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November 20, 2009
Beginner's Mind
It comes as a shock to realize, well into a teaching career, that the more you know about your discipline the harder it is to teach it well. So says Dr. Eric Mazur, physicist, Harvard professor, and an educational innovator who developed peer instruction in the early 1990s. And though the inverse may not be true (the less we know the easier it is to teach), the truth of what Mazur says should stop us in our tracks. Long after we take a deep breath, walk into a classroom for the first time, and realize that we’re flying on a trapeze without a net, we find out that knowing our stuff may have rendered us incomprehensible to our students.
Another truth is that we teach as we were taught, replicating the best of the teachers we had and avoiding the teaching methods that discouraged, enraged, or simply bored us cross-eyed. And so the practices of generations now gone sift down to our students, most of whom were born after the Berlin Wall toppled. Why is it that the very profession responsible for opening minds, challenging the status quo, and pushing the limits of what is known, is one of the last to welcome change?
To be sure, education as a profession is a perennial whipping-boy—whipping-person?—these days. Reports, commission findings, and investigative articles on the dire state of American education cascade through the media and pile up on our desks. Most of these conclude that somewhere along the trail from the 19th century we lost our edge in the teaching game, that Chinese and Indian students are hard on our heels in engineering and science fields, and the country that put a man on the moon can’t seem to locate Iran on a map.
A recent Newsweek/Intel international poll finds that more Chinese think Americans are still innovators than Americans do. And the poll confirms that Western and Eastern ways of teaching produce different results. To wit: Americans are great at conceptual thinking but apparently tank when it comes to math and science. And now the Chinese, having aced the facts and figures, want to learn how we teach independent and creative thinking to our students.
When we hear students ask, “What do you want in this paper?” we think we know what they mean, but the impulse to whack them lightly on the ear with a rolled-up term paper is sometimes almost overwhelming. It’s that alert passivity, the talent for doing exactly the minimum and no more, that can be discouraging to the teacher for whom critical thinking is the Holy Grail. How do you get across to a student the joy of discovery when he or she is bent on mimicry? How to pry them loose from the notion that if an idea doesn’t have immediate application to an assignment or a job situation then it’s probably not worth considering?
Something is not working in the castle that is American education. But before we leap into the moat or pull up the drawbridge, let’s return to Mazur’s idea about the expert who can’t teach. Peter Senge, in his masterful book, The Fifth Discipline, spends several chapters exploring the idea of mental models. Mental models are what help us perceive the world and interpret it, says Senge. As the models go, so go our perceived realities. We build these models, inhabit them, pass them on to our children, until they become Reality instead of a way to depict a slice of reality. Nothing wrong with mental models, says Senge, unless we forget that they are models. We work inside our disciplines, crossing the threshold daily in from the outside, and knowing, even in the dark, where all the furniture is. Such familiarity can breed contempt for those who struggle to grasp even the floor plan. So the expert who would teach well, says Mazur and others, must learn to think like a beginner as well as an expert. How can we help our students if we can’t regard our disciplines from the perspective of a first-learner? How can our students tell us what they do not understand if they feel intimidated in doing so?
We must become as little children, said Jesus; we must cultivate beginner’s mind said the Buddha. In this context we could imagine what they meant was to see the world anew with fresh eyes, to ask questions both simple and profound, and to do so with the joy of discovery in our minds and hearts.
October 9, 2009
Times Wingéd Chariot
I went to a library book sale not long ago and it made me melancholy. The opportunity to browse over used books usually fills me with a quiet glee for the treasures I might find there. I’m almost always rewarded with one or two books I’ve been looking for that I like to think have been waiting for me.
I constrain myself by several rules so that I’m not simply warehousing more books. First, no hardbacks unless they’re cheaper than the paperback edition. Second, only buy what can be clutched in one hand. And finally, keep the total under $10. Having fulfilled the conditions and dutifully heading toward the cash register, I paused near a rolling cart full of books of educational theory, sociology, and psychologies of human development. That’s when the melancholy crept up on me.
A bit of context might help to explain this condition. I grew up on college campuses because my guardians, my grandparents, were teachers and librarians. I spent countless hours as a child in libraries, sitting cross-legged in a quiet corner poring over anything I found that intrigued me. In the late afternoon sun dropping in slant-wise between the stacks of books I could find geography, literature, religion, psychology, myth, history, economics, political science and physics. All these books! All these authors! These were their lifeworks, their precious ideas, concepts they had been exhilarated by and had inspired others with. And now they were dead and their books sat, illuminated by the afternoon sun, catching the dust motes that drifted in the shafts of light. Occasionally, a student would wander through without pausing to read the titles or even to glance up. I wondered if the spirits of those books ever longed to take flight off the shelves, find themselves opened and breathing again, to hear the buzz of ideas and feel the bracing surge of excitement as their pages were smoothed.
So when I see these books for sale it’s a reminder that discovery does not wait, will not be fettered, and all our ideas are conditional. What is the shelf life of these ideas and interpretations? Fifty years? Twenty? In an online conference recently a presenter noted that knowledge in some areas becomes obsolete in 18 months. By the time computer science majors graduate from college, assuming they do so in four years, the information they began with will have been surpassed several times.
And so, like Andrew Marvell, that impatient prelate from the 17th century, I feel time’s wingéd chariot at my back. Maybe it’s because having cleared the year-50 hurdle seven years ago my horizon line is beginning to appear faintly through the fog ahead. Maybe it’s because I treasure the wisdom of the ages and wince when it’s lightly passed over or simply dismissed with a blank look. Or maybe I find myself suffering from vertigo on this bridge to the indefinite future where knowledge and information appear without effort on my computer or iPhone screen.
Shouldn’t we rejoice that the drudgery of gathering facts, the slow accumulation of lines of thought, the tedious totting up of countless experiments has been sloughed off like a snake skin? Why would we want to return to card catalogues, IBM Selectrics, slide rules and protractors when we can move directly to opinion? And opinion is the dominant viral agent in our biosphere. Once released it circles the globe in minutes, leaping effortlessly across borders of race, gender, ethnicity, income level, education, religion, and status. We hear its voice, tinny, sharp, brittle and shrill; indeed, its very name is Twitter, the meaningless chatter that hums through our culture day and night.
But there’s no reason to think this is the twilight of Western Culture. A few million Tweets from teenagers aren’t going to blow the lights out in libraries across the country. One need only listen to the most popular talk shows and read the comments following an op-ed piece or a music review to realize that it’s adults in this country who have cornered the market on vicious and predatory opinion making. Blaming the generational divide for the triteness of popular culture is to ignore the fact that those with the most strident voices usually have the least to say of substance.
No, gentle reader, what found me sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought there in the library was the sense that opinion and the manufacture of it is rushing outward at the speed of light, while the wisdom of thoughtful women and men is dropping like stones to the bottom of the sea—and I wonder if we are teaching our students how to dive.
To change up the locus of attention in conclusion: Andrew Marvell, in his colorful and sensuous phrases, was urging his coy mistress to give in to the sweetness of love before old age dimmed their eyes and their ardor. Surely we can do no less than to be the lovers of wisdom—philosophia—in our classrooms and laboratories.
September 1, 2009
Two Mistakes To Avoid Early
NOTE: Here are timely words at the beginning of the semester for any teacher. These are two of the mistakes featured in a column from Rick Reis’ weekly Tomorrow’s Professor newsletter from Stanford University. For the full 10 go to: http://cgi.stanford.edu/~dept-ctl/cgi-bin/tomprof/postings.php
— Barry Casey, Interim Director, Faculty Development Center, UMBC (bcasey@umbc.edu; www.umbc.edu/fdc).
The posting below looks at common teaching mistakes we need to avoid. It is by Richard M. Felder, North Carolina State University and Rebecca Brent, Education Designs, Inc. See also Felder's: RESOURCES IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING EDUCATION at: http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f/felder/public/
Rick Reis - reis@stanford.edu
[Two of] The Ten Worst Teaching Mistakes
Like most faculty members, we began our academic careers with zero prior instruction on college teaching and quickly made almost every possible blunder. We've also been peer reviewers and mentors to colleagues, and that experience on top of our own early stumbling has given us a good sense of the most common mistakes college teachers make. In this column and one to follow we present our top ten list, in roughly increasing order of badness. Doing some of the things on the list may occasionally be justified, so we're not telling you to avoid all of them at all costs. We are suggesting that you avoid making a habit of any of them.
Mistake #5. Fail to establish relevance.
Students learn best when they clearly perceive the relevance of course content to their interests and career goals. The "trust me" approach to education ("You may have no idea now why you need to know this stuff but trust me, in a few years you'll see how important it is!") doesn't inspire students with a burning desire to learn, and those who do learn tend to be motivated only by grades.
To provide better motivation, begin the course by describing how the content relates to important technological and social problems and to whatever you know of the students' experience, interests, and career goals, and do the same thing when you introduce each new topic. (If there are no such connections, why is the course being taught?) Consider applying inductive methods such as guided inquiry and problem-based learning, which use real-world problems to provide context for all course material.6 You can anticipate some student resistance to those methods, since they force students to take unaccustomed responsibility for their own learning, but there are effective ways to defuse resistance, 7; and the methods lead to enough additional learning to justify whatever additional effort it may take to implement them.
Mistake #2. Teach without clear learning objectives
The traditional approach to teaching is to design lectures and assignments that cover topics listed in the syllabus, give exams on those topics, and move on. The first time most instructors think seriously about what they want students to do with the course material is when they write the exams, by which time it may be too late to provide sufficient practice in the skills required to solve the exam problems. It is pointless-and arguably unethical-to test students on skills you haven't really taught.
A key to making courses coherent and tests fair is to write learning objectives-explicit statements of what students should be able to do if they have learned what the instructor wants them to learn-and to use the objectives as the basis for designing lessons, assignments, and exams.11 The objectives should all specify observable actions (e.g., define, explain, calculate, solve, model, critique, and design), avoiding vague and unobservable terms like know, learn, understand, and appreciate. Besides using the objectives to design your instruction, consider sharing them with the students as study guides for exams. The clearer you are about your expectations (especially high-level ones that involve deep analysis and conceptual understanding, critical thinking, and creative thinking), the more likely the students will be to meet them, and nothing clarifies expectations like good learning objectives.
References
6. M.J. Prince and R.M. Felder, "Inductive Teaching and Learning Methods: Definitions, Comparisons, and Research Bases," J. Engr. Education, 95(2), 123-138 (2006),
7. R.M. Felder, "Sermons for Grumpy Campers," Chem. Engr. Education, 41(3), 183-184 (2007),
11. R.M. Felder & R. Brent, "Objectively Speaking," Chem. Engr. Education, 31(3), 178-179 (1997),
July 29, 2009
Five Things for the First Week
1. Introduce yourself to the class. Let them know how you prefer to be addressed (first name or last name prefaced with Dr., Professor, Mr. or Ms.). Share a bit about yourself, your educational background, where you grew up, your interests and passions. Above all, share your enthusiasm for your discipline and for teaching.
2. Introduce the syllabus and explain the learning objectives of the course. Go over course requirements and give estimates on the workload. Invite students to stop by your office and to post questions on the course discussion board.
3. Gather information about the students in your class. You can learn a lot from a questionnaire handed out in class or completed online. Ask students for: name (what they prefer to be called), hometown, campus address, email address, phone numbers and how they prefer to be contacted, year in school, participation in campus clubs and activities, chosen major. You may also want to know what courses they have taken already in this field, other courses they are taking this semester, reasons for enrolling in this course, career plans, hobbies and interests, and jobs/internships completed. Some faculty have asked other questions such as: How do you learn best? What do you most want to know about this course? Where do you feel strongest in preparation for this course and where do you feel the need for improvement? What do you expect to do with what you learn in this course? Some teachers ask students to write a paragraph about themselves and attach a photo. This can be emailed or printed out and brought to class within the first week of the course.
4. Learn students’ names. When you call roll the first day, ask them to correct your pronunciation and how they would like to be addressed. If you have small classes of 20-30 consider calling roll for the first few sessions. Try to call upon students using their names in the first week or so of discussions. If you make a mistake it can be a learning experience for the class and for you—and provide a laugh as well.
5. Introduce students to each other. Have students introduce themselves to the person next to them and then each pair introduces each other to another pair. Everyone should leave the first week of class knowing at least two other students.
Derived from Davis, Barbara. (2009). Tools for Teaching, 2nd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publ.
July 23, 2009
Entering the Cave
“I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place.”
— Howard Gardner, 1999
If you browse around Facebook a bit you might be accosted by an application challenging you to test your IQ. It pulls a few friends from your list and assigns them labels about their intelligence. You come at the end of a descending line and the implication is that you’re a moron if you don’t take the quiz. That’s okay: if it means avoiding a plethora of notifications and sidebar advertisements, I’m happy to be the moron.
While we’re fascinated with intelligence it’s usually the first thing we denigrate when ridiculing others. My own highly subjective research suggests that readers’ comments online about their fellow respondents’ intelligence become personal and even vicious after about 10 entries. It’s illuminating to graph out the trajectory of these ad hominem comments. You’d think we were a nation of amateur jihadists, ready to kosh each other upside the head at the slightest deviation from conformist bloviating. But not to worry—this won’t be another rant about the coarseness of public discourse.
Howard Gardner has been exploring intelligence for the whole of his career and has made the concept of multiple intelligences part of educational conversation since 1983 when Frames of Mind, his first book on the subject, was published. In a chapter published in 1999 he gives educators and parents a view into how his multiple intelligences (MI) approach can work in the classroom.
Students do not arrive in the classroom with blank slates for minds nor can they be measured by a single axis of intellectual accomplishment. They are the sum total of their experiences to that moment and they apprehend and comprehend the world through multiple intelligences. The problem for the educator is how to effectively teach students who learn in very different ways. Gardner believes it’s complicated but not impossible. On the contrary, MI offers the teacher various ways to reach all students.
He holds that every person should master a core set of ideas, although he’s not going to dictate the canon. But to penetrate to those ideas—and to fully understand them—we need to provide students with an opening to the cave. Gardner’s begins with entry points, six of them, that correspond to his multiple intelligences.
Narrative, quantitative/numerical, foundational/existential, aesthetic, hands-on, and social—there’s something here for everyone. An entry point to the idea of evolution for the hands-on approach might be the breeding of generations of fruit flies while for the students who ponder the foundational ‘bottom-line’ questions, what evolution implies about human nature is what draws them across the threshold. The entry point ushers students into the disciplinary arena, arousing their interests, and forming commitments to thinking—the phase that Alfred North Whitehead called the ‘romance’ of learning.
But while the entry point draws in the student it does not specifically help with understanding the idea. For that Gardner uses analogies, the second step in the process. Analogies help us link the unknown with the known; we learn about the new by making connections to what we already understand. We can see an analogy to evolution in the way that a character matures in a book or changes in the course of a film. The way a river adapts over time to its changing landscape is another analogy that can easily be understood. There is a caution to using analogies, however, in that not all the parallels are helpful or even true.
Now we come to the crucial educational question: How can knowledge of individual differences (MI) be used to convey the core ideas in a reliable and thorough manner? How can we tailor multiple approaches to a common core so that each student understands the material in the way best suited for that person?
Gardner puts it this way: “The key step to approaching the core is the recognition that a concept can only be well understood . . . . if an individual is capable of representing that core in more than one way, indeed in several ways (Gardner, 1999, p. 163).” We know a thing well if we can explain it several different ways.
What would it take for a learner to grasp a core idea in this way? First, it takes a significant amount of time (think depth rather than coverage). Second, the teacher needs to portray the topic in a variety of ways—hands-on, social, aesthetic—so all facets can be enjoyed and understood. There are multiple ways in to the cave for those coming to the entrance from different locations. And finally, it’s helpful if the students have a number of ways to express their understanding and application of the ideas. For one it might be an essay exam, for another a presentation, and for still another a demonstration in front of the class. We learn by doing, said Dewey, and Gardner would agree.
As attractive as this may be, one can hear the sighs. How would you teach this way to 80 or 100 students? Who could keep up with the grading? Who has time to individualize a course for each student? Gardner makes reference to technologies that can help tremendously, but he’s not naïve about the effort involved. Yet, educators are constantly tinkering with the process, he says, because they fervently believe—as he does—that education must ultimately enhance human understanding and help to ‘chart the human possibilities.’ Wouldn’t that be worth working for? Maybe, just maybe, an understanding of core ideas in this way could mean a more intelligent and humane commentary after the news of the day.
You think?
References:
Gardner, Howard (1999) in Reigeluth, Charles M. (Editor). Instructional-Design Theories and Models, Vol. 2. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
General information and a synopsis of Gardner’s work can be found at Smith, Mark K. (2002, 2008) 'Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences', The Encyclopedia of Informal Education, http://www.infed.org/thinkers/gardner.htm.
July 2, 2009
Knowledge Base
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” somebody once said. I was reminded of this one Thanksgiving when I was 16 and my college-age cousin came over for dinner. What he had learned in one semester of General Psychology and Intro to Political Science was astonishing. It overturned all our cherished notions of human development and social organization. It rewrote the history of Western Civilization and set Hegel, Freud, and Rousseau on their collective little ears.
I learned so much that day, not the least of which was the intoxicating lure of knowledge pursued for its own sake. What my cousin lacked in perspective he more than made up for in enthusiasm. Some years later, doggedly but joyfully trying to swim through a sea of Greek verbs and nouns, I learned that the ‘enthusiastic’ were those who were ‘in God,’ caught up, as it were, to the heavens.
Confucius, master teacher that he was, believed this is the kind of energy necessary to learning. He declared that if he held up one corner of a handkerchief and a prospective student didn’t come back with the other three corners, he couldn’t teach that person anything. Now that’s an entrance requirement.
By the time first-year students arrive on campus they have already endured 12 years of noble experimentation in building a knowledge base. Much as in the world of corporate finance some of this knowledge has come through mergers (biology and chemistry), some through hostile takeovers (addition, division, multiplication), some as a result of downsizing (this is all you need to know for the test), and some through acquisition (this is good for you).
And now they are in college where the possibilities for increasing that knowledge base may seem both daunting and exciting. And perhaps for the first time as working learners they will be asked to focus, narrow, limit and direct their knowledge acquisition. People will ask them, by way of conversation openers, “What’s your major?” or “What are you planning to do with that?”
Those questions come from a desire to know them, to add to someone’s knowledge base the equivalents of name, rank, and serial number. They begin to be defined by what they know—and don’t know—a curious rite of passage into adulthood that seeks to categorize by the lowest common denominator. What we don’t know can be seen as a weakness and so we try to deny, cover up, and otherwise bluff our way through life. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Confucius counseled humility. Come to knowledge acquisition with a humble spirit, an open mind, and boundless enthusiasm. Better yet, realize (make real) that knowledge is the beginning of wisdom, the tempering that comes through experience applied with humor and compassion. The author of Ecclesiastes, his constant tone one of irony and rueful skepticism, does not sneer, however, when he urges us to ‘get wisdom.’
The role that teachers are called to play in all this is simple. As Robert Grudin says in The Grace of Great Things, “The fundamental motive of true teaching is the love that seeks and studies and performs. True teachers not only impart knowledge and method but awaken the love of learning by virtue of their own reflected love.”
We might, as teachers and learners ourselves, feel caught up to the third heaven of the joy of learning. Rejoice in that feeling! On the other hand, we may find ourselves, like Dante, feeling our way through a dark wood with no idea where in Hell we are. We may rejoice in that feeling too, for we are not lost. We are on the brink of discovering how boundless the world is and how rich the experience of those who enter into it with joy and humility.
A Community of Privilege
I was raised by my grandparents, both of them teachers, and I lived with them in Canada on the campus of a private, church-based college and at Pacific Union College in California, until I graduated, got married, and moved to British Columbia.
I have benefited from living on or near college campuses most of my life. The rhythms of the school year are as natural to me as the seasons, and the peculiar blend of exhilaration and weariness that accompanies faculty life are second nature to me.
Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of sneaking into the back of my grandfather’s European history classes and watching newsreels of the Second World War, or being tossed—giggling with glee—from one brawny college kid to another up on the college farm in Canada as they were bringing in the hay. Later, at Pacific Union College in California, I witnessed a succession of my grandparents’ former students coming through our home every summer. I listened as they talked and laughed with my grandparents, as they proudly introduced their children (with whom I then got to play), and as they sometimes wept, recalling classmates who had died or incidents in their own lives.
Without fail, before they stood to leave, these former students would turn to my grandparents and thank them for the years of learning and mentoring they had enjoyed. Both of my grandparents had been deans, both had been librarians, and both had been teachers—so the kinds of learning their students had experienced from my grandparents had been varied, both in content and in venue. But the bond between student and teacher was evident even after all the years. Inevitably, after these families had driven away from our home, built high up on the mountains overlooking the Napa Valley, my grandparents would turn from waving goodbye and head back into the house to reminisce about their students.
We are shaped, to a large extent, by our early experiences, and we take our cues for situations in life from the experiences of the past. My grandparents’ lives were certainly shaped by their years of teaching and it was fortuitous, although not inevitable, that my life would be shaped by those years with them. Now, all these years later, I can appreciate how privileged my upbringing was. All the resources of a college campus were at my disposal as a kid. Professors, janitors, college students, cafeteria and bakery staff —all were my friends. It was never in doubt whether I would—or could—go to college. I came of age just north of San Francisco in the sixties—and the currents of politics, popular culture, the struggle for civil rights, and the agonizing spectacle of the Vietnam War were what I lived and breathed. My son, for whom the Sixties are the Dark Ages, wonders how I survived without iPods, cell phones, computers, Star Wars, and U2. I managed—somehow.
Now, as I listen to the stories students tell of how they are the first of their families to go to college, or their casual talk of friends or relatives who are the victims of violence, or the many ways the American uber-culture clashes with their parents culture and languages, I marvel at their determination. I had it so easy by comparison. I don’t feel guilty or ashamed of the privileges I had growing up. But I do realize how deep and how pervasive the roots of racism are in our culture, and how many of the benefits of my middle-class upbringing are things almost out of reach for many young people these days.
This is one of the reasons why students and teachers need each other—to flourish within this community of privilege so that we can make a difference to those without community. The possibility of learning and the community that supports it ought not to be squandered or taken for granted. It is a gift that changes us in the receiving.
July 1, 2009
Freedom as Motivation
“Unless the pupils are continually sustained by the evocation of interest, the acquirement of technique, and the excitement of success, they can never make progress, and will certainly lose heart.”
There you have it— the prescription for student success from one of the Grand Masters of education, Alfred North Whitehead (1929, p. 38). Of course, there’s much more to what he said in The Aims of Education, a collection of lectures and essays first published in 1929. But in an elegant phrase or two Whitehead reveals the process and the affective and cognitive parts of learning. Interest, technique, and success or, from another perspective, motivation, disciplined learning, and assessment.
What creates motivation in a student or in any of us? The literature is voluminous and sometimes inspiring. The contrast is drawn between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, between external rewards and punishments and the upwelling joy of discovery. Whitehead’s trenchant observation is that “Interest is the sine qua non for attention and apprehension. You may endeavor to excite interest by means of birch rods, or you may coax it by the incitement of pleasurable activity. But without interest there will be no progress” (p. 31).
Where does the interest come from and how can we fan that flame? The general take on motivation is that it’s there—we just need to know where to look and how to release it. Raymond Wlodkowski says “Motivation is the natural human capacity to direct energy in pursuit of a goal” (1999, pp. 7-8). The approach is like that of an amateur electrician: connect the right wires and the lights will come on. It might take several tries and rude shocks, and the process might blow a few bulbs, but once the connection is made it can be maintained.
But motivating students is far from simple. We don’t exactly know all the influences on motivation nor can we always accurately track the line from motivation to behavior. Whitehead notes that, “It is the unfortunate dilemma that initiative and training are both necessary, and that training is apt to kill initiative” (p. 35). That’s the Catch-22: as soon as we try to harness the interest all the energy sags but without direction the interest itself soon dissipates. A balance can be found, said Whitehead, between freedom and discipline. The student begins in wonder and freedom—Whitehead called it ‘romance’— proceeds to a disciplined ‘precision’ and gradually achieves ‘generalization,’ the ability to weave the details into broad principles of application.
That is the process he advocates from elementary school to university but he also sees it built in to every lesson and unit along the way. Romance. . . . precision. . . . generalization. The joy of discovery. . . . the precision of the facts. . . the application to general principles. “We should banish the idea of a mythical, far-off end of education,” he says. “The pupils must be continually enjoying some fruition and starting afresh—if the teacher is stimulating in exact proportion to his success in satisfying the rhythmic cravings of his pupils” (p. 19).
While Whitehead cursed the ‘dullards’ who would crush wonder in the student, he was equally stern with those who shoveled dead facts on students in hopes that the sheer weight of knowledge would benefit them. “A certain ruthless definiteness is essential in education. I am sure that one secret of a successful teacher is that he has formulated quite clearly in his mind what the pupil has got to know in precise fashion. . . . Get your knowledge quickly, and then use it. If you can use it, you will retain it” (p. 36).
I read those words years ago in graduate school but they went right over my head. Concerned as I was to grasp facts, knowledge, the whole load at once, I missed the implications. I reread Whitehead recently and his words went right through me. I’d like to do over every class I taught in which I quelled wonder in favor of precision or pushed students to application before they had grasped the tools of precision and knowledge.
Can we motivate students? No, not if they aren’t interested. Can we interest them? Yes, if we connect our interests to theirs, show them what can be done, and let them do it.
Our role is simple says Michael Theall: we are “to create situations in which others provide their own motivation to succeed” (1999, p. 1). Whitehead agreed, “But for all your stimulation and guidance the creative impulse towards growth comes from within, and is intensely characteristic of the individual” (p. 39).
If we build it well they will come with eagerness, each in their own way.
References:
Theall, M. (1999). Editor’s Notes. In Michael Theall (Ed.), New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 78, 1-3. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Whitehead, A. N. (1929). The Aims of Education. New York: Macmillan Company.
Wlodkowski, Raymond J. (1999). Motivation and Diversity: A Framework for Teaching. New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 78, 7-16. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
June 25, 2009
Lessons Learned
We learn some lessons in the odd moments between efforts to remember. I once worked for a tough and wise old woman who had a beautiful garden and a greenhouse full of orchids. She’d grown up in Hawaii and was now living in retirement after decades of teaching. She lived in Northern California in the hills above the Napa Valley, just a half mile through the pines from my house. I was twelve when she hired me for the summer to “help” her in her extensive garden. She paid me two bucks an hour and taught me a lot about gardening and learning.
Here are some lessons she taught. First, a plant is a lot tougher than it looks. Take grass, for instance. You can freeze it, burn it in the sun, tramp all over it, drop all manner of junk on it, and scuff it up all day—and it still comes up through the cracks in the sidewalk. Give it a bit of water after a long drought and it’s there and green in a couple of days. Not given to sentimentality my boss attributed this to its will to survive. “If you really want something,” she said, “you’ll put up with a lot to get it.”
One morning when we were yanking out ivy from around the base of an oak tree, she paused, wiped her brow, and said, “A plant out of place is a weed.” I could see how that applied to ivy and trees—vines can kill a tree in time. But later in the day, when I was weeding out a rock garden on the side of the hill I came across a fragrant lavender plant springing up amongst the ice-plant spilling over the rocks. “What about this one?” I called. “Rip it out,” she said. “If it’s not ice-plant it doesn’t belong.”
Later in the summer she actually let me in the greenhouse while she tended her orchids. She had a sumptuous collection, gathered from exotic places all over the world. Each was labeled, given a space, and carefully monitored. Every one of them got exactly what they needed to flourish. She knew their differences, their quirks, their reactions, and she treated them like individuals. I knew she was leaving in a month and would be gone for six weeks. And I knew she was counting on me to care for the orchids while she was gone. I watched while she moved quickly and decisively from one to the other, clipping here, watering there, sniffing and peering under the blossoms on another. I wondered how I was ever going to learn enough to keep them going, much less to flourish. “It takes time,” she said, as if she were reading my thoughts. “Time and patience. Let them teach you. They’ll tell you what they need.”
I learned a lot that summer about caring for a garden and in the years since I’ve reflected on the lessons my gardening sage gave me. Students, like grass, are resilient and adaptable. Give them what they need and they’ll overcome almost any obstacle. But there’s no need to put more obstacles in their way just to see if they’re tough enough.
A plant out of place is a weed and should be torn out by the roots. On this one I respectfully decline my sage’s advice. Perhaps, if we really must have uniformity in a garden, this is an option rather than a necessity. But applied to students? No. A student out of place is probably a first-year student. Like grass they can be resilient but like orchids they need time and patience in order to flourish.
And finally, we can learn what students need in order to thrive—if we’re patient and pay attention. We need patience and time because there aren’t many rules that apply to everyone in every place and time.
We learn best by doing, said John Dewey, an idea my boss refined and focused. She explained the concept while she demonstrated and then stepped back; now it was my turn. I worked at it, sometimes making mistakes, sometimes getting it. If I got it right I had to explain the process that worked. If I got it wrong I had to figure out where the process had broken down. Watch . . . listen . . . do . . . explain. Repeat as needed.
Oh, and by the way—I didn’t lose a single orchid while she was gone.
February 20, 2009
The Diverging Road
In the course of teaching for over twenty-five years I have sometimes met students who suffered from an excess of interests. Not that being curious about life and wanting to follow many different roads is wrong—far from it. But for these students the thought of tying themselves down to a particular major and a specific employment track is agony. There is a lot of pressure on them to conform, too. Parents look at the tab running up at the Student Accounts office and wonder what their hard-earned money has to show for it. Friends who are less encumbered by curiosity and more disposed to follow a single childhood dream nod and make sympathetic noises, but privately shake their heads. Teachers look askance at a fifth-year senior who gives no indication of settling into a prescribed course of classes leading to graduation.
In talking to these students it is clear that they are not without goals and motivation. On the contrary, they have many goals and they are highly motivated. What is particularly difficult for them, however, is the idea that going down one road shuts them off forever from traveling on other roads. At this point Robert Frost’s poignant words chime in: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.”
In three phrases Frost tugs at some assumptions we hold. The first is that choices are more or less forced upon us; roads diverge and we must choose. The second is that the less traveled road is more interesting. Or maybe it’s that we want to be thought of as the interesting person who took that road. And the third assumption is that it matters immensely. It matters so much that we might as well chant, “This is the first day of the rest of my life.”
There are two schools of thought on this. The first, which I call the apocalyptic, says that every decision has ultimate significance. No act is trivial, all are of equal importance, but some decisions—like the pigs in Orwell’s Animal Farm—are more equal than others. There is no time for experimentation, no room for mistakes. Every decision implies a judgment.
The other perspective is the dynamic one. In this view, most decisions have a cumulative effect rather than an immediate one. A slip here, a missed opportunity there—over the course of time it adds up—but each day we are given a new start with new possibilities. It’s not that this perspective encourages recklessness or irresponsibility, either. People who believe this show up for appointments, pay their bills, and make plans for the future. But they do so believing that we define the significance of our moments instead of the gusts of history. It is a modest view of one’s role in the world, for who can know what history will judge as the liminal points of our time? Instead of the tyranny of future expectations they are intent on doing their best in the possibilities of the present. Think of it as a light-footed dance instead of a stolid march.
Thus we circle back to our assumptions. Diverging roads bring us what William James called a ‘forced option:’ we have choices but they are limited and we cannot not choose. Not choosing is in fact having made a choice, James reasons, and asks whether we wouldn’t rather do our best with what we’ve got. The second assumption is that the less familiar is the more interesting, a natural result of curiosity and blissful ignorance. But the whole game rests on the third assumption that everything we do has eternal significance and either impels us forward to the finish line or sends us sprawling far short of the mark.
But there are no straight lines in life, at least none we can see from beginning to end. We ride on a wave of rising ellipses, up and back and down, but ever forward through our moment of time. On the way we carry the certainty of death inside the travel pack of our present. Traveling in this way demands reason and patience, but it also calls for courage and hopefulness. When the road diverges, as it must, gather your true self in the moment and follow the you you want to become.
