On advertising styles and teaching styles

On "Thinking Allowed" this week, there was a discussion of advertising, which included the question of differing US and British approaches. In the US, a contributor argued, an agency is expected to sell hard, and full on; it would never be allowed to get away with the British approach, which relies on humour and is frequently quite oblique and sometimes downright obscure.

The typology works in relation to teaching, too. There is pressure from curriculum authorities and validating bodies and assessment regimes to get the message across full on. Spell it out! Simplify! Use technology (even when it can't add anything)! The FE system, and increasingly HE is dominated by this simplistic approach.

My own preference of course is for indirect teaching, rather more like the British approach to advertising. Of course it is not as obvious when it is working, and sadly, increasingly students used to the "US" model find it difficult to relate to. So perhaps it is appropriate that I am retiring.

But I was interested to come across a ten-year-old book this week which—from the kind of critical perspective of ten years ago, but also from the USA—explored quite comprehensibly the nature of the teaching and learning encounter, and how and why the "US model" inhibits learning rather than encourages it.

Ellsworth E (1997) Teaching Positions; difference, pedagogy and the power of address Columbia; Teachers' College Press.

On threshold concepts

I am writing this in Kingston, Ontario, on the evening after the conclusion of a very successful symposium on threshold concepts (for which I can claim no credit at all; I was merely a participant, but thanks are due in particular to Caroline Baillie and her team at Queen's University for a great event).

As academic conferences go, this was a small event, with about 90 participants from a range of countries, institutions and disciplines. Threshold Concepts (TCs) is/are still something of a niche market, but attracting more attention all the time. What are they? See here for my introductory take and useful links at the bottom of the page.

There were many fascinating papers, but here is not the place to attempt a report; if and when that becomes available, I will post the link. But, reflecting more broadly:

Why are TCs gaining attention and popularity? Strangely, the view was expressed several times that although theoretically elegant and practically very useful, their virtue (in the classical sense--one of the sessions I attended this morning was by a classicist) resides in what they represent to academics. This was articulated particularly convincingly by Mick Flanagan of UCL, who is an electrical engineer; and there were many engineers present, which is not usual for a teaching and learning focused event. Mick explained how the pedagogy of engineering has almost stalled over the past decades, and (I exaggerate his more nuanced account) how academics--particularly by implication hard-nosed practical engineers--resent educational/faculty developers descending on the them and telling them how to do their jobs. Proponents of threshold concepts do not come across in that patronising way. They acknowledge subject or disciplinary expertise, and simply want to encourage and support teachers in those disciplines to discover the threshold concepts in the discipline and to find ways teaching and assessing them. The model necessarily implies partnership, acknowledging the precedence of subject expertise.

But! Critical to the emerging corpus of theory and indeed speculation about threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge is the notion of "liminality". What's that? Good question.

• Formally, it derives from the work of anthropologist Victor Turner (1967; The Ritual Process sorry I can't reference the publisher, but I am away from base...) He coined it--roughly--to describe the transitional position of participants in rites of passage and initiations, when they are moving between their previous status and their new one, venturing tentatively into the unknown. It's a good framework.
  
  
• Practically, it is gloriously fuzzy and confused... How do I know? Because of the very unusual concluding plenary. (Actually, it is unusual now, but it was more familiar in the '70s. But that is another story.) We met in an almost circular room with bays around it each containing a table and chairs. Each table had on it several lumps of plasticine (play-dough) and some plastic utensils, and the ad hoc group which gathered around each table was instructed to use those to model, literally, their conception(s) of liminality. The sharing process after that was well done but does not matter for present purposes. I did lots of this kind of stuff thirty years ago, and approached the exercise with resentment, and did not contribute much although I learned a lot from watching and listening; so my apologies to the rest of the group.
  
  
• The picture/image/impression/... which emerged was unmanageably rich. Get that word right; it's not "unimaginable"--far from it--but "unmanageable". And probably irreducible.
  

But some common features were (and here I anticipate Caroline's more detailed account based on photos and reporting back);

• Unpredictability
• Sensations of confusion and disorientation---
• ---which cannot be short-cut

All of which is fascinating to me, because it has been my stock in trade for decades. But I had thought it was confined to distinctively "difficult" areas of learning. Here, there were engineers and economists (I suspect the best represented disciplinary groups) and classicists and historians and... all admitting to the same phenomenon in their students' experience.

What is the main message here? (I was tempted to say "threshold concept", but I forebore. There is a cloud on the horizon the size of someone's hand. What counts as a threshold concept? There were some papers which took a very tight view, demanding that all the published criteria be satisfied, and some which seems to accept that anything students find difficult is a TC; articulating the boundaries may be the next task for the next symposium in Sydney 2010)

The main message, I submit, is to question the view of (pardon the cliche) the "learning journey" implicit in the discourse of instructional technology.

Enough! Scripsi totum da mihi potum.

On priorities in HE

It's not that this says anything new, 0f course, just that it says it again, today.

More sophisticated is this piece by Alan Ryan in the THE.

On reflection on TV

I am gobsmacked. I don't know where to start, This film deserves a book on its own... and it is clearly an instant classic. (I'm assuming that all the complex ethical issues have been addressed.)

So, to invert the usual pattern, here are my reservations/complaints...

• where are the girls?
• the perspective is all hub and spoke: staff and child. Child-child does not figure; although bullying and imitation are doubtless as important as in ordinary schools.
• and the routines? Mealtimes, bedtimes, getting up? They feature in the background, but only insofar as they are arenas for conflict or comfort, and
• of course, the treatment of the outside world is hopeless. You couldn't presumably use anything without waivers? More later.
• and for once I comment with some (limited) authority/background knowledge so I am not taking it all at face value. The producers clearly decided against voiceover explanations; it was a swings and roundabouts call...

The Mulberry Bush has been the epitome of therapeutic child care for half a century or more. It has, I think as an outsider who has never visited, been through several phases of development. As with so many initiatives , it was the vision of a charismatic founder--Barbara Dockar-Drysdale. Amazingly, unlike the Homer Lanes and the George Lywards, it has survived its founder and taken its own wing. In the process it has become more pragmatic, less ideologically Kleinian and perhaps more humble...

But this film is much more hard-headed. It shows that the "emotionally and behaviourally disturbed" label does not mean "mildly upset and stroppy"; it is about children emerging from the extremes of abuse. And it shows just what is involved for the staff. The title is exactly right; it really is about holding and letting go, literally and metaphorically. And, given that those staff are real live human beings who find it difficult---see them choose the constructive and therapeutic response in the face of extreme provocation, from moment to moment---and respect it.

Thirty years ago now, I was privileged to work with students who were already serving staff at other similar institutions, usually for older children, and those who worked in the unsung "bog-standard" local authority sector. I supposedly taught them something on the basis of my academic credentials, and on the whole they were kind to me in listening to my irrelevant drivel. Much more important for me was the experience of visiting them on practical placement. OK, they had a standard "defence" ----"What do you expect me to do when the whole set-up is crap?" (As indeed it was, much of the time, for good reasons which have nothing to do with this blog...) Beyond that, their expertise; their social skills, their empathy, their emotional intelligence (if we have to call it that) their second to second decision-making about how to respond most constructively to an instance of bullying, bad news from home, sheer stroppiness, being haunted by memories of abuse, not liking cabbage--was and is amazing.

And this film, beneath the surface, is about all that.

More generally, I am aware that I probably saw more in that film than the average naive viewer.

What does that imply for its use in teaching? Discuss....

On surfing in class

Since I don't teach young undergrads any more, is the situation described now common in UK classrooms too?

On analytical thinking

The CIA does not have a brilliant practical record, but from what I have read, this text is an accessible introduction to analytical thinking.

On the intelligence of crows

If you have read my page on Gestalt learning, you may have seen the amazing case of Betty the Crow. She features again in this longer clip, courtesy of TED.com:

On an (or the) educational myth

The author of this article is Charles Murray, one of the authors of the famous or notorious 1995 book on IQ, "The Bell Curve". That text was fashionably vilified, although it was by no means as reactionary as often depicted. In this article he takes on what he calls "educational romanticism", particularly as enshrined in the No Child Left Behind Act (2002) in the USA; it is broadly the belief and policy framework which aims at every child being above average.

Think about that phrase! It is a mathematical impossibility, let alone a practical one.

As I wrote a little while ago, the UK is playing a very similar game; and it is time to give up and let educational institutions loose to do what they are good at (if they can remember).

On meltdown

The reductio ad absurdum of the loss of academic trust.

On primary sources of chaos

Nowadays, even respectable writing often relies on secondary sources. One of the most-cited ideas of the current period is that the flapping of a butterfly's/humming-bird's/mosquito's wing in Peru/Brazil/Panama (it's usually South America) can cause a hurricane/typhoon/tornado/flood in the US/Russia/wherever.

Click on the heading link for the primary source, from Ed Lorenz (1917-2008), and get the answers right next time you use it.

But thanks too for the secondary source which put me on to this (the full link will break the layout).

On gloriously silly evidence of education

A classicist's commentary on Doctor Who (12 April 08); but read the comments! Hint; scroll to the bottom and read them chronologically, id est upwards.

On dyslexia and the structure of language and learning

The linked article reports on neurological research on dyslexia among English and Chinese speakers, suggesting that its manifestations in brain activity are quite different.

That's not unexpected, given that the structure of alphabetic writing and that using Chinese idiographs (apologies if I got that term wrong) is so radically different. Chinese readers have to remember the shape of thousands of characters; alphabetic readers need to remember only about forty standard phonemes and a few wild variations (such as the notorious "-ough"), even in English.

Much of the work on cultural differences in approaches to learning, such as that of Biggs (1996)* comments on Chinese students' ability to (apparently) learn by rote, and their (apparent) adoption of surface learning approaches; but it goes on to suggest that this is deceptive. My own conversations with Chinese academics suggest that they do not recognise this account; indeed, the deep/surface distinction seems less than helpful to them.

Speculating wildly, but someone may even now be taking this up— might the difference in approach have little to do with "Confucian heritage", but more with orthography? Indeed, may both the Confucian heritage (do read Karen Armstrong's wonderful The Great Transformation [2007]) and the approach to learning stem from the "brain-training" associated with learning vast numbers of discrete items?

• Indeed (do excuse me, I feel a geekish episode coming on; feel free to stop reading) Nakamura (1964)** suggests that Chinese thought tends towards the concrete (rather than speculative or spiritual), which might perhaps reflect their ability to handle large numbers of discrete items in working memory at a time...?

However, does this pose questions not only for teaching and assessment methods but also the construction of curricula for Chinese students (given their ever-greater importance in both the HE and FE sectors)?***

*Search for [Biggs "confucian heritage" student learning] for a range of useful references
** Nakamura H (1964) Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples (tr. P Wiener) Honolulu; University of Hawaii Press [I knew I'd be able to cite that some day; it's earned its continuing place on my shelf!]
*** I'm not going down a Sapir/Whorf line on linguistic determinism, but the Chinese record on human rights, at home, in Tibet, and by neglect in Africa is very grim. It's just a little too tempting to speculate and generalise too much and sail close to the racist wind, though.

On personal preferences in learning

Not "learning styles"! That idea is useless and counter-productive, but nonetheless people do have preferences about how they learn best.

And the material on my sites certainly appeals to some of them; I'm lucky enough receive a handful of emails most days from readers who have taken the trouble to say they have found them useful. Some of them compare my work favourably with other material, not infrequently "official" material from a college or university. It's flattering, but in the interests of dispassionate evaluation it needs to be approached critically. Here's how I responded to one such email today—

"How nice of you to get in touch! Feedback like yours is always encouraging, and much appreciated.

But don't be too hard on [the university]! There's a lesson in all this...

• You turned to my page after wrestling with their material. It's quite possible that had they not laid the foundations you would not have been able to make sense of it with the help of my page.
  
  
• And quite possibly you looked at a few other pages before settling on mine; it just so happened that my approach clicked with you, just as I'm sure it fails to do with lots of other people who never tell me about it.

It has always been thus in teaching!

On e-tailoring (emperors, for the use of)

Excuse the cryptic title. The link is to Phil Beadle's stimulating column in Tuesday's Education Guardian. He discusses the current obsession with "e-learning" in education, in very sceptical terms.

Education is periodically swamped by waves of fads, which (usually) retreat leaving only a little damage. We are hearing a little less about "learning styles" nowadays, "accelerated learning" has passed by, but "inclusivity" is breaking all over the shore (it's made all the more potent because few people know what it is, and it appears to have no downside—until you try practising it, of course, and see what it does to all the students who are not "special"...)

But few of these illusory panaceas have been embraced as enthusiastically as e-learning, partly of course because it is a very profitable business. Beadle points out how in schools it introduces a layer of mediation between pupil and the topic of learning; instead of learning how to produce silk-screen prints, he points out, children are encouraged to simulate Warhol's effects on a computer. Calculators came in twenty or more years ago, and mental arithmetic had to be re-introduced as a specific disciplines because the mediating technology substituted for the mental skill. Richard Sennett points out that computers in architecture, for example, can actively militate against the development of craft skills.

I used to argue against e-learning on the grounds that the technology placed an accessibility barrier between the learner and the material; until the computer interface was transparent and taken for granted, it would be very difficult to engage with the material. The ubiquity of computers is such that nowadays such a consideration does not apply for most university students, although it may well matter for older learners. However, when e-learning substitutes for rich direct experience, it cannot but deliver an impoverished version; it needs to be relegated only to those areas where it unequivocally adds to the overall experience as nothing else can.

On seeing

The "next blog" link at the top of most Blogger pages is horribly addictive. There is an option to turn it off, but it really irritates me to find a site which has done that, so I can't do it myself.

I gave in to the urge this evening, and came across this page. It's not really that remarkable, I suppose. But I see these pictures of rather mundane objects (particularly the toilet roll) and wonder at the gift this photographer has to frame and select this stuff to produce two or three stunning images a day. I carry a camera at all times, but I don't see what this person sees.

How do people learn that? (I don't buy that "innate talent" fudge; people get better at this kind of thing so they must be learning...) And how does one teach it? (Oodles of supportive but honest critical feedback is a sine qua non I know, but what else?)

On books and blogs (roughly)

You may have noticed that the blog has had a re-design. Frankly, I managed to break the previous template with a tweak too far, so I had to choose another but then I couldn't resist messing with it a bit...

So, being self-referential, that coincides with a message from a correspondent enquiring whether I have written or am going to write, the book of the site. I get such emails every other week or so, which is gratifying, but I usually respond very briefly; "No!" or words to that effect. Perhaps because I have been working on (grandiose term! I have been messing about with...) the re-design, on this occasion I decided to explain myself a little. And the more I got into it, the more interesting the issue became. (And of course, now I have a ready-made explanation to refer other correspondents to in future.)

I hear [an author my correspondent mentioned rather unflatteringly] is doing well out of his books and his consultancy; good for him and others (some of them friends of mine) in the same business. But in business terms his "offering" is really rather different from mine. People pay up-front for his expertise. Either they buy books (or more likely, libraries buy books), or they engage him for staff development sessions and pay for it. They do this because they have reasonable expectations of the quality of what he will offer, and he doubtless takes considerable care to deliver to meet those expectations. It's a traditional model, and it does tend to lead to slightly staid and conventional material.

The web is an entirely different medium; it is far more casual. People only have to click on a link to come to my site, and they can leave just as easily. They can glance at a page for six seconds (I read that somewhere, but this is not a topic I reference punctiliously); if it is not what they are looking for they can move on at no cost.

I get over a million unique visitors a year (as you may know, web hosting companies provide incredibly detailed statistics). But over a quarter of those visitors (28% at the latest count) only look at one page; presumably they then decide it is not for them and they move on. I get appreciative notes from people like you who stick around—and many thanks for them—but all I know about the others is that they did not stick around, because visiting a web-page is not like picking up (still less, buying) a book.

And for me that means that I can mess about a bit. I'm not constrained by much of a contract with the reader, and certainly no financial one. I can do my "heterodoxy" stuff, without taking it too seriously; see http://www.doceo.co.uk/heterodoxy/index.htm I can crack jokes, and if some people don't like them and move on, that is no big deal. I can take risks.

I could of course even misrepresent ideas and be sloppy or biassed or unfair about the material, and that is the risk you as a reader take if you decide to trust me. Even Wikipedia is monitored by editors; personal sites aren't. There is no peer review process, and no quality assurance mechanisms. (Actually, I did take the first steps to setting up an "advisory committee" in 2005. Several of the people I approached pointed out it was a bad idea—the Unique Selling Point of the "brand" was my distinctive voice. Of course they may just have been trying to get out of serving on it...) Certainly, no-one should trust just my site.

There is also another, quite different reason for choosing this medium. It is what accounts for its appearance in the first place: and although books can manage it quite well, readers rarely make use of the facility;

Hyperlinks, and non-linear reading. About half of the present material on the "learning" side of the site started life in the form of handouts in the mid-90s. I used to give handouts to support lectures. But they were only about one topic—the topic of the lecture. And it frustrated me that my students, even Master's level students, were not making the connections between the topics. They were not fitting individual ideas into a coherent (or even incoherent—even better) whole. I was impressed by how the "Help" files of various packages used hyperlinks to help create such connections, and I found a package which would build such .hlp files from word-processor files. So I distributed these things on floppy discs... Eventually, web access came along and I put them up there. (Fortunately before VLEs, or the whole thing might have got stuck in that dead-end, but that's another story...) But the hyperlink is critical; it enables readers to construct their own mental image of the topic, rather than being dragged along by an author.

That's the rationale behind the web-sites. The blog is different again.

The point, in terms of teaching? We use many media, and often treat them as interchangeable. They're not. Often the differences don't matter much, but sometimes they do, and they go quite deep.

On process and fluidity

(The link relates to the programme of 20 March 08, on Kierkegaard; there may be ways of retrieving it after 27 March, but you may have to root around for them!)

"In our time" today was about my old mate, Kierkegaard. The gloomy Dane. Not a barrel of laughs, most of the time. But nevertheless capable of being witty and playful on occasion. I did not understand that when I first read him, on the cusp of my twenties; but then I was never good at "framing" what I was reading, at that age. I took it all terribly seriously. Jane Austen was great literature and therefore "profound" and certainly not funny; no wonder I didn't enjoy her. Then.

To the point(s);

• I've read a large proportion of Kierkegaard. I have read and still possess Kaufmann's definitive two-volume critical biography. I took a course on him. I've used his work even in the unpromising context of a manual on professional supervision in group care (Atherton, 1986). I've relished getting the allusions and jokes in David Lodge's Therapy (1995)...
  
  
• But I may have missed his point. The contributors this morning suggested that K. used so many pseudonyms in his published work because there was no definitive K-ian position. Like his hero, Socrates, his point was in the process rather than the product; in the debate rather than the conclusion.
  

(This is where we begin an asymptotic approach to relevance to learning and teaching...)

• Did I miss the point as an undergraduate because I was simply not intellectually mature enough to engage with these shifting points of view? Quite possibly; certainly Perry would suggest as much. (I'm working on my own page on Perry.)
  
  
• So, is it reasonable to expect undergraduates to exhibit this required sophistication? This is a big deal. It may lead us to decide that there are some ideas we can't teach (to standard, school-leaver) undergraduates. If we do, they'll get them wrong. It's not their fault or their lack of intellectual capacity, they are just not ready for them, yet. This is the same argument as Loukes and others engaged in about children's capacity for religious understanding in the '60s.
  
  
• I suspect (nay, know) that we frequently get this wrong. In a well-meaning attempt to steady a moving target, we attempt to render "that which is to be learned" as something static. Just as mathematics was almost incapable of dealing with moving (and certainly accelerating/decelerating) objects without the tools of calculus, we can't conceptualise the learning (still less, the teaching) of something which is perpetually changing.
  
  
• We try to freeze it, so we can teach it. Flexible skills are reduced to standardised techniques. We don't teach languages for fluency, we teach for "getting by in routine situations--always assuming the native speaker responds in a standard fashion". We don't teach cookery, we teach recipes and isolated skills... We don't teach appreciation of literature, we teach either the pre-existent opinions of earlier critics, or standard "methods" (a.k.a. recipes) of analysing/deconstructing the "text". But there are qualitative leaps (almost like Kierkegaard's leaps between his "spheres of existence") between these levels of understanding.

• Regrettably all of this is made almost obligatory by the rhetoric of "achievement" instantiated (I wondered whether I would ever manage to use that word! Look it up.) in—of all things—the funding formulae of further and higher education. It comes back to the goal displacement I discussed earlier.
  

Moral? Gooood question! It relates to Bateson's levels of learning, certainly, but also to a number of other issues... I'll return to the theme.

On the return of rhetoric

It's not got much to do with the topic of this blog, but this must be a candidate for one of the great speeches of the decade, at least.

Even Andrew Sullivan agrees.


Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

On goal displacement/mission drift in Further Education

On Tuesday the Guardian published a paid-for supplement for the Quality Improvement Agency for lifelong learning. Its front-page article, "Progress Report" includes this;

"This is the first year ever that in all types of providers--work-based learning, adult and community education and colleges--the failure rates are below 10%," says Andrew Thomson, the QIA's chief executive. "They are about 3 or 4% in the case of colleges. And success rates are the highest ever."

Success in further education is tightly defines as the percentage of people signing up for a course that finish having achieved all the requirements. The success rate across the sector in 2006/7, according to data just released, had risen to 77%.

The same edition of the paper's Education Supplement includes an article expressing concern at the standard of training received by early years child care staff. After discussing the alleged decline in standards embodied by the current NVQ2 and even NVQ3 qualifications in the field, the article concludes;

So, are training providers passing students who don't make the grade?

Davies words her answer carefully. "Naturally colleges want to get 100% pass rates, so some of the students who are coming through these courses are being very much supported. Which is good, of course, but it is very much in the college's best interests to support those students to pass."

Two points; "success" and "achievement" are now defined solely in terms of retention and qualifications, and there is no longer any necessary connection between those "qualifications" and actually knowing or being able to do something. Qualifications, which are proxies for capabilities, have become aims in their own right. This is something which disturbs teaching staff in all sectors.

Second, this does not just lead to a dumbing down of the qualification to the level where only 3-4% fail, it also leads to unrealistic coaching to get people through. That might not matter so much in areas where there is no expectation that the holder of a qualification will at the very least be a safe practitioner, but it is unacceptable when issuing what are effectively licences to practice.

More on this from a slightly different perspective here.

On deliberate practice

I am reading Richard Sennett's (2008) The Craftsman London; Allen Lane. It is a brilliant attempt to make explicit the implicit or tacit "knowledge" which underpins craft skill; and it fails. I've read a couple of reviews, such as Roger Scruton's in the Sunday Times and Fiona MacCarthy's in the Guardian. They are both respectful and enthusiastic, but also suggest that he has missed out somewhere. Perhaps we want him to. Perhaps craftsmanship ought to be a little mysterious?

Sennett tackles his topic in the form of an erudite meditation, in the manner of Montaigne, albeit at much greater length. This is becoming, it seems to me, an ever more popular genre; I've also just read Lewis Hyde's (1983/2006) The Gift, and Thomas De Zengotita's (2005) Mediated and I confess I have given up on Michael Frayn's (2006) The Human Touch. They are all fascinating and provoke admiration at the range of material and allusion they contain, but they do tend to attract attention more to the author than to the topic, and on the whole they stay within the author's intellectual comfort zone.

The linked article from the title of this entry (pardon the political allusions in it, which will soon be very dated) is much more hard-headed and of course journalistic. It is almost certainly more useful; and I wonder why Sennett (I must confess I still have 50 pages to go) does not draw on this well-established research tradition. After all, he draws lessons from playing music and boning a chicken...

However; watch this, and think about what kind of practice regime these guys have to engage in to exhibit this effortless and entertaining skill.

On creativity and education

TED is a brilliant site, full of thought-provoking stuff. Ken Robinson's piece is a virtuoso performance as a performance, as well as of course containing some really worth-while insights. Sadly, if you go to the TED site itself and read some of the comments, there is a distinct failure to understand that this is all part of a conversation and debate...

On when to give up

(In a similar vein, see this article, too)

There comes a point when the sensible thing is to give up. The article describes several students who have made that quite rational decision; unfortunately the government does not seem to be capable of acting with similar rationality. Of course, to do so would be to concede that ordinary people are sometimes more sensible than governments, so perhaps their denial is a little more understandable.

The 50% participation figure was plucked out of the air anyway. It was quite a noble if naive aspiration, but it is clearly not going to work, and the money could be spent better elsewhere.

Both this and other educational targets for literacy and numeracy achievement wilfully ignore the bell-curve distribution of abilities within the population. (I say, "abilities" because it goes for athletic ability, and musical talent and even maturity and sunny disposition [sorry, now known as "emotional intelligence"] and good teeth just as much as it does for academic ability.) If that level is seriously low, probably lower than in comparable countries, then by all means try and improve it. You will probably succeed and make quite rapid progress at first. In the current cliche, which is quite accurate and Aesopian, you are "plucking the low-hanging fruit". But then it get more difficult; more and more effort and money is required for less and less gain; the law of diminishing returns has set in. This is the case in all such areas of public policy.

But what started out as emphasising increasing opportunities has become an end in itself, as usual; and the degree, the qualification rather than the learning which led to it, has equally become an end in itself. Just as have improving pass rates for national exams. It is not an ideological point to observe that such obsessions with meeting targets for their own sake must distort the processes they are supposed to improve. They must dumb down.

And the only thing which cannot be pursued for its own sake in this system is education; even the word itself, in a truly Orwellian move, has disappeared from the titles of the government departments supposedly promoting it.

It is time to give up.

On another swallow--but still far short of a summer

Another voice to add to the general trend identified in previous posts—a recognition that the instrumentalism of HE has gone too far.

On the restoration of sense

I am indebted to a correspondent from New Zealand (whose actual email I have accidentally deleted, it appears) for drawing my attention to this article, apropos of my remarks a few days ago about the theremin player. I can only whole-heartedly endorse Pring's remarks.

On special music

First; enjoy!

Second; Watch this clip and Pamelia's absorption in making music. I noted, for what it is worth;

• How abstract the theremin is; she is getting no tactile feedback as she would have if playing a 'cello, for example.
• Her total absorption in the task, and her limited ability to talk about it; no criticism implied, other than of our "educational" system which identifies skill and expertise with the ability to write about having it...

However; play it again!

On cultural ignorance

One can take many different stances on Woolworth's withdrawal of a range of children's furniture called "Lolita". My take is about education and cultural background.

Woolworth stores are an enormous organisation. They doubtless employ thousands of graduates. Some of them will not be business studies or IT or whatever specialists. Some will be humanities graduates...

And none of them recognised the connotations of "Lolita"?!

That is what happens when instrumentalism takes over.

On saying it yet again, but never too often...

This article is an old staple, re-worked every year. It needs to be, particularly for teachers. I know I am violating the rule with this cryptic introduction, but if teachers don't express themselves clearly, how will learners do so?

The article even mentions one of the current education buzz-words, "diversity". Its current counterpart is "inclusivity". They are both used so much that they no longer mean anything. They merely point to a poverty of thought at the heart of an educational system which has lost all confidence in the value of what it teaches.

On feeling at home

"In Our Time" is one of the most improbable glorious media successes imaginable. Melvyn Bragg discusses one unashamedly intellectual topic with three academics for three-quarters of an hour. Yet more evidence that Radio 4 is the Enlightenment.

Just look at the topics for this series, in reverse order;

• The Fisher King - the wound that does not heal
• The Charge of the Light Brigade - "All in the valley of Death rode the six hundred"
• Albert Camus - Rebel with a Cause
• The Nicene Creed - when Christ became God
• The Four Humours - yellow bile, blood, choler and phlegm in the original theory of everything
• The Sassanian Empire - in the shadow of Ancient Persia
• Genetic Mutation - the error-strewn secrets of life
• The Fibonacci Sequence - the numbers in nature

It has a mission to bridge Snow's two cultures, but blow that! It simply and unashamedly delights in ideas. I would gladly pay my licence fee for this programme alone. Lord Bragg is (in the best senses only) the Lord Reith de nos jours.

But today's programme topped the lot! As an undergraduate at Sussex in the 60s, I effectively took a term out from the formal course requirements (I went through the motions, as most undergraduates do nowadays [sorry!], but my heart and most of my head was elsewhere) to pursue the grail myth; Eliot was my starting point, through Weston to Frazer and R S Loomis to Malory and de Troyes via .... It was an exhilarating quest; I pestered librarians in the basement of Falmer House before the proper library was completed, to drag obscure stuff out of the stacks for me, and went back day after day in the hope that they might have arrived...

The story has fascinated me ever since but even so, today's discussion--if it did not actually tell me anything new--put a lot of material into perspective. The notion of the grail as an object to be possessed even after the loss of the holy land in the crusades... How the first world war provided a lens to view the Waste Land... Wow!

Next week plate tectonics...

On learning outcomes and the study of English

The Quality Assurance Agency is an easy target for UK academics. It is incredibly bureaucratic, and preparing for its "reviews" (inspections) soaks up vast amounts of time which could certainly be spent on other things. It has contributed to the development of a compliance culture in teaching in universities which is quite counter-productive, and it is great fun when someone like Thomas Docherty of Warwick swings his trusty broadsword of iconoclasm at it. (It is far from as much fun when Peter Williams, chief executive of the QAA, contrives to be waspish, patronising and smug in his response, all at the same time.)

But... Docherty is really against the notion that universities exist to get students to reach pre-determined learning outcomes. He teaches English, and I am right behind him on that. For English. I did my first degree in English. It was, I am happy to say, almost totally useless; that is not a criticism. So it did not matter what we actually learned, directly. We learned an enormous amount indirectly, but it was probably different for each of us. That was fine.

One thing I did learn, though, was how almost lethal it is to one's enjoyment of literature to have to read it and write about it every week. A week to compare Richardson's "Clarissa" (well over a thousand pages) and Fielding's "Tom Jones" (500 pages)? Stupid--but, yes, I did actually read them. Immediately after finals I turned to reading science fiction and touched nothing with any literary pretensions for twenty year, to my loss.

Perhaps we ought to specify in advance some non-learning outcomes; what we shall do our utmost to ensure that students do not learn from a course...

However, I digress. I wonder if English is not unique, or at least exceptional, in being a discipline where pre-determined outcomes may indeed be inimical to learning? They certainly make very good sense for any discipline which is in any sense instrumental or professionally focused. English is also largely a divergent discipline; convergent ones take to pre-determined outcomes much more readily. I wonder what fine art academics make of the point?

And of course there is the question of level; I know that knowing what happens in "Vanity Fair" does not really qualify as the study of English Literature, but familiarity with the canon (heresy!) is surely a sine qua non? And that requires pre-determined outcomes. They may not apply to the higher slopes of Bloom's taxonomy but they certainly apply at the lower levels.

However, I should recognise that I am out of touch; the study of English has changed enormously since my day having been colonised by the intellectual flatulence and empirical insouciance of incomprehensible French writers. Not that it matters that they are incomprehensible, or whether there are any learning outcomes associated with teaching about them; it is in the nature of post-modernism that it is impossible to be wrong!

On improbable research

To brighten up your day; that wonderful institution, "The Annals of Improbable Research" is now online for free. The site's strap-line says it all; "Research that makes people laugh and then think". Unlike other humour sites, though, this one is factual.

On new posts on sister blog

In preparation for some imminent study events, I am posting a few further thoughts about threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge. Click on the heading link to catch up over the next few days, and do get back to me even if you are not on that course—it's open to all.

On the Edge of a New Year

If you only read one website this year (apart from this, of course), you find enough at the Edge to keep you going all year.

On the passing of a year and an era

I wrote some time ago about the death of Tony Nuttall. Now I've heard, a little late, about the passing of his more gloriously disorganised friend, Stephen Medcalf.

I knew him, Horatio... But there's not the point. The point is made well by Gabriel Josipovici (my personal tutor, although he won't remember that) in the obituary;

He would not have lasted long in the present academic climate, which is the poorer for turning its back on people like Medcalf ... who felt that what they were there for was to teach, to impart to their students the values they themselves had learned from their teachers and from the authors they admired.

Going through the obituaries, the word which sticks in my mind is "inspirational". He was probably deemed "research inactive" for the Research Assessment Exercises before he retired. The Quality Assurance Agency would have thrown up their hands in horror at him (more mundanely, it is claimed that the university cleaners refused to enter his office...) Some students would have not had a clue what to make of him.

But read this (which he was apparently encouraged to write by a former student, a certain Ian McEwan) for an insight into the mind of a humanist (not in the religious sense; Stephen was a devout Anglican). There are depths of significance and resonance here which are not merely affectations for publication; they were simply the waters in which Stephen swam, and they have a natural richness which few of us can share, for all our striving.

Alongside all the conventional wishes for health, happiness, prosperity, etc., I can't just wish Stephen's sensibilities to you; they represented years of committed and serious scholarly enjoyment, but it's never too late to start. So I had better get on with it!

On plagiarism

I came across this story when idly pursuing links. (I can heartily recommend the site to check out scare stories and urban myths on the net.)

There is a variant in my experience. In about 1974 or '75 I was teaching on the "Certificate in the Residential Care of Children and Young People" (CRCCYP) programme at Salford College of Technology. Our external examiner was Chris Beedell of Bristol University. Following standard practice, we sent him a sample of student work before the assessment board meeting.

On this occasion, he took aside a colleague to say, "You may be excused for not noticing that three pages of this assignment have been copied directly from my book, but not for giving it only a 'D'!"

On an online petition

I got this from Chris Pegler at the Open University, and I'm happy to pass it on. The petition already has over 16,000 signatures.

You are probably already aware that the government is intending to withdraw funding for students studying courses which are a lower or equivalent qualification (ELQ) to that which they already hold. They are perhaps studying a PG Certificate course and already have a Masters Degree. The idea behind this is to prioritise spending on those who do not yet have that level of qualification, but the change is likely to: a) cause problems to delivering lifelong learning - as it will affect older students and those changing career/reskilling; and b) be a nightmare to administer as there is no clear record of what courses students may have done previously. Students on the same course will pay different fees.

There are some proposed exceptions and the changes will be phased in over three years. There is also an enquiry. This is operating to tight deadlines and the DIUS recently announced a change to the date for submission of evidence. Submission now has to be made by 7 January 2008 (instead of 14 January).

The relevant web site address is http://www.parliament.uk/parliamentary_committees/ius/ius_061207.cfm

You may be interested in responding yourself, or belong to an institution which you feel should respond. Or you might like to sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/ELQFunding/

On time to learn

And on a lesser-known facet of Benjamin Bloom, who did do other things in the course of a long career.

As Lee Shulman points out, "mastery learning" rose and fell. It had quite a lot going for it, and to a large extent, our Adult Basic Skills programmes in the UK are influenced by it. And Bloom had a serious point, as does Shulman today. And we know that the practicability of responding to their point is limited by timetables and course designs and assessment regimes—and of course funding. But beyond a certain point, how much of the story is about "not enough time"?

Even at the level of basic skills, learning is not simply the incremental acquisition of ever more items of knowledge or skill. At some point it has to involve the capacity to organise and deploy that knowledge and those skills, and that is a different order of learning. As Bateson suggested, and the current thinking about threshold concepts supports, more at the same level will never of itself make the leap.

But we still don't know how reliably to teach this second-order stuff.

On the perfect lesson

Last night I watched Heston Blumenthal producing the "perfect" chilli con carne. There is of course no such thing. (I had not thought of using cumin, I admit.)

And the notion of "perfection" (whatever it means, pace any surviving Platonists) is one which can appeal only to commercial caterers, to whom the food consumed is the single criterion by which a "meal" might be judged. The rest of us know, of course, that as long as the food does not fall below a certain threshold, we will judge the meal by the ambience and the company much more than their gastronomic pretensions.

Similar considerations apply to the evaluation of teaching sessions. Yes, there are clear(ish) thresholds below which practice fails to contribute to learning and may indeed inhibit it. But beyond that we can judge only very broadly. And that is where Ofsted inspectors and QAA reviewers (now of blighted memory) get it all wrong;

• They tend to assume that the perfect lesson is the result of following a standard recipe (they deny it, of course, but there is plenty of evidence to the contrary). For Blumenthal, it may be true. The "perfect" chilli is contained in his recipe. But there is no guarantee that the diner will like it. Technically, the system is defined too tightly, according to that which lends itself to measurement/judgement.
  
  
• They assume therefore that the process of teaching (and learning) is a series of tableaux or set pieces, which can be judged independently. Were the lesson objectives spelt out at the start of the lesson? (Yes = good; No = bad.) Thus we inculcate ritual knowledge (Perkins, 1999) with no understanding of its significance. Are the experiential targets spelt out at the start of the opera? the stand-up routine? the liturgy?
  

I could go on (I have just done you a favour and deleted five more bullet points), but, from Socrates to Laurillard (how is it to be in that league, Diana?) the highest-level learning is a conversation. It's dynamic, it's fluid... Time, and its story, is of the essence.

And the best chilli is rarely the hottest.

On a brilliant initiative

I heard about this site through BBC Radio 4's iPM programme/show—which is in itself a very interesting innovation, structured as it is around a blog to which listeners can contribute ideas for features and spots within the programme.

But Planet-scicast? Not only is it about interesting young people in science (target group about 12-16 year olds, I think), but it is employing the methods of Web 2.0—YouTube, FaceBook, BeBo etc. to do so. Because the content is created by the students; that is a superb exercise in itself, it publishes the material (and it is quite an addictive, "sticky" site to visit) and they learn from watching others' videos, and it's a resource for teachers (using creative commons licensing).

Shut up, Atherton!—let them see for themselves; http://www.planet-scicast.com/films.cfm

On more IQ debate

Here is more to go with my post of a week or so ago. Don't just read the main item, another essay by Flynn, but check out the follow-up ripostes and comments in the column on the right.

On felicitous phrasing

In the midst of a deeply serious and concerning article about the manufacture of psychological ailments by the labelling activities of big Pharma, I came across this gem;

...Lane is not a psychiatrist but a psychoanalytic literary critic who aligns himself with such empirically insouciant authorities as Jacques Lacan...

What a lovely phrase! It means "couldn't give a damn about the facts." With intellectual style.

On IQ back in the news

James Watson really stirred things up the other week with his remarks about Africa, and has been met with universal condemnation. Without wishing to endorse--or reject outright-- a long and complex paper with both good and not-so-good stuff, do read this counterblast.

It does pose the seriously difficult question of whether or not political factors should be taken into account in the publication of awkward findings. There is a lot of poor science out there which comes to facile conclusions about that endlessly contestable concept of "race" (see here for another blog making that point), but it is not all by definition poor.

At the same time, see here for a review of What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect by James Flynn. Flynn is a political scientist (of all disciplines) from New Zealand, who has noted the year on year rise in average IQs across the world (known as the "Flynn effect"), and has unpicked its significance—which is much more complex than at first appears.

On where to go

Assuming that you have not set up an RSS feed to alert you to my latest words of wisdom, you have probably stumbled idly on this blog. Instead of stumbling idly in the vain hope of finding something stimulating, go to ted.com. I'm not going to describe it--go there and find out for yourself. It is the web at its best, both in content and in implementation (although I have not yet checked how accessible it is to people with disabilities; I suspect that its reliance on video marks it down on that front).

On expressing an opinion

In the UK, the clocks go back an hour tonight. We revert to "Greenwich Mean Time" from "British Summer Time" a.k.a. daylight saving time. I, with many other people, think this is silly, so I thought I might make a comment on it on the blog.

It was then that I was struck with the curse of academic integrity. When was BST introduced? Who invented it (it was William someone). If the counter-argument to the reversion (how about that for abstraction calculated to lose one's readership?) concerns traffic accidents as children go to school in the dark in Scotland (which is a major plank in the argument. [Isn't it? where's the evidence?]) then how realistic is it? And is it still true today, when fewer children walk to school? (Is that true? Particularly in Scotland?)

• Norway extends even further North than Scotland (doesn't it?) How do they handle that problem? (Can I get that from http://www.regjeringen.no/en.html?id=4 ?)
• And Sweden, and Canada, and Russia...

And what, for goodness' sake, does all this mean in the context of what someone has apparently called "wikieality"? Can't remember who they are, but it was in today's paper somewhere...

More seriously, the gap between the double standards is getting wider.

Asserted opinion seems to be winning; incontrovertible evidence-based research is losing (partly, of course, because there is no such thing. It's a boojum [or is it a snark? I need to check that out].)

OK, 'twas ever thus. (Prove it!)

This post clearly needs the services of a fact-checker in the New Yorker tradition. At least I can support the notion that there are (or were, of course; all evidence pertains to the past) such people. Or can I? The link was to wikipedia...

Draw your own conclusions!

On students' experience

A friend has sent me this link;


I'm not entirely sure what to make of it; it's a class exercise (probably a very good one for freshers) but the methodological implications of developing ideas via wikis is something I need to think about...

Can it be trusted? Is it a true picture? Is it different in the UK? If it is true, and these are the "millennial students" we hear about, what does it say about our teaching methods? Is it incumbent upon us to adjust to their experience and expectations, or on them to "get real" and "grow up"? Or both?

On taking risks

Today we had a really good staff development meeting across the college network on the pedagogic rationale (hey! that sounds good, must use it again...) of our new Study Days programme. [If you have just stumbled across this blog, you don't need to know this.] The underlying principle will be "Threshold Concepts and Troublesome Knowledge" (papers on this very promising angle on learning and teaching can be downloaded from http://www.tla.ed.ac.uk/etl/publications.html)

However, as we were discussing what constitutes a "threshold concept" in our own discipline (no, I'm not going to explain. Read the papers from the link above. And it doesn't really matter for the sense of this entry.) ... we got onto spontaneity and risk-taking in teaching.

And it is a real battle-ground within institutions nowadays. Quality assurance procedures and watchdogs (such as Ofsted) insist on a "consistent product". They insist on believing in a self-serving myth of setting "minimum standards"; teaching will never fall below these standards, but is (of course) free to soar way beyond them.

Bul***it. In the real world, setting minimum standards involves setting maxima, too; because reaching for the stars involves the possibility of failure.

We didn't set out to make the point, but it became clear as we proceeded that our systems have made the "good the enemy of the best"*

We did that in social care, too, twenty years ago; I'll return to this.

* Yes, I know. This is a deliberate inversion of "Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien" Voltaire (1772)

On PowerPoint (again)

It doesn't say it all, but it does say a lot.

On machines to solve crosswords

I don't often buy the "Telegraph"—honest! :-)

The paper came with a brochure for a mail-order company, one of whose products is "the world's most powerful pocket crossword solver". I'm sure it is very good at what it does. I'm not at all good at cryptic crosswords* but the last thing I want is a machine to solve the clue for me! All the fun resides in the fact that it is difficult and that it is only one's personal brainpower which solves it. It is in the process rather than the product that the enjoyment resides.




* Not the "sauce made from meat juices" clue, but the "Victory enlivens monochrome sauce!" clue. The answer to both is "gravy". If you are wondering "how?" you have got the point.

On old textbooks

A correspondent (who happens to host this disturbing and important site on how schools blindly and blithely ignore pupils' rights) has been in touch about a more benign but fascinating issue.

Do you remember your school textbooks (regardless of the subject)? How they presented their subject was hugely influential on their generation of pupils, and it is a much neglected source for research today.

Most obviously, the implicit values of old textbooks on history and geography can tell us so much about the world-views of their period. Consider E H Marshall's "Our Island Story", which has been reprinted and can now be read on the web.

But what can textbooks in English, Maths, French, Latin tell us about the expectations of pupils at various ages in the past? "Deconstructionist" documentary research in education does not seem to have the profile it deserves. (I am very far from a fan of the emperor's-tailoring of postmodernism, but diluted with a nice cup of tea, the general idea that what has been written says something about the writer's world, is acceptable.)

And put that together with the exam. papers of the era... I would not wish to pre-empt the results of any research, but it's a fruitful seam to mine.

Are there any collections of old textbooks out there? Is there a research tradition of which I know nothing? Are there others interested in exploring this area of research? Get in touch!

On fuzzy terminology

A few weeks ago, some colleagues (Peter, UK, Tony and Renee, US) were presenting at a conference in Sydney on how students learn to "think like" professionals or practitioners of disciplines. The session went quite well, but it would have been so much better had it taken into account this paper from 2003. I had never heard of it; nor apparently had any of the two dozen or so other people, from the UK USA Canada, Australia and New Zealand, attending our session, because it was not mentioned in the discussion.

I don't know how I came across it, other than undertaking a "random walk" across the web, but it has a lot to say, and it is based on empirical research. So why did none of us find it before? Because we work in disciplines where the labels attached to ideas are relatively arbitrary, so we don't know what to search for, even on the web. Meyer and Land, following Perkins (1999) talk about "troublesome knowledge"; one reason for it being troublesome is that it may be "alien" and disorientating. It might challenge earlier learning. I researched that in the late 80s and published on it in the 90s, but I called it--from a slightly different angle--"supplantive learning". Our labels are both reasonable, but there's no way for anyone to work from one to another.

The "semantic web" has a long way to go, and there's still no substitute for just meeting colleagues and making arbitrary connections.

On 'A' level results

The mantra of the day—congratulations, everyone, but...

No, I'm not going to pontificate; I'd just like to commend this page for its presentation of the stats. The different sex profiles and subject profiles are fascinating, and if you teach research methods or associated areas, they clearly show how existing documentary statistics can be interrogated.

On 60 cows and 20m people

One for those of you teaching media studies;

• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/6930684.stm ; the breaking news of sixty cattle likely to have foot and mouth disease. It's the top story on BBCNews 24.
• http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/6927389.stm Twenty million people have been displaced by floods. To do the BBC credit, it is their second story on the website, but...?

Even Stalin said (allegedly) "one death is a tragedy, a hundred are a statistic".

I know you will have picked up the point already; this post is in case you hadn't checked out the urls.

On something completely different

Yes, it is a curiosity, but what else?...

On Potter punctuation

On p.345 "it's a damn' sight"

Right! Oh, the story's quite good, too.

Roger Scruton on the nature of education

• 'What we teach in school, what subjects we encourage in universities and the methods of instruction are all subject to the one overarching test: what do the kids get out of it? And this test soon gives way to another, yet more pernicious in its effect, but no less persuasive in the thinking of educationists: is it relevant? And by “relevant” is invariably meant “relevant to the interests of the kids themselves”.
• 'From these superstitions have arisen all the recipes for failure that have dominated our educational systems: the proliferation of ephemeral subjects, the avoidance of difficulties, methods of teaching that strive to maintain interest at all costs – even at the cost of knowledge.

Discuss!

On an academic's job description

A friend and colleague has just been told that as a course leader, it is his job to make sure the accountants have set up a project accounting system for a particular course event.

Over coffee, he went over his responsibilities for the course. It is now his job to;

• write the course advertisements, brochure and prospectus entry
• tell marketing where and when to place the advertisements
• respond to prospective student enquiries
• invite suitable students to interview
• interview them
• manage the course induction (across nine centres)
• co-ordinate staffing
• manage quality assurance procedures
• set the agenda for and chair course boards
• respond to any student complaints and manage that procedure
  
• run staff development sessions for colleagues in the associate centres
• liaise with the professional validating body, which includes
• re-designing the programme to comply with their new standards
• preparing the documentation for university validation
• co-ordinating that validation across all the centres
• writing new course handbooks;
• oversee the assessment procedures
• set work
• mark work
• moderate work
• liaise with external examiners
• visit centres to ensure consistency of teaching observations
  
• ensure all assessment data is entered onto the system
• check the accounting procedures and ensure the budget is balanced (although he is not trusted with authorising expenditure)
  
• attend graduation
• provide references for former students

In other words he has to do everything.

Except for one thing.

The university has decided not to run a cohort in the university itself any more.

So he doesn't get to teach on it.

On nostalgia—or serendipity, or something.

I enjoyed it, too! Serendipitously, clicking on "next blog" occasionally yields some gems.

BUT! Is the act of clicking through random "next blogs" worth it, on the off chance there may be something worthwhile among the dross (and this blog may well be among the dross)?

In parallel, how does one evaluate the truth-value of a list like this? I hate to be a spoil-sport, but I grew up in the '50s, and we were terrified by the spectre of polio... Perhaps our parents would have kept us at home if they had access to ways to to entertain us there.

What is happening? de Zengotita, T (2007) Mediated; how the media shape the world around you London; Bloomsbury has produced an exasperatingly (and certainly deliberately) ill-referenced rant about this.

I've changed my mind. I'm not going to ask you what you think. You can do that for yourself.

Or can you?

On "slow blogging"

This is a thoughtful post about how blogging to students works as a process of reflection and learning. (OK, it is occasionally a bit pretentious if your background is not in the humanities, but hey! she knows it!)

On academic pomposity

I've just received one of those "message undeliverable" emails which tells me the system could not deliver my posting to whom I never sent anything anyway. But I was intrigued by the address in the message history, so I went there; and this is what I found;

• "The Dog Trainer's Journal is being moved to the International Institute for Applied Companion Animal Behavior and expanded to include other companion animals. The new journal will remain the same in most respects but be attached to an established and respected institution. The new journal will be called The Journal of Applied Companion Animal Behavior (JACAB). Please visit the IIACAB web site and check out the journal page.

My dog is not impressed.

On good vibes, for once.

(Note that the site linked to is being revised, so the link will not work for long--and it's boring, in any case)

I am just back from a couple of days with about 60 National Teaching Fellows, in York. Many thanks to everyone in the Association of NTFs responsible for organising the event, which struck just the right balance between structure and flexibility, for me. We met up and compared notes. That's all. That's all?

The delight was that;

• the bitching (insofar as there was any at all), was a very low level undercurrent; OK, we all knew how privileged we were to be NTFs (but not merely "privileged", everyone except me clearly deserved the honour!) but even so it was delightfully odd to be at a meeting of academics who were so positive.
• there was a real sense of collegiality, of sharing and mutual support.
  
• and hence of wanting to go on and do even greater things!
  

Why? Because in a world/arena/sector/whatever increasingly characterised by sticks—accountability, micro-management, performance-related pay—there was evidence that carrots work. People who had been rewarded for their achievements were meeting to conspire to build on those achievements. There was no "resting on laurels". Prior success was and is an incentive for later success...

I've posted a couple of positive items in the past month; that may take me over the threshold for Pollyanna syndrome. I'd better get myself tested!

On Edu-Babble

I caught this feature (early part of the programme) on Radio 4 last night and again today. Very salutary!

Incidentally, the QCA's definition of "scaffolding" is not, as I understand it, the same as Bruner's use of the term.

But the item did present a challenge; perhaps I should re-write all this current validation documentation in plain English, with no jargon whatever. Would it then be longer or shorter?

On some advice on learning

I'd really like some feedback on this reply I gave to a correspondent a few minutes ago. We had exchanged emails a few months ago as he sought a study strategy for a technology course he was doing. His message this time suggested that my advice had been helpful on that occasion. Now he has moved on to a different part of the course, with a higher science and maths content, and once again he felt he was floundering. Was he just "bad at" this stuff?

"You have stumbled on something which many people (including some researchers) believe to be the case; that some people are "naturals" for maths and others aren't, (See http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/multiple.htm ) and some people handle technical stuff better or worse than "artistic" stuff (http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/converge.htm)

However, it is not as clear-cut as may at first appear, and although I can't "prove" it, I suspect that this is partly a matter of how abstract ideas appear to be. In the old days of photography before everything went automatic and even digital, we were recommended to "bracket" our exposures. Work out the recommended exposure, take a shot at that setting, and then also take one with the lens one stop more open and one stop more closed. All of us have levels of abstraction with which we are comfortable (and maths tends to be very abstract). On the whole storytellers (very concrete) are not great analytical philosophers or mathematicians (very abstract) and vice versa (OK, Sartre was one exception...). But we can still engage effectively with other levels on either side of our comfort zone.

The problem is that maths etc. tends to be taught at one level (and possibly tested at a slightly more concrete level). If you can't work with the level at which it is being taught, move down (not academically but concretely) and ask yourself to generate examples of how all this works out in practice; or move up, and look for the underlying patterns, of which the stuff you have been taught is just one instance.

Now, frankly, this specific advice may be total rubbish! But it still works! Because it is not the specific exercise, but as you say, your engagement with the material which makes the magic happen. I'm just saying, don't take it at face value as your teacher or the text book presented it; you can manipulate it and manage it as you will--and at the most basic level, you will find yourself remembering it, and being able to apply it.

I'll say no more!

On dumbing down---or not

I am prompted to write, tonight, by a chance hearing of a Radio 4 programme on "The Rise and Fall of the Hapsburgs" as I was going to bed. I'm not a great history buff, but the fact that such a prgramme could go out on one of the four major UK radio networks (albeit just before midnight) suggests that we are not yet totally dumbed down.

And then there is "In Our Time" (Thursdays, 0900-0945, Radio 4). Having tried several times to draft an encomium for this consistently brilliant programme, I can't encompass it. There is its reach and scope. The selection of articulate experts. Melvyn Bragg's chairing (having dropped all pretence of spontaneity; it is paradoxically more immediate). And the newsletter. This is an exemplar of radio at its very best.

But that is not all. Last week, I found myself showing an American friend around the tourist sites of Cambridge and central London. St John's College, King's College Chapel, Peterhouse... Parliament Square, Westminster Abbey, the Manet to Picasso exhibition at the National Gallery... It was almost twenty years since I had last been to these places. The Abbey had not changed much (but, hey, it has been there for about 950 years!) but other places had changed, and not in the direction of "dumbing down". They were more accessible (physically, intellectually, socially) than they were, but they did not compromise their integrity. For once, without irony, I was simply impressed.

And! We went on the London Eye. It is not part of the intellectual and cultural heritage; it is too new for that. But it is a great tourist experience on its own terms, and it is also a brilliant feat of engineering.

And as we went, we listened to our fellow tourists. And perhaps the most gratifying and uplifting part of the tour was to hear how well-informed many of them were. OK, perhaps the groups were self-selecting (apart from the, many, school groups); rubber-neckers may not make it into the basement of the National Gallery. Even so... here were unapologetic "culture-vultures" seeking out the very best; and there were unapologetic elitist "providers" (I have no idea what to call the people who manage these sights/sites) who knew that you can't beat an original Picasso or van Gogh.

I spend too much of my life only engaging with the problems of people who are marginalised disenfranchised oppressed and exploited, if I have no time to raise my sights to what we aspire to for them. Moreover; how come I have stayed away from this for twenty years?

On Inclusive Learning

Yes, I know the connection between the title and the link is not self-evident, but the link is the source for most of the nonsense I have just been struggling with.

New readers start here: sexy but politically correct Svetlana Ukridge (a.k.a SVUK), daughter of crusty Llywellyn Ukridge (a.k.a. LLUK) is .... Sorry! There are new regulations afoot, from the aforesaid LLUK, governing teacher training for post-16 education in the UK (now known as the "Learning and Skills Sector"*) These have to be incorporated, at vast effort but no benefit, into existing teacher education** programmes, for the next academic year. Like every other university offering such programmes, mine is currently struggling to accommodate the new regulations and retain at the same time to retain some vestige of academic integrity.

* "Learning and Skills Sector"? Learning is a process; skills are achieved capacities to perform (albeit always improvable). How do they constitute a "sector"? OK, it means a part of the education system. But (assuming that one can thus yoke together such disparate concepts—sorry! Can't remember the right phrase; Helen Gardner on the metaphysical poets? If anyone reads this, please put me right.) but, what part of education is not about "learning and skills"?

** they think (as their "guidance" eloquently testifies) that one can "train" teachers. We know that trained teachers are useless, whereas educated ones...

The "guidance" notes are obsessed with "inclusive learning". I thought—naively—that I had escaped fatuous political correctness when I escaped from the gulag of social work education. Not so.

There is a whole unit called; "Curriculum development for inclusive practice". There are so-called "assessment criteria" like;

'Explain ways in which theories and principles of learning and communication can be applied to promote inclusive practice.

'Analyse how theories, principles and models of inclusive curriculum design and development are used to inform own practice and the provision in own specialist area.

I'm not sure what these actually mean; I certainly do not know what would count as satisfactory evidence for their achievement, but beyond that...

What does "inclusive learning" mean? The phrase originates from the Tomlinson Report of 1996 (for which I have great respect);

'By "inclusive learning", therefore, we mean the greatest degree of match or fit between the individual learners' requirements and the provision that is made for them.'

OK. Remember that the report was specifically about students with learning difficulties and disabilities. It proposed that in contrast to the usual approach, of defining the course according to the requirements of the subject and the level, and then providing support to help students with disabilities could attain that level; the "inclusive curriculum" should be designed around the "individual learners' requirements".

That is fair enough, in the "special needs" area. But most students in PCE do not have "special" needs in that sense. This is the politically-correct tail wagging the dog, and to elevate it into the major principle underpinning the education of all future teachers in the post-16 sector is stupid.

• either it brings the teacher education process into disrepute (the more likely and less damaging result) or
• heaven help us—people may believe it! What will that do to our confidence in our plumbers, chefs, care staff... ?
  

On academic game-playing

A former colleague and student, having moved jobs, is now undertaking a "teacher training" course at his new institution, and sent me a draft of one of his essays. I have changed some details of my response to anonymise it, but retain the argument:


What a joy to read!

We have corresponded, you have sat in my sessions and you have participated in them (not necessarily the same thing), but I have never actually read any of your stuff, apart from emails.

Did you choose this topic? Was it up to you to suggest it, or a choice from a list? I suspect it is the former. Much as I enjoyed the TV adaptation of the Delderfield novels--I confess I didn't read the primary source-- there is something of a mismatch between the Arnoldian ideal of the teacher which suffuses Delderfield and (to continue the Arnold [Matthew this time] reference) the Hebraist, utlilitarian construction of the role in the present.

Were I marking this, I would be in a real quandary. There is no doubt as to its academic quality; argument, sourcing, ... they are all there. (And frankly, although there may be dispute about the grade, this is a clear pass at M level, regardless).

But, this does smack of an expert playing an academic game. It takes one to know one! As you know, we set up assessment systems for all kinds of reasons and in response to all kinds of pressures. Very few of those pressures are about demonstrable improvement in professional performance, for all kinds of reasons, including the sheer difficulty of specifying a valid task. But the game is not the real world. The map is not the territory (I know, someone else articulated that before Korzybski, but it's Friday night!)

This submission clearly demonstrates that you can play the game. But how does it contribute to showing how your performance has improved as a teacher? It doesn't. You asked for my opinion on this as a submission for assessment; I've been through the criteria, and there is clearly no problem with any of them-----------given the choice of topic, of course.

Now to get brutally real.

• I would not have accepted this title, but I would have insisted on it (the title) being submitted and approved in advance, so you would never have written it.
  Delderfield's romantic vision of (school) education for a privileged elite between the wars has very little connection with "bod standard" (i.e. post-1992) universities today. You do not show how any connection might be made.
• I can't see how working on this essay (not just writing it) has challenged or stretched your understanding of teaching and learning (apart perhaps from the reference to your changing view of Friere).
• Playing structured games is about maximising performance within given rules and parameters. It's not about stepping outside them and seeing whether such skill works in the real world. We devise games as pale imitations of the real world, and the educational game is the most hubristic of them all, as you know. Perhaps it is because you know that, that you play the game so knowingly!

I may meta-comment later!

On bandwagons

I have been contacted by someone who obviously knows that the blog exists, although I have no idea whether he has ever read it. He wants me to plug the conference which the header links to; I declined, but I'm doing it anyway. This is a great way to earn the opprobrium both of fans of the conference, for not endorsing it properly; and of opponents, for not simply ignoring it!

However! I'm actually mentioning it because of a phrase in the email commending it to me; "delegates have lots of opportunities to become inspired to try new ideas and leave with 'use it on Monday' materials!" Gee-whiz! This is two (quite expensive---£325 + VAT for the conference alone---and it's "not for profit"?) two days which will revolutionise attenders' teaching? What do these people know, and what can they impart in two days which teachers did not get in a year's PGCE training and another year's NQT mentoring, and a programme of CPD ever since (apologies to those of you not familiar with the initials, but you'll get the gist)?

No only do quick fixes not exist, but most claims to them back-fire. Remember "learning styles" and "multiple intelligences" and "accelerated learning"? You should, because they are still current. But what do such ideas actually do?

• They declare that if teachers adjust to ever more variables in planning and fine-tuning their teaching (as if they ever could do any more than have broad-brush plans given all the variables which come into play when you get into the classroom) — then students will miraculously learn better!
• And if students don't learn (sorry, "achieve") better, it is of course the fault of the teachers for not adopting this refined approach. (No way, of course, has it anything to do with the half-baked, untested and unresearched dogma underlying this snake-oil prescription.)

Forced to the choice, I'll go for prescribing fish-oil and better diet. The methodology of the "research" is just as flaky, but it has other spin-off benefits, it helps school meals staff feel valued (and even university catering staff—let's hear it for them!—they're brilliant and seriously under-valued) and even if it doesn't help with learning it protects joints and the cardio-vascular system. (I haven't checked out that research in detail, I confess, but I'll take the media reporting on trust for once.)

On visualisation

Wow! If you like visual representations of all kinds of phenomena, this site is amazing. There's no more to say, other than to recommend that you not go there if you have anything else planned for several hours.

On VLEs

I have just come across this wonderful rant! I agree with it all (at least, the bits I can understand), and it is a superb examination (some might even say "deconstruction") of the educational, cultural and even political assumptions contained in them.

One thing the author does not mention, however, is that a Virtual Learning Environment (or Learning Management System/LMS) requires a sophisticated infrastructure; small educational "providers" can't support them. Then again, they may need them even less than the rest of us, because people might actually talk to each other... On the other hand, the net has evolved. "Web 2.0", the social web is here. Practically everything a VLE can do can now be done better and more easily using free tools on the wider web; I'm working on a paper on "DIY VLE" about this.

Any ideas and comments would be welcome!

On the skills crisis

For all those of you in technical and vocational education; listen to this BBC "File on 4" programme to find out how present policies are causing distortions in the system.

On a passing tradition

This posting is unashamedly academic, elitist and reactionary.

I was sad to read today of the death of Tony Nuttall, who taught me as an undergraduate at Sussex in the 'sixties. But I was also deeply struck by his obituary by Laurence Lerner, another of the founding faculty at Sussex, and the values implicit in it. Lerner starts;

"A. D. Nuttall once gave a lecture at Sussex University about some difficulties in the Darwinian theory of natural selection, of which the first sentence was: "This lecture is the rashest act yet committed in an admittedly rather unadventurous life." [...] the sentence is a splendid glimpse of the intellectual atmosphere of the early years of Sussex (a new university in 1961) which he did so much to create.

"As a literary scholar, Tony Nuttall was willing to explore all intellectual issues that seemed to him to impinge on our way of seeing the world: [...] he showed his lecture to his colleague John Maynard Smith, one of the world's leading Darwinians, who took its objections wholly seriously.

Where and how would one now find;

• A specialist in English Literature capable of lecturing seriously and critically on Darwin?
• An institution which could offer him the opportunity to do so?
• One in which academics in English actually know any of their biologist colleagues?
• ... to the extent that each would look over the other's lectures?

As Lerner goes on;

"At Sussex, [...] he played a leading part in the development of the contextual course on the Modern European Mind, which placed some of the great modernist writers in their intellectual context, so that students read Dostoevsky or Lawrence along with Freud, Conrad or Sartre along with Marx, Thomas Mann along with Nietzsche. This course was an unforgettable intellectual adventure for several generations of students - and for their teachers.

It was indeed; it was certainly one of my greatest privileges to have taken some of it. Some of it, because at its heart was a lecture circus, as one of the faculty called it; three lectures a week throughout the year, one on each of three strands for the term. On that basis, it was estimated that, provided no more faculty wanted to join in (gloriously forlorn hope!) it would be possible to begin to repeat the sequence in five years or so. (The undergraduate programme lasted then as now three years.) Indeed, the sheer chutzpah of offering a course too big for anyone to grasp the whole of it was an academic statement in its own right.

We could not do it now. What would be the "learning outcomes"?

On completion of a glimpse of this module, students will;

1. Have been permitted to stay up late, creep into a corner of a sometimes hushed and sometimes raucous debating room in the library and begin to participate in the "conversation across the ages" which is the glory of our culture.
2. Have found their heads to be the battlegrounds of competing ideas on the most important (and occasionally the most trivial) topics of our time.
3. Have realised that there are no static answers, nor should there be, and that it is our obligation to ensure that there never are ...?

Devise an assessment scheme for that!

The author of this obituary, Laurence Lerner, gave me the only A+ grade I ever got. It was for an essay on "Was Henry James a philistine?", in which I discussed "Portrait of a Lady" in the framework of Kierkegaard's "spheres of existence". Not that it mattered what grade one got, in terms of degree classification; all summative assessment was by sudden-death final exams in three weeks at the end of the third year (perhaps there are some areas in which we have made progress).

I'm not bemoaning, "where did it all go?" (even at Sussex). I'm asking if there is any chance we might get some of it back?

On Spring

It may be some way off, but—for all you literacy buffs out there;

What is the past participle or simple of "spring"? Is it;

1. springed
2. sprung
3. sprang
4. sprought
5. spromething else?

On Academese

I'm thinking of signing up for a conference in June in Poland. I went to their website and found—great idea—that they had set up a blog for the session proposals as they came in. (That's the link in the title.)

Then I read the abstracts. Oh dear! All my prejudices about my fellow-academics are confirmed. Just read them for yourself!

I'd still like to attend (but only because I know from experience that this silly pretentious language is—in most cases—confined to the formal academic jousting of the event, and bears little relation to how people talk informally); but I can't play this game. Nor do I want to.

And for all the pretentions, there are still no hotel recommendations or costings. Forget it!

On References

Very best wishes to you all for 2007!

The link in the title to this post is primarily a bit of fun, but I do enjoy a beautifully crafted reference!