Month: September 2017

Group Work and Assessment

Let’s assume that you are working on a group project in a class. You are ambitious about this project, but, two other team members are not that interested in the group project as you are: one member is always late in the group meeting or does not show up. Another member comes to the meeting, but does not want to work. The portions he wrote have errors all the time. In addition, he keeps criticizing and rejecting your works or ideas during the meeting without showing his works or other alternatives. You are tired of arguing with him. The due date is coming, but your group work has not proceeded. What would be your solution to this situation?

  1. Work everything alone, and just put the group name on that
  2. Stop being ambitious, give up your grade, and leave the situation as it is
  3. Talk to the professor that your team members are not working

I made the situation above based on the stories of some college students’ comments. A college student says that group work is communism. This method takes away his motivation, thus, he couldn’t learn anything from his group works; another student complains that group work is an outcome of professors’ laziness because group work is easier to grade than grading the whole students, also professors don’t need to prepare their lectures during the group presentations. College students express many kinds of negative opinions about group works on the web, but I realized that there was always one reason behind their complaints: they don’t want to share their “A” with a member who doesn’t work. We cannot blame this idea because it is true that getting “A” without any contribution to the group would be unfair.         

Reading the article, Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning written by Lombardi (2008), I found a wonderful table called “Peer Group Assessment Template.” The idea here is that students evaluate each other after their group works, which can be reflected in the final grade. If this table was utilized in the classes, the college students’ experiences about group works might have been different. But at the same time, I was questioning what if there was no grading or just pass/fail system related to those group works? If so, the fundamental reason of avoiding group work will disappear because students will not have “A” anymore that they should share with a lazy group member. I am not sure if the quality of the group work outcome will be better or worse without grading system, but I guess that the atmosphere of the group would be much more humane because they will see each other as friends rather than a manpower for achieving a better grade.   

Week 5: Assessment

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Our topic for this week is “Assessment.”

I plan to have us watch one of the Dan Pink videos posted on the Schedule this evening, but if stuff happens and we don’t get there, you will definitely want to familiarize yourself with Pink’s perspective before proceeding further. (Choose between the 11 minute animated version and the 18′ 30″ TED Talk). Then read “The Case Against Grades” (Alfie Kohn) and “Imagination First” (Liu and Noppe-Brandon). If you get to Lombardi’s piece on “The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning,” and /or Peter Elbow’s “Ranking, Evaluating and Liking,” that would be great.

You may post about whatever issue (or set of issues) raised in these materials resonates with you the most.  Assessment is a complicated topic and we have complicated (and sometimes contradictory) ideas about how it works and how it should work (in general and in our particular field.)  This should be an interesting session, and I am eager to read what you have to say.

For those interested in annotating via Hypothes.is, there’s a good public thread available for the Kohn reading and I’ve started one for Lombardi’s text here (for the GEDIVT) group.

Image: By State Library of Queensland, Australia [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

Don’t Go for the Presliced Experience

“A mindful approach to any activity has three characteristics: the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective. Mindlessness, in contrast, is characterized by an entrapment in old categories; by automatic behavior that precludes attending to new signals; and by action that operates from a single perspective. Being mindless, colloquially speaking, is like being on automatic pilot.”

Ellen Langer, “The Power of Mindful Learning”

Promoting mindfulness in learning is a concept that I think is extremely important in providing students with real tools that they can use instead of just checking the boxes of a curriculum. After reading the first chapter in the book, “The Power of Mindful Learning,” by Ellen Langer, I was really struck by how prevalent rote learning really is and how ineffective it can be. I also really enjoyed the many musical examples that she used.

It was very interesting/alarming to see how creativity is stifled when people are taught using traditional techniques. Throughout my educational experience, the majority of the classes I have taken relied primarily on the ideas of memorization and repetitive practice to master concepts. I think that this culture of teaching and learning is especially prevalent in the field of mechanical engineering, which I find ironic because one of the main duties of an engineer will be to solve problems in creative ways. It is essential that engineers can adapt the skills that they learn to novel situations that often do not have well defined constraints. Adopting a mindful approach would be a much better method for educating engineers, and really all students.

I also connected with the idea of “Sideways Learning” and how the methods we use to partition skills actually prevents true mastery of the information.

“Mindfulness creates a rich awareness of discriminatory detail. Theories that suggest that we learn best when we break a task down into discrete parts do not really make possible the sort of learning that is accomplished through mindful awareness of distinctions. Getting our experience presliced undermines the opportunity to reach mindful awareness. Sideways learning, however, involves attending to multiple ways of carving up the same domain.”

Ellen Langer, “The Power of Mindful Learning”

It is so important to real understanding that we are not just taking our “presliced” knowledge. To truly understand, you must look at the whole and dissect it for yourself; discovering the different parts and having the freedom to explore it from all points of reference. Learning in a mindful environment promotes this type of thinking.

I also really appreciated the discussion that Langer included about pianists and the idea that a truly amazing performance requires not only mastery of the technical parts of the music, but also the ability to convey the emotion and the performers individual adaptation of the music to create a unique performance. I thought this was a great demonstration of how important mindfulness can be.

“If a pianist is preoccupied with the voluntary, manipulable end of the spectrum of neurological possibilities, this preoccupation resounds in the music. The performance sounds calculated, not shaped from a spontaneous response. Hence critics often comment on virtuosos who, for all their technical brilliance, are unfeeling, or mechanical, or characterless, and so on.”

Ellen Langer, “The Power of Mindful Learning”

Teachers must change their material to be more mindful, but they can also incorporate the lesson of the pianist into their pedagogy by not just being a master of the material but also learning how to convey it in a mindful way.

The best part is that Langer found that students actually liked the experience of mindful learning more than traditional memorization techniques. This makes sense to me. Students want to succeed and they also want to be able to express their creative and unique ideas.

Mindlessly reading materials about mindful learning! SAD!

Browsing through social media on Sunday evening, instead of reading for this class, informed me that I had missed the Hokie Half Marathon. It is OK, a half marathon isn’t my kind of a race anyway. If I were to run, it would look something like this:

Click Image to go to the source

I was mindlessly reading the Langer article until I reached the part where the author wrote that the importance of learning delayed gratification is overstated and it is a myth. So instant gratification works well for learning? I guess we need to provide instant gratification to students, but not ourselves, cause the last time I checked, instant gratification leads to procrastination, and that is a daily battle for me.

There is a really interesting TED talk on allowing the “instant gratification monkey” to take control leads to procrastination:

I get the reasoning behind mindful learning, but how could we apply it to learning outside class? How could we use mindful learning to teach an undergrad how to measure chlorine in water on a HACH? This process has set steps that need to be followed in the same order and a typical day can involve repeating those steps dozens of times. This is just one instance of precise vital repetitive tasks that are common in my field. Our group recognizes the risk of becoming mindless, which is why we are reminded to be mentally present even after “mastering” the techniques. This is definitely a point where delayed gratification works. Reminding oneself of the big picture to justify the value of tedious repetitive tasks is vital to be successful in research. I believe these repetitive tasks are the backbone to the good stuff in research – performing experiments, which is where the real learning happens.

So, how should a master procrastinator like me resist self-instant gratification, while providing the same to students in a classroom setting? I hope this is discussed at some point in class.

Word of the week: mindfulness

Mindful learning. It’s such a powerful concept. As one of the last blog posts going up this week, I had the pleasure of reading the reflections of so many of my classmates before I composed this post. I have to say that was probably the best thing for me as I have been struggling with what mindful learning should/could look like for an educator in the design field. I enjoyed reading my classmate’s stories because I realized that we all have a shared experience of classrooms/learning environments that are not actually designed for student learning. Each story I read was different, some students shared stories of triumph over the obstacles that stood between them and accomplishment; others were sadder: reflections on surviving in an educational system that wasn’t designed to educate but to test.

In the end, I realized it’s not what you teach, but how you teach. Dissecting “how you teach” for me became another series of questions I’m asking myself: what will my lessons be like if I’m going to encourage mindful learning? How do I create a culture and environment in the classroom that can facilitate the learning outcomes I want for my students? What small changes can I begin to incorporate so that I can systematically overhaul my teaching style to reflect the kind of educator I want to be for my students? What can I do to make sure that every student leaves my class feeling like they gained something beneficial?

For any readers that are new to this concept, here is the link to the TED talk given by Sir Ken Robinson “How to Escape Education’s Death Valley.” It’s a 19 minutes well-spent.

So here’s the honest truth: there’s a learner in each of us. It’s human nature to be able to grow as learners. To suggest that some people are just incapable or don’t want to–well, to me, that’s just preposterous. To give up on a difficult student is a failure of the educator and the system that the student is in. Sir Robinson is right: “Teaching properly conceived is not a delivery system.”

Coming up, I could tell the difference from day 1 in the classroom whether or not the class was going to be fun, exciting, and something to look forward to or if it was going to be difficult in the sense that I was going to have to force myself to survive it until the term was over.  Even today, I can generally tell on the first day of class what my experience is probably going to be like over the upcoming semester. And despite there being all of these awesome resources out there-seminars, TED talks, workshops, and the like–we still seem to have a large population of our educators who either don’t know or just don’t get it. I’m a class right now that I find super-fascinating and I’m excited to be learning the topic–but the lectures—well, they’re fast, full of jargon, and truth be told, after the hour and a half is up, I find myself thinking “what in the hell just happened?” Because I don’t remember a bit of what he just said. Thankfully, I’ve learned to develop an independent reading list from the sources that get cited on the PowerPoint or else I would be completely lost. I’m determined to make it through the course, but it’s proving to be a rough ride. So then I think about it in the context of this course, and I wonder: why isn’t it fun for me? What can I do as the student to make this more fun? I don’t have an answer to those questions yet.

But learning IS fun and exciting (I wouldn’t have chosen to spend my life learning new things if it wasn’t!) And learning IS an adventure (Thank you Dr. Nelson!) So why, if these ideas about changing the way we approach teaching and learning are we still running into educators (and administrators) who don’t appreciate that there is a difference and there is room for they themselves to grow?

Again, I don’t have an answer to this question, but I’m working on a philosophy. In the meantime, I am working hard to change how I choose to think, act, and react in the classroom (and out of it). Bringing mindfulness to every aspect of my life has been a real challenge–I’m having to step outside of myself and learn to view the world with a new perspective. I’m fighting falling into the trap of automatic behavior, thinking, and responses. Just because we were trained in our formative years to be good little students doesn’t mean that we were actually being trained to be good learners and thinkers.

For me, the real challenge is learning how to see the difference and then changing my approach so that I can be a facilitator instead of a road-block in my own classroom and learning environments. I’m grateful for this experience in Contemporary Pedagogy–every week, there are new seeds planted and I am eager to support this personal growth.

I’m late writing my blog this week because we had a family emergency over the weekend. I have a 9-month old who has been very ill the last few weeks. Friday night was pretty difficult. She spiked a fever, so we returned to the doctor Saturday morning and we ended up spending the night in the Pediatric wing at Carilion in Radford for her to undergo some testing and receive IV fluids. Lucky for all of us, she had a positive response to the new medication they placed her on and we were able to return home Sunday to continue her care. After a sleepless weekend I am finally starting to catch up with my academic life (as I put everything on the back burner for a couple of days), but I’m still feeling pretty scatter-brained from the mental and physical exhaustion. The lessons on mindfulness were extremely helpful in coping with the ups and downs of the last few days. Interesting how that works.

Learn from the experience

After the activity we did in the last class, everyone or every group stressed on how experience is a great way to learn. We can all agree that learning is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural, and physical contexts. Nonetheless, learning is more likely to occur in authentic contexts where knowledge is gained and applied in everyday situations. As an example, if a child reads every book in the world about how to play soccer, but he/she won’t fully learn how to play until he/she goes and plays soccer at a soccer field with other people who know the game.

By saying so, we must think of how to incorporate learning from experiences and show the student how the may use the content learned in the real world. Teachers and instructors can do that by creating real-world situations or examples, so students can apply the skills they learned. Developing a scenario, case studies, or role plays will increase student interest and involvement. Also, students will have the chance to practice and make choices and receive feedback on them, which will increase the application of the skills they learned in the class.

Automaton or Autonomous?

Those days. Those good old days in elementary school. Sometime during the late 1990s when the rat race was well and truly alive. The objective of learning to me, just like everyone else in class, was to get better grades. My grades did improve over time. I had become the perfect little automaton (not the type that could think for itself). Solving arithmetic problems and spouting out solutions just like I was taught. Never really thinking for myself. Hephaestus would have been proud.

The years passed. I tried to mug up regression equations and likelihood functions but to no avail. Being a machine would not help me anymore I would have to unlearn years of education. I was expected  to function autonomously from now on. To think and learn for myself. I was expected to be able to extend the regression analyses beyond the silly assumptions of normality and homoscedasticity. I realized that years of stagnancy had not dulled the human ability to learn and adapt. I got better at it over time. However to some this was another system, another system that they would try to game. For grades.

aa.JPG

Source: http://eli.thegreenplace.net/2014/derivation-of-the-normal-equation-for-linear-regression

P.S. Tune in to the next episode when we talk about grades, to find out who succeeded.

Dragon Ball Z, Time, and How: HOW MANY SUPERSAIYANS DOES ITTAKETOCHANGEALICHTBULBp FINDOUT NEXT TIME. ON DRAGON BALL Z! MEMEFUL.coM

 


Sorry but I can’t memorize

I have always been very bad at memorizing things, especially equations. However, most of the classes during my undergraduate degree required me to memorize numbers and lots of equations. I still remember the day, when I went home feeling completely devastated after doing terribly bad in my Hydraulics exam. I wasn’t sad because I didn’t know how to solve the problems, in fact I knew the solution to each and every problem very well. However, I couldn’t remember any of the equations associated with solving those problems and hence, I couldn’t write the final answer in numbers. I knew I wasn’t going to get good grades although I wrote the step by step procedure to solve the problems because the examiners only cared about the final answer. Finally, the results came and I got a very poor score which was expected.

This is probably the story for many people like me who have a hard time memorizing equations and thus have failed to get good grades in exams. Our education systems are built in such a way where students are graded and ranked based on their ability to “memorize” things. An example of this is the multiple-choice exams where the students are solely graded based on the number of correct answer choices in the Scranton sheets. This in no way appreciates any of the efforts that the students put on trying to solve the problem. Even if you did everything correctly but messed up while pressing some numbers on the calculator in the final step, you will probably be put in the same category as someone who had absolutely no clue about how to solve the problem.

https://heartoftheclassroom.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/mind-full-or-mindful.png

I think there are issues with both the examining and the grading system which in many ways forces students to “rote learn” and the distinction between a good and a mediocre student is made based on their grades. There has to be definitely a better methodology for teaching and grading where mindful learning is encouraged and the efforts of the students in solving the problem is appreciated.

 

Weekly pessimism – Anti-Teaching

I always seem like a depressed pessimist when writing these blogs… ? At any rate, as usual, these readings and videos seem wonderful in theory, but they just gloss over the problems. Perhaps the issue is that those who go into pedagogy enjoy their work too much… To be fair, most people who stick through a PhD and build a career, enjoy their work. But for those in pedagogy, their work is guided learning, teaching itself, and they can’t seem to grasp the idea that some student’s don’t want to be a part of it.

This does not apply at the graduate level, because presumably all of us actually enjoy what we do and wouldn’t be here otherwise. But most of our readings seem to cover all schooling at all ages. And I am certain I have encountered more than a few undergrads who simply didn’t want to be there. And of all the students, these are the ones most resistant to “fun” and active learning. They are also the ones most in need of being reached.

Thomas and Brown suggest that learning is inexorably tied with play and fun, and when combined properly, people are happy to learn. Which I would agree with, though their example of middle-school kids learning about Harry Potter lore is borderline absurd. First and foremost, the Harry Potter books are fun, for most students, spatial statistics and antebellum US history are not. You can certainly improve upon dry boring lectures, but you’ll never make it exciting unless you have the talent of someone like VT’s John Boyer or Youtube’s Dan Carlin.

Second of all, aren’t we ignoring the fact that high school age and younger kids have a psychological need to rebel against authority? (Again, this is not applicable to graduate students.) I’d wager that if you took a class of 8th graders, and required them to read Harry Potter, and assigned homework on the subject, and tested them, and then said that their futures depend on their ability to recall mundane details, they would hate it as much as they hate earth science or algebra. To those students, the teacher is the authority they are supposed to rebel against.

I hate to sound so negative, but the fact is that there isn’t enough flexibility for undergrads to exclusively take interesting courses. Sometimes they have to take required courses they despise. I certainly don’t blame them for that, but it doesn’t change the fact that some of them really don’t want to be sitting in your class.

The single most difficult moment in my short teaching experience was for a summer program introducing STEM fields to 8th graders. All of them were bright, and some of them wanted to be there, but a few very clearly didn’t. Who knows if their parents forced them to be there, or if they misjudged how interested they were in the program… Either way it seemed like torture for them. We tried to make our session as active as possible, running a real-time epidemic simulation and infect an imaginary population with some horrific pandemic influenza virus to see how many survived. Most of the students were happier playing the game than listening to our PowerPoint intro, but the more we tried to engage the disinterested ones, the less interested they were. I honestly think they’d have preferred to sleep through a lecture than be bothered by us. As soon as they structure of the rigid lecture (we teach, you listen) disappeared, they were free to completely disconnect. They certainly didn’t like the lecture either, but the game certainly didn’t help. Honestly it completely prevented me from reaching the other students. I felt like I was hurting these poor kids (because I remember being in their shoes in 8th grade myself). In fact, the only time they paid any attention was at the end when they got to control the learning entirely (asking questions about famous epidemics).

TL;DR: All of the methods we’ve read about so far are wonderful for interested students, but they make the fatal assumption that all the students want to be a part of this experience. If I get one thing out of this class, I hope I learn how to deal with these ones who don’t.

________________________

Unrelated side-note: One of the readings talks about the transition from black and white to color TV. Ever wonder what it looked like?

The “basics” have saved my life, more than once.

The “basics” are a critical foundation to learning any new subject.  They’ve saved my life on more than one occasion.

For four years of my life, I professionally taught people how to fly airplanes.

L-29 Delfin
The L-29 Delfin was the Soviet jet-trainer of choice during the early Cold War period.

It’s something I’m surprisingly good at.  The regional FAA examiner used to refer to me as “Ace”*, not because of my flying skills, but rather, because of the quality students I sent to him for evaluation.  During those four years, not a single one of my students failed: a nearly unheard of statistic.

* [Simply “Brandon” would have been more to my liking, but it’s not something you get to choose in that line of work.]

While immensely proud of the hard work my students put in to achive that pass-rate, it’s not what I’m most proud of during that period of my life. The high point of me is that two students (and myself) are still alive today because my instructors took the time and care that was needed to ensure I had the best understanding and practice of the “basics” when I was learning how to fly. I’m proud of them — my mentors. I’m a difficult student. It took a lot to put up with me.

Without that I most assuredly would not be around today to write this post.

Some background: Pilots, as a matter of their basic flight worthiness, train for emergencies. One such emergency that is often practiced is the event of an in-flight engine failure. The public is most likely familiar with this idea from the wet landing of US Airways Flight 1549:

(C) NY Daily News / Maria Bailey
(C) NY Daily News / Maria Bailey

One of the most deadly times an in-flight engine failure can occur is immediately after take off when no suitable locations for ditching the airplane (like the middle of the Hudson River) exist directly ahead of the plane.  In this scenario,  the pilot has only one option: attempt a u-turn back towards the airport.

This is such a difficult maneuver that it has earned the nickname “the impossible turn” in piloting circles.  Statistics show that somewhere between 80% and 90% of aircraft that are forced into this maneuver of last resort crash — typically with fatal results for everyone aboard.

Here is a video of a successful attempt:

While acting as a flight instructor, this happened to me twice.

I should stress though that this is an extremely rare event. It occurs in a statistical sense to general aviation type aircraft (“small planes”) once every 50,000 hours of flight.  In both cases the engine failure was a result of easily avoidable, poor maintenance practices — but that’s a story for another time.

On to the basics…. To execute this turn, the pilot must possess a  solid foundational knowledge of the aerodynamics involved and an even better “feel” for the aircraft — after all, this is a kinesthetic exercise. It’s a high standard to begin with, but as an added complication, the pilot must be able to recall these things in a split second and act on them under the stress of an incipient fatal crash.

Not only does the positioning, speed, and orientation of the aircraft in its takeoff configuration give a window of only a few seconds to react successfully to an engine failure at this point, but the execution of the maneuver must be near-perfect. For this to work, the pilot has to push the aircraft to the very edge of its operational envelope and hold it there. Any deviation will  result in one of two things happening:

  • The plane will stall and crash, or
  • The plane will run out of altitude (energy) before making it back to the airport (and crash)

For me, I only was able to perform at this this level thanks to practicing the fundamental skill set that makes up pilotage… the boring stuff… the “rote” movements of flying an airplane… the basics… over and over and over again. And doing so while in the presence of an experienced instructor that cared enough to provide an honest critique of my performance (over and over and over again).  It was frustrating and (at the time) it didn’t seem to have much of a purpose, but looking back on it, I’m grateful my instructors had the wisdom to hold me to a higher standard than most do. I would imagine my two students are grateful as well.

Some activities in life require training to a standard of “right and wrong”. Getting too creative, too early can be dangerous.  That’s not to say we can’t develop or grow past this point with experience, wisdom, and creativity, but as instructors, it’s our duty to know where and when this is advisable for a student.

 

 

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