But there was a huge elephant in that room: what do the students take away, after the semester is over?  Joe asked us what we want our students to say about the class, and some of the guys there were delighted to say “I want them to say ‘Whew,I’m glad that is over!’ “

But whether students loved or hated the class–how were they changed? What will they remember? What can they do that that they couldn’t do before? What new insights and habits of mind do they carry with them?

How can we even talk about the quality of teaching without talking about the results of the teaching: the change in the students?  And if A+ teaching is basically keeping the students “in their place” and jumping quickly through every hoop, even if the training is well designed so that with repetition etc. they will remember their training for a long time–is this really what we want out of a university education?

With our students, we are hoping for the kinds of transformative educational experiences that will lead to lives of meaning and purpose–at least, that is what we say.  In my classes, I am hoping to help students see truths that will help them develop what Keats called “negative capability.”  I am hoping to create learning environments that are safe but challenging, and where they will strike out on their own to places they (and maybe I) hadn’t considered.  In my classes, we learn together.  And that is why I love community-based learning–real challenges are way messier and way more fruitful than textbooks with answers in the back.

And I suppose that Joe is smarter in some ways as a faculty-developer than I am, starting with an ego stroke.  But here is what I will do instead.  I really believe that we each teach from who we are, and we teach the content that we do for a reason.  So I start by getting to know each individual, and what they are fascinated by, and what they want for their students to learn.  And I don’t believe there is any one perfect way to teach.  But I do believe there is a RIGHT focus: student learning.

So much conversation in the Higher ed admin circles seems to say we are on the verge of really going for it, of making student learning and development the true mission of the university, and of making deep learning, innovative experiences, etc the heart of it all.  But the clear sighted among us say: really? or is it just talk?

I get to make it my mission.  And I get to help people who make it their mission.  Maybe that is enough for now.

http://writingintheory.blogspot.com/2010/04/future-of-composition.html

Then I read this interview in Inside Higher Ed. I was amazed by the sophistication of the student’s understanding, but I really shouldn’t have been so amazed. I know the wisdom is out there; I struggle with how to get at it. And Lucretia Witte explains it so simply:

More than anything, I would encourage professors to involve students in their own learning experience. Ask your students to take a pre-course survey one week before class starts. How do they learn best? What aspect of the course topic interests them most? What kind of assignments do they like? Is there any skill or aspect of the course that they feel apprehensive about? Best case, this allows professors to set the bar high for personal investment in the course, allows them to tailor the course to the students’ interests, sends a message that the professor genuinely cares about the students’ experience, and takes the first step in establishing that invaluable dialogue.

We will all be lucky if Ms. Witte joins us as a colleague in education, which she says she intends to do.  In the mean time, I am grateful for this insight, and for the encouragement from a student to keep heading down the road toward greater student engagement in learning.

So I was really pleased that UR News did a great story on one of our CBL classes from this year’s CBL Fellows. The story of this class–and the student comments–help show how community-based learning works here at UR, and how it is different from service learning, but gets at some of the same goals. It was an honest to goodness literature class, and it used a variety of connections to the community, some of which weren’t even covered in the article. (Some of the students gave a poetry reading at the local VA hospital for their final project, for instance.)
And, dearest to my heart, is the comment by the professors that they actually discovered new insights themselves because they taught the class this way. Nice.

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.

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.

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.

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.