As I was reading Kohn’s (2011) article, a new insight into my own educational history came into view. I was homeschooled from Kindergarten – 12th grade and in my own experience homeschooling I was never given grades.
In describing this to others, I have explained that, “I was expected to do the work and get it right.” So I developed the belief that I should have all of the right answers for any worksheet, assignment, or test that I encountered. When I read a chapter, I felt I should know all of it when I was done. A “passing grade” (though that was not a concept in my mind at the time) was 100%.
Once I reached college and found myself retaining the idea that 100% was the only acceptable grade on tests, quizzes, papers, and other assignments (I was always disappointed when I got a 94 or even 98 on things) I assumed that this was a wrong viewpoint that I had developed based on previous experiences and assumed that I needed to readjust my standards to the “correct” ones that I was doing well if I got an “A” on whatever grading scale we were using (rather than 100%) and that, really, even a “C” should be fine with me, since that was said to be “average” (and who did I think I was to assume I was above average among college students?).
As I read this article it slowly dawned on me that rather than simply having a misunderstanding of grading scales and expectations, I had developed an entirely different view of learning than is perpetuated by environments focused on grades. I had developed habits of learning just to learn. There wasn’t a grade coming at the end. There wasn’t “enough” learning or retention to pass a class. I just did educational activities and learned things. AHA!! Until this moment I had no idea that I had been a living experiment (though not necessarily an intentional experiment) in how students respond to educational opportunities when grades aren’t involved.
This new realization from my own history and experiences has been helpful in continuing to shape my views on education and learning. In the past I had thought, “There’s no way that students would be motivated to learn if there were no formal assessment measures.” I am so appreciative of the realization that I have a lifetime of personal evidence to the contrary. While I still do not lean strongly one direction or the other on whether or not we should continue using grades in formal education, I am thankful to have a new perspective on my own educational experiences and how they have been impacted at various levels of education by grades (or a lack thereof), which has subsequently impacted my later experiences with learning as well.
Reference
Kohn, A. (2011). The case against grades. Educational Leadership, 69(3), 28-33.
The reading materials regarding assessment this week reminded me of my school days. I have taken grading or ranking for granted quite a long time because I only experienced that kind of assessment since I entered into the regular school curriculum in Korea. I hadn’t recognized it as a problem much, but looking back, the ranking system made not only teachers have preconceptions about each student, but also students form social groups according to their grades. The students were generally classified into model students who study well and poor students who don’t study well. The focus of teachers and schools was more on the former because the school’s reputation and success are evaluated by how many students go to top universities. This test score-oriented educational atmosphere was also prevailing amongst students. They tended to socialize each other whose ranks are similar because sometimes top students studied separately with others. I assume this grade-focused assessment in school might affect widespread prejudice and discrimination in various fields of Korean society.
On the other hand, from the perspective of a parent of a Kindergarten kid, I admit that sometimes grading assessment makes me easier to identify how my child has been improving briefly and clearly. When I first received my son’s first report card last year, it helped me to understand which subject he needs to help and he is doing well. But without teachers’ narrative comments and conference, it must be difficult to know how to help him to improve some abilities (even though Alfie Kohn pointed out the inefficiency of adding narrative reports). Another thing I was not able to figure out through his report card was his interests or talent of physical activities, music, or art because it was more about his literacy, math, and sociability.
Although grading must be the easiest and simplest way of assessment of academic achievement, it does not correspond to the primary goal of education as well as assessment. Assessment needs to play a role in discovering and improving students’ interests, capabilities, and talents, not harming them. As more and more innovative endeavors are being carried out in schools, I hope better assessment tools will be developed and spread out.
After completing all the readings this week for GRAD 5114, there was one phrase from it all that continued to echo in my mind. “We believe in a pedagogy of possibility,” from Imagination First. Reading their examples of different “deaths” of imagination, such as when the little girl was discouraged by her father from being an astronaut because it is no life for a lady, or when the biologist is discouraged from working on his own project concerning suspended animation in the lab, I remembered instances in my life where my imagination was stifled, but also, when it was encouraged (and even once when it was overwhelmed). I want to share those experiences with you–not because they are better or different examples from those given in Imagination First, but because they might give some deeper insight into the specifics of how to encourage and teach imagination.
I’ll start with the time when my imagination was murdered, just to get the bad out of the way first, but also to demonstrate the major need for a cultural change in how teachers are viewed. As a child, I wanted to do many jobs, mostly related to fashion and the arts. I wanted to be a model, then a fashion designer, then a visual artist, then an art teacher. My parents were very encouraging, especially once I shifted away from model. They even enrolled me in extra art classes outside of school. However, in third grade, I had an amazing teacher. His classroom was unlike any I had ever experienced. He incorporated music and art into all subject areas to make them more interactive and interesting. I felt inspired to do actual school work for the first time ever. In second grade I made Cs in English because I didn’t even care to put periods at the end of my sentences and the only books I read were Junie B. Jones and the Magic Treehouse. But in third grade, I wanted to do more and try more–I tried to check out Anne of Green Gables and Little Women from the school library. The librarian did not let me. However, Mr. Decker and my dad spoke to her and she acquiesced to giving me the books. I read them, passed the Accelerated Reader tests with perfect scores, and was allowed to read whatever I wanted from them forward. I never forgot Mr. Decker, or the way he taught. It was the memories of his classroom that led me to want to be a teacher, so that from 4th grade onwards, whenever anyone asked what I wanted to be, the answer was easy. However, with my newly inspired love of learning, I became good at school. People became certain I was capable of great things. In freshman year of high school, my best friend’s mom asked me what I wanted to be. I said a teacher. She laughed. She asked why I would waste all my knowledge and talents like that. I clearly could find the cure to cancer, so why didn’t I focus on science or inventing? That killed a part of me. At the same time, she was an adult, so I believed her that I might waste my talents as a teacher. In undergrad, my majors were Psychology and Pre-Med. But I still never forgot Mr. Decker. Once I started working as a tutor, I finally realized she was wrong. Being a teacher wouldn’t be wasting my skills–it would be using the best of the ones I have. Mr. Decker changed my whole life–as a teacher, I could do that for my students too.
Now for the times when my imagination was encouraged. Both occurred in high school. For my sophomore English class, I had a new teacher who had just gotten her degree. She was young and could easily pass for one of the students, except for the fact she wasn’t in uniform like the rest of us. She tried a lot of different things for her class to find what worked and what didn’t, always asking for our feedback. Once she even let me teach the class because I had reach and watched Oedipus Rex many times, while she had not, and it’s plot is necessary background information for reading and interpreting Antigone (as we were doing in class). So, I knew that while she was the teacher, she valued my opinions and my ideas. It was honestly the first time I wasn’t terrified of a teacher as the authority figure. Because of this, when it came time to do our final projects for Tale of Two Cities, I asked her if I could do something different from the prompts she provided. In Tale of Two Cities, Lucie is described as the “golden thread.” I am a huge Greek mythology nerd, so wanted to tie this in with the myth of the Minotaur. I built a maze with a golden thread through it, and along the walls were my analyses of how the two stories tie together. This project took way more work and effort than the prompts provided, but I loved every second of creating it and fell like I thought more deeply and in new ways about Tale of Two Cities. In being allowed to create this project and think about how different ideas connect, I started to be able to do the same kind of divergent thinking in other subject areas. I took more risks. For example, in my junior year, I took a dual credit U.S. history class (my high school offered this class at our school, but we got college credit through Spalding University). One major arc of the class focused on the suffrage movement, and culminated in the suffrage project. There was of course a standard list of prompts, but I hated all of them. I asked if I could do something else. Dr. Hall was hesitant to allow me, but I told her I was willing to take the risk. I developed Suffragopoly–yes, a Monopoly board game based on the suffrage movement. I designed the board, property deeds, chance and community chest cards, and box design in Publisher and had them printed. I constructed the board and all the playing pieces. In going around the board, you went through the suffrage movement in chronological order. It was a successful project–on that day we presented our projects, Dr. Hall even let me and several classmates play it for a bit. She also spoke to a friend of hers that is a curator at a museum in Louisville and had it displayed there for awhile. My sister goes to the same high school I did, and now Dr. Hall doesn’t offer a prompt for the suffrage project. She gives some examples of past projects, but let’s students engage with the material in any way they desire. Now, all the projects are super intense and creative. Dr. Hall has thanked me for inspiring her to make that change with my project.
From these stories then, I hope to suggest that by interacting with students on a personal level so that they trust they can be creative in your class, you will get much better projects and learning in students. This is the same message from the TEDx talk by Michael Wesch earlier in the semester–when he allowed his student who was sleeping through class to design a game, the student was much more engaged. I studied many more facts about the suffrage movement to make my game perfect and historically accurate than I would if I just had to study for exam. I also retained those facts far longer, and my game, whenever I play it with my sister (because we do sometimes; in fact, we did this past Christmas break), reminds me of the whole of the movement. I would never keep copies of old exams to look back on for facts (Google is much faster for looking up information), but some old projects I have kept because they are interactive and fun and make me remember much easier (like the playdough model of the parts of the brain I made). So, when the readings for GRAD 5114 suggested doing away with assessment, and grades especially, I think it is possible and could be effective. The focus could be on projects of various sorts (like those suggested in Making the Grade: The Role of Assessment in Authentic Learning) and the “assessment” of these focused on the evaluative and liking aspects, rather than the ranking (letter grade) of them as suggested by Peter Elbow.
However, as promised in my introduction, I did want to mention one time when my imagination was overwhelmed. In my senior year of high school, a handful of girls from my school were selected to attend a day of the IdeaFestival (specifically the day for students called Thrivals). There were speakers from many different disciplines in science and medicine along with music and slam poetry performances. Several students were even able to compete against Watson, the super computer from Jeopardy. It was exciting and I was exposed to so many innovations and ideas, but I left feeling inadequate rather than inspired. This is because no part of the program focused on telling you how to have these big ideas, and the presence of so many big ideas in sequence made anything I had done seem small and meaningless, especially because I had no idea how to have such big ideas. So, if you want to encourage imagination, rather than stifle it, you have to be a model for students on how to think creatively, and if you are going to create prompts, create them in ways that encourage creativity and sideways learning as described in the readings by Ellen Langer last week. Like the authors of Imagination First, I believe that everyone has imagination and can be taught. I also believe that applying your imagination to material you are supposed to learn can be fun–as teachers, we can inspire students to use their imagination to make course material come to life in just as exciting ways as Mrs. Frizzle does on the Magic School Bus. So, together, in GRAD 5114 and beyond, let’s create a pedagogy of possibility.
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.
Dan Pink puts forward the fact that incentives at a workplace do not help in improving the work or achieving a task faster. Moreover, sometimes they hamper the task at hand. In short, incentives are not a good motivator. He further talks about the importance of Autonomy (desire of self-driven), Mastery (desire to learn and improve without any incentive or recognition) and lastly Purpose (something you can align yourself with, want to achieve through work and contribute to the world). These points made by Dan Pink makes me think that in a way grading and assessment at the school or university level are supposed to be motivators. The question is how good are they?
Well, getting good grades might land you a job but does not necessarily guarantee mastery, autonomy, purpose or even creativity. The only way these things can be achieved is if we start to adopt a new way of learning which focuses more on learning and mastery rather than grades. If we want students to retain knowledge and transfer it further, written exams and tests alone won’t help. Practical knowledge along with the use of creativity and problem -solving needs to be adopted as well.
There is no way we can get away with the exams completely. They have their place. But there is a need for change in student attitudes. There is a need to make them think that learning is also important and not only grades. This I think can be done by incorporating new assessment techniques. Group projects involving real-life problems is one of the ways. Group projects also lead to peer assessment which is very close to the real world job scenario. I also feel that exam questions should be set more in a practical way rather than a theoretical way. Real life situations in exams will make students think of the problem at hand, analyze it, question it, use existing approaches to solve it and identify the consequences. Self-assessment by the students at the end of the class is something that is gaining popularity as well. This is where students assess their performance in the class and submit the assessment to the teacher. In the end, it is all about adjustment and change for the betterment. It does not motivate students to do better but moreover, stops their creative thinking by narrowing their approach to learning. Bad grades may also sometimes shatter you completely. So, I think a mid-way approach (improving our current grading system) is the best way forward. I am of the view that grading and exams should stay but their importance should be minimal. Learning is the main focus and should always be.
What do you think? Are the grades necessary? Are they motivating students to perform better? Is there a middle way? Can we improve the current grading system and make it more learning-centric?
… but using turn signals, because there’s nothing wrong with it.
Teaching with non-teaching. Maybe we should just stop teaching. Sort of. Many of the lessons we’re learning in this pedagogy class focus on changing our abilities to teach, on how we can better use the newest tech as tools, and how to let go and allow students to teach themselves. It is as if our ability to adapt will somehow allow all students to be reached, to allow all students to learn, to allow all to succeed. I say, that depends.
I’m going to switch gears for a minute regarding last week’s post so that I can better see both sides and ask more questions from you, dear reader. It’s kind of a devil’s-advocate-view against my own words. In those words, I discussed cross-training and well-rounded students. Now I’m going to ask: What about highly-specialized students instead?
Yes. All students learn differently, and we need to approach them in ways more conducive to their abilities. But what I haven’t heard is this: we’re still teaching all of the students all of the the same material long after many have shown they lack interest. For instance: Basics? Core? Fundamentals? Are they really essential to our lives? I’ve said it before, I don’t always math good. Not all designers are engineers, and not all engineers are designers. I hated my core classes, and it wasn’t until I got into my major that I became excited. Why did I have to take another English course?
Is it possible that some students don’t belong in those 100-plus lecture halls? “Don’t belong” doesn’t mean they are incapable of learning, only that what they’re learning in those classes doesn’t apply well to them. It seems like a waste of time. Again, devil’s advocate voice here.
Flip side: What about the students in their latter years, when they’re starting to get into the meat of their major and really focus on their goals: Are they more focused than in their core classes? I definitely was. So why are we still requiring these ‘fundamentals’ for graduation? I realize the core system is older than the Standards of Learning law, but if you think about it, isn’t this just an extension of the SOLs we so loathe? Why are they in the room if it isn’t important to them? Are they in the right room? #seewhatididthere
I can’t remember his last name, but his first was Chris. He was Swiss, and he was the best CAD teacher I ever had. His background was what Americans might call a high school degree, except his was highly advanced in the construction field. That’s because several countries like Switzerland and Germany allow the educational focus to change according to a student’s abilities. Some kids are more adept with machinery and shop tools. Others are artists and comprehend the nuances of Nietzsche. After their primary years, students are directed into vocational and/or theoretical secondary education depending on their aptitude. This happens when they are around age 11. Secondary education in this manner is meant to prepare you for life-beyond-school, and it begins at eleven in these countries. Eleven. I was trying to figure out how not to get beat up at eleven.
Preparing students for life-beyond-school: what is that? Again, are we beating ourselves up because a few students didn’t read the Odyssey? I’ve read it four different times in four different school systems, including my freshman year in college. It’s a wonderful story, but I can’t think of a context in my life where I’ve used it until just now. It has more than 123,000 words to read, which is time I could have spent better honing the hand skills that my life-beyond-school required. Did I have a bad teacher that did a poor job expressing the metaphors and meanings of this Homeric epic? No. He was humorous and affable, and I picked up the word übermensch from his lectures. I sat right up front and paid attention and read all books and wrote all papers. It just wasn’t my desire to learn more about this material. This fundamental text was not in my lane. And besides, the Iliad has more life lessons in it, am I right?
I think Ellen Langer was misguided in describing her seven mindsets of learning as myths. They aren’t myths to everyone, but to be fair, I also don’t think they are truths. I believe these precepts to be subjective to the person teaching and to the person learning. There are right and wrong answers in air-traffic control – #7. Forgetting to set your alarm will get you fired in life-beyond-school – #5. Rick Perry will never live down that time he forgot what agency he wanted to destroy during the presidential debates. And even though Langer’s driver continued to use a turn signal when no one was around, the law requires he do that. Stupid law, yes, but he was in the right. Change it.
Back to my Swiss-born CAD teacher. Chris lived on a small-town beach in North Carolina with his wife and children. We took study breaks by swimming in the ocean and catching fish. We grilled whatever we caught for dinner, and his kids ran around laughing in English, German and Spanish – his wife’s native language. His skills as a CAD instructor had him flying around the world. He loved what he did and couldn’t have been more welcoming to me.
He also couldn’t stop talking about how the education system in the United State sucked and he was so thankful to have been born somewhere else. He credits that he was setup for success and was encouraged to follow his strengths early on. Similarly, Germany has an 80% rate of hire after graduation, which means there is great value placed on this type system and a high incentive for students to learn.
For some reason, it reminds me of my friend Ty, the designer who stated he went to ‘art school, not smart school.’ Maybe he’s right. He got the art part absolutely right. And the other part about not being smart? He got that right too, but not the way we think. Our society places a high value on certain fields over others, and calls one group smart and another group ignorant.
In reality, it is as much bottom-up as it is top-down. I’m not screaming socialism, but welders are as equally important as engineers in the working of our society – the bridge requires both to function. What if someone had told my teacher Chris that construction work was for drop-outs and engineering school was the way to go? Maybe he would have done well. Maybe he would have burned out. Maybe we should stop teaching students what they don’t need to learn.
I’m not laying blame on teachers teaching poorly. And I’m not laying blame on students skipping lessons. I think there’s another mode where the actual abilities and desires of the students are given more credence and the classes they take are truly important to them on a base level. I believe Chris was right about the differences in our systems. It’s very societal and complex.
We should change that if we can. And please understand I’m not saying a person has to be one thing and only that thing and not anything else. I do not believe this in my heart. We all have many skills and I still encourage their exploration. Some people have lots of them: Think of the jack-of-all-trades, the polymaths – the übermenschen. If my doctor is also an artist – wonderful. But really, I’m not going to cry if she failed my design class – maybe it wasn’t her lane. And truth be told, I’m okay if my heart still looks like a heart and not like a Picasso. I’m fine with that. Does that mean I’m a bad design teacher?
For a while, I have been thinking about my own learning process. As everyone has a unique character, it can change person to person, but “learning” for me is generally about the logic of “no pain, no gain.” Every time when I study, I tend to jump the conclusion, main ideas, or arguments to get it done. And, what if I have been studying mindlessly?
As opposed to my struggle inside my mind, in her book “The Power of Mindful Learning,” Ellen J. Langer as a psychologist is talking about kind of gain without pain type of learning through, what she calls, “mindful learning.” It is sort of “studying on your headspace.” Indeed, she uses this term quite different from, what we got used to knowing, meditation. For Langer, mindfulness is about openness to wider possibilities or sort of a cognitive recognition of possibilities or alternatives at the time we learn; for instance, it involves awareness and broadened attention. She defines the term and compares it with “mindlessness” as such
A mindful approach to any activity has three characteristics: the continues creation of new categories; openness to new information; and an implicit awareness of more than one perspective. Mindlessness, in contrast, is characterized by entrapment in old categories; by automatic behavior that precludes attending to new signals; and by action that operates from a single perspective. (p. 4)
To overcome mindlessness in learning and teaching, she proposes “sideways learning” by maintaining a mindful state, which she explains
Sideways learning aims at maintaining a mindful state. As we saw, the concept of mindfulness revolves around certain psychological states that are really different versions of the same thing: (1) openness to novelty; (2) alertness to distinction; (3) sensitivity to different contexts; (4) implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and (5) orientation in the present. Each leads to the others and back to itself Learning a subject or skill with an openness to novelty and actively noticing differences, contexts, and perspectives-sideways learning- makes us receptive to changes in an ongoing situation. In such a state of mind, basic skills and information guide our behavior in the present, rather than run it like a computer program. (p. 23)
Her alternative learning method pushed me to make some self-reflection. I am more inclined to jump to the conclusion of any book or article, by only getting its main arguments-methods etc., rather than really getting into it. Honestly, this has been my way of survival in academia given the assigned tons of readings, as if everyone is able to internalize all those readings. However, this kind of psychological awareness has great potential to enable deeper involvement, concentration, and more importantly being “at present” in learning as well as teaching. From another side of the coin, Langer also shows that how alarming traditional learning techniques restrain creativity due to memorization and repetitive practices to master the theories or concepts. This culture of teaching and subsequent learning technique of the students only deepens being an “auto” pilot, what Langer calls, “mindfulness.”
Undoubtedly, I really appreciated the idea of “sideways learning” and the way how Langer sheds lights on our alarming reality about learning and teaching…
While reading Langer’s article on mindful learning, I realized that the whole structure of schooling and education in the present sociocultural context might be a result of mindlessness.
The past causes the present and the present leads to future. Thus to understand the present structure of education, I believe it is imperative that we also analyze and spend some thoughts about the history of education. From the beginning of human history for ages and ages, children have been educating themselves through self-exploration. The only concrete and documented form of imparting knowledge from one generation to another was through the means of stories, fables and fairytales.
But as humankind began to develop and form civilizations, children were put to work as labors alongside adults, in agriculture and industry. They began to master the necessary skills of livelihood. And thus came about the definition of “good children”: the hardest workers, the most disciplined and dutiful ones, the ones that grew out of their curious and unruly childhood all too soon. And while the practice of schooling as a structure of education for children grew and spread all around the world, the societal norms of what was considered “good” were already deeply instilled by then. Schooling replaced labor jobs as “work” for children. There remained no scope for playful learning, no place for willfulness of children. Education became restricted to schools, delivered in form of lessons from teachers to students thus establishing the hierarchy of greater knowledge. Everything outside of school, even reading storybooks became “extracurricular”. The concept of school was designed in the minds of children as some morbid place that is not meant to be fun at all.
And this concept lives up to this day! We have all hated the strict boundaries and rules of school life at some point, we have all dreaded the exams and the penalties of getting low scores on a test. With the advancement in science and technology, and the standard of human lives, schools are predominantly focussed now on the colossal amounts of information they have to disperse to students. Stories, which were the most prevalent form of learning in the past, is not even recognized as an important tool for learning anymore.
While reading about the history of education in Wikipedia, I found the most profound statement: it talks about the Hindu scripture Upanishads dated back to 500 BC as “an exploratory learning process where teachers and students were co-travellers in a search for truth. The teaching methods used reasoning and questioning. Nothing was labeled as the final answer.” This states three very important pillars of what learning should be about and what the current culture of education have mindlessly ignored! Education should be curiosity-driven; there doesn’t always have to a binary right/wrong; peer-learning rather than mainstream teacher-student hierarchy.
Thus, I want to end the article on the note that instead of just brainstorming ideas of revolutionizing education to come up with “new and fun alternatives”, may be we take a look way back in the ancient human history to gain a better understanding of learning; may be we realize that learning is nothing but fun and play and stories and fables!
Reading Ellen Langer’s article on Mindful Learning, I kept revisiting how I have taught in the past. More specifically, was I teaching the students to learn mindfully, and if not, how could I improve this. According to Langer, mindfulness is “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.” And when it comes to Agriculture, and Dairy farms in particular, context is everything.
I teach a senior-level course at Virginia Tech that focuses on learning how to examine and evaluate dairy farms based on the way they operate. One important aspect that I try to stress with the students is that no two farms are exactly the same. The goals of each farmer may be different. The layout of their farms will differ. The type and number of cows they have on the farm with vary. And the work style of the farmer and their staff will most certainly vary. All of this needs to be taken into consideration when examining an individual dairy farm. However, when beginning to teach student’s these concepts, I start by removing as much of the variables as possible and have them focus on changes in specific areas of the farm (i. e. nutrition, housing, milking, health, etc.). Then as the semester continues, I’ll add a new portion of the farm to examine until they are taking the whole farm into context. This seems to be beneficial, as by the end of the course, the students are typically able to successfully provide recommendations to an actual farm.
However, looking at how I have taught the course, I still think I could help the students learn even more and become even better by intentionally getting the students to mindfully learn. As I question and assess my students, I have noticed they compartmentalize the sections of the farm, thinking about them individually, when in real life there is overlap between a lot of sections of the farm. They are focusing on some context of the situation, but not the whole context. I’m wondering if this is a result of my teaching, and therefore learning, mindlessly, expecting the students to make some of the ties between sections of the farm. It also could be a result of how we typically teach agriculture majors about their specific systems. For animal science, typically, we teach courses that are specific to one section of the farm. An entire class on lactation, then one on nutrition, then one on reproduction, all focusing on that one topic and nothing outside of it. The same seems to be true about other agriculture system. If there was a push to have the students think a little about the context of the entire farm in these topic specific courses, they might start to become more mindful learners and probably better critical thinkers as well. The same could maybe be said about other non-agriculture, but very applied majors, such as engineering or even those on education. However, I am starting to get outside of my sphere of knowledge.
This next semester I teach, I am going to try to teach more mindfully by getting the students to challenge the context a little more. Maybe after we run through a scenario, I could have them come up with a list of what other factors will be affected if one change is made. Or maybe we go over the scenario as if it was a typical United States dairy farm, but them put it in the context of a New Zealand farm that is more seasonal. Let me know what your thought are about mindful teaching in the context of your area of teaching. Is it anywhere similar, or does your department seem to have a better grasp on mindful learning? Thank you!
This week’s readings made me realize I should tell y’all something about myself. I’m annoyingly curious. I’m that person who hears the words “I don’t know” and is googling the answer before the sentence is even finished. I’m a strong believer that if we have roughly all of humanity’s knowledge in our pocket, we might as well use it. This curiosity has driven me to waste tons of extra time on various tasks because I want to know just a little bit more.
As I’ve gotten older, this has led to me getting antsy and annoyed at any class that tries to teach me something that I feel won’t lead to a lasting skill or understanding of some sort. From my experience, required classes rarely have more than a 5% application to my research/life, especially if formatted as an information dump. To me, such classes are a waste of my time.
As it turns out, I dislike these courses because they feel mindless to me. I sit in those classes and zone out because enough material is easy/old that it’s difficult to think critically about the information. It’s hard to just accept information as it’s piled on top of you at a rate that doesn’t allow in-depth question/answer sessions.
To combat such classes I’ve started adapting assignments such that they force me to learn something on my own. Instead of throwing data into excel and letting it make an ugly plot, I started taking the time to learn a coding language and analyze the raw data by myself. I ignored software options to calculate peaks and slopes, opting to program derivatives and other things instead. This technique took way more of my time, but it also taught me way more. I was deliberate about my learning and had to think about the content from a variety of angles before I could implement the necessary strategies.
This is to say that while I’m a strong proponent of teachers reworking classes to push students toward mindful learning, sometimes students have to learn to be mindful themselves. We have the ability to turn the tables and say hey, your way isn’t working, but this way worked really well for me.
Ideally, both teacher and student would work towards a mindful learning approach. However, I think this would take extra work for both parties. So my question is, how do we convince people to put in the extra effort? I had wanted to learn to program, so the effort was worth it to understand something I’d been putting off for years. Without that incentive, I think I would have just suffered through the class.
