Pedablogy: Musings on the Art & Craft of Teaching

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a “BA.”

So begins a thought-provoking op-ed piece in today’s Wall Street Journal. Is this an argument for or against liberal education?

Leslie Madsen-Brooks has provided a great example of the kind of post I would flag and redirect to the UMW Teaching Center website if I were in charge–A thoughtful example of progressive thinking about how to improve teaching and learning.

This post interests me on several levels: the connected nature of media today; contemporary economic issues, specifically the difficulties being faced by Fanny Mae & Freddie Mac due to the mortgage market meltdown; and the issue of the market system & the social good.

I subscribe via rss to a number of news feeds, including the editorials of the Wall Street Journal. Due to the magic of my feed reader, each morning, with very little effort I can get up to date on the news of the last 24 hours from a variety of perspectives. This is very useful for a teacher of the social sciences. This morning I discovered an article in the Notable & Quotable column of the Journal, which gives a brief snippet of something clever. The article today turned out to be a blog post by Lawrence Summers, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, and former President of Harvard University. The post was one of the clearest and most thoughtful interpretations I have seen of the current problems of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, the government sponsored mortgage market players. After reading the post, I followed it back to the source, and discovered another nugget: a new blog called Creative Capitalism: A Conversation, which describes itself as:

a web experiment designed to produce a book — a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development — to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point a speech Bill Gates delivered this January at the World Economic Forum in Davos. In it, he said that many of the world’s problems are too big for philanthropy–even on the scale of the Gates Foundation. And he said that the free-market capitalist system itself would have to solve them.

This is the public blog of a private website where a group of invited economists have spent the past couple of weeks criticizing and debating those claims.

How cool is this? One might even call this a form of scholarly activity.

The premise of Gates’ speech was that the power of the market system can and should be applied to solving the substantive problems associated with economic development, from educating women to erradicating disease to developing effective financial systems. Can the market system, which is predicated on personal gain, be effectively used for the social good? Check out this blog to find out.

For a couple of years now, I’ve tried to build low stakes, formative assessment into my intro courses. The intent was to help students become more responsible for their own learning and promote more mid-course adjustments to study strategies while there was still plenty of time for that. (Contrast this approach with the mid-term, final exam model.) The way I implemented this metacognitive effort was to encourage students to take the online quizzes provided by the text book publisher at the end of each chapter. As long as students took the quizzes, I gave them extra credit regardless of how well they did. And, to judge by their scores, nearly everyone did well. When individuals did very poorly, which was rare, I spoke to them publicly about whether they had taken the quiz seriously or just for the credit. The message was received and the students almost always did substantially better next time.

Unfortunately, the plan didn’t work as well as I had hoped. In past years I found that the assessment quizzes, based on textbook test banks, didn’t correspond well to my exam questions. The quizzes were not very challenging and thus not adequate preparation for my exams. Students could do well on the quizzes and then not so well on the exams. I felt like the lack of correlation between quiz and exam questions defeated the purpose of the exercise and encouraged students to think of the former as busy work, unrelated to assessing their mastery of the material.

This past semester, to address this concern, I adopted the Aplia product, customized for the text I was using. I made this selection principally because of the higher quality of their quiz (problem set) questions compared with textbook test banks. The result was disconcerting. Student scores on the quizzes, were low, and as the semester went on they got worse. After about the fourth week, the class mean never reached 70%. I got the feeling that students were not taking the quizzes seriously, that they were just going through the motions. Economics suggests that people behave rationally, predicting that students would merely make an effort to get the credit, while not taking the assessment seriously. And yet this seemed to conflict with my experience in past semesters when the students did consistently well on the quizzes.

To examine this paradox, I added a question to the final exam, which I told students I wouldn’t look at until after grades were in. The question asked:

The average score on the Aplia problem sets was pretty low. How did you approach them?
a. I tried to do my best, but the problems were difficult; when I did badly on the problem sets, I took that at as a sign that I hadn’t mastered the material. (11%)
b. I tried to do my best, but the problems were unlike the ones we did in class. (32%)
c. I tried to get the right answer but it didn’t bother me when I got the questions wrong. (41%)
d. I didn’t take the problems too seriously; I was just trying to get the points for trying. (16%)

I intended ‘a’ to be the right answer, the answer which indicated that the exercise was achieving its goal. Answer ‘b’ was included to reflect the fact that mid-way through the semester, many quizzes began to include numerical questions, which usually were based on methods of solution that I didn’t emphasize in the course. The advantage of numerical questions is that they result in “exact” answers. The problem is that often numerical questions are driven by the need to keep the math simple, which requires the economics to be trivial or an unusual case.

The frequency distribution of the responses is given in parentheses. Thinking about the likely bias in the responses this suggests to me that probably 60% of the students didn’t take the quizzes seriously, which is a problem.

What I’ve decided to do is raise the bar a bit. For this coming semester, I will give credit for the quizzes as long as the score is 70% or more. We’ll see if that makes it more of a useful assessment while still keeping the stakes low.

We need to come up with an appropriate name for the UMW Teaching Center. Ernie, the Chair of the Teaching Center Advisory Committee, points out that most teaching centers have similar and not very catchy names. Does the name matter? I think it does.

In my view, the concept of a teaching center suffers from several automatic problems. The first is that, especially at a school like Mary Washington, we all know how to teach. The second follows from the first, that almost by definition, a teaching center is remedial in nature, that it’s where instructors go to fix problems in their teaching. The third is that teaching isn’t serious intellectual activity like the scholarship we do in our disciplines. I suspect we all know colleagues who never participated in a TIP activity because of these reasons. I also believe that these problems are false, or at least misleading.

I think that teaching (or more precisely, thinking about teaching) should be construed as serious intellectual activity. That’s not to say that all teaching is necessarily serious intellectual activity. We all know colleagues who have merely gone through the motions. Suppose we replace the word ‘teaching’ in the previous paragraph with the word ‘research’. Would we criticize a research center because everyone knows how to do research? Would we think of a research center as remedial? A research center is a place to go (think sabbatical) to enable us to put time and effort into improving our research. It’s a place we go to get access to sources or data we don’t have in our normal professional lives. Suppose you needed to learn Latin or SAS to complete a research project. Lack of those facilities is “a problem,” but we wouldn’t think of learning Latin or SAS as a negative thing. Rather, it is just what we need to do to get the project done. Our teaching center should be perceived in the same way, and I think the right name can point in that direction.

In a previous blog post I said,

The mission of the teaching center should be advocacy of a culture of teaching innovation at the university. … [The] Center shouldn’t be conceived primarily as a department offering programs, but rather as a focus for building and nurturing intellectual community on teaching and learning in higher education.

It is for these reasons that I recommend a title like “The UMW Center for Teaching Inquiry”. I think that such a title would help people understand that the Center is not about something that can be easily put into a box and dismissed, but rather something more serious and open-ended: intellectual inquiry into teaching and learning.

Martin Weller provides a compelling vision of University 2.0, or perhaps Learning 2.0 in this post (by way of The Chronicle: Wired Campus Blog). I found the original post broader and more interesting than the Chronicle synopsis.

If you’re interested in how institutional higher education can remain relevant in the 21st Century, you’ll want to read this.

Injenuity has an awesome post, which speaks to my previous post on change.

It made me think.

In a recent conversation, Gardner and I talked about whether or not one can be open to genuine teaching innovation without considering new media. This is a different question from whether or not (some) technology is embodied in all teaching practices, which I believe is true. For this conversation, Gardner was specifically referring to the tools of Web 2.0. I think this question relates back to the panel discussion I moderated at the Faculty Academy this Spring. Why are faculty so resistant to incorporating new media in their teaching? Why are they so conservative to change in their teaching generally? And what was apparently of interest to Gardner, why am I not? Why I am open to trying new things?

One of the observations that we came up with is that most faculty seem to see choices as constraints. There is an issue of path dependence here: During the 1960s, there was a theory of business investment called “Putty-Clay.” The idea was simple: a business could build any size factory it wished—investment opportunities were malleable like putty. But once the decision was made, they became hard like clay. Once the investment was made, the firm had to work with the factory it had built, whether business increased or decreased. This is an example of path dependence. Where we are now, what our options are now, is based on our history. Decisions made in the past, limit our choices in the future. I could (perhaps) have become a physical therapist, but once I began graduate study in economics, that decision put me on a different path in life.

What does this suggest about teachers and change? I can only speak from my experience, which is, of course, subject to the fallacy of induction. Lecture notes are an example of path dependence. They are also a metaphor, I think, for our teaching in general. When I began teaching at UMW, I taught eight courses/six preps the first year. I had complete lecture notes for only one of those courses (Environmental Economics, which I had taught twice as a graduate student.) I also had partial notes for principles of micro and macro economics. (I had taught a one semester Intro to Economics course in graduate school.) That left three courses to develop from scratch, two of which I had never even taken as a student. Those first few years, course development was a real time sink, and by course development, I mean just putting together rough lecture notes. While I no longer teach some of those courses, the ones I do teach still reflect, at least in part, those original lecture notes. Putting those notes together took so much effort that I am reluctant to get rid of them. It’s like writing. Those lecture notes are part of my identity. Throwing them away would be like throwing away part of my self.

Over my career, I have revised my courses, sometimes very substantively. But why has it been so difficult to make the decision to do so? For a number of reasons: Because my old courses worked adequately. Because substantive rethinking of a course takes a huge amount of time and effort. Because throwing away my previous course is painful.

Gardner asked me some probing questions which revealed some interesting thoughts and which he urged me to blog about. That was the impetus for this post. I think many faculty see choices as constraints. Choices that they have made in the past become constraints on their future behavior. That’s the idea of path dependence again, but the thing is, this path dependence is not absolute. Just as businesses can decide over time to either expand or contract the size of their factory, so can faculty revisit their past choices. When looked at in this light, constraints become choices again. I think to a modest extent, that’s what I do.

Why am I willing to do this? Why am I not satisfied with the status quo of my courses? I’m not sure. One thing I know is that I’m regularly inspired by what I learn at workshops offered by our Writing Program, our Speaking Program, our Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies, and most recently by our First Year Seminar Program. I hear things at those events and find myself thinking: What a cool idea! I could use that to teach [insert course or topic]. I don’t feel that way about every idea I learn about. But I do about enough of them that I regularly have rich ideas about ways to tinker with my courses.

I may be poking the bear here, but I’ve been following the discussion of EduPunk and have a few questions I’d like to raise. I’ll admit that I haven’t given this as much thought as I’d like to, and I also admit to being naive in the ways of the world, but can EduPunk ever be mainstream? The way it seems to be defined now, I don’t think so. If not, how can the majority of faculty be brought into the good practices EduPunk espouses? I think this question is related to the point JJulius makes here.

If the crux of EduPunk is radical first adoption of cutting edge technologies, whatever they are, then no. But if it means radically rethinking how we conduct higher education, then perhaps.
Is the purpose of EduPunk to provoke a change in mainstream academia? Okay, then what do we call those who adopt the new paradigm? What do we call the system that our IT staffs design to make the new paradigm easy to use and scalable?

I can imagine a learning management suite of tools, small pieces, loosely joined, that faculty are trained to choose from as they build their own course environments, and I can imagine that these environments are linked, like a bee hive to form a university’s online persona. I can imagine the tool suite having many default settings based on what the majority of faculty are using, but also allowing innovators to choose alternatives to better fit their own teaching needs. Would this be EduPunk or just Blackboard Version 15? If it results in most faculty using better teaching practices, don’t think it ultimately matters.

Garr Reynolds.

If you want to design presentations that people will find compelling, instead of the standard “Death by Powerpoint”, check out this video: Presentation Zen

(Thanks to Tim O’Donnell who turned me on to this.)