On emotional aspects of learning

This deserves more than simply a blog entry, but starting with this may prompt me to something more substantial in the future. With the exceptions of Illeris (2004), Salzberger-Wittenberg et al (1983?) and Willie More back in 1977-ish, and my occasional references, this is a sorely neglected issue.

Two prompts today; I stood in for P. to do a session for 3rd-year undergrads on "e-learning" on the "Adult Learners and Learning" module. It was rather a lacklustre performance, I confess. I had a lot of material but limited acquaintance with the group, and although they did the brain-storming* exercise very well—sufficiently well to render some of my prepared material irrelevant (thank goodness, I'd have hated to spell it all out). Still, one point which was missing was about the limits of social and emotional support available for learners on-line.

Even ordinary "additive" learning (as opposed to the "supplantive" learning I have researched) can be frustrating and exhausting, and as well as the importance of feedback (which the students picked up on), simple encouragement is very important. Impersonal on-line responses don't really cut the mustard on that count.

The second prompt was really close to home. I do not like the layout of this blog, so I have been trying to edit the template, with guidance from a tutorial in .net magazine. After two hours, I gave up. I could just about understand the html/xml markup involved, by dint of very careful reading, but there was just too much of it. I played with some of it but it had unpredictable results.

• So I got "fed up" and decided it was just too complicated to bother with. I may return to it later (it's the diffference between its display in different browsers which really bugs me, although you probably couldn't care less).

That's trivial, but the general issue of frustration at not understanding, or of being overwhelmed by how much there is to learn, or lack of confidence that it will ever be mastered—it's all a very potent demotivator for our students.

Partly it is a matter of timing. I am a motivated learner (or at least problem-solver) in this area, and I am also used to long-term learning projects (see here for more on this than you may want to know) but I need to know that I am making progress. As it was, everything I did seemed to take me backwards. So I got frustrated and gave up. It's normal, but its implications are considerable, and often neglected.

So you are stuck with this clunky page design for a while yet! In particular, why does it just refer to the dates of the posts and not to their subjects? I'll sort it one day, but I've had enough for the moment.

Footnote:

*Some PC people seem to think that "brain-storming" is an unacceptable term. I gather that is not so according to a National Epilepsy Society survey; it is after all a positive and creative activity.

On online surveys

This has little to do with teaching and learning, but a great deal to do with the credibility of on-line surveys (and hence with research methods).

I recently signed up with a survey company in order to manage a questionnaire to former students (which proved to be more problematic than I had anticipated, but that's another story). The signing up process included asking me whether I would like to earn money by responding to on-line surveys. I was a little intrigued, so I said yes.

Today I received the first request to participate. It proved to be a market "research" survey about chocolate and other snacks. I answered honestly, only to get to the end to get a message (sorry, I should have copied and pasted the wording) which said in effect that I was not the kind of person they wanted answers from! (So I would not get any credits for answering.)

From a methodological point of view, sampling from that small subset of consumers who sign up to respond to such surveys is very dubious in the first place (given that they in turn are a small subset of net-savvy people, who are in turn a small subset of the population --however defined--at large). But effectively throwing away answers which do not suit is the unforgivable methodological sin.

OK—they were only interested in regular consumers of chocolate bars and crisps and their preferences, andbut I buy them vary rarely. (I always buy a multi-pack of crisps at Christmas for some reason and then throw most of them away the next Christmas because I've just bought another pack... why?) But how legitimate is sampling from net-savvy, money-motivated geeks? Only if it can be demonstrated that those "qualities" are independently correlated with product consumption. Has that test ever been done? Who knows? I do know that I read the results of some very strange polls in .net magazine; I don't believe a word (or statistic) of them, but some credulous marketing executive might.

So what? That's their problem. I want valid and reliable research; trust me, I'm an academic!

On a familiar assignment

A correspondent today asked about a familiar assignment on teacher education courses. He was asked to take a recent teaching session and to relate it to the learning theories he had been learning about (in this case within a thousand words). It's a sufficiently common assignment, although one which I have come to believe unhelpful, to pass on my response (with additions);

I replied:

• "I've set exercises and assignments like this in the past (although not in 1k words!) From the tutors' point of view it seems like a good idea, encouraging reflection and application and the like. Unfortunately, the results are almost invariably disappointing, and that is not the fault of the students. It is because the assignment is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about the relationship between theory and practice.
• Practice is a "blooming, buzzing confusion". It's multi-dimensional; it's protean; it's not repeatable; it's fragile--it always teeters on a knife-edge between success and disaster... And theory is neat, and almost static, and enshrined in supposingly authoritative books--and it focuses on just one aspect of everything which is going on in the class.
• In other words, theories have a "range of convenience"; they are good at explaining some things, but have nothing useful to say about others. You cannot teach by applying theories. Gagne is the theorist who was most explicit about attempting to set up a template for lessons, with Ausubel coming up behind; but try to use their ideas to account for a whole session, and all you end up doing is explaining why you didn't follow their prescriptions. Just for fun, you might try applying my "mayonnaise" model (http://www.doceo.co.uk/tools/mayonnaise.htm) and seeing whether that works.
• In terms of the three groups, it's important to note that they are not mutually exclusive. Following the "range of convenience" argument above, most self-respecting teaching will have elements of all three, but probably at different time-scales. Behaviourism is important second-to-second; cognitive theory informs session planning; and humanistic theory informs overall strategy (although of course it has implications down at the second-to second level).OK--now you are even more confused! Console yourself that you are confused at a higher level than before!

But there is more to it than that. The theory is supposed to be descriptive about effective teaching and learning. But we (teacher educators [or even "trainers"]) have made it prescriptive. In a broadly "scientific" framework, theory follows practice or experiment or observation; it does not dictate it. That's dogmatism.

No wonder so many teachers are dismissive of much of their training.

David Hume pointed out that you can't derive an "ought" from an "is" (http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/) Theory in teaching is simply there to direct your attention to things which may not be obvious as you face a class, and to help you to move on from your initial natural preoccupation with your own practice to pay attention to whatever the students are learning.

In the final analysis, I could not care less whether the graduates of our courses can recite the theory, but I do want them to have used it to inform their practice--assuming, of course, that it helps to do that. Sometimes it doesn't. Much recent hoo-ha about "learning styles", for example, has really been counter-productive; see http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/styles.htm but particularly the references at the bottom of the page.

Teaching is a craft, and just as your specification of behavioural learning objectives can never really aspire to create/generate/programme/whatever proficient practitioners in your own discipline, so it is with teacher education. Theory has its place, and it is an important place, but it is the servant of practice and experience.

On practical working myths

I have written elsewhere about "learning styles", and I am sceptical about them, with good reason, according to the (rigorous) literature. However, a correspondent wrote yesterday about her own research into how her own students responded to the introduction of the idea; and her results were overwhelmingly positive. What is one to make of this? This is part of my reply (slightly edited);

I suspect that the issue is about empowerment and focus; regardless of the legitimacy of the VAK (this is one learning style model) idea, it does draw teachers' attention to how students experience learning. Indeed, it can present an empowering myth (quickly, "myth" in my terms is an account in which usefulness takes priority over truth; I wrote about it in a book in 1989 in a different context) which helps teachers to get a handle on their practice.

Further, they experience the presentation of the alternative strategies as more empowering than direct injunctions. For example, one source (sorry, not to hand at the moment) suggests that 38% of learners are primarily kinaesthetic, and a further 30+% are secondarily so. (The research methodology, based on self-selected respondents to a large net survey, is dodgy, and the questions themselves are not above suspicion, but still...) But... If you are a teacher (as you are) presented either with an injunction from on high which says, "Thou shalt make use of active hands-on learning wherever possible." how are you likely to react? "Yeah, OK." seems about right.

But: given the chance to discover exactly the same point through your own action-research and reflection? You will own it. It's your insight. You are more committed to it, and you are more likely to follow through. It's a variation on the placebo effect, I suspect; but the placebo effect is very powerful indeed.

Coffield et al quite rightly make the point that all this "learning styles" stuff has been used by Ofsted and other as a means to dump on teachers responsibility for issues which are actually beyond their control. But there is perhaps another side to this coin; the theory may give teachers a powerful strategy to believe that they are indeed in control.

And it doesn't have to be "true" to do that, as long as you believe it.

On credibility

Last weekend I was at an old friend's 59 364/365 unbirthday party. (In other words, he greeted me at the door with "I'm not sixty yet!") Being 61 1/4 I couldn't see the problem.

His former doctoral supervisor was there. That was really nice; my friend completed his Ph.D 35+ years ago, and he has remained friends with J., his supervisor, ever since.

I've only met J. once before, decades ago. He is a world-class expert on robotics, and had just returned from teaching a short course on it in Biarritz. Technically, he ought to have retired a while ago, but he keeps going and gives the impression of being about a quarter-century younger than he is. Crucially, he is a practitioner in the commercial field, as well as an academic.

However, to the point. He was talking about his experience of teaching, and how much he got out of it. He knew nothing of my interest in this, so his comments were completely unsolicited; I was merely a listener. But reflecting on his regular visits to Biarritz, he commented (I paraphrase, I was not in researcher mode and I don't usually take a recorder to (un)birthday celebrations);

'The thing is, that I can relate my material to practice. I can introduce an equation, and say "this is really important! I've used this so many times in the past, and it has really helped us." and, "now this equation is really elegant; but to be frank, I can't recall every having used it in the past twenty years."'

I could immediately relate to the issue, but I confess I had not realised how important it was in a convergent discipline such as engineering. I'd naively assumed that this was positivistic stuff, where ideas and theories either worked or they didn't; and it was a surprise to find him talking, from vast experience, of the prioritisation of "really useful" ideas, and of how these were validated by his reference to experience.

Having real-life practical hands-on experience to draw on has always been an important factor in my teaching experience, principally because for almost thirty years I was pulling an academic con-trick. I was teaching social workers, without ever having been one myself (although with accumulated classroom experience I could have passed myself of as one, and I did have some voluntary work in relevant areas of practice to fall back on.)

• No, blow the excuses, I was just an academic; I did not know by acquaintance what I was talking about. So I had to fall back on drawing out, and helping to make sense of, my learners' experience. I had authority as a "teacher", but none from experience. On the one hand that made it easy for students (who invariably had some practical experience, because that was a criterion for admission to the courses) to dismiss me; on the other it honed my practice skills in teaching and particularly in listening to them. But if well-grounded practitioners dismissed me as an airy-fairy theoriser, they were probably right to do so.

Now, of course, I teach about teaching; and I've really been there, done that, and learned from it. Perhaps that was the greatest relief in my switch of disciplines, from covert pretence about practice to real experience. But, I hadn't previously realised how potent a factor it was in less emotionally charged disciplines. It made sense when someone asked, "Have you ever had to take a child into care, and away from her parents?" or "Have you ever sectioned anyone under the Mental Health Act?" because I was well aware of the emotional turmoil involved. To discover that the ability to refer to personal experience carried as much weight in engineering was quite a revelation.

An ESOL teaching Journal

More for language teachers; this is a useful reflective blog on teaching ESOL, but at fairly advanced levels addressing issues of pronunciation and prosody. It helps if you know that "IPA" stands for "International Phonetic Alphabet".

On learning to distrust experience

(Apologies, Jim. This was originally a post just to you, but on reflection I thought this edited version might be of more general interest, and I'm into "reusable learning objects". Wonder if it will get any comments?)

What students learn by default in what we call the education "system" is distrust of their own experience. I remember, in the '50s, doing science experiments at school in what was of course then a seriously under-funded system (but I don't think funding has changed it much). The experiments always came out "wrong" (OK, chemistry experiments were more reliable, but physics stuff never worked because all the equipment was worn out); so we did them and wrote them up, and then the teachers told us what ought to have happened, and the results we should have got. The scientific method was turned on its head! So what we learned was that really that science was what the teachers told us it was, and any efforts on our part to test the hypotheses were bound to fail. What kind of message was that? Precisely the message that our schools and universities are now set up to convey.

In the '60s, I kid myself that I could have got a 1st (rather than my 2:1) if I had actually been able to read what the literary critics said about the works we were set to read. As it was, I was arrogant enough to rely on my own reactions to the primary texts; but more to the point, lit. crit. was and remains quite incomprehensible to me. Lord knows how I should fare on present-day courses!***

I'm complicit. I have just done some marking of assignments which require student teachers to draw upon their own (often extensive) experience, and I have complained in more than half of the cases that they do not do sufficient justice to the literature (despite good accounts of their practice, which are critical, analytic and reflective). Why should they? Much of what passes for "literature" (i.e. what someone has managed to get past an editor and much-vaunted "peer review") is trite rubbish, saying little about the subject, but more about the writers ("I'm an academic--I'm determined to be noticed!" [By whom?]) or their situation (it's publish or be damned in UK universities today, with the Research Assessment Exercise 2008 looming.)

Academe has always been a game. Cornford (1908) (yes, the date is correct) set it all out in bitter detail, including this little gem which I happened to find on the web while searching for the date;

The Principle of the Dangerous Precedent is that you should not now do an admittedly right action for fear you, or your equally timid successors, should not have the courage to do right in some future case....Every public action which is not customary either is wrong, or, if it is right, it is a dangerous precedent. It follows that nothing should ever be done for the first time.

(From his wonderfully astringent "Microcosmographica Academica") It's worthy of Sir Humphrey! (Character in the sitcoms "Yes, Minister" and "Yes, Prime Minister" -- in fact I half-remember that he quotes this gem.) I actually (tongue-in-cheek) wrote something to this effect on someone's essay.

The bottom line of the hidden curricula in so many courses is--"don't think for yourself!" and unless somebody else said it first and got it published, it doesn't count. Frightening!

So once most students escape from this game (apart from those who go on to be academics, who think that the game is the same as "life") they are firmly and surely inoculated against both original thought and testing against evidence.

Dick Cheney may have a problem with his aim. Academics' aim is better; they are firmly aligned on their own feet.

Now I'm going to take something for my dyspepsia!

***Actually, I'm kidding myself. I might still not have got a first, but I really blew it because I did not read the rubric on my very last paper in finals which told us to answer four questions, rather than the three required on all the preceding twelve papers. Am I bitter? Forty years on? Yes!

On "A Word In Your Ear:"

This could get incestuous, but I'm apparently not the only person concerned about levels of HE teacher-training; this blog is well worth following (and that's not only because he says nice things about me—although it does help—flattery is not common currency in our world.) Jonathan has a more specific subject focus than I do, and whatever your own subject, it's interesting to hear about how things look from that angle; it may not be so different in engineering, or history, or...

There are links to other HE blogs on my "About this blog" page (lick on the logo at top-left), but given the ferment in the sector, we are under-represented (probably because most people are too knackered to spend the time). Still, if I have missed one, let me know.

On listening to lectures (again)

Building on Wednesday's posting;

The Times Higher Education Supplement (THES) carried an article today on Richard Sennett. (Sorry I can't point you directly to the article, it's in the "Subscription only" area; but you can get a sense of his ideas from Laurie Taylor's "Thinking Allowed" programme on BBC Radio 4 of 18 January, including a chance to listen to whole thing. It is well worth listening to.)

However, the article starts, painstakingly re-typed as a short quotation which does not I think violate copyright (hey, I care about mine, I respect others);

'Just after Richard Sennett arrived in the UK in 1999 [...] he got his first introduction to British bureaucracy in the form of a teaching quality officer* [who] sat in on a lecture on Max Weber and [...] seemed to be busy writing throughout. Sennett later found out that the officer was ticking boxes for the number of times he made eye contact in the lecture. When Sennett later asked the officer what he felt he had learned about Weber from the lecture, the officer said that he was not interested in Weber. "The content was not important, just the process," Sennett says.'

GARNER M (2006) "'Craftsmanship' is laid low by quick-fix fever"
Times Higher Education Supplement 10 February 2006 (No. 1,729) p. 18

[* "Teaching quality officer" sounds like a QA commissar; I'm almost certain that, particularly at the LSE, this is something of an overstatement. And, for what it's worth, eye-contact in lectures does matter, as I have noted earlier in this blog; but the point is still well-made.]

We'll come back to that. However, today I discovered (not before time) the virtues of the "Blank" (sometimes "Black") button on the remote control for the data projector. It simply shuts down the projected image, and it is liberating! It overcomes quite a lot of my objections to the use of presentation packages in lectures. There are other ways of achieving the same effect, but not as simply and elegantly; I hope your kit has got a similar facility.

That set me thinking about writing a page, which I may do shortly, on the sensitive use of presentation package techniques ("ppt" -- any resemblance to a certain trademarked Microsoft file extension is entirely intentional, but you can get just as impressive results from OpenOffice, which is free, and you can even save the results as ".ppt" files—rant over).

But reflection often rambles, and in this case the article and the eye-contact point and ppt came together. I had noticed the eye-contact issue in a teaching session where I could not understand the language much of the time; so my mind was highly focused on the process rather than the content. On the other hand, I do observe many teaching sessions (as a teacher-educator) where I find it hard to concentrate on the process because the content is so interesting; in fact, it is a good marker for a good session that the process slips out of my attention**)

And so, (I have finally got to the point) I do sometimes find myself able to empathise with the students. And ppt often sends many of the wrong messages. I'm not quite as convinced as Edward Tufte that "Powerpoint(tm) is evil!" but I can see his point, from the receiving end. Imagine sitting there (as a student) in the lecture theatre being bombarded with an inexorable barrage of bullet points. You will eventually think, "Gee, there is so much to know about this stuff", and "I have to remember this!" So your naive aspirations as a student to understand the subject are driven into the ground by the pile-driver of (apparently essential) "facts". Most of them, of course, are not "facts". They are mainly the lecturer's cues about what to talk about next, but she thought it would help the students to flag them all; after all, aren't "visual aids" desirable? Yes, but...

On Wednesday, I would have appreciated a few markers as to where we were in the argument, but the argument was what mattered, much more than the individual components of the evidence, and Trevor Phillips knew that. Using ppt to flag every stage and every point is in danger of of devaluing the whole in favour of the parts—and then we complain about "surface learning". It's not the whole story, but in some measure we asked for it!

** I have only once actively slipped out of role as an observer, though. I was observing a really good Access class at a college, when the teacher (my student) referred to the work of Roy Nash on how self-fulfilling prophecies and labelling processes happened in the classroom (mid '70s); I had actually been present at Roy's initial presentation of his work, and it just seemed the right thing to do to pipe up and say so, and to bring alive what might otherwise have been just another dry reference. (Sorry, this research does not show up on a web search.)

On listening to a lecture

I have just returned from attending the annual Gaitskell Memorial Lecture at Nottingham University, given this year by Trevor Phillips.

It prompted thoughts at two levels, neither of them to do directly with its content, which was very impressive, but not part of the remit of this blog. (How often do you get that on a blog? [It does not necessarily set a precedent!])

I was not making notes, so the fact that I recall all this is some testimony to his lecturing style; and he was lecturing rather than speechifying. He respected his audience (mainly academics and their friends); at an early point he referred unapologetically to "Butskellism" (my initial metasearch for the term on the web, qualified with references to Gaitskell, got only seven results) but presumably knew the reference would not be missed by the middle-aged UK academics who constituted (at a rough guess) two-thirds of the audience. The lecture was delivered without any visual aids at all.

The first concerned the simple problem of following a lecture, a point I have made elsewhere. He is a very accomplished speaker; he is after all a former (and occasionally present) broadcaster, and very easy to listen to. He had a few jokes, mainly at the beginning, at his own expense ("Thanks for the introduction. It helps clarify things; I have lost track of the number of times I have stood up to speak and people have been disappointed because they expected the guy who reads the ITV "News at Ten" or more recently, the fellow who advertises the Halifax Bank!") He had interesting new information, and provocative perspectives, and he both illustrated and lightened the tone with anecdotes, such as the one about the multi-racial day-centre in Glasgow which fundamentally worked on women's shared hatred of their daughters-in-law; a great inversion of the mother-in-law joke tradition. The teaching-observation protocol which is (unfortunately) indelibly printed on my brain was filling up with approving ticks.

But I can't sustain attention forever, however interested I am. At one point he referred to a poll which asked people to identify the ethnicity of their twenty closest friends. Afterwards at the reception, someone commented to me, "I lost the argument at that point; I was trying to list my twenty closest friends!" When you lose track of an argument, how do you tune in again?

My mind wanders, and then returns. But what am I listening to, now? I don't know. Is it a major point, or a gloss, anecdote (illustrating what?) or an aside? I am relying purely on auditory material. Trevor, on the other hand, had a script (and this is where it is important for the rest of us) . As an accomplished speaker, he did not so much read it, as use it as a list of cues on which to elaborate. But his script (which I have not of course seen) will have been laid out in paragraphs, and even bullet-points within paragraphs. The level of his points would have been clear to him, but his purely verbal delivery gave no idea to the (momentarily interrupted) listener as to what they were listening to.

At one, early, point (as I recall) he distinguished between under-achievement of ethnic minority people due to discrimination (OK, familiar territory; I used to teach social workers), cultural factors (sit up here; is he--chair of the CRE--going to say it is their own fault?), and systemic factors (what are those? this is a new idea!). So I was primed to hear interesting stuff on the latter two factors. I heard a lot of interesting stuff, but it did not fit with those categories, so I could not organise it.

I am not setting out to demolish a really interesting lecture, by any means; I am just trying to give some indication of how it might have made more impact as a whole, from the point of view of a member of the audience.

(Oh, the second level, too. That was to do with the hidden agenda of how Trevor's comments might be reported. I've said enough already, and this particular issue does not rate highly on the scale for most teachers and lecturers; it's sufficient to say that we were in the presence of a master. I am not being cynical or sarcastic at all, here. I know something of the waters in which he must swim, and they are full of sharks. This was a master-class in how to get the important messages across without offering oneself up to be eaten; but that's not really an issue for this blog.)

On training and education for academics

I have just—checking the clock— spent an hour responding to a new colleague expressing concern about the vagueness of the course he is presently taking on teaching in higher education.

1. I don't want to waste that hour (not that responding to R. would be a waste, but it might be even more useful.
2. His concerns are real and pose interesting questions, so they are worth sharing and inviting wider comment.

Apologies if some of what follows is not entirely clear; it is part of a longer thread, but of course I have no authority to post the rest of it; (it starts by referring to some useful guidance my correspondent had received from a more experienced colleague on how much support one could give undergrads with their assignments.)

"****'s response is useful and helpful at the level of tactics, and represents an appropriate response in teaching a large undergraduate module. And implicitly he makes a very sound point about consistency and fairness in the way in which we deal with student requests for guidance.

On the old MALT, on the other hand, partly because the smaller numbers permitted it, and partly because it was PG, and partly because assessments relied more on drawing on experience, I was equally explicit in encouraging draft submissions. Since (at this level where it doesn't really matter much) I couldn't really care very much whether people complete and get a qualification or not (that's their business) and I am more interested in what they learn along the way (because of, in spite of, or independent of, the teaching). [I am not sound on this, and have in the past received some stick from the university and QAA about it; so what?] I'll help as much as I can within the constraints of responsibilities to other students and other courses. The argument that some students benefit from this at the expense of others seems to me to be spurious, at that level.

On the PGCE/Cert Ed, we use a system of "submission proposals" to clarify the process, with the expectation (but not obligation) that students will use the proposal form to help clarify their ideas and then clear them with the tutor. It is basically a formalisation of the process **** described so well. Our proposal form (downloadable from http://www.dmu.ac.uk/~jamesa/pce/download/ also includes a section for students to specify the tutor and mentor help they need, and we can either sign up to it or not. For more on the general approach see http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/learning_contracts.htm

The choice of the approach to use is of course strategic rather than tactical; and given the variety of disciplines and courses represented on the PGCertHE, it is more appropriate to concentrate on the strategic issues, as you will appreciate given your previous experience. People on the course will be working with a variety of assessment techniques and strategies, and each of them needs to decide what is appropriate to their own context. The tactical considerations of the implementation of the strategies are matters which can only really be examined within that general context. We do appreciate, however, that there is something of a problem here, because the assessment strategies are often pre-specified for the modules beginning lecturers are called upon to work on; their immediate concerns are to do with implementing what they are lumbered with.

The strategic curriculum-planning decision, however, must be that it will not always be thus. For better or for worse, we generally get only one stab at introducing colleagues to the range of assessment strategies; we aspire to the state where, when those colleagues are devising their own modules and courses, they will be able to think widely about the appropriate principles, strategies and techniques to create a valid, reliable and fair assessment policy. We are working with a similar situation to that which you experience in undergrad. business education; some of the questions which we need to address are not part of the experience of our students, so they may respond with "chance would be a fine thing!" With more experience under their belts, they will eventually value what is being taught--but in the absence of a phased CPD programme which introduces new and wider material as our students experience of the task expands, some things have to be introduced when they may be considered merely "academic" (in the pejorative sense of the term).

Ideally, in the way the course is set up, mentors with direct experience of the subject area and the context should be able to provide this kind of detailed guidance, which you have received from ****, and the overall course and individual mentoring should be complementary. We have to confess that this complementarity does not always work, but it works well enough not to shift the balance between the two, and we have always worked to develop further the mentoring component.

Yes, it is frustrating; but frankly, so it ought to be. Perhaps it ought to be more so. Frustration is an excellent stimulus to reflective practice. Your previous posts have clearly demonstrated your commitment to this. One of the features of academic life, across the board, is that everything is arguable. Partly this is because the desired outputs--the bottom line--are contestable (vide. my insouciance about achievement, supra) [And we go in for pompous obscurantism as in the previous parentheses], and partly it is because the academic frame of reference is necessarily questioning and indeed sceptical (which sometimes shades into the cynical, I fear).

Within academic discourse, too, there is a question of level about the PGCertHE. The view of the HEA (in their statement on professional standards which will come out later this month--see http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/ for the latest news) is broadly that lecturers' professional programmes should be at M level. Given the previous academic level of most or even all HE academic staff, that makes sense; as far as their own disciplines are concerned. M level, being highly academic, is highly strategic and very sceptical.

On the other hand, as new practitioners of a very practical discipline, there is an argument that courses should be training at HE 1 (NQF 4 or even lower). You may be a world-class biochemist, but that has no correlation with your ability to teach.

This is a real circle-squaring problem, represented in practice by the decision on the previous MALT programme to assess "Teaching in Practice" "only" at HE level 3. "Only"? HE level 3 is final-year undergraduate level. In a practical discipline, the practice of a final-year engineer, or graphic designer, or nurse, or even teacher, is expected to be very sophisticated; not least because they have had at least three years of practice on projects and placements. Why should we expect that because of their expertise in a totally unrelated discipline, lecturers should be able to work practically at HE 3 after only one year?

But it gets worse. Now it all has to be at M level. Master's level "mastery" of the moment to moment practice of teaching cannot, in my opinion, be achieved with less than five years' practice. It simply needs at least that much time to try things and evaluate them, and to repeat the cycle and refine them, and to grasp the wider implications, and to try again... The fudge is to assess via writing about it, so-called "praxis". It is not the same thing. In my view, M level direct practice is University Teacher Fellow standard. I lost this argument in the validation process, but it is still a very important one.

Sorry--you have set me off on a rant, and I have been writing for an hour. Time for bed, said Zebedee.

Please comment; I just got my first comment on the blog, after a couple of months of posting. Thanks to "unknown"! But the comments are what bring these things alive, so get on with it!

On learning languages

Just listened to this (available on-line for a while). I do not teach languages, but I teach many people who do; there are some very challenging and stimulating ideas here.

On Marking

Serendipitously (via pedablogue, a site which I originally visited for its witty name) I came across this interesting if lightweight article discussing how flexible one might be in marking (or grading in the US), and its comments.

I hate marking. I put it off as long as possible; but the students were asking me about it last Monday, so I have to do it this weekend come what may.

Why do I hate it? Two reasons, really. First, I have no problem with providing formative feedback; indeed on the Master's course where the submission of draft work was encouraged, I tackled it with enthusiasm at the first opportunity. My problem is really with summative assessment—actually closing down the debate and discussion with a unilateral mark. I am not so confident with my own authority as to do that comfortably. It is not made any easier by the fact that in deference to my seniority (perhaps) second-marking colleagues rarely disagree with me. OK, there are some (most, I suppose) clear cases, but...

The second reason is of course that the work students submit is the rawest form of evaluation of the teaching. They have done the best they can, I assume. I have no problem with castigating them for lack of referencing, for grammatical solecisms, for poor structure. But when they show that they have not really understood a concept—that says more about my teaching than their performance. And if several of them make the same errors; that says more about me than about them.

In the States, "evaluation" is often used for what we in the UK call "assessment"; we routinely (and without much thought) refer to "assessment" of student learning, and "evaluation" of teaching. But we do make a big mistake in assuming that "assessment" is purely about students; it is also about us. It is a cruel mirror to the teacher's effectiveness.

In part, of course. Oh, and see http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/marking.htm for ways of removing personal bias.

Today our session included a discussion of what really works in teaching. See http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/what_works.htm What really works is, in Hattie's phrase, "dollops of feedback". Marking really matters, and detailed constructive marking feedback matters even more. Going back to the link at the top of this post, the "grade" is a really crude instrument. Your scrawled comments in the margin are for more important for actual learning. (Assuming you can get the students to read them, of course.)

On preparation

My email is working again, so ignore the earlier post.

As I wrote to a correspondent a few minutes ago:

• " It's 11.25 pm, and I am wrestling with my lecture for tomorrow. How did I ever teach for two hours on "motivation and learning"? (I go through this every year--perhaps for the last time?) I have reviewed my PowerPoint, which is rubbish, and the exercise, which even I don't understand... And I have just picked up a new text (pub 2006--my first of the year) on this with 400 pages of text and 70 pages of references (which the keen ones will expect me to have read already). So I need to re-do the whole thing. Not that I will use it, of course, it's merely a safety net in case the discourse does not emerge. It's a con-trick, really. We are supposed to teach the students that if you are properly organised this kind of situation does not arise. Bullshit. I've been doing this for 40 years and it still happens. And I would not have it any other way. I'll miss it! "

(Note to students; you're not supposed to know that!)

On being off-line

For some reason my main email account (to which other email addresses get re-directed) has been corrupted. My ISP says that they will fix it in 48 hours, but that I may lose anything still in the in-box on the server. So my apologies to anyone who has tried to contact me over the past day or so; the gmail address still works, though. Try that one or try again in a couple of days. Thanks.

On being (over) prepared (2)

OK; I did the session. It went "quite well" as we report to our colleagues who bother to enquire. I managed to avoid imposing all my slides on the poor students (the follow-up web page with the presentation material I actually used can be seen here), but the evidence of the closing stages was that they were mainly baffled, if a little intrigued.

We started with two student mini-presentations; these were pre-arranged as part of the overal scheme of work, and consisted of two five-minute presentations; one was on Dewey, and the other on Freire. Both of them provided quite useful links with associated material for the main session, so that was helpful. I followed up the Freire presentation with some more material (which I just happened to have prepared earlier) on "banking education" and his overall project from The Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

As we moved on to the main topic, I asked the students about what they had written about as "critical incidents" in adult learning. The first student to volunteer was spot on; she spoke about her decision to return to full-time education, saying something like;

• "A number of things changed in my life, and that set me thinking about what I was going to do with it. So I decided to get off my butt and get a proper education..."

As I commented, you can't get much of a better definition of "transformative learning" than that! Other students reported on; how studying literature at university was different from doing it at school, a dance module she was taking which she hated because it was so unstructured, and the experience of becoming a mother for the first time. I was able to pose some questions in response to each of these which helped to focus the idea of transformative learning (at least, I thought so).

In introducing the input I made explicit reference to the Kolb learning cycle, pointing out that they had had concrete experiences, the critical incident exercise had helped them to reflect on them, and that we were now moving on to theoretical/abstract conceptualisation of that reflection.

We were now half-an-hour into the class (nominally a two-hour session, or a one-hour lecture followed by a one-hour seminar according to the bureaucrats). The students (10/14) needed prompting to contribute, but they became more forthcoming as we went on, and they found that I was keen to pick up on their ideas and relate them to the taught material. (Until the end.)

So to my presentation. (You can see the PowerPoint material at http://www.dmupce.org.uk/transformative/Transformative_Learning_files/v3_document.htm)
I followed through the eight "mainstream" slides as planned, and introduced some anecdotes and comment as I went along. At "A view of its significance" we had a brief discussion of how some adult education practitioners emphasised this transformation (particularly in term of building self-confidence) at the expense of the actual "stuff" to be learned; this elicited some protest—as indeed it should—from the mature students who had come in to university via "Access" courses (a non-standard route for mature students without the usual entry qualifications). This could have gone further, but on reflection my reaction probably came across as defensive, and thereby alienated those students in some measure. Damn!

There was some protest at the "Mezirow's stages" slide that I was not leaving it there for long enough for them to make notes; I responded by promising that it would appear on the web, but also questioning why they wanted to make notes of the detail. The fact that we fell back to that level of conversation suggests we were back at "transmission" learning, in the terms of this session.

On "Perspective transformation" I raised the issue of the emphasised assertion of values. I enquired whether anyone had done a mini-presentation about Gramsci. One student had! I asked about "organic intellectuals"; she searched her notes and came up with a definition (which was slightly unfocussed), but it did give me the cue to discuss the issue of how current educational policy "creams off" into formal education and the middle classes, those people who might otherwise have become "community leaders". I'm not sure that this meant much to them, and at this point I began to feel that my own awareness of the links between this notion of transformative learning, and a host of other ideas in adult education was beginning to lose them. The relationships make sense to me, and I want the students to pick them up, but I should have been more focused in the direct presentation.

So to the questions posed at the end of the main sequence. There was little spontaneous response. Sometimes you get the feeling that if they do say something, it is chiefly to make you feel that your efforts have not gone unappreciated. It was like that this time; but the student who had made the original brilliant comment on her "critical learning incident" did ask how transformative learning could be anything other than a Good Thing. This was my cue to talk about the less value-laden notion of crisis intervention theory, and how the stages described by Mezirow could go wrong. I did not, for some reason, relate this to my own research.

By this time they had had enough (after about 95 minutes); there were no further responses to my request for questions or discussion points, and so I wound the session up.

From moment to moment, it all went pretty well according to plan. I managed to contain myself about Perry, Belenky and Gilligan (who they? it doesn't matter). But it could have been better, and the "tipping point" at which I lost them was my over-stated assertion about Access courses, and my subsequent defensiveness. The mature students in this group probably identified their Access courses as their occasions of transformative learning, and I managed to undermine and devalue that. Damn! again.

That was not the problem I thought I was going to have. But I did; it was not fatal, and all being well they will find enough material on the web-page to encourage them to explore further, but it could have been better.

Sorry! Didn't mean to write so much, but that is what happens when you start doing disciplined reflection!

On being (over) prepared

One thing about being semi-retired is that you have more time. Or at least you do if you are stuck in the house waiting all day for a delivery (of joinery supplies, of course) which never came.

So I spent the day preparing for a session tomorrow, standing in for a colleague, with final year undergraduates whom I have not yet met. It's on "transformative learning". It's a fascinating topic, which reaches out in all directions, and so it was not difficult to spend the day looking things up in books and journals and the net, and putting together the presentation. Then I had to impose some order on all the stuff I wanted to convey...

Uh-oh! Dangerous! Having spent the best part of forty years never having enough time to prepare, I know that this could well be the kiss of death for this session. What I want to convey? That's the way novice teachers think; and it is ironic that given ample time to prepare a two-hour session, I fall back into that trap. 44 slides? No. It is a recipe for disaster.

I have at least learned something about how PowerPoint can prepare a "summary slide", but still requires you to enter hyperlinks manually, so I am free from its dreaded inexorable bullet points (it's an oldie, but see Edward Tufte on this) but will I feel compelled to use the stuff because I have it, regardless of whether the students can/want to take it in?

I'm posting this now as a hostage to fortune. I could edit it tomorrow, but I promise not to; but I will report on how I actually handled the session.

On the teacher as a variable

Like most real-world disciplines, with the exception of best practice in medical research, it is rarely that those of us in education get to witness anything resembling a controlled experiment. In this case, all I mean by that is a situation in which just one variable changes between two teaching situations, so that we are privileged to get a clue about the significance of that variable.

I won't go into detail, partly to keep this anonymous, but partly for other reasons. However, I recently did two teaching observations, of different teachers, immediately after each other. They were teaching full-time mature students on intensive language courses (the language was one I do not understand and can't even read—which is always interesting anyway!) What I had not realised was that they were both going to teach the same group of students, in the same room, with just a 15 minute comfort break between the sessions. Both teachers were confident and fluent (but not native) speakers of the language, and indeed were graduates of a very similar course.

There was one other minor variable which changed, of course; they were not teaching exactly the same material. However they were both teaching points of grammar which followed one another according to the syllabus.

The first teacher was the more experienced, and the more confident; he had had some input to writing the course. His approach was very conventional; he introduced the topic, worked through some examples with extensive student questioning, assisting students with step-by-step prompts as they struggled with the grammatical construction, and then set a written exercise from the course book. When they had done it, he went through their answers, going round the class with targeted questions about it. Apart from the book, he used only questioning and the whiteboard (probably appropriately). Not exciting, and raising interesting questions about how to teach people to manage a complex rule primarily through individual examples, but sound stuff.

The second teacher was much newer to whole-class teaching, having previously mainly worked on individual tutorial (or "oral practice") sessions. Although familiar with the material, he was not as familiar with the prescribed text-book, and frequently had to look down at it, open on his desk, to check that he was following the recommended structure. The session followed broadly the same pattern. As far as I could gather, though, all this teacher's examples (bar one) were straight out of the book. He showed his nervousness by banging the cap back on to his marker pen after each major point he had to make. He asked questions, but not as frequently as his more experienced colleague, and he did not wait as long for the answers, or prompt students to construct their stumbling answers. Perhaps most important, he did not look at the students much. Like any beginning teacher (and in case he reads this, he'll get there, with more practice and experience) he was pre-occupied with himself and his performance, rather than the students' reaction and learning. He fitted with Dreyfus' and Dreyfus' definition of a "novice".

What did not really occur to me until I reflected on the trip back from the observation, was the significance of what I had seen of the students' behaviour. I usually have to infer this from a position at the back of the room, but on these occasions, because of the fixed layout, I had to sit at one side between the front row of students and the teacher's dais (yes, there was one). So, opportunistically, I got to see them from the front.

It would have been good to have a video record. In the first session, the students sat more upright, spent more time looking at the teacher (who in turn was looking at them; it's called "eye-contact" in the jargon, which sounds portentous, but just means "looking at each other") than at their books or notes (although some annotated their books, in neither condition did they seem to make many spontaneous notes). In the second condition, they appeared more "slumped" in their positions, and looked down at their desks for more of the time, only raising their eyes occasionally to the board as the teacher wrote up his examples, (which he actually did rather better than the first teacher, making use of different coloured pens to good effect.)

There was some difference, too, in the students' responses to questioning. With the first teacher, more hands went up to volunteer responses; the students seemed more confident, and more prepared to take risks. They fairly readily suggested their own examples of the grammatical construction, and worked their way through the translations with an apparent sense of achievement.

The second teacher more frequently (I wish I had been counting, but hey... this was real-world grounded theory non-participant observation) had to use the "pose—pause—pounce" tactic to get students to work on the example set in the book. Their tone of voice also seemed more tentative and they were more inclined to talk to their desks than to the teacher (bear in mind that I may be over-stating the case, as I reflect and reconstruct my memory).

At the end of the session, the first teacher got more questions from the students than the second (five as opposed to two, as I recall), which he fielded more confidently. The second teacher got a googly, in the form of a question about a rather obscure special case. He responded, rightly, with "I'm afraid I don't know the answer to that," but omitted to undertake to find out and report back. I speculate that part of the motivation for the googly (no relation to Google, unless it is the derivation of that brand name; it's a term from cricket where it refers to a notoriously unpredictable style of bowling) might have been "testing-out" the teacher, in a very under-stated way as might be expected in the particular situation.

Conclusions? Please comment!

On interesting new links

Thanks to an indirect recommendation from one of our librarians, I have discovered "The Irascible Professor" site: if you like my "Heterodoxy" pages, you will like this. It is US-based but its opinion pieces and polemics are not only entertaining but often thought-provoking.

More conventionally, but perhaps more solidly rewarding, those of you in adult education should be sure to bookmark Roger Hiemstra's web-site, with full on-line versions of whole books to which he has contributed, as well as a great list of links (I would say that; he has just been kind enough to add mine!)

On experience versus theory

I've just had an email from a student who teaches in a rather unusual setting. S/he is just starting our PGCE course and coping with her (OK, she is female—no great breach of confidentiality, but I can't hack all this gender-neutral stuff in practice) first major assessed work. She has been trying to reconcile her experience and practice with the theory, and it hasn't been working; she realises that she has simply been parroting (how many 't's in 'parroting'? OK, the spell-chequer accepts it!) the received wisdom in the texts, but it has not touched her practice (let alone changed it).

This was my reply, in case any other readers are in the same boat. It starts from the fact that she wrote and explained the problem [necessary commentary in italics]:

You may not realise it, but your note has actually been a really good start to your submission [our course does not have "assigned" assessments, but invites students to "submit" their ideas for credit]. And it clearly shows the strategy which will pay off when you start writing.

In short, trust your experience! If it doesn't match with the theory, that's the theory's problem, not yours. You can address the outcomes by showing how conventional approaches break down in non-standard situations like yours; you demonstrate that you are trying to link the theory and the practice, as required, but we make no assumption that they will always link up seamlessly. Not only that, but PGCE encourages a critical approach; so if you read something in Reece and Walker [one of the recommended texts] and think "chance would be a fine thing", then write about it and explain the issue.

Having said that, we have had some people working in non-standard situations who used that as a standing excuse for not drawing on established good practice; I remember one guy working in the local prison who maintained that nothing on the course applied to him. However, there had been students before (and indeed after) him working there who showed the contrary; I know, because I observed their teaching. The theory is not a matter of faith, to be accepted or rejected wholesale; it's pragmatic, and you are free to test it and apply or reject as befits your practice.

You have already immersed yourself in the outcomes [the course requirements are expressed in term of 'outcomes'; "by the time you have completed this module, you should be able to..."]. So forget them. Write about what you want to say in the first place, and then go back and check off those you have already addressed (probably more than you think). Then go back and deal with those you have not mentioned; you may be able to integrate them with your own narrative, but if you can't, it's OK to settle for second best and write about them separately.

Actually, the "submission proposal" system is intended to enable you to pick up on and discuss these issues at an early stage, and get your tutor's agreement in advance to your strategy. ["Submission Proposal" is course jargon for a learning contract] So it's a good idea to be quite bold with the proposal in future; you may have to negotiate a bit, but if your tutor signs it off, he/she is agreeing that if you deliver what you have promised, it will be awarded credit; and then you will be free of the uncertainty which has been dogging you for a couple of months.

If you trust your experience (and talk about it in class—other people may well benefit from your testing of the ideas, and have their own angles to offer) I'm sure you will find the course much more stimulating and enjoyable. After all, if we are not offering what you need, that's our problem, not yours.

Hope this helps, and all the best with the submission!

Where's the reflection? Actually, it goes back to the bookshelves I have been building. Again. I designed them and worked out the dimensions. I measured twice and cut once. All by the book. But I have learned from prior experience that when it comes to actually erecting them, in a real room, you always have to leave some margin for reality. So I have put them up with a spirit-level and a tri-square, not a ruler. I just could not measure all the bumps and troughs in the real room, so when it came to actual construction I deferred to pragmatism; I pre-cut everything for the first four bays, but the fifth (up to the opposite wall)? I built that on the basis of measurement in situ. OK, this goes back to the experience of the wardrobe a few days ago, but it also relates to my correspondent's concerns; in professional practice (not that my joinery skills aspire to professional standards; even I wouldn't pay me for it) the theory takes us so far, but no further. It is always subject to the vagaries of circumstance. The mark of a professional, however, is whether you have the tools (intellectual as well as practical) to deal with that last, idiosyncratic, bit.