Evidence of Deep Learning

I had such an interesting conversation with one of our best community-based learning faculty. She is presenting at her professional conference (Poli Sci) about her CBL course that she taught last year that was really successful. And she finds herself in the position of having to explain how she knows it was successful. Ahh. So many of us are in this position now.

Yes, the students did the readings, talked in class, wrote papers, created presentations, took tests, and the results were kind of normal. Yet the class felt exceptional to her. So we pressed on. What made it exceptional? Jennifer said the students were more engaged than any before. How did she know?
1.at the end of every class there were still at least 5 hands still in the air, people with more to say
2. the students started going to lunch together after class so they could get out what they wanted to say but didn’t get to during class time
3. students spent loads of extra time, especially at their community sites, which she discovered in their presentations at the end of the semester
4. the end of the semester presentations, which synthesized data on the Richmond community where the students worked, the theories they read, and their actual experiences, were so helpful to the community partners who came to review them on the last day, that word got out and now the professor has made multiple copies of the presentations at the request of other agencies in Richmond
4. in student blogs she saw that students made connections between the Richmond area issues and national and international issues, using links that showed they were doing extra reading outside of class (not even assigned!)
5. though the class ended in April, Jennifer has had emails over the summer from former students who want to tell her about new insights and experiences that relate to what they studied.

Jennifer had actually done some pre and post surveys to monitor change in attitude. They were not too startling. She did the usual Student Evaluations of Instruction, and the course got a high rating, but these still didn’t really tell the story. I think her observations about her students’ engagement were more telling about what happened in the class.
I am just wondering if other people are finding unique ways to capture what is happening in a class where students are highly engaged? Because I know we have NSSE and CLA but I don’t know that either of those would capture what we saw in Jennifer’s excellent class.

Learning And/OR Doing?

Looking back at my posts from earlier this summer, I see that I am fixated on how liberal arts education can or should work.  This obsession might  explain why I would spend the money to buy a hardback book called “Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work” First, a word of warning about the book: reading it feels like stepping into the mechanic’s shop, or some other “man cave.”  I found lots of the language and metaphors rough and insulting to females, and I am not an easily offended girlie-girl.  ( I can honestly say that I own no other text that uses and extends the metaphor of the “cheap whore” and I wouldn’t have paid the money for this one if I had known that was the case) Once I was able to tune out all the chest-thumping machismo noise, I was able to find some ideas worth exploring. For example, I enjoyed learning more about the history of “work” and what he sees as the turn toward separating “thinking from doing” and the denigration of craftsmanship. I found myself reflecting on various jobs I have worked, and considering more about the concept of “satisfying work.”

The part I was most affected by, however, touches on ideas of learning, and most of those ideas he draws from a work by Iris Murdoch called “The Sovereignty of Good.“  Crawford says:

Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly, and this requires a kind of  “unselfing.” “[A]nything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue…[V]irtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.” (99-100)

His interpretation of this is that by working on a problem with an objective reality and real consequences, (as doctors and mechanics do) brings to the worker both humility and

“the pleasure that comes with progressively more acute vision and the growing sense that our actions are fitting or just…” “[It] is achieved in an iterated back-and-forth between seeing and doing.  Our vision is improved by acting, as this brings any defect in our perception to vivid awareness.” (100)

This is the whole idea behind active learning, isn’t it?  And I am 100% behind us increasing the amount of active learning, both K-12 and also in higher ed.  But I have to disagree with the notion that the only way to do this is through the trades for this reason: life is more than work.  People may or may not find a way to earn money in a way that “their deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger” as Buechner would say.  But they will certainly live among other people and have to sort out relationships and make decisions as citizens, and in all ways live a life.  And so I have always believed that the liberal arts is a way of studying that goes beyond curriculum and that addresses how to live a life. (At least, that is how many of us see it, as in this article in Insider Higher Ed today)

And here is my “real life” example: my son just came back from working at a camp for special needs kids, and he was describing to me the challenges of figuring out how to work with a severely autistic young man who was about the same age as he was.  He had to find ways to get through the mysterious veil that seemed to surround the boy, and my son did find some success at this.  But he was forever changed, I think.  And he said “I couldn’t help but remember the stories I read by Kafka, and sometimes I would get upset thinking of what it must be like to be stuck inside your own mind that way.”  Kafka’s stories were an anchor for him, a way that he had experienced a little of what his camper might be experiencing.  Contrary to the implication that reading books is the same as living in your own head, reading stories is a way to get inside someone else’s head, to experience what they experience, maybe to touch what we call “universal human experience.”

My conclusion, then, is that a good, rich, full, useful education can not be one or the other–learning or doing.  Rather, it is by definition, a combination of learning and doing, reading and visiting important places, making mistakes, moving forward, getting uncomfortable and talking about it, reading what someone wrote hundreds of years ago, and realizing that it is still true, and that we all struggle, every day.

Students Assessing Teachers

Early on in my work as a faculty developer I realized the scarring that occurred from SEI’s (student evals of instruction). I knew myself that I had to always get some distance and a stiff drink before I could read mine, but I found out that I was not alone. We all focus on the one less than glowing comment, and that makes it hard to use the SEIs as “data” in the way we could.

In my next stage of development, I decided that we just had bad SEI forms and weren’t asking the right questions. The forms have been revised and now we can add our own questions . But it still didn’t feel like I was getting the kind of rich information about learning that I wanted to get.

One day in class I asked students to chose three of their blog posts from the semester that they felt best showed learning happening, and then write a brief explanation of why they chose those posts to highlight. Blank looks. Finally, one student said “How do I know which posts to choose?” I replied “Well, how do you know when you have learned something?” I asked. He replied “By the grade I get on the test.” A great discussion followed in which we tried to  define “learning” and what it looks like, and how, other than grades, a person can assess their own learning.
So my current belief is this: we need to do more to help our students take ownership of their own learning, and we need to raise with them the big questions about knowledge and life. We need to take more responsibility in educating our students in ways that help them become better members of our learning communities.

This article by Ken Bain and another professor at Montclair, Paul Zimmerman, talks about “good teachers” versus “popular teachers” and they say it is important for us, as teachers, to understand what “good teaching” is:

Student ratings have their limitations, and it is precisely those limitations that call for clearer notions about what we mean by good teaching. If we think of excellent teachers as those people who help and encourage their students to take deep approaches to their learning, we can begin to identify, as we have done in this essay, those practices and perspectives that achieve those noble ends.

I completely agree.  But they also say in the article that not all students appreciate deep learning, that many are surface learners.  And surface learners do not like deep learning.  My question is: can we change students from surface and strategic learners and make them deep learners?  If so, how do we do that?  Until we adress the student awareness of their own learning and students and professors alike agree that deep learning is desirable, we are still stuck in SEI hell.

Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

Steve’s response to my last post inspires me to bring our  conversation around to his original post which started this conversation.  Steve was writing about  creating an environment and the resources that will enable the faculty to pursue excellence in teaching.  I should have said this to begin with: I agree heartily with all  of Steve’s ideas about how to do this, and the importance of a Center to making it happen.  But I have experienced how difficult it can be to change the culture of a place.  I think we have to be very honest about the challenges.

Steve admits there is a tension between the culture of research/expertise and teaching  students in the way that the concepts of liberal arts espouse.  I do not think this is an unresolvable tension, and I do not advocate for having only “interdisciplinary PhD’s” or something along those lines.  I actually see a lot of value in the hard intellectual work of completing the PhD, and in continually learning and producing knowledge in one’s field.   I believe that the disciplines do each have value and contribute in significant ways to collective knowledge. In fact, many scholars feel (as Libby does) that their research inspires their teaching.  The  key, then, is to be a scholar and at the same time to realize that teaching demands even more from us–as Steve said, being a scholar in a field is “necessary but not sufficient.”

I think that, in order to change a culture, it would be a significant step to get faculty to think of their teaching as something worthy of scholarship in the same way that  their disciplines are  legitimate areas of scholarship.  And this scholarship of teaching and learning is a scholarship that we all share, across our disciplines.  Steve’s notion of making our teaching public is an important step in this process.  There is no one teaching strategy that works for all teachers and courses.  The important thing is to try innovations, study the effects, and share our results.

This kind of large-scale change doesn’t happen without extra-doses of motivation, and what I am suggesting is that for a widespread culture change to happen, for faculty to re-envision themselves as scholars of their teaching, I think they need a compelling reason.  This is where resolving the tension comes in.  I believe that if faculty could see clearly that the WAY they teach may have even more impact on the majority of their  students than the CONTENT they teach, then they would feel compelled to explore new techniques.  For instance, research shows that one effect of using a service-learning pedagogy is that students develop self-efficacy, a sense that they can have an effect on things around them.  Students in a Biology class that incorporates service learning then benefit in tangible ways from the course even if they never work in a field that uses biology knowledge in any way.  And that, to me, is the spirit of liberal arts education.  We aren’t just about teaching our content; we are about developing our students.  The two happen naturally together IF we are intentional about discovering our best teaching selves.

Scholars, Experts, and Liberal Arts

I grew up hearing my father say to my brothers when they performed small tasks: “Why, thank you!  You are a gentleman and a scholar.”  This told me two things: it was an honor to be called a “scholar” and being a scholar was something the wealthy class did. (And a third thing too– “ladies” were not scholars.) But if you could HEAR him say it, you would get a truer sense of his meaning.  His thick West Virginia accent, learned growing up in a “coal hollow” and never unlearned despite 4 years studying speech at Marquette, carried a certain sarcasm, an ambivalence toward wealthy intellectuals.  Real praise in our household was reserved for actual hard work and earning money,  not small tasks.

I work in the Ivory Tower, and live in a country that shares my father’s love/hate relationship with intellectuals.   I sometimes wonder how we got to this place, where scholarly professors and higher education are  the gateway for students to make more money in better jobs than their peers who got off the education train at high school.  As one professor friend puts it: “I can’t advise students about jobs outside the academy; I’ve always been in the academy.”

One thing we are all clear on here: at a liberal arts institution, we are not about mere “job training.”  We are about preparing people to live thoughtful, meaningful lives.  But I think it is time we looked at this claim more closely.  PhD’s spend years learning a more and more specialized area of study,  becoming a “literature scholar” or a “biologist” –and then they become professors in the department that houses others in this discipline, and attend weekly meetings with those folks, and spend a lot of energy continuing their specialized research and creating a curriculum for majors, etc.   So they have moved away from being generalized scholars, just as their students also move to to being mini-experts by completing a major, in the footsteps of their mentoring faculty.

I have heard faculty claim that they are clear that they are not training their students to go on to graduate school, or at least not all of them.  But  then, considering faculty’s specialized expertise, what ARE they preparing students for?  How does being a novice literature scholar prepare one to find a career other than as a lit scholar?  It does so through things like “critical thinking” and “writing skills.”  So it is not the content itself, but the subskills that matter.  At least, that is the gospel as we preach it. Here is my confession: I think I have lost the faith.

I have worked for years in cross-disciplinary contexts–Writing Across the Curriculum, faculty development, teaching and technology, and now civic engagement.  And I have seen faculty in these contexts alternately defend their own discipline and beat others over the head with their disciplinary beliefs.  Anthropologists don’t think literature students can record people’s stories, because they need to be trained in oral history technique and go through the IRB, as one example. I have also heard people excuse what would otherwise be unacceptable behavior, saying “well, she is a brilliant scholar, so we just have to let that slide.”

When these kinds of things happen, I believe it is evidence of us moving away from being “scholars” and into being “experts.”  The first two definitions of “scholar” are actually pointed toward learning:

from the OED:

1.”One who is taught in a school”

2.”One who studies in the ‘schools’ at a university”
Only the third leans toward “finished” learning:

3.”One who has acquired learning in the ‘Schools’; a learned or erudite person”

This matters because, for liberal arts education to work, we cannot get caught in expert mode.  We need to listen to the voices that accuse the academy of being arrogant and disengaged from reality, of being only the “sphere of polite learning” (which are the words the OED uses to define “scholarship.”)  In this video, Liz Coleman, president of Bennington College, makes a compelling case for rethinking liberal arts in America, for returning to the Jeffersonian vision.  She makes some great statements about the problem of “learning more and more about less and less” and about the way education can go wrong when it “engenders a sense of learned helplessness, rather than to create a sense of empowerment.”

I’ll leave you with a quote from a student who participated in one of our community-based learning classes this spring: “I used to think the problems in the world were so huge and that I could not do anything to fix them so why would I try?  But now I don’t feel that way; now I believe in my own efficacy.”   He didn’t believe he had all the answers or was an “expert;” instead, he believes he has some tools to learn about things, and a right and a responsibility to be part of a community.  That did not happen in a traditional class, but one which was intentionally designed to actively engage students, inside and outside the classroom.

We have to be clear with ourselves.  What are we doing for our students?  HOW is their work in our classrooms going to equip them to live well?  How can we innovate and better design courses and curricula that serve our students, and not merely march them down a content path to be an “expert” in something they will never actually pursue?

Making them curious again

On our campus we are beginning the dreaded “Curriculum Revision” process. God bless those of you with the nerve to enter into the fray. I am enjoying thinking about the possibilities for a first year program, so I thought I would throw out my idea here, hoping people might have ideas and reactions. I am still on the fence about formally proposing such a thing to our faculty committee.

Idea for a unique and innovative First Year Experience

Our students come to us adept at absorbing information that is given to them. To make the most of their college experience, students must move from passive receivers of knowledge to  active seekers, discriminating consumers, and competent communicators of information.
A first year course should motivate and facilitate this move from passive to active learner. This can be accomplished through a course which, regardless of content, has 3 key features:
1. The design of the course leads students to a point of “expectation failure” (Bain, 28) where students experience the short-comings of their existing mental models by encountering information that does not fit the model.
2. The class is a safe environment where the students are supported through the process of re-evaluating knowledge and constructing new models and mental structures through exploration and discovery.
3. The content of the course has a real, physical element, or connection to a place, that the students can experience.

Proposal: Reading Richmond: Place as Text

How do scholars make sense of the world around them? Professors would construct courses whose topic can be connected to the Richmond area in some way. As part of the course, students would spend time outside of the classroom, in the Richmond area.
Readings in the course would interrogate and interact with what the students see upon first “glance,” encouraging students to explore further, go deeper.
1. Students would develop individual (or group) research projects to learn more.
2. The research process would be monitored carefully and mentored by faculty, utilizing proven approaches for this such as research logs.
3. Every student would contribute a piece to a living, growing digital archive called “Reading Richmond.” Picture a Google map with pins. When a user clicks a pin, s/he would be taken to a student project developed in the “Reading Richmond” class.

The goal of these projects would not be to create new knowledge, but to learn well the first step of creating new knowledge: evaluating what is currently known. At the college level, this means going beyond accepting simple, basic information and working to obtain more accurate and perhaps more complex information.

What will make these classes exciting is what the individual professors bring to the class, and the opportunity for students to interact with the professor in his/her area of passion. Imagine a physics professor teaching a class about bridges in Richmond…a business professor teaching about the evolution of Philip Morris…A religion professor teaching a class on the statute of religious freedom…a literature teacher teaching a class on Edgar Allen Poe…What all the courses have in common would be students being surprised, confused and confounded, and then being helped to move beyond that through information gathering and research, reading, writing, discussing, trying and trying again.

Any faculty member could create such a course and this will create buy-in from all parts of the university, engaging the broadest possible spectrum of faculty in this crucial work with first year students. It would be necessary for the best teachers to teach the course, those who are adept at motivating and mentoring students. It would be a challenging course for faculty as well as students because it asks faculty to not rely on having the answers to give to students, but instead on leading students through sophisticated ways of asking and answering questions.

If the class is successful, students will be more curious and, at the same time, more confident that they have the tools to satisfy their curiosity.

If UR required all first years to take this course in the fall semester, each section/group could stay together for a spring course where students then focus on reading written texts, similar to the current Core course. It would be different, however, in being a class that is truly about reading complex written texts, and not an attempt to survey the history of thought. The texts could be linked by a theme like “What can we know?” Or perhaps “What matters?” This course would be writing intensive and focus on academic argument. It would be important that the course on reading written text come after the more experiential course. The emphasis would be understanding why “hard texts” exist: that life is complicated and knowing is a complex task, and that writing is one way that people have developed to accommodate these truths.

Bain, Ken. “What the Best College Teachers Do.” Cambridge: Harvard University Press

future of higher ed

Is a liberal arts education useful?   I re-read Bok’s book, Our Underachieving Colleges, and have been looking at the latest updates on the LEAP project at AAC&U.  I see lots of consensus on how to  shape  curriculum and programming to educate our students, a liberal arts education that prepares citizens and responsible, thoughtful adults.  The list in George Kuh’s report is similar to Bok’s list: First Year Seminars, Common Intellectual Experiences, Learning Communities, Writing Intensive Courses, Collaborative Work, Learning Communities, Global Learning, Internships, Community-Based Learning and Capstone Courses.

We are doing all those things at UR, some would say.  And yet, I maintain we aren’t really doing most of them.  As Bok notes, we keep trying to fundamentally change higher education by tinkering with number and kinds of courses.  And yet, that doesn’t make a deep change.  It is not the “what”–it is the HOW.  For example: we have a first year program called Core which is a common intellectual experience.  The faculty spend much time deciding what great books all freshman should read.  But far fewer faculty consider what should happen in the classrooms themselves, how the students should engage with these texts and with each other. And I am not sure we who teach it  try to go out into the world with the students and make the real world connections.

Dickinson has found a really interesting way to bring many of these elements together in their first year program.  In this article, they report on the connections between the design of their first year program and certain student outcomes that go beyond traditional reading and writing skills.  They measured student mental health, levels of alcohol use and development as citizens and engaged thinkers. The content of this report is interesting, as is the method:

Working with Bringing Theory to Practice became a vehicle for rigorous assessment. We wanted to explicitly study the effects of student participation in our first-year engaged-learning initiatives to examine whether variously structured learning experiences would yield different impacts on student learning and engagement, mental health, alcohol use, and civic engagement over the short and long term.

As we phase in our new first year curriculum components, there is a great opportunity to do innovative assessment work like this, comparing control groups to those in the new curriculum.

There is also another opportunity here: to reach across not just departments, but also across the student life-academics divide.  I have heard academics complain for years that students don’t live the “life of the mind” outside of the classroom, but as academics we too often stop ourselves at the threshold of the classroom or office.  Our Sophomore Scholars in Residence Program is a fascinating way to begin to bridge the divide, and it has brought student-life professionals into working relationships with faculty.  Our new Roadmap program does that as well, bringing faculty into student lives before they even begin their first semester here with us, and continuing through all four years. You can read about both programs in Artes Liberales.

What I am getting at is that if we want to educate whole people, we as faculty may have to leave our comfort zones.  But the times call for action, for change.    Consider a place like Hampshire college, trying to think differently about education. President Ralph Hexter wrote about the connection he sees between how we educate in higher ed, and the citizens we turn out, pointing out that at the heart of the financial scandals were people “well educated” by America’s top universities. He frames the mission of higher education as

each student owning his or her learning and understanding the context and significance of that learning.

A great liberal arts education should allow students to reach back to the great thinkers of the past, to view the present with an educated eye ,  and to  imagine their own way into a new future.  Active learning, metacognition, problem-based learning, community-based learning, personal learning environments, learning communities…there are so many promising ways to think differently about learning and to bring the liberal arts to the citizens of the new millenium.  It makes me glad to be sending my children into higher education.  Now, about paying for it…

Faculty as Learners

Steve asked me a question on Twitter that I started to give a quick link to answer, but then realized it deserved so much more. The prompting question: What is a “Faculty Learning Community?”

I have spent the last few months trying to answer this question myself. And since I am presumably facilitating one right now, you could say the situation is urgent. The official answer is this webpage from Milt Cox’s site. Cox is the father of FLC’s. In a sentence,

“A faculty learning community (FLC) is a group of trans-disciplinary faculty, graduate students and professional staff group of size 6-15 or more (8 to 12 is the recommended size) engaging in an active, collaborative, yearlong program with a curriculum about enhancing teaching and learning and with frequent seminars and activities that provide learning, development, transdisciplinarity, the scholarship of teaching and learning, and community building.”

I had attended a workshop at POD to learn about the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning and how to set up a faculty learning community to support faculty who might be interested in SOTL. It started to sound to me like the concept of the FLC was a promising model for faculty learning.

I sold the idea of trying an FLC as a way to work with our first group of Community-Based Learning Faculty Fellows, and I got some money together to pay a stipend to support the group for meeting over a full year, and then started what I am calling a “pilot year.” Almost immediately, my lack of experience running a group like this set me back. I had 13 faculty in a room, all with various levels of experience with CBL, and I felt like they were just daring me to waste their time. gulp. I was really wishing we had a text to follow that I could hide behind. In fact, I was resisting the idea of a fixed curriculum provided by me. The really powerful part of the FLC model is that the group produces a group project and an individual project, and that is where I put my focus. The first two meetings were just discussion about the group’s own experiences teaching a class with a CBL component. The third meeting we looked at CBL in the new university strategic plan being proposed. Now we have moved our focus to the group project, and I can finally feel the group gelling a little bit.

But I am not feeling like I really know what I need to know to make this work. I avoided buying a book for everyone about CBL because I always get the message from faculty that they are too busy. (Plus, there is no one text I can find that fits the way we do CBL here) And frankly, when I have tried reading-based things in the past, the faculty didn’t do the reading. I think faculty are a bit uncomfortable in any situation where they are not the experts, and so I was trying to downplay the “outside expert” quotient and raise the “learning from each other while we are in the trenches” quotient. I’ve also been doing training on how to be a better facilitator, and I was using those ideas to try to help them build on their own experiences.

What I would really like to do is go to the annual conference on FLC’s but it is in California and I am not sure how to get the money to go. Meanwhile, I have just given the group a mid-year survey through survey monkey, and am making plans for next year’s group. I plan to also survey them after they have finished the project and the year, because I have heard from faculty at other institutions that they had a different perspective on the experience after it was finished rather than they did when they were in the middle of it. A couple of changes I have already decided on:
1. I want a smaller group. 13 is too many.
2. Being in the FLC is a privilege that fellows have that they can OPT INTO. (This year it was a required part of a larger fellowship)
Everyone attends a 2 day workshop in the spring where we will do nuts and bolts of course development, and they will get a book on service-learning course design. Then, those who want to, sign on for the next year’s FLC.

But I have not yet decided how I will structure the FLC for the next year. I am thinking of having a specific focus to the group that comes from the field of CBL, and assigning some readings. We would do that the first few meetings, and then move into the project part of the learning community. But I would also like to find a way to keep the meeting time a place when people can just talk about their own ups and downs while trying to use this complex pedagogy. Or maybe that should be a separate thing? I will listen closely to the insights of this pilot group as I do my planning.

I keep thinking of the session that Jeff and I did at POD about faculty as both adult and gifted learners. The discussions were fascinating as experienced faculty developers put their heads together to figure out the implications of those two sets of theory (andragogy and gifted ed). Faculty tend to be independent learners, very sensitive, highly distractable… (actually, I’ll have to do a whole separate post on this). One participant said “after thinking about it this way, it seems to me that the faculty learning community model is a good fit for faculty learning.” Part of me thinks that is true, but I just don’t feel I have fully figured out how to structure this kind of learning group.

So, Steve, that is the long answer.

Creative Ideas Needed

I am hoping some of my web-savvy friends can put their heads together with me to figure out a free solution to my problem. Here is the deal:
I support bunches of students, across various courses, who are going out to sites around Richmond as part of their academic work (so their grade partially depends on getting to the sites regularly).
Students seem to have less access to cars all of the sudden (economic downturn?) I am trying to think of something I can set up quickly to help them find out who the people are WITH cars and where and when they are travelling off campus.

What would you use? A wiki? Any special ideas about how you would set it up?

Responses to Gladwell’s Essay on Teachers

I was fascinated by Gladwell’s article in the New Yorker, despite his drawing parallels with two fields I am not expert in: football and finance. This Clutter Museum postdoes a nice job capturing some of the responses to the article, but I was interested to see that my own reactions weren’t represented there. So I would like to add a few points.
First, the part of Gladwell’s article that most fascinated me was the description of the successful teacher in action. Pianta at the Curry School studied videos of teachers teaching and interacting with little children. Even just reading about the teachers actions, the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful was obvious. But teasing out what elements make that true can be tricky. One thing they identified was respect for the learners:

Pianta’s team has developed a system for evaluating various competencies relating to student-teacher interaction. Among them is “regard for student perspective”; that is, a teacher’s knack for allowing students some flexibility in how they become engaged in the classroom.

Is this an inborn trait, or is it something that a teacher can learn?

You can see how hard it is to teach new teachers this idea, because the minute you teach them to have regard for the student’s perspective, they think you have to give up control of the classroom.”

There are some people who learn to do this on their own, or are born knowing how to do it. But I also think it is part skill, part attitude. Successful teachers believe their students can learn, and that their students want to learn. They know how to manage a group of people to create an atmosphere that optimizes every student’s opportunity to get excited about learning. In addition, successful teachers give a lot of feedback to students individually so that learning is active and experimental, as demonstrated by the math teacher in Gladwell’s article.

One question not thoroughly explored in the article is: can these skills and attitudes be taught? Or, let me make this distinction: can they be learned, but not taught? Gladwell asserts that the different mechanisms (degrees and certifications) we have now for teacher education do not guarantee successful teachers. This seems to indicate that the most important elements for successful teaching can’t be taught. But that is not true: it indicates that the system now doesn’t teach them, but not that it can’t be done. But it also seems to be true that these elements can be learned, that it is not true that if you are not a fantastically effective teacher your first year, you never will be. In fact, all the teachers I know developed into more effective teachers after experience in the classroom. This is a point that Gladwell also makes. But I want to go one step further: what are the circumstances that allow ineffective teachers to develop into effective teachers?

As a person working with faculty to improve their teaching, I have seen the importance of the institution’s message to the teachers about developing. We need to be clear that excellent teachers work at their teaching skills, not just their content knowledge. We also need to respect each faculty member as a learner, in the same way that good teachers respect students as individual learners. This does not mean that we allow people to hide behind “individual academic freedom” so that they never have to develop. It means that we encourage them to be “reflective practitioners” analyzing their successes and failures. I also think that having a community of other teachers to talk to and share ideas with makes a big difference, and that joining the larger community of scholars who study how people learn, by reading journals, attending conferences, etc. This is the ideal; is it happening? If we wanted to make sure that teachers could be successful, we would focus on helping them learn the process of critical reflection, as well as introducing them to the community of teacher/scholars.

Some studies seem to show that having a deep knowledge of the content is crucial for making an effective teacher. I would love to see more research done to tease out the reality of this. Is it a “necessary but not sufficient” precondition? What about the importance of being able to understand your audience of beginners well enough to get them started? I am quite sure that my high school chemistry teacher understood her chemistry well; but the fact that she made us all miserable in that class guaranteed that none of us developed a desire to learn more about chemistry. In fact, I think I feel hives breaking out just thinking of it.

Successful teaching is complicated and wonderful, worth studying and worth advocating. I am happy Gladwell is encouraging the conversation.