I’ve experienced mindless learning and mindful learning, but didn’t know they each had a name. Langer’s example of arriving at a destination in a car and not remembering the exact trip there is the perfect example, and has happened to me before. So has reading several paragraphs, or pages, and having no recollection of what I read (it happened while reading part of one of Langer’s articles, for full disclosure).
I absolutely do not want my students to drift into midlessness during my class. But I’m sure has happened before and might happen again. It is a challenge with 400 students in one lecture hall. In the past I’ve tried to incorporate humor into my lectures. This is exceptionally hard for me because everyone who knows me will readily admit I am not funny, or if I am it is purely accidental. I’ve tried to add meme’s to my lectures to keep students interested; sometimes it works, sometimes I’ve inadvertantly chosen one that is outdated (more applicable to my age group than theirs).
What I learned most from this weeks’ readings was that simple changes in wording might be more effective than failed attempts at humor or coolness. The idea that facts are relevant from multiple view points (the Christopher Columbus and U.S. Civil War are excellent examples) is something I think I can incorporate into my lectures. I imagine using an interactive tool, like mentimeter (Dean DePauw uses this a lot), could enhance this approach.
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Changing readings to the TedTalk from Sir Ken Robinson, I find it ironic (see what I did there?) that it’s a Britain who so succinctly described the problems in the American educational system. We are teaching to the test too much. We are treating each student as if they were the same. I support his approach of increased individualization. As he states, though, that won’t work until there is a paradigm shift in our country about how teachers are perceived and treated. Well before I became a teacher I felt that teachers are as important as, and should be paid as much as, doctors or maybe even professional athletes. My children and I have experienced some of the best and some of the worst teachers there are. If teaching was respected and well paid enough that it was highly competitive, only the best teachers would be hired.
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Coming full circle on the readings, if all teachers were of that high caliber, the classroom experience would be much improved. Then I imagine students would rarely, if ever, be mindlessly going through a school day. Perhaps, like Finland, students wouldn’t drop out of school.
nowldgeAll the way through my early years of education and college, I took to learning the material in my classes through repetition and rote memorization. After about a year and a half into my master’s degree, I realized I was never learning to understand but simply just memorizing the material. This was a huge detriment to my knowledge base because I basically memorized for an exam and subsequently forgot everything. Now that I am having to use some of the material from my undergraduate classes for my research, I am having to go back and re-learn “the right way”. I really began to see the difference in learning methods when I came to VT for my Ph.D. I had to take a few deficiency courses to graduate with an Engineering degree, which was mostly math courses. In undergrad, these courses were very hard for me and I just thought I wasn’t very good at math. But now that I had to go back and take additional courses, I tried actually learning the material by understanding. I was listening in class and actually taking the time to understand why something was a certain way The ridiculous part is that I was studying for significantly less time and doing really well in the class. There were times that I didn’t study at all and got a top score. It was amazing to me. After employing this new found method (to me, anyway) it was like a light bulb went off in my head.
Ellen Langer in “Mindful Learning” suggests that this phase I was in and broke out of may be rooted in the way we teach and are taught from a really young age. She states that being taught to repeat information to learn at a young age may instill in people that this is THE way to learn. I can attest that this was how I was taught to learn by both my teachers and parents. Probably the worst example of this comes from my high school biology class. The professor would give us a set of 150 multiple choice questions to study from and he would choose 50 to be on the exam. I was so good at recognizing patterns, I didn’t even read the problem on exam day and just circled the answer based on the answer choices and usually the first couple words of the question. I always finished first, usually in about 5 minutes, and always got the top score. But I didn’t learn anything, at least not for the long term.
How many people go through this and what does it say about our education system? To me, it seems that how we learn to learn is instilled in us at a very young age. If someone learns to learn by memorizing and are simply tested on knowing the material, that person may never break that habit. I was only able to break that habit by staying in school past undergrad. We need to make students think by challenging their knowledge base. Using exams to test their knowledge only enforces rote memorization. Adding more and more exams further enforces that because they have so much to know for the next exam, they simply memorize to get through it and then forget.
Two concepts rose to the surface in this this week’s reading on learning; how we learn and why we learn. When one is taught the process behind a skill they are learning the how. Whereas, when one seeks the reasons behind that particular process they seek to know the why.
THE HOW:
Langer writes that “when we first learn a skill, we necessarily attend to each individual step” and the ways in which her process of learning differs around baking a cheesecake each year continues to bring delicious results. Additionally, many of our readings last week surrounding digital learning as well as Thompson’s Smarter Than You Think explores the paradigm shift of how access to information in our digital age has changed the process of how one learns. We are shifting from a place that sets computers and humans as opposites to a place where they are collaborating in order to “help us work, mediate and create.” Knowing the how helps create sustainability.
THE WHY:
Keeping one on it toes, the why is ever-evolving. It incorporates the context found in oneself as well as the respective environment and to what degree that context affects one’s process. Sir Ken expresses teaching goes beyond delivering information, teachers must also “mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage” to ensure that any real learning taking place. Real learning takes place when one has a curious mindset, when we desire to look beyond the steps of the process and the how something took place and discover the why it took place. Knowing the why helps create adaptability.
I need to be mindful of both the how and why when creating a platform of learning for students. Being new to teaching, I aim to have a better understanding of ways to cultivate that environment and am open to hearing suggestions for developing these best practices.
This week, our reading discussed embracing change and allowing students to learn through play and imagination. The whole theory of anti-teaching seems to center around inspiring students to ask good questions instead of conveying useful information. It seems, though, that our education system has produced students who ask only the worst question: “do we need to know this for the test?”
How do we engage students who have been trained in this way? It seems like some students are happy to go through life and education like this fish from Spongebob:
How do we teach students who are so entrenched in this mindset that they don’t want to embrace change? This is especially relevant in many of the general education courses that are required for students. Many students come to class and are uninterested in the subject at hand; they’re more interested in getting in, passing the test, doing a core dump of the information, and then getting out and moving onto the next semester. They’re anti-learners.
Historically, the pattern has been that as children grow up and become more proficient at making sense of the environment in which they live, their world seems to become more stable. Thus, as a child grows and becomes accustomed to the world, the perceived need for play diminishes.
When we’re in the classroom, our role is not just to convey information, it’s to introduce students to a new environment and allow them to ask thoughtful questions which in turn guide our teaching. The problem lies in anti-learners who have lost the desire to ask questions and just want to receive the information and then give it back to you in the form of an essay/short answer/fill-in-the-blank. We can talk all day about changing the culture as a whole, but when it comes down to it, we’ll have the students that we get and those students will have already been shaped by their educational experiences. They will likely have an expectation that our class will be similar to most of the classes they’ve taken – their ability to memorize but not understand, they think, will get them through. When we require more of them, some may grow and learn, but some won’t want to rise to the challenge.
I’m reminded of a history class I took my freshman year of college. HI 210 – History of Modern Europe. When we went to class on the first day, the professor handed out the syllabi and told our class “This won’t be like a normal class. There are no tests… no quizzes… all I expect is for you to interact with the readings, write an essay each week on what you found, and come to class prepared to discuss with other students.” When I went back for the second class, half the class had dropped.
How do we respond? How do we engage the unengaged, the students who are happy in their stable environment who don’t want to change? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
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.
There’s a massive incompatibility between the realities of how much information & tooling is readily available online right now, versus the teaching approaches and methods commonly used in engineering higher ed. If I wanted to implement a website with a backend, physically construct and implement controls for a robot, integrate multiple smarthome devices to suit my needs, or just about anything related to electrical/computer/software engineering, there is next to no relevant course content for me to draw from across my CS & ECE dual engineering bachelors degrees. What little I would be using would come not from senior year ‘specialized’ courses, but from sophomore year ‘fundamental’ courses.
This discrepancy is made visible via the problems discussed in the readings from this week, but originates in a deeper mismatch in what “engineering” entails.
“Design”: What engineering culture calls actual engineering
Among a lay-person audience, a simple description of what ‘engineering’ entails would probably land somewhere near “solving problems using technology”. Engineering academia would likely claim that’s what one learns to do over the course of an engineering bachelors. However, once you are exposed to engineering education’s discussions of engineering content, especially as an engineer, it’s clear there’s two wholly distinct types of ‘problem’ being referred to: ‘idealized’ math problems completely abstracted out of any and all relevant context- social, geographical, or even physical or economic- and “real”, actual problems experienced by specific human beings that individual engineers, situated from their particular social/political/institutional context, are attempting to address. With few exceptions, engineering instruction at the university level focuses almost entirely on solving idealized, glorified math problems and simply renames “solving real problems” to “engineering design”. We then spend in the ballpark of 120 out of 128 credit hours solving ‘idealized’ math problems, and only bother with ‘real’ problems in a generally-final-year-long “design capstone” involving little actual instruction.
This fundamental misunderstanding, in my opinion, drives so, so much of the tensions described in the readings this week between old and newer teaching styles. Why cultivate curiosity and self-directed engagement if the students simply are there to learn the patterns of specific new math problems? Why should students have access to the internet- along with all its tools for ‘collaborating’ ‘cheating’- during class? How is experimentation even useful when the ultimate endeavor ‘engineering’ consists of is answering math questions?
These newer, alternative teaching practices are only alternative because the underlying need that justifies them has been deemed, a-priori, irrelevant to the course content we’re supposed to provide. When put alongside the misaligned incentives and absent teaching training of faculty/instructors/TAs at major research universities, of course we continue using the arcane, demonstrably inferior teaching practices that establish boring, soulsucking, uninformative classrooms. Why wouldn’t we?
Lectures: Specialized Tools for Specific Content
I LOVED the 4 Things Lecture is good for piece; it gives name to one struggle I’ve faced with paying attention to or absorbing anything from so, so many instructors, talks, or conferences. In naming the 4 things lectures do well, not only does it imply that if you arent doing one of those, there’s a better method than a lecture; it also implies that for any given lecture you’re writing you should be able to articulate which of the four it is at any given point in time. I have looked back at my lectures from last semester’s course, all of which I recorded live, and can see the lack of all 4 styles during those specific, least-engaging lectures.
So what sort of content are these four use cases most compelling for?
When I go to teach how to solve some idealized math problem, like finding the far-field beam pattern from a given antenna structure analytically, the overwhelming bulk of the time is spent walking through algebraic manipulations. There will be some inevitable point where I need to apply a trick, or think about the math in a clever way, where we briefly use modeling thought processes, but often for such a problem it’s 30 seconds at best out of 10 minutes straight. If I’m in my differential equations course and we’re doing an ‘applied’ example problem, perhaps the instructor needs to give a brief hint of context from the field of application; most likely the example problem came from some textbook, however, so the instructor often doesn’t actually have that context. My best instructors only managed to do this by teaching the story behind the development of the content at hand; the stories of Einstein’s correspondences grappling with the instantaneous information transmission implied by naive interpretations of Maxwell’s equations formed the basis for my understanding of special relativity. If you’re an engineer, think back- how many of the ‘idealized’ problems our coursework focused on in homeworks and tests actually would involve 10% or more of the time fitting any of these 4 things:
Modeling Thought Processes
Sharing Cognitive Structures
Giving Context
Telling Stories
But when focusing on ‘real’ problems, engineering design problems, you see all 4 of the above in spades. Because we’re actually trying to design things to do stuff to address problems, we need to have developed intuitive understandings of what the different technical tools in our toolbox do. We need to explore the thought processes involved in driving all the way from abstract user needs like “I want a thing that can deliver my water bottle to me from my car mid-hike”, to the broad strokes questions of finding what options for design-types are available and selecting one. Suddenly we’re lecturing on the cognitive structures by which I conceptualize different types of motors, because in order to actually make things you need to lay out a whole plan without restricting yourself to specific exact components. And because these problems are coming from addressing needs, examples used in class naturally lend themselves into telling the stories behind them- they are problems involving individual human beings, rather than purely hypothetical interactions between abstract objects removed from place and time.
Technology in the Classroom
The other piece I found myself really responding to was the discussion of tech access in the classroom. The accessibility aspect of policies blocking students from participating cannot be understated; I was outed unwillingly in several courses at my alma mater by professors with strict no-technology rules running afoul of my accomodations from the disability resources office. I’d end up sitting there in the front two rows with my laptop clearly out, open, and on, blatantly using it unpunished while the instructor scolded student after student for taking out their phones. In the end in each course I ended up fielding questions or accusations of favoritism so much that I stopped using my laptop despite my accomodations, and eventually no longer bothered attending the class times. It’s an uphill battle to even feel able to ask for accomodations, such policies pose additional barriers each of which renders your classroom increasingly inaccessible, filtering out disabled students ‘multiplicably’.
This is a hot-button issue, however, as plenty of instructors feel resentment against percieved threats to their sole dominion over the classroom. There are instead even easier, completely unabiguously positive possible applications of technology in the classroom: Recording, uploading, and transcribing lectures.
Due to the rise in live videogame streaming sites like Twitch.tv, where individual full-time professional streamers play videogames on a usually daily basis to audiences ranging from 5 to 15,000 concurrent viewers, it’s never been easier to record and distribute your lectures for your students. Programs like Open Broadcaster Software are extremely approachable, even to the tech non-savvy instructor. With laptops including a webcam and mic, the barest minimum quality recording is most likely achievable for free with under 5 minutes of initial installation & configuration time and less than 20 seconds of pre-lecture prep time. Significantly better quality is easily achieved via the use of a simple webcam, external microphone, and potentially a tripod, with total cost for a solid kit running $110 in class-relevant expenses and increasing pre-lecture prep time to roughly 6 minutes, like using a Logitech C920, a BlueYeti mic, and any cheap portable tripod, which is my recording setup. CMS programs like Canvas include built-in media hosting functionality, which is what you see in the screenshot above, in case you only want to expose your lecture videos to your current class; Instead hosting them on a public resource like Youtube or a self-hosted place like on IPFS can dramatically increase your instructional reach beyond those students currently in your classroom. Both Canvas and Youtube include automated transcription systems costing nothing to use (though Youtube’s in particular is flooringly inaccurate at any rare or remotely technical term) and are compatible with uploading & auto-synchronizing transcripts of your own should you have them.
The benefits for recording lectures and sharing them this past semester in my/Dr Wicks’/Dr. Asbeck’s ~100person Mechatronics course cannot be overstated. Students could re-watch lectures to better absorb the content, and were more likely to do so because the playback speed can be varied anywhere between absurdly slow and too fast to comprehend. They can actually listen and ask questions in class because they know they don’t need to take explicit notes in order to have a record of what was discussed. Students unable to attend class, whether due to disability, social, or financial reasons, could easily still see the exact same lecture as those who were present. When giving live demos, such as coding the microcontroller to do a certain behavior or demonstrating the debugging thought process, students can rewind and watch my screen as I do it, pausing and unpausing as they follow along. Students for whom english is their second language, or hard of hearing students, could actually see my lecture with captions! As I move toward sharing them publicly, my lectures can reach so many more people, beyond merely the students who happened to get into my course and attend that day, including people who could never have made it into the college in the first place due to finances or race, gender, or class barriers.
I’ll share a detailed tutorial with pictures later, in a future piece on this blog, but a great place to start is simply using OBS, whatever CMS you’re already using, and your laptop’s built in mic and webcam. Here’s an imperfect example recording, my “Sensor Cornucopia” lecture describing the immense array of different sensors available to the mechatronicist and providing the framework by which I organize their fundamentally simple underlying technologies, all captured via my laptop’s webcam and my external $50 Blue Yeti microphone:
Youtube video: Transducers of All Sorts, recorded on Nov. 7, 2018 by Hani Awni for the Mechatronics 1 course, ME 4735, at Virginia Tech. The webcam completely missed my face for the bulk of the lecture; sorry.
In sum:
There’s immense underexplored potential for these new, digital alternative teaching approaches for the modern era, particularly in Engineering education. Fighting to update our teaching practices is the same problem as fighting to focus our engineering instruction on real, human problems instead of purely abstracted math problems, this shift also corresponds to the fight to meaningfully engage with the sociopolitical aspects of our engineering work instead of our current, presumed-apolitical-by-omission-only framing. In taking on this transition, many of our current teaching practices in engineering educational contexts will need to change if we wish to continue to claim to be acting in light of current research.
This weeks readings had an encompassing set of views ranging from the use of laptops, phones, and/or other digital technology in the classrooms to rethinking teaching and learning from game design to a new culture of learning revolving around creativity and imagination using games to facilitate that kind of learning (Kamenetz). Whew, there is a … Continue reading Considering Video Games and Play as Criteria for Course Design→
If you are a social media user, you have noticed that in the last weeks many people are posting then-and-now profile pictures: the ten years challenge. Even though many might believe that this is a movement created by Facebook to train their facial recognition algorithm, I think it is a nice opportunity for me to reflect what changed in my learning process in the last ten years.
Before College... I got my first computer in 2011 during my first semester in college. Up to that time, learning for me was basically an offline process. At my high school, we did not have PowerPoint classes. If we were lucky, maybe in one of our classes the professor could show some pictures in this old projector. It was the closest thing to PowerPoint that we had:
Old Projector
Because we did not have PowerPoint classes, some professors did an effort to give us some handouts so that we did not have to copy too much from the black board. However, the handouts were not photocopied. Does anyone remember this machine?
What is the name of this machine?
We did not have books for every class. Even the classes we did had books for, most of them were borrowed from our school. Therefore, we needed to copy in our notebooks most of the subject taught in class.
Some part of our grade was based in our notebook. We did not have smartphones to take pictures of the board that we would never look at. In fact, we had to practice handwriting a lot. At some extent I believe that this process made me a better writer as I was able to learn a lot of the subject because I needed to read it as I wrote it . Last semester at Virginia Tech I remember one of my classmates complaining to the professor that we should have extra time during exams, because handwriting was a slow process, and everybody was used to write using their computers.
Schools did not have electronic resources
Project Cover: written by hand
I had more opportunities for "hands- on" learning. This is an example of a biology homework we used to do at school.
Example of a biology homework
Do not get me wrong! We had internet on 2011. However, not everybody had easy access to the internet and the school did not have computers in any of the classroom. I remember we had to be really creative for presenting projects. Nowadays, I am used doing a nice PowerPoint presentation for any type of project presentation. Not too long ago, we used to create songs, dance, perform or find new creative ways to present something.
The most common way of presenting projects besides PowerPoints
I have made so many cardboard TV's to present project's and homework:
Cardboard TV example
This book collection was my google up to year 2010 or so:
Barsa Collection
In college ...
When I went to college, everything drastically changed. I went to a good private school and so, they had many resources that I was not used to. It took me a while to get used to the "PowerPoint class idea". Even though my whole life I was exposed to the traditional lecture-oriented classroom, the lack of technologies forced us to find creative ways to engage students. In college, learning became quite boring. The creative ways were always based on "showing videos" or "PowerPoint presentations". I had to learn basic rules to write academic documents. I did not even know what a citation was. It was a difficult change and I had to start taking computer classes and start accepting more about the idea behind computer programming. However, not everything was more difficult came with hardship. Doing homework and projects became an easier process. Google reduced immensely the time I spent looking for references.
However, I feel that I learnt more how to Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V. Because I did not have to handwrite anything, I could only scan read most of my references. In fact, in less time, I had more information (But, do students really read the references? ). Also, I basically did not need a notebook for school as I was used to do my whole life!
Exchange Program ...
In 2014 I came to the US in an exchange program and I started learning English. The way that I understand learning drastically changed. I had came in contact with many technologies, and I started to get to know basic tools that could make my learning experience more interesting. Also, there were so many games in the classroom that the same subject I learned in Brazil taught me something different.
From this phase of my life, the most important thing that happened to me was learning English. Up to that point, everything that I knew was taught to me in Portuguese. In this sense, my references were limited to my language. There were many important things related to my major that I could not find in Portuguese. For the first time in my life, I had no limit to things I could learn. In English I could find just about anything I wanted. Also, I started to realize how manipulative the news I was getting in my country were.
Now ... Nowadays I am surrounded by far too much information. I am connected to many social media and I spend a lot of time keeping up with them. There are times that I feel I should delete some, but even my school duties here in US obligate me to keep them. Not too long ago, I did not have a smartphone and now I have trouble focusing in the classroom without getting distracted by other things on my phone. I still feel like I am behind on the understanding of some technologies that are common in the US but not in my country. I have access to many resources, but I do not fully know how to effectively incorporate them in my daily learning life.
How about you? What has changed in the last ten years?
This week had interesting timing as I spent much of my “free” time looking at mobile conference app websites. A lot of them emphasize that you can gamify (yeah, it makes me uncomfortable that this is a word too) your conference to get people really involved/invested in the conference. Then I start reading about the same idea for learning. I had previously seen this for learning good habits, and I think many of us have play exam jeopardy or something similar to try to make learning fun.
However, the quest to learn floored me. The amount of emphasis on all aspects of the gamification process is astounding. This is a tremendous way to get children involved and critically thinking about problems. Programming your own games requires you to explicitly solve many tiny problems that you normally wouldn’t realize you’re solving. This teaches kids to critically asses everything they do, but in a fun way. It’s absolutely amazing really. I can’t help but be tremendously jealous of these young programmers.
This brings me to my next point though. The money that quest to learn must have, to supply Macbooks to students, is way out of reach for most schools. Even today, teachers across the country are complaining about basic teaching supplies like pens and pencils being out of reach. I can’t help but feel that this program comes from a place of tremendous privilege that is unobtainable for the majority of schools in this country, and certainly in the global community. The learning techniques are wonderful, but unless we change our funding priorities in a big way, they are only going to facilitate a larger divide between the haves and the have-nots.
What are your thoughts? Is gamification the future of teaching? Is it a temporary fad? Or is it another tool for gentrification?
When I was in undergrad, on top of a full course load each semester because my major was Psychology and Pre-Med and I participated in the Honors program, I worked 30 hours per week–20 hours in the Bursar’s Office and 10 in the Tutoring Center. I started working in the Tutoring Center the summer after my first year as a Chemistry tutor at the recommendation of my Chemistry professor. At first, the idea of tutoring was terrifying because I felt I was in no way an expert in Chemistry and I did not know how to convey the information any better than Dr. Sinski. Even after attending tutor training (our Center required every tutor be at least Level 1 certified by the College Reading and Language Association), I did not feel much more confident. Of course learning about active listening and learning styles and types of difficult students was interesting, but none of it seemed to relate to what actually happened in tutoring sessions. Yes, I had students with different learning styles and some were “difficult” students and I listened to them actively, but I wanted tips for actually making my specific material easier for them to comprehend.
Eventually, I realized I wasn’t going to get those tips from any training, but from experience with what worked and what didn’t. I had the tools in my toolbox to get students thinking–the Socratic method, scaffolding, etc.–and I could build rapport with students such that they would be honest and tell me. That was when I realized that the mantra from tutor training that always seemed the most annoying–“you are not a teacher, you are a peer learner”–was perhaps the most important. The point of being a peer-learner was that you should not re-teach the material as you are not an expert, you should simply guide students to the correct answers and better learning by providing tricks for studying and remembering. However, this realization made me think that perhaps everyone would learn better and have a better classroom experience if teachers considered themselves peer learners.
A teacher as a peer learner would be the classroom facilitator, but they wouldn’t just lecture. They would lay a groundwork and then let the students guide the course, just like we would let tutees guide our tutoring sessions. In Contemporary Pedagogy class, several voiced how students do not do the reading before class, so it is difficult to have meaningful discussion. However, I feel like this stems from the fact that students expect that the teacher will lecture on the material regardless and they will then have all the information to do as well on the test as they feel they need to do. But what if we undermined this expectation by changing the way that readings are used for class–not as materials to be taught for adequate knowledge as obtained by testing, but as materials for completing learning activities in the class. For example, in two readings for this week’s Contemporary Pedagogy, A New Culture of Learning and Setting Students’ Minds on Fire, the authors mention how basing the course on an active learning paradigm, such as having a show and tell aspect demonstrating projects created using the skills from that week’s readings or playing a Reacting to the Past game where every student has a role in a debate making history come to life lead to students reading materials not assigned and engaging with fellow students about the course. By working on these projects with students, the teacher can act as a peer learner.
As a chemistry tutor, I eventually did find those tips about how to better get the content “point” across to students, but it was by working through problems with them and making mistakes. When a mistake is made, and you work to learn how to fix it, you never make the same mistake again. Eventually I felt like I learned all the pitfalls to solving Chemistry problems (I didn’t, but by final year tutoring, I had found all the ones my students would come across). And I had accumulated many tips for making content easier to remember (I had a great 30 minute spiel about how to name compounds properly and a flowchart for any conversion problem), but I did not develop them by myself. As a teacher now, and in the future, I don’t want to teach in the traditional sense. I want to be a peer learner. Even in my own field, new research will continue to develop and I will never be a complete expert in the sense of knowing everything there is to know about psychology (or even my niche within it, biological psychology). So, because as a peer learner you are humble and accept help from outside sources, the idea of having a digital aspect to the class is welcome, rather than something to worry about as a distraction. We’re all human, we all get bored, and some content just doesn’t excite us no matter how much our peer learner tries to show us how it relates to our life and interests (believe me, the beauty and importance of chemistry is challenging to get across to students who only seem to care about running track). But we can try to make it fun, and inclusion of games is just one way. I often directed my students to Sporcle for chemistry practice, and I frequently use Kahoot in presentations for seminar classes in grad school. Our students should want to win. Like the students at Quest to Learn, if learning is focused on developing practical skills to solve more problems (learning like occurs in video games, where you do not move onto the next level if you are not ready to learn it–like scaffolding in tutoring!), then school work becomes not only much more exciting, but also much more practical for doing jobs in the digital age.
One final point: because our students are digital learners, even if it is difficult (for example, I myself am terrible at games and coding and most things related to technology), we need to embrace digital resources. That’s also part of being a peer learner–you have to meet the tutee where they are. You can only be helpful if you can keep up and make the material applicable to how they live. Truly, technology can make all the difference. I often think back to when I attended Thrivals 3.0 at the IdeaFest in Lousville. The readings for this week aligned so perfectly. A researcher there spoke about how kids could teach themselves as demonstrated by his Hole-in-the-Wall project. Basically, he just stuck a computer in a wall with no instructions for use in a slum and kids quickly learned by working collaboratively how to use it. As a teacher who is also a peer learner, we can both be the provider of the “computer” and one of the kids learning from the group.
