Education focus:
You Don't Remember Anything You Learn at School. Do You? - Lincoln Allison remembers lessons at Lancaster Royal Grammar School and University College, Oxford
Lucky guy (as was I). But it's not the same now, is it?
Felipe Fernández-Armesto recalls a golden age when learning was treasured (Times Higher Education)
I thought I was heterodox, sometimes! (http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/education.htm)
The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever (Wired.com) On the free open-access courses on Artificial Intelligence.
Should Effort Count? Students Certainly Think So (Faculty Focus) --in terms of marks.
To flip or not to flip? The pros and cons of flipped classes: new material presented on-line, class time spent on exercises and practice.
Reading the dictionary (Joi Ito's Web) 'Shouldn't we be looking at the Internet as an amazing network enabling "The Power of Pull" and be empowering kids to learn through building things together rather than assessing their ability to complete courses and produce the right "answers"? (Comments also interesting.)
More generally:
The Knight’s Song, or What is a [scientific] theory? (Evolving Thoughts) Not as hard going as it first appears!
(Mark) Twain on inference about the past (Evolving Thoughts)
Age and wisdom: Older and wiser? (The Economist) Americans get wiser with age. Japanese are wise from the start
The human advantage: middle age (The Washington Post) A cheering take on our middle years!
What the 'limits of DNA' story reveals about the challenges of science journalism in the 'big data' age (The Last Word On Nothing)
John Cleese on the 5 Factors to Make Your Life More Creative (Brain Pickings)
Are humans naturally religious? (First Things)
The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower (The Atlantic)
14 April 2012
10 April 2012
On "reflective practice" as a threshold concept
This is in danger of becoming a little arcane! Is "reflection" (in the Schon/Kolb/Boud/Moon and co. sense) a threshold concept? And what difference does it make to anything if it is?
The story so far--starting a couple of years ago, I've been doing occasional presentations, in many cases in association with Peter Hadfield, on re-evaluating the notion of "reflective practice" and its usefulness a quarter-century after it was promoted in a rather different professional culture. The other day I was invited to do a session in the Open Lecture series on learning and teaching at the University of Greenwich, and Peter was able to come too. So it was that we went through the lecture on the train, on my laptop, and he posed the question whether reflective practice is a threshold concept.
Yes of course! ...Well, no. ...But it ought to be! It matters because this idea tests some of the supposed criteria for threshold concepts (although it has to be granted that those for TCs are tighter than those for RP--excuse the initials but they should be obvious by now). And certainly, the origins of TCs were found in the "Ways of Thinking and Practising" (WTP) which Entwistle identified. In many disciplines, RP is regarded as central to their WTP, and it is certainly intended/assumed to transform practitioners' approaches to their practice. It is considered not as an additional item of knowledge, but as a transformational perspective or frame of reference.
In practice it doesn't work like that. And it so happened that the other day I did a teaching observation of a student actually teaching a module on "reflective practice" on the final year of an undergrad programme in... social work/ nursing/youth work/ community development/ informal education (It was one or more of those--I'm being coy for ethical reasons, but it doesn't affect the argument: and this has nothing to do with the performance of the student--we had interesting issues to discuss which concerned context and background and style, but her core performance was fine*).
RP is regarded as a theme (perspective) running through the entire programme, but the existence of a discrete module accords it the status of (merely) additional knowledge. I can see how it happens, of course. As I cited in the lecture:
Two aspects in particular struck me:
Making it into a discrete module had transformed it; it was no longer the same activity. As Reflection (I'll capitalise it in its RP sense so I can use the more general term uncapitalised) was originally recommended by Boud and Schon et al, it was a characteristic of the accomplished practitioner, and effectively something which he or she could not help doing. In that form it is a reactive process, not a proactive one. It is something which takes place because one is that kind of practitioner, not in order to become one.
For the Greenwich lecture, I looked up the phrase "reflective practice" on Ngram: I noted that when I published my first book, on Professional Supervision in Group Care in 1986 (written of course in 84-85), the term "reflect / reflection" appeared only once in the index, and then in a specialised context. The ngram graph seems to show that the idea came out of nowhere in the 'eighties.
So if we are to believe one proponent of RP, practice prior to its identification could only be, "at best
uninformed, and at worst ineffective, prejudiced and constraining" (Hillier 2002: p.xi) which is self-evident nonsense. It's clearly a case of Jourdain's syndrome--the Moliere character who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. Identification and labelling is the first step in the process of systematisation, and that is what the Schon and co. started to do. Indeed, Schon was clear about his intentions. Nevertheless, that inevitably started a process of change.
As I explored very briefly in discussing Bruner's cone of experience, in order to talk about an "enactive" experience, one has to step back and enter the "iconic" or even the "symbolic" zone--and such a step is an act of abstraction. So the act of reflection is in itself an abstraction and to talk about reflection is even more of an abstraction. And after talking about it for 25 years, and codifying it and evaluating it and representing it within Learning Outcomes and Module Descriptors--it has become something different.
In particular it has become (at least on this course), a label for an approach to action-planning and target-setting, where despite the rhetoric of self-directed learning, the action and targets need to fit within the pre-determined framework of the curriculum. It's putting it too strongly to suggest any element of "indoctrination", but as Hargreaves points out above, when you start to assess Reflection, you have to go down that route.
Perhaps that is not too bad an idea, really. There's nothing wrong with becoming proficient in planning and meeting targets. In current working systems and cultures, indeed, those skills may be more use than Reflection, but I did not get the impression that this position has been arrived at consciously and deliberately (let alone Reflectively).
The students had learned it. Only problem, I (and my student) were no longer very sure what "it" was. And I did not know whether the students believed in it, or were just going through the motions, because they (at the end of three years, after all) knew very well how to play the game. It's nothing new: I've just found this, which I wrote in 1998:
Reflection is no different.
But now it doesn't sound much like a concept, "akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress." (Meyer and Land, 2006:3)
And yet it started off that way. It's just that in its journey from being a necessary feature of a professional's manner of reacting to her practice, to this compliant choreographed process of planning to address external targets, it seems to have had a run-in with the Dementors and lost all its energy. It continues to exist as ritual knowledge, which has a “routine and rather meaningless character” (Perkins, 1999, p. 8**). I know it, but I no longer know why I know it, or what it is really for.
Instead of opening doors, it is closing them.
I am coming to realise, rather belatedly, that the threshold quality of a threshold concept, and the transformative potency of reflection, do not lie in their content as such. It lies in the manner in which learners are prepared to let them permeate and act on other areas of knowledge. And clearly caging these ideas up in discrete modular boxes and then treating them as mere additional gobbets of knowledge to be assimilated is guaranteed to emasculate them; we need to take the risks inherent in letting students engage with accommodating to them.
* "Fine" does not do her justice, but we do not grade observations, and so I'm not going to use a term in Ofsted's vocabulary. Sorry if that is meaningless to anyone, but you're not missing anything!
** Many thanks to David Stone for finding this accessible source!
References
Hargreaves J (2010) "Voices from the past: professional discourse and reflective practice" in Bradbury H, Frost N, Kilminster S and Zukas M (eds) (2010) Beyond Reflective Practice; new approaches to professional lifelong learning Abingdon; Routledge
Moliere (Poquelin, J-B) (1670) Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (play)
The story so far--starting a couple of years ago, I've been doing occasional presentations, in many cases in association with Peter Hadfield, on re-evaluating the notion of "reflective practice" and its usefulness a quarter-century after it was promoted in a rather different professional culture. The other day I was invited to do a session in the Open Lecture series on learning and teaching at the University of Greenwich, and Peter was able to come too. So it was that we went through the lecture on the train, on my laptop, and he posed the question whether reflective practice is a threshold concept.
Yes of course! ...Well, no. ...But it ought to be! It matters because this idea tests some of the supposed criteria for threshold concepts (although it has to be granted that those for TCs are tighter than those for RP--excuse the initials but they should be obvious by now). And certainly, the origins of TCs were found in the "Ways of Thinking and Practising" (WTP) which Entwistle identified. In many disciplines, RP is regarded as central to their WTP, and it is certainly intended/assumed to transform practitioners' approaches to their practice. It is considered not as an additional item of knowledge, but as a transformational perspective or frame of reference.
In practice it doesn't work like that. And it so happened that the other day I did a teaching observation of a student actually teaching a module on "reflective practice" on the final year of an undergrad programme in... social work/ nursing/youth work/ community development/ informal education (It was one or more of those--I'm being coy for ethical reasons, but it doesn't affect the argument: and this has nothing to do with the performance of the student--we had interesting issues to discuss which concerned context and background and style, but her core performance was fine*).
RP is regarded as a theme (perspective) running through the entire programme, but the existence of a discrete module accords it the status of (merely) additional knowledge. I can see how it happens, of course. As I cited in the lecture:
Whilst many authors [...] have expressed doubts regarding the wisdom of formally assessing reflection, the currently favoured 'alignment' model of curriculum development ([...] makes it extremely difficult to make the development of reflective skills a core element of the curriculum design without it being overtly assessed. Despite my own reservations regarding the ethics
of assessing student reflections [...] even I would struggle to envision a curriculum where reflection was central to the learning strategy but absent in the design of assessment.
(Hargreaves 2010:91)
Two aspects in particular struck me:
Making it into a discrete module had transformed it; it was no longer the same activity. As Reflection (I'll capitalise it in its RP sense so I can use the more general term uncapitalised) was originally recommended by Boud and Schon et al, it was a characteristic of the accomplished practitioner, and effectively something which he or she could not help doing. In that form it is a reactive process, not a proactive one. It is something which takes place because one is that kind of practitioner, not in order to become one.
For the Greenwich lecture, I looked up the phrase "reflective practice" on Ngram: I noted that when I published my first book, on Professional Supervision in Group Care in 1986 (written of course in 84-85), the term "reflect / reflection" appeared only once in the index, and then in a specialised context. The ngram graph seems to show that the idea came out of nowhere in the 'eighties.
uninformed, and at worst ineffective, prejudiced and constraining" (Hillier 2002: p.xi) which is self-evident nonsense. It's clearly a case of Jourdain's syndrome--the Moliere character who discovered he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. Identification and labelling is the first step in the process of systematisation, and that is what the Schon and co. started to do. Indeed, Schon was clear about his intentions. Nevertheless, that inevitably started a process of change.
As I explored very briefly in discussing Bruner's cone of experience, in order to talk about an "enactive" experience, one has to step back and enter the "iconic" or even the "symbolic" zone--and such a step is an act of abstraction. So the act of reflection is in itself an abstraction and to talk about reflection is even more of an abstraction. And after talking about it for 25 years, and codifying it and evaluating it and representing it within Learning Outcomes and Module Descriptors--it has become something different.
In particular it has become (at least on this course), a label for an approach to action-planning and target-setting, where despite the rhetoric of self-directed learning, the action and targets need to fit within the pre-determined framework of the curriculum. It's putting it too strongly to suggest any element of "indoctrination", but as Hargreaves points out above, when you start to assess Reflection, you have to go down that route.
Perhaps that is not too bad an idea, really. There's nothing wrong with becoming proficient in planning and meeting targets. In current working systems and cultures, indeed, those skills may be more use than Reflection, but I did not get the impression that this position has been arrived at consciously and deliberately (let alone Reflectively).
The students had learned it. Only problem, I (and my student) were no longer very sure what "it" was. And I did not know whether the students believed in it, or were just going through the motions, because they (at the end of three years, after all) knew very well how to play the game. It's nothing new: I've just found this, which I wrote in 1998:
An external examiner on the social work course commented at the assessment board that although he was satisfied by the way in which anti-racist and anti-discriminatory practice was being taught on the programme, he saw little evidence from the work he had read, that students were actually using any of these principles, despite the fact that they were explicitly marked on the extent to which they were incorporated in all assignments. Discussion with some of the students after the final assessment revealed that for at least some of them:
a) The teaching represented a form of political correctness to which they knew they were supposed to pay lip-service in order to pass the course, but they did not actually believe that it was any use as a principle of practice.
b) More than that, several regarded it as inimical to their effective practice, because of the self-consciousness it engendered.
Reflection is no different.
But now it doesn't sound much like a concept, "akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress." (Meyer and Land, 2006:3)
And yet it started off that way. It's just that in its journey from being a necessary feature of a professional's manner of reacting to her practice, to this compliant choreographed process of planning to address external targets, it seems to have had a run-in with the Dementors and lost all its energy. It continues to exist as ritual knowledge, which has a “routine and rather meaningless character” (Perkins, 1999, p. 8**). I know it, but I no longer know why I know it, or what it is really for.
Instead of opening doors, it is closing them.
I am coming to realise, rather belatedly, that the threshold quality of a threshold concept, and the transformative potency of reflection, do not lie in their content as such. It lies in the manner in which learners are prepared to let them permeate and act on other areas of knowledge. And clearly caging these ideas up in discrete modular boxes and then treating them as mere additional gobbets of knowledge to be assimilated is guaranteed to emasculate them; we need to take the risks inherent in letting students engage with accommodating to them.
* "Fine" does not do her justice, but we do not grade observations, and so I'm not going to use a term in Ofsted's vocabulary. Sorry if that is meaningless to anyone, but you're not missing anything!
** Many thanks to David Stone for finding this accessible source!
References
Hargreaves J (2010) "Voices from the past: professional discourse and reflective practice" in Bradbury H, Frost N, Kilminster S and Zukas M (eds) (2010) Beyond Reflective Practice; new approaches to professional lifelong learning Abingdon; Routledge
Moliere (Poquelin, J-B) (1670) Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (play)
09 April 2012
Items to share: 7 April 12 (late)
Education focus
- Can Technology Help Education? (Farnam Street)
Steve Jobs had his doubts, apparently. (I don't know enough about US schooling to comment on the unions.)
- Two great problems that go great together. (More or Less Bunk)
And here may be one reason for Jobs' reservations.
- We don’t need no grade inflation: Jonathan Hartford (Spiked)
Spiked is generally stimulatingly contrarian. This story is all too familiar, though. It scores by going behind the scenes and looking at impact in the A level classroom.
- A Don's Life: Gove's "new" A' level scheme?
Excellent post from Mary Beard on what needs to be reformed about A levels.
- Thoughts on Art and Teaching: Assessment in Practice Conference at Glasgow School of Art
Interesting thoughts from Jim Hamlyn, particularly on the Ben Craven paper; isn't all assessment ultimately norm-referenced? I wrote along similar lines here.
- Evaluating students: the halo effect — Crooked Timber
Quoting Kahneman on the "halo effect" in grading.
- Phil Race's latest "Ripples" model
Phil has consolidated/updated the "Ripples" model--here is the latest version to download.
- Intelligence and Other Stereotypes: The Power of Mindset (Scientific American Blog Network)
- David Goodhart on Immigration and Multiculturalism (The Browser)
Excellent interview with book recommendations.
- 10 Photographers You Should Ignore (Wired)
... if you want to find your own vision, that is. Trouble is, just how many others can you avoid being like?
- NeuroSynth
Just amazing. Type in the label of a mental activity and this returns an fMRI scan synthesised from 4k+ real studies where the report included the chosen label.
- Oscillatory Thoughts: Automated Science, Deep Data, and the Paradox of Information
And this is the post which pointed to Neurosynth.
- Biologist E.O. Wilson on Why Humans, Like Ants, Need a Tribe - The Daily Beast
- Letters of Note: C. S. Lewis on Writing
- Dropbox just got even better! Disclosure, for everyone who signs up on my recommendation I get more free space--but then so can you when you recommend it in turn. And I don't know if it works from a blog. Who cares? This is the easiest conceivable FREE "cloud backup solution". Yuck. Did I write that? (As long as you are not a paranoid security nut.)
31 March 2012
Items to share: 31 March
- Received wisdom | Prospect Magazine
Is the Flynn effect (rising IQs) going into reverse?
- Cheese made with "gecko technology" Swiss humour!
- Friday Weird Science: The Urinal Problem , and
The Social Psychology of Flatulence Two pieces worthy of nomination for an IgNobel prize from Neurotic Physiology. Incidentally, didn't Goffman write about the first issue in Relations in Public; microstudies of the public order (1971)? If not, he should have done.
- Want superconductivity? Add red wine. Yet another use for a wonderful substance! From Boing Boing.
- Ballet dancers in super slow motion; self-explanatory
- How to Write Like a Scientist. Badly
- Daniel Kahneman: "A Short Course in Thinking about Thinking" An Edge Master Class by the author of the recent Thinking; Fast and Slow. A good taster for the book.
- Rhetological Fallacies Probably appropriate for 1 April--but there's much more to this than that: an "infographic" of rhetorical and logical fallacies.
- Science on the Rampage by Freeman Dyson from The New York Review of Books
- Robert Frost recites "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" from Open Culture.
- Quality Teaching: We're Looking in the Wrong Places This is US-centric and school-based, but exposes the delusional obsession with blaming teachers as individuals for poor student performance, and of course the fallacies behind Ofsted teaching grades, and here, disputing whether their view of "outstanding" teaching makes contact with reality...
- Risky biscuits from Prospect Magazine: it's a hoary old topic but still interesting.
23 March 2012
Items to share: 24 March
- Is Homeopathy A Sham? : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR Interesting to find this. In a lecture earlier this week (link to come) on the "Limits of Reflective Practice" I speculated that this generally inoccuous but over-rated approach to professional practice survives--like homeopathy--as a "meme", not because it does what it sets out to do, but because of side-effects valued by its proponents. Perhaps it is a matter of selective attention (a la Invisible Gorilla) that I seem to have picked up three alternative medicine pieces this week:.
- Diluting the scientific method: Ars looks at homeopathy : An earlier link on the "memory of water" (18 March) has mysteriously disappeared... Thanks to David S for noticing and suggesting this sounder counterbalance.
- Evidence-based medicine v alternative therapies: moving beyond virulence: And in the same area, a counter-blast which deserves to be entertained, at least.
- It's 'not' history - Research - University of Cambridge The history of negation
- Body Language - Lapham’s Quarterly More precisely, cultural variations in gesturing.
- Barack Obama and sign language: ASL, that is.
- Online
PhD Resources:Thanks to a correspondent for pointing me in this direction--looks interesting.
- Robbers' Cave Experiment: A Week with the Boys Not quite as famous (or notorious) as Milgram's obedience experiments, or Zimbardo's prison, or Asch on conformity, the Robber's Cave study of creating conflict and co-operation is nonetheless a classic which could not be replicated today (Sherif et al., 1961). Well, not in an academic setting, but of course "reality" TV operates on different rules...
- Removed by request (1 Feb 3013)
- NCBI
ROFL: Which brand of ball point pen is best for an emergency airway
puncture? | Discoblog | Discover Magazine Just in case you need to know... (The site isn't serious, but the studies are.)
- Nick
Kwiatek — Web & interaction designer + developer Just stir up the screen and see what happens...
- Presentation
Zen: Videos to help you rethink education, learning, and school Nothing particularly new, but a useful compilation to have access to nonetheless (US-centric, of course)
- The
End of Pax Papyra and the Fall of Big Paper - Forbes
I always like takes on the less obvious impact of technologies, promoting sideways looks.
18 March 2012
Items to share: 18 March
- Philip Tetlock on Expert Prediction Just a pointer.
- BBC Two - Horizon, 2011-2012, Out of Control? On the role of the unconscious, but not as Freud would have it.
- Water has Memory Almost lends credibility to homeopathy (a claim the piece does not make). [This link has now been taken down--the source was here. Thanks to David S for the correction.]
- Art Direction: (musical) instruments from the inside on the Behance Network
- dy/dan » Blog Archive » “It’s Killing Me. I Gotta Know.” The suspense and excitement of doing maths.
11 March 2012
Items to share: 11 March
Apologies for this (late) ramshackle listing. I'm experimenting with delicious as a means of gleaning interesting links. It is indeed easy, but getting the results from there to here appears to be convoluted, until I get the knack...
- Times Higher Education - This edition - Satisfaction and its discontents Frank Furedi on the National Student Satisfaction Survey--distorting the culture of higher education.
- Neurons v. Free Will : the backlash against reductionist neuroscience--but do read the comments.
- Big Dog, Little Dog: The Mosaic of Learning Styles A defence! Still not convinced.
- PHD Comics: The Methodology Translator Ought to be in the handbook for every research methods course.
- Thoughts on Art and Teaching: Doubtful Pedantry: Interesting thoughts about the impact of confidence and certainty, and credibility
- ...and this sort of follows on, on the virtues of not being defensive about one's teaching. Creating an Authentic Learning Environment by Embracing What’s Real | Faculty Focus
- Clear Your Google Web History - Wired How-To Wiki In case you are concerned about the new privacy policy. And here is some useful background: I'm Being Followed: How Google—and 104 Other Companies—Are Tracking Me on the Web - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic
- A fitting tribute to Alan Turing « Mind Hacks He would have been 100 last week.
06 March 2012
On Pinker's latest
“One always tends to overpraise a long book because one has got through it.” — E.M. Forster (Attributable of course to cognitive dissonance.)
In that spirit Steven Pinker's On the Better Angels of our Nature is brilliant. It's the book of the century!
It's on "the decline of violence in history and its causes". The Preface sets out the argument very succinctly, so you don't really have to read the rest. The main body smacks of protesting too much, but I'm not a historian and really capable of evaluating the evidence Pinker cites; but then, nor is he. Other critics have complained about his use of relative rates of violence (instances per 100,000 population raather than absolute figures) as if it were a sleight of hand. I can't, for example, comment knowledgeably on that. I am largely convinced by what Pinker discusses, but then I don't know enough to know what he doesn't discuss, and the counter-arguments and counter-evidence.
The final chapter on game theory and violence is more convincing. But overall, I'm not convinced that Pinker has added very much to Robert Wright's argument in Nonzero: History, Evolution & Human Cooperation: The Logic of Human Destiny (2001)--certainly not 700 pages worth.
In that spirit Steven Pinker's On the Better Angels of our Nature is brilliant. It's the book of the century!
It's on "the decline of violence in history and its causes". The Preface sets out the argument very succinctly, so you don't really have to read the rest. The main body smacks of protesting too much, but I'm not a historian and really capable of evaluating the evidence Pinker cites; but then, nor is he. Other critics have complained about his use of relative rates of violence (instances per 100,000 population raather than absolute figures) as if it were a sleight of hand. I can't, for example, comment knowledgeably on that. I am largely convinced by what Pinker discusses, but then I don't know enough to know what he doesn't discuss, and the counter-arguments and counter-evidence.
The final chapter on game theory and violence is more convincing. But overall, I'm not convinced that Pinker has added very much to Robert Wright's argument in Nonzero: History, Evolution & Human Cooperation: The Logic of Human Destiny (2001)--certainly not 700 pages worth.
03 March 2012
Items to share (3 March)
- Social history comes alive in these images of the East End of London of less than fifty years ago.
- Michael Ruse on Thomas Kuhns' The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 50 years on.
- Interesting piece arguing that in the Middle Ages it was usual to go to bed at sunset or shortly after, and then to get up again for an hour or two around midnight.
- Ben Goldacre argues for more randomised trials on social policy and initiatives across the piece as well as medical interventions
- Jean McNiff (of action-research fame) has a new website. (Thanks to Jim Crawley's delicious feed.)
- Based on marketing toothpaste, a different take on the traditional behavioural account of learning.
- A technological fix on how to make people shut up!
25 February 2012
On starting from the question
Background: Recently I went to observe a training session for nursery nurses (staff at day-care facilities for pre-school children). They are a major constituency for vocational education, but the job is low-status and traditionally undertaken as a process of drift, from leaving school with few qualifications to motherhood. Not "parenthood"--not only are young men rare in the sector, they are often regarded with suspicion. The pressure for training comes from well-meaning government regulation and inspection of everyone from registered child-minders to nursery schools by Ofsted.
So, in practice the class consists of eight young women. Because of the nature of the scheme, which requires the accumulation of assessed units of competence--taken in no particular order--into a portfolio which can be presented for accreditation (roughly), this group has met only for this morning. Some of them know each other and have met before, most don't and haven't. Similarly the tutors (I forgot--there are two of them and they are [in-service] students on our course) have met some of them before and even know their names, and in a couple of cases know something of their background and work setting, but are meeting others for the first time. And this particular group may never meet again.
The topic concerns the systematic observation of children to... Do what?
The EYFS sets out recommended procedures for systematic observation of children, and recording them.
So... how does one teach that? Boring, but simple.
First, ask why "we" might want to undertake such observations.
The students don't know each other and so they don't trust each other. Come to that, they don't know or trust the tutors--there is no track record of knowing whether wrong answers will be met with encouragement to get closer to the answer, or humiliating scorn for monumental ineptitude.
Good move from the tutor: everyone has to write down their answer, and then she goes round the group asking them to read them out. Everyone says, "to assess development" in one way or another. But because they are reading what what they wrote, the last person is not humiliated by failing to come up with an eighth distinctive reason.
So we now know that they know an acceptable answer. (And further questioning elicits more, and a later pair exercise makes them more comfortable with each other...) Yes, an "acceptable" answer. The criterion is fundamentally about the process in the class.
I don't want to get too precious about this. This kind of closed-question, guess-what-I'm-thinking, Q and A has been the staple of such courses from time immemorial (for all the much-vaunted "Socratic method", he was a serious perpetrator, too). And it works.
I've just been watching Call the Midwife on BBC1. A newly-trained midwife on a solo call is faced with a breech birth; you can see her (no tricks, just Miranda Hart's acting) recalling her training as she carefully follows the recommended procedure (which may well have been up-dated since). She learned how to do that from just the same kind of instruction, I'm sure, especially given that it is set in the early 'fifties.
And as I was writing I came across this real-life example. That crew may well have learned the same way, too.
And yet. The dramatic, high-stakes situation depicted concentrates the mind wonderfully; she would have reached back into her training and drawn everything she could from it, no matter how badly it was done, as would the fire crew.
Systematically observing children is not like that. It's more of a chore. Quite rightly, the staff would rather be playng with the children and responding to them moment by moment. (Indeed, is there any evidence that other than in gross and obvious cases of "abnormal" behaviour--which tend to force themselves on the observer--that the effort expended on such surveillance has any payoff? The session I observed implied that it was principally about generating evidence for a report for the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator [a.k.a. SENCO], which could then be produced for Ofsted as evidence of due diligence. )
And similarly, later they could be shown
completed examples of the observation sheets, and asked to
interpret what story they tell, and what hypotheses (or in
Sherlock's case) conclusions they might draw from the raw data.
Perhaps one could use selected clips from CSI or a similar forensics-based show?
A few days later, the students and I discussed the session and the alternative strategies. They have done something similar in the past, and agree it is more engaging--but it all takes so long to "cover" the material. Yet again, the tyranny of the syllabus, which is all about "knowing about". It matters more that the material has been seen to have been taught, than that it has been learned. And paradoxically that puts more of a burden on the trainees and their mentors at work, because everything has to be addressed again there, often without the benefit of understanding the underpinning principles which could be addressed in class, and which would have increased the probability of the practical instruction "sticking".
So, in practice the class consists of eight young women. Because of the nature of the scheme, which requires the accumulation of assessed units of competence--taken in no particular order--into a portfolio which can be presented for accreditation (roughly), this group has met only for this morning. Some of them know each other and have met before, most don't and haven't. Similarly the tutors (I forgot--there are two of them and they are [in-service] students on our course) have met some of them before and even know their names, and in a couple of cases know something of their background and work setting, but are meeting others for the first time. And this particular group may never meet again.
The topic concerns the systematic observation of children to... Do what?
The EYFS sets out recommended procedures for systematic observation of children, and recording them.
So... how does one teach that? Boring, but simple.
First, ask why "we" might want to undertake such observations.
The students don't know each other and so they don't trust each other. Come to that, they don't know or trust the tutors--there is no track record of knowing whether wrong answers will be met with encouragement to get closer to the answer, or humiliating scorn for monumental ineptitude.
Good move from the tutor: everyone has to write down their answer, and then she goes round the group asking them to read them out. Everyone says, "to assess development" in one way or another. But because they are reading what what they wrote, the last person is not humiliated by failing to come up with an eighth distinctive reason.
So we now know that they know an acceptable answer. (And further questioning elicits more, and a later pair exercise makes them more comfortable with each other...) Yes, an "acceptable" answer. The criterion is fundamentally about the process in the class.
I don't want to get too precious about this. This kind of closed-question, guess-what-I'm-thinking, Q and A has been the staple of such courses from time immemorial (for all the much-vaunted "Socratic method", he was a serious perpetrator, too). And it works.
I've just been watching Call the Midwife on BBC1. A newly-trained midwife on a solo call is faced with a breech birth; you can see her (no tricks, just Miranda Hart's acting) recalling her training as she carefully follows the recommended procedure (which may well have been up-dated since). She learned how to do that from just the same kind of instruction, I'm sure, especially given that it is set in the early 'fifties.
And as I was writing I came across this real-life example. That crew may well have learned the same way, too.
And yet. The dramatic, high-stakes situation depicted concentrates the mind wonderfully; she would have reached back into her training and drawn everything she could from it, no matter how badly it was done, as would the fire crew.
Systematically observing children is not like that. It's more of a chore. Quite rightly, the staff would rather be playng with the children and responding to them moment by moment. (Indeed, is there any evidence that other than in gross and obvious cases of "abnormal" behaviour--which tend to force themselves on the observer--that the effort expended on such surveillance has any payoff? The session I observed implied that it was principally about generating evidence for a report for the Special Educational Needs Co-ordinator [a.k.a. SENCO], which could then be produced for Ofsted as evidence of due diligence. )
So--leaving aside reservations about the
whole idea, and living with what we have got--how do we get
the class members to engage with the requirements?
The template for the session is information-transmission.
That first of all requires motivation, and in this session the
students were asked to come up with their reasons about why we
might observe. Then they were provided with standard
observation tools, and encouraged to familiarise themselves
with them and use them with a video clip. I was quite
interested to see how detailed (and time-consuming)
the tools are.
I wonder if this couldn't be flipped. How
would it work if the students were shown the video first, and
encouraged to pay close (but non-specific) attention to it,
and then asked what they observed, perhaps in an open format
first, and then testing them on specific points? (I'm reminded
of the Sherlock Holmes trick of asking Watson what he can tell
about their latest client, and then showing off his skill by
reeling off a lot more information he has picked up by
observation and deduction--on Sherlock they do it very
neatly with key-words labelling the tell-tale signs.)
The
point is they won't report much to begin with, because they
don't know what to look for. But this technique would
make them aware of that, and create a need (i.e. motivation)
to get hold of the tools, so they would be more likely to take
them in.
Perhaps one could use selected clips from CSI or a similar forensics-based show?
(23.01.12)
A few days later, the students and I discussed the session and the alternative strategies. They have done something similar in the past, and agree it is more engaging--but it all takes so long to "cover" the material. Yet again, the tyranny of the syllabus, which is all about "knowing about". It matters more that the material has been seen to have been taught, than that it has been learned. And paradoxically that puts more of a burden on the trainees and their mentors at work, because everything has to be addressed again there, often without the benefit of understanding the underpinning principles which could be addressed in class, and which would have increased the probability of the practical instruction "sticking".
Items to share (25 February)
- Fascinating extract from Robert Trivers' "Deceit and Self-Deception: Fooling Yourself the Better to Fool Others" (2011)
- And slightly related: Matt Ridley on how internet anonymity removes inhibitions.
- Bryan Appleyard on Rupert Sheldrake, a heretical biologist who nevertheless poses some challenging questions. (Sheldrake's site)
- It's taken a long time (13 years or more) for Jerry Fodor to review two books by Steven Pinker and Henry Plotkin, but it's a platform for an interesting discussion (and rejection) of "psychological Darwinism".
- Another mind and brain piece: V S Ramachandran on what neurology can tell us about human nature.
- "The idea that the self can be split into body and mind is at the root of psychology, but there is no laboratory test, questionnaire or brain scan that tells us this – it is a product of our culture." Vaughan Bell briefly discusses alternative views.
- Dan Meyer's exploration of how text-books could develop when freed from the constraints of size and weight and printing; it's about maths teaching, but also applies much more generally.
- And a selection of pieces, largely by or about Stephan Collini, on what universities are for. Here he is interviewed for Times Higher Education. Here he is in conversation with Laurie Taylor on Radio 4. Here is his book reviewed in the Guardian, and here in the Independent. And coincidentally, it appears, here Jeffrey Williams surveys the emerging field of which Collini's book is a part, "critical university studies".
- Now back to something sensible.
18 February 2012
Items to share (18 February)
- The myth of brainstorming, (and why the building matters more than you think).
- Misquotations--cheesy banality hijacks nuanced wisdom.
- The ever-rational Ben Goldacre sympathetically (and sensibly) entertains some way-out ideas.
- Correcting the misunderstanding of memes (Burman 2012).
- Academic translation guide (thanks to Simoleon Sense)
- What are the humanities for? A big question in higher education at the moment, and rarely answered as directly as this--they introduce us to the art of living, they are a toolbox for life. Here are seventeen full lectures from that course at Stanford University on video (I've only sampled them so far). The liberal arts tradition has almost gone from British universities, but it's still alive and well in the USA.
- Willpower is back in fashion.
- Reclaiming a Sense of the Sacred: Marilynne Robinson contemplates religion, science, art, and the miraculous.
- A collection of discussions and illustrations of the Prisoners' Dilemma. (Note that at the end there is a link to a page on the Tragedy of the Commons. That's interesting, in that the original article by Hardin (1968) is apparently "one of the most-reprinted articles ever to appear in any scientific journal", and the most uncritically accepted. My quote above is from an interesting dissenting article [decidedly from the left, but not necessarily any the worse for that] by Ian Angus in 2008; The Myth of the Tragedy of the Commons which suggests that it has never been demonstrated in practice, and yet it is adopted because of its convenient fit with pre-existing ideological interests. Illustrates the principle that utility comes first, and truth a poor second in these circles. Well worth reading.)
- Interesting piece on Better Living Through Electrochemistry and a companion article by the same author (Sally Adee) in New Scientist. Is this likely to have an impact on mainstream learning, and what are the implications?
16 February 2012
On a classroom double-bind
A colleague has just circulated links to a package on Learning to Teach Inclusively, which includes a video on "setting ground rules".
Social Work - Classrom session - Setting inclusive ground rules from Learning to Teach Inclusively on Vimeo.
You might like to watch it and think about (OK--"reflect on") your impressions before clicking to get past the break below.
Social Work - Classrom session - Setting inclusive ground rules from Learning to Teach Inclusively on Vimeo.
You might like to watch it and think about (OK--"reflect on") your impressions before clicking to get past the break below.
11 February 2012
Items to share (11 February)
- Thoughts on excavating an anthill. (Thanks to Andrew Sullivan.)
- I can't claim to have fully explored this site of free educational tools for cognitive neuroscience, but even casual perusal reveals brilliant material.
- The wisdom of crowds strikes again--quite unexpectedly--with a new font.
- Very US-centred, but nonetheless a fascinating exploration of "industrial bread"--from chemistry to process management to politics and culture.
- Now we've actually had some snow, anyone for yak-skiing? (Thanks to Dr Grumpy)
- Excellent extended further critique by Jim Hamlyn of the Susan Cain articles on introversion, linked to earlier.
- Indulge me! I've actually read Julian Jaynes' magnum opus (and foolishly lent it to someone about 20 years ago and never got it back). This is a good review of a great and original (if indeed totally wrong-headed) idea, which is so much less likely to see the light of day today, with the imprimatur of a respected publisher. The freedom of the air-headed blogosphere, where anyone can say anything, has diluted the potency of such serious fancies to nil. The absence of any bar to publication has undermined the value of it...
- I've been longing to know this for years!
07 February 2012
On the limitations of e-learning
Even if you are not concerned with maths education, this post by Dan Meyer on What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About Math Education Again And Again is well worth reading, because e-learning does change the content of most (if not all) subjects. I made the point (rather more vaguely and broadly) in this paper, which is now over ten years old. For all the increased sophistication of the technology, the arguments still stand.
03 February 2012
Items to share (4 February)
- What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? (Thanks to the Browser for these two links)
- The Rise of the New Groupthink: more from Susan Cain (and see Jim Hamlyn's comment on the 28 January post--thanks Jim.)
- Stuart Kauffman takes on the entire Western philosophical tradition! On The Inadequacy Of The Empiricist Tradition In Western Philosophy
- By implication, Geoff Pullum would like to see political speeches run through Turnitin.
- Top five regrets of the dying: according to a palliative care nurse.
- Happy Groundhog Day (2 February) and here.
- Equality and Diversity Training: Cambridge University's Own Goal according to Mary Beard. Hear, hear! Interesting to think, though, how long it took Mary to write this excellent piece, compared with how long it took to tick the electronic boxes. I'm pretty confident of which was more valuable.
- All Hail the Stand-Up Meeting! And if Borgen is to be believed, they are the norm in Denmark.
- Brainstorming debate (and forget all the PC stuff about epilepsy--that community has no problem with the term): Against and For.
01 February 2012
On Franklin's Gambit
Thanks to Jim Hamlyn's intriguing review, I have just finished reading John Kay's Obliquity. I'm not quite as enthusiastic about it as Jim is--it's easy to read, but also repetitious and wordy, almost padded. Nevertheless, it is the book I have been looking for, for some time, because it addresses an issue--namely tackling problems and challenges indirectly--which has interested me for some time, and to which there has not really been an accessible introduction I can point other people to, and say, "It's all there!" There's been a series of books, largely by economists (as Kay is), perhaps most notably by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2008), which touch on similar areas, but without the clarity of focus Kay brings to bear.
Kay starts thus:
Today I was approached over the net by an overseas researcher seeking the views of academics on the various competing taxonomies of education objectives, helpfully accompanied by a handout summarising the models he was investigating. Some were familiar, and there were two I had never heard heard of; most were horrendously complicated. They were just unmanageable, and I couldn't imagine anyone actually using them. I thought, "these are not designed to be used. Despite appearances, the only person (if anyone) who got anything out of these was the person who designed them." That is not to say that the exercise of designing them was not useful, as a way of clarifying the designers' thoughts--it's just not directly communicable to other people.
I'm an unregenerate builder of conceptual models; my Doceo site is full of more or less half-baked ones, which people do occasionally tell me are useful, but I do try to keep them simple, with a focused and limited range of convenience.
...but even then, I suspect that most of even those are employed in the service of Franklin's Gambit--just seeking a legitimation for what someone was going to do anyway.
Which rather puts most educational theory in its place.
So now I've got to work out how to respond to 29 Likert-scale questions on learning taxonomies...
Kay starts thus:
For over ten years, I built and ran an economic consultancy business, and much of our revenue was derived from selling models to large corporate clients. One day, I asked myself a question: if these models were helpful, why did we not build similar models for our own decision making? The answer, I realised, was that our customers didn't really use these models for their decision making either. They used them internally or externally to justify decisions that they had already made.In my early days teaching, when we actually had long summer breaks, I moonlighted for a small management consultancy. I was so naive, that I reported back to the boss after a few days on an early assignment, that I didn't know what to recommend to him (the boss) to advise the client. He laughed and said, "You don't understand! The client has always already decided what to do. He employs us to give him good reasons for doing it, so your job is to go back there tomorrow and find out what he has already decided."
They were playing what I now call Franklin's Gambit, after the American polymath Benjamin Franklin. He wrote: 'so convenient a thing is it to be a reasonable creature since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.'
Today I was approached over the net by an overseas researcher seeking the views of academics on the various competing taxonomies of education objectives, helpfully accompanied by a handout summarising the models he was investigating. Some were familiar, and there were two I had never heard heard of; most were horrendously complicated. They were just unmanageable, and I couldn't imagine anyone actually using them. I thought, "these are not designed to be used. Despite appearances, the only person (if anyone) who got anything out of these was the person who designed them." That is not to say that the exercise of designing them was not useful, as a way of clarifying the designers' thoughts--it's just not directly communicable to other people.
I'm an unregenerate builder of conceptual models; my Doceo site is full of more or less half-baked ones, which people do occasionally tell me are useful, but I do try to keep them simple, with a focused and limited range of convenience.
...but even then, I suspect that most of even those are employed in the service of Franklin's Gambit--just seeking a legitimation for what someone was going to do anyway.
Which rather puts most educational theory in its place.
So now I've got to work out how to respond to 29 Likert-scale questions on learning taxonomies...
28 January 2012
On "Borgen"
I've just emerged from watching another two hours of Borgen on BBC4. It's possibly even better than the West Wing, principally because as a few critics have pointed out, Danish politics are more intimate and personal than the vast US stage.
Danish politics? After the Killing and of course Hamlet a while ago, that seam must be exhausted, surely? Far from it, but I am interested in just what compels me to commit two hours on a Saturday night to watching a pair of episodes (incidentally, one episode at a time is a feast; please don't force-feed us). And it is a compulsion. I did have a couple of other things to do this evening, but I didn't do them. I did not even open this infernal machine while it was on.
Partly that was because it demanded my full attention because it is subtitled (although there are occasional disorientating moments of perfect unaccented English). I could not let my visual attention wander and rely on background hearing to make sense of what was going on, so for example, checking email while watching is not an option. Similarly, but more surprisingly, muting the sound and relying on the sub-titles just does not work for some reason. The content is in the subtitles, but the paralanguage is on the soundtrack and the main visuals.---That is the takeaway point from a teaching perspective, but;--
It has lots of other things going for it... It's rather late to pick up many of the themes by now, but 80% of each episode stands on its own.
Just a pity if you missed the reason why Kasper is such a lying s**t. That didn't need subtitles, and I've never seen anything like it, but it was brilliantly both discreetly graphic and could not have offended any naive viewer. It does relate to this recent post.
Danish politics? After the Killing and of course Hamlet a while ago, that seam must be exhausted, surely? Far from it, but I am interested in just what compels me to commit two hours on a Saturday night to watching a pair of episodes (incidentally, one episode at a time is a feast; please don't force-feed us). And it is a compulsion. I did have a couple of other things to do this evening, but I didn't do them. I did not even open this infernal machine while it was on.
Partly that was because it demanded my full attention because it is subtitled (although there are occasional disorientating moments of perfect unaccented English). I could not let my visual attention wander and rely on background hearing to make sense of what was going on, so for example, checking email while watching is not an option. Similarly, but more surprisingly, muting the sound and relying on the sub-titles just does not work for some reason. The content is in the subtitles, but the paralanguage is on the soundtrack and the main visuals.---That is the takeaway point from a teaching perspective, but;--
It has lots of other things going for it... It's rather late to pick up many of the themes by now, but 80% of each episode stands on its own.
Just a pity if you missed the reason why Kasper is such a lying s**t. That didn't need subtitles, and I've never seen anything like it, but it was brilliantly both discreetly graphic and could not have offended any naive viewer. It does relate to this recent post.
Items to Share (28 January)
The Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips
"On the Mechanics of Choice"; good summary article on the psychology of decision-making
A perceptive but sceptical discussion of Apple's further forays into the education market, raising again whether technology and education are on divergent paths.
Is this a game-changer? MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency.
Vindicated! The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance (review article)
Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking
It's been a slow week, but this is daftly delightful and even uplifting--even if you are not a Doctor Who fan! (15 mins)
...and forfeiting all intellectual gravitas, watch this on the Canadian space programme. (1:30)
"On the Mechanics of Choice"; good summary article on the psychology of decision-making
A perceptive but sceptical discussion of Apple's further forays into the education market, raising again whether technology and education are on divergent paths.
Is this a game-changer? MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency.
Vindicated! The Power of Introverts: A Manifesto for Quiet Brilliance (review article)
Cambridge Nights: Late Night TV-Style Show Takes Deep Look at Scientific Thinking
It's been a slow week, but this is daftly delightful and even uplifting--even if you are not a Doctor Who fan! (15 mins)
...and forfeiting all intellectual gravitas, watch this on the Canadian space programme. (1:30)
26 January 2012
On abuse undetected for years
The story is here. A teacher at a primary school in Somerset was convicted today of 36 counts of the sexual abuse of children during his 15 years of employment at the school, many of them taking place during classes, and despite concern having been expressed by colleagues on thirty occasions. The head teacher has been dismissed.
How could that happen? All too easily. I wrote in a similar area here. In view of some of the comments I received on that post (now deleted, of course) I want to be clear that I am not making excuses for anyone and still less condoning child abuse.
Several times in my career I have come close to having to report abuse, of elderly people and people with learning disabilities and mental health issues as well as children. I'm relieved to say that I have never had to make the call because someone else more closely involved has beaten me to it. Once I decided not to make the call, and it appears that I made the right judgment, although...
I have also been on the fringes of many cases, talking to social workers and others about their experiences. And in a different capacity as a teacher trainer, I have sat in on many many "safeguarding" training sessions.
I do know the ropes, both in policy and principle, and in practice.
Cut to the chase... the reporting system is misconceived. It's a top-down idealised model. Whoever you are, if you have suspicions of abuse, report to your supervisor.
That is the worst possible scenario...
The matter needs to be taken out of their hands.
However fallible our social workers are (and of course by the nature of their task they get no publicity for their unsung achievements, just their disasters) they've been there before. They are pretty good at sorting through malicious referrals, deluded suspicions, reasonable concerns, serious cases, and emergencies. Referrals do not faze them. They can do proportionate responses, discreet investigations, re-assurance of reluctant victims and families
Good grief! I've got a positive proposal!
So the safeguarding/reporting procedures need to be changed. Regardless of what you are taught: If you suspect abuse,
Many years ago I taught on a continuing professional development course on pastoral care for teachers. During the coffee break, one of them took me aside and sought advice about one of her pupils, who (she believed) was being abused at home. I explained the formal procedure, but she stopped me,"I know all that, but, if I pass this on, she'll end up in care--and I've seen what happens to children in care--her chances in life will be blighted. And if I don't, she'll continue to be abused, and learn that there is no point telling anyone because nothing happens..."
It's always a difficult call.
How could that happen? All too easily. I wrote in a similar area here. In view of some of the comments I received on that post (now deleted, of course) I want to be clear that I am not making excuses for anyone and still less condoning child abuse.
Several times in my career I have come close to having to report abuse, of elderly people and people with learning disabilities and mental health issues as well as children. I'm relieved to say that I have never had to make the call because someone else more closely involved has beaten me to it. Once I decided not to make the call, and it appears that I made the right judgment, although...
I have also been on the fringes of many cases, talking to social workers and others about their experiences. And in a different capacity as a teacher trainer, I have sat in on many many "safeguarding" training sessions.
I do know the ropes, both in policy and principle, and in practice.
Cut to the chase... the reporting system is misconceived. It's a top-down idealised model. Whoever you are, if you have suspicions of abuse, report to your supervisor.
That is the worst possible scenario...
- Your supervisor is your boss. An abuse report is the last thing she wants to hear--so unless you have a group of supporters (who may well evaporate at the least sign of opposition), you are not going to approach. It is not a good career move.
- Because the boss may refer it up the line to her boss, but despite the formal procedures, boss1 is in the same position to boss2 as you are to boss1. Follow?
- Regardless of the number of stages before external action is taken, the default action at each stage is of course denial: "It's probably all a misunderstanding/mistake/personal issue/ will sort itself out..."
- And the longer that goes on, the worse will be the consequences if there is an inquiry, so cognitive dissonance sets in...
The matter needs to be taken out of their hands.
However fallible our social workers are (and of course by the nature of their task they get no publicity for their unsung achievements, just their disasters) they've been there before. They are pretty good at sorting through malicious referrals, deluded suspicions, reasonable concerns, serious cases, and emergencies. Referrals do not faze them. They can do proportionate responses, discreet investigations, re-assurance of reluctant victims and families
Good grief! I've got a positive proposal!
So the safeguarding/reporting procedures need to be changed. Regardless of what you are taught: If you suspect abuse,
- first report it to the NSPCC (the organisation is far from perfect, but it is accessible and ubiquitous and not in hock to any local interests), and
- then to your boss.
Many years ago I taught on a continuing professional development course on pastoral care for teachers. During the coffee break, one of them took me aside and sought advice about one of her pupils, who (she believed) was being abused at home. I explained the formal procedure, but she stopped me,"I know all that, but, if I pass this on, she'll end up in care--and I've seen what happens to children in care--her chances in life will be blighted. And if I don't, she'll continue to be abused, and learn that there is no point telling anyone because nothing happens..."
It's always a difficult call.
21 January 2012
On the journal scam (ctd.)
Following on from this earlier post; there is a protest here from someone much closer to the situation than me.
[Up-date 26.02.12] More.
[Up-date 26.02.12] More.
Items to share (21 January)
- ...and here on normal and formal language. I'm an ironic formalist; I know the "rules" and sometimes decide to break them (as does Pullum). It's not the same as not knowing the (sensible) ones.
- Lecture by Nassim Nicholas Taleb on impact of failures within systems; one of the few people who seems to see systems as they are, rather than as we would like to believe them to be.
- Be careful; there are 191 answers to this year's Edge question, and will take a l-o-n-g time to get through them.
- We know crows are bright, but who would have thought they went in for snowboarding? Thanks to Ben Goldacre for the link
- Need to write an article in a hurry? Send for Pootwattle.
"Maslow had a nobler humanity in mind than the one our cult of the self produces in barbaric multitudes. [...] The prospect of a race of moral giants has issued in a breed of selfish twerps, with a sizeable proportion of genuine degenerates. How the highest democratic longing — to realize the best in one’s nature — has been debased into a pervasive complacency, even a widespread monstrosity, is more than an interesting question in intellectual history; it is a grave and ongoing public catastrophe."
- V S Ramachandran's quick tour of some of the most intriguing case studies revealing the powerful, adaptive potential of the human brain.
19 January 2012
On disclosure
Yet again I have been asked about my presence (or rather lack of it) on Facebook and Twitter, and Google+ and LinkedIn and... I'm not going to go in to all the details about what such sites expect one to disclose about oneself; it's all old hat. That isn't my problem.
My problem is about imposing on other people. I did sign up for Facebook some time ago, and obviously clicked some buttons without reading the small print, as 99% of users presumably do. It then proceeded to "invite" all my gmail contact to be my "friends" --I've been on the receiving end of this too many times to mention, and so I know how much of an imposition it is, not to mention the implied snub in refusing to "friend" someone. (The usual verb in the real world is "befriend"--that does have its dark side, too, but its paradigmatic relationship is rather richer than this impoverished online version.) I then spent over an hour crafting, pasting and editing dozens of apologies to them. Actually, it did bring some people to mind whom I had neglected, but that did not make up for my unintended imposition.
LinkedIn I can understand. It's about networking and business and work. I just don't respond because I'm semi-retired. I'm interested in doing things for people who are sufficiently interested in me to seek me out--which ain't difficult because there is a contact link at the bottom of all my web-pages. I'm no longer in the business of promoting myself, but I can see it makes sense.
But there is a degree of arrogance in other social networking sites, an assumption that other people will be interested in me and the minutiae of my life, to the extent that I can push it at them. It fits with and feeds off the inanities of "celebrity culture". To a certain extent writing a blog buys into the same idea, of course, so I'm already guilty, but I'm not going to compound the offence.
I suspect--although I can't see how to test this--that there is an inverse correlation between the interestingness (horrible clumsy word, but I can't find precise synonyms) of a person and their compulsion to project themselves to a diffuse cloud of acquaintance on the net. Up-dating a defined community of family, friends and colleagues is a different matter, of course. Even so, I'd rather be selective and incremental--it's about interaction and conversation rather than broadcasting.
No, Google+ circles are not the answer, although a tiny crawl in the right direction.
I've bored you long enough. Should I send this?
My problem is about imposing on other people. I did sign up for Facebook some time ago, and obviously clicked some buttons without reading the small print, as 99% of users presumably do. It then proceeded to "invite" all my gmail contact to be my "friends" --I've been on the receiving end of this too many times to mention, and so I know how much of an imposition it is, not to mention the implied snub in refusing to "friend" someone. (The usual verb in the real world is "befriend"--that does have its dark side, too, but its paradigmatic relationship is rather richer than this impoverished online version.) I then spent over an hour crafting, pasting and editing dozens of apologies to them. Actually, it did bring some people to mind whom I had neglected, but that did not make up for my unintended imposition.
LinkedIn I can understand. It's about networking and business and work. I just don't respond because I'm semi-retired. I'm interested in doing things for people who are sufficiently interested in me to seek me out--which ain't difficult because there is a contact link at the bottom of all my web-pages. I'm no longer in the business of promoting myself, but I can see it makes sense.
But there is a degree of arrogance in other social networking sites, an assumption that other people will be interested in me and the minutiae of my life, to the extent that I can push it at them. It fits with and feeds off the inanities of "celebrity culture". To a certain extent writing a blog buys into the same idea, of course, so I'm already guilty, but I'm not going to compound the offence.
I suspect--although I can't see how to test this--that there is an inverse correlation between the interestingness (horrible clumsy word, but I can't find precise synonyms) of a person and their compulsion to project themselves to a diffuse cloud of acquaintance on the net. Up-dating a defined community of family, friends and colleagues is a different matter, of course. Even so, I'd rather be selective and incremental--it's about interaction and conversation rather than broadcasting.
No, Google+ circles are not the answer, although a tiny crawl in the right direction.
I've bored you long enough. Should I send this?
16 January 2012
On journals (and Pozzo and Lucky...)
I wrote recently about the arrogance of the publishers of academic journals. I have to declare that I have now heard from the real human editor of the journal in question, who took the trouble to write personally to apologise for the form letters from the publishers, and who is probably as put upon as the rest of us...
And today I came across this piece, which speaks for itself.
But it reminds me of one of the most bizarre incidents of my academic career.
It was a warm summer afternoon in the mid-'90s. My colleague and I were sitting on folding chairs on the grass outside our building near the campus entrance discussing something or other.
A man in an unseasonable heavy black overcoat came by, followed by his associate/assistant/servant/slave who was pulling a very large trolley case. Initially black overcoat asked for directions to Reception, but he had no clear idea of whom he wanted to see or details of any appointment, and being rather cravenly polite and not having a door to shut in his face, we allowed him to state his proposition/pitch.
(If you are familiar with Waiting for Godot, Pozzo and Lucky are the best parallels.)
Briefly, he wanted us to sign up PhD students from the Arabian Gulf area. He was not particularly interested in our areas of expertise or research, although when I referred to social sciences, he suggested that a Deputy Chief of Police in one of the Emirates would be an ideal candidate for me to "supervise". He was a little disappointed that we had no expertise on campus in chemical engineering--to his ?credit, my father's and brother's background in that field was not sufficient for him to point students my way...
The deal was that his clients would sign up for a part-time overseas doctoral programme with us. We would not have to do anything except process the proposal and the assessment. All the supervision could be arranged locally. For the viva (defense) the supervisor and external examiner (and companions) would be flown out to the Gulf and accommodated at 5* level, and would then be keynote speakers at a major conference to celebrate the award (for which a suitable fee would be arranged payable to the individuals rather than the institutions) extended to a two-week vacation, courtesy of /not clear/you don't need to know/.
The trolley-case was full of theses, and glossy commemorative volumes of the "conferences" including pictures and profiles of UK supervisors and mentors. (I never bothered to check up on them.)
And bound volumes of journals, with respectable titles such as those listed in the link above. All of them, Mr Overcoat was keen to stress, have ISSN numbers (as if that guaranteed academic respectability. I don't know if Viz comic has got one, but it could have). He could guarantee acceptance of papers in such journals, and even recommend us for the editorial boards or even editorships...
We accepted his business card, but explained that the registration process was a little more complex than that, and after an hour or so, he took the hint.
...and asked for directions to Cambridge...
And today I came across this piece, which speaks for itself.
But it reminds me of one of the most bizarre incidents of my academic career.
It was a warm summer afternoon in the mid-'90s. My colleague and I were sitting on folding chairs on the grass outside our building near the campus entrance discussing something or other.
A man in an unseasonable heavy black overcoat came by, followed by his associate/assistant/servant/slave who was pulling a very large trolley case. Initially black overcoat asked for directions to Reception, but he had no clear idea of whom he wanted to see or details of any appointment, and being rather cravenly polite and not having a door to shut in his face, we allowed him to state his proposition/pitch.
(If you are familiar with Waiting for Godot, Pozzo and Lucky are the best parallels.)
Briefly, he wanted us to sign up PhD students from the Arabian Gulf area. He was not particularly interested in our areas of expertise or research, although when I referred to social sciences, he suggested that a Deputy Chief of Police in one of the Emirates would be an ideal candidate for me to "supervise". He was a little disappointed that we had no expertise on campus in chemical engineering--to his ?credit, my father's and brother's background in that field was not sufficient for him to point students my way...
The deal was that his clients would sign up for a part-time overseas doctoral programme with us. We would not have to do anything except process the proposal and the assessment. All the supervision could be arranged locally. For the viva (defense) the supervisor and external examiner (and companions) would be flown out to the Gulf and accommodated at 5* level, and would then be keynote speakers at a major conference to celebrate the award (for which a suitable fee would be arranged payable to the individuals rather than the institutions) extended to a two-week vacation, courtesy of /not clear/you don't need to know/.
The trolley-case was full of theses, and glossy commemorative volumes of the "conferences" including pictures and profiles of UK supervisors and mentors. (I never bothered to check up on them.)
And bound volumes of journals, with respectable titles such as those listed in the link above. All of them, Mr Overcoat was keen to stress, have ISSN numbers (as if that guaranteed academic respectability. I don't know if Viz comic has got one, but it could have). He could guarantee acceptance of papers in such journals, and even recommend us for the editorial boards or even editorships...
We accepted his business card, but explained that the registration process was a little more complex than that, and after an hour or so, he took the hint.
...and asked for directions to Cambridge...
14 January 2012
Items to share (14 January)
Rather a fallow week this week.
- Delightful animation--you can't do this with a Kindle!
- What's the difference between a "neat" idea and a "brilliant" one? Or a "weird" one and a "terrible" one? Explore here.
- I'm currently working further on rubbishing the notion of reflection. According to research pointed to in my piece on that, "grit" is a more reliable indicator for success as a teacher than any capacity for reflection; here is a TED talk on grit.
- Late addition; if you despair about young people and their education, watch this. OK--these young women are exceptional, by definition, but the comment stream is also interesting.
08 January 2012
Items to share (7 January)
- A murmuration of starlings (thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the link)
- Here are Stuart Kauffman's new year thoughts, always worth reading, and actually quoting Gordon Brown with approval (in a tiny way).
1) Not only do you not know what will happen, you don't even know what can happen [...]. Then reason, dream of our Enlightenment, is an insufficient guide to living your life. We need reason, emotion, intuition, sensation, knowledge of our culture and our evolved humanity. 2) Because you do not know what can happen you cannot make normal probability statements about what you cannot know: [...]. (So management from the top as if you knew and could optimize is often deeply wrong). 3) Radical emergence occurs all the time, Turing machine to the Web to Google, Facebook and the Arab Spring.
- Lord Sacks (the Chief Rabbi) argues cogently on the Limits of Secularism.
- If you want to know how people go about thinking through courses from the bottom up, using experience, theories, coincidences, epiphanies... then read this piece by Paul Maharg on designing a graduate diploma in law. There's at least a term's work in it!
- Francis Fukuyama on the virtues of analogue media.
- At the nominating session for the American Dialect Society 2011 Word of the Year, Geoff Pullum made "a strong case for his favorite word of the year, assholocracy." (Thanks to Language Log)
- An excellent debate on the "flipped classroom" model--the article is just the stimulus, the quality is in the comments (for once!)
- ...and the Royal Institution Christmas lectures, on the brain, by Bruce Hood, are now on line.
04 January 2012
On phasing out feedback.
Thanks once again to Bruno Setola for putting me on to this very interesting take on feedback (and I can recommend his site for some interesting further work on TCs).
This is an invited lecture (the whole video is 88 minutes) from Royce Sadler of the Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Brisbane, given for the WriteNow Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and organised by Liverpool Hope University in May 2010.
At first sight Sadler directly contradicts Hattie's major finding from his meta-analysis--which is in itself interesting enough to make him worth listening to. But there is more to his approach than that, bearing in mind that he is talking about the assessment of complex learning among university students, rather than for example the development of simpler skills among children.
The abstract is here. I am not going to cover the entire lecture, but to give pointers to some of the most interesting parts of the argument below the video:
(The video starts with introductory remarks by Lin Norton and Bart McGettrick. The numbers are the time index from the very start of the video. Numbers in [square brackets] refer to my notes at the end.)
[1] It's not only students. This is a little-mentioned feature of involving less-experienced colleagues, such as postgrads (and here), practice supervisors and mentors in the assessment process. They may be highly- experienced as practitioners, but not as assessors. A course on which I work matches each student with a work-place based mentor, who receives some training and undertakes some direct assessment of teaching, among other duties. But many mentors only work with one student, and often have fallow years with none at all. They will undertake just four formal observations with each student over two years--and those may well be the only occasions they use the observation protocol. The tutors do dozens or scores of observations every year, and develop a common approach to making judgements, but we can never be sure that mentors have had a chance to internalise those standards. No--you can't address the issue with more reams of spurious "guidance"...
[3] He is of course helping them to develop their own frame of reference, and capacity to notice factors germane to the quality of the piece. But I wonder how he learned this bit? I was asked a few years ago to contribute to a staff development event on "Assessment on Taught Master's Courses", a joint enterprise between two universities. I devised an exercise which was almost identical to Sadler's except that the participants were themselves experienced tutors and assessors at Master's level--and it ground to an embarrassing halt when they all claimed they could not judge how good the samples were without the rubrics and criteria to guide them. I felt very remiss for not having provided them, and--even worse--unprofessional, because I know what I am looking for, and the qualities and trade-offs to notice. I suspect now that they felt them same but could not admit it in front of their peers. I feel a little vindicated that Sadler adopts the same approach.
There is something similar underpinning this piece by Gary Klein--in quite a different context!
This is an invited lecture (the whole video is 88 minutes) from Royce Sadler of the Griffith Institute for Higher Education, Griffith University, Brisbane, given for the WriteNow Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching, and organised by Liverpool Hope University in May 2010.
At first sight Sadler directly contradicts Hattie's major finding from his meta-analysis--which is in itself interesting enough to make him worth listening to. But there is more to his approach than that, bearing in mind that he is talking about the assessment of complex learning among university students, rather than for example the development of simpler skills among children.
The abstract is here. I am not going to cover the entire lecture, but to give pointers to some of the most interesting parts of the argument below the video:
(The video starts with introductory remarks by Lin Norton and Bart McGettrick. The numbers are the time index from the very start of the video. Numbers in [square brackets] refer to my notes at the end.)
- 25:45 Sadler argues that feedback is over-rated, and outlines the basic argument.
- 35:00 Writing feedback on students' assessment tasks is both demanding and time-consuming for the marker, so we are entitled to ask about the return on investment of this activity. Many students don't even pick up their work after marking, still less read the comments, still less learn from them...
- 37:30 The basic problem is that giving feedback is about telling students what the problems are and how they might improve; we no longer think that the "transmission" model is a good way of teaching content, so why should we think it's a good way of conveying feedback?
- 44:00 Students are rarely familiar enough with the process of marking/grading work to have any idea what actually constitutes quality--a good piece of work--so often what we tell them means nothing to them and they don't know what to do with it. [1]
- 52:00 Accomplished practitioners in all disciplines no longer rely on other people giving them feedback based only on externally determined criteria. They know for themselves;
- When and how to adjust their provisional plans, as they are going along.
- What issues they can ignore; what doesn't matter (and of course what does).
- They notice inconsistencies in their own work, and take steps to correct them as they are going along. [2]
- 58:00 But students do not yet have those skills. So the challenge is how to inculcate them. We have them, based on hours and years of practice in assessing students' work, but that does not mean that we can communicate them.
- 71:30 Sadler describes one approach to developing students' skills in self-monitoring and -assessment in tutorial:
- He gives out a sample piece of submitted work. He asks the students;
- Does it address the task as set?
- Is it any good? (He refuses to set out the criteria for them. [3])
- Why do you say that?
- What advice would you give about how to make it better?
[1] It's not only students. This is a little-mentioned feature of involving less-experienced colleagues, such as postgrads (and here), practice supervisors and mentors in the assessment process. They may be highly- experienced as practitioners, but not as assessors. A course on which I work matches each student with a work-place based mentor, who receives some training and undertakes some direct assessment of teaching, among other duties. But many mentors only work with one student, and often have fallow years with none at all. They will undertake just four formal observations with each student over two years--and those may well be the only occasions they use the observation protocol. The tutors do dozens or scores of observations every year, and develop a common approach to making judgements, but we can never be sure that mentors have had a chance to internalise those standards. No--you can't address the issue with more reams of spurious "guidance"...
[3] He is of course helping them to develop their own frame of reference, and capacity to notice factors germane to the quality of the piece. But I wonder how he learned this bit? I was asked a few years ago to contribute to a staff development event on "Assessment on Taught Master's Courses", a joint enterprise between two universities. I devised an exercise which was almost identical to Sadler's except that the participants were themselves experienced tutors and assessors at Master's level--and it ground to an embarrassing halt when they all claimed they could not judge how good the samples were without the rubrics and criteria to guide them. I felt very remiss for not having provided them, and--even worse--unprofessional, because I know what I am looking for, and the qualities and trade-offs to notice. I suspect now that they felt them same but could not admit it in front of their peers. I feel a little vindicated that Sadler adopts the same approach.
There is something similar underpinning this piece by Gary Klein--in quite a different context!
01 January 2012
On celebrating ignorance
The perpetual cry of all but the semi-mythical intrinsically-motivated student is, "What do we have to learn this for?" Although I do recognise that it is a legitimate question and do try to answer it, on the whole I don't empathise with it.
(And I don't count, "Because it will be in the exam!" as a legitimate response. On the other hand, I'm sometimes hard put to, to think of anything else in the case of some silly syllabi)
I've built what there is of my distinctive career on encountering and exploring resistance to learning, so why am I extolling not learning?
Because there are some areas in which learning really is just loss. There is no ultimate upside.
A good friend once gave me a small cushion embroidered, "Life is too short to drink bad wine". Perhaps. But only if you know that it is "bad". And as this study shows, despite all the hype and bull, nowadays "it's all a matter of taste" is much more significant than so-called authoritative judgements (as reflected in pricing).
Several years ago, I argued slightly differently: why should I learn more about wine, when all that would achieve would be to make me dissatisfied with what I could afford, and spoil my enjoyment? Now it appears that my dissatisfaction would itself be a con!
I have no doubt that there are some people who can tell the difference which warrants pricing some wines higher than others. But is that the same as claiming that some wine is "better" than another? I do remember about twenty or so years ago when it was possible to buy really execrable wines--a judgement which would be shared by almost everyone. But, like the spurious research on IQ differences between various demographic groups, closer investigation apparently shows that nowadays intra-group variability is greater than that between groups; and that comes down to acknowledging that personal taste is what matters.
So--all I might achieve by studying wine-tasting (given that I have no business interest) is to acquire some spurious basis for deprecating some wine which I would previously have greatly enjoyed. In favour of spending a lot more on other stuff of very dubiously demonstrable superior quality? Seems quite pointless.
Happy New Year, and feel free to enjoy cheap wine!
(in moderation, and qualified by all the weasel words of pusillanimous bureaucracy...)
And here is argument/evidence that the emperor's clothing effect may extend to musical instruments, too...
(And I don't count, "Because it will be in the exam!" as a legitimate response. On the other hand, I'm sometimes hard put to, to think of anything else in the case of some silly syllabi)
I've built what there is of my distinctive career on encountering and exploring resistance to learning, so why am I extolling not learning?
Because there are some areas in which learning really is just loss. There is no ultimate upside.
A good friend once gave me a small cushion embroidered, "Life is too short to drink bad wine". Perhaps. But only if you know that it is "bad". And as this study shows, despite all the hype and bull, nowadays "it's all a matter of taste" is much more significant than so-called authoritative judgements (as reflected in pricing).
Several years ago, I argued slightly differently: why should I learn more about wine, when all that would achieve would be to make me dissatisfied with what I could afford, and spoil my enjoyment? Now it appears that my dissatisfaction would itself be a con!
I have no doubt that there are some people who can tell the difference which warrants pricing some wines higher than others. But is that the same as claiming that some wine is "better" than another? I do remember about twenty or so years ago when it was possible to buy really execrable wines--a judgement which would be shared by almost everyone. But, like the spurious research on IQ differences between various demographic groups, closer investigation apparently shows that nowadays intra-group variability is greater than that between groups; and that comes down to acknowledging that personal taste is what matters.
So--all I might achieve by studying wine-tasting (given that I have no business interest) is to acquire some spurious basis for deprecating some wine which I would previously have greatly enjoyed. In favour of spending a lot more on other stuff of very dubiously demonstrable superior quality? Seems quite pointless.
Happy New Year, and feel free to enjoy cheap wine!
(in moderation, and qualified by all the weasel words of pusillanimous bureaucracy...)
And here is argument/evidence that the emperor's clothing effect may extend to musical instruments, too...
31 December 2011
Items to share (31 December)
- Tyler Cowen on stories (transcript of TEDx talk) Kind of interesting talk on the limitations of story construction as a way of thinking, but offered with apparently little grounding in the substantial literature apart from Booker, 2005* (which is odd given Cowen's reputation as a voracious reader), so just an introduction. You can watch the video here, but it is out of sync so it is almost unwatchable.
- On the less-than-obvious connection between photographs and the real world.
- Frozen Planet's brinicle sequence explained Incredible dedication and effort and stunning results; but was it actually worth it? Discuss. (Some of these links are courtesy of Ed Yong's excellent Not Exactly Rocket Science blog. Many thanks!)
- The psychologists' vow. For good measure, external examiners also take a vow to express concern over the quality of referencing...
- And the inexplicable German New Year tradition of Dinner for One:
* Booker C (2005) The Seven Basic Plots: why we tell stories London; Continuum
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