The Confusing Message: Sourcing Student Feedback

Posted: May 26, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Once, for a course which we shall label ‘an introduction to X and Y’, I saw some feedback from a student that went as follows. A single student, on the same feedback form, and in adjacent text boxes, gave these answers:

What do you like most about this course: the X

What would you like to see happen to improve the course: less X, more Y!

Now, of course, this not inherently contradictory but, honestly, it’s really hard to get the message here. You think that X is great but less useful than Y, although you like X more? You’re a secret masochist and you like to remove pleasure from your life?

As (almost) always, the problem here is that we these two questions, asked in adjacent text boxes, are asking completely different things. Survey construction is an art, a dark and mysterious art, and a well-constructed survey will probably not answer a question once, in one way. It will ask the same question in multiple ways, sometimes in the negative, to see if the “X” and “not ( not (X))” scores line up for each area of interest. This, of course, assumes that you have people who are willing to fill out long surveys and give you reliable answers. This is a big assumption. Most of the surveys that I work with have to fit into short time frames and are Likert-based with text boxes. Not quite yes/no tick/flick but not much more and very little opportunity for mutually interacting questions.

The Red Tick of Courage!

Our student experience surveys are about 10 questions long with two text boxes and are about the length that we can fit into the end of a lecture and have the majority of students fill out and return. From experience, if I construct larger surveys, or have special ‘survey-only’ sessions, I get poor participation. (Hey, I might just be doing it wrong. Tips and help in the comments, please!)

Of course, being Mr Measurement, I often measure things as side effects of the main activity. Today, I held a quiz in class and while everyone was writing away, I was actually getting a count of attendees because they were about to hand up cards for marking. This gives me an indicator of attendance and, as it happens, two weeks away from the end of the course, we’re still getting good attendance. (So, I’m happy.) I can also see how the students are doing with fundamental concepts so I can monitor that too.

I’m fascinated by what students think about their experience but I need to know what they need based on their performance, so that I can improve their performance without having to work out what they mean. The original example would give me no real insight into what to do and how to improve – so I can’t really do anything with any certainty. If the student had said “I love X but I feel that we spent too much time on it and it could be just as good with a little less.” then I know what I can do.

I also sometimes just ask for direct feedback in assignments, or in class, because then I’ll get the things that are really bugging or exciting people. That also gives me the ability to adapt to what I hear and ask more directed questions.

Student opinion and feedback can be a vital indicator of our teaching efficacy, assuming that we can find out what people think rather than just getting some short and glib answers to questions that don’t really probe in the right ways, where we never get a real indication of their thoughts. To do this requires us to form a relationship, to monitor, to show the value of feedback and to listen. Sadly, that takes a lot more work than throwing out a standard form once a semester, so it’s not surprising that it’s occasionally overlooked.

Teaching: Now That You’ve Got The Lion Up the Wall

Posted: May 25, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Apparently, years ago, the infamous Walls of Death were a big thing – people would ride motorcycles, cars, you name it around inside a walled enclosure and pick up enough speed to be able to move up onto the wall. (There’s some great Physics here, of course, discussions of centripetal and centrifugal force and all that.) It was also a spectator sport, of course, because there’s nothing human beings seem to like more than the threat of imminent death and a good crash.

I stumbled across this image and immediately thought about teaching.

Wall of death with a woman driving a car, with lion in passenger seat, while motorcycle rides on the wall above them. No, seriously.

Take that, dogs – this is the ultimate “head out of the window” experience.

Apparently, women riding with lions in the sidecar or passenger seat was a big thing because… well, I’m guessing that no-one had invented the Internet yet. More seriously, look at this picture. This is an excellent example of keeping everything up in the air as long as you keep the balance right.

To get to this stage, someone had to:

  1. Find a lion.
  2. Train the lion to deal with the noise and rush of cars (or find an appropriate lion sedative).
  3. Find a woman who liked driving along walls.
  4. Convince her that it’s ok that she’s riding next to a large wild animal that could fall on her if it all went wrong and would either crush her or maul her.
  5. Find a stalker crazy enough for the woman that he would learn to ride on a wall so he could sashay behind her nonchalantly as she went on her lion date.
  6. Hire Vidal Sassoon to style the lion’s mane because, seriously, check out that ‘do’. That lion is owning the ‘drome.

Of course, one mistake, one miscommunication, one problem with the track, and those keen people looking over the sides at the world’s smallest NASCAR track will get what they secretly want, which is a sudden and unpleasant fusion of human, metal and lion. With extra fuel poured over it.

Teaching a large class, or a smart class, or a large and smart class, is a really challenging activity. You can’t prepare for the exact questions that students will ask and this gives you two options: don’t take questions or get good at rolling with it and staying on your feet. Keeping the momentum going in class is crucial. Once you have the class with you, you have to keep moving, heading in different directions, taking what they say and integrating it. Basically, good teaching with a good class is like trying to write a coherent screenplay for a movie that is being filmed now, except that they keep changing the actors and the plot on you as you go. How do we prepare someone for this?

To get to this stage, you have to:

  1. Work out if you have the ability or the desire to teach. (First, find your lion…)
  2. Train yourself to deal with difficult questions, active classes, changing techniques and methodologies, often by working from an excellent background in theory and practice. (Or find an appropriate stimulant. Like coffee. 🙂 )
  3. Find a class that needs a teacher like this or turn your existing classes into that class.
  4. Prepare your students for the fact that asking questions isn’t going to hurt them, that appearing wrong is part of learning and that their learning experience doesn’t have to be scary or dull.
  5. Find some other teachers, or support staff, who think the same way as you do and get them together.
  6. Style your materials to match your teaching, your students and your environment. (Fix your ‘do’ but in the teaching materials sense.)

You need to have an excellent preparation strategy to be able to look like you’re just handling things on the fly. The amount of work, practice and preparation that must have gone into that “lion” picture says it all. Each participant trained for this and, most of the time, nothing went wrong. Like pilots, who train for the moment when they have to really earn their money, a lot of teaching is somewhat routine.

In class, with live students, with evolving situations and lots of questions – it can seem pretty intimidating but that’s when the preparation comes in.

Plus you have to remember that very few poorly answered questions are going to leave you lying in a pit of motorcycle parts, covered in fuel, while a lion wakes up beside you and looks at you. Comparatively, it’s really not that scary at all!

Proscription and Prescription: Bitter Medicine for Teachers

Posted: May 24, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Australia is a big country. A very big country. Despite being the size of the continental USA, it has only 22,000,000 people, scattered across the country and concentrated in large cities. This allows for a great deal of regional variation in terms of local culture, accents (yes, there is more than one Australian accent) and local industry requirements. Because of this, despite having national educational standards and shared ideas of what constitutes acceptable entry levels for University, there are understandable regional differences in the primary, secondary and tertiary studies.

Maintaining standards is hard, especially when you start to consider regional issues – whose standards are you maintaining. How do you set these standards? Are they prescriptions (a list of things that you must do) or proscriptions (a list of things that you mustn’t do)? There’s a big difference in course and program definition depending upon how you do this. If you prescribe a set textbook then everyone has to use it to teach with but can bring in other materials. If you proscribe unauthorised textbooks then you have suddenly reduced the amount of initiative and independence that can be displayed by your staff.

Excuse me, Doctor, you appear to be writing in invisible ink…

As always, I’m going to draw an analogue with our students to think about how we guide them. Do we tell them what we want and identify those aspects that we want them to use, or do we tell them what not to do, limit their options and then look surprised when they don’t explore the space and hand in something that conforms in a dull and lifeless manner?

I’m a big fan of combining prescription, in terms of desirable characteristics, and proscription, in terms of pitfalls and traps, but in an oversight model that presents the desirable aspects first and monitors the situation to see if behaviour is straying towards the proscribed. Having said that, the frequent flyers of the proscription world, plagiarism and cheating, always get mentioned up front – but as the weak twin of the appropriate techniques of independent research, thoughtful summarisation, correct attribution and doing your own work. Rather than just saying “DO NOT CHEAT”, I try to frame it in terms of what the correct behaviour is and how we classify it if someone goes off that path.

However, any compulsory inclusions or unarguable exclusions must be justified for the situation at hand – and should be both defensible and absolutely necessary. When we start looking at a higher level, above the individual school to the district, to the region, to the state, to the country, any complex set of prescriptions and proscriptions is very likely to start causing regional problems. Why? Because not all regions are the same. Because not all districts have the money to meet your prescriptions. Because not all cultures may agree with your proscriptions.

This post was triggered by a post from a great teacher I know, to whom I am also related, who talked about having to take everything unofficial out of her class. Her frustration with this, the way it made her feel, the way it would restrict her – an award winning teacher – made me realise how privileged I am to work in a place where nobody really ever tells me what to do or how to teach. While it’s good for me to remember that I am privileged in this regard, perhaps it’s also good to think about the constant clash between state, bureaucracy and education that exist in some other places.

If You’re Stuck In Slow-Moving or Stopped Traffic – Should You Be?

Posted: May 23, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

On the way home tonight, we encountered substantial delays – 40 minutes to get out of the carpark due to a broken down car (not ours), a further 50 minutes to crawl the 5km home. Yes, that’s 90 minutes for 5km… (we drove today to save time. 🙂 )

I’ve spoken before about hurdles (activities or assignments that must be met before proceeding) and we had an interesting discussion in and around the comments regarding the potential fear factor associated with hurdles but also that hurdles must be chosen well. Pre-requisite courses function as hurdles – you must complete course A to attempt course B. In terms of course design, therefore, we must make sure that we set up our hurdles so that they are framed in a way that they are neither frustrating or fear-inducing. However, they must also be seen as necessary, which (of course) means that they must actually be necessary.

Go! Stop! About Turn! Walk Left! Stop! Radiate!

We can underestimate the importance of sharing information with our students so that they understand the reasons behind what we have asked them to do. If we don’t, we run the risk of the students trying to work out why we’re doing what we’re doing and, if they get it wrong, then they may take actions based on intentions that we don’t have. Worse, if uninformed, unengaged and under performing, then a sufficiently frustrated student will just slip away and leave our course.

Today, on the drive home, I only managed to find out what had happened in the car park just as I left. After spending 40 minutes crawling down 1.5 floors, having to negotiate to back out, having no idea what was happening and while I was watching a fuel gauge that was not giving me reassuringly full signs. Then, thinking I’d dealt with that hurdle, I leapt out into traffic, started moving again and then hit a patch of road that crawled for the next 40 minutes.

What’s interesting about this is that I can see notionally live traffic updates on my maps overlay on my phone (or, because I was driving, my wife could see it on her phone). Now this would have been great, except that it was completely and utterly inaccurate for the bad patch of road I was on. “Green! No obstacles!” So I could not depend upon the map application to give me guidance because what it was saying was quite obviously not reflecting the situation I was experiencing.

This is exactly what some of our students feel like – trapped along a path that they have to follow, not knowing where and when they can make change, not necessarily getting the information that they need to make an informed choice. If, like me, they were also watching the gas needle head towards Empty (as both a measure of their resources or their dedication), then they may have had to make a choice to turn off the path and come back later.

Except, as we know, a University career is easier to walk away from than a car – despite costing several times more!

Today, after an international flight home yesterday, and a longish day, I spent 1.5 hours in a car for reasons that I don’t understand, powerless, uninformed and arriving home none the wiser as to why it all happened. Tomorrow, although I was going to drive, I’m now going to walk because, unless I break a leg, I will only take an hour in either direction. Today, too much frustration is leading me to question the utility of driving – fairly or not – because I have a very dim view of the drive home at the moment.

Today, the hurdles were set too hard, opaquely and were of no use to me. So, tomorrow, I won’t repeat the activity. That’s a pretty simple lesson.

If We’re Going To Measure, Let’s Measure Properly: Teaching Isn’t a NASCAR Race

Posted: May 22, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

I’ve been reading a Huff Post piece on teacher assessment, entitled “Carolyn Abbott, The Worst 8th Grade Math Teacher In New York City, Victim Of Her Own Success”, where a teacher, Carolyn Abbot, at a gifted and talented school in Manhattan was rated being the worst teacher in 8th grade.

The problem, it appears, is the measurement used where your contribution is based upon whether your students have performed better or worse than last year on the Teacher Data Report, a measure used to assess contribution to English and Math. So here’s the problem. The teacher taught maths to grades 7 and 8 and her Grade 7 students achieved at the 98th percentile for their test in 2009. Therefore, according to the Teacher Data Reports modelling process, the same students should have achieved 97th percentile in their Grade 8 tests the following year. They only managed 89th percentile. Abbot had made a significant negative contribution to her students, by this logic, and her ranking was the lowest in NYC 8th grade mathematics teachers.

Yes, you read that right. She’s kept the students in the 1.5-2 standard deviations above the norm category. The students have moved up a year and are now starting to run into the puberty zone, always fun, they’re still scoring in the 89th percentile – and she’s the worst teacher in NYC. Her students struggle with the standardised testing itself: the non-mathematical nature of the tests, the requirement to put in a single answer when the real answer is potentially more complex, the fact that multiple choice can be trained for (rather than test anything) – and they’re still kicking out at the +85 level. Yet, she’s the worst 8th grade math teacher in NYC.

This also goes against one of my general principles of assessment, in that the performance of someone else affects the assessment of your performance. (Yes, that leaves me at odds with national testing schemes, because I don’t see a way that they can be meaningfully calibrated across many different teaching systems and economic influences. It’s obvious that New York haven’t worked it out properly for one system and one economy!) Having a notion of acceptable and unacceptable is useful here. Having a notion of exemplary, acceptable and unacceptable is useful here. Having a notion of best and worst is meaningless, because all these teachers could score 100/100 and one scores 100/99 and they’re the worst. Ranking must be combined with standards of acceptability where professional practice is required. This isn’t a NASCAR race: in teaching, everyone can cross the line in a way that they win.

I am a big fan of useful, carefully constructed and correctly used measurement but this story is an example of what happens if you come up with a simple measure that gives you a single number that isn’t much use but is used as if it means something. Now, if over time, you saw a large slide in scores from one teacher and that dropped down low enough, then maybe this number would mean something but any time that you simple number has to come with an explanation – it’s not that simple anymore.

In this case, what’s worse is that the rankings were published with names. Names of teachers and names of schools. Abbott’s boss reassured her that he would still put her up for tenure but felt he had to warn her that someone else might take these rankings into account.

Abbott’s ranking doesn’t matter to her much anymore, because this teacher has now left teaching and is undertaking a PhD in Mathematics instead. Great for us at University because having good teachers who then successfully complete PhDs often works out very well – they’re highly desirable employees in many ways. Not so good for the students at her school who have been deprived of a teacher who managed to get a group of kids to the 98th percentile on Grade 7 Math, providing a foundation that will probably be with them for their whole lives (even if we quibble and it’s down to the 89th) and giving them a better start for their academic future.

But that’s ok, kids, because she was the worst teacher you’d ever have. Oh, of course, there’s another new “worst” teacher because that’s how our ranking system works. Sorry about that. Good luck, Carolyn Abbott!

How Do We Equate Investment in On-Line Learning Versus Face-to-Face?

Posted: May 21, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

It’s relatively early/late where I am because my jet lag has hit and I’m not quite sure which zone I’m in. This is probably a little rambly but I hope that there’s at least something to drive some thinking or discussion. No doubt, there is an excellent link that I can’t find, which describes all of this, so please send it to me or drop it into the comments!

One of the things I’m thinking about at the moment is how to quantify an equivalent ‘Teaching Dollar’ that reflects what an institution has to spend to support a student. Now, while this used to be based on investment in a bricks-and-mortar campus, a set number of hours and instructional support, we now have an extra dimension as blended learning spreads – the costs required for on-line and mobile components. We can look at a course in terms of course content, number of units contributing to degree progress, hopefully tie this into a quantification of requisite skill and knowledge components and then get a very rough idea of what we’re spending per “knowledge progress unit” in board dollar terms.

What’s the electronic equivalent of a lecture theatre? If I can run an entire course on-line, for n students, should I get the equivalent dollar support value as if they were on campus, using the expensive bricks-and-mortar facilities? If we spend $x on lecture theatres, what do we have to spend on on-line resources to have the equivalent utility in terms of teaching support? In a flipped classroom, where almost all informational review takes place outside of class and class is reserved for face-to-face activities, we can increase the amount of material because it’s far more efficient for someone to read something than it is for us to chalk-and-talk them through it. Do we measure the time that we spent producing electronic materials in terms of how much classroom time we could have saved or do we just draw a line under it and say “Well, this is what we should have been doing?”

On-line initiatives don’t work unless they have enough support, instructor presence, follow-up and quality materials. There are implicit production costs, distribution issues – it all has to be built on a stable platform. To do this properly takes money and time, even if it’s sound investment that constructs a solid base for future expansion. Physical lecture theatres are, while extremely useful, expensive to build, slow to build and they can only be used by one class at a time. We’re still going to allocate an instructor to a course but, as we frequently discuss, some electronic aspects require a producer as well to allow the lecturer to stay focused on teaching (or facilitating learning) while the producer handles some of the other support aspects. Where does the money for that producer come from? The money you save by making better use of your physical resources or the money you save by being able to avoid building a new lecture theatre at all. If we can quantity an equivalent dollar value, somehow, then we can provide a sound case for the right levels of support for on-line and the investment in mobile and, rather than look like we’re spending more money, we may be able to work out if we’re spending more money or whether it’s just in a different form.

I’m mulling on a multi-axis model that identifies the investment in terms of physical infrastructure, production support and electronic resources. With the spread of PDF slides and lecture recordings, we’re already pushing along the electronic resources line but most of this is low investment in production support (and very few people get money for a slide producer). The physical infrastructure investment and use is high right now but it’s shifting. So what I’m looking to do is get some points in three-space that represent several courses and see if I can define a plane (or surface) that represents equivalence along the axes. I have a nasty suspicion that not all of the axes are even on the same scales – at least one of them feels log-based to me.

If we define a point in the space (x,y,z) as (Physical, Production, Electronic) then, assuming that a value of 10 corresponds to “everything in a lecture theatre” for physical (and the equivalent of total commitment on the other axes), then the “new traditional” lecture of physical lectures with slide support and recordings would be (10,0,2) and a high quality on-line course would be (0,10,10). Below is a very sketchy graph that conveys almost no information on this.

Simple 3-Axis model in the most unclear graph ever.

It would be really easy if x+y+z = V, where V was always the same magnitude, but the bounding equation is, on for a maximum value of M in each axis, actually x+y+z <= 3M. Could we even have a concept of negative contribution, to reflect that lack of use of a given facility will have an impact on learning and teaching investment in the rest of our course, or in terms of general awareness?

I suspect that I need a lot more thought and a lot more sleep on this. Come back in a few months. 🙂

Matters of Scale

Posted: May 20, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I wrote about how important it is to get people properly involved in new learning and teaching approaches – students and staff – based on the the whole condemnation, complaint, compliance and commitment model. But let me be absolutely clear as to why compliance is not enough.

Compliance doesn’t scale.

If you have a lot of people who are just doing what they’re told, but aren’t committed to it, then they’re not going to be willing explorers in the space. They’re not going to create new opportunities. Why? Because they don’t really believe in it, they’ve just reached the rather depressing stage of shuffling along, not complaining, just doing what they’re told. When we don’t explain to people, or we don’t manage to communicate, the importance of what we’re doing, then how can they commit to it?

I’m fortunate to be at a meeting full of people who have done amazing things. I’m really only here as a communicator of some great stuff going on at my Uni and in Australia, I’m a proxy for amazing things. But being around these people is really inspiring. They know why they’re doing it, they’ve heard all of the complaints, fought off the underminers and, in some cases, had to make some very hard calls to drive forward positive agendas for change. (Goodness, such phrases…) But they also know that they need other people to make it happen.

We need commitment, we need passion and we need people to scale up our solutions to the national and international level.

The Higher Educational world is changing – there’s no doubt about that. Some people look at things like Khan Academy and think “Oh no, the death of traditional education.” Most of the discussions I’ve had here, and I agree with this, are more along the lines of “Ok, how can we use this to go further?” Universities are all about knowledge and the development/discovery of more knowledge. If we have people out there with good on-line courses that cover the basics in disciplines, why not use them to allow us to go further? The gap between what I teach my undergraduates and what I do in my research is vast – just about anything I can do to get my students to develop skill and knowledge mastery is a good thing.

Ok, we are going to have to sort out quality issues, maybe certification or credit recording, work out if someone has done certain courses: there’s a lot of organisation to do here if we want to go down this path. But, most importantly, I don’t see this as the death of the University – I see this as an amazing opportunity to go further, do better things, allowing students and staff to get much, much more out of the educational system.

So everyone has learnt to program by the time that they’re 12? FANTASTIC! Now, we can start looking at actual Computer Science and putting trained algorithmicists out there along with extremely well-trained software engineers. We can finally start to really push out the boundaries of education and get people working smarter, sooner.

Are there risks and threats? Of course. But, no matter what happens, the University of the 21st Century is not the University of the previous millennium. Change is coming. Change is here. We may as well try to be as constructive as possible as we try to imagine the shape of the University of tomorrow. We’re not talking about University 2100, we’re talking 20XX, where XX is probably closer than many of us think.

To quote Captain Jack Harkness:

“The 21st century is when everything changes. And we have to be ready.”

We Expect Commitment – That’s Why We Have to Commit As Well.

Posted: May 18, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’m currently in Cupertino, California, to talk about how my University (or, to be precise, a Faculty in my University), starting using iPads in First Year by giving them to all starting students. As a result, last night I found myself at a large table on highly committed and passionate people in Education, talking about innovative support mechanisms for students.

Pizza and beer – Fuelling educational discussions since forever. (I love the Internet: I didn’t take any pictures of my food but a quick web-search for BJ’s Pizza Cupertino quickly turned up some good stuff.)

I’ve highlighted committed and passionate because it shows why those people are even at this meeting in the first place – they’re here to talk about something very cool that has been done for students, or a solution that has fixed a persistent or troublesome problem. From my conversations so far, everyone has been fascinated by what everyone else is doing and, in a couple of cases, I was taking notes furiously because it’s all great stuff that I want to do when I get home.

We expect our students to be committed to our courses: showing up, listening, contributing, collaborating, doing the work and getting the knowledge. We all clearly understand that passion makes that easier. Some students may have a sufficiently good view of where they want to go, when they come in, that we can draw on their goal drive to keep them going. However, a lot don’t, and even those who do have that view often turn out to have a slightly warped view of what their goal reality actually is. So, anything we can do to keep a student’s momentum going, while they work out what their goals and passions actually are, and make a true commitment to our courses, is really important.

And that’s where our commitment and passion come into things. As you may know, I travel a lot and, honestly, that’s pretty draining. However, after being awake for 33 hours after a trans-Pacific flight, I was still awake, alert and excited, sitting around last night talking to anyone who would listen with the things that we’re doing which are probably worth sharing. Much more importantly, I was fired up and interested to talk to the people around me who talking about the work that had been put in to make things work for students, the grand visions, the problems that had been overcome and, importantly, they could easily show me what they’d been doing because, in most cases, these systems are highly accessible in a mobile environment. Passion and commitment in my colleagues keeps me going and helps me to pass it on to my students.

Students always know if you’re into what you’re doing. Honestly, they do. Accepting that is one of the first steps to becoming a good teacher because it does away with that obstructive hypocrisy layer that bad teachers tend to cling to. This has to be more than a single teacher outlook though. Modern electronic systems for student support, learning and teaching, require the majority of educators to be involved in your institution. If you say “This is something you should do, please use it” and very few other lecturers do – who do the students believe? Because if they believe you, then your colleagues look bad (whether they should or not, I leave to you). If they believe your colleagues then you are wasting your effort and you’re going to get really frustrated. What about if half the class does and half doesn’t?

We’re going through some major strategic reviews at the moment back home and it’s really important that, whatever our new strategy on electronic support for learning and teaching is, it has to be something that the majority of staff and students can commit to, with results and participation drive or reward their passions. (It’s a good thing we’ve got some time to develop this, because it’s a really big ask!)

The educational times are most definitely a-changin’. (Sorry, I’m in California.) We’ve all seen what happens when new initiatives are pushed through, rather than guided through or introduced with strong support. Some time ago, I ran across a hierarchy of commitment that uses terms that I like, so I’m going to draw from that now. The terms are condemnation, complaint, compliance and commitment.

If we jam stuff through (new systems, new procedures, compulsory participation in on-line activities) without the proper consultation and preparation, we risk high levels of condemnation or under-mining from people who feel threatened or disenfranchised. Even if it’s not this bad, we may end up with people who just complain about it – Why should I? Who’s going to tell me to? Some people are just going to go along with it but, let’s face it, compliance is not the most inspirational mental state. Why are you doing it? Because someone told me to and I just thought I should go along with it.

We want commitment! I know what I’m doing. I agree with what I’m doing. I have chosen to not just take part but to do so willingly and I’m implicitly going to try and improve what’s going on. We want in our students, we want it in our colleagues. To get that in our colleagues for some of the new education systems is going to take a lot of discussion, a lot of thinking, a lot of careful design and some really good implementation, including honest and open review of what works and what doesn’t. It’s also going to take an honest and open discussion of the kind of workload involved to (a) produce everything properly as a set-up cost and (b) the ongoing costs in terms of workload, physical resources and time for staff, organisations and students.

So, if we want commitment from our students, then we must have commitment from our staff, which means that we who are involved in system planning and design have to commit in turn. I’m committed enough to come to California for about 8 more hours than I’m spending on planes here and back again. That, however, means nothing unless I show real commitment and take good things back to my own community, spend time and effort in carefully crafting effective communication for my students and colleagues, and keep on chasing it up and putting the effort in until something good is achieved.

Things I Have Learned From my Cats, About Teaching

Posted: May 17, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

If you don’t have cats, or don’t like cats, then (a) get cats or (b) give in to your feline masters. More seriously, cats are very handy as a reference for the professional (or enthusiastic amateur) educator, because they ground you before you go and try something that you are heavily invested in with a whole class of students.

The important lessons that you can learn from cats are:

  1. Cats will only do what you tell them if they were already planning to do it.Obviously, students are more intelligent than cats and can learn a whole range of complex things. However, it’s easy to sometimes think that a particular thing that you did led to a completely different behaviour on the students’ part. Once you’ve removed other factors, isolated the element, repeated the experiment and got the same result? Sure, that’s influential. Before then, it may be any one of the effects that contaminate this kind of perception.
  2. Cats have good days and bad days. These are randomly allocated.

    Sometimes cats stay off the table. Sometimes they don’t. This is for reasons that I don’t understand because I can’t see the whole of the cats’ thinking process – despite them living inside my house for the past 8 years and me being able to observe them the whole time. I’ve realised over the years that I see my students for a very small fraction of their lives and trying to determine  when they’re going to be really receptive or not is not easy. I can try to present or set up my course in a way that reaches them most of the time. Sometimes it won’t happen. (I should note that they generally do, however, stay off the tables.)
  3. Cats can’t tell you what’s wrong because they don’t have the vocabulary.Of course, students can talk to me most of the time and we can talk about what’s wrong, but we have very different vocabularies in many ways. By exposing my thoughts and my processes to the students in their language, and scaffolding them to an understanding of the vocabulary of teaching education, or to get them to understand how collaboration isn’t a shorthand for “straight copying”.

This is rather trivial but, as always, it’s about framing and engagement. I suppose I’m saying the things I usually say but with a strange linkage to cat stories. As you read this, I’m probably on a plane somewhere, so I’ll try to be more coherent once I land.

Getting Into the Student’s Head: Representing the Student Perspective

Posted: May 16, 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Education | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I’ve spent a lot of time on the road this year – sometimes talking about my own work, sometimes talking about that of a research group, sometimes talking about national initiatives in ICT and, quite often, trying to talk about how my students are reacting to all of this.

That’s hard because, to do that, I have to have a fairly good idea of how my students see what I’m doing, that they understand why I’m doing what I’m doing and I have to be honest with myself if I can’t get into their heads.

Apart from this kind of writing, I write a lot of fiction and this requires that you can get into someone else’s head so that you can write about their experience , allowing someone else to read about it. This is good practice for trying to understand students because it requires you to take that step back, make your head fit a different brain and be honest about how authentically you’re capturing that other perspective.

Of course, this is going to be hard to do with the ‘average’ student because, by many definitions, I’m not. I am one of the ones who passed their Bachelors, a Masters and then a PhD. Even making it through first year sets me apart from some of my students.

Rather than talk about my Uni, which most you wouldn’t know at all, I’ll talk about Stanford. Rough figures indicate that Stanford matriculates about 7000 undergraduates a year. They produce roughly 700 PhD students a year as well. So let’s assume (simplistically and inaccurately) that Stanford has a conversion rate of undergrad to PhD of 1 in 10 (I know, I know, transfers, but let’s ignore that.) (At the same time, 34,000 students apply to Stanford and only 2,400 get admitted – about 7%. We’ve already got some fiendish filtering going on.)

So someone who has graduated with a PhD and goes out to teach is, at most, similar in process and end point to 10% of the people who managed to get all the way through. And that’s the best case.

So whenever those of us who have PhDs and are teaching try to think of the student perspective, thinking of our own is not going to really help us, especially for first year, as it is those students who don’t think like us, who may not see our end point and who may not be at the right point yet, who need us to understand them the most.

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