Interesting, well-produced, and potentially controversial video here:

“Good teaching is good teaching. And teachers don’t have to adjust their teaching to individual students’ learning styles.”

From a 2004 review by George Leef of Patrick Allitt’s book I’m the Teacher, You’re the Student:

[M]atters might improve considerably if the rest of the faculty were also fighting against the student aversion to reading, but few of them probably are. Allitt doesn’t say much about his colleagues, but I suspect he knows that many of them have given in to what Murray Sperber calls the faculty/student non-aggression pact: Students get light assignments and good grades in return for expecting little instructional effort from their professors. Allitt’s willingness to stay and fight when much of the rest of the faculty has surrendered is commendable, but if only a small number of professors insist that students read and understand, the college experience is just the skeletal remains of its former self.

The bolded passage is a dead-on appropriate term for much of what goes on under the guise college teaching and learning these days.

Sounds like a good book but one which might be too depressing to read just before the semester starts.

In my upper-level courses — especially the two senior-level math majors courses I teach, Modern Algebra and Topics in Geometry — traditionally I’ve seen timed tests and so forth as being ineffective in assessing the kinds of advanced problem-solving that students in those classes have to do. Mainly the problems are ones in which they have to prove a theorem. It’s hard to do that under a time pressure because it’s a creative endeavor.

So typically I’ve given such problems out as homework, with the instructions that students may work together on understanding the problem and drafting up a sketch of the solution (Polya’s stages 1 and 2) but the main solution itself, as well as any reality-checking, has to be done individually.

This article from the Harvard Crimson from a year ago captures exactly what I wish this process would look like on the students’ level. The article is about Math 55, called “probably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country”. How do these students handle the homework in this class, which is assigned frequently and hits like a ton of bricks?

Georges Bizet’s Carmen blares from the computer of Menyoung Lee ’10. The boys sit scattered around their gray worktable, their eyes telltale red and fingers sore from countless hours at their laptops, dutifully LaTeXing problem sets. They have been here since 2 p.m. and will work for almost 12 straight hours to complete the problem set due the following day.

As the hours pass, they discuss the problem set. They formalize and write the solutions on their own for academic integrity. Despite the class’s cutthroat stereotype, this session is about community, not competition. [emph. added]

They work hard as a group — they have to — but when it comes time to actually write the solution, they voluntarily break off to work the solution out on their own, because they have a sense of academic integrity. It’s a community, but not a commune. Nobody is taking anybody else’s work and turning it in as their own, because I suppose they have pride in their work and in their abilities. As far as I can tell there are no timed assessments in Math 55 to hold them individually accountable.

I wouldn’t want my Geometry and Algebra classes to be as hard as Math 55, but I’d love it if students would have a solid sense of the correct point when working together on problems needs to stop and individual work needs to begin, and then make that switch from group to individual work as a matter of personal ethics and an understanding of what it means to learn a subject.  And I’d love not to have to shift assessment of problem-solving over to timed tests as a result.

Do students in high school and certain college courses where group work is stressed more and more frequently understand that this point exists?

Another thing about group work and assessment. In some courses, particularly upper-division courses with small enrollments, the same kind of individual accountability I’m looking for can be found through oral presentations, not just timed assessments.

I found this out in the textbook-free quasi-Moore Method abstract algebra course I did this past semester. Students were free to work with each other and consult outside sources on any course task they wished to, but at the end of the day their grade depended on their ability to get up in front of the class (and me) and present their work — answering questions on the particulars, being able to explain the overall strategy of a proof, and defending their work against potential holes. Students who could do this on a regular basis scored highly. Students who couldn’t scored poorly. It worked out.

And I know that the students learned a valuable lesson: You don’t present something unless you know it’s right, otherwise you’ll end up embarrassed. And don’t discount the educational value of potential embarrassment.

One of the things I have learned this semester (which is now officially over, having turned in my last batch of grades this morning) is the following lesson which I am convinced I must implement immediately: Group work has been playing far too great of a role in my student’s grades. From this point forward, assignments which could conceivably be done in groups — not just those that are designated for group work — will count for no more than 10-15% of the grade in my courses.

I like collaborative learning. I think, in fact, that working with other people on math can be not only a highly effective way of doing so but also carries with it a powerful pro-math socialization effect. The best personal friendships that I had during my college + grad school years were those that I formed with my classmates in my various math classes, as we struggled through material that, to us at the time, was really hard. Not only did those friends help me learn, I also associated good times and shared victories over math problems with learning math.

But here’s the deal: At the end of the day, the grade that an individual earns in a class, mine or anybody else’s, has to be an accurate reflection of that individual’s mastery of the material and that individual’s ability to solve problems and think effectively. If were reasonably confident that group effort on problems was translating into individual mastery, I’d be perfectly willing to admit as much group work as students want. But the fact is that this has not been the case.

Case in point: In a recent course, I gave out some pretty difficult advanced problems and instructed students on the usual academic honesty procedures, which boil down to “collaborate if you want but not to the point where you’re no longer doing your own work”. I got back solutions which were eerily similar and all basically correct, and in many cases way out of character for the students handing them in. It was enough to make me suspect a breach of my academic honesty policy, but not enough to make a case. So I simply reproduced the exact same problem on a timed test. And guess what? Whereas before, nearly everybody had a really nice solution — the same really nice solution — this time only one or two people had an idea where to start or even how to correctly parse out the terminology in the problem.

And this has been happening all over, not just in that class — a sort of soft academic dishonesty that nominally stays within bounds. Students work together and hand in work that earns points but does not reflect their understanding of the material. I understand earning good grades is important, but equally important is my ability to identify problem areas and help students grow through them.

So I know what all the digital nativists say about how in the modern workplace, people work collaboratively and it’s a 19th century anachronism to give out timed tests and all that. But you know what? You can’t contribute to a group if you yourself have used the group to feign your own competence. So from here on out, the majority — if not all — of my assessments of students will be done in a timed setting, under conditions that I can set and monitor. For example, in calculus next semester, I’ll assign homework problems and let students work on it all they want in any size group they want. But the grade is going to come from timed quizzes, tests, a midterm, and a final. Some variation on that will also be in place for my two sophomore level courses as well. If you do group work properly, contributing where you can and really working to understand things where you can’t, then it will be no problem to do well on a quiz or test. If not, then the quiz or test will show that up as well.

If that makes me an anachronism, or unhip, or whatnot, then so be it. I’m tired of students not learning the material because they have easy workarounds for doing their own work, and one way or another they will get a good grade in the course if and only if they can show me that they know what they are doing.

This is the final article in the weeklong retrospective series. We’ve seen twelve posts, all on different subjects but also all about the same thing — the stuff I think about regarding teaching, education, math, and technology. It’s been a fun week for me, and I feel re-energized having reminded myself of just what it is this blog is for. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed it too, and thanks for your indulgence.

This last article is a more recent one. I don’t blog about my religious beliefs very often, although I probably would be justified in doing so since my Christian faith is at the core of who I am and why I am doing what I am doing. On this occasion, though, I was moved by my then-pastor’s sermon on Philippians chapter 2 to consider how humility plays itself out in my daily life. Sadly, it doesn’t play out nearly as much as it should. But when you think about it, how often do you hear the word “humility” used in conjunction with “higher education”? That’s even sadder, and it should really not be this way. 

So this last article is both an observation and a challenge for me — for all of us in this business — to approach the call to teach, learn, and serve with selfless enthusiasm. And for me, to blog accordingly. 

Humility and higher education

Originally posted: May 22, 2007

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A couple of weeks ago, our pastor preached a sermon on Philippians 2, the main idea of which is humility. The link gives you the text for the whole chapter (read it!) but verses 3 and 4 give a strong command:

Do nothing from rivalry or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others.

As a Christian whose vocation is to higher education, I find these twin commands to be deeply countercultural, not only to the culture at large but especially to the culture of higher ed. After all, I work in the “ivory tower” — a parallel universe to the rest of the world where the rules of common sense and human behavior seem to take on Bizarro-world-like properties at times.

What would real humility look like, as practiced by a professor actively working in higher education? Taking the verses above at face value, it would seem pretty simple: treat people with a sense of their worth, and value their worth more than you value your own, and look to their interests in addition to your own. This in turn requires that professors think about two big questions.

Question 1: What is it about my students and colleagues that makes them so significant? Christianity offers an answer in terms of the inherent worth of each individual as a creation of God. For me, that’s enough. But I can also get a sense of how true that worth is when I think about my kids. My 3-year old, as smart as she is, can’t read; can’t do any kind of math besides counting; can’t take care of herself in anything but the most rudimentary ways. Every so often, when I teach or interact with students, it’ll hit me — how amazing it is that these people can do what they do! They may not be very good at math or writing, some of them, but they can at least do it, and somehow they made it from infancy to being functioning adults capable of holding their own in a college classroom. If that were my kid, I’d be proud beyond words, and rightly so. I suspect that this kind of revelation is a lot closer to the truth about my students than the ever-present disappointment with inabilities to do whatever it is they are supposed to be doing in my classes.

Question 2: What are my students’ and colleagues’ interests? I think there are two ways to interpret the word “interests”. One is “needs”, and the other is the more traditional idea of “interests” as things which people find valuable. But for now, let me focus on “needs”.

What are the needs of my students? Well, every student has different needs, but there are some common threads. Students generally need discipline in their thinking. They need help in managing their time, priorities, and life choices. They need an expansion of what they already know and enjoy. They need to become engaged with, and learn to enjoy, things that are wholly outside of themselves. They need to be equipped not only to learn things in the present but to be able to learn and expand themselves throughout life.

It’s easier to think about what I needed when I was an undergrad. I needed discipline; I was pretty smart but not at all focused, and I wasted a lot of time and energy in college screwing around with all kinds of things that added nothing to my life in the long term (or the short term). I also needed a sense of belonging — a need to “find my tribe” and fit in somewhere, which is something that never happened to me growing up and happened only belatedly in college thanks to our Honors Program. I needed a sense of how all the stuff I was learning fit together and what it was all about; I was really good at playing the education game to get good grades, but when I went off to graduate school I was out to sea about the big picture of my discipline. Finally, if I was going to have any kind of faith or spiritual element to my life at all, I needed it to be something real and vibrant, not the legalistic socializing that passed for faith when I was a kid. I didn’t start to get that until I was a senior in college, but that’s a whole different story.

I don’t think I was so different from college students now, even though it’s a whole generation later and I teach in a much different institution than the one I attended. But in fact, our college has this mission statement that outlines five main organizing principles for the life of the college: faith, respect, responsibility, honesty, and lifelong pursuit of learning. I think it’s pretty striking that these are precisely the five things that most college students, including myself at the time, lack in the greatest quantities.

So humility, from the college professor’s standpoint, consists in understanding what students’ needs are; accepting that students have them and not being disappointed or upset when those needs show up in the education process; letting the students have entry into “my world” of higher ed; and then simply trying to give them, to the extent that I can, what they need.

There are also some things that humility does not look like. It is not the same as simply being soft, or lowering one’s standards, or giving students endless breaks when completing their assignments. I’ve been ripped on evaluations before for being “arrogant” when all I was really doing was holding high standards, assessing students accordingly, and frankly pointing out to them where they needed to improve. We tend to think of humble people as undemanding or “nice”. In most contexts that may well be the case. But in education, teachers and professors have to learn to strike the fine balance between uncompromising, tough-minded, disciplined thinking — and teaching — on the one hand, and the notion of counting others more significant than yourself on the other. You have to be tough/disciplined AND caring/nurturing at the same time. They are not mutually exclusive, although too many education schools think that they are and force students to choose between them. I’ve written about this before here — ironically, only to be taken to task by students who thought I was being arrogant and uncaring in saying so.

I want to take it on as a goal for next year — heck, for right now — to practice this kind of tough-minded humility on a daily basis. I hope that it will bring some changes for the better for everyone.

Editorial: Here’s the second in a series of reruns retrospectives I’m running all week here at CO9s. This one goes well with the one I posted yesterday. Students learn best in an environment where their curiosity is nurtured and sculpted, and this museum store vignette is a great microcosm of what I wish academia were really like most of the time. I think the message that we have to de-institutionalize learning in order for it to become compelling to young people is an important one, and I hope that I embody that message every day in my work.

The Lesson of the Museum Store

Originally posted: June 23, 2006

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Since writing that post, the 2.5-year old is now almost 4, and she has a 2-year old sister who likes the museum store almost as much. Sadly, this particular museum store in the mall closed over the summer. But there’s still the real thing just a half hour away, and it’s a LOT more dangerous on the family budget.

Last night we packed up and went to the mall for some playtime (the kids’ play area has been a Doodlebug favorite for a long time) and some small-scale shopping. After the Mrs. went off to shop, though, Doodlebug wanted to run around the mall rather than play. We ended up at a newly-arrived store: The Children’s Museum Store, which is evidently a branch of the store found on the bottom floor of the awesome Indianapolis Children’s Museum (consistently ranked as the top children’s museum in the country).

Discovering this store has serious implications for our family budget. There is a small but great selection of cool kites (which I like to play with moreso than Doodles, although she’s getting big enough to handle one on her own), cool toddler toys, and — most dangerous of all — a huge wall of Thomas the Tank Engine stuff, including one of those big train tables that Doodlebug simply adores. (We couldn’t bring ourselves to investigate how much one of those would be after finding out that one little bridge by itself was $30.) Also lots of dinosaur stuff to go along with the new exhibit at the Museum, which she was surprisingly into; and several levels of the BrainQuest “books” she has really come to enjoy since she got the age 2-3 version for Christmas; and dozens of paychecks’ worth of neat stuff besides.

I was, in fact, shocked that we managed to avoid buying anything from there — both because we knew Doodles wanted to play with stuff there, and also because her Dad did. I suspect that frugality won’t last forever.

What is so appealing about all this stuff? There’s something mysterious, almost addictive, about things that are simultaneously fun and educational — and which provide signficant amounts of both fun and learning. I think it’s because toys like this show us that the divide between pleasure and learning is not so great as we think — perhaps isn’t even there at all unless we choose to put it there — and they show us what learning really could be like, and probably really is in its purest form.

Somewhere between being a 2.5-year old, like my daughter, and being a college student, that disconnect between play and learning becomes profound and almost irreversible. Our play becomes mindless and our learning becomes boring and overly serious. The sense of exploration, questioning and questing, and having fun while discovering what is out there is inexplicably sucked out of schools, teachers, and students alike. We have taken the tremendous joy and fun of learning and discovery and institutionalized it.

And so I think it takes an intentional de-institutionalizing — in other words, a personalizing — to bring all the fun back. This is just one place where parenting plays a huge role; as my daughter’s dad, I can build up in her a sense of the pleasure of learning by surrounding her with an environment that admits no denial of that pleasure — not just neat toys, but more importantly attitudes and actions that allow her to gain a foothold herself which lay a foundation for how she approaches learning her whole life. As I’ve said before: Most of what we call “educational” problems in our schools are really parenting problems, and similarly for the successes.

Likewise, although my students are at a far less formative stage of their development (or are they?), I can surround them with something personal, not institutional, that dares them to tell me that learning is universally boring and uninteresting. Enthusiasm like this is very hard to resist; many of us who teach are teachers as a direct result of somebody’s enthusiasm. I can’t expect to change the mind of a student about mathematics if the only experiences they’d had up to that point were the typical negative authoritarian ones in high school, but I can make myself stick out as perhaps the one person in their whole experience who thought math was beautiful and interesting and fun, and therefore force them to think about it everything they want to think otherwise.

It is hard work, but necessarily and important — and fun. Now if you all will excuse me, I am going to go sneak off to the mall and buy that kite that was shaped like a sailboat.