Category: Week 3 – Anti-Teaching/Mindful Learning

I think that Michael Wesch hits the nail on the head in his article Anti-Teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance when he states in the first two sentences that,

The most significant problem with education today is the problem of significance itself. Students – our most important critics – are struggling to find meaning and significance in their education.

A dominant problem in our educational system is that we lose the student by silencing their voice. We do not make the education relevant to their lives, and therefore they do not engage.

It is my opinion, though, that as we discuss solutions to this, we go too far. We, as people, have a tendency to rebel against one extreme by running to the other. When it’s cold outside, my mother cranks the heat in the car until I’m sweating. When all pop music sounded the same, we ended up with such levels of individuality that some music became hardly musical.

I think this can happen in education too. Today, Christine Ortiz, the Dean of the Graduate School at MIT announced that she is taking a leave to start a new university with “no majors, no lectures, and no classrooms.”

Too often we ignore the input of the student crying “This isn’t relevant to me!” But we need not run so far that we ignore wisdom of the faculty member saying “I know it’s a stretch for you, but this is really important for you to learn.” How do we provide a meaningful and significant experience for the student without losing the direction of their education?

The nice thing about the car heater is that it usually ends up at a comfortable temperature after a little bit of sweating. And thanks to those that have continually pushed the boundaries of music, we’ve ended up with so many original masterpieces.

We need people like Dr. Ortiz to help us push the pendulum in a new direction. I can’t wait to see where we end up.

Why is education significant to you?
What do you think of Dr. Ortiz’s new university?
Where do you think education is headed?

It was always challenging for me to find an appropriate method to teach some courses for undergraduate level. I saw several methods of teaching during my bachelor because I passed several courses with different instructors those had their own method of teaching. Some instructors used the blackboard or whiteboard and they preferred to ask the students to write the notes during their lecture. I remember 10 years ago when I entered to the university, most of the instructors have used blackboard and whiteboard but they wanted to change their mind to use video projector for presenting their lecture by PowerPoints. So, I experienced both sides of teaching methods (using blackboard and PowerPoints). However I believe that we may need to recruit another method to optimize our time.

I personally tried to implement different method of teaching when I had the opportunity to teach some undergraduate and graduate courses in the past years. For example, I was a co-instructor for Bio-instrumentation course. I utilized several learning assessment tools. I asked the students to form their groups, then design and perform an applied project regarding biomedical engineering. They needed to collect the data from the patients in the hospitals and clinics. I taught them some topics related to instrumentation and asked them to apply this knowledge during their data collection.  In the end, they submitted their results as conference papers. I wanted to get feedback from other experts practically, therefore I encouraged them to submit and present their projects in an International Biomedical Engineering conference. The reviewers rated the papers and the average score was about 4.2 out of 5. This grade meant that the papers were between very good and excellent domain. Two papers got the best paper awards from that conference.

I also asked the students to fill out the evaluation form beyond official one from the university. They stated that this way could improve their understanding regarding Bio-instrumentation because they used the knowledge practically.

Subsequently, using the novel method for teaching related to the course’s topics may has an effect on the consequences of teaching significantly. I do not claim that my method may work for any courses but I concluded that if the instructors try to utilize innovative ways for teaching, the students will appreciate it and learn the topics more effective. What do you think? Did you have any specific experience regrading new methods of teaching?

I think the readings and videos this week made some interesting and well-founded critiques and analysis of the state of education and teaching. Conceptualizing education around the learning experience as opposed to the information learned offers a powerful tool to re-imagining what it means to be well-educated. I would contend that what you know – or even how much you know – has little to do with whether or not someone is well educated. But if I’m going to talk about what it means to be educated, perhaps I should say something about the goals and purpose of an education.

 
The purpose of an education is often connected to larger views about society, self-hood, ethics, and so on. It seems to me the current dominating attitude is that education is an investment in future workers so that they may be more productive later on – that is, schools are primarily economic tools to further corporate profits. I believe schools should primarily be seen as tools for serving and improving democratic society. With this view of schools, it is relatively easy to see that the purpose of an education should be to instill people with critical thinking skills, a social conscience and sense of justice, the capacity to understand individual consciousness, and to generally produce cheerful people with amiable ties and attitudes towards the rest of their community. But I have to question how realistic it is that you can teach people to be this way. Can you?

Ultimately, a good education mostly prepares one for more education. It seems then that to be well educated is simply to have the desire to continue learning. But how can teachers help to ensure this outcome – that their students become enthusiastic, self-directed, intellectual explorers capable of challenging themselves and others with interesting questions? In addition, how to you convince students that they should have an interest in thinking this way? How do you inspire the intrinsic motivation to learn for the sake of expanding one’s intellect?

Unfortunately, I don’t think you can teach these things. This is tangentially related to a theme that ties together many of Herman Hesse’s – one of my favorite authors – novels: that there is a certain knowledge and wisdom that can only be gained through experience. I think the democratic and humanitarian values we should really want to teach our children are the very things we cannot directly instill in them.

The videos and readings this week made good arguments for how teachers can better foster a learning environment that facilitates the self-learning of students. However, I did not see much about how teachers can lead by example through their own learning. For instance, I am teaching an engineering lab course, but I try to inspire students to become more independent learners with my behaviors outside the classroom. I am always reading (typically fiction) when I walk through campus and have donated a small library to the MSE undergraduate lounge. This being my first time teaching, I have many opportunities to share what I am learning with my students from the experience. If we want to educate people well we first have to inspire their confidence and curiosity to learn – the best way to do that is through our own example.

Immediately following last Wednesday’s class I heard something that changed the way that I look at not only this course, but also the way that I perceive learning. To start, I got into the habit of listening to podcasts because I had a job a couple of years ago that required me to travel over an hour for work. To kill the time–and prevent myself from dying in a fiery, though peacefully somnolent, accident–I figured that podcasts would be a good way to keep me focused and entertained on my way to and from work. I’ve since kept up this habit, and am now a shameless addict. I can hardly spend time alone, or do chores, or run errands without my earbuds in. Wednesday evening, on my way home, I listened to a podcast produced by Cracked.com, a comedy website that I find entertaining occasionally.

In it the podcasters were talking about the generation gap is a myth, how we have this perception that each successive generation is essentially getting dumber, and things will never be as good as they were in the “good ‘ol days.” One of the most intriguing explanations for debunking this myth was the Flynn Effect, which according to every lazy researcher’s friend, Wikipedia, is “the substantial and long-sustained increase in both fluid and crystallized intelligence test scores measured in many parts of the world from roughly 1930 to the present day.” Essentially, James Flynn, a political scientist, studied the scores for IQ tests across generations, dating back to the 1930s. What he found was that not only are we progressively getting smarter with each generation–students 10 years younger than the previous generation are on average 3-5 IQ points smarter. If tested to today’s standards, students in the 1930s would be classified as mentally retarded. But before all you Beliebers start handing out dunce caps to your grandparents for not understanding your music or Youtube or who think that a “tweet” is just the sound a bird makes, know that it’s a little more complicated than that.

Flynn figured out that each generation’s intelligence grows, so does the environment around those individuals. Intelligence and environment are relative to each other, and as the environment of an individual grows more and more complex, that individual must learn how to adapt to his or her environment in order to thrive. Think about it: since 1930, not only has literacy risen exponentially, but thanks to the web, we have a seemingly infinite amount of information at our fingertips. We multi-task, and speak in jargon. Our outreach grows more and more expansive everyday. We’ve had to grow more intelligent because our environment is consistently growing more and more complex, and vice versa. We are all bricoleurs, as Claude Levi-Strauss says, craftsmen using the tools available to us to thrive in an ever more complex world. Flynn calls this “equipment.” To throw someone from the 1930s into today’s world would, aside from making a trite movie premise, be like asking a blind man to describe color. By conventional standards, he would be ill-equipped to accomplish such a task.

Speaking of color… To better illustrate the complexity of our world compared to that of the past, let’s look at the work of Homer. In 1858, scholar and future Prime Minister of Great Britain William Gladstone, noticed that Homer had a few turns of phrase which seemed a bit peculiar to modern audiences. One famous example is when describing the ocean, Homer calls it “wine-dark sea.” I’ve only been to the beach a handful of times, and not once did the water look like red wine–and you can rest assured that if it did, I would have stayed comfy and cozy in my air-conditioned hotel, thank you very much. This isn’t the only instance of this kind of strange color description “Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armor, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to color are strange. Iron and sheep are violet; honey is green.” Gladstone’s explanation was that colors, as we know them, didn’t exist back in the time of ancient Greece. Blue, as we conceptualize it, didn’t exist. In fact, further academics found that the same is true for all cultures. Of all the colors to be studied, blue is consistently last on the list. The reason for this is that blue, aside from the sky and the sea, maybe a bird here and there (and blue eyes), doesn’t naturally occur often in nature. There was no reason to differentiate blue things from other non-blue things because there were so few of them. If you wanted to something was blue, you could compare it to the sky in spring or the sea on a clear day. The world was not complex enough to need differentiation between blue and non-blue.

Now all of this brings us back to our discussion for class. Taking what Ken Robinson said about learning, about fostering a love of learning, “a curiosity,” we should keep in mind that using the tactics that worked to teach students for past generations, are not always the appropriate tools to teach students today. We have evolved beyond the “traditional” modes of teaching, beyond chalkboards and handwriting. We now live in a multi-modal, ever-changing, ever-consuming, complex society, that is constantly evolving and expanding. Students today use the tools available to them to learn, and those tools are very different than they were 10, 20, 50 years ago and have more untapped potential than ever before. If we are to usher education and pedagogy in the 21 Century and beyond, we need to do so by staying ahead of the game, by learning new trends, new technology, to constantly continue to grow, change, and evolve, alongside our students. Progress only moves in one direction and we have to keep the engine running, otherwise we are all lost in our own “wine-dark sea.”

To check out more on the Flynn Effect here is James Flynn presenting a TED Talk.

To read a rather fascinating article about the color blue in culture, check this out.

And to check out the podcast that sparked this whole post, click on this link. Disclaimer: there is some adult language, as it is a comedy podcast. However, if it is your thing, I recommend checking out more of their episodes.

From primary school to middle school, high school and finally to college, getting good grades during tests have been the only goal of my life. I was raised in an environment that grades speak for every child, and I felt lucky that I was so good at this. My talent on taking tests has taken me all the way from a small town to a middle city, and to the biggest city in China: Shanghai.

The more specific the goal is and the stronger the desire is, the easier one can get lost once the goal is achieved. After the most stressful National College Entrance Exam, I got a good score and went to one of the top five universities in China. Suddenly all the pressure was gone and life is much more about tests and grades. I started to skip classes, attending activity associations such as dancing club, debating team, basketball team etc., any thing but paying attention to what was taught in class. But several questions kept haunting my mind:

What do I really like? Why am I studying this major? What is my life about?

Am I being stupid and unrealistic? No. I never had a chance to ask myself these questions. But they are so important for a student to love his or her life, love learning and live happily. And I am not the only one who did not start to think about the question of significance until entering college or later. More than one of my friends realized that their true  interest lies somewhere else in the second or third year of their Ph.D.. Why? Because their life direction has been led by grades, rankings and other people’s opinions, nothing related to their true inner desire.

We’ve been taught for so many years. It’s time to really start to learn.

On the other hand, from the point view of a future teacher, we need to learn to avoid the same thing to happen to the future students. Anti-teaching and mindful learning can be a guideline on this. “Learning is the hallmark of humanity”, and the purpose of teaching is only to invoke the students’ desire to learn. We no longer need to indoctrinate the students with all the knowledge, but some of the basics and the way to learn through connected learning. And basics are not basics either. “Facts, derived from science of not, are not context-free”. “The routine stayed fixed, while the context changed.” We need to insure that the teaching environment can facilitate mindful learning. i.e., encourage the students to think while they learn. Let them enjoy learning.

I really enjoyed reading articles about mindful learning by Ellen J. Langer. The results of experiments in the article (pay attention vs. notice new things, and tasks vs. play) were very interesting but not surprising. I have already experienced this behavior in some classes.  Here is an example. I was teaching assistant for an undergraduate course. The first semester, the instructor told students that we will have 4 exams before the final exam. That semester, some students were always complaining about the number of exams in my office hours! Next semester, the instructor changed the syllabus and told students we do not have any in-class exams. Instead, we will have only four quizzes.  In the second semester, students never complained about the number of quizzes, although the workloads and quizzes were similar to the previous semester’s exams!

I think mathematical modeling of a problem is one of the most difficult skills to teach in my field. Here is a very simple example: we have four employees and four different jobs. Employees have different skills. How to assign the employees to the jobs in order to have maximum efficiency? This is a simple problem that students learn to model it (See the following picture for a more complicated mathematical model).

source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925527315002194

One difficulty of the mathematical modeling is that the problems do not have one unique model and each person can model a problem differently. In addition, the number and type of problems are not limited. There are complicated problems that scientists still cannot model it mathematically. Therefore, we cannot teach a specific technique to the students and tell them that use this technique in order to model all types of problems (there is only a general guideline). Students should learn to be creative facing with different problems. Teaching the modeling skill to new students in the field is a very difficult and challenging job. I have seen many students struggling to learn mathematical modeling and complaining about instructors. I also have seen a student used the YouTube to learn mathematical modeling and said that this is more helpful than the class and I should not go to the class anymore!

Teaching the modeling skill is not possible without engaging students and encouraging them to learn mindfully. In my opinion, this is why some instructors are more successful in teaching this skill even through the YouTube. I definitely will think and read more about encouraging mindful learning and ways to improve it in the classes. Thanks to Dr. Langer for the amazing articles.

The Meisner Technique is an approach towards acting that focuses on external impulse. It requires an actor to be fully aware of their environment and their surroundings so that every external condition has the potential to influence the characters in the scene. The Meisner Technique embodies the “why” behind things. Why does a character move? Why does a character speak? Why does a character think the way they think? It’s important to understand that the why is based in external circumstances instead of internal circumstances (which is a different “method” all-together).

Mindful learning is an educational approach that utilizes many of the same principals as the Meisner Technique. According to Ellen Langer, “Mindfullness is a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.” Similarly, Meisner is quoted as saying, “Act before you think – your instincts are more honest than your thoughts.” The connection here is actors can become trapped in the realm of thinking rather than responding to emotional instinct or impulse. In order to recognize those impulses, the actor must be wholly present, aware of the moment, and highly focused. Langer’s definition of Mindful Learning states the same principles.

Digging into the “why” as an actor or as a student is essentially the same process. The internal questions result in a disconnect from the source material both in an educational context and a theatrical context. “What are my character’s motivations” is essentially the same question as “what material will be on the test.” Instead the questions should be more focused on contextual evidence that include acute awareness of the self within the environment. The “why” suddenly becomes about impulse and instinct rather than a baseline outcome.

I’ve long believed that teaching is a form of performance art. Good teachers instinctually know how to engage their audience through a variety of theatrical techniques that all have definitions within the cannon of acting training. Through Mindful Learning, the role of a teacher is to impart this type of training onto students. Connecting mindfulness to acting technique is potentially a way to bridge the gap between mindful learning and disconnected learning. Now I’m not suggesting that every student and faculty member ever needs to undergo rigorous acting training. I spent my time studying the Meisner Technique when I was at acting conservatory and I fully recognize that acting training may not be for everyone. Creating an awareness of the connections that exist between Mindful Learning and Acting Technique could offer insight on how to engage students and redirect their purpose of asking “why.”

Mike Wesch’s piece on Anti-teaching is a very interesting reading. I have to say that I was intrigued by the reference to contemporary techniques in teaching as “anti-teaching” and then traditional teaching as “teaching”.  He suggests that traditional teaching is a “hindrance to learning”.  I definitely see where this feel could come from.  Especially in the last decade, a lot has changed and such an emphasis on testing has made teaching about conveying facts and teaching to the test.  I completely agree that this is (ineffective) teaching as it takes away ALL interesting subject matter and only focuses on what is necessary to “know for the test”.  However, there is some value to didactic learning which I think is falling into this category of (ineffective) “teaching”.  Some students do actually respond to lectures and ppts though I agree not everyone.  Each student learns a little bit differently.  The nice think about the more contemporary approach (or anti-teaching) is that it gets students to think.  There is still a place for facts and figures but getting our future generations to think and problem solve is where contemporary pedagagy will be have such an advantage.

From a young age, I was taught skills in an absolute sense just as described in the readings. From middle school to high school to college, I learned to study solely for the test. I sat in large lecture halls, listened to lectures, and worked through standardized homework in a step by step fashion. I was taught how to do things in a “this is the way they are done” fashion. I was taught to not color outside of the lines and stick within the frame of the picture. However, what I needed most is to color outside the lines. What expanded my learning the most was stepping out of the classroom to help with community development and other application projects. However, I still find myself preparing content for a lecture from the start of class to the very last five minutes. Giving little time for discussion throughout the period since so much material needs to be covered over a fifty minute time span. Langer made the point that prepared class material can work against the goals of teaching. I agree with that statement too much structure may compromise the learning environment not allowing students to explore on their own curiosity. Learning skills in a conditional manner as opposed to an absolute manner can help spark questions and encourage further learning.
As I continued to read about anti-teaching and how managing the learning environment of the classroom may be more important than the content, I was also thinking about cases where this may be difficult. The description of the mass lecture hall (250 seats nailed to the floor aligned in rows, a small podium with a microphone, and massive screen) reminded of my chemistry class. This got me thinking of how it could be possible to incorporate this idea of Teaching as a Subversive Activity in a class that is more content/memorization driven such as anatomy or chemistry? Any thoughts?

Image: http://www.atesldocuments.com/cf/mindfulLearning