On the importance of context

I'm at the ISSoTL conference in Liverpool. It got off to a great start with a plenary from Graham Gibbs. At the Washington conference in 2006, Graham piggy-backed an intervention on Diana Laurillard's plenary, to lambast the conference for academic and theoretical ignorance and sloppiness, asserting that 75% of the papers he had attended would not have made the cut for the Improving Student Learning Symposium which he had founded in the 'nineties.

This year the ISL symposium and the ISSoTL conference are effectively one and the same, and so (and in deference too to the shake-up he had given the SoTL community) Graham got to offer the opening plenary.

Which he did in exemplary fashion. First, he is a superb lecturer. Understated and unflashy, he lets the material speak for itself and steps aside so as not to muffle it. PowerPoint yes--very plain text-based slides which did not draw attention to themselves but to their content, black-and-white but for the key bits in red. Funny bits but no jokes. Sadly no questions because apparently he is now hard of hearing, but all brought in with precision timing of which the (BBC Radio 4) Today programme would have been proud.

So much for the process--what about the content? It was billed as being a reflection on 35 years of experience in pedagogic research, but it was rather more specific than that. It was about the importance of context for making sense of what we think we know about teaching.

Having been engaged in what amounts to a meta-analysis of research on teaching and learning in HE, Graham became interested in material which does not fit the general message. Simply, if research indicates on the whole a 0.4 correlation between, say, student participation in class and student achievement, the picture is far more complex than simply asserting that is quite a good correlation and so we ought to be encouraging more participation. The other side of the coin is a 0.6 absence of correlation, which is stronger. But of course the 0.4 figure is attributable to the choice of apparently straightforward variables to correlate, whereas the 0.6 is attributable to a whole host of amorphous variables which did not correlate. So you can't draw any conclusions, can you?

Well, yes, pointed out Graham. You can draw some conclusions about the ways in which the researchers approached their task, and how they sought likely variables to explore, in accordance with what they expected to find. And of course how they only sought to publish the expected and positive results, and how peer-reviewers might regard negative and inconclusive or ambiguous results...

So he investigated (some of) the anomalies, and was reminded of the significance of context, which meant that, for example, "student participation" might mean radically different things in different disciplines (a dance class in which a student did not actively participate--leave aside the injured student sitting in--would not be a "class" in a meaningful sense). A science lecture to a hundred or more students is not where you expect their active contribution--you would expect it in the follow-up seminar or problem class or hands-on lab class.
He examined, drawing on the universities with which he has worked across the world, and many different disciplines, the role of academic and professional disciplines in creating different pedagogic cultures and structures. He examined traditions across different institutions and how these were entwined with and inseparable from even such matters as the layout of buildings and staff hiring policies. He explored the quality guidance and criteria laid down by many bodies for evaluating the excellence (or otherwise) of courses--and showed that some of the avowedly best institutions might meet none of them. He showed that in some cases staff engaged in "industrial deviance", violating university policies where they actively inhibited the provision of formative feedback to students. The result was the students appreciated this bending of the rules as evidence of the staff interest, and succeeded. But this department seemed to be bucking a trend in the research--because when the investigators visited the staff were reluctant to confess to such "illegal" good practice!

He discussed the impact of organisational culture on the development of excellent practice; out of four kinds of such culture found in universities--collegial, corporate, bureaucratic and entrepreneurial, it was the first and the last which actually promoted excellence. The corporate and bureaucratic models were dead hands. So why has government and the quality movement (he did not mention the QAA, or Ofsted, by name) persevered in plugging precisely the least effective models?

And in passing he mentioned the irrelevance of specifying learning outcomes and objectives for every session... (Teresa, if you read this before I reply personally, that is what I shall say).

A masterful lecture, and sadly perhaps his last public address, he said. I do hope it appears, soon, in an accessible form.

And just before I started on the second half of this post, I read Sean's latest and characteristically challenging post--perhaps Gibbs has some answers for him.

P.S. -- Several people have commented that Gibbs has undermined everything he himself has stood for, for the past thirty years. I confess I am not sufficiently familiar with his canon to confirm that, but they may indeed be right. This holist, contextualised approach is contrary to the viewpoint of much research. It is idiographic rather than nomothetic, and scholars from humanistic traditions have been delighted to celebrate the claimed switch.

...and I have been reminded that he also claimed that increasingly detailed course specifications resulted in students learning less from the course. Counter-intuitive again, but the more detail is specified, the more students can target their study strategically in order to pass--and to pass well.  Which they will do with the minmum sufficient knowledge, never having had to engage with all that pesky background stuff which may help you understand but not directly to pass.

On the point of teaching

An excellent piece on being able to see the wood for the trees in relation to teaching;

In discussions of “effective” teaching, we often hear about the “objectives” that teachers should spell out and repeat, the “learning styles” they should target, the “engagement” they should guarantee at every moment, and the constant encouragement and praise they should provide—all in the interest of raising test scores. The D.C. public schools IMPACT (the teacher assessment system for D.C. public schools) awards points to teachers who implement such practices; Teach For America addresses some of them in its forthcoming book.

Except for the misguided notion of targeting learning styles, none of these techniques is wrong in itself. But together they raise a barrier. Instead of bringing the subject closer to the students, this heap of tools proclaims: “No entrance! The subject is too hard without spelled-out skills, too boring without adornment, and too frustrating without pep talks and cheers!”

Worse still, such techniques take precedence over the lesson’s content. A literature teacher is evaluated not for her presentation of specific poems, but for stating the objectives, keeping all students “on task,” reminding them about the relation between hard work and success, using visuals and manipulatives, and, ultimately, raising the scores. It matters little, in such a system, whether the poem is excellent or trivial, what kind of insight the teacher brings, or what the students might take into their lives."

My sentiments exactly, as I've note before on the blog  and on the site. And thanks to Sheffner for saving me the trouble of looking up those urls for myself!