Monday, October 19, 2015

Surly with Some Next-Level Linkage

I know many CMers hate links, so here's my contribution to their inevitable rage-stroke: a double-link post. 

I think I have posting rights, but...

a. I'm too hungover and tired to deal with finding and blurifying a cool pic, and 
b. I don't know if you want a super-linky post on the page, especially one that links to my own thing.

First, Molly Worthen wrote this op-ed piece about lecturing that's been making the rounds.  I know everyone has seen it.  I am, though, interested in what CMers think about it, so I thought it would be interesting to post it and see what people have to say.

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Lecture Me. Really.
The vogue for active learning blinds us to the value of ancient teaching methods.
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Second, I my Surly self have recently begun a sort of shitty, half-assed, blogging project, mostly about my K-12 experiences and solely to keep sane in the face of the relentless onslaught of terrible ideas and insane "initiatives" from admins and consultants.  It's just therapeutically ranty and mostly insufferable.  

BUT, coincidentally my first post was a thing about lecturing, which is pretty much everything I have to say about lecturing, so instead of pasting it into a CM post or comment, here's the link:

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On Lecturing and Learning
Someone sent me a thing.  It's by Grant Wiggins on why history teachers lecture all the time.  Here it is: I had some feelings about it.  Then I had thoughts and th...
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So please to enjoy or delete!

Hugs.

Surly

23 comments:

  1. If we're linking on that topic, we must, MUST, also include Miriam Burstein's immortal rejoinder: http://littleprofessor.typepad.com/the_little_professor/2015/10/how-to-write-an-essay-about-teaching-that-will-not-be-published-in-the-nyt-chronicle-ihe-or-anywhere.html

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    1. That's brilliant. The only thing she left out (though it's in there, implicitly) is admitting that a great many current teachers teach well, using the variety of techniques mentioned.

      Articles that go viral nearly always start with the assumption (or often the explicit statement) that, with the obvious exception of the author and a few of his (it's nearly always his) buddies of similar philosophy (and teaching load/carefully-selected student body and up-to-the-minute hip accoutrements), most teachers are doing their job very, very badly, and need to be reformed/enlightened, lest the students perish of boredom/disengagement.

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    2. Thanks for sharing that: I think it's the best thing I've ever read about teaching!

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    3. Oh heavens yes. And yes to what CC said, with that whole irritating "I'm one of the few hip proffies that 'gets it'" schtick. I'd add that the ReformerPreneurs (or whatever we're calling them today) and their media scribes exhibit that diabolical kind of thinking that C.S. Lewis described back in 1942, in The Screwtape Letters. Here senior demon Screwtape advises his nephew Wormwood, a newbie tempter, on how to distract his “patient” from the truth:

      Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism* is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous – that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

      * substitute Edu-Fad du Jour here

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    4. And here's another pretty good one (from someone with at least some of the accoutrements of a hip proffie, no less): "Every NYT Higher-Ed Think Piece Ever Written"

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    5. I seem to have lost my tough with embedded links. Url: http://www.thetattooedprof.com/archives/491

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    6. Or "touch," as the case may be. Aargh.

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  2. Surly, I should be grading right now, but I read your post, and I liked this quote so much

    People who say you should NEVER lecture ultimately scare teachers away from creating a reasonable blend of approaches in the classroom. (They also tend to be big fans of TED talks and Khan Academy videos that are, of course, lectures. And they like to visit our schools on in-service days to tell us about the evils of lecturing by lecturing to us).

    that I took the liberty of tweeting it.

    Okay,I'm going to finish grading and then on to read the Burstein article.

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    1. And that, too, is all too true. I've had a few visiting "teaching experts" at least make a bow toward demonstrating/practicing the techniques they're urging on their audience, but, with those very few exceptions, they almost always give powerpoint presentations, even at supposed "workshops" (in fact, you know there's a real problem when the pre-conference "workshop" and the 1st 2/3 of the conference "keynote" use the same powerpoint slides, and even feature many of the same anecdotes/jokes. Such moments are the ones when I really resent my comparatively low salary, while wondering if/how I could break into the same racket at which the speaker is succeeding, and whether it *has* to be a racket, or whether I could somehow do it ethically.)

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  3. Thanks for tolerating the linkage. It was worth it just for the Burstein recommendation. That was a gorgeous mike-drop on the whole discussion!!

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  4. Thank *you*, Surly. I actually hadn't seen the column, or seen mention of it, yet. I need to become more active on twitter and/or subscribe to the NYT (and then, probably, add blood pressure medication to my routine).

    On the original subject, I suspect that the 50-minute (or so) lecture is, and probably should be, on the wane as a pedagogical method, but that doesn't mean that shorter lectures/similar methods of oral communication necessary are or should be defunct. There's a lot to be said for breaking up lectures with brief discussion-type activities (think/pair/share et al., or maybe even some of the better stuff one can do with clickers), if only because such activities can be used to help students learn how to get the most from a lecture (e.g. you could have students share/compare their notes from the first 10 minutes of lecture with each other as a think/pair/share type activity).

    By the same token, there's a lot to be said for the "flipping" approach (which almost always includes some sort of "chunked" approach to the taped lecture), *if* you can be sure that students will actually take the time outside of class to watch the lectures and do the associated in-between-video activities (not at all a foregone conclusion, especially with students on the financial edge, which is a lot of students these days), and *if* you can find a way to make genuinely good use of the freed-up class time (I'm not at all sure that everybody working problems or discussing case studies or whatever in a big room built for watching lectures is an ideal setup, even if you've got enough TAs or similar to answer any questions that come up). As Burstein's piece points out, there are a lot of conditions, and conditionals, involved.

    I also found myself wondering about Molly Worthen's educational background, and looked it up; as I suspected, based on her assumption about how a "lecture class" works, she's an Ivy League grad, undergrad and grad (Yale and Yale). Like her, I was once under the impression that lectures always come with discussion sections, conducted by at least a grad TA (in some places, such as Princeton, they were once conducted by either the professor or another professor in the department, though that went by the board decades ago, despite what the Orange Key tour guides will tell you about how precepts work. Apparently they all skip precept to give tours, and so haven't noticed that they are, in fact, being "taught by grad students"). I've since learned that, in plenty of places (not Chapel Hill, I gather, but it comes under the "Public Ivy" designation, I suspect, albeit with a bit of tarnish thanks to recent athletics-related scandals), discussion sections are not an inevitable/required part of the picture, and/or may be replaced by "homework/exam review sessions" or similar, often conducted by undergrads who did well in the class a semester or two ago. So in many places a lecture class really is just lecture, not the 66% lecture/33% seminar arrangement that graduates of wealthier institutions envision when they hear "lecture class." As always, it helps to check that the terms involved mean the same thing to all participants in the conversation; otherwise, considerable unnecessary confusion may result.

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  5. Dear Student,

    I am not lecturing. I am curating and presenting information. You should not only understand but be able to explain the difference.

    You want active learning? Go back to your dorm room and actively draw a diagram of what I described, or write a description of the diagram I drew.

    When you read the textbook or journal articles, challenge what you read with your own ideas and those of other sources. Then challenge those ideas with what you just read.

    Do this all like you want it, like it's the only thing you want to do, even when you don't want to. And do the same for all your classes.

    "Active learning" is not just a system wherein I con you into passively watching the lecture outside of class in lieu of homework, and then I con you into doing homework in class in lieu of sitting through a lecture. The active part of learning begins and ends with you.

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    1. Publish that somewhere, and it'll be cited like crazy, I'm sure.
      (and if you don't, can I steal it? It's glorious!)

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    2. This is great! I have nothing against the flipped classroom, but it did always seem like a con that didn't really change much. I'm all for all the different ways profs teach, isn't that part of learning? To learn how to learn? Some profs are great lecturers/story-tellers and I wouldn't want it any other way. Also, I don't think students want every teacher to teach the same way as every other teacher. I had some students last year say "Thank GOD this is not another one of those power point classes!" Nothing wrong with power point, unless everybody is using it!

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    3. Thank you very much and please, steal it. It is not really mine, but the collective wisdom of everyone here.

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  6. All that said - don't knock active learning either. Mazur is an extremist in this regard (although a thoughtful one) - almost everyone who uses active learning lectures too.

    But the techniques are not just there to make students' happy. Done correctly, it often infuriates them. The point is to stop and force them to apply the ideas they think they just learned, to force them to confront their incorrect intuition. You get them to commit to answer to themselves, then show them they are wrong: the goal is to leave them no wiggle room when confronting their own misunderstanding.

    There are lots of places this could be used in the humanities, I suspect. I use several techniques every day, and found them very useful and rewarding.

    But I still lecture.

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    1. There is nothing wrong with active learning or "Active Learning" at all; a pedagogy is "wrong" only when it is believed to be the only option.

      At my joint, adminiflakes and Ed.D.uflakes will embrace whatever shiny fad comes along, hailing it as the bullet that will finally kill the lecture, the term paper, the this or the that. Their track record on such predictions reaching fruition has been... spotty.

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  7. I don't hate links. I only hate myself around links.

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