Category: Hot Topics – Prior Weeks

Four Things I Learned from Working with Students… but not with Grades

I have an odd job if you can call it that – some days, “lifestyle” seems like a better descriptor.  For my assistantship, I am a live-in employee of Housing and Residence Life at Virginia Tech.  In that role, I supervise RA’s, serve as a conduct officer, and handle daily operations of two all-male residence halls, which, as you might expect, brings a new adventure every week.  The work is hard to predict and takes a great deal of time, but I love it.

My path to this line of work felt reflective of Dan Pink’s TED Talk on motivation.  My undergraduate study was in chemical engineering, where I was driven purely by extrinsic motivation, primarily grades, to painfully grind through a curriculum that did not feel meaningful to me.  However, my “side-project” of serving as a resident advisor (RA) provided me the sense of autonomy, mastery, and purpose mentioned by Dan Pink.  As such, I ended up putting a lot of time and effort into that work, which didn’t feel like work, and decided to pursue work in student affairs, beginning my studies in higher education.

My work directly with students, both the RAs I supervise and residents of the buildings I oversee, has provided insight regarding the struggles students face academically.  Aside from one semester where I served as a TA for a course all RAs must take, my connections to the academic side of campus are few and far between.  However, I often talk to students about their coursework, and make a point to talk about academics with my RAs.  The subject matter of those conversations is often total foreign to me, but they have been productive.  I certainly can’t tutor these students, but we still learn together as I learn about their struggles and challenge them to think about learning differently.  Here are a few things I learned from my conversations:

Intrinsic motivation produces the best work.

With the student population of Virginia Tech, I work with a lot of engineering students and hear a lot of stories that bring me back to my own undergraduate education.  Fortunately, I see a marked difference between myself as an undergrad and many of those students.  Recently, I was having a conversation with one of my RAs about a project he was tasked to complete earlier in his engineering career in an intro class.  All groups in the class were tasked with building a machine that kept a ping-pong ball suspended in the air.  He discussed his group’s process of buying electrical hardware that could integrate with code they had written with the code controlling how high about the fan the ping pong ball would be suspended.  (To be clear, I am not doing this process justice in summarizing it.)  He then said that other groups in the class seem to do the bare minimum with Legos and a fan, probably something I would have done back in the day.

I imagine that both groups met the criteria for an A on that project, though my RA added that his professor specifically thanked his group for leaning into a creative process and going above and beyond.  There might have been a difference in ability between those two groups, but the primary difference was motivation.  My RA wanted to be creative and engineer something, not simply get a grade that could be achieved with a much lower level of effort.  I see the same thing in my RAs within their role in the hall.  Those that perform the highest do it because they are passionate about serving, not for a positive performance evaluation or from fear of being fired.

Our current method of grading does not expose students to open-ended problems.

I once had a professor who many times repeated, “When you cannot measure what you value, you come to value what you can measure.”  While this statement was made in context in assessment for research in higher education, I found in rules true from our assessment in grading.  Learning is not easily measurable; it’s difficult and time-consuming to make judgments about how much a person has learned or developed.  It’s based on qualitative evidence, which can be interpreted differently from person to person.  However, one can measure how many facts a person has retained or how a project or composition adheres to a pre-defined rubric.  It makes grading a lot easier, but then education becomes a series of boxes to be checked rather than true learning.  Perhaps students can be extrinsically motivated to tackle these tasks, but it doesn’t seem to prepare them for open-ended problems.

I never doubt the intelligence of the students I work with.  Since they’ve made it into Virginia Tech, I’m confident in their ability to learn, but I believe our use of “measurable learning” does not equip them to tackle ill-structured problems.  Fortunately, the RA role is full of these sorts of problems.  I often get questions from staff members like “How do I get more guys involved on my hall?” or “Is it okay to be friends with my residence?”  I’ve found that some of my RAs expect to get a list of steps or a quick yes-or-no answer, and I’m occasionally met with frustration when I launch the conversation by admitting I don’t have a clear-cut answer.  While I feel fortunate to facilitate a conversation that helps them generate their own solutions, I can only hope that other students are finding these ill-structured problems elsewhere, so they are prepared to face them beyond their time in college, where rubric won’t define success.

“Exceeds Expectations” doesn’t mean much.

The one time in my work that I use quantitative measures to “grade” students is when it comes time for RA performance evaluations.  The process by which RAs are evaluated includes a self-evaluation, an evaluation from a supervisor, and a discussion comparing those two evaluations to come up with a consensus.  I’ve quickly learned that a key part of this process is to explain the evaluation scale beforehand.  The scale is descriptive and is made up of the following descriptors: exceeds expectations, strong performance, meets expectations, inconsistently meets expectations, and needs improvement.  I’ve found that it is essential to explain that “meets expectations” will likely be the most common grade on any positive evaluation.  If I don’t RAs are inclined to give themselves “exceeds expectations” or at least “strong performance” in every category unless we’ve discussed performance issues in a particular area.

While this tendency made for a few frustrating evaluations early on in my role, the broader implications seem more problematic.  It seems that with the way we assess, an A denotes adequacy.  If there are no problems with an assignment and it matches the rubric criteria, it is deserving of an A.   This leaves little room to formally note excellence and little reason for students to reach for it.  How can we challenge students and get more out of them if the bar is set low?

Grades are not for the learner but for the outsider, and even they shouldn’t be using them.

In my work with students, I find myself reiterating that learning is about far more than a grade.  In my academic work, I try to work to produce quality, independent of a grade.  However, at times as a professional, I find myself overly reliant on those measures that I know to be problematic and imperfect.  The process of hiring RAs is logistically difficult.  In a typical year, a couple hundred applicants compete for what ends up being about one hundred spots.  While the process includes a written application, individual interviews, and group interviews, it all eventually boils down to one number.  Though I try my best to find RAs based on interactions I’ve had with students, recommendations from those who have worked with applicants, and the qualitative measures that accompany the scales, I still must prioritize a list of a hundred names to fill three positions, so numbers end up playing more of a role than I’d like them to.  It’s just not possible for me to read every application or note written by an interviewer.

I think if we are to ever step away from grades in working with students, we need to think more critically about how we compare and evaluate in daily life.  While quantitative measures seem quick and easy, they are not always effective in dealing with complexity, particularly when people are involved.  We cannot capture a person’s abilities in a single number, and a single number cannot provide someone with clear opportunities for improvement.  It takes more time to engage in the complexity that a single measure attempts to evade, but it must be done if we truly wish to invest in student learning.

Process VS Product

When putting the pieces of a puzzle together there is time and effort going into the puzzle’s construction. There’s always the pre-excitement–going through Amazon or the aisle of a department store and looking at the covers of boxes. There are paintings of landscape reminiscent of Bob Ross or of your favorite movie poster. When you get the puzzle that is 1,000 plus pieces, you know there will be rigorous hours put into it, just to get into the end result. There are people who appreciate the tedious hours and work put into the puzzle. Whether they attack the puzzle alone or with a group, there is a learning curve to puzzles. They come up with their own strategies like getting the border first and then assemble the pieces that are more distinct in the original painting. There is more beauty in the process of making the puzzle than actual puzzle itself.

This can be similar to how instructors should look and value assessment. In “Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning” by Marilyn Lombardi, the article addresses how standardized testing can prove to set students up to fail. Even when we look at the SAT and the ACT, the answers are given in a multiple choice format which sets up the notion that only one right answer can be chosen out of 4 or 5 possibilities. In real life problems, there aren’t usually just one solution, but rather there are many of them that could reap different benefits or repercussions.

In the table Lombardi provided on page 6 discusses her viewpoints on Traditional Assessment vs Authentic Assessment. Even the wording on the chart is interesting rhetorically because it implies that traditional assessment is inauthentic, the assessment doesn’t ring true or genuine. In regarding to the previous paragraph, Lombardi compares answers that have a general reliance on forced-choice, written measures (traditional assessment) to answers that promotes integration of various written and performance measures (authentic assessment) which basically states that we won’t be placing students in one confined box.

In terms of my own grading in my English composition class I assess students partly on how well they improve from their original task and their skill set that they come in with. If an essay isn’t “perfect” in my eyes, I’m not going to dock them terribly if I felt like they put time and effort into their papers and saw their drafts got tremendously better over time. I don’t know how this would look exactly in a STEM class, but I’m sure there can be a way to look at performance and improved performance in the classroom. I know that in my high school, my math teacher made us do problems and show our work. Even if we got the answer wrong, she looked at the steps we made. If we were close in our process she wouldn’t completely dock us, but gave us partial credit. I think this viewpoint allowed me to have room for growth in math and not get discouraged if I did get an answer wrong which further emphasizes the point that process and not the product should be valued.

Rethinking the Grade: Risky, but Necessary

One of the most unfortunate feelings I experienced in my undergraduate courses was the feeling of disappointment, and really outright betrayal, when something that I had learned for an exam never actually appeared on that exam. “Well, dammit, why did I waste my time learning it if I wasn’t going to be tested on it?!” I would think to myself. I felt as though the teacher had tricked me into learning something and taking up valuable space in my already crowded head.

Of course, this is the opposite of what learning is all about. Learning should not be valuable only if it is necessary to some immediate goal, but undergraduate Jackson didn’t see it that way, not when he had to cram for three exams in one week (or even one day, at times). The assessment system as the majority of students have experienced it is broken and backwards, emphasizing rote memorization for the purposes of getting a good grade rather than actual learning.

Of course, this isn’t a secret; most educators will readily admit that the way that student learning is assessed is fundamentally flawed, or at the least in serious need of retooling. Yet, changing the grading system that is now fundamental to US education is a monumental task and one that requires great acts of bravery and defiance. That may sound dramatic, but think about it from the point of view of, well, me!

I am going to complete my PhD program soon, and am beginning the process of applying to institutes of higher education, with the goal of teaching as my main focus. In crafting my teaching philosophy, a large part of me wants to passionately espouse how I am going to reinvent learning and integrate all these newfangled active learning techniques while doing away with categorical grading. However, unless I am applying to an institution that does not use standard grades, I will be required to supply a letter grade for each student, and, more than likely, have a three exam a semester normative syllabus, especially if I teach introductory biology.

I want to get a job, more than I want to be a champion of change. I need to provide for my family and heralding a massive upheaval of the current education system is not likely to help. And, when I do hopefully get that job, I will want to get tenure, and not cause waves by teaching my introductory classes differently than the other sections. So, what do we do, as new teachers do we risk derailing our careers, or not even getting a career in the first place, by championing for change? Do we only apply to institutions like Warren Wilson that already “get it,” thereby changing nothing? Or do we wait patiently until we have our valuable tenure and then begin implementing the changes that we desire, that is if we have not already become mired in the standard grading system and too disimpassioned to change?

I only bring these questions up because I think they are important to consider. Of course we can champion change in smaller, bite-sized amounts that hiring committees will see as appropriately progressive, and departments will not balk at. My passion may scream out “To Hell with anyone who stands in my way! We need to change the entire system NOW!” but change, especially on an individual teacher basis, needs to be both strategic and iterative. Instead of giving exams, for instance, have students write review papers on a topic of their choosing (within the greater subject) and have their peers review those papers for quality and accuracy. The student then may make changes based on their peer review or not (though have them defend their decisions in a written statement) before presenting their paper to the class. In this way, you may assess whether concepts are being sufficiently learned while mimicking the real world of scientific discussion. There are no standardized exams in the real world, and you do not get a grade for each paper you write or talk you give. That being said, it may be a good idea to give weekly quizzes to ensure that the basic, necessary factoids are sinking in, but make them pass/fail.

As I apply for positions, I must keep in mind that I can make change, and stand up for what I believe, without doing away with everything standard at once. As future educators, it is our duty and responsibility to improve how we teach, and how students are assessed. There will undoubtedly be pushback from fellow faculty, the administration, students, and even parents, but we must be firm in our convictions and loyal to the success of our students.

Grades “Never Became the Focus of Energy”: Assessment and Black Mountain College

“I doubt there is a student or teacher worth a damn who has not at some moment pondered creating his own university” my friend Leon Lewis writes at the beginning of his essay, “Black Mountain College: A Strange Spot in A Strange Spot” in Appalachian Journal (vol. 1, no. 3, 1973).  I first read this essay when I was in college, recently fascinated with the strange experimental art school that operated between 1933 and 1957 in my backyard in Black Mountain, North Carolina. There are many things that thrill me about Black Mountain College (BMC) including the lengthy list of art-world teachers, faculty, and visitors who graced the community — Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Charles Olson, Buckminster Fuller, Hilda Morley, MC Richards, Jonathan Williams, Ruth Asawa, Albert Einsten (ok, not an artist per se, but still impressive), Salvador Dali (who visited and orchestrated a film viewing), and Joseph and Anni Albers, among many, many more. Yet, like several of the contributors as well as myself wrote in the new Black Mountain College Special Issue of Appalachian Journal, BMC is and was so much more than the big names who lived, wrote, worked, and created there.

As an educator, BMC captivates me because of its almost complete aversion for grades. As BMC faculty member John L. Wallen relayed to historian Martin Duberman in “the Bible of BMC,” Black Mountain: An Exploration in Community,  when asked what kind of education BMC stood for, would reply, “We don’t have grades,” “we don’t have required courses” (275).

Further, Duberman explains that “Classes varied considerably in format, since each teacher was left to his own devices. Some would lecture or direct discussions more than others; some would settle for words, others would show pictures or play music; an occasional seminar would be jointly taught by three or four instructors, and many classes had staff members or their wives sitting in as students” (100).

While grades were not central to the College’s pedagogy, Duberman writes, “Most instructors privately jotted down grades, but only–so went the rationale, anyway–in case a student later needed a ‘record’ for transfer or for graduate school. The grades were never passed on to the students themselves, and never, therefore, became the focus of energy or the standard for evaluating self-worth that they commonly do in most schools” (100).

Back to dear Leon’s idea that many of us involved in education have daydreamed about our own utopia-inducing schools, mine, like BMC, would not be “grade-obsessed.” I am so fascinated with BMC’s lack of emphasis on grades and meanwhile, the College’s production of loads of artists and writers that had extraordinary impacts on art and culture, both in the US and abroad. Whenever the topic of grading inevitably comes up, either in my own classes as a doctoral student, when grading my own students, or when talking with colleagues, I am always envious of BMC’s approach.

This week, while reading more modern scholarship on assessment and education, I heard the rumblings of the BMC spirit within the words of Alfie Kohn.  Suggesting that the basic function of grades is to collect information about student progress and share that information with students, Kohn suggests, perhaps controversially, that: “Collecting information doesn’t require tests, and sharing that information doesn’t require grades.  In fact, students would be a lot better off without either of these relics from a less enlightened age.”

Citing research from others in education and across the humanities, Kohn establishes his argument against grades across three main findings: (1) “Grades tend to diminish students’ interest in whatever they’re learning” (2) “Grades create a preference for the easiest possible task” and (3) “Grades tend to reduce the quality of students’ thinking.” 

Kohn suggests that in order to revise these deleterious effects of grades, educators should aim to “delete” or at least “dilute” grades and their hegemony in the classroom. Writing in favor of more narrative assessment, like in a letter from teacher to student upon completion of a course, Kohn adds that this change in grade format can be gradual, taking place over time, and that in the meantime, the grade-giving process can be made more democratic if students are invited to collaborate on their grade alongside an instructor, weighing in on the decision. Throughout Kohn’s piece, I kept daydreaming about my own ideal school, and feeling excited that the ideas of BMC and other experimental schools are very much still alive and in circulation through discussions of best-practices for educators.

As a graduate student, I am not quite ready to abandon grading, mainly because I’d rather not have that undoubtedly lengthy, difficult discussion with those in power in my department, at the registrar, etc. However, with the legacy of BMC and current scholars like Kohn in mind, I hope to switch to more narrative-based assessment for my students in the coming semesters.

Week 4: “What are you doing with that carrot, Professor?”

First things first, let’s hype everyone up, because I just know you’re reading this with bleary eyes at 3AM, and that’s okay. No judgement here.

“If we start treating people like people, and not assuming that they’re horses… slower, smaller, better-smelling horses… I think we can actually build organizations and work lives that make us better off, but… also make our world just a little bit better.”

-Dan Pink: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

When Dan Pink suggested that humans are not infinitely pliable creatures who can be easily controlled by their environments and the (market) forces surrounding them, I immediately began to reflect back on my brief liaison with psychology, and the Behaviorist school of thought more specifically. I went back to one of its most prominent detractors, Steven Pinker, who criticizes the Behaviorist approach to the human psyche in his book, The Blank Slate. In this model (or at least, his version of it which isn’t entirely accurate), we are primarily driven by external stimuli, the consequences of our actions, the things we have been conditioned (dare I say, programmed) to do, a model with which I happen to agree… to an extent. There is merit to our friend Steven’s critique of Behaviorism, and given my own experiences with genetic traits and their influence on human behavior, I happen to subscribe to the current model, which incorporates elements of Behaviorism (B.F. Skinner–the guy with the rats and the levers–being one of its most notable cheerleaders) and evolutionary psychology (our friend Pinker), among other things (ask the psychologists–they know way more than I do: also, Psychologists, please tell me if I totally butchered the whole Behaviorist thing!).

What does any of this have to do with learning? Well, by the psychological definition, learning is what allows us to adapt to new conditions, like, say a stressful university course that comes with specific expectations. In its most simplistic form, and sadly, in the form we most often see in too many schools, learning occurs when students associate conformity to testing standards, rubrics, syllabi, and rankings with positive reinforcements like gold stars, passing grades, higher class rankings, university admissions, and “better-performing” schools. This form of learning is not exactly the most inspiring or the most motivating, but it gets results–at least, the sort that would interest test-prep companies, school districts, and other adults who like quantifiable results. It does not benefit the students, however, because, according to the deeply depressing and realistic film, Declining by Degrees, many of them are simply going through the motions, seeing school as yet another series of hoops to jump through until they meet their next goal.

This is where Dan Pink’s motivational speech (about motivation… har-har) comes in. These uninspired, unmotivated, disenchanted students leave college and enter the workforce. Up to this point, they’ve spent their lives being treated like “slower, smaller, better-smelling horses” or worse, depending on the school district. Uninspired, unmotivated, disenchanted students make for disengaged workers who are less likely to come up with innovative ideas, be more productive, or even like their jobs. Worse still, those who aren’t fortunate enough to travel that path can end up in prison, which results in even more lost productivity and innovation since entire cohorts of young minds are wasted behind bars. I completely agree with Dan Pink: we need to endow our workers and students with a greater sense of purpose, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. He’s already mentioned the profit-driven model of large corporations and the problems that can cause with employee disengagement, but I think we should investigate the motivations of school districts and everyone else who is responsible for our current educational system which, if we look back, has mostly been corporations (remember that passing comment Dr. Nelson made about the role of the Ford Motor Company in the creation of school assessment? Yup. That B-minus was kinda sorta their fault).

 

Congratulations on surviving the first sixteen years of school! Now let’s see if we can make it better for those coming after us!

Don’t Judge a book by its cover, but still!!

I have to admit that before reading the article “The Case Against Grades” I was extremely biased. As soon as I read the title, I directly knew what to do next:
read the article, bash the article every chance i get, criticize the article in my blog. However, i quickly realized that the author Alfie Kohn is making very good points, and looking back on my own education, i have been the victim of many downsides of grading which include:

>Diminishing students’ interest in whatever they’re learning.
>Creating a preference for the easiest possible task
>Reducing the quality of students’ thinking
>Increasing the levels of cheating
>…

However, as much as i do agree with these points, I still think grading is necessary, at least in advanced levels of education. I definitely see how letting go of grades for children can enhance the learning experience, i mean giving a 7 year old an F isn’t really helping anyone. However, i would definitely feel more comfortable knowing that my surgeon can identify every single organ in my body, or that the pilot knows what the big red button does. Don’t take the previous examples too literally, but try to see the underlying point. If no grading exists how can we differentiate between people who are qualified and people who are not. The article suggest personalized feedback, or meaningful assessment, but once other people have access to these assessment this becomes another way of grading, basically all we end up doing is manipulating semantics.

So yes, i agree grading has an ugly face. However, before launching a crusade against grades to save students, we have to find an alternative that fixes the drawbacks of grading without destroying its benefits. Namely I m talking about the millions of people who choose a career based on making money without having any real interest in the contribution towards the domain. How fair is it to put a person passionate about his major at the same exact level of a person who can basically now manipulate the system since all forms of quantification have been removed?

Are grades hindering learning?

dwight studying

Part of learning how to educate involves learning about teaching and course styles that we have never encountered before. I prefer to make decisions based on facts, yet I have a quick, knee-jerk reaction to the idea of getting rid of grades. I feel profoundly uncomfortable – both as a student and as an instructor- with the idea that more students excel where they are not graded.

A premise behind getting rid of grades is that students will always choose the easiest tasks and take the fewest risks when in a graded environment. When freed from the confines of the traditional course structure, students will actively engage in the learning process. Students can and will learn without the threat or treat of a grade.

 

We can discuss how course structure impacts students, but a large component of student engagement comes from the students themselves. 

My struggle to accept the premise stems from my own experiences. As an undergraduate, I went to a college which emphasized not discussing grades with other students to avoid a competitive, grade-focused environment. It almost seemed like we didn’t have grades, because we were given our grades without any context. But for me, being freed of the competition of grades did not make me embrace creativity in all of my classes. Instead, I did minimum effort in courses that I thought were boring, and I poured more-than required effort into courses that interested me.

paid attention in classAs a graduate student, my habits became more refined. When I started taking courses that I knew would be useful my career, I made serious efforts at studying terms, taking thorough notes, and connecting information within and between courses. Content I did not believe would be relevant to me or I perceived as busy work received the minimal effort, and work that seemed relevant to my learning and my future career received more time and focus. When possible, I would choose paper and project topics that interested me or allowed me to pull in ideas from other courses. However, I simultaneously found myself motivated to earn good grades.

The two objectives did not exclude each other, though they were not always the same. When doing work just for grades, I did the minimum amount possible to earn the grade required. This could be taken as a comment about how grades distract from learning. But the issue was not grades, but that I did not desire to put any effort into work I considered a waste or my time or irrelevant to me. I would have felt the same even without grades. I would argue that the issue is instead that the required course work was not well-crafted to encourage learning or that the class was of no use to me, and I should have skipped it (the two concepts are not mutually exclusive/overlapping).

 

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“The typical structure of lectures and exams may simply prolong the time during which a learner continues to think like a student rather than an apprentice practitioner.” Lombardi 2008

The above quote stuck with me as I read Lombardi’s paper. I whole-heartedly agree with the intent: in undergraduate education, we should be focused on creating and fostering apprentices not throwing information at and evaluating students. We should be developing the skills and knowledge base required for students to be successful in their future careers. Some of this development requires the hard work of being a student; even master practitioners should be always learning new techniques to gather and analyze data, getting feedback their work, and learning from other people. The second portion of this development is on the educators- we need to treat students’ undergraduate experience as preparation for their future and help students recognize it as such.

Course work itself can burden students with work that does not help students learn.
As a graduate student, where I have had a lot of freedom to choose courses, the conflict between me wanted to earn good grades and learn led me to take busy work-heavy courses pass/fail or audited. With professors’ permission, I sat in on classes that seemed relevant instead of taking them for any credit. Courses do not need get rid of grades in order for students to be engaged with the course work, though they must not be so focused on evaluating students through grading that they don’t give students the ability to learn.

As instructors, we should be thinking about our objectives and student time. Can we test in a way that fosters thinking and not just regurgitation? If we need some memorization, can we evaluate students’ learning in ways that don’t require hours of simply retyping definitions?

With a Mind for Learnin’: Some Thoughts on Mindfulness in Higher Education

“You know, darlin, you’ve got a mind for learnin’,” my grandmother said to me countless times while washing dishes, peeling potatoes, or making cakes. My grandmother has always encouraged and emphasized my interest in what she refers to as “book learnin'” and has continually encouraged me to follow my dream of becoming a college professor — not the strange, quirky, “sage on the stage” type, but the type of educator that truly changed my life, offering me encouragement and a love of lifelong learning that I never knew I would discover. My grandmother, as well as my parents, sister, and amazing significant other, have been so encouraging of my hope to become like a Professor Lane, a Dr. Schmitz, a Dr. Rodrick, and a Dr. Goldey — to become like the educators that had such a powerful influence on my own life.

Yet, since beginning my doctorate, I have become afraid that just having a “mind for learnin'” may not be enough to be an excellent educator. This fear, sadly, comes at least in part from my realization that being good at research, producing brilliant theories and a plethora of articles, is in no way indicative of being a high-quality teacher. As a GTA (graduate teaching assistant) for a course that is struggling to say the least, I have often felt downtrodden that my own interest in continual, perpetual learning, may not be enough to make me a good educator.

Luckily, thanks to Virginia Tech’s Contemporary Pedagogy course, I recently discovered the concept of “mindful learning” a principle that will undoubtedly influence my pedagogy and can hopefully help me design curricula to encourage and interest students, infusing a love of learning in my students that extend beyond my own (admittedly wide-ranging) interests.

In The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen J. Langer suggests that there are “seven pervasive myths, or mindsets, that undermine the process of learning” including:

“1. The basics must be learned so well that they become second nature
2. Paying attention means staying focused on one things at a time
3. Delaying gratification is important
4. Rote memorization is necessary in education
5. Forgetting is a problem
6. Intelligence is knowing ‘what’s out there’ and
7. There are right and wrong answers” (2).

Langer argues that “these myths undermine true learning. They stifle our creativity, silence our questions, and diminish our self-esteem” (2). Yet Langer also suggests that uprooting all of these myths in a massive overhaul of the educational system would be meaningless and useless, “unless students are given the opportunity to learn more mindfully” (3). Langer defines “mindful learning” in a specific way, offering three characteristics of any mindful approach including: “the continuous creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective” (4).

Langer argues in The Power of Mindful Learning, that “One of the most cherished myths in education or any kind of training is that in order to learn a skill one must practice it to the point of doing it without thinking. Whether I ask colleagues concerned with higher education, parents of young children, or students themselves, everyone seems to agree on this approach to waht are called the basics. Whether it is learning how to play basketball, drive, or teach, the advice is the same: practice the basics until they become second nature. I think this is the wrong way to start” (10).

Langer’s argument not only prompts a paradigm shift for how we conceive of education, but her ideas also uproot contemporary understandings of pedagogy (or at least my own understanding of pedagogy up until reading Langer’s work) as she writes, “One of the ‘basic skills’ of teachers, and all lecturers, is the ability to take a large quantity of information and present it into bite-sized pieces to students. For those of us who teach, reducing and organizing information becomes second nature. How often do we, so practiced in how to prepare information for a lecture, continue to present a prepared lesson without noticing that the class is no longer paying attention? Presenting all the prepared content too often overtakes the goal of teaching” (12). Again, as a GTA, I often feel stuck with the assignments and information that I must present according to my supervising instructor. Personally, I am only fond of brief lectures that provide background for class discussion and collaborative projects, yet the dismal reality is that as GTAs, we are often not allowed to develop our own pedagogies in the classroom for which we are “teaching assistants,” but I am grateful for Langer’s ideas to help me think about how I will teach my own classes in the future.

Langer offers a rather straight-forward method for approaching mindful learning, writing that “The simple process of mindful learning, of actively drawing distinctions and noticing new things–seeing the familiar in the novel and the novel in the familiar–is a way to ensure that our minds are active, that we are involved, and that we are situated in the present. The result is that we are then able to avert the danger not yet arisen and take advantage of opportunities that may present themselves. Teaching mindfully not only sets students up for these advantages, but has advantages for teachers as well” (222). Even in my current limited teaching experiences, by widening collaboration and class discussions to include not only my own lecture slides, but also student opinions, I have already seen student abilities as a wonderful thing, as a way for me to see new things in the material that I teach. Langer’s ideas about mindful learning only encourage me to incorporate this practice into my future teaching.

I don’t mean to begin this post about my sweet grandmother to make others feel strange or odd. I just include it to suggest that I don’t think of graduate education and become an educator as a college / university as a means to “get above my raisin'” but rather to follow my own innate passion for learning and hopefully help students discover their own interest in learning. And I think mindful learning is an excellent way to go about it!

Being Mindful about Mindlessness and Mindfulness

When first approaching the term “mindlessness” from a perspective of learning, it seems inherently unproductive.  In her work, Ellen Langer defines mindfulness as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context,” which sounds entirely superior to acting mindlessly, “like automatons who have been programmed to act according to the sense our behavior made it the past.”  However, to accept that at face value would be mindlessly learning about mindfulness.  The context of mindlessness is also important when we live in a world where repetition and single exposure (the elements that Langer notes bring about mindlessness) are inherent.  While it is often important to be mindful, there are also times when it’s more productive to ignore the contextual nature of knowledge for the sake of efficiency.

A routine, which is necessary to some degree for effective functioning, is rooted in mindlessness.  By not considering context and new perspectives in brushing my teeth, driving to the store, or walking to class, I save time and mental energy for more meaningful pursuits.  Similarly, with so much information readily available to us, it would be stressful (if not impossible) to critically consider the context of every post, tweet, article, and video I view.  Additionally, there is some knowledge that seems unchanging enough to assume a level of objectivity, for example multiplication tables or how to read the English alphabet.  Furthermore, as young people approach learning, they may not be at a level of cognitive development where they will be able to approach knowledge as subjective and contextual.  Hence, mindless learning might be a necessity when someone is young or new to a subject.  (For example, you might need to learn that 1+1=2 before you deeply consider the nature of number systems.)  While it sounds like a bad thing, mindlessness can also be viewed as maintaining a sense of objectivity.  Nothing may truly be objective, but by assuming it is, we have a basis for complex thought.

Still, it is important for everyone to develop the capacity for mindful learning.  To listen to “authorities and experts” mindlessly can be dangerous, particularly since information is so easy to spread via technology regardless of its validity.  Additionally, sending students into the world without preparing them to deal with subjectivity, context, and ambiguity is doing them a disservice.  Life poses complex problems, and a single mindless view cannot be used to tackle them.  Regardless if a student is studying education, engineering, or fine arts, they will need the ability to acknowledge the contextual nature of knowledge to solve real problems.

When I considered how we might help students learn mindfully, I quickly recalled the cognitive domain of Bloom’s taxonomy.  Bloom’s taxonomy is a series of increasingly complex objectives which is well demonstrated below in the infographic from the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching.

While the low levels of the system can be achieved by mindless learning, the steps of analysis, evaluation, and creation require students to acknowledge ambiguities stemming from the context of knowledge; there is no one answer.  We can tap into these levels of Bloom’s taxonomy just by being intentional in what we ask of students.  If we ask them to memorize, describe, or solve, they may be able to do so mindlessly, but if we ask them to differentiate, argue, or design, they are more likely to mindfully engage with the material.  This holds true regardless of discipline.

The solution of tapping into higher levels of Bloom’s taxonomy is simple in theory, but poses problems in practice.  First, we must be intentional in asking students to work at a level that matches their cognitive ability; if they are unable to understand a concept, they certainly can’t evaluate it.  However, even if students are able, it’s more difficult to motivate students to create and evaluate than to remember and understand; it requires more support, and it’s harder to assess.  It’s a scholarly essay versus a scantron. 

The scantron only asks students to remember concepts and promotes an objective worldview since there is literally one right answer.  However, with little effort on the part of the educator, it provides an objective grade that a student can hardly argue.  The essay will take more time on the part of the student, likely require more support from the educator, and necessitate a more difficult grading process, which can be disputed.  It’s undeniably a lot more work, but it certainly engages students in context and ambiguity.  Mindful learning is undoubtedly harder, but true learning is worth the effort.  While there may be ways to make it easier, willingness and time investment to do the work that is mindful learning are an obvious first step.

Mindful Teaching

Today we hear a lot about a term called mindful learning, but what about mindful teaching? If “the role of the teacher is to facilitate learning,” as Sir Ken Robinson says, then wouldn’t that involve a mindful approach to teaching? If teaching is such a creative profession, why aren’t more teachers getting creative in the classroom?

Being a mother is a lot like being a teacher, just on a much larger scale. Therefore, when I look at my teaching style, I believe it resembles my mothering style pretty similarly. Watching my daughter grow and learn I absolutely agree that children are natural learners. We as parents and teachers are there to mentor, stimulate, provoke, and engage their passions, but this process involves so much more time and energy than the stereotypical lecture-based course in typical college courses.

I loved the segment of Sir Ken Robinson’s TED Talk when he says, “The arts are not just important because they improve math scores, but they also speak to parts of a children’s being that are otherwise untouched.” This statement particularly resonated with me because I have always been an artist from a very young age. When I was in kindergarten and beginning of first grade I was sent to a private school with very strict rules. Not only did I get in trouble on a regular basis for being too fidgety and disruptive in class, but my parents were forced to remove me from the school after they refused to put me on ADHD medications. I specifically remember my first grade teacher ripping an assignment out of my hands when I refused to circle items and instead drew stars and hearts.

When I transferred to public school, I was placed in a first grade classroom with a teacher who was miles ahead of her time. Mrs. Montgomery had a class rabbit and in the spring we hatched and raised baby chicks and ducks in the classroom. Thinking back on it, I don’t know how she was able to get a bunch of first graders to focus on anything else, but she did!  I also had the opportunity to audition and was accepted to an after school gifted art program. It was through this program that I was able to find an outlet that engaged my inner creative side.

Given our current educational culture of standardization, it’s really no wonder that so many students are treated for ADHD or difficulty focusing in class. When teachers don’t teach to the individual, all individuality and creativity gets lost in the shuffle of standardized tests and lectures and then we sit here wondering why student aren’t learning.

So, now that I have gone on and on about becoming a more creative teacher and how it stems from me being a mother, what have I done in order to be a more mindful teacher? I had my college students color. And they loved it. :-)

 

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