Author: glupton

The Convergence of Best Practices and the Best You

I remember my first year as a teacher.  I knew the content of the courses I was assigned, I was good at building relationships with most of my students, and I always tried to make my lessons applicable (I wanted my lessons to naturally answer the question, “Why do we need to know this?” so that I didn’t have to mid-lesson).  Although there are only a few specific interactions and classroom activities I can vividly recall, I absolutely remember that I didn’t really know what I was supposed to be accomplishing or how to know whether or not I was doing a good job.  That was the hardest part of my first year teaching.*

I think my experience is similar to what a lot of first-year teachers experience.  This feeling that you really should know what you’re doing (we’ve been in school for at least 16 years, shouldn’t we have this figured out by now) set against the realization that you really don’t know if what you’re doing is right.  I felt this tension in Sarah Deel’s essay, Finding My Teaching Voice.

Deel describes the process she went through to become the best teacher she could be.  She did things she remembered her teachers doing that she liked.  She tried to be funny.  She tried to be cool.  She tried to be interesting.  I could relate because I tried to be a lot of things that I admired in others that I simply was not.  I tried to be impressively smart.  I’m not.  I tried to be a stern classroom dictator to maintain control of my classroom.  That didn’t work.  I tried to use instructional strategies I saw other teachers using who were considered model teachers.  That worked sometimes, but not always.  Honestly, it took me a while to figure out which way was up and what I needed to do to get there, but I think Sarah Deel and I found the same answer.

The most important thing I did was to learn how to be me in front of my students.  I’m much better at working with an individual or small groups of students.  I started doing more of that.  I am really good at planning lessons and activities that make the content applicable in a real-world setting.  I did more of that too.  I’m good at asking questions.  I had my students do more work that gave them control over elements of the deliverable so that they could incorporate things they’re interested in and I could ask them about.  That worked really well (high school students like talking about themselves, go figure).  Being me and playing to my strengths really worked, but it was only a start.  There was more room for growth (and still is honestly).

The next step was learning about teaching strategies that really work with students.  I needed to become better at whole group lecture and discussion.  I researched that skill and learned how to do that really well while retaining my personality.  There are so many good sources of information on this (one of my favorites is actually Visible Learning).  Professor Fowler’s Authentic Teaching Self and Communication Skills is a great resource for learning a lot of this in a really condensed way (seriously, where was this 15 years ago!).  Be yourself.  Teach in small chunks of time.  Don’t lecture for more than 15 minutes (10 is better).  Engage students in lecture with discussion.  Draw on student interests and past discussions.  Move around the room.  These are just a few of the “little things” that totally change your classroom.

Lastly, I’ll also say that now (15 years in) I see teaching as a journey that both changes me and allows me to change it.  Every day is a little different and offers opportunities to help me improve my craft and learn about myself.  I don’t see a way that I’ll ever become static in this line of work.  It wouldn’t work.  So my hope is to continue to grow as a person, learn more about the process of teaching and learning, and put it all together to be the best teacher I can be.

*For full disclosure, I started teaching without the benefit of having any coursework in education.  I had an accounting degree and had worked briefly as a software developer and even more briefly as an internal auditor at a credit union.  I was hired on a provisional license offered by the state that allows schools to hire teachers who have not filled all the education requirements in hard-to-staff disciplines for a three-year period.  I completed a Masters degree in Career and Technical Education in my first two years to become fully licensed.

Incentives and Inhibitors

In his book Drive, Daniel “Dan” Pink argues that money is an incentive that encourages low-skill work, but that money actually has the opposite effect when used as an incentive for creative tasks.  Pink uses this argument to point out how businesses are using the wrong approach to encourage creativity and innovation.  The natural inclination is to assume this research should inform the design of schools.

I’m not entirely convinced, just from the research noted by Pink, that it should be.  The major reason why I would propose caution in doing so is that children are different than adults.  Brain development impacts how we respond to incentives and risks.  It’s reasonable to at least consider that the way we see adults respond to incentives is not the same way children do.  I’m not arguing that children don’t respond in the same way, I don’t know, but we need to at least consider that possibility before arriving at a conclusion.

A change that I do think needs to be put in place in schools is in how students are evaluated.  The system we have used is pretty simple to understand.  The students who do the best producing what the teachers want get the best scores.  Those students who have a more difficult time producing what is asked of them get lower scores.  It’s a system that allows students to be easily ranked, sorted, and categorized.  It’s an efficient and effective system for pushing students towards different outcomes based on their perceived aptitudes.  It makes grades and test scores the golden ticket on the yellow brick road to higher education and a happy life (I don’t believe this, I’m simply arguing it as the perception).

The problem with this system is that it no longer prepares students to participate in our current society, much less the society that they will be expected to participate in when they reach adulthood.  We need to change the way we approach education.  The thing stopping us is the fact that change is difficult.  Changing things that have been a certain way for a long time are even harder to change.  Changing the way we assess and evaluate is going to impact students, teachers, parents, employers, institutions of higher education, car insurance, and any other countless number of groups and institutions.

The changes that need to happen are significant.  To make this happen well there needs to be a series of purposeful incremental change as opposed to a single seismic change.  Shifting from giving traditional grades on every assignment students submit to giving significantly fewer grades and more detailed feedback is one step we can take.  We can also scaffold activities up, meaning that the focus of a course, unit, or lesson can be changed from memorization to meaningful application of knowledge.  As we venture down this path we can eventually move away from grades towards an evaluation approach that is more descriptive.

The nature of the world we live in means that we need to know things, we need to be able to research things on our own, and we need to be able to take what we learn and use it to change the world around us.  Those are the traits I believe students need to have before they leave school.  There are lots of reasons why this will be difficult, or won’t work, for many students.  I know I have a lot of questions about this change myself!  I also know that if we don’t start making the change we won’t be preparing students appropriately.  If we can’t do that as educators then its hard to argue for the value of education and, more specifically, the need for compulsory education.

Flipping the Script on Teaching and Learning

One of the most tried and true ways to generate support for change is to identify a crisis that threatens the very foundation of a society.  If the crisis isn’t averted or somehow mitigated the results will be catastrophic.  At least that’s the message that needs to be believed for the change proposal to receive widespread support.  In 2001, education changed as a result of federal legislation titled, “No Child Left Behind (NCLB).”  The messages of NCLB were that education is failing our students, teachers aren’t teaching the content they should be, too many students are dropping out of school, and students who did graduate weren’t prepared for the demands of college or the workplace.

Of course, this wasn’t the first time the US was facing a “crisis” in K12 education.  Some argue that NCLB was as much a response to a dubious report published almost twenty years previously as it was to anything in the current educational landscape.  That report was titled, “A Nation At Risk.”   The report warned of the potential end of American economic prosperity and the possibility of the end of American democracy if student achievement didn’t improve.  Nothing short of our way of life was at stake.

We’ll never know what would have happened if NCLB had never been passed, or if “A Nation at Risk” had never been published.  Maybe we would have lost the Cold War?  Maybe we would no longer be an economic world power?  Both of those things seem highly unlikely, especially in hindsight, but maybe.  My opinion is that we were trying to address a problem that didn’t exist, at least not in the size and scope NCLB felt it did.  Education was doing a good, not great, job at educating students.  There was room for improvement, especially in low-socioeconomic schools and communities, but the answer should never have been to create a highly-standardized model that treats students as parts of a machine as opposed to the unique human beings that they are.  As with most things in life, the answer was to find a balance between what all students need to know and be able to do and with encouraging students to pursue their individual strengths and talents in meaningful ways.

The standardization approach to K12 education has done some good things to help raise the floor but has also resulted in fewer students reaching anywhere near their ceiling.  When you set a minimum expectation that tends to become the only expectation that students pay attention to.  So how do we go from standardization to engaging students as individuals?  That’s a tricky question.  The nature of individualization (born of the constructivist paradigm in education) is that students choose at least some direction for their educational pursuits.  This is more than selecting electives.  It can be selecting content and/or selecting projects that demonstrate learning.

One approach that can allow for this is using a “flipped classroom” model.  In this model, students are expected to prepare for class by reviewing some basic material before class.  Class time is then devoted to working with the content in a deeper way.  This changes the role of the teacher from being responsible for providing content to being responsible for helping students process that content in a meaningful way.  This allows for more flexibility for students to work with the content in a way that is meaningful for them and changes the educational goals from rote memorization to the application of content.  In theory, this should improve student motivation.

I think this change in educational goal setting is really important, however, it is not without problems.  The biggest issue I see is the change in expectations for students.  In a flipped classroom students must take responsibility for learning outside of the classroom.  Some students simply aren’t willing to do this while other students are so involved in other things outside of school that doing homework simply isn’t an option.  Homework has and continues to be a source of contention for many reasons, including important ones such as access and equity, so it is a consideration that needs to be thoughtfully considered.  Another issue that arises from this model is when student motivation isn’t improved.  In this model, an unmotivated student gets zero benefits whereas a classroom working towards proficiency with rote memorization at least offers some form of low-depth learning.  It’s not ideal, and not particularly good, but in the absence of anything else it’s something.

I think the reason we adopted the standardization approach was that the public didn’t trust that what teachers were doing was really beneficial to their kids or to society.  There was a sense that students weren’t doing anything of value in school.  Maybe they weren’t.  If not, that’s a problem that needs to be addressed with the teacher, school administrator, or school board.  However, and this is what I believe to be the case in most schools, maybe what students were doing in schools was valuable all along and students were learning without realizing they were learning.  That is, after all, the best way to learn.

In reality, we were probably somewhere along the spectrum as opposed to being at either of the poles.  Unfortunately for those in positions of authority, the need for slight adjustments doesn’t produce the kind of crisis they need to push their agendas.  Hopefully, we can get to a place where education can be viewed through the perspective of growing individual human beings to reach their fullest potential as opposed to a political issue used to solicit donations and votes.

Being a Part of This Thing Called Education

Let’s start with a philosophical question.  What is the point?  I think that question can be asked of just about anything we are expected to do.  Go to school.  Get a job.  Get married.  Don’t get married.  Have kids.  Get a pet.  Learn an instrument.  Have a drink.  Start a blog!  Well, why?  Why do any of it?

All right, now that all the nihilists have sat back down let me just say that I am not a nihilist.  I believe the overwhelming majority of things in life matter to a certain degree, but some things have a more pertinent point than other things.  You would most likely drive yourself mad very quickly if you tried to treat every detail of your life with the same degree of extreme importance.  I certainly would.  Where I am beginning this blog post is with the question, “How important is formal education?”

I started thinking through this question this week after a few short readings on the subject (here, here, and an excerpt from here).  As a career K12 educator, I certainly had some thoughts on the subject, as well as some Pavlovian defensive reactions.  You see, it’s pretty fashionable, not to mention politically expedient, to blame education for most of the ills in our society.  If that ire were directed at those setting the “education agenda” (mostly politicians) then OK.  In fact, I agree that there is some change needed in top-down direction for public schools.  Unfortunately, the people who get most of the blame are the educators working with students and running schools.

Now let me pause here and say two things.  First, not all teachers are great at what they do.  Everyone has had a bad teacher and they leave a sour taste for a long time.  No one (especially other teachers) wants bad teachers in schools.  That being said, please don’t let one bad teacher spoil your experiences with the other great teachers who cared for you and helped you learn.  That’s like getting a bad waiter and swearing off going out to eat for the rest of your life.  It’s nonsense.  Second, I get why it happens.  It’s easier to pick on someone who either won’t or can’t fight back in the same way they are being attacked.  In schools, we call that being a bully.  It also gets you in trouble.  I suppose that is one of the disconnects schools have with “the real world.”

So let me take that opportunity to segway back into the idea of educational goals.  That’s where I was going originally.  If I were to condense those previously mentioned readings into one sentence, it would be this:  There is a significant gap between what schools are teaching and what students need to be successful adults in our society.  Right now, schools are focused on cramming information into students in an effort to get them to repeat that information back by correctly answering multiple choice questions (at least that’s the perception).  Instead, schools should be focusing on teaching students how to be good thinkers, to solve problems, and to guide them in finding their individual path to personal fulfillment.  I propose that we can think of these two constructs for educational goals as points on a spectrum.  We don’t have to choose one or the other, because there is a fairly massive area in between with plenty of available real estate.

So let’s say that right now our education system is indeed currently too close to the “information acquisition” side of the spectrum (the more skeptical might call this “memorize and monetize”Smilie: ;) and we need to shift more towards the “motivate to innovate” side (which a different set of skeptics might call “rainbows and unicorns”Smilie: ;).  How do we get from where we are to where we’d like to be?  Since this is a real problem there are many thoughts on how to do this.  Here are a couple ideas worth considering and my thoughts on each.

Let’s consider how a school environment would change if we moved from “information acquisition” to “motivate and innovate.”  The first change I think we’d all notice is significantly fewer lectures and PowerPoints.  Notice I didn’t say we’d eliminate lectures and PowerPoints.  There is absolutely still a need for experts to act as experts to the benefit of students who are working on learning.  Don’t agree with that?  Here’s what an expert has to say on the matter.  Teachers have value.  If we attempt to replace teachers with systems and AI we are really doing a disservice to students (sorry Sal, but sites like yours should support the work of teachers, including being used a curriculum, but should not attempt to displace teachers).

So we still need teachers, but we need teachers who are able to help students see the value in what they are learning.  Some see this as making learning fun.  I think sometimes we see stories or videos of kids making their own educational video games and think of that as the “gold standard” of learning.  It’s a valuable approach that can yield cool results.  For full disclosure, I taught and developed curriculum for two separate Video Game Programming courses.  One was more focused on using games as a tool to teach programming concepts while the other attempted to balance an understanding of gameplay concepts alongside basic programming concepts.  The classes were great.  Most students really enjoyed the classes.  There were some in every class that didn’t.

So what happened there?  Students had a fairly high degree of freedom to explore concepts in an elective class they chose to take.  There was always time built in to play with the game design tools.  That was intentional.  Why didn’t all students engage in the course?  Based on my personal interactions with each and every student in the courses I taught, the reason some students really tried and others didn’t is because some cared enough to try and others did not.  Not one single student who did poorly in my class did so because he or she couldn’t grasp the content.  If the student was motivated to get it then the student eventually got it.  Some progressed faster than others, which is what you’d expect, but the difference between learning and not learning was student motivation.

This realization is incredibly important in the discussion of changing educational outcomes for students.  Some (possibly even some authors and articles linked to in this post) see the key to improvements in education occurring as a result of increased use of situated learning and gamification practices.  Both those things are great!  Both can lead to improved motivation and better learning outcomes.  Neither is a “magic bullet” that impacts every student.  We’d like to find that, but we haven’t yet.  The most impactful teaching strategy I’ve ever seen is personal relationships with students, but even that falls short of inspiring some students.  There has to be some movement on the part of the student to want to learn, whether that happens through reading, listening to a lecture, participating in a simulation, or playing a video game.

Be bold with innovative instructional approaches that push students to learn in unique ways.  Online communities, gaming, and project-based learning are just a few of the multitude of instructional practices that move us along the spectrum towards “motivate and innovate.”  Just know that regardless of the fun and engagement you build into a course, the outcomes you want to achieve matter and there very well could be students who simply don’t buy in.  That is, by far and away, the most difficult thing about being a teacher, but you can’t let it define you as a teacher or cause you to lower your expectations to include unmotivated students.  Appreciate the fact the majority of your students bought into the process and continue to look for ways to help your students learn more deeply and demonstrate their learning more creatively.

Educational Outcomes and the Role of Networked Learning

Sometimes we lose the big picture as a result of focusing on the details that are part of our role in the system.  I’m not arguing that details are unimportant in light of the bigger picture.  Details are important and we should strive to address them as well as possible.  If you go out to eat at a high-end restaurant you expect the ingredients to be quality, the chef to put those ingredients together in delicious ways, the wait staff to be attentive, the restrooms to be clean, and so on.  However, if you get an amazing meal in a wonderful space, but have a less than stellar experience, I do think you can look past that slight to appreciate the overall dining experience.

Now if you’re asking yourself what I could possibly know about high-end restaurants I must conceed your point.  I’m a public school teacher and graduate student.  Chick-fil-a is a wonderful treat!  That being said, I do stand by the analogy and would argue that the big picture makes the details important pieces and a group of exceptional individuals acting independently will consistently struggle to produce a great end product without some cohesive vision.  This concept matters in higher education.

Gardner Campbell introduces his article Networked Learning as Experiential Learning by generally asking the question about the purpose of higher education.  While I’m not sure he arrives at an actual point, he does seem to imply there needs to be some balance between preparing students for vocational work and increasing the “humane capacities” of students.  This question has a much larger social context that I’d like to briefly explore as a pathway to understanding the role of networked learning within the structure of higher education.

First, if the goal of higher education was ever to solely increase the intellectual and social attributes of individuals, that time has passed.  Higher education is widely seen as the “yellow brick road” towards economic stability and personal fulfillment in U.S. society.  I believe that is to the detriment of both students and the institution of higher education, however, that is the direction society has adopted.  With 60% of college students graduating with some form of debt, and with an average debt of over $37,000, it would be neglectful of colleges to provide an education that does not prepare students for vocational work.  On the other hand, higher education does hold a certain level of responsibility in developing leaders who can rise above the current trend of political vilification at any cost to both hear and debate differing viewpoints on a topic.  So why not both?  Why can’t we expect institutions of higher education to prepare students for jobs and help them become better versions of themselves?

If that’s the big picture, then how do we get there?  I believe the answers lie in creating varied experiences for undergraduate and graduate students.  As we learned from baby George, learning doesn’t have to be the regurgitation of information gleaned from a lecture.  It can come through “real-world” interactions and experiences.  Creating those interactions and experiences can be a real trick for those working in higher education.  How do you make your class look like that?

One idea, amongst many it must be said, is to create authentic interaction that pushes us to improve as individuals by making us accountable to an authentic audience.  This idea is supported by academics like Tim Hitchcock, as well as authors Seth Godin and Tom Peters, in the form of blogging.  I think this idea has real merit.  The practice of self-reflection coupled with the accountability delivering to an audience demands will push students to do something meaningful.  This practice isn’t without risk.  The Internet never forgets and that could lead job search difficulty, but maybe that needs to be part of the learning process?

The more I think about this the more my conclusion is simply that higher education can do better.  We can better prepare students for vocation and to be decent people.  Is blogging the answer to that?  Certainly not in whole, but maybe in part.  Is there a single answer that will do this?  Probably not, but if there’s one that’s close it’s this.  More than likely the answer will be creative instructors developing learning opportunities that engage students in meaningful ways who understand that there is a bigger picture they are a part of and that their individual efforts are a vital piece of the design.

What is Finding Praxis?

For full disclosure, this blog was created as a required part of my enrollment in GRAD 5114 – Contemporary Pedagogy for the Spring 2019 semester at Virginia Tech.  I would like to go into post-secondary education in order to teach future Career and Technical Education (CTE) teachers and administrators at the university level.  Taking this course isn’t part of my program of study, but I believe it is an important part of the process I’m going through to prepare for that future.

All that is to say, if and when you visit this blog you will find that the majority of the posts are required for the GRAD 5114 course, but my hope is that not all of them will be.  My broader goal with this blog is to explore pedagogical thoughts directly related to the course assignments and also some of those that are not directly related to course assignments.  That goal is why I’ve named this blog Finding Praxis.

The term praxis refers to the point where theory meets practice.  I see this as the way my understanding of how something should work influences what I actually do.  In my day job, I’m a high school teacher.  I’ve worked in K12 education for 14 years.  I’ve had a lot of opportunities to adjust both my theory and my practice and continue to do so in some way every year.  I’m still trying to find that ideal intersection of what I would like to see happen and what is actually happening.  My hope is to refine and improve my praxis in both my current and future teaching roles and that’s what this blog is intended to help me do.