross oversimplification, I know, but the point is that treating online courses as some sort of junior teaching endeavor ignores the very real and difficult challenges online learning presents. In a traditional class, an instructor has immediate and tangible feedback about how the class is going, and can make immediate changes as needed. Online courses, on the other hand, may be entirely written before hand, and in some cases there may be little to no meaningful interaction with some students. In this case, it takes a very skilled and adept instructor to both design a course that won’t run into problems, and to be able to pick up on scant signals that something might be awry. Although there are many excellent adjunct instructors out there, many may simply not yet have the experience or support necessary to tackle the difficult job of creating a great online course.

Online students are not the same

At the risking of making sweeping and unjustified generalizations, the students who take online courses simply are not the same – on average – as those in traditional courses. They may be non-traditional students just returning to school, they may be students who are simply not comfortable in traditional classrooms, or they may be students who view online courses as an easy way to get the same credits without the time demands. All of these cases present unique and often difficult challenges to an instructor. For instance, returning students might be overwhelmed by being in the classroom again, and may be in need of an intervention to provide the academic and moral support to help them gain confidence. Recognizing and providing that support is not easy, and once again, if online courses are “farmed out”, they may be taught by faculty who for any variety of reasons are not prepared to deal with student issues like that. Even my own immediate teaching supervisor, who is herself an excellent teacher, was surprised by how different the students were in her experimental online lab course, so this is not a trivial challenge. The fact of the matter is that students who sign up for online courses are self-selecting to a degree, and knowing the type of student you will have is a major factor in executing a good online course, one not often considered in the course design process.

Providing rich learning experiences is difficult online

One of the most powerful aspects of a good course – traditional and not – is providing rich learning experiences to students, which lies at the core of active learning strategies. One of the reasons I love teaching labs is because labs are inherently active learning, but lecture time slots can also be used for working real-world problems, designing projects, or any other variety of learning experiences beyond content delivery. When dealing with a course delivered entirely online, this becomes much more difficult. This is not, of course, to say that it is impossible, but in my experience many online courses focus entirely (if not exclusively) on content delivery. This may partially just be a reflection of the belief that content delivery is the sole purpose of any course, but it can become even more harmful in the case of online learning. In a traditional lecture, students at least have the chance to potentially engage with the material through dialogue, questions, etc., but in an online course of the same material, that possibility may easily be lost. Therefore, it becomes even more important to actively consider the learning experiences that will be provided online to students, because if they are not explicitly considered, the course risks falling flat.

There is no substitute for face time

The most salient argument against online education is that it does not allow the same sort of personal interaction and student-teacher relationship traditional classrooms allow. We know that the student-faculty relationship is possibly the most important aspect of a good education, so this is a damning argument. Unfortunately, there is not really a good response except making sure that every student has a chance to interact personally and meaningfully with the instructor. And I don’t mean asking questions and getting answers, but actually engaging in a deeper dialogue that extends beyond the class and allows building that relationship. This simply requires a lot of time, often as much [if not more] time as a traditional course would require, and there’s no way around that if we want an online course to work. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the students in an online course might not even want that student-teacher interaction, or they may (in the case of returning students) be intimidated by the technological component. None of these are truly insurmountable obstacles, but they require a skilled hand to deal with, and overcoming them is the sine qua non of a successful online course.

For all their disadvantages, online courses and online learning are here to stay. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is absolutely essential that we as instructors and faculty members are aware of the unique challenges associated with online instruction. I think it is clear that it is not appropriate to simply hand off online coursework to a novice part-time instructor, yet the possibility of saving money by doing so is one of the motivating factors driving university decisions. Online coursework can be very powerful in terms of increasing education accessibility, but that power cannot be realized if the proper investment in skilled instructors is not made. If online course work is treated simply as an additional revenue stream, it will lead to a situation where no one wins: students will lose out and faculty member will see a continued erosion to mere content-delivery vehicles. On the other hand, if done well, online learning is a very powerful tool for inclusion, and so should be pursued as far as possible to that end.

I’d like to close with my own vision of the future of coursework, online and not. The internet is a very powerful engine for finding and accessing content, and so I think the ideal course in the future will be a hybrid of online and traditional. Students will find and absorb content on their own through online delivery, and the limited “lecture” time will be spent on active-learning experiences. I don’t think we’ll ever move to an entirely digital classroom (maybe…holodecks, anyone?), but that doesn’t mean online tools can’t dramatically improve the courses we deliver. IT is a tool, and like all tools, it is only as good as how you use it.

Unknown Unknowns

I know of few phrases that have been so derided in recent times as Donald Rumsfeld’s famous “Unknown unknowns.” In all honesty, though, as nonsensical as the phrase may seem at first glance, it actually conveys a very important idea, one that we as educators should be much more aware of. The same idea is also contained in Socrates’ famous quote “If I know anything, it is only that I know nothing.” In that case, Socrates would have been talking about Known Unknowns, and both of those represent points on a kind of spectrum of competency. I remember graduating from college thinking I knew a good deal about how the world worked, and six years later I’m convinced we know next to nothing about that same subject. What could have possibly happened (besides the insidious and very real imposter syndrome)? Simply put, the more I learned, the more I started to see the gaps, and I’m sure most readers who have an advanced degree can entirely sympathize with that experience. Because we have such a firm grasp of what we still need to learn, we are at or near the end of the competency spectrum.

When students start out, they are what can be considered “unconsciously incompetent.” I know that sounds like a harsh term, because of the unavoidable connotations of the word “incompetent,” but it simply means that novice learners don’t have competence with a particular skill set, and that they don’t know how to address that…that is, the unkowns are, to them, unknown. As they learn more and start to develop skills, students (if primed to think about how they learn) hopefully develop the ability to highlight important areas for improvement. They have become “consciously incompetent,” meaning they are still struggling to develop a skill, but they now know areas where their knowledge is lacking. I like to think of my own development as a musician: when I first started learning violin, everything was new and I had no idea how to even start learning the instrument. Nowadays, although I still have a lot of room for improvement, I have a firm idea of things that need work: my tone, my use of dynamics, and so on. Armed with that knowledge, I can devise strategies and devote effort to fixing my weakness. Is that not precisely what we want our students to be able to do?

Of course, “conscious incompetence” is only about halfway through the competency spectrum. Getting students there is a huge accomplishment, but ideally we want students to be able to move even further, to “conscious competence,” where they have conscious mastery of a skill set. I would argue that many starting graduate students fall into that category. We enter graduate school with a solid handle on research methodology, writing, and the technical know-how of our fields, but we are still developing and it may still require a good deal of effort to use those skills. At the final end of the spectrum is “unconscious competence,” which I like to think of as synonymous with “second nature.” Again, I like to refer to my own music education: although I am definitely consciously incompetent with the violin (maybe consciously competent on a good day), playing trombone or piano are second nature to me. I don’t have to consciously think about all the small technical details that add up to performance, I just do them. Of course, at one point, that was far from the case, and it has only been constant practice and use of those skill sets that has allowed me to fluidly and competently play music. That’s certainly another argument for the importance of challenging work to help students develop, but I would argue that we need to be aware of the competency spectrum for two other reasons.

We as instructors are usually unconsciously competent, with the possible exception of first-time instructors teaching something somewhat outside of their immediate field. As counter-intuitive as it may seem, being unconsciously competent can actually prove an obstacle to effective teaching, because we may have forgotten what it was like to first learn a subject and the particular obstacles we faced. For instance, when I taught my remedial marine science course a couple of summers ago, I stumbled (to put it mildly) when it came time to teach the Pythagorean Theorem. The math and idea was so familiar to me that I could not comprehend how differently my students were approaching the problem (compounded by my lack of knowledge of metacognition), and I just ended up doing the worst thing a struggling instructor can do: repeating the same thing over and over. Had I taken the time to really consider what my students were thinking, perhaps it would have occurred to me to start with a tactile, physical example of how the Pythagorean Theorem actually works in the real world, which would have been a much better starting point than just jumping into a formula with no background. Any time we teach something that is second nature to us, we risk falling into the same problem, and so next time you’re teaching something and students “just don’t get it,” consider the possibility that we just haven’t yet given them the framework to understand the skill in the way we do. Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to this issue beyond active thought on our part as instructors, but actively talking with our students to understand where they may be stumbling is an essential first step.

The second reason that the competency spectrum becomes essentially important is a bit broader-scale than issues of instruction. Even the luckiest students, those who know precisely what they want to do in life, start out without clear knowledge of how to make that happen. In other words, they have a goal, but no path. Of course, this is why we have well-defined curricula; students may know what they want to do, but we as the experts (presumably) know how to help students get there. In the traditional approach to education based on set curricula, this is an excellent solution to that aspect of students’ unconscious incompetence (assuming the curriculum is well-designed and articulated, but that’s a separate issue). However, in recent times, there has been an extremely rapid growth in “personalized education,” education that is student designed and driven. While the importance of passion in driving learning cannot be overstated, shifting curricular control mostly or entirely to students (especially at lower levels) carries a great deal of risk because of students’ unconscious incompetence. Ignoring the fact that many starting students may not even know what they want to do in the long run, how can even the best-meaning student truly design a curriculum that works for them if they don’t know what they need to know or learn? This is not an insurmountable obstacle, of course, and I honestly think the shift to a more personalized education is a net good thing. That said, as the shift continues and “students as customers” (why I despise that notion is a separate subject) get more control over their education, we have to remember that in this case, the customer is not always right. If they were, they wouldn’t need an education.

And maybe we can all learn a new instrument in the meantime; it just might be that we’ve forgotten what it feels like to learn something entirely new.

The Oldest New Idea

I was originally planning to dedicate another post to the rising adjunct crisis, prompted by this open letter on the Chronicle. Really, though, I don’t think I can say much that hasn’t already been said. At some point, we have to find a way to make the public aware of this crisis, but I fear that day will come only during a major wave of crises heralded by closings like Sweet Briar’s. That, however, has nothing much to back it up on my end besides gut feelings, and I likely shouldn’t discuss it until my bleak outlook has at least lightened a little.

Instead, I want to provide some thoughts that were prompted by this essay on Inside Higher Ed. I won’t really comment much on the article itself, not least because it’s frustratingly low on details and looks more like a product plug than a thought piece, but rather I want to discuss this “new” idea that has been coursing through higher ed circles: active learning. The idea is simple: students learn better if they are actually doing things, either mentally or even physically. That’s one reason I think labs are among the best ways to teach a material in the sciences (if the labs have a proper focus on skills), and it goes along with a previous post about the importance of teaching skills. After all, skills are intrinsically active, and I’ve found in revising curricula that active learning and skill-centered instruction are so interconnected that adding one to the curriculum will always add the other.

The thing that amuses me most when I read articles on active learning (and the motivation for this post’s title), is that this idea (as well as all the related ones) is some bold, new concept. While it certainly is a bold concept in a realm that is known for being hidebound and slow to change, active learning is anything but new. When I was a new undergrad at Hendrix a decade ago, active and experiential learning permeated the curriculum, to the point that it was one of the first schools (if not the first) to document students’ active learning experiences in a separate “Odyssey transcript.” Although Hendrix was and is one of the pioneers in excellent undergrad education, it is not alone; almost every liberal arts institution I’ve known even briefly has had active learning at the center of students’ experience for years. I’ve always thought that small liberal arts colleges (SLACs), by their very nature, are the ones really at the cutting edge of education, with big state schools lagging pretty far behind, and this is one of the best examples I can think of. So, if the idea of active learning is new and foreign to you and you’re curious what that might look like in practice, spend a little but of time on the websites of some SLACs! Of course, SLACs and big R1s occupy very different niches in higher ed, and although I think the big schools have a lot to learn about effective education from the small schools, I do not think they should simply try to emulate them (the same goes the other direction for SLACs and the research emphasis, but that’s a topic for another day). Being in a large school, potentially with very large class sizes, has a very different set of challenges which impact how and when we can implement new teaching strategies.

So what is active learning? The thing that might first come to mind is “getting out there and doing things.” While this is certainly one of the biggest pillars of active learning – and would lie at the center of every curriculum in an ideal world – it captures only one realization of the idea. In more general terms, active learning strategies are any which encourage/require students to actually engage with material in a way other than reading a book or taking lecture notes. Student-response systems (aka “clickers”), discussions (good discussions), working real world problems, and laboratories or simulations are just a few of a very long – and growing – list of strategies that would fall under the umbrella of active learning. I would also argue that almost every aspect of writing a dissertation or thesis is the manifestation of active learning; I have no doubt in my mind that I have learned far more in the fours years of PhD research than I did in the two years of graduate level classes (in no small part because I screw up a lot and have to figure out why…). The wonderful thing about active learning is that the possibilities are almost endless with a little thought, which also gives us the flexibility to apply it under a wide variety of different situational factors (e.g. small class versus giant lecture. The sine qua non is that students have to be actively thinking about the material, analyzing, synthesizing, and applying what they know (the higher levels of learning in Bloom’s taxonomy). Well-designed active learning techniques can also be paired with exercises that get students thinking about their own thinking and learning, a pairing of strategies that is incredibly powerful.

Of course, there are some major challenges to implementing these strategies, especially in very large lecture classes (yet one more argument against these types of classes). Logistics is hands-down the biggest obstacle to overcome; active learning requires a lot of cooperation and dialogue between instructor and student. In a very large lecture hall, it may simply be impossible for the professor to interact with every student or group of students. This is one motivation for the use of student response systems, and at least one instructor here uses breakaway sections of smaller classes with TA’s to facilitate the active learning portion, using lecture only for conveying bulk information. In my mind, one of the best and underutilized ways to achieve active learning in a large lecture course is to work more closely with the associated lab sections. To borrow my own personal example, my lab course (and those of my junior TA’s) is a companion to a single lecture course that contains all the lab students in one or two sections. Although the two courses unfortunately have relatively little overlap right now, it could be an excellent opportunity after revisions to exercise active learning in the context of the lecture course. Of course, relying on such pairings is not an ideal way to incorporate active learning, but it is one that could be relatively easily accomplished within the constraints of existing curricula at large schools. Another important challenge can also be the scale of change: having one or two possible active learning opportunities is only a very modest improvement, and realizing the full impact of active learning/the flipped classroom can require substantial curricular changes that professors may feel unwilling or unable to make.

One major obstacle to implementing active learning comes from, surprisingly (or not surprisingly, if you’ve read some of my previous posts), the students. When reading about my companion lecture course’s instructor on the infamous Rate My Professor, many of the comments completely derided active learning, with one even saying “[the instructor] has this weird idea that lecture isn’t an effective way of learning, and using group work and some weird active learning thing.” As was the case with skills-based learning, active communication with students about our motivation and reasoning can dramatically improve student attitudes about these “new” approaches, but I think we still once again run up against the obstacle of asking students to reject a learning model they have come to accept as “the way it’s done.” The best solution, of course, is to implement active learning strategies across whole curricula so that students are exposed to it from day 1, but that is a solution accompanied by its own unique set of logistical and institutional challenges. I have, however, personally seen a desire on the part of institutions to make that change; UGA recently announced a move to experiential learning (once again falsely claiming its “newness’), and I have even some openings at large schools specifically for faculty members who can implement curriculum-wide changes.

Of course, it is individual faculty members themselves who are best positioned right now to make these changes. If anyone is curious about learning more, I strongly suggest referring to the Chronicle’s free guide on the matter (it is worth noting they use the term “flipped classroom,” but the ideas are largely interchangeable).

Active learning may not be an idea as new as some might say, but it’s just as powerful as when it was indeed a new teaching model.

Teach the Skills. Ditch the Content.

I watched the Google Education on Air conference in bits and pieces over the weekend (I’ll admit, sitting down passively and holding your attention fixed to a computer screen for that long is a more daunting task than I expected; there’s something to be said for in-person meetings), and the first thing that struck me was how many non-academics they had involved. Of course, I don’t mean that disparagingly; on the contrary, it was refreshing to see so many outside the system that are interested in it. Even though I’ve always been skeptical of people who want to change a system they have experienced only as students (their ideas are valuable, but have to be weighed against the lack of experience “on the other side”), I was pleasantly surprised to see how well they tied in their own experiences to the needs of a modern educational system. Of course, with such a massive diversity of views and ideas, it would be impossible to boil the entire thing down to one or two main ideas. Instead, I want to discuss one that repeatedly jumped out at me, an idea that has underlain my current teaching and course design.

We should be teaching skills, not content.

Well ok, that’s a bit of an over-broad statement; content is still an important aspect even in modern curriculum design theory (I’m thinking especially of Fink’s book, where it falls into “Foundational Knowledge”, one of the six aspects of significant learning), but it is only one small part of a larger whole. Unfortunately, in many courses, content reigns supreme, which has led to two major issues in my mind (though from conversations with fellow educators, it seems to be a valid and widespread problem). First, teachers are under constant [partially self-imposed] pressure to cram more and more content into already overfull courses, leading to massive exposure but little retention on the part of students. Second, when new standards come around that emphasize the importance of teaching skills, one of the more common responses is “how am I going to fit that in when I already can’t cover all the content I want to cover?” That’s a valid and important question, and in a content-driven course can be a major obstacle preventing implementation of skills instruction. How can we do that, add skills instruction without sacrificing content? I would argue that we can’t, but that this is not necessarily a bad thing for our courses.

Take a moment to consider your ideal student. And I don’t mean your ideal student constrained by the realities of modern education. I mean what you wish your ideal student could be in an equally ideal world. If you’re like me (and I can only speak from experience in the sciences), your ideal student would be excited about what they study, be able to make solid judgements about what they do and do not know, and be able to take steps to fill in their gaps to learn something new (aka being a lifelong learner). In that case, not being able to address all the content in the field would not at all be a shortcoming; what isn’t covered in class the student is now well-equipped to tackle on their own. Moreover, a student thus prepared is able to recognize the fluid nature of what we know, and most powerfully is armed with a capacity to quickly and easily learn new things. That is exactly the type of student that a skills-based approach aims to create.

So how can we go about creating that kind of student? One of the first steps is to reevaluate your own learning goals and objectives for students. Are they content centered (“know the parts of the cell”, “know the taxonomy of arthropods”, “know the important world events of the 19th century”, etc.) or do they emphasize what students should be able to do after they take your course? As an example, the learning goals for my non majors organismal course are all actions: I want students to be able to understand and explain how we go about learning things in biology (i.e. experimental design), be able to answer important questions (GMOs climate change, etc.) using scientific/biological reasoning, and to be able to articulate the importance of biology in their everyday lives. Week to week, learning objectives are similarly action-oriented (and, as an aside, are always clearly communicated to students; the importance of communication cannot be overstated); sometimes this may be simply a matter of language (but language matters!), but there have been times when whole goals have been tossed because they teach only memorization. Once you go through this process of redefining your learning goals, you may be pleasantly surprised to see how much the foundational knowledge (content) ends up seeping into the skills you want students to master. For example, to explain how we understand things in biology, my students must possess basic knowledge of the scientific process and experimental design, but they must also know how to apply and synthesize those concepts (two of the higher-order learning levels in Bloom’s taxonomy). More importantly, using this approach, students tend to have much higher retention of what content we do cover because they actually use and apply it.

Although the definition of clear, skills-based learning goals is the crucial first step to designing an effective curriculum (and can be painful when it requires completely redesigning a course and syllabus), there are at least two other considerations that cannot be ignored during this process. First, classroom activities should focus on encouraging and giving students chances to practice the skills you want them to learn. In my course, a massive amount of time is spent actually designing experiments, asking questions, and synthesizing observations to answer them (this is one of the pillars of active-learning methods, but that is a topic for another time). The second main consideration is that assessments for the course actually assess and utilize those skills. If a course is taught emphasizing skills, but the assessment emphasizes content, that mismatch can cause a major breakdown. A mismatch in the other direction, teaching content but assessing skills, can be just as – if not even more – disastrous; unfortunately I can speak from my experience as a novice instructor on this one, though I can happily say that is no longer the case for me. Assessment design, however, is another topic that deserves its own post similar to my scribblings on the role of grading. Suffice it to say that skills-based education is more than just how we frame learning goals; it must permeate every aspect of course design and execution.

To close, I want to leave you with an observation from my own experience with how students react to this approach. Surprisingly, many of my students don’t like it, at least at first. I’m sure this is due at least in part to the fact that my course is required for psychology majors, and the “here because I have to be” mentality can be very strong when asking students to do the level and intensity of work I ask of them (though it pays off: my students routinely tell me they learned far more in my once-a-week lab than in the corresponding lecture course). More fundamentally, however, I think some of the opposition I experience comes from the fact that my model of course design flies in the face of almost everything my students (who are almost all 3rd and 4th year students) have experienced thus far. The ones who have made it to this level have done so because they have learned how to excel in a particular system, even if it is an inherently flawed system of instruction. One of the most effective ways I’ve discovered for dealing with this opposition is simply communication. If students know what they will be doing, and more importantly why I will be asking that of them, they are much, much more willing to “play along” and benefit from this different approach. There is also evidence that first-year students are much more amenable to these approaches (because they are approaching them with a blank slate of college level experience), so as courses continue to change across entire curricula, hopefully student opposition will become a thing of the past, along with content-centered courses and the tyranny of lecture.

P.S. the Google Education on Air panels were all recorded and can be accessed here if you’re curious about hearing some of the ideas.

Cogito ergo…cogito?

I had said previously I wanted to write a post discussing the topic of metacognition (which can be summarized as “thinking about thinking”), because it is a natural outgrowth of considering the importance of grading as communication. While I was sitting on that particular topic until I had written about some others, I stumbled across this article during my morning internet stroll, and it hit me that this may be a perfect time.

The idea of metacognition is not new, nor is it new for good teachers to at least intuitively make use of the ideas in class. Indeed, Pedagogy Unbound over at the Chronicle recently released on excellent article on the use of metacognition principles in course design. The idea is basically to get students thinking about how they learn new things, which is in fact one of the six “domains” of Fink’s significant learning taxonomy. This can be accomplished many ways over the course of an entire semester and even an education, and the reader curious about those powerful curriculum design methods will likely find that column indispensable. The overall goal of metacognition approaches is to help students learn how to learn, both practically to prepare for exams and more abstractly to become lifelong learners. This is of course one of the central goals of any good course/education, but what I want to talk about is a little different, and goes back to the study I linked in the first paragraph. What I think should be discussed more often usually occurs early in a student’s life (possibly even before we get them in higher ed): the creation of fixed versus growth mindsets.

Think of a skill that you use frequently. Maybe you’re an excellent writer, or an astute musician. Perhaps you’re great with your hands or an amateur gourmet chef. Regardless of the skill, I’d be willing to bet that – at some point in your life – you were awful at it. In my own case, I like to consider my musical instruments (in this and many other aspects of teaching): I am fairly good at violin nowadays, but when I first started, I was banned from practicing within earshot of another human being. It was extremely frustrating, especially because I was surrounded by exceptionally talented musicians, but I knew I would improve with enough practice. That is precisely what the growth mindset says. Had I been holding a fixed mindset, the outcome would have been very different; I likely would have put down the violin to never touch it again under the assumption that I just wasn’t “a born musician.” Now think of your students. How many of them enter your class “knowing” that they can never play the proverbial violin? What are you doing to encourage them to practice?

The issue of fixed or growth mindsets seems to become even more pronounced when you teach non-majors, which is my particular specialty here at UGA. It is often easy to tell by students’ actions within the first class meeting who is eager to try new things, and who is convinced that they can never possibly understand this subject that is so outside their own domain. In more cases than not, the latter group consists of students who in the past have suffered under an inadequate teacher of the subject. Without knowing better, such students often internalize their failures in the subject as a reflection of their own capacity, not knowing that it may be a reflection rather of how they’re taught. That of course is an insidious problem, and one not entirely easy to fix, but we have the opportunity as higher ed instructors to undo at least some of that damage. So can we go about that?

One of the most important steps in encouraging a growth mindset is to make students care about the material. I stuck with violin and the hours of hellish sounds I produced because I really, really wanted to be able to play some of the beautiful music written for the instrument. I deeply cared about it, and I was willing to sound embarrassingly bad because I know the payoff will/would be worth it. If students can say the same about the material you teach, then the biggest obstacle has been overcome. Usually, this might mean nothing more than explicitly saying at the beginning of a course why you think it’s important for students. For example, I start my own organismal biology course with a discussion of current controversies that have a biological component, making the case that students need to understand biology to understand these issues. I also make an active effort to relate every day of material to something the students encounter in day to day life; with a little thought and effort, you might be surprised how easy this actually is when you teach a subject you deeply care about. If students are on board with you in thinking your subject is important or even intrinsically interesting, they will almost always be willing to put forth the effort to “practice” rather than turn away from difficult material.

Of course, getting students interested is only one step, albeit a big one; a course must also be designed to allow students to practice their skills at the subject under low- or even no-stakes conditions. Some may point out that this sounds like “teaching to the test,” and I would agree; but if the test assesses the key skills (not content, a topic for later) they need to develop, is it so bad to teach to it? If my violin instructor gave me a bunch of practice materials then assessed me by handing me a piano concerto to play, my reaction would have been…less than pleased. On that line, the other big factor in encouraging a growth mindset is *drumroll* your grading! As I discussed in the previous post, grading should be a communication tool, a way to acknowledge the skills your students have developed and show them how they can improve and build on those skills. Something as simple as tweaking your grading a little can make a huge difference, especially early in the semester.

To close, I want to mention something that might seem a little counter-intuitive. Sometimes, it is the smartest of students who display the most rigid fixed mindsets. This may come as a surprise, but often times these students have been able to adopt new skills with ease as they explore them, and they have repeatedly received feedback from well-meaning peers and parents that they are “just so smart.” The consequence is that later in life, when they are challenged with new things (such as in the high school to college transition), they might dismiss skills they cannot immediately master as something they simply cannot do. Many of my close friends who try to take up an instrument in their adult life have fallen prey to this mindset, at least at first, without remembering that everything was at one point a new skill to them. As more and more research comes out confirming the lifelong plasticity of the brain, that will change, but for now, we as instructors should always keep in mind that sometimes our first challenge is to convince students that they can even learn in the first place.

As an aside: musical instruments seem to come up a lot as a perfect example of the benefits of practice for learning. Perhaps that is an argument for more musical education at a young age? Hmmm.

On [the Importance of] Grading

“It’s THAT time of year again.”

If you’re in academia, know someone in academia, or even follow it to the slightest, you know what the above phrase means. The end of the Spring semester and academic year is upon us, and with it comes the flurry of that most maligned of teaching activities: grading. Hatred of grading seems to be one of the few universally shared views among academics, and the dominance of grades (for better or worse) has been a part of almost everyone’s lives (most of us, after all, were getting grades at some point). There are good reasons grading falls on the less-than-favorable side of the scale in terms of teaching activities: it’s tedious, can be extremely frustrating, time-consuming, and invariably results in conversations along the lines of “I need this grade” that no one wants to have. Grading might even seem a profanity for some; we spend a semester convincing our students that whatever we teach is interesting, meaningful, and complex, but then we have to boil all of that nuanced complexity down into a single number at semester’s end. Clearly, grading is a fraught subject, and I’m personally in the camp that believes an ideal world would dispense with grades entirely. But of course, we don’t live in an ideal world, so we have to find a way to work within the system we have in front of us (unless you’re one of the lucky few working for a school that has made the switch to narrative evaluations). Instead of viewing grades as an evil necessity (a straw man argument, I know, but bear with me), I think instead we should “subvert” them and treat them like the vital teaching tool they are.

Full disclosure: I admit I have a bit of a soft spot for grading, as tedious and frustrating as it can be. When I’m up against a brick wall in my research spending hours if not days with nothing concrete to show for it, the tangible productivity represented by a pile of graded papers can be quite the refreshing break. There’s also nothing quite like the feeling of seeing proof positive that your teaching efforts have not been in vain; I will never forget the feeling of writing a well-earned “A” on the paper of a student who the summer before had been left after an accident with an inability to encode/decode written text (if you’ve never worked with special needs students, moments like that make it worth the effort). But emotions aside, I think there is a very strong case to be made for the utility of grades and grading as a teaching tool, IF DONE CORRECTLY. And of course, that last clause is the kicker.

Oftentimes, faculty members might consider grades simply as a way to document work that has been done or skills that have been mastered. While this is certainly the case, that view ignores one critical aspect of grading and assessment: it is part of an academic conversation. Whereas some might consider grades as a representation of past work, I think we should consider grading as a way to encourage and highlight areas for improvement (I must also point out that this is not an original idea; I first encountered it in L. Dee Fink’s “Creating Significant Learning Experiences”, well worth the investment if you’re a faculty member seeking to perfect your art). When I grade a paper, I don’t just indicate the value of the work a student has done, I also explicitly point to areas where they can improve and provide suggestions for HOW they can do it. Thus, my comments are not justifications for a grade so much as suggestions for doing better. I’d like for you to pause for a moment and think about your own grading (if you’re in the position of providing grades): are you justifying a grade, or are you helping students improve? Of course, many of the assignments in my own course are drafts building toward a final version, so writing suggestions for improvement comes naturally to the assignment; if the skill that has been asked of students in an assignment is never used again, this approach to grading becomes less useful. However, if that is the case, there are very serious reasons to reconsider those assignments or perhaps even the course as a whole (for reasons of metacognition and course design that I think deserve separate treatment in later posts). When advising fellow faculty members, I like to use my own music education as analogy: if my violin instructor had simply told me that I was holding my bow incorrectly and nothing more, I would still be as incompetent at the violin as I was when I began lessons (apologies to Dr. Baker, I’m probably still holding my bow wrong; a year of lessons is not enough). You may not be teaching your students to play an instrument, but are the skills you teach any less complex?

I don’t think grading will ever be an altogether pleasant activity. Tedium is a difficult thing to eliminate, and all good teachers are vulnerable to the emotion we get when an earnest and hardworking student fails by the numbers. But as maligned as grading is (nor is the malignment entirely unjustified), we must realize it is a very powerful tool in our toolbox. So next time you’re grading, ask yourself one thing. How is my feedback helping students improve?

You may just find your own grading could itself use a few constructive criticisms.