Details are the devil

Details matter, whether in education, research, parenting, or sports.  And because details matter, they trouble the diligent in pursuit of excellence or in pursuit of completion, on less lofty days.

Today was devoted almost entirely to completing the blended course required for my certification of mastery in blended course design.  The deadline (Tuesday) for submission to the certifying agency is self-imposed, though prudent, given that the course is to be taught in April.

I am being reminded that the challenge of a well-designed course is in the be-deviling details of aligning the course objectives to each teaching unit and to every measure of learning...to what I teach in each week, each class, and each assignment...the details of a lecture versus a reading versus an in-class exercise or activity.

I'm convinced that many of the questions students ask about assignments, course expectations, and grading are more indicative of a lack of good course design than of student laziness, inattention, or boredom.  To my chagrin and delight (depending on my level of preparation), I have found that clear expectations, well-written directions (for assignments), and carefully planned lessons both decrease student questions and increase the likelihood of student participation--even when the assignments are not graded.  When assignments are planned well, it's easier for students to do them well.

Students from freshmen through graduate school will do their best to comply with course requirements if they are clear, well planned, and designed for learning.

It's not magic, nor is it manipulation.  It's taking the time (a lot of it) and the thoughtful planning (even more than the time) to design a course from which students will learn, in which they can be successful, and during which they see relevance to their lives.  That's what makes the difference.

The more attention I give to course design, the more I enjoy teaching and the more my students seem to enjoy learning.  The challenge is the time required to attend to the details, the details that differentiate lectures developed years ago to be delivered on auto-pilot from courses that invite students into a collaboration of learning.

It's been a long day and I'm tired.  But the details are coalescing into a course I will be happy to teach...and for which I will be prepared enough to focus on the students and what they need and want to learn.  The more I focus on the devilish details in the planning, the more I can focus on my students in the delivery.

What I've learned about course design

Recently, as part of a continuing education certification, I was required to (re)design a face-to-face course for delivery as a blended course.  Same content, same student classification (MBA candidates)...one would think this would be easy, right?  Just substituting some online delivery for some of the classes; it's a piece of cake.

Here's what I learned in the process:

1. I'm a collector and a hoarder of educational "stuff."  This includes but is not limited to textbooks, popular books, scholarly articles, news articles, assignments used by others (with their permission), ideas I've read about, websites...you get the picture.
2. As a result of my collect-and-hoard habit, I have far more content for any given semester than I can ever use.  Which means I need to prioritize and make difficult choices.
3. I don't like eliminating any of my precious hoard, all of which is gold(en) and some of which has to be platinum.  This would be true of most academics, despite my tongue-in-check self-characterization.
4. None of that is about the students.  None. At all.  
5. Starting with the students and what they should know or be able to do because of my course (outcomes)--the starting point for all design--is far harder, 
6. The process of course design has an elegant simplicity, once I get past the hard part of articulating student outcomes, and provides an organizing schema that makes sense to me and, far more importantly, to my students.
7. It's easy to do this backwards.  (Worth repeating.)
8. Assessment can be a learning opportunity, not just a testing or evaluating checkpoint.
9. Less is ultimately more.  (With credit to Robert Browning's lovely "Andrea del Sarto.")
10. The better designed my course is, the more I am able to be spontaneous, timely, and embrace the delightfully unexpected.

One of the quiet truths of academia is that most professors are never taught to design any of the courses they teach. They teach as they were taught...or as they wish to learn.  See numbers 1-4 above.

Eloquence (be)heard

I'm not an expert in technology.  I'm not.  Just ask anyone who is an expert, whether in hardware or software (including how to use either or both to accomplish specific tasks) and you'll hear a chorus of agreement. Not. An. Expert.

Now that we've established my credentials, read on.

After talking with a peer about a specific technology we both use and for which we are planning a short presentation for faculty, I was baffled when I received an email that said: "I want to thank you for our conversation Tuesday; I think I learned more during that time than in many many (name of technology) seminars all rolled into one!!!"

I have no idea what I did.  So I asked my peer what was different about the "babbling" (my word, because that's pretty well how it felt) and received this reply:

My first impression is that the technical stuff wasn't the focus, rather, the focus was on interesting stuff we can do and (how) this technology can assist us.  It was--we can use this technology to make our teaching better. Also, it was a willingness to go outside the confines of (the technology) to achieve the goals we want to achieve in our teaching.

Then there was that confident, knowledgeable tone you have when we speak about this stuff. The sort of "of course you can do this" attitude didn't hurt either.

And here are vestiges of my first corporate job, where I found unexpected allies in the technology group of the insurance company where I worked.  Allies who offered solutions to problems I had and critiques (often accurate) of the other business problems they could have solved, had anyone bothered to ask. What intrigued me was how helpful I found the tech folks to be, how willing they were to share what they knew, and disenfranchised they seemed to feel. Even in our language, there was Technology and there was The Business, as though they were distinct factions, rather than intertwined and interdependent elements of mutual success.

Fast forward almost 30 years and the dialog is similar between Technology and The Faculty.  The vast majority of what I shared with my peer last week was shared with me by technology experts on campus. If I'm confident in the use of any technology, I owe much of my comfort to the people who've answered my questions, fixed the things I have (frequently) broken, laughed when I challenged them to explain it in terms that even I can understand, and generally provided solutions to my problems.

Student frustration...revisited each semester

"You're frustrated in my class," I say.  The student agrees emphatically, telling me that he is not learning, not being given substance, not being given deadlines, not being given lectures from which he can learn.  And we have arrived at the point where learning may actually begin.

I ask him if he's read the syllabus...and he tells me that he has not.  I ask if he has started on the assignments due in the course...and he has not.   He tells me that he is seeking substance and does not believe I am giving him any, since the class is mostly "free time" during which he feels compelled to be productive...by working on assignments for other classes.

He does have a point about the lack of structure during the class period, as there is very little.  But the lack of structure is by design and I am learning a great deal about my students by watching (in a leadership class, by the way) how they approach unstructured opportunities to learn and to lead.

And I have, indeed, given the students a great deal of substance, if one considers the textbook, articles from MIT on leadership, and bookmarks to the material I research and read on a near-daily basis to be substantive.  All of this material--the substantive material this student has been seeking--is...guess where?  It's all hyper linked on the syllabus. The syllabus I reviewed and explained on the first day of class.  The same syllabus I've referenced several times since the first day of class.

So, now the time is ripe to tell the student that my issue with lecturing is that students don't listen until a need has been created.  For the most part, we filter out information that we do not perceive as useful.  But the student and I have now discovered a need for information, information that has been available (but ignored) since the beginning of the semester.

It really was a good discussion, once he believed that my goal is his learning.

Student frustration is (still) too valuable to waste.

Pandemic consumption

I have a weakness for English majors.  A case in point is Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University, and editor of The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking.  In the eight-page introduction alone, I found several gems:

• In wondering about 6,901 comments posted in response to a 2,500-word newspaper piece, Bauerlein questions "what readers think when they encounter 4,838 comments to a news story and believe that post #4,384 really matters.  Is this democratic process or fruitless vanity?"
• "How many decades passed between the invention of the telephone and its daily use by 90 percent of the population?  Today, the path from private creation to pandemic consumption is measured in months."
• The phrase "reclusiveness in public spaces" aptly describes how we "look the same" to others (at the coffee shop, for example) whether we are reading a book online, checking Facebook, or contributing to a malicious gossip site.  "Nobody can tell, and that precise shelter removes one of the long-standing curbs on vicious conduct, namely, exposure."
• And, in the final paragraph:  "If we let the human realities that accompanied those older tools fall into oblivion...then we lose a part of our humanity, a historical sense of our recent selves."

More reading material...woo hoo!

A lot to learn

This fall, my friend Julie is teaching high school English for the first time as a 'real' teacher and she is unabashedly excited.  Her students will have what every student deserves--a teacher doing what she/he loves.  Julie returned to school after becoming a mom; several semesters of coursework and student teaching later, she received her Master of Arts in Teaching.   

When I saw Julie the week of new teacher orientation, she made a passing comment about seeing the Benchmark results for classes taught by her colleagues (the other English teachers) as part of the formal presentation...and wondering how her own results will look next year.

Yesterday, the Mayor posted on Facebook (the fact that our mayor posts--and 'likes'--frequently is one of many charming things about our city) a quote by educational philosopher Robert Maynard Hutchins:

The object of education is to prepare the young to educate themselves throughout their lives.

One of the responses to the Mayor's post came from a friend of mine, the single father of a son starting sixth grade:

Now the object is to prepare them for the Benchmark Exams, not to educate.

This morning, a shared link about Molly Ivins caught my eye and connected the dots. Julie, the Mayor, and Molly Ivins, three highly educated people, committed to their own education and the education of others.  Maynard Hutchins and a single father wondering about the object of education.  And they can't all be right.

Except that they are.  

We need Julie's enthusiasm, the Mayor's willingness to engage in the dialog, Hutchins' legacy (which, by the way, is a continuation of a far older Socratic legacy), parents who challenge our educational priorities, and Ivins' example of refusing to abandon the belief that speaking out (over and over again) will make a difference.  

I have so much to learn...

Learning can be painful for the instructor

In the final stretch of the academic semester, the interest always builds.  Not in the content of the course, however, but in The Grade and what it will take to get The Grade by the end of the semester.  It's perilously close to the end of my first semester to teach innovation and creativity.  I am not happy with the method I established at the beginning of the semester for determining grades and neither is a subset of my students.

In courses I've taught before, I have a reasonably robust method of assessing student learning.  I've clarified the expectations, developed rubrics (where they are of benefit), and created assignments that measure progress toward course objectives...more or less.  Because I'm never completely happy with whatever process is in place to determine The Grade.

In the innovation and creativity course, my logic at the beginning of the semester was to assess completion (rather than quality) of assignments in the majority of the homework or in-class work.  Thus, there have been frequent, short assignments with low point value (10-20 points), so that students could be candid or creative or selectively omit assignments.  The total number of points earned (at least in some portions of the course) was left to the student.  The unintended consequences were a record-keeping challenge for me and a fallacy of composition for students.

I ended up monitoring submission and/or completion of numerous assignments with low point value for 35 students; some of the students chose not to complete early assignments (due to the low point value) and are now unhappy with The Grade.  The goal of allowing students freedom to be expressive, take risks, and manage their level of interaction has worked very well for some, well enough for most, and extremely poorly for the rest.

The easy solution is to limit the number of assignments and provide more structure relative to the content.  But since the easy solution seems to defeat the purpose of the course, I have more thinking to do about how to determine The Grade when I teach this course again.  And I intend to solicit as much input as I can get from my current students...particularly the unhappy ones.  At this point, I'll take any suggestions I can get.

Student frustration is too valuable to waste.

With this quote from the instructor manual for the business simulation used in undergraduate strategy, we are off and running. The instructor is also frustrated at this point...and my own frustration is too valuable to waste.

The premise behind the frustration-learning link is that frustration leads to problem solving and, eventually, to learning.  The learning is intended to be the fun part.  The solution, even if imperfect...the sense of accomplishment, even if wrong...the learning, even if painful.  I get it; I believe it; I don't have to like it.

When the University makes changes to the curriculum, the faculty (which, in this very particular case, would be me) is required to adjust.  As a proponent of change and flexibility, I am--at least in a theoretical sense--in favor of progress and the changes required.  As a flawed human being with my own sense of frustration, I am having a challenging beginning to the semester.  And I am reminded (again) how it feels to struggle with ambiguity.  Our Blackboard system is new, slow, and flawed.  Our class sizes have increased, with no increase in the size of the classroom, the support provided, or the length of the time required for mastery (by the students...and, if we are being honest, by the instructor).
 
So, after worrying about my own ability to learn the details of this simulation and make it work, I have decided that I can do this, I can teach my students to do this, and we will get through this semester together.  This particular frustration may or may not be valuable, but it certainly is motivating.  Welcome back.

Ancient history, scholarship, and deja vu

I find myself in the oddest--and most unexpected--places, of late, at least as far as my reading material.  A student sent me an article from The Journal of Higher Education (and how cool is it that a student reads the Journal?) on the use of technology in teaching; I wound up reading the referenced essay by David Pace on the history and scholarship of teaching and learning history.  And that essay from The American Historical Review is absolutely worth the effort to read and evaluate critically.

The essay begins and ends with the contrast in colleges and universities, "between the amateurism that we accept in our knowledge about teaching and the professionalism we demand in other aspects of our work."  It's not a secret that the rigor demanded of researchers is not expected of teachers, for reasons we love to debate ad nauseum, including the ubiquitous recognition and reward structure biased toward publication (regardless of value, whether to the classroom or to the community).  But lost in academic posturing and debate is the informed discussion of what makes good teaching:  

• How do we measure good teaching?  
• How do we teach the art and science of good teaching?  
• Shouldn't those questions--and their answers--inform not only how we teach but also what we teach?

The academic equivalent of throwing money at a problem is developing and teaching courses designed to address specific needs.  We create courses and assignments to teach collaboration, teamwork, ethics, diversity, and a host of other Real World Problems so that we can

teach students to evaluate claims critically, to see complex questions from more than one perspective, to understand how different groups can view the same situation in different ways, to recognize the long-term consequences of actions, and to master dozens of other subtle mental operations that are absolutely necessary for their success as individuals and for the very survival of our society.

And the method Pace proposes to teach those things?  It's history. But history taught well, informed by rigor, based upon proven methods, and shared in forums traditionally reserved for scholarly research.  Just imagine...

Writing crap

In the world of online reading, it's hard to know where the road will lead. That happened today when I found Danah Boyd's post about the academic impact of what we--meaning, loosely, academics--write.  In a conference presentation to academics focused on research output, Danah (a researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society), calls it as she sees it:

If you didn't believe in the value of research, my guess is that you could game the system to maximize citations and publications. There are plenty of folks out there who do indeed write crap that they don't believe in so that they can stir up controversy and get people to pay attention to their work.

Impact doesn't necessarily have to be about the public, but it does have to be about the future. It is fundamentally about getting people to think and see the world in new ways. My hope is that we can find a way to get beyond discussing impact and generate research that does impact.

In this view of the world, impact includes writing for the public, which may actually make some research far better, more useful, more engaging.   Anne Davis writes about the unfortunate dichotomy between research and writing in her EduBlog Insights:

I have blogged very little since working on published research for the past two years. I can’t help but think all the published results would have been improved with input from the larger audience that would lead to better meaning making.

This isn't a new dialog; it's been around for as long as I can remember and all that's changed is the forum.  But perhaps a larger forum will generate more possibilities by blurring the line (for the better) between quantifiable research for the purpose of securing tenure and research that allows us to be better educators.  Or, as one of my students wrote:

(We) should be taught real world experiences from teachers (not researchers) with real world experiences. Researchers should be in educational walls, but in concert with teachers. Researchers provide a great foundation for the theory of the concepts used in the real world, while the actual teachers should provide knowledge of how to apply these concepts in real world situations. This would apply Bloom’s taxonomy by providing the knowledge, understanding and application from researchers and analysis, synthesis and evaluation from the teachers.

The first week of class

The first two classes were a lot of fun, at least for me. I've been able to watch what happens when 31 really bright students explore the content, the technology, the classroom, and their team. Structuring the assignments and then getting out of the way seems to be working, just as Marc Prensky describes it:

"One reason that the pedagogy of students teaching themselves never caught on as the mainstream approach – although it has been advocated by many, certainly since Dewey and probably since Socrates – is that the available tools for learners to use just were not good enough....Today’s technology offers students all kinds of new, highly effective tools they can use to learn on their own – from the Internet with almost all the information, to search and research tools to sort out what is true and relevant, to analysis tools to help make sense of it, to creation tools to present one’s findings in a variety of media, to social tools to network and collaborate with people around the world. And while the teacher can and should be a guide, most of these tools are best used by students, not teachers."

We're contributing as we are able, from the instructor's experience (sprinkled with curiosity) to the students' enthusiasm and willingness to explore. What an adventure...and there's an entire semester to go.

The syllabus and course plan

The syllabus and the course plan for the entire semester are in final draft form. I have a plan for each 3-hour class from August 25 through December 10, knowing full well that the plan will have to be adjusted. But at least there is road map for where I plan to go and some milestones to mark progress. I suspect the students--and their interaction with the technology--will take some of my plans in an entirely unexpected direction. The learning objectives will serve as course corrections (pun unintended).

Our University is fortunate to have a Teaching and Faculty Support Center, sponsors of the annual Teaching Retreat designed to "facilitate and assist faculty with pedagogical issues." The 2009 retreat was the first week in August and provided me with ample (and timely) opportunity to review my course plans and syllabus for improvement opportunities, of which there were many.

Tomorrow is the first day of training on the new tech tools installed in the Collaborative Learning Classroom (the official name). I am, once again, reminded how our students feel when asked to walk into a new semester, new course, new instructor, new expectations--and it's not an altogether pleasant feeling.