On blowing my own trumpet

...because as my mother used to say, "no-one else will blow it for you!"

It's not exactly media-hype; but thanks to Steven Jones for a very fair, if skilfully selective, account of our discussion at the link in the heading. So far, I haven't the chutzpah to put a direct link on my site, but I'll get there!

I drafted what's above a week or so ago as soon as the article was on the web, but forebore to publish. It would be self-indulgent, I thought.

But my brother mentioned it to the former head of my primary(elementary) school (she actually took over after I left, but my mother was still teaching there... I haven't mentioned before that my mother was once my class teacher, have I? Well, doctor.........) She is 93; she wrote me a real (paper and ink) letter, in a beautiful teacher's hand, which was generally very complimentary.

But, she picked me up on my (reported) use of "bureaucratise". Had I succumbed to the very jargon I castigate?

Apart from being delighted at the feedback, I felt at once as if I were before her at the teacher's desk for having yet again mis-spelled "becuase" (sorry! "because"). Two reflections;

• the potency of the teacher/pupil relationship. For better or worse, it has an impact fifty-two years later. The UK teaching development agency has a slogan, "No-one ever forgets a good teacher". I'm not so sure about that; few people forget bad teachers, either. But I am still challenged by her comment much more than I would be had it come from anyone else!
• Her integrity; she gave me that feedback. It was I (I have to careful about syntax here--she might read this!--should I say "me" as assumed object, or "I" as the technically correct complement?) who volunteered the information, but she could not forebear to correct me.

I can't begin to express the happy confusion of feelings this exchange engendered. Mrs B retired 30+ years ago, but she is still a teacher at heart. There's a chiasmus here; "You can take the person out of teaching, but you can't take the teacher out of the person." It could work nastily, but this was wholly benign, and I was delighted.

On planning

Just read this from Dwight Eisenhower, from Mardy Grothe's fascinating weekly newsletter (link in heading);

"In preparing for battle,
I have always found that plans are useless,
but planning is indispensable."

That goes for teaching too.

On craftsmanship

While in Madison, Wisconsin, my friend Peter and I visited the superb Capitol building with the fourth-largest dome in the world, according to the guide. But Peter drew my attention to the superb inlaid floors in different kinds of stone, laid with such precision, and (being about 90 years old) with the benefit of only what we would regard as very crude technology. I was reminded of this piece, which I wrote a few weeks ago, but did not upload because something else came up that day:

I've just caught, while channel-surfing, another of Fred Dibnah's wonderful programmes about the industrial revolution, which appear happily to be re-circulating on digital channels. Apart from having met Fred casually a couple of times at charity fund-raising events in Bolton Market Square and seeing his LandRover around when we lived in Bolton, I'm a great admirer on two levels;

• his infectious enthusiasm for sheer craftsmanship in the Victorian age in particular, when engineering depended so much on the direct personal skills of craftsmen. (Pardon the implict sexism; women were also very skilled in operating the mchines, but the transience of their contributions is part of the point of this reflection.)
• his skill in communicating it.

So I started thinking about our shared (if I may be so presumptuous) admiration for craftsmanship, and I realised that his is largely about the craft of product. He bubbles with admiration for a steam-engine or a mill, but of course—given that he was making a film about it—he could point to the product, and invite us to admire it, and by implication the skill of those who designed and made it.

There's another kind of craft; that of process. It is by definition ephemeral. It leaves only indirect "products", and we need to infer what went into their making.

Teaching is such a process skill. Its products may be evident, but indirect. Its proof, as a skill, is in ephemeral, moment-to-moment interaction, rather than in the product of the "successful student", because there are so many other factors which influence that "successful" outcome.

On reading blogs and Pandas' digestive systems

Read a Blogger blog, and in most cases there is this seductive button at the top of the page which invites; "Next blog". I'm getting hooked on it. I just spent half an hour ploughing through pages in Spanish and blank pages associated with jewellery and adolescent self-indulgence, when I came upon;

"Waiting for spring is like [...] constipation. It's always so close to breaking free, yet it's stuck fast." (http://irisyapp.blogspot.com/ 14 March)

Which prompted me to the analogy with Pandas. They have to eat vast quantities of minimally nutritious bamboo every day (both shoots and leaves, of course) in order to survive; so they have to--er--"evacuate" most of it. Reading blogs is rather like that... Hope this one is the nutritious bit, but should I remove the blogger bar at the top?

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!