On "Make it Stick" (Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, 2014)

Brown P, Roediger H and McDaniel A (2014) Make it Stick; the science of successful learning. London; Belknap imprint of Harvard University Press.

It was a rave pre-publication review in Times Higher Education (3 April) which grabbed my attention:

'If you want to read a lively and engaging book on the science of learning, this is a must. Two cognitive scientists, Henry Roediger and Mark McDaniel, and one storyteller, Peter Brown, have teamed up to explain how learning and memory work. [...] This is a rich and resonant book and a pleasurable read that will leave you pondering the processes through which you, and your students, acquire new knowledge and skills.

I went away for a couple of weeks and then tried to buy it in the best physical bookshop to which I have access (Heffers in Cambridge) only to be told that it had sold out. Even better!

So I resorted to the black arts of the net, and Amazon--I have to admit--delivered for free within 48 hours (yesterday--and I must say it is disconcerting to get a message in your inbox saying "Your order has been posted through your letter-box" and to go there and find it so...).

I finished it a couple of hours ago. I was looking forward to being the first (trivial pleasures loom large at my age) to spread the news across the course network, in time to get it on reading lists and library orders for the new academic year.

OK. It's good, but not that good.

If you haven't a clue how to teach (or indeed how to study academic material), and you want a primer, it's great. It talks to you directly (it uses the second-person more often that anything I have read for years). It is up-front about "everything you thought you knew about learning is wrong". It makes a good job of bridging from arcane research to practical application, and—its Malcolm Gladwell point—it has (mostly) terrific and engaging stories to support its arguments (although they do take over sometimes, like exhausted analogies...)

It is by no means unusual for academic authors aiming for a wider audience to engage ghost-writers (usually barely acknowledged) or collaborators. Leavitt and Dubner of Freakonomics fame are a classic example of the latter model. I can't remember which is the economist and which the journalist. In this collaboration, despite the detailed and scrupulous acknowledgements, the writer (Brown) seems to have taken the lead, certainly (going by the notes) undertaking much of the leg-work and interviews. That's not a problem, but it does influence the structure and the style of the book.

Its strength is therefore in its readability. I read it in about as long as it would take me to read a novel of similar length (main text; 253 pages). The authors are explicit about the structure of the book—it will, they promise, re-visit its main themes several times over, and it will inter-leave them. This approach mirrors their recommendations about studying, and is generally very effective. Where it does get rather repetitious is in the final chapter, which they introduce rather apologetically by saying that they had been explicitly asked by pre-publication readers to draw out the practical implications of the ideas. They were clear enough already, and in any case flagged by a "Takeaway" section at the end of each chapter. What they do not do, however, is make the connections; the ideas are consistent with those of Bruner on the spiral curriculum, for example, and a reference in the notes would have enabled them to point readers to further material and indeed debates.

I dislike it when reviewers complain that a book should really have been another book altogether, and I'm not going to do that—as an introduction to learning for beginning and even experienced non-specialist teachers it is excellent, but rather like a purely conversational approach to learning a language, it is in danger of being self-limiting. And there's an enormous amount which is not even mentioned, such as how to explain stuff to students, or even much on what the teacher can do to improve learning—apart from some examples and vignettes of practice. The key to learning is presented as memory and recall, and they are unapologetic about it being hard work—they make a good case for why it ought to be regarded as hard work, and indeed for the introduction of "deliberate difficulties" into the process.

The authors do quote Rumsfeld, of course, on "unknown unknowns" (p.17), but their approach to reviewing practice in order to correct and develop it does rest on the assumption that best practice in teaching and learning is well-known and not contestable. See also their account of Sternberg' "dynamic testing" (pp.151-152). As the argument proceeds, this becomes more of a hindrance, and the section on training in the final chapter raises more questions than it answers. (Here, a short discussion of Kirkpatrick's four levels of evaluation would have helped a lot.)

Similarly, there is over-simplification in their account of dyslexia (although they do enter a disclaimer about engaging with the "enormous body" of literature on it), but that chapter 6, titled "Get Beyond Learning Styles" is otherwise well-balanced, and even cites Coffield et al. (2004), although they do give Gardner's "multiple intelligences" a rather easy ride... On the other hand, that chapter, dominated as it is by a rambling eight-page case-study of an all-American self-made entrepreneur which totally loses sight of the wood for the trees, fails to tie the illustrations to the ideas. Occasionally, material seems to be dropped in because it is part of the cognitive science canon—such as the obligatory reference to Mischel's "marshmallow" experiments; mentioned (unnecessarily) at the start of chapter 7 and then ignored. And, saddest of all, all the invaluable material from Hattie's and Marzano's meta-analyses is not discussed at all. I haven't been through it all (there are some issues with varying terminology, too) but the authors' contention about the effectiveness of spaced versus mass practice is massively supported by Hattie (2009: 186), so why isn't the point made?

However, the book is certainly good enough to hope that there is a British edition in the pipeline; anyone unfamiliar with US sports will be baffled by some of the examples and illustrations, and even the educational terminology needs more background (although the arcane mysteries of UK A-levels are spelt out in some detail for the US readership; p.190).

And as the THE review highlighted, it is refreshing to have a book to recommend which a reasonably motivated student or colleague can actually sit down and read through—which is perhaps ironic given that that is a method the authors would not recommend.

Items to Share: 25 May 2014

Education Focus

• Introducing Carl’s Banned-Word Scanner – Phenomena: The Loom 'I’ve gotten very persnickety about the individual words and phrases that students choose. I’ve built up a list of “banned words” that I’ve come across in assignments and which I never want to see in class again. It’s not that those words are absolutely wrong in terms of their meaning. It’s just that writers–both new and veteran–should try to do better.' 

• Top 5 Ways to Explain - badly... (Tom Boulter: Thinking on Learning) 'There have been some fantastic blogs appearing recently on what seems a bafflingly marginalised topic in much teacher training and INSET: the techniques and strategies behind constructing clear, effective and memorable explanations.'

Other Business

• Notation, notation, notation: a brief history of mathematical symbols | Joseph Mazur | Science | theguardian.com  '[A]lmost all maths was written rhetorically before the 16th century, often in metered poetry. Most people think symbols for addition, subtraction or equality had been around long before Euclid wrote his Elements in the first century BCE. No!'

• Devorah E. Klein , Gary Klein and Shawna J. Perry take a critical look at a key component of health-care reform. - Project Syndicate  'As we consider a likely future in which physicians adhering to [Evidence-Based Medicine] are paid more, we must consider the cognitive limitations and the human cost of unquestioning compliance with so-called “best practices.” A more effective approach must be to combine EBM with the expertise and intuition of experienced caregivers, and to take the benefits of both.' (Gary Klein is well-known for his studies of firefighters and other practitioners who have to make fast decisions: see this conversation between him and Daniel Kahneman—also on video.)

Items to Share: 18 May 2014

I've been away for a couple of weeks, so this catch-up is even more random than usual!

Education Focus

• The Opposite of Boring  : Conceptual Understanding Hocus-Pocus | Webs of Substance Two stimulating posts from Harry Webb.

• BBC Radio 4 - Intelligence: Born Smart, Born Equal, Born Different 'BBC Radio 4 has just concluded an excellent three-part series on the controversies over the genetics of intelligence and it’s one of the best and most nuanced discussions you’ll hear about the topic for many years.' (Vaughn Bell: Mindhacks) 

• Lectures Aren't Just Boring, They're Ineffective, Too, Study Finds | Science/AAAS | News 'The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation.' (Breaking news!)

• Is Rereading the Material a Good Study Strategy? | Faculty Focus  '“Rereading has three strikes against it. It is time consuming. It doesn’t result in durable memory. And it often involves a kind of unwitting self-deception, as growing familiarity with the text comes to feel like mastery of the material.” (p. 10) I was a bit taken back when I first read that. But part of the argument made sense immediately....' 

• A System for Remembering What you Read

• One scientific insight for curriculum design Joe Kirby on quizzing. 

• What is a more effective way of taking notes - laptop or notepad? | Neurobonkers | ''The researchers found that on factual recall questions, the students performed equally well no matter how they took their notes but for conceptual questions the students using the laptops performed worse. The students writing longhand wrote fewer words and used less verbatim transcription but scored better when tested on what they had learned.' 

• ResearchED York- the blogs ResearchED York: It's great up north  Two posts from Tom Bennett on the latest ResearchED conference. Zombie bølløcks: World War VAK isn't over yet - Tom Bennett again

• But I Already Learned MLA! Why Do I Need APA Style? A dubious article which implies that knowing how to comply with APA style in detail is a sufficient credential for membership of a professional community=== There's a form of dogmatic fundamentalism about this which can only detract from students (or even academics) daring to experiment or even speculate in their writing...

• What the PISA problem-solving scores mean--or don't. - Daniel Willingham  'So the PISA 2012 is surely measuring something, and what it’s measuring is probably close to something I’d comfortably call “problem-solving.” But beyond that, I’m not sure what to say about it.'

• Making It Stick - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education  '"Make It Stick", the single best work I have encountered on [memory and learning]. Anyone with an interest in teaching or learning will benefit from reading this book, which not only presents thoroughly grounded research but does so in an eminently readable way that is accessible even to students.'

Other Business

•  Seeing red? The mind-bending power of colour - Telegraph telegraph.co.uk
  '[O]ur perception of colour really does affect our minds, and our bodies. A 2004 study found that football teams wearing red were statistically more likely to win than teams in other colours. Another, in 2008, found that male volunteers shown photos of averagely attractive women on red and white backgrounds rated the women on red as more good-looking. Meanwhile, an experiment in the Seventies found that male prison inmates became physically weaker when they were housed in pink-painted cells.'

• phdcomics.com research methods,  ethics, humour  

• Phineas Gage neuroscience case: True story of famous frontal lobe patient is better than textbook accounts.
  

On nuances of loss

I've just finished Stephen Grosz (2013) The Examined Life: how we lose and find ourselves (London, Vintage).  As so often, it comes with lots of hype on the cover, but for once it may be justified.

It is a series of essays, perhaps meditations, or even reflections on some of his patients, their experiences and the experience of therapy. They are not case-studies—that term implies far too much distance. It is very readable, moving and thought-provoking.

Grosz is a psychoanalyst. That has always been a confusing label. He is not a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist. It's not even clear whether he is a psychologist (clinical psychologists treat behavioural and psychiatric problems in ways which do not involve medication or other physical interventions, usually based on established treatment protocols originating from academic and clinical research). He is a psychotherapist, technically, in that he practises "talking cures", but that is too broad a label, in that it now includes practitioners of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), who are very effective for "routine" cases of depression etc. (I hasten to add that there is nothing at all "routine" about the experience of clinical depression.)

Grosz is a lay (non-medical) psychoanalyst. Technically that implies that he is a follower of Sigmund Freud, but that is much less likely to be the case than 25 years ago, when he began to practice. Freud's daughter, Anna, gets a look-in in the book, but only when a young patient mixes her up with Anne Frank. Sigmund gets one mention in the bibliographic notes. So does Dr Seuss.

I labour this point a little because psychoanalysis (now much more a critical "lens" for the humanities than a serious approach to the treatment of neurotic disorders) does have a few very distinctive features:

It takes its time. As Grosz puts it;

"Most of my work [...] has been with adults in psychoanalysis--meeting with one person for fifty minutes, four or five time a week, over a number of years. I have spent more than 50,000 hours with patients." (p. xi)

It takes as long as it takes. It has to be acknowledged that "efficiency" is not psychoanalysis' strong suit, particularly when patients sleep all through their allocated time, and the analyst lets them ("Through Silence" p.199). And it does tend to support David Cohen's observation (from memory) about psychiatry in the USA, that the better qualified and the more skilled the practitioner, the more trivial the problems he deals with... And of course there is the skewed demographic profile of patients, because it is extremely expensive. But the other side of the story is that there is no need to push patients into pigeon-holes. (I remember a couple of professionals in the field--no idea of their professional labels--catching up  before a case-conference settled down to business. One said, "Oh, her? British Standard Low Self-esteem, level 3!")  Grosz readily admits formulating initial hypotheses about the problem, and then abandoning or refining them, or waiting months for the evidence to test them.

It contextualises the presenting problem within the life-space of the individual patient--and perhaps their family or immediate relationships. There's almost no jargon in this book, and indeed some trenchant dismissal of conventional wisdom (especially the "closure" myth; "My experience is that closure is an extraordinarily compelling fantasy of mourning. It is the fiction that we can love, lose, suffer and then do something to permanently end our sorrow..." (p. 209). Instead, there is a much more dynamic view, characteristic of humanistic depth psychology at its best: What is the point of this behaviour/reaction/experience? What does it do in this particular setting/relationship/personal history? What is it preferable to (i.e. defend against)? What is involved in giving it up?

This is, I think, the defining characteristic of psychoanalysis and its variants. Freud was wrong about practically everything, but every great innovator is practically bound to be. So was Marx. So was Darwin (less so, of course; he just didn't have the tools we have today). Initial formulations are simply starting points. But the recognition of what lies behind trivial issues and interactions (such as vacillating about whether or not to take off one's shoes before getting on the traditional couch [p.169]) and how minutiae can expose great themes is a transformative framework.

The sub-title, "how we lose and find ourselves", suggests that loss will be a major theme, as indeed it is. The section on "Changing" (pp. 121-196) discusses the issues of loss implicit in even the most beneficial change. It's long been an interest of mine, but while I have tried to explore some of the general principles in respect of learning (“Learning as Loss”), Grosz engages with specific instances and manifestations in the lives of specific individuals. His stories are far more nuanced than anything I could aspire to.

Incidentally, I was also reminded of a psychodrama exercise; the Magic Shop (Moreno, 1948), which focuses on the “bargain” of change, and how everything has to be paid for. It is a far blunter* instrument than Grosz would use, but I've used it effectively (I think!) in the past in an educational context.

* I almost wrote that it was a far too "gross" instrument... Now what would that imply?

Items to Share: 20 April 2014

Education Focus

• The Lost Art of Memory: Moonwalking with Einstein | Pragmatic Education Techniques for memorisation extracted from Joshua Foer's 2011 book

• Cheating Lessons, Part 3 - Do Your Job Better - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'A robust body of research shows that taking frequent exams improves learning more effectively than studying or reviewing notes.' 

• Issues with Cognitive Load Theory | Webs of Substance 'This theory implies certain teaching practices. For instance, when learning new material, we should be careful to structure teaching programmes so that the concepts are broken down into small numbers of interacting elements in order to ensure that students can apprehend all of the required concepts in their working memories. As learning develops and relevant knowledge is built in students’ long term memories, we can start to make use of chunking and expose our students to more complex concepts. This is why the prior knowledge of our students is important and why teaching a group of students with a wide disparity of prior knowledge is problematic.' 

• My First Year of Teaching - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'I didn’t know what to expect of my first year in the classroom. And as an American teaching U.S. history in England, I didn’t know what to expect of British students.'

Other Business

• The Art of Wisdom and the Psychology of How We Use Categories, Frames, and Stories to Make Sense of the World | Brain Pickings '[W]hat can we do, as a society and as individual humans aspiring to be good, to cultivate that deeper sense of right and wrong, with all its contextual fuzziness and situational fluidity? 

• The Poetry of the Trading Floor, Going Beyond Bears and Bulls - NYTimes.com 'Meanwhile, stags buy new issues in the hope of a quick return. Black swans swim in unexpectedly, as dishonest brokers perform goose jobs (promoting a stock to increase demand so that they can unload their inventory). And when all such people have been fired, the remaining dealers, left huddled together for warmth, are called penguins. The dogs of the Dow bark, but the caravan moves on. Bulls make money. Bears make money. And PIGS get slaughtered.'

• Free: British Pathé Puts Over 85,000 Historical Films on YouTube

• The Surprising Science Behind Why and When We Yawn : The New Yorker 'At its most fundamental, a yawn is a form of communication—one of the most basic mechanisms we have for making ourselves understood to others without words. “It’s often said that behavior doesn’t leave fossils,” Provine says. “But, with yawning, you are looking at a behavioral fossil. You’re getting an insight into how all of behavior once was.”

• Science & Cooking: Harvard's Free Course on Making Cakes, Paella & Other Delicious Food - Open Culture

• Ants Build Complex Structures With a Few Simple Rules | Simons Foundation 'Ants might even shed light on the complex organization of the organ we use to study them — the brain. The behavior of an ant community resembles the organization of neurons into a functioning brain, [...] “Each neuron is relatively dumb, but if you take billions of neurons, they interact in a way that we have only scratched the surface of understanding.”'

• The Stoic Reading List [farnamstreetblog.com]  'something I wish I had found a few years ago when I first started reading philosophy, a stoic reading list.'

Items to Share: 13 April 2014

Education Focus

• Bringing the Locker Room Into the Classroom - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Over the past couple of years, I have come to see what a classroom dynamic of engaged participation and collaboration might have in common with the fast-paced give-and-take of a basketball game.' What academic teachers can learn from sport coaching.

• Teacher's poem blasting Michael Gove and his 'Dark Ages' curriculum hits a nerve on YouTube - Education News - The Independent 'An excoriating poem lambasting the policies and the “Dark Ages” curriculum of Education Secretary Michael Gove has become an internet sensation among teachers. 

• No Child Left Undiagnosed | Psychology Today On the pathologisation and medicalisation of childhood.

• Tom of Finland Part 2: Should Learning be Fun? - Tom Bennett - Blog - Tom Bennett - TES Community 'I'd love to find some evidence to substantiate the claims that the Fun Learning camp makes- I'm like an atheist, glumly investigating every miracle hoping to find God- but every time I put my hand out it melts away like mist. [] Can learning be fun? Of course. Is learning sometimes fun? Undoubtedly. Should it be fun? That's a whole different question. Simply saying yes damns every act of learning that isn't enjoyable, and you would have to be completely bonkers to think that everything you learn should be fun as well. Almost everything worth achieving requires sweat, grit and the ability to stick with something when it's hard- also qualities I'd like to see in my students in general. I don't want them bored, but I have no problem if something they do is boring, if it's necessary. 

• Joe Moran's blog: Fail better ''Teaching is mostly about failure, because it is based on conversation and words are always liable to fall on stony ground. Reading is about failure, because most of what we read we forget, and quite a lot of it is not as interesting as we thought it would be. Writing is about failure because, even if we manage to finish something and send it out into the world, we will mostly come up against a wall of indifference made of people who have other things on their mind and other things to read and write. [...] In other words, you just keep throwing enough mud at the wall until some of it sticks. Maybe you only have to succeed once, or at least to fail less catastrophically.

Other Business

• Ronald Blythe sees the contradictions in a funeral held in the spring What an extraordinary sensibility and what an extraordinary writer!

• Get Comic Neue The free and (a bit more) stylish successor to Comic Sans

• Antifragile: A Definition 'The classic example of something antifragile is Hydra, the greek mythological creature that has numerous heads. When one is cut off, two grow back in its place.'

• So You Think You're Smarter Than A CIA Agent : Parallels : NPR Using the wisdom of crowds to interpret international relations.

• Looking For Tom Lehrer, Comedy's Mysterious Genius [buzzfeed.com] He's performed on and off (mainly off) since the '50s. His entire repertoire is 37 very dark and very clever songs... Taught maths at Harvard but never finished his PhD. Fascinating profile. 

On the Whole Game

 (An expanded version of a piece for the student newsletter, with links and references.)

I took a workshop session at a recent Study Day on "Emotional Aspects of Learning and Teaching"—of course it had to be very selective, and I missed out one very important emotion; boredom. I was reminded of that at some of the teaching observations I have done recently, and how much of a challenge it poses to the teacher. When we express concerns about behaviour management, many of the problems follow from learners being bored.

Many years ago, David Hargreaves suggested that teachers fall into three categories; lion-tamers, entertainers, and "new romantics". Lion-tamers believe that learners do not want to learn, but they will if you crack the whip hard enough. Entertainers also believe that learners do not want to learn, but they will if you make it fun enough. New romantics are foolish enough to believe that learners do actually want to learn, and the job of the teacher is as much to get out of the way as anything else. Lion-taming is the position taken by many starting teachers—often because they are nervous. It is something of a dead end, because once students detect nerves, they close in. But there is something in both the other positions.

At least the entertainers recognise the pernicious effects of boredom—it's just that all too often overcoming it becomes the prime objective, often to the detriment of actually learning anything. The new romantics, while they may be accused of some naivety, are aware that teachers can sometimes be impediments to learning. If the prime requirement of medical personnel is "first of all, do no harm", that of teachers may well be, "first of all, don't turn students off".

And yet we do actively, if unintentionally, do that.

I'm thinking particularly of vocational courses I have sat in on over the past few years, and how boring they often are. The teachers try to liven them up with activities and an engaging manner, but they are trying to roll a rock up a hill, and the moment they relax the boredom rolls back in.

Why? There are many reasons of course, but one is the way the content has been pre-processed and pre-digested so that it can be taught in small incremental gobbets, each of which can be assessed and added to a portfolio. The learners go through the motions, and they do "achieve", but there is little connection with the real world in what they have to do, and it is indeed boring.

(And PowerPoint doesn't help, either. It defaults to bullet-points and there is nothing more calculated to fragment content and lose any sense of context and connection than a bulleted list. See, of course, Edward Tufte on this.)

“M... was teaching a group of nursery nurses coming to the end of their [...] course, and she was, as she said, tidying up loose ends. Their syllabus required them to have studied team-working [... ]

At a technical level, M. is a good teacher: she tried to draw information and ideas out of the students but since they had little experience to draw on, she could not get the “right” answers from them. […] At last, she put up on the whiteboard the three essential components of good team-working ... I thought at first, that was interesting. Then I put myself in the position of the students, who were dutifully making notes, and thought, they have to remember these points for their exam: there is a lot more to studying in this area than I thought. Perhaps I ought to make a note of these points for my own future reference?

Then I “woke up”. [...] I have been involved in team-working for the past twenty years, working in and leading teams myself, and conducting training and consultancy on it. There was nothing “wrong” with the three points on the board, but I had never conceptualised the issue to myself in that way, and I saw no particular advantage in doing so.[...] They seemed to represent the outcome of the text-book author’s search for three simple headings under which to organise his required thousand words on team-working. But for these students, this was now the definitive knowledge on the subject, to which their experience had to be subordinated ... As M. said afterwards, it was what they were expected to “know”... (1999)

On another of many occasions:

This class was part of an "access" course. (Access courses provide an alternative route to "A" levels for mature students wanting to go on to train for—chiefly—occupations such as nursing, social work, and teaching. Many access students are women whose youngest child has started school.) It was on Human Growth and Development, and concerned language acquisition, exploring the competing accounts from Skinner and Chomsky. It proceeded in a rather pedestrian but informative session for the first half, and then there was a brief comfort break. When the students came back, they were much more animated, swapping stories about their children and when they had started talking, and the mistakes they made. The teacher could barely get a word in edgeways...

Afterwards, she was very apologetic. "I'm sorry about the second half—I really let it get away from me, didn't I?" It took her a while to realise that those animated conversations in the second half would have provided a solid experiential base for the ideas of the first half, had she been able to swap the lesson round—and with a little more practice she could have drawn the formal "teaching points" out of what the students already knew at one level, but had not yet conceptualised.

(And with one of my own classes);

We were discussing the importance of making content relevant to learners' experience, and I referred to a session I had observed a few days ago, in which the teacher (also teaching about motivation, and stuck in a bind about having to "deliver" prescribed schemes of work, but doing her best) had taught well on the basis of "this is stuff out there which you need to know in order to pass the assessment".

She could have connected and taught much better by drawing on the learners' shared interest in sport. This wasn't accidental. It was a course about "Sport Leadership" [...]

But hey! Motivation and sport are topics made for each other.

I know nothing about sport. [...] But even I could see this connection and use it to get the class discussing forms of motivation and the tactics coaches use to hype it up...

(More on the observations behind these reflections here and here, and an interesting post about what professors can learn from coaches [in the US context], here. The Access example nicely suits Kolb's learning cycle, too)

Attempting to reduce material to simple concrete items which can be made a note of or memorised sucks all the life out of it. It strips away the context, and it is context which brings it alive. Without that, the knowledge is in David Perkins' (and A N Whitehead's) term, "inert". It's not used—"it just sits in the mind's attic, unpacked only when specifically called for by a quiz or a direct prompt but otherwise gathering dust." (More here, from Perkins 1995:22)

Put it into context and a sequence—draw on your experience, or better still get the learners to draw on their own experience if possible—and it becomes a story. Much more memorable and engaging.

I sat in on a class last week which included why certain finishes might be used for partitions in a building. Sadly, the students were bored much of the time; they weren't concentrating, and they drifted off the task at the merest opportunity. The teacher agreed later that she had had to act like a sheep-dog, trying to keep them together and going in the right direction...

But then—it might have been a slight digression—but the teacher was talking about how fast-food restaurants use bright colours, especially red, to get customers energised and more inclined to eat and move on, rather than to relax over a leisurely meal. I remember that and it will probably come back to me next time I have a hamburger, but I still can't think what the three types of building plaster are...

And then during groupwork a student told a spontaneous—and relevant—story about how his firm had modified an original design in order to improve the customer's requirement for better soundproofing; the body language of the rest of the group clearly showed how the material was making sense and coming alive.

David Ausubel (1968) famously (well, relatively, if you move in the right circles) said that the most important determinant of learning is what the learner already knows. From this he developed the principle (already known to good teachers for centuries, of course) of the Advance Organizer. It's an introductory strategy to put the lesson into the context of what the students already know, but in practice it can be used at any time, as the teacher mentioned above did, without being aware of it. Hattie rates them as just below average effect-size (0.38), but on the other hand they are so easy to use, what's not to like?

And back with sport as a context, and with David Perkins; he explores these matters in what he calls the "whole game" approach to teaching:

'Perkins sees two unfortunate tendencies in education: One is what he calls “elementitis”—learning the components of a subject without ever putting them together. The other is the tendency to foster “learning about” something at the expense of actually learning it. “You don't learn to play baseball by a year of batting practice,” he noted, but in learning math[s], for instance, students are all too often presented with prescribed problems with only one right solution and no clear indication how they connect with the real world.

'The way to let young learners play the whole game is to find or construct a junior version of it. ...

It is in many respects the obsession with enabling learners to "achieve" their qualifications, rather than actually to become better builders, hairdressers, nursery nurses or travel agents which leads to this denaturing of the course content and the stultifying boredom which besets many classes—and which learners compensate for by messing about.

As ever, read Becker (again).

---

Hargreaves D (1972) Interpersonal Relations and Education London; Routledge and Kegan Paul

Perkins D N (2009) Making Learning Whole; how seven principles of teaching can transform education San Francisco; Jossey-Bass (Also discussed on the blog here.)

Items to Share: 6 April 2014

Education Focus

• ResearchEd: cognitive science in the classroom | Pragmatic Education Andrew Old's talk at the ResearchEd conference in Birmingham last weekend. And Part 2: Three Applications of Cognitive Science | Pragmatic Education 'From a hundred years of research, there are three deceptively simple insights that when applied well in the classroom, have very powerful effects. They are not quick wins, silver bullets or revolutionary innovations. Instead, they offer something more modest: a chance to focus our teaching and help pupils remember what they’re learning. And expert teachers have been doing them since time immemorial.' 

• Active learning is powerful magic | Webs of Substance 'I think we can do without the notion of ‘active learning’. It serves no useful purpose.'

• We're good at something, but what is it? PISA problems [Tom Bennett] '"Pupils in England are 'significantly better' at problem solving than the average for the industrialised world, the latest results from an influential comparative education study show. [] The country finished 11th among the 44 different international territories where 15-year-olds took new computer-based tests, as part of the last round of Pisa (Programme for International Student Assessment).' But what does it actually mean?

• The Adult Learning Theory – Andragogy – Infographic [elearninginfographics.com] 

• The 50 great books on education [Dennis Hayes] 

Other Business

• Big data: are we making a big mistake? - FT.com 'Cheerleaders for big data have made four exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends: that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote “The End of Theory”, a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, “with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves”.' 

• Cool Ad Watch [Andrew Sullivan]

Items to Share: 30 March 2014

Education Focus

• The research-practice paradox | Pragmatic Education “Nearly everything suggested in education can claim to be ‘evidence-based’ because, in research, nearly everything works!
The trick is to ask the next question: “how well does it work relative to everything else?”
 When we ask this one we find that the debate is dominated by methods which work, but only have a tiny effect. While much more effective things, like ‘linking to prior knowledge’ are little used.”

• Gaming it [Sam Shepherd] 'I’m doing an online training course on data protection. It’s moodle based, and consists of stages to work through before a moodle quiz, successful completion of which produces a certificate which ticks off that I have done my bit of training, and I am fully data protectioned up. I discover, through geekiness, that you don’t actually have to work through the stages, and can go straight to the quiz, which I open in another window, then complete using a combination of current knowledge and simply checking back through the power of skimming, scanning and the browser “find” function. Sorted.'  

• Reading Circles Get Students to Do the Reading | Faculty Focus 'In my course, the required reading is intensive and extensive. Students must read multiple texts that range across disciplines, genres, history, and culture. The goal of this interdisciplinary course is improvement of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. My students, like many others, live complicated lives. Add to that the fact that many are not particularly good readers or people who like to read, and the result is students arriving in class not having done the reading. When that happens, the teacher becomes the best student in the room. She talks about the text while students dutifully listen—or appear to listen.'

• What we still don't know about what works in education [Stephen Gorard (Durham)] 'Education is one of the largest academic research enterprises in England, and yet in over 50 years, research into education has failed to find useful answers to many of the most basic questions about how we teach children. The department of education, which recently published a proposed set of research priorities for schooling in England, is attempting to close the evidence gap. While this is a welcome endeavour, it raises questions about how far politicians should set the academic agenda...'

• The future of educational research | Webs of Substance Excellent and considered critique of meta-analysis as a method of evaluating educational interventions.

• Explainer: what makes Chinese maths lessons so good? [theconversation.com] '...most classrooms have few concrete teaching materials for maths lessons. The cultural traditions of Chinese maths education lead people to believe that routine practice is the most efficient way to learn. This continues today. And as a result, schools in Shanghai have scored highly in recent years on international tests of maths ability.

Other Business

• The Chomsky School of Language Infographic | e-Learning Infographics 'Noam Chomsky is a lot of things: cognitive scientist, philosopher, political activist and one of the fathers of modern linguistics, just to name a few. He has written more than 100 books and given lectures all over the world on topics ranging from syntax to failed states. The Chomsky School of Language Infographic presents some of his most well-known theories on language acquisition as if he were presenting them himself.'

• On Kahnemann [Edge.org] 'Daniel Kahneman turned 80 on March 5th and [we] noted the occasion with a reprisal of a number of his contributions to our pages. [...] At that time, [...] Richard Thaler, suggested that Edge follow up the birthday announcement by doing what it does best, asking Edgies who work in fields including, but not limited to, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, law, medicine, a question. [...]—"How has Kahneman's work influenced your own? What step did it make possible?"....' 

• The Future of Self-Improvement, Part I: Grit Is More Important Than Talent - 99U 'In the late ’60s, Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel performed a now-iconic experiment called the Marshmallow Test, which analyzed the ability of four year olds to exhibit “delayed gratification.” Here’s what happened: Each child was brought into the room and sat down at a table with a delicious treat on it (maybe a marshmallow, maybe a donut). The scientists told the children that they could have a treat now, or, if they waited 15 minutes, they could have two treats.'  [And some notes from a session I did on Saturday on Emotional Aspects of Learning and Teaching which alludes to this and associated issues.]

Items to Share: 23 March 2014

Education Focus

• On Obedience [Harry Webb] 'A new school is about to open in London. The Michaela Community School [...] is controversial [...] It will be following what could be described as a traditionalist set of principles. I sincerely hope that it will do so successfully and that this will provide the proof-of-concept for traditionalist education that the free schools programme promises to deliver.  [...] As part of their preparations, Michaela released their educational vision. I find it most fascinating. However, I think we have an indication of what is to come in the reaction on Twitter to one little sentence, “We will expect our pupils to be polite and obedient.”'

• researchED UK: Teachers are doin' it for themselves [Tom Bennett] Bennett set up a conference on research in education last year, and it's expanding this year: 'I had no idea how successful the conference would be, but then I had no idea how much of an appetite there was for teachers to become involved in research, to be active participants in its inception, investigation, and execution. I thought it was just me – it wasn't. There was a whole army of edunerds and numbers-fetishists, empiricists, sceptics and weary practitioners, labouring out there under the yoke of 'research proves', when it bloody well didn't. [...] We sold our 500 tickets in a month, and curated a waiting list that eventually rose to three hundred. Some of the best names in UK education and beyond queued up to help. It was a real grassroots event, and six months later, I'm still reeling. [...] So we decided to see how far it would go. Which brings us to researchED Birmingham, on 5 April, the first in a series of national mini-conferences – a tour, if you will – that will take the concept everywhere that people want it.'

• Should we do away with 'dyslexia'? [theconversation.com] 'No-one is denying the reality of children’s reading difficulties, or that these need to be identified and treated as early as possible. What is in question is whether we should give the label of “dyslexia” to children with reading difficulties. [] It is important to note that reading ability falls on a continuum in the population; it is normally distributed like height or weight. Thus, deciding whether a child does or does not have dyslexia will always involve applying an arbitrary cut-off.'

• ZCommunications » On Academic Labor 'an edited transcript of remarks given by Noam Chomsky via Skype on 4 February 2014 to a gathering of members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, PA.

• Love Mental Models? Study Threshold Concepts! [simoleonsense.com] Good introduction if you have managed to avoid them so far (illustrated with a graphic from my site, incidentally).

• Time Estimates for E-Learning Development '[...] let’s say a client asks me to convert an existing full day training program to self-paced e-learning. This will be mostly linear with some interactivity and a branching scenario practice activity. A “full day” or training in this case means 6 hours of actual content. The content itself is in pretty good shape; there’s slides, a participant guide, and a facilitator guide, and it’s all fairly complete. There’s no video, only limited animation [...] and professional voice talent will be used. [] I’m going to assume this can be compressed to about 3 hours of e-learning. [...] [based on the research]  the ratio for development is 127:1 (that is, 1 hour of e-learning takes 127 hours to develop). For 3 hours, that’s 127 * 3 or 381 hours total work.' A sobering guide to time and costs.

Other Business

• FiveThirtyEight | What the Fox Knows [fivethirtyeight.com] Introducing Nate Silver's (The Signal and the Noise) new site on using and evaluating the data behind news. Thus, one story: FiveThirtyEight | Finally, a Formula For Decoding Health News 'To keep on top of the right health information [...], you don’t necessarily need to know about medicine. What you do need to know is how to use data to make health decisions. As a statistician, I use a simple computation based on Bayes’ rule to combine my gut feeling about a piece of health news with information about the study it comes from. The result gives me a better idea of how much to believe a given headline. [] This is not a definitive way to tell whether a headline is right [...] but I find it a pretty useful exercise.' The method works for educational headlines too. And it is essential to evaluate any headline in the Daily Express!

• Mindwise: How We Understand What Others Think, Believe, Feel, and Want [farnamstreetblog.com] 

• When March blows [thedabbler.co.uk] 'two poems about hanging out the washing…'  

• The Evolution of Aww – Percolator The Chronicle of Higher Education 'We live in the golden age of cute. As one scholar recently put it, cuteness has become a “dominant aesthetic category in digital culture.” Hard to argue with that. Even if you steer clear of toddler pics on Facebook, even if you’ve never clicked on Reddit’s popular “aww” category, your elderly former neighbor will still email you a random photo of, say, three adorable piglets peeking out of a coffee mug.'  

• Physicist rejoices as he learns his Big Bang theory is correct [gizmodo.com] 

• Books, Inq. — The Epilogue: A new submission and reading site ...
  
  

On educational research and teachers

In November, I blogged immoderately but, I believe, quite accurately about the crappiness of most educational "research". Since then, I've come across, and reviewed, Tom Bennett's satisfying hatchet job—Teacher Proof. A friend and I discussed it inter al. over lunch last week—he doesn't hold it in as high regard as I do—and the conversation set me thinking about the relationship between researchers and practitioners. It's far from simple, as I see it. I'll cite what research evidence I can (given my earlier reservations), but much of what follows is merely relatively well-informed opinion...

First at the severely practical level—Bennett himself has pointed out the excessive workload of (school) teachers. The same goes for staff in post-compulsory and in higher education—although it is difficult to make direct comparisons in the latter case, because part of their job is research, and that is a very different kind of activity. Regardless, none of them have the time to read the literature outside their subject area. The mantra of "dual professionalism" (good short discussion here) has receded over the past few years, perhaps because of a recognition of how fatuous it is; it's hard to keep up professionally in one area—it's impossible in two. The only people who can lay some claim to it are those who teach teaching.*

That points to big issues about dissemination, of course. But that perspective is, I think, too limiting. It is not just a matter of disseminating research and supporting innovation based on it. To speak of “applying research to practice” is extremely simplistic.

The teachers' and the researchers' worlds

To go back to the earlier post:  I commented there that much of what passes for research is too broad and shallow, but that is understandable (even if I do counsel against it when I am supervising). It all comes back to the way in which teachers experience and make sense of their practice, which is fundamentally different from how it is regarded by researchers. For the teacher, life in the classroom is like a dance. It is fluid and ever-changing. It makes no sense to take a still photograph of it. The essence of the challenge of teaching is in the movement and indeed the interplay between the components of the class.

Researchers see it all differently. Their task is to isolate researchable topics; clearcut, preferably measurable features of the whole which can be analysed to test a hypothesis. They want to minimise any interaction between variables which does not contribute to test the hypothesis. So they have to simplify and leave aside much of the context.

I am reminded of the distinction Gregory Bateson** drew (following a systems theorist called Mittelstaedt) between skills which can be practised and polished by considered adjustments of parts on the basis of feedback and then assembled into a whole (the example is firing a rifle), and those which cannot be broken down like that, but the whole sequence has to be rehearsed and repeated as a whole (his example is clay-pigeon shooting with a shotgun, but diving from a board is perhaps more recognisable). He argues that the latter kind of practice is "calibration" of the whole. For our purposes, the teacher is using a shotgun and the researcher a rifle on a static target.

Rob Coe's excellent discussion of the difficulties of improving education implicitly acknowledges this difference in perspective between practitioner and researcher; and the view from the lab., as it were, and that from the teacher's desk: 

"Related to this is the need to acknowledge that the results of reviewing research studies of the impact of interventions may not correspond with the likely impacts of making those changes at scale in real contexts. We know, for example, that positive results are more likely to be published and hence to be included in reviews [...]. We also know that small studies and studies where the evaluator is also the developer or deliverer of the intervention tend to report larger effects than large-scale evaluations where there is separation of roles [...]; the latter are probably more likely to represent the impact if the intervention is implemented in real schools.  

"Another related issue is that effects often depend on a combination of contextual and ‘support factors’ [...] that are not always understood. Sometimes things that are proven to work turn out not to. Evaluations tell us what did work there; they do not always guarantee that if we try to do the same it will work here too. (p.xi. Refs. removed)

It is that kind of consideration which leads many practitioners not to trust "the research", even if they know what it says—and they may well be right.

Bullet points and stories.

The same point is made in a different way when we look again at how ideas are disseminated. The researchers' weapons of choice are the article (in largely unread peer-reviewed journals—which all goes to show that "publication" is not about dissemination, but more like an academic counterpart to extravagant display in Darwinian sexual selection... sorry!) and the presentation. That's marginally more realistic, as the results and the ideas do get passed on through CPD activities and courses, but the medium (PowerPoint) turns them into objects to be studied... Coe quotes Wiliam (2009):

"Knowing that is different from knowing how. But in the model of learning that dominates teacher professional development (as well as most formal education), we assume that if we teach the knowing that, then the knowing how will follow. We assemble teachers in rooms and bring in experts to explain what needs to change—and then we're disappointed when such events have little or no effect on teachers' practice. This professional development model assumes that what teachers lack is knowledge. For the most part, this is simply not the case. The last 30 years have shown conclusively that you can change teachers' thinking about something without changing what those teachers do in classrooms.

Teachers, on the other hand, tell stories. That is what all the stuff about "reflection" comes down to, and the process of storification is complex and arcane as well as banal, so I plan to revisit it in another post later (although I don't have a good track record on keeping to such plans, I confess). I suspect that it is different in schools—I've worked in post-compulsory education for the past 40 years—because the rhythm of work is different; but in colleges and universities (as long as the air is not so rarefied that teaching is never mentioned), the routine question to a colleague in a break after a class is, "How'd it go?"  The equally ritual response is, "OK" or "Fine". But if prompted further, you get a story—a narrative of how the session unfolded, and what worked and what didn't, and the hiccups with the technology and the incidents with ridiculously late students...

Stories take context into account. When told badly, they are continually interrupted as the narrator realises the (possible) significance of some background information—"It was Tuesday. Or was it? No. Shane didn't come in on Tuesday because he had to babysit while his sister went for an interview. Or so he said. So it must have been Wednesday..." They may conceivably illustrate points from research (and they are the best ways in to the research evidence), but they are principally about making sense of experience by using how it unfolds over time.  

All that of course lays them open to all kinds of bias and distortion... (Oh dear, I feel some bullet points coming on. Sorry!)

• Spinning
• Inevitability
• Selectivity
• Exceptionalism
• etc.

It would be a distraction to pursue these fairly arbitrary points in detail here. But the point is that the evidence serves the argument, whatever that is. Remember that given the social context in which it is uttered (the staff-room or senior common-room [where they still exist]) the story may serve many purposes much more important than those of "truth"...

In particular, stories lend coherence to practice. They are accounts of how tensions and problems were resolved, challenges faced and opportunities seized—in a particular place and time, with particular people. They make minimal claims to generalisability, but nevertheless justify (usually) actual practice.

• In Gordon Allport's distinction (following Kant) stories are idiopathic rather than nomothetic. Research usually aspires to be nomothetic.

• And amazingly, this issue takes me back to the very first post on this blog, (I promised then that I would get round to considering stories—I have actually fulfilled that promise, about nine years later...)

• Communities of practice are built out of stories. I remember even now how staffroom stories influenced my perceptions of students in my first years of teaching. They were full of stereotypes, and they created self-fulfilling prophecies; beware the FETs (Full-time electronics technician students) because they'll never engage with anything beyond their core curriculum... But quite right, too; in the early seventies repairing TVs (where I worked) was a niche occupation taken up by young men from the Indian sub-continent—mostly very focused and hard-working but impatient with anything which was not immediately relevant. Plumbers, on the other hand, had a reputation for being the "salt of the earth" (and almost all white...). Communities of practice are not necessarily benign.

• It's not a simple one-way process, but stories tend to emerge from experience, and then get re-imposed on it in the interests of developing solidarity (and/or competition) within the working group. Research has no such traction.

• All it does is set the research-based practitioner apart—at worst the "Oh! Get him! He's using the research!" dismissal.

• ...which leads generally to Strivens (2007)  argument that the only kind of research that counts is action research (she is a little more nuanced than that). (The link is to a .pdf of a whole edition of the journal; the article in question starts on page 81. And to complete the circle, Janet Strivens herself was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2012*. And the friend who put me on to her work was my host for lunch last week—where we came in.

 Lots of lovely loose ends here to pursue further...

---

* It's not coincidence that in the HE sector, the National Teaching Fellowship scheme of the Higher Education Academy is dominated by people who list their discipline as "education". A quick play with the directory of fellows on the Academy site shows that out of 500 awards so far (up to the 2013 cohort), almost a third (141) went to that discipline, including, I confess, my own. Indeed in the latest cohort (2013) almost exactly a half (27/55) were in "education", and if you count those who identified their area of practice as "learning support and technology" (5) or "staff and organisational development" (4), that proportion is almost two-thirds. (Source p.14)

• Just as examples over the whole scheme; there have been 37 in English (I think the second most represented discipline), just 11 in Nursing (which—given its emphasis on reflective practice, a dubious snake-oil to which it is as much addicted as teaching is—I would have expected to come higher), 9 in Physical Sciences, 6 in Business and Management, and none in Classics.

• Indeed the 2012 review of the scheme noted as an issue to be addressed: 

2.2.3 The insufficient focus on ‘real teachers’ ..."It is perceived that there has been a shift in the overall profile of an NTF away from teaching staff, which was the initial focus of the scheme, to those who are managers, professors, pedagogic researchers and educational developers." (NTFS Review 2012: download from here.)

• and also that too much of the evidence in the portfolios was coming from publications about teaching rather than direct evidence of excellent practice.

This is not to disparage the NTFS, with which I am very proud to be associated—leaving aside the funding which made possible the development of my sites and this blog—but to point out that most academics are too busy to pay attention to their "secondary" discipline. The NTFS is the tip of an iceberg...

** For a (more) accessible account and a full reference see Bateson, G and Bateson, M C (1988) Angels Fear London; Century Hutchinson pp. 42-46.

Items to Share: 16 March 2014

Education Focus

• Online Discussion Tips Infographic | e-Learning Infographics

• Learning from Our Teaching Mistakes | Faculty Focus [MaryEllen Weimer] 'I hold in particularly high esteem those faculty members not only willing to talk about teaching failures but also to publish articles about them. At the end of this article I’ve listed a collection of my personal favorites. You can’t read them without admiring the courage of the authors. But you also can’t read them and be unimpressed by how much they learned through the analysis.'

• Getting Beyond Brain Games - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education [James Lang] 'Educators [...] need to tread carefully into the fields of brain-based research. Fortunately, some of the leading thinkers in the field have taken up the challenge of pushing their findings outside of the laboratory. They are testing their theories in real classrooms and in other learning environments, and spelling out the implications for teaching.'

• A Don’s Life: Teaching and tears [Mary Beard] 'And finally I remember saying that no computer course could make you cry and that good teaching was always liable to lead to tears. Now this is a favourite, slightly exaggerated, image of mine. It's meant to capture the idea that really learning to think can be hard, uncomfortable and actually upsetting... sometimes it has to make your head hurt, and make you feel you can't do it. That's what learning really difficult stuff means.' 

• Fascinating Aida : very funny OFSTED song for teachers - YouTube 

Other Business

• The day I met Abdul Sattar Edhi, a living saint [3quarksdaily.com] A very different side of Pakistan from the stories we usually hear.

• Why Survey Questions Matter: Blasphemy Edition [Sociological Images] “How could we get evidence for this?” I often ask students. And the answer, almost always is, “Do a survey.” The word survey has magical power; anything designated by that name wears a cloak of infallibility. [] “Survey just means asking a bunch of people a bunch of questions,” I’ll say. “Whether [it] has any value depends on how good the bunch of people is and how good the questions are.” My hope is that a few examples of bad sampling and bad questions will demystify...' 

• Thoughts on Art and Teaching: Realism and Reality [Jim Hamlyn] 'Despite the fact that more distant objects are projected at a smaller scale onto the retina than closer objects, it is crucial that we perceive the size of distant sources of food, predators etc. as accurately as possible. If our ancestors had perceived proximate objects as larger than distant objects, their chances of survival would have been severely limited. One of the major evolutionary obstacles for the development of visual processing therefore, must have been to overcome the fact that distant objects are projected onto the eye in this way. What we see when we look at distant fruit is distant fruit, not tiny little tidbits. Nonetheless, when we draw distant fruit we have to render them at a smaller scale than closer fruit.' 

• The Tri-X Factor [More Intelligent Life] A tribute to the classic b&w film stock no no longer produced—but some devotees have fridges full of thousands of rolls ..'if we include just a few other Tri-X users—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Josef Koudelka and most of the finest of the photographers who worked for the Magnum agency—it becomes clear that this film may be the most aesthetically important technology in photographic history. The story of Tri-X is unique. It goes to the heart of how we see and what we see and what we may be losing as billions of casual, digital snaps are taken daily and as photographic integrity is subverted by the dead, flawless, retouched faces of actors and models that gaze blankly out at us. 

On showing my age... or On phoney [pun] intimacy ...and an invariant rule.

Ring... (Recorded message. "We are connecting you. Your call may be recorded." —that calls for a deconstruction all of its own...)

Estate Agent: Hello, this is W.... P.... Estate Agents. My name is Dave. How may I help you?

Me: You are selling [...] I'd like to arrange a viewing.

EA: I think that property is already under offer, but can I take your details, to get back to you? [...] Your name?

Me: Atherton A-T-H-E-R-T-O-N

EA: First name?

Me: James

EA: OK, Can I have your postcode please, James?

Me: No!  (Hangs up)

Wife: What was all that about?

Oliver Kamm has a column in the Times (OK, of London) on Saturdays, titled "The Pedant". Frankly it has become somewhat formulaic recently, although it is still entertaining on occasion. It follows a standard pattern;

• a quotation from the paper which may contain a grammatical solecism
• a discussion of what the issue is in grammatical/stylistic terms
• usually an assertion that English is based on conventions rather than absolute grammatical rules
• evidence that Shakespeare/Milton etc. broke the "rule" in question long ago
• so...

 (Come to think of it, there are echoes of the Kolb cycle here.)

So, in the spirit of Kamm, what is worthy of attention in the exchange above? (Since the column is in print, the question has to be rhetorical, and he answers it...) And my wife asked it, too.

He used my first name. Without asking. After less than 30 seconds "acquaintance".

Hey! Lighten up! That's OK. After all, he introduced himself with his first name... Yes, he did. Implicitly he volunteered his first name, although he was, I'm sure, following a script. (I've changed the name.)

But he elicited mine as part of an information-recording process with no implied permission to use it. Had he asked, "May I call you James?" as occasional unwanted callers from my bank ask, I would have had the opportunity to say No, and to get even more pompous and self-important than I am already and insist on being called "Dr" Atherton (as I have done, and as I am now addressed, no doubt thanks to tags "pompous" and "old git" on their system). I'd still rather the bank didn't call me at all, but it is one small step...

Actually, it's not just me. Roger Brown (Brown and Gilman, 1960) articulated the rules underpinning what he called a "universal norm", in terms of the appropriate use of First Name (FN) or Title and Last Name (TLN) forms of address, which also apply to the use of "intimate" and "formal" pronouns (not applicable in English nowadays, but "tu" and "vous" in French, „du" and „Sie" in German).

(Brown, 1965: 93)

The original account is not easily accessible, so I'm quoting an edited version after the jump:

Items to Share: 9 March 2014

Education Focus

• Textbook Publishers Push to Provide Full Digital-Learning Experience - Technology - The Chronicle of Higher Education I saw this coming in 1998.  

• Why use multiple-choice questions? | Pragmatic Education wordpress.com 1. They make assessment more reliable 2. They make marking far less labour-intensive 3. They make pupil understanding more visible to teachers.

• Who should teach the teachers? theconversation.com (Dennis Hayes) 'What we need today is a cultural debate about the meaning of education. What we do not need is a narrow professional debate about what education is and what schools are for. The crisis of meaning exists at a cultural level and cannot be resolved by teachers and academics alone. The opportunities for a real cultural debate are few.

• Truly ‘higher’ study demands critical thinking, not faking it | Opinion | Times Higher Education 'the political orthodoxies of the age [...] have come to the fore in grandiose statements about graduate attributes or as the integrative principles of elective programmes. [...] Some disciplines also require the adoption of particular mantras, such as “reflective practice” in teacher education. [] At one level, the expression of such values is a well-meaning attempt to define a common culture in an age of mass higher education. [...] To take issue with values such as global citizenship might seem like attacking Bambi. But their aggressive promotion within the curriculum is seriously at odds with a liberal conception of a “higher” education. This needs to empower rather than restrict students in developing their own ideas, giving them the confidence to critique sacred tropes rather than display a slavish commitment to them.' 

• Turning students into nervous wrecks | Education | Therapy culture | spiked spiked-online.com (Kathryn Ecclestone) Why do we assume students are vulnerable? The vast majority aren’t. 

• Creating learning objectives, flipped classroom style - Casting Out Nines - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'Coming up with good learning objectives is something of an art form, and I have a lot of room for improvement in the way I do it. However, I’ve been working with the following workflow for generating learning objectives that works particularly well for my students and fits the ethos of the flipped classroom. Here it is step-by-step.'

Other Business

• BBC News - The Indian sanitary pad revolutionary 'A school dropout from a poor family in southern India has revolutionised menstrual health for rural women in developing countries by inventing a simple machine they can use to make cheap sanitary pads.' (Thanks to the Browser for the link.) 

• The Cookie Monster Knows More About Willpower Than You farnamstreetblog.com 

• Symbolic Interaction - Volume 37, Issue 1 - Erving Goffman - Wiley Online Library  A special issue on Goffman—all articles free downloads.

• Linguistics qua Affliction – Lingua Franca - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education [Geoffrey Pullum] 'Like most linguists, I know odd things about various languages, and whenever I see linguistic material I am not just tempted but driven to analyze and compare. The observations about Italian above forced themselves upon me, based on no more than my recollection of Poe’s story and the smattering of knowledge my life in linguistics has vouchsafed to me concerning Latin, French, and Spanish (though I can’t converse in any of those languages either).'

• Ronald Blythe is happy to leave choices over new plumbing to the expert 'I am starting on a new book, and a pile of books must be read before I write "Page One". They totter about in the study, crying "Me next!" Like children. It is called studying. Studying is bliss. I have known writers who spent their lives doing it, and who have never written Chapter One. There used to be grants for doing this, which ran out long before its birth pangs. Reading before you write a word for other people to read can be spread out, can last a lifetime. And you will have the notes to prove how busy you have been.'

• Why England Isn’t Russia « The Dish andrewsullivan.com

 

Items to Share: 2 March 2014

Education Focus

• Too busy to teach- why we've all got work to do [tes.co.uk] Tom Bennett on teachers' unrealistic workloads. 

• Lesson Observations Harry Webb: 'I do think lesson observations need to continue as part of the evidence-gathering mix. If nothing else, they connect school leaders with something approaching the reality of their schools. However, lesson observation grades are highly suspect and feedback needs to be something that is of actual use to the teacher being observed.'

• Do it yourself  Also Harry Webb: 'The purpose of this post is [...] to present some resources that may be of help to you. They are just a selection and they reflect my own view of the state of education. However, I believe that they are all honest and demonstrate some fundamental truths about education; truths that are routinely dismissed or denied; truths that can make us better teachers. Whether used for personal reflection only, or for deploying in reasoned debate, they all have something to offer.'

• 40 Android Apps for Teaching and Learning – ProfHacker, The Chronicle of Higher Education

• Examining Your Multiple-Choice Questions | Faculty Focus 'the multiple-choice question “holds world records in the categories of most popular, most unpopular, most used, most misused, most loved and most hated.” According to one source I read, multiple-choice questions were first used around the time of World War I to measure the abilities of new Army recruits. As class sizes have grown and the demands on teacher time expanded, they have become the favorite testing tool in higher education.' 

• Angela Duckworth on Why Grit Matters More than IQ [Farnam Street Blog]

• Real-Time Automated Essay Writing? – Lingua Franca - The Chronicle of Higher Education 'When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type.'

Other Business

• Golden Meaning: picture gallery | Alex Bellos | Science | theguardian.com 'A selection of images from Golden Meaning, a book project in which 55 of the world’s top graphic designers illustrate the maths of the golden ratio.'

• PHD Comics: The Higgs Boson Re-Explained 

• The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance and Other Real Laws - Boing Boing Including 'Lei No 3.770 of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, which requires cellular phone companies to extend a 50% discount on airtime to stutterers.' Quite right too! 

• Feeling Down? Watching This Will Help [npr.org]

• The Two Cultures, Then and Now | Books and Culture 'the sciences and the humanities share a common enemy: an educational system that, despite its ceaseless rote invocations of the value of "critical thinking"—overwhelmingly evades the "severities" that might equip people to deal seriously with the world and its manifold challenges. A rigorous education in any field challenges its students: it doesn't let them get away with easy answers; it doesn't reward "glib examinees"; it forces second and third thoughts; it demands revision and correction, and presses people even to start over from scratch when that's necessary. People trained in this fashion will be ready for surprises, will expect the unexpected, will adapt to circumstances.' 

On the next generation...

(This is not a rant, despite the starting point. It may even be a reflective piece—except that I no longer know what that means...)

I've just about descended from the ceiling. I would say I had scraped myself off it, except I can't work out how that might happen. I very nearly sent off an expletive-ridden missive but heroically restrained myself...

New readers start here: In 1996, some great colleagues and I set up a new teacher education programme for Post-Compulsory Education—further- higher- and adult- education. It grew from several roots. It started with about 60 students in three centres—two university campuses and one assoociate FE college. At its peak a few years ago it had about 700 students in 10 centres. The national market for such courses has contracted, but the programme has held its own.

The programme (following on from its heritage as part of the great Huddersfield system) has had several distinctive features, among which have been:

• an assessment scheme based on learning contracts rather than assignments.
• no grades; pass/refer/fail, but lots of feedback
• whole programme-wide gatherings—initially residential symposia, latterly Study Days—to address discipline-specific issues which require the critical mass of the whole course

And under the indefatigable leadership over 12 years of Peter Hadfield, it thrived. It has been inspected by the QAA, by Ofsted, and SVUK (if you don't recognise them, don't worry), and internally through regular programme review. Including—I can't resist mentioning this despite it being rant-ish—a total review invoked (without proper authority) by a former Head of Department on the grounds that it was required before a typographical error in the documentation (undetected for several years and with no practical consequences) could be corrected.

The problem, of course, is that the programme does not readily comply with the standard university regulations. It is, after all, a part-time programme for mature students, while the default university regulations are written for full-time undergraduate students who have just left school.

But! Under Peter's tutelage, we built up a community of practice across the network which really believed in what we were doing and why we were doing it. It is a community of practice* because of the amount of time and debate and effort we have put into developing the model, explicitly based on values set out in the course handbook**.

Now read on...

What follows is based on this argument.

Recently the programme has come under increased pressure to conform to standard grading procedures.The present programme leader has of course consulted her colleagues around the network. I haven't seen all the responses, and those I have seen are on the whole supportive of the present policy.

But one stands out. It starts with:

"it would make life easier if ..."

It was never the point to make life easy! Enough! (This is not a rant.) But that's a plea to relax to what I term the "level of administrative convenience", on the cited page.

Even so. The programme has been through three sets of external regulatory bodies and more sets of actual regulations, based in two universities, with a slow churn of associated colleges... It's like our old axe; it's had three new blades and four new handles—is it still the same axe? I've just realised I am the sole active survivor of the original team of 18 years ago. (I decided a couple of years ago not to attend any more network meetings—I could only cramp the style of the next generation.)

But how do we pass on those values to the next generation (of tutors, let alone students)? Indeed, should we even try? Do they have different but equivalent moral/professional principles in the current era? Whatever the answer, it's not:

"it would make life easier if ..."

---

* Although as I understand it, that's not necessarily a Good Thing. It is a "community of practice" as long as members influence the practice of other members and however casually induct newcomers into it, regardless of the quality of that practice. There can be—and are—communities of toxic/brutal/lazy/corner-cutting/corrupt... practice.

** Those values are spelt out here:

2.7 Course Values
The course is based on the following values and convictions which apply to and have implications for both students and staff:

1. That you, the students on this course, are competent adults, already acquainted with the field of work and study, and having more or less clear ideas about what you need to learn to improve your knowledge and practice.
2. That those ideas will vary according to the nature of your experience, but need to be respected, even when it is necessary to show their limitations and to go beyond them.
3. That you will learn most effectively when you are both involved in and have appropriate control over your learning experiences.
4. That the accumulated experience of members of the student group is one of the most valuable resources available to the course, and every effort should be made to utilise it.
5. That in view of the continuing change which characterises this area of practice, the ability and motivation to learn from continuing experience through disciplined reflection is a defining characteristic of a professional, and should be fostered by the course.
6. That the experience of being a learner in a formal educational setting is an important resource in itself, enabling you to appreciate anew the experience of your own students and their corresponding opportunities and difficulties.
7. That a course which purports to teach good educational practice must itself embody and model such practice, and lay it open to scrutiny.
8. That this includes attention to inclusivity and the active mitigation of disadvantage experienced by minority groups.
9. ...And a commitment to the highest standards of scholarship in respect of the disciplines contributing to the course.