On a trick or treat?

For All Hallows' Eve.

On evaluation via twitter

You can also read the comments from New Scientist's reporting here.

The basic idea is that Twitter can be used by students to give feedback on lectures in real time, without any special classroom technology, such as clickers. I can see the attraction, but it necessarily entails students using laptops on-line in the class, and that must be distracting, even for the famed multi-tasking millennial students.

Dedicated as I am to keeping things simple, I'd still go for the old primary-coloured cards; their signalling is not as rich, and it is more teacher-centred, but they can easily add enough two-way communication to make the lecture an interactive experience.

See also:

• http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/exercises_lectures.htm
• http://www.doceo.co.uk/reflection/labels/learning%20styles.htm

On taking my name in vain...

I'm semi-retired, and I have a little discretionary time. So I use Google Reader to aggregate updates from a range of blogs and sites of interest. Indeed, you may well be reading this via such a portal.

But of course I need to filter all this potential information. Among many other filters I include my own name, principally to find who is picking up on this blog (actually not a great strategy because my name as such appears rarely in these posts).

I share my name with several great photographers of the past and present. That's interesting because in my adolescence I aspired to be a professional photographer, but had to recognise that I lacked the "eye" to detect a picture in the blooming buzzing confusion of real experience... It's fun to come across their galleries.

I also share my name with a pastor of an evangelical church in Lexington, Kentucky, who posted the link about All Hallows' Eve, with which--shall I say--I would not wish to be associated.

And as well as being a fictional character in Arachnophobia, I am credited here (in real life to the best of my knowledge) with advocating the oral consumption of fresh human sperm for its protein value.

No wonder I'm mixed up!

On the world upside down--again

The link is to a blog about a conference; "Workshop on the Impacts of Pen based Technology in Education". Naively I thought we knew most of what there is to know about the use of pens in education; granted they only really superseded slates (oh! perhaps that is what they mean by "tablets") and styluses in primary schools early in the last century, but if you count quills, they have been around in schools for hundreds of years...

On inert knowledge

Two recent incidents;

• A correspondent asked me where the "S.M.A.R.T." acronym came from. I didn't know, and that irritates me so I started to look. I still don't know the answer (suggestions welcome), although the sterling work of Mike Morrison demonstrates how hard these things are to trace. However, that is not the direct point of this post.
  
  My investigations naturally took me back to my shelf-full of teaching textbooks, and their chapters on objectives. And since I was looking for something other than what they were intentionally about, I saw them through different eyes, through a different frame of reference.
  
  And I found a lot of needlessly complicated distinctions without differences (frankly, I still hardly know the difference between a product and a process objective--and still less why it matters, or any evidence that it makes any difference in the real world) which serve no other purpose than to create "inert knowledge"* to be rote learned and tested as a proxy for practical proficiency which is so much more difficult to capture.
  
  
• And a couple of days ago I did a brief session on referencing (podcast version here) in which I tried hard to stick with the principles and to play down the arbitrary elaborations of the rules. One student saw through this and asked why there were so many variants. I explained it in terms of the petty power of journals to dictate their own citation styles.
  
  "These people ought to get a life!" she declared. I replied, "They think they have."
  
  I'm not mentioning this merely because it is a rare example of me aspiring to an approximation to repartee, but because it illustrates what happens to fairly straightforward ideas when they get elaborated by those who have a vested interest in making them seem as complicated (or profound, as possible--after all, it's the same thing, isn't it? Isn't it?). 

Those of us who trade in such ideas and rules start to be absorbed in them and to take them out of context, so that we forget that the test of their value is their utility for practice, and start to believe that they matter in themselves. Then, if we aspire to some significance in the community of practice, we start to inflict them on the less well established members. And for them, entry to that inner circle comes to depend on their ability to say the right (indeed, precisely and dogmatically correct) things--with little attention paid to their capacity to practice.

Alongside this, the actual knowledge itself, which probably started out as being quite useful, is rendered inert and dogmatic.(See Peddiwell, 1939)

This is certainly the case in teaching, where the allocation of hours on teacher education courses no longer exhibits even the most tenuous connection with the significance or utility of what is being taught (and the practice of teaching modelled by the teacher trainers is not always up to the effective standard.)

But it has also become the case in relation to written expression--see this blog post on the deadening effect of arbitrary rules such as;

...The first paragraph of this essay contained five sentences, some run-on. The second paragraph of this essay was made up of only one sentence. It is my understanding that in many American High schools, this concise, accurate, and very clear one sentence paragraph would not be allowed in any student wiring (in English class or Science class) because it breaks a rule. The rule is that a paragraph has five or more sentences. WTF?.

I find this rule to be profoundly disturbing. [...] it does symbolize much of what is wrong about our system of education in general. This rule solves a problem (students not thinking enough about what they are writing) and in the process ruins the teaching of good communication. Similar arbitrary and capricious rule making plagues each area of our educational system.

There are various ways in which one might profitably "reflect" on this, from spluttering exasperation to a consideration of how it illustrates the perverse consequences of a "restrictive solution"... but all of them are likely to lead to the conclusion that the supposed "knowledge base" of a discipline has totally lost touch with practice.


I've touched on this before, from a slightly different angle (here).

There are a few more stages to this argument, but a blog post is not an article so I'll return to them later....


* Perkins D (2006) "Constructivism and troublesome knowledge" in J H F Meyer  and R Land (eds.) Overcoming Barriers to Student Understanding: Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge London; Routledge.

On knowing best

The substance of this is not my main territory, but the process interests me.

The Cambridge Review of Primary Education has just been published. "The most comprehensive enquiry into English primary education for 40 years" (i.e. since Plowden). It took three years, involved 28 major surveys and 31 interim reports and runs to 608 pages. It's not an op-ed piece in a newspaper.

The Department for Curtains and Soft Furnishings (DCSF) rejected it out of hand on the day of publication. Oh, and so did the Tories. There's no point in saying anything more, is there?

On evaluating the one-off lecture

OK, it happened, and indirect feeedback via a colleague who could not attend but who spoke to people after the event was that it had been well-received, even remarked on as a "proper academic lecture" (not sure whether or not that is a compliment!)

There are of course standard procedures for evaluation, including the usual feedback sheets and the like. Such procedures are unsurprisingly not routine on this course, and it didn't seem appropriate to introduce them--after all, this was from the students' point of view just another session in a regular timetable. It was my decision to get all self-conscious about it.

So just a few remarks on practical aspects, and then a more general thought.

• time-keeping and pacing is always tricky the first time around; I seem to have got it pretty well right, though.
• The presentation? You can see it via the link on yesterday's post, but the version there has been annotated and expanded. I don't like too much content on the slides, and I tried to use them as headings to show the students where we were. That was OK with a heading like "fashions and fads", but not really satisfactory when I talked ever so briefly about a particular theorist; I was using slides cannibalised from another lecture including images which may not have been the very best choices. 
• Delivery? A guy at the back said he couldn't hear me in the first few seconds. I thanked him and talked louder, but I didn't continue to check--which I could have done very easily with the traffic-light cards all the audience had. Specifically everyone had a red, a yellow and a green A5 card, with which they could signal answers to questions, like "If you have never heard of Skinner, show a red card. If you've heard of him but don't know much about his ideas, show yellow. If you know quite a bit about him show green..." It's clickers-lite, but a lot easier to manage spontaneously.
  
• As to use of the cards; they were appreciated and commented on afterwards, and they are so easy to use. No downside, if you sort out the logistics of distribution. As ever, it is not merely the technical advantage they confer above a simple show of hands which makes the difference--it is what the very fact of issuing them and using them says about the kind of interaction the lecturer wants within the session. They send a message--"I want you to be able to communicate back to me".
• And as for that great bug-bear of the lecture, attention-span, that little bit of activity every few minutes seemed to get the students re-engaged. Visual clues suggested they were still with me at the end of the session.
• The two-minute buzz-group exercise came almost exactly half-way through; frankly it was as much about breaking the session up as it was about content, but some of the ideas were interesting enough to weave into the rest of the session. It also gave me a chance to nip out and buy an extortionately priced bottle of water--why no water-coolers?

More generally, though; did the session achieve its objective of providing an orientation to learning theories so students can engage with them on a fairly deep level? As ever, I think the argument was clearer to me than it was to them, and I perpetrated the sin I have been trying not to commit for years and years (and which I can avoid as a part of regular teaching); I elaborate arguments in the hope of making them clearer, but in practice I am obscuring and burying them in a mass of marginally relevant detail. Once I get into the swing of a lecture I can always think of more stuff to pile in. When it is something I do regularly, I can prune it and filter it so that what gets said is what needs to be said and no more, but I'm still not good at that on a one-off basis.

And is a lecture, at this stage in their programme, the appropriate means of communicating such a message? Probably not, but given the constraints it was a reasonable strategy to choose.

One comment my colleague heard was that I had rubbished some current fads, or even sacred cows. Indeed I had, and I now wonder whether or not I should have done. After all there was a team of about a dozen other colleagues attending, most of whom I don't know, and I may well have stepped clumsily on a few people's toes. I'm pretty sure the students enjoyed it, but that's not the point. Had I had more notice I could and should have circulated some of the proposed content in advance for comment; who knows, perhaps one of those colleagues will have to deliver a session next week advocating learning styles! An interesting and open question about the responsibilities one has to the rest of the team...

Still, I have to admit that I enjoyed myself thoroughly; not something to be aimed for, but a good spin-off if it happens.

On the web-page from the one-off lecture

I'll get round to evaluating that lecture some time soon, but just to fill out the content, here's the resource page to support it.

On doing a "one-off" (written 8 10 09)

I have been asked to step in to do a single one-hour lecture to about 200 Secondary PGCE students tomorrow on "Major Theories of Learning", for reasons which don't matter. So I thought it might help concentrate my mind, and give some hostages to fortune (this is before the event, and I'll post afterwards, too), if I "talked through" some of my thoughts with whoever is out there.

In what follows, it is not my intention to be critical of the programme or of colleagues working on it. It is in the nature of the situation that I have a very limited view of the factors which went into its design. But it is a challenge, just as it would be for someone else making a similar emergency contribution to a programme I had designed.

Beyond my control/above my pay grade (basic VL contract): If you are outside the UK, the PGCE (I won't expand the initials--there is a big argument with policy implications over what they stand for!) is the basic qualification for graduates who wish to become teachers and acquire Qualified Teacher Status (QTS) in schools. (Yes, there are lots of other teachers who do not work in schools, but that is another story...) It is a full-time one-year course, which consists of 80% teaching practice in a school supported/assessed by a mentor, and 20% = one day a week in the university. In the unlikely event that you want to know more go here. This is, I think, the end of week three of the initial study block.

The programme concerned has, I am told, just this one lecture on learning theories. It is followed by a seminar, granted, but the topic of that has been decided already. It is based on the "Simple Minds" video, which is a very stimulating polemic (some parts of it are used here), but since I was not involved in the original planning, I am not sure what connection was being made between the lecture and the seminar.

The details of learning theory will be dealt with by practice-based mentors as they arise, I am told. If this happens, it is in my view the best way of dealing with the material. It will be anchored in experience and practice and responding to students' questions. I'm not sure in practice that mentors and students always have enough space to stand back from actual teaching and consider the underlying principles. But let's assume that it works.

So! The one and only explicit hour in the year which addresses the body of learning theory (we'll assume that it is confined to taught learning in young human beings.) How should I make the most of the opportunity?

I have a copy of last year's presentation, but the lecturer is not identified so I can't check anything out with her or him. But she (probably) was helpfully explicit about her Aims and the Session Outline (again, we clearly differ about tactics, but this was a well-crafted lecture. Come to think of it, why could she not have just repeated it this year?*). She identified the Aims of the session as;

• To consider some of the major theories that try to account for how learning happens 
• To explore how learning theories may help us to understand issues related to learning 
• To think about the implications of these ideas for our work as teachers

That makes good sense. But it is Teacher-think. Precisely, of course, what this course sets out to endow on its graduates, and to which I shall appeal a little later, which is rather ironic.

I read through the presentation, trying to wear my hypothetical recent-graduate-teacher-trainee-to-whom-all this-education-stuff-is-rather-bewildering head. I got a headache from the hammer blows of bullet points telling me what I ought to know about learning theories. Unless I know this, I won't be able to be an effective teacher...

Apart from the self-evident fact that this is egregious bullsh*t (don't you think that the asterisk is overworked?), that is only self-evident to 40-year denizens of the swamp like me...

Isn't this putting the cart before the horse? I've just been in correspondence with a student elsewhere who has been very critical, in public (a mistake) about one of his lecturers, who clearly knows a lot about teaching, but has not connected that with how s/he does it.

I think I have to go for the "thinking-like-a-teacher" orientation. This of course buys into all the Threshold Concepts stuff I have been exploring for the past year or two...

But reality obtrudes. It's after 9 pm and I have to prepare the session for real rather than pontificate about it....

*  Does all this agonising about teaching actually matter? Does it make any difference? Wouldn't we do better relying on the Pareto principle?

On approaches to teaching

Teaching is an applied discipline. So is engineering. To what extent can the discipline of engineering be applied to the theory and practice of teaching? This is an old question, but I'm enjoying engaging in a dialogue with a clearly accomplished and thoughtful engineer who has been teaching for some time, but has finally grasped the nettle of undertaking a PGCE/DTLLS, and has been less than impressed with what the course has had to offer...

Click on the link--read both on, and back, and do comment both here and on Sean's blog.

On an "outstanding" lesson

I've just been channel-hopping and came across Teachers' TV. It was citing an example of an "outstanding" lesson on elementary geometry for, I guess, 9-year-olds. "Outstanding" is Ofsted's term, by the way.

Not only was the lesson poorly constructed, but just under the surface it was teaching rubbish...

1. The teacher gave several instructions but then qualified them with, "but before that, you need to..."
   
   
2. She put up a small text slide outlining the lesson objectives. Why? This is teacher-speak, which means nothing to learners, who have no interest in framing stuff this way. Basically, in order to make sense of this kind of specification of steps towards a goal (if that is actually a good metaphor) you need to be able to stand outside the experience, to see the map of the journey; and of course very few learners can do that. Indeed, probably none of them... not even postgrads. So all this "explanation" does is to confuse further.
   
   
3. Most egregiously though, it reproduced precisely the offence I experienced at the same age. I can remember the class vividly. It was the first half of a Friday afternoon, just before Art or the Story which wound down the week, probably in the Spring of 1953 or thereabouts.
   
   We were given exactly the same exercise as the pupils in the programme. Construct a triangle (actually, these pupils had the triangles drawn and cut out for them), then use a protractor to measure the angles, and add them up to arrive at the magic total of 180 degrees.

Except that they didn't! As I recall, my total was about 183 degrees, and the girl next to me got 178 degrees. Neither our understanding nor the teacher's (OK--to confuse the issue but to explain much else, this was the bizarre year when my mother was also my class teacher) could cope with "margins of error". So there was a meta-learning in this lesson:

The theory and received wisdom is correct. If your experience differs, it is wrong. 

It was repeated many times afterwards, in practically every "science" lesson in particular throughout my schooling. To be fair, it wasn't surprising in those days. I was in secondary school in the late '50s when budgets were very tight, and the improvisation of equipment was taken for granted. 

But things have changed; we are no longer constrained by limited facilities (at this level). And while I and my peers understood at some level that our practicals were just playing at science, children today are accustomed to something more definitive.

I don't want to get hyperbolic, but forget "objectives" and aspirations, and get down to more realistic "takeaways" including the unintended ones.

About twenty years or more ago, there was a late night Open University programme on "Professional Judgement". [See; Dowie J and Elstein A (eds) (1988) Professional Judgement; a reader in clinical decision making Cambridge; Cambridge U P] It was fascinating, and I am amazed now to find out how old it is, but the relevant point is that at the end of each programme, there was space given to --as I remember-- an academic from the LSE, to critique the assumptions and the methodology of the preceding argument.

That's the way to promote sound development of practice, not facile and fiddled "demonstrations" of what "ought" to have happened.

On a different way of conceptualising a curriculum

From D G Myers "Commonplace Blog";

A local private school has asked me to help revise and standardize the English curriculum. By the time its students graduate and head off to college, they should know, in my opinion, at least these core terms, arranged under three headings:

Genres:

Allegory, Comedy, Drama, Elegy, Epic, Fiction, Lyric, Melodrama, Novel, Poetry, Satire, Sonnet, Short story, Tragedy

Formal components and structural devices:

Character, Couplet, Imagery, Meter, Monologue, Plot, Point of view (First-person Omniscient Unreliable narrator), Prose, Rhyme, Setting, Stanza, Stream of consciousness, Symbol, Theme and motif, Verse, Blank verse, Free verse,    Iambic verse

Elements of style:

Alliteration, Cliché, Conceit, Connotation and denotation, Diction, Irony, Metaphor, Onomatopoeia, Personification, Tone, Wit

The accomplished student ought to progress from definition to recognition of literary examples and finally to application of the terms in criticism.

 I've reformatted the list, but otherwise that is the whole thing. Is it idiosyncratic? Just one scholar's way of distilling the essential of his discipline? Or is this kind of list routine? It's certainly alien to British experience although I do note that it is a private school, and "local" presumably mean "in Texas".

But how would you feel if confronted by that list--or its equivalent in your own discipline--as a curriculum? Free? Lacking boundaries? Heaving a sigh of relief? Bewildered?

I note that despite all of this being (potentially) about literature, it is totally non-prescriptive about literature itself...

On a complete(d) site revision

At long last I have finished the current revision of the site (apart from some pages which are completely past revisability and which I shall now re-write.) So I think all the links work, but please let me know of any which don't, and tell me what ought to be there but isn't.

On OHTs and other aspects of recent history

OverHead Transparencies/acetates/viewfoils...

From a blog reporting on a current cosmology and philosophy conference;

2:00: We kick off the afternoon with Sir Roger Penrose talking about entropy issues for cosmology. Penrose has enough clout that they have brought out the overhead projector so he can show his famous hand-drawn slides.

And well might they be famous! Do that in PowerPoint! (Yeah, I know you could scan them in, but it's not the same...)

It's just another reminder of rapid change. "University Challenge" this evening seemed to be characterised by many questions which I could answer without thinking, but the student teams could only guess at because they were just beyond their Ken (geddit? If you do, you are almost as old as me). What was the next in order?

"penny, threepence, sixpence, shilling, florin..."

 A farthing, guessed one team. A crown, hazarded the other. (It's a half-crown, a.k.a. two-and-six in the prelapsarian days before 15 February 1971) How could they not know that? Because they would not be born for fifteen years or so! But they did get Khruschev as the guy who banged his shoe on the podium at the UN.

The point? Embarrassingly I can't find the reference (if I do, I'll come back and edit the post). An academic in the States has published a warning list of allusions faculty might commonly make in lectures which will mean absolutely nothing to their students (except to show how out-of-date their professors are).

On putting paltry talent contests to shame...

Indeed, Ukraine has got talent!



(Thanks to 3quarksdaily for putting me on to this.)

On cloning Dan Brown

Not only are the novels formulaic (although great fun), but this piece from Slate has the formula and allows you to write one yourself!

On learning from listening (to the weather forecast)

Listeners to the BBC Radio 4 news programme "PM" have been complaining that no matter how hard they concentrate, they can't remember the content of sound-only weather forecasts. This has led to an interesting exchange on the programme blog, and the programme item itself is available to listen to at the linked page.

Why mention it? Partly because the weather forecast has probably been a feature of radio since the BBC started in 1922, 87 years ago. And they still have not got it right? Has no-one ever asked listeners or done a proper evaluation before now?

Or have listeners changed? Are they (we) less familiar now with taking in information solely by ear? Practically all information is presented by multiple channels nowadays, with interactivity wherever possible. Most students attending university today have never before sat through an hour's verbal exposition of a topic (even if "enlivened" by PowerPoint(tm) slides. They don't listen to sermons any more. Few items on the radio last for more than two or three minutes, even on serious programmes like "Today" (or PM). (Anyone mentioning "learning styles" at this point will be summarily ejected!)

Some listeners have suggested that a pattern be adopted similar to that of the Shipping Forecast--namely announce the region first in a standard form e.g. "North-West England" and then a brief statement of the weather in a similarly standardised form, "showers at first, clearing later from West". The listener could then use the announcement of the region as a cue to pay attention because the bit which interests them would be coming up. Less information, but more useful. And even more boring for the poor people from the Met. Office who have to deliver it, (they are proper meteorologists and not announcers) and who like to "tell the story" of the weather.

It's a question of short-term memory, of course, but also a microcosmic version of the problem of conveying information and ideas through lecturing.

On a New Year

In the world of education, it is a New Year. Last Friday evening we had the induction meeting for the incoming cohort of the PCE course. Thinking about this post and the academic cycle I decided to go back and see whether my thoughts have changed about this marker over the four years of this blog. There has been no direct university intake for the past two years, so I checked 2006, and then 2005. For some reason the September entries are blank.

So I can start from scratch with a few observations/reflections;

•  We had real business to transact last evening. Students were signed up and they left carrying their university ID cards! What am I getting so excited about? We'll come back to it, but at the severely practical level, this year is the first time, after four years of trying, that the on-line registration system has worked and people have received their IDs at once. Many thanks to B. and her team who went out of their way to turn up on a Friday evening and make this a reality!
  
  
• But there was another agenda, too. Uncertainty/anxiety/excitement... We don't think much about the emotional challenges faced by students signing up for courses, and the extent to which those feelings frame their experience of the induction/enrolment process. This is not an over-blown touchy-feely sensitivity issue... Most dropouts occur in the first six weeks, I gather (sorry, I'll take this on trust. It'll take too long to research properly, but it is consistent with other research on crises and adjustment periods). You could see it in some of our (potential) students on the cusp of committing; I mis-directed one who was looking for the finance office, and when she came back for further directions she was clearly on the edge of giving up. This year the emotional agenda was more apparent than ever before; changes in the funding procedure mean that students are expected not merely to produce a letter from their local authority confirming fees will be paid, but actually to produce a credit card or a (large) bunch of used fivers in order to proceed.
  
  Psychoanalysts apparently used to argue (perhaps the remaining members of that endangered species still do) that payment was a critical part of the therapeutic relationship. It means, quite literally, that you value the therapy, and ensures that you will do your share to make sure it works. Without being so explicit, I am sure that "alternative therapists" and assorted charlatans also make use of the same principle. It's largely a matter of managing cognitive dissonance.
  
  The course, as recognised teacher training, is still (almost) free. But now, instead of all the nasty financial business being handled behind the scenes, students have to apply for funding directly, and then pay for the course personally. It will be interesting to see whether this does lead to a "consumerist" or "entitlement" disposition on the part of students, as colleagues have claimed to detect among fee-paying undergraduates.
  
  
• This level of (admittedly apparently minimal--we may be diverse, but we are still British after all) emotional arousal may account for an observation by a colleague. He is new to the university staff, but not new to the programme, having been a (very successful) Centre Leader at an associate college for several years. He noted that delays in receiving university ID cards had been serious bones of contention among associate college students for years, despite the fact that they had minimal practical significance.
  
  What is going on? First impressions. First impressions frame later experiences. For traditional undergraduates there is not much point in trying to manage those first impressions beyond trying to convey a sense of underlying order and competence, because everything is up in the air for them. They may be leaving home, ... you can complete the list.
  
  But for mature students, paradoxically, who are not changing their whole lives; for whom a course is going to be a regular additional hassle for a couple of years; the cost-benefit judgement is different...

Until a couple of years ago, all our students were volunteers. The qualification was not required as a condition of employment in mainstream post-compulsory education. Now it is. For a few years, until the previous conditions have been forgotten, there will be an undercurrent of resentment among a few of the students that they have to do the course. And that will affect the course group. It won't, after a few weeks and all being well, be a "problem", but it will always be there like a dormant infection which may erupt and disrupt normal acitivity in unpredictable ways.

That undercurrent is powerful as students approach the start of the course. In the past, if it became dominant they could easily say "Stuff this--I don't need it! I'm off!" and walk away.

That's no longer as easy an option. Their employers expect completion and qualification, and the university has debited their card!

They are looking to us for re-assurance that they are not simply stuck with two years of time-serving penance.

And it may not be sufficient, but it is necessary. Re-assure them with competence. Administration staff rarely appreciate how much students' learning is framed by the emotional container of their efficient and friendly procedures.

Our admin. colleagues delivered brilliantly last Friday. They will probably never know, but they have probably set the tone for the entire run of the course here at the university. "Probably" because I'm not setting up a controlled trial...

On Norman Borlaug RIP

Most people have never heard of him, but he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and he has been credited with saving the lives of many millions of people in the developing world--more than any other person in history. He was 95.

On distrusting dogmatic forecasts

Another doubting voice about the unstoppability of e-learning.