I was in prison the other day (just visiting for a teaching observation).
My student and I were just beginning our post-session discussion when one of his colleagues knocked on the classroom door to remind him that the morning team meeting would begin in a couple of minutes. He asked whether I wanted to attend. I wasn't sure it would be appropriate, because I was an outsider, but I needed an escort to get back to the gatehouse and no-one would be available until after the meeting, so I acquiesced.
I was so pleased I did. It only took ten minutes, and nothing exciting happened; some nagging about locking doors (of course), some reporting back on "incidents" last week which some people may not have known about, with a clarification of reporting procedures...
There were a dozen or so people present, most of them standing up, in the dingy outer office. About four or five people spoke in response to the chair's invitation for anything to share.The "manager" was not even there (and I'm sure she's not happy with her formal label--she was a student of ours several years ago) but it all happened regardless. I have no idea whether anyone took notes. I hope not, because there is nothing more toxic to teamworking than having an eye to an audit trail.
I was the outsider, and stayed physically on the periphery. But I felt totally at home.
It may be that working as a teacher, in a prison, focuses one's thinking on the clash of educational and custodial values. (Although it does occur to me that these meetings may be part of the standard operating procedure and that the prison officers on the wings do the same thing... I don't know enough to have a view on that.)
But what really struck me was the sense of team membership. Interdependence counts in an uncertain environment (although in practice of course prison education is much less hassled than in any open environment). It's the culture I have spent most of my working life in, and although not a demonstrably sociable person, it's one I value enormously.
And it is almost totally absent in most teaching in higher education*. (Big generalisation, carefully qualified, and of course not properly evidenced... B-?) It exists in research teams, sometimes very powerfully, but not much in respect of teaching.
I think there is probably more of a sense of being a team amongst staff teaching on a professionally-- rather than academically--oriented programme. The modules of a professional programme are jigsaw pieces rather than free-standing units**, and (apart from notorious instances where the staff are at vicious loggerheads with each other) the staff need consciously to work together. Numbers of students and of staff are probably more manageable, too.
On academic programmes, particularly those such as humanities where there are few prerequisites, the structure (and options) of the course typically follow the individual interests of the faculty. ("Fred's retired, so we'll have to drop 'Origins of the novel' this year, but Gabby needs some hours, and so we could offer 'Queer theory and early 20th century poetry' instead...")
Academe has an ambivalent relationship with teamwork. It's both a highly individualistic environment and highly mutually dependent (and the extent depends a lot on the discipline--the more equipment you need, the more you have to depend on each other). But it's a tremendous and yet little explored resource.
Incidentally, real Teamworking has absolutely no connection at all with what Human Resources departments think it is, with their obscene expenditure on external "team-building" consultants whose only impact is to unite the potential "team" in visceral hatred of HR and probably management in general. It has to be a bottom-up phenomenon (and of course as such it can--for better or for worse--interfere with top-down initiatives) but when it comes together it is transformative.
Showing posts with label student experience. Show all posts
Showing posts with label student experience. Show all posts
10 June 2011
24 April 2011
On challenging beliefs
This post draws attention to:
My personal terminology for challenging existing ideas is learning as loss, or "supplantive learning". A quick glance at the link (or an even quicker one here) will establish the parallels.
What I find interesting about the slightly different perspective of the research discussed here is the way in which it meshes with what I discovered empirically and even experientially about the critical importance of personal credibility when trying to teach people things which run counter to what they already know.
For teaching (adults) in the context of professional practice it is utterly critical. Self-affirmation seems to suggest a relatively weak effect of establishing common ground with someone over practically anything (as Robinson's musical taste examples show) which nevertheless grants you a hearing and overcomes some resistance. The issue in a professional context is not merely about some areas of cognitive agreement, but about whether you have ever actually been there and done that... (see the links below for examples).
"In my experience" trumps "research demonstrates". No contest.
Unfortunately experience may be crap...
See also (manually generated):
On credibility (30.10.10)
On credibility (25.2.06)
h/t David Robinson
...self-affirmation.[...] Basically, it goes like this: when your beliefs or world view is threatened in some way, you’re likely to respond defensively. However, if you are able to affirm another part of your world-view positively, you are likely to be less defensive in the first instance.(It's not new--the reference [full citation in the linked post] is dated 2000--but it's one of those things you are unlikely actually to come across unless you search on just the right terms, and every researcher seems to invent their own.)
My personal terminology for challenging existing ideas is learning as loss, or "supplantive learning". A quick glance at the link (or an even quicker one here) will establish the parallels.
What I find interesting about the slightly different perspective of the research discussed here is the way in which it meshes with what I discovered empirically and even experientially about the critical importance of personal credibility when trying to teach people things which run counter to what they already know.
For teaching (adults) in the context of professional practice it is utterly critical. Self-affirmation seems to suggest a relatively weak effect of establishing common ground with someone over practically anything (as Robinson's musical taste examples show) which nevertheless grants you a hearing and overcomes some resistance. The issue in a professional context is not merely about some areas of cognitive agreement, but about whether you have ever actually been there and done that... (see the links below for examples).
"In my experience" trumps "research demonstrates". No contest.
Unfortunately experience may be crap...
See also (manually generated):
On credibility (30.10.10)
On credibility (25.2.06)
h/t David Robinson
16 December 2010
On making learning more difficult by making it easier...
Who writes curricula, or rather syllabi?
In further (rather than higher) education, on the whole they are not written by people who have studied on the kinds of course they are designing. The course designers are, probably, graduates who have progressed to their present positions via quite a different route from that followed by the students who will take their course.
(I'm sure there are counter-examples, of course, and I can remember that when I started in FE teaching 40-odd years ago, there were respected vocational teachers in the college who had come up "through the ranks", as it were, and were actively involved in designing ordinary and higher national certificates and diplomas in shorthand and typing, in office practice, and other vocational areas. They represented the community of practice in the Lave and Wenger sense, even if they were located in a college. But the process has become more professionalised since then, and the practitioners' voice is fainter, with the exception of some of the National Vocational Qualifications.)
And of course the writers are older and experienced (and quite probably experienced teachers in the area).
What these factors mean is that designers have a totally different perspective on the content from that of the learners. That is not surprising, but it appears to have some less obvious consequences.
Let us also throw into the mix the pressure on the awarding bodies (for whom the designers work) to create courses on which "learners" (i.e. students) can "achieve" (i.e. pass); colleges get a bonus for students who pass.
I have undertaken several teaching observations recently on such courses, and on the whole they have not been very good. At one level that is only to be expected; the teachers I observed have only just come to the end of the first term of a two-year part-time course and in these cases they have little experience under their belts.
But that is not the whole story. In one case the teacher thoughtfully provided me with some of the course documentation including photocopies of pages from the "official" textbook which she was using as a handout.
(Not best practice, but with a heavy timetable and no time to develop her own resources, understandable.) So I could see that she was following the required Scheme of Work almost to the letter. The handout declared authoritatively that there are four theories of such-and-such (well, it all depends... and two of the theories were simply variations on a third, but there was no acknowledgement of that), and the teacher was supposed to "get through" these at the rate of ten minutes each, and to test that they had been "learned" (whatever that means in this context). Being fair to her, again, she was not very familiar with the area she was teaching, and so she had to stick largely to what the book told her*. She offered few examples, because she was not confident they would be "correct".
And I could tell that some of the information on the handout was misleading and even simply wrong.
The students, rather sadly, were bored but compliant. They "researched" allocated topics (Googled them), and paraphrased what they found and the relevant paragraph from the handout, and two of them gave short presentations by the time the session ended. They spoke when spoken to, but volunteered nothing. They exhibited a weary familiarity with yet more half-understood gobbets of information they were supposed to "learn", without a clue as to why.
The teacher and I had our post-observation discussion. I checked on the academic/vocational level of the programme (3; the next level below first-year undergraduate level). She agreed it was dumbed-down to near meaninglessness, because that is seen as the way to get the students to "achieve".
As I drove back I realised how many times before I had been to such a class. I wrote about one in 1999.
It's to be hoped that with more experience, and a little (well, a lot of) reading round the subject, and confidence from her training, this teacher will like so many others get to lighten up a little and her proficiency will lead to more learning. But it's difficult when she is constrained by the limitations of the curriculum.
What appears to have happened is that in order to ensure that the students pass (and thereby ensure that this particular awarding body continues to be used by the college in this vocational area) the content has to be made as easy or simple as possible. Einstein is frequently paraphrased as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Courses like this appear to have violated that threshold. In an attempt to reduce the "learning" to discrete gobbets of information, they have ignored the context and the connections between those items, so that learning one provides no assistance with the next one.
(A few weeks ago, one student offered a micro-teaching session on an introduction to Chinese calligraphy; it was principally a practical session but of course provoked many questions from group members, some about the difference between a logographic and an alphabetic system of writing. C. pointed out that every character in a logographic system has to be learned from scratch; while some are composites, the link between the elements is not mediated by phonemes in the same way as in an alphabetic system. So one character offers little as a clue to another; it's the same issue. And learning three or four thousand separate characters is a formidable task!)
After another session I compared the content with a bowl of beads. They can be mixed up any way you like. Pick one out (teach it) and it has no implications for the rest. There is no system of knowledge. It cannot be other than inert. But thread the beads together, and picking one up will bring others with it... Context and connection are not optional extras.
In trying to make things simpler, this curriculum made them a whole lot harder.
The designers seem to have forgotten, at their distance from the students, what it is like to study this stuff. The teachers (we hope) and the designers have an overview of the field. They know where everything fits in so it makes sense. The students on the other hand are just thrown one thing after another in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. They are like puzzlers trying to make sense of the jigsaw without the picture on the box.
Surface learning and at best the unistructural level of the SOLO taxonomy is as good as it can possibly get. There is a special challenge in “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
* One little-remarked feature of vocational programmes is that of course they include some necessary background material which may be based on academic areas of study which may not be the teacher's own area--physiology, sociology, even physics, for example. Since each of these specialist topics may not feature very much, it falls to the main teacher to be a jack-of-all-trades teaching all of them even when her or his knowledge is shaky. (Yes, a great opportunity for e-learning indeed, but not much used.)
In further (rather than higher) education, on the whole they are not written by people who have studied on the kinds of course they are designing. The course designers are, probably, graduates who have progressed to their present positions via quite a different route from that followed by the students who will take their course.
(I'm sure there are counter-examples, of course, and I can remember that when I started in FE teaching 40-odd years ago, there were respected vocational teachers in the college who had come up "through the ranks", as it were, and were actively involved in designing ordinary and higher national certificates and diplomas in shorthand and typing, in office practice, and other vocational areas. They represented the community of practice in the Lave and Wenger sense, even if they were located in a college. But the process has become more professionalised since then, and the practitioners' voice is fainter, with the exception of some of the National Vocational Qualifications.)
And of course the writers are older and experienced (and quite probably experienced teachers in the area).
What these factors mean is that designers have a totally different perspective on the content from that of the learners. That is not surprising, but it appears to have some less obvious consequences.
Let us also throw into the mix the pressure on the awarding bodies (for whom the designers work) to create courses on which "learners" (i.e. students) can "achieve" (i.e. pass); colleges get a bonus for students who pass.
I have undertaken several teaching observations recently on such courses, and on the whole they have not been very good. At one level that is only to be expected; the teachers I observed have only just come to the end of the first term of a two-year part-time course and in these cases they have little experience under their belts.
But that is not the whole story. In one case the teacher thoughtfully provided me with some of the course documentation including photocopies of pages from the "official" textbook which she was using as a handout.
(Not best practice, but with a heavy timetable and no time to develop her own resources, understandable.) So I could see that she was following the required Scheme of Work almost to the letter. The handout declared authoritatively that there are four theories of such-and-such (well, it all depends... and two of the theories were simply variations on a third, but there was no acknowledgement of that), and the teacher was supposed to "get through" these at the rate of ten minutes each, and to test that they had been "learned" (whatever that means in this context). Being fair to her, again, she was not very familiar with the area she was teaching, and so she had to stick largely to what the book told her*. She offered few examples, because she was not confident they would be "correct".
And I could tell that some of the information on the handout was misleading and even simply wrong.
The students, rather sadly, were bored but compliant. They "researched" allocated topics (Googled them), and paraphrased what they found and the relevant paragraph from the handout, and two of them gave short presentations by the time the session ended. They spoke when spoken to, but volunteered nothing. They exhibited a weary familiarity with yet more half-understood gobbets of information they were supposed to "learn", without a clue as to why.
The teacher and I had our post-observation discussion. I checked on the academic/vocational level of the programme (3; the next level below first-year undergraduate level). She agreed it was dumbed-down to near meaninglessness, because that is seen as the way to get the students to "achieve".
As I drove back I realised how many times before I had been to such a class. I wrote about one in 1999.
It's to be hoped that with more experience, and a little (well, a lot of) reading round the subject, and confidence from her training, this teacher will like so many others get to lighten up a little and her proficiency will lead to more learning. But it's difficult when she is constrained by the limitations of the curriculum.
What appears to have happened is that in order to ensure that the students pass (and thereby ensure that this particular awarding body continues to be used by the college in this vocational area) the content has to be made as easy or simple as possible. Einstein is frequently paraphrased as saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Courses like this appear to have violated that threshold. In an attempt to reduce the "learning" to discrete gobbets of information, they have ignored the context and the connections between those items, so that learning one provides no assistance with the next one.
(A few weeks ago, one student offered a micro-teaching session on an introduction to Chinese calligraphy; it was principally a practical session but of course provoked many questions from group members, some about the difference between a logographic and an alphabetic system of writing. C. pointed out that every character in a logographic system has to be learned from scratch; while some are composites, the link between the elements is not mediated by phonemes in the same way as in an alphabetic system. So one character offers little as a clue to another; it's the same issue. And learning three or four thousand separate characters is a formidable task!)
After another session I compared the content with a bowl of beads. They can be mixed up any way you like. Pick one out (teach it) and it has no implications for the rest. There is no system of knowledge. It cannot be other than inert. But thread the beads together, and picking one up will bring others with it... Context and connection are not optional extras.
In trying to make things simpler, this curriculum made them a whole lot harder.
The designers seem to have forgotten, at their distance from the students, what it is like to study this stuff. The teachers (we hope) and the designers have an overview of the field. They know where everything fits in so it makes sense. The students on the other hand are just thrown one thing after another in a seemingly arbitrary fashion. They are like puzzlers trying to make sense of the jigsaw without the picture on the box.
Surface learning and at best the unistructural level of the SOLO taxonomy is as good as it can possibly get. There is a special challenge in “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
* One little-remarked feature of vocational programmes is that of course they include some necessary background material which may be based on academic areas of study which may not be the teacher's own area--physiology, sociology, even physics, for example. Since each of these specialist topics may not feature very much, it falls to the main teacher to be a jack-of-all-trades teaching all of them even when her or his knowledge is shaky. (Yes, a great opportunity for e-learning indeed, but not much used.)
06 August 2009
On Coffield's latest
Frank Coffield has done it again. All you ever wanted to know about learning and teaching but were too cool to ask is a counterpart to Just Suppose Teaching and Learning became the First Priority. As before it is available as a free download from Learning and Skills Network Publications. While the former pamphlet was addressed to college managers, this one is aimed at actual students, and based on conversations with a range of them on courses in further education.
It's arrived too late to go into the essential reading section of our course handbook, but we shall plug it hard.
It's arrived too late to go into the essential reading section of our course handbook, but we shall plug it hard.
29 January 2009
On-line learning (1)
My apologies for the heading! I somehow fell into the pattern of prefacing all the post titles with "on" from the very start...
I posted a link a week ago about a Canadian professor of tourism about to embark on his his first e-learning course as an instructor. Well, I'm doing the same thing as a student; I have previously designed, written and run two quite different blended learning modules through several iterations, but I have never before been at the "receiving" (if that is the right metaphor) end of such a course.
The heading links to the course description, and since one of the requirements is to keep a reflective journal or blog (surprise!), I thought a bit about whether to create a blog solely for the purpose or to use this existing one. There is of course the danger that I will simply bore stiff those of you who for whatever reason read this in the real world, and those of you kind enough to sunscribe via RSS may well not be pleased to have esoteric ramblings pushed at you... On the other hand, the knowledge that I am not writing purely for myself or to be read only by "insiders" should impose some constraint on my self-indulgent ramblings. I promise not to post too frequently.
On the other hand... This blog's "manifesto" (pardon the grandiosity) is about modelling reflection, or at least producing samples of it for illustration or critique, so I have to share my thoughts to live up to that.
For those of you less interested in this, I'll keep to the same heading for related posts with updated index numbers and possibly sub-heads.
I posted a link a week ago about a Canadian professor of tourism about to embark on his his first e-learning course as an instructor. Well, I'm doing the same thing as a student; I have previously designed, written and run two quite different blended learning modules through several iterations, but I have never before been at the "receiving" (if that is the right metaphor) end of such a course.
The heading links to the course description, and since one of the requirements is to keep a reflective journal or blog (surprise!), I thought a bit about whether to create a blog solely for the purpose or to use this existing one. There is of course the danger that I will simply bore stiff those of you who for whatever reason read this in the real world, and those of you kind enough to sunscribe via RSS may well not be pleased to have esoteric ramblings pushed at you... On the other hand, the knowledge that I am not writing purely for myself or to be read only by "insiders" should impose some constraint on my self-indulgent ramblings. I promise not to post too frequently.
On the other hand... This blog's "manifesto" (pardon the grandiosity) is about modelling reflection, or at least producing samples of it for illustration or critique, so I have to share my thoughts to live up to that.
For those of you less interested in this, I'll keep to the same heading for related posts with updated index numbers and possibly sub-heads.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
