I have been a Teaching Assistant for the Food Microbiology Lab Course for the past two years (one year at NC State and one here at VT). I always assumed that the class was “hands-on”, “real world”, and “thought-provoking”, but with what I have learned this year in Contemporary Pedagogy, I realized that I wrong. Lab exercises provide instruction for students to follow and complete the work but don’t ask students to question the process behind it or innovate. The labs all relate to a specific microorganism that is isolated and grown on a nutrient agar plate. Students come back to observe these plates and record the results. Many have become so focused on the plates and worry when they don’t get the bacteria to grow as they need to. They chalk it up to failure immediately and do not consider why “X” organism may have not grown as well as it should have.

Seth Godin’s TedxYouth Talk had a part where he talked about an activity he did with people where he brought in a bunch of blocks and asked people to take four and form whatever word, sequence, acronym, etc. with them. He stated that people hated this activity because there was no one right answer. I love this statement because it means that everyone’s interpretations of what they have are different. In addition, students are “collecting” the information on the microorganism, but are not “connecting” the results to other areas. Relating this back to the class, something I’ve included in my Teaching Philosophy is:

“For students’ laboratory activities, I aim to challenge students to critically analyze their data, make conclusions, and discuss their work. There are times with lab where they do not work out as intended, and these are moments where students are asked about what could be done differently next time. It is valuable for students to realize that experiments fail and that learning from these mistakes is what matters.”

I believe that failure is okay. Innovation occurs in the fields sometimes due to failure. Yes, Food Science and Food Microbiology may be characterized as a “conservative” field due to its reproducibility, according to Edelstein’s article, but these changes through tinkering, transforming, and revising what is already there, is what leads to innovative ways of solving problems. Creativity and innovation can be applied with the help of questioning what is already out there. We can learn alongside and teach our students this intellectual process. Rather than making labs like a recipe that can be followed by every student (with hopes of reproducibility), varying and differing what is done can be beneficial.

School factory is a complicated concept, the sustainable world despises it, capitalism consuming society is dependant on it. A great example can be a large operating mine. The operating company have designed a routine and wants employees to learn the routine, perform it in a safe, productive manner like a robot. They train employees over and over (like quarterly mandatory training) for the same routines to make sure they go through it step by step; because an incident will cause more loss than a profit based on a new way of completing a task. Shortcuts are forbidden, and instructions are the golden rules, especially if you are a worker in the field. It can make sense in terms of ensuring that employees are careful enough in completing the job in the safest way without skipping a step to finishing the job earlier. This emphasis on codes and rulebooks can increase safety, preventing the potential hazards of working with heavy-high energy machinery. However, the employees are turning to robots! They are expected to work like robots! But why they do not replace them with robots which can be easily done for simple tasks such as remotely controlled equipment, automatic data logger and so many other simple examples. One reason is that they can create jobs for the local community and get social acceptance. And those employees are happy earning money by following a simple routine in some cases. The interesting part is when they have the same instructions for engineering tasks as well, and if an engineer as the design wants to change a routine in one task there is a long justification process which makes it almost impossible to have a creative idea. If they need a creative idea they hire consulting companies. All of this is to secure the process as much as possible to have a minimum loss in case of any failure or challenging crisis. In this system, the risk of trying a new beneficial path is more than repeating the traditional time-consuming ways. And they apply technology just in case of urgent need and guaranteed result.

You might think that; it is the rule of the business so what? My point is that to train engineers for such a system, there is no need to change the school factory method. The traditional schooling is exactly what industrialized and developing societies require. They hire you to serve a certain task you want to make a home run out of it which is not required, they switch you with an easier-to-deal-with employee. Large companies and organizations and also governments are supporting this education system as it is in their favor. Therefore, although there are research-based organizations which support novelty for their purposes and are supporting higher education, the majority of the jobs in the society required trained obeying employees graduated from a school factory as explained by Seth Godin.

My point is that an aware knowledgeable teacher, who values the novelty and ingenuity, is one side of the story. The other side is the system, which measures students based on their performance on tests. Teachers cannot ignore the acceptance rate of their students on those national or required tests and just rely on training future entrepreneurs. The assessment system is the one which the large companies require to pick the employees who will obey instead of making a mess by initiating a new method.

My question is that, how much is the role of the teacher in this system? I remember my college years in Iran. The entire curriculum was designed to teach students technics in theory with no room to think out of the box. Even in such a framed education system, the courses which were taught by more knowledgeable instructors who encourage students to get deep in concepts were more interesting to me, I spend more time on having extracurricular study on their topics and I am better at them even now. So, the bright side is that although the system might be rigid, the teachers have the power to create microcracks in it.

I have listened to podcasts and read the articles about inclusive education, while I thinking about what I am going to post on this topic I realized how it is difficult to write about any topic related to racism. I found out a great tendency to avoid writing about this topic. Isn’t it interesting? I am making up my mind about what to write about why the education system needs to be inclusive; and at the same time, I have the fear of not to offending some people and the uncertainty of whether I am exclusive as well!!! Maybe some part of my fear is due to what  Shankar Vendantam explains in “The hidden brain” and I afraid that deep down I have some racial preference. Also, it might be due to the cultural difference between my country of origin and the U.S. as a multi-cultural country. Or maybe I have to study more about the boundaries and depth of inclusiveness to reduce my uncertainty.

Here is what I wanted to write briefly: I believe having a truly inclusive system requires time and consistent effort to be able to gradually change the unconscious biases of people. This cannot be achieved in a single day but a long investment is required to educate fair instructors to teach children how to deal with their unconscious preferences, which can be based on gender, race, abilities or even attractiveness. Meanwhile, the system has to protect individuals against others who take advantage of the privileges for both minorities and majorities. And this is what I do not know how can be actually feasible.

The podcast “Dismantling Racism in Education” had a section at the start where one of the authors Cornelius goes into the constituent parts of the learning system and provides the example of “if only writing counts as work, the kids that are culturally predisposed to speaking…nets less in that system.” He goes on say that your particular culture and/or racial or ethnic background doesn’t allow for success. This reminded me of an experience I had as an English as a second language speaker back in grade school.

I started in the English Speakers for Other Languages program in the 1^st grade and went to the ESOL classes that were scheduled a few times a week. I was stuck in this program until I went to middle school. As a quick learner, I was proficient in English very-quickly, but I felt that I was chained to the program. I excelled at the subjects taught whether it was history, science, math, or even English. I yearned for more to learn and more to do, but was unable to fill that void. This would have been offered by the “Gifted and Talented (GT)” Program at my school, but I was unable to join it. The reason cited for this was that I was still in ESOL and that I could not succeed or do well in it…It took me a long, long time to realize that this had even happened to me.

Shifting gears a little, as a teaching assistant and educator, I loved reading on open-minded, inclusive materials and how to utilize those. I am terrified about trying to incorporate these “difficult conversations” that may arise in my classroom from utilizing such material. Although there are tips provided on establishing guidelines and ground rules, a big fear of mine is that I will say something inappropriate without meaning to, or a heated argument will occur.

Learning and academic performance of students are largely influenced by their ability to concentrate on subjects. The attention level of individuals is based on the neurobiological structure of their brain, which is unique for each individual. For example, students diagnosed with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) cannot stay focused on their tasks; against their will. Their performance on tests is not usually the true representative of their knowledge and learning capacity. They might perform poorly on exams due to several distractions and lack of ability to follow the questions thoroughly. On the other hand, if they are interested in the topic or they can overcome the distractions, their performance will be boosted drastically. The traditional teaching and testing routine in schools are not effective for these students. An interactive teaching and assessment policy, however, can be more helpful to motivate these students and encourage them to improve their capabilities. The explanation of Dan Pink on the ineffectiveness of the reward on creativity and the role of passion in an individual’s performance reminded ADHD daily life. Their work quality differs vastly if they are interested in the topic. According to the National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) data, the number of students diagnosed with ADHD has increased since 1997 (based on different testing criteria). Therefore, more students require a more effective education system annually.

On the other hand,  I was thinking how is the result of the improved education system in Finland as exampled by Ken Robinson.

As a student and as a teaching assistant, the question of “is this on the exam?” was and continues to always be on my mind in a classroom setting. I find myself zoning in on minuscule, insignificant details as a student for fear that small piece of information may appear on an exam or assessment. I am guilty of memorizing concepts, prioritizing easier tasks (a shorter book, a familiar topic), and skimming books at one point– all the reasons concluded in Kohn’s article about the effect of grades. I have been taught the ins and outs of how I can succeed at “being a great student” by performing well on an exam or paper.

I wonder what it would have been like to go through schooling in an environment where grades were replaced be measures of progression and learning itself. I felt like I would have learned more rather than be forced to think in a way to do well on an exam. I see both sides of the argument for grading. Efficiency and ease cannot be beat and would be argued by some as the reason for staying with grading. I see a system where grades can be utilized to an extent but be done with more meaning rather than be a simple “ranking”. Maybe grades that represent an overall period rather than just a single performance time/date like an exam.

My reflection on my current educational career so far and this weeks’ readings have sparked a curiosity on correct usage of grades and alternatives. I am curious about how to incorporate these ideas into a classroom where you are not the main instructor. I love the idea of portfolios and evaluation-free zones but wonder how I would discuss these concepts with a professor in hopes of adding/trying it in their class for which I TA for.

There have been many critiques on the grade-based evaluations among the resources of this week. Alfie Kohn summarizes some negative side effects, and introduces few alternatives– such as replacing letter and number grades with narrative assessments or qualitative summaries of student progress offered in writing or as part of a conversation. Although these scenarios seems like “utopian fantasy” at first glance, I will be explaining a case study which proved to me it is possible to get the most out of students’ potentials without threatening them by grades!

I had a graduate level course last year, with around sixty other graduate fellows from several departments at Virginia Tech including statistics, civil engineering, industrial engineering, physics and computer science. Apparently, this was extremely challenging for the instructor to evaluate the students with these broad background in a fair manner. What he did, was to define quite easy homework assignments to involve everyone in the class and guarantee a big chunk of total grade. The final project, though, was open-end and huge. In groups of five, we were required to have many meetings to brainstorm, design algorithms, code and analyze our results. The professor created groups of people from different majors, and organized many “lighthouse sessions” to answer our questions at high level. More interestingly, he collaborated with a sponsor company which provided free food (!) during a lighthouse session, and also considered monetary gifts for the top three groups. Last but not least, the professor invited Virginia Tech faculties and the experts form the sponsor company during the lighthouse sessions to answer our questions. After a while, what happened was that students were not just working on the project to get a good grade. We were competing to do our bests, as we observed how well the professor did to provide everything for us during the semester. We were all so excited and determined. I remember that the last week we barely slept, and worked extremely hard. Our group was not among the top three, but we all were happy at the end because we truly did our bests during a productive friendly teamwork.

In a nutshell, I highlight the role of teachers in deleting or diluting the grade-based system and replace it with more effective alternatives.

An innovated education system has been always my matter of concern as I believe the current teaching system, including tests and grades, cannot help students to foster their potentials to serve the society as their best; but to categorize them in order to identify the most capable ones in specific tasks. The current education system, metaphorically, is like the old story of having rabbits, fishes and pigeons in the same school and ranking them in jumping, swimming and flying altogether. There is no need to teach rabbits the basics of jumping but how to jump better. They can try swimming but no need to get ranked upon their fun experience and for sure they need help for that.

Moreover, the competitive filtering system creates one-dimensional mindsets, for example, smart engineers whose world are just numbers, equations, and codes. Statistically, in a competitive environment, individuals get less time to explore and try other aspects of life like art for the engineering example. On the other hand, a grading system in which the variety of abilities, personality and background of students is not considered, cannot be  a  proper measure to quantify how much they have learned.  The performance of individuals in responding questions is different apart from their knowledge or fluency in the topics. Thus, testing can be a tool to identify the stronger student conditionally, which adversely causes the students to label themselves under titles of good or bad.  This grading system could be more advantageous in old school times when individuals had to seek the masters in each skill or science, learn their technics and find a job based on their new mastered skills. Maybe, the employers needed a scale to hire the best ones. With extended resumes and portfolios in our modern day, grades are not demonstrators of the capabilities of the people.

The goal of modern education is to help individuals to achieve their best in their own path, to help students to find the fittest role in which they can be creative while handling responsibilities in our complex society. However, ranking them based on the grades might make them disappointed in fostering their strongest side. In addition, as benefits of technology, students have access to a vast amount of documents to read and learn independently, the help of the instructor can be to optimize the learning during a specific period and this process can differ based on the effort of the student.

Finally, as the human generation is adapting promptly with technology, our educating system has to advance with the same pace as well.