Month: February 2016

A dichotomous key is a useful tool that practically anyone can use for identifying plants. “Is the bark smooth? If so, go to step 5. Are the leaves serrated? If so, go to step 8. Your tree must be is a beech tree.” Of course, in a plant identification class, using this step by step plant identification key would be considered cheating. A good horticulturalist should have these steps memorized then, right? Actually, no.

The woody landscape plants identification lab is a class I’ve taught for six semesters now. As the course name infers, students learn identification features (e.g., leaf shape, bark color, fruit size, etc.) of plants typically used in landscape design. As part of their evaluation, students are required to correctly identify these plants by their common and botanical names, on the spot, as we walk through campus. Without a doubt, students’ greatest struggle at the start of this class is that they try to get by with memorizing a few ID features for each plant and forget to look at the big picture—to literally step back and consider context. This is what I call the mindless, “dichotomous key approach,” and it doesn’t work; nature doesn’t have a mold. For example, after having incorrectly identified a plant, a student will comment, “but that tree isn’t supposed to be crooked like that.” My reply is something along the lines of “…and that tree didn’t expect to get hit by lightning.”

Ellen J. Langer (2000) defines mindfulness as “a flexible state of mind in which we are actively engaged in the present, noticing new things and sensitive to context.” She asserts that how we teach may be more valuable than the material we are actually teaching. After having read Langer’s article, I had a teaching epiphany. My students don’t need a longer list of differentiating anatomical features to improve their ability to identify plants. They really just need to remember to think. From here on, my teaching strategy for this course will be geared more toward how to think about plant identification, rather than what to remember.

Have any of you had a similar experience in your field?

Literature Cited:

Langer, E.J. 2000. Mindful Learning. Current Directions in Psychological Science 9(6):220-223.

According to National Council for Excellence in Critical Thinking, critical thinking is “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action.”

Everyone endorses the teaching of critical thinking and every teacher try to build their teaching philosophy. But critical thinking taught in what fashion? And how to evaluate teaching effectiveness for critical thinking?

In the field of Geography, there is a growing need for software training, especially for GIS and remote sensing. I think the best way to learn software is a question-driven approach or a project-oriented approach. Most of GIS and remote sensing courses use computer labs and customized class projects to help students to get familiar with software packages, and more importantly, to improve their skills in computer-aided problem-solving. Based on my experience as a teaching assistant and an instructor, two types of strategies are used mostly for computer labs. The first one is providing students with detailed step-by-step lab instructions. Students only need to follow the instructions and click the button even without thinking. There are less simple questions from students because they have all the information. But at the end of the courses, many students still know little about the software techniques. The second one is providing students with problems, goals and plenty of data. Students need to select their methods and data to support their analysis. It encourages students to think critically to solve the problems. Some students will find multiple ways to reach the goals and bring good ideas for their class projects, but many others, especially undergrads, still rely on instructors and teaching assistants to tell them step by step. They complain the second method is too hard and time consuming. They suggest instructors should provide step-by-step instructions from their evaluation. In such cases, evaluation is not effective. How to solve this mismatch problem?

As an Iranian who was born during a huge baby boom after the revolution, I have experienced how wasteful and useless is the standardized test.  The university entrance exam in Iran was held since 1969 and it continues till today. Iran education system suffers from lots of deficiencies. The education system in Iran mostly copied from France and it faces few reforms since early of twentieth century. In my opinion, Iran education system needs a revolutionary change. It wastes time and energy of students in a most ineffective way!  Here in this post I try to describe some of the problems of this system and how the university entrance exam kills creativity and innovation in my country.

The first problem in this system came back to tracking. As of lots of other countries such as Germany, France, China, Hong Kong and so on, Iranian students also tracked in different branches when they finish 9^th grade. Students should choose between academic track and vocational track. In academic track there are four theoretical branches: Mathematics and physics, Biology, Humanities, and Art. In vocational track there are lots of applied branches which have a goal to provide technicians for country. The government tried to encourage more students to choose vocational track back to early 90s but the reform program in high school at that time was totally failed. Students who choose to go to vocational track could get vocational diploma and they only can take associate exam and earn associate degree. Although after they earn associate degree, they can attend in another exam and if they earn good points at that exam they can enter to college to earn bachelor degree, the total process is both time consuming and risky. In addition, traditionally, more talented students choose the academic track since they will have chance to go to the best colleges of the country. Families don’t like their children choose vocational track because they think it is risky, time consuming, with less social prestigious as well as lower peer effect during high school. As a result all reforms have been made to improve the situation of vocational track has been failed.

At the beginning of grade 10, student should have chosen their field. Again, another sorting happened among students and it causes lots of troubles for them in future. Most families in Iran have a desire for kids to be either engineer or medical doctors. The situation is much better now due to high unemployment rate among engineers and doctors in Iran but in my time, lots of families forced their kids to choose either mathematics or biology branch in high school to have a chance to be either engineer or medical doctor. I have seen this phenomenon among lots of my friends and later on in university they faced with depression, having a reluctant feeling to continue their education, wasting their times and energy and so on. Other than families’ forces, there is not enough clear information regarding to different path of that important decisions. Teachers in high schools encourage talented students, especially those with higher grades in mathematics, to choose mathematics and physics branch. Those who are good in math and biology encourage choosing biology, the rest of students choose either humanities or Art. Because of this sorting, the resources (students) may allocate inefficiently during high school. Even if a student is free to choose the branch based on his/her own interests, since s/he faces with weaker peer groups in humanities or Art, s/he may prefer to choose mathematics in high school and then take art or humanities entrance exam for college. These cultures along with the system itself cause wasting time, energy, incentives, and resources.

The second problem of the system came back to national university entrance exam. Best universities in Iran are public universities and the private universities (where Azad University is the largest of them) are not as good as public universities. The problem I try to explain here is not as severe as my time because the student population declines drastically due to family planning run since end of 1980s. In my time, more than 500,000 students participated in mathematics exam and less than 50% of them would be eligible to choose major/college and among those 50% qualified students, less than 50% of them went to college. For instance in 2003, the year I took that exam, about 1,400,000 students participate in entrance exam in all branches and less than 250,000 were admitted for college (about 17% of them). As a result, lots of students would take the entrance exam again or go to job market. Those who went behind the exam would not have good situation. For boys it is not good because they should go to military service and put two years of their lives for that task. For girls, it is not good because few job opportunities are available for them as high school diploma. It is essential to note that in general women face with lower job opportunities in Iran than men and in addition, whiles lots of unemployed women with bachelor degree are in job market, the situation for those with high school diploma is even worse. High competition in this exam causes lots of social problem. One problem came back to rising inequality of opportunity. The second problem is related to killing of creativity and innovation among high school graduates and high school students. The third problem is students again sorted based on one number and if you were a good test taker specially performed well in multiple choice exams, you would be the winner: you can choose the best university and the best majors. If not, you will end up with the worst results. Since this post is already too long, I would like to explain in details in next post.

I said last week that metal casting students (engineers in general, but especially metal casters) are some of the most static and resistant to change of any at Tech. Well, they’re a faithful reflection of the field as a whole.

In an industry whose main job is to make the same parts in the same ways, for the sake of reliability, predictability, accountability, day in and day out, that repetition bleeds into many aspects beyond the physical process itself. It creates that mentality that change is scary and bad: “we know method A works because we’ve used it for twenty years. We don’t want to risk trying method B.”

There aren’t many fields where a textbook on modern practices and techniques can be thirteen years old and still completely up to date, but I have one, and it is.

I think a large part of the problem is with how casting students are taught. In the introduction and first chapter of Ellen Langer’s book The Power of Mindful Learning, she discusses the dangers of overlearning basic skills, to the point where they become rote and mindless. The danger, she says, is that when a skill can be performed without thinking about it, it cannot be modified or adapted to new contexts. She cites a number of examples where students were given lessons in either authoritative, this-is-the-single-correct-way styles or more open-ended, conditional, there-are-more-options-than-these styles.

This really struck a chord with me because I see the former style so often in our curriculum. The thirteen-year-old text, for example, presents its information as absolute fact, this-is-how-it’s-done. This is one of the two texts that I have available with which to teach my design class. The other text, while it takes an approach that’s very contradictory to the older book, still presents the information as this-is-the-only-true-answer. Neither of them allow for a great degree of latitude or creativity.

I’ve seen it in myself, where skills I’ve either acquired or have been taught have stayed fixed and static because I never thought to vary them or never thought I could. I did my best to fight back against it starting last semester, when I was helping to teach hands-on skills to new students at the foundry. I made sure to minimize how often I said “this is the way to do it” and instead phrase it as “one way that works for me is X”, and I encouraged them to find their own styles.

I want to continue this in my class this semester, especially since it’s a design class. Nothing will create worse designs than a mental framework that can’t change and is locked in a singular method of doing things. I want to encourage my students to get creative, to challenge and doubt what the texts, and I, tell them is “right” or “wrong”. And that’s the beauty of the computer simulations that we can do in my class: they can make as many different designs as they want, get things “wrong” a hundred times, and just keep playing around with it, keep tweaking their designs, until they find their unique vision and strategy for how to approach these issues.

At the beginning of the semester, I asked my students to tell me what they wanted to learn from the class and to describe their learning styles. One student’s response stands out to me in particular after having read Langer’s piece: they said that they would love to get a flowchart for the design process. This is a terribly stifling idea, that there’s a simple procedure to follow to make a good design. If making a flowchart works well for you, then by all means, make one. But I wouldn’t dare create one for the class and have them all follow it. Everyone needs to be creative and flexible, willing to fail, to try new things, because that is how you truly Create.

Because remember, there’s no right answer.

A couple of months ago I decided to read a book written by the author Dr. Robert Siegel: The Mindfulness Solution with the purpose of finding a way to align all my thoughts and to gain the power of deciding whether I want to think in something or not and if its going to affect me. This book shows several ways or solutions on how a person can stop living in their routine life and start taking a moment to stop on the road and smell that flower that was never notice before. Dr. Siegel believes that nobody is alone in this life due to the difficulties that each one of us encounter everyday or as he might say, difficulties that we bring to ourselves. He sees Mindfulness as a solution or antidote that will help us reduce our suffering by living each experience in our lives. Although he does not concentrate his ideas and solutions in the learning process of a student, it can be apply as stated in the book Mindful learning by Ellen Langer.

Ellen Langer express in this book that it does not matter if we change the curriculum of the school, standard of the testing or even increasing the budget for education will make enough difference in the learning process unless students are given the opportunity to learn more mindfully. Each student should be allowed to leave the classroom environment and pursue their challenges by means of different approaches such as Connected Learning.

The author not only believes that learning more mindfully is a solution, but also that there are several myths that prevent people to achieve mindful learning. Before learning something, everybody has to go through the “basics” so that way they can continue learning. By achieving mindfulness, you will realize that this statement is completely wrong, due to the fact that you can not use the same approach on every student. Explaining math the same way to everything student will force them to think that this is the only way to do it and they will perform the calculation mindlessly. Why do you think students does not have the imagination or maybe the ability to go beyond what has been taught to them? When they taught you how to sum numbers you never though that multiplying them was even possible. Albert Einstein once said that if you judge a fish on it ability to climb a tree, the fish will live his life thinking that is a stupid thing to do, in other words teaching students the “basics” will force them to think that nothing else is possible besides what they were taught. Students need to start thinking What else can we do with this numbers? instead of asking themselves is it possible to do something else with this numbers?. Telling themselves “what else” instead of “is it possible”, will help them open their minds and believe that there is always a way; it will help them learn more mindfully.

Although the author presented seven myths, the last one that caught my attention was that people tend to think that intelligence is knowing what’s out there. Knowing what is already there will not allow you to open your mind and reflect on everything that you see because you will believe that nothing else can be done since is already “out there”. The way I see it is that Intelligence is having the ability to see everything in different perspectives and not in the way it is presented. Using the same example of the numbers, a student can know the entire multiplication table and knowing that does not mean that there is intelligence in that student, it means that he manage to memorize those results. Learning more mindfully will let the student deduct that there is more than multiplying the numbers and for me that is the real meaning of intelligence: knowing what is not out there.

Taking into account the two myth presented before, mindfulness will not only allow you to be aware of your daily experiences but also accept them. A student that is allowed to learn mindfully will achieve great things in life, will accept that there is more and that there is no basic or standard way that by knowing it will determine their intelligence.

Where do I begin?

While reading Anti-teaching: Confronting the Crisis of Significance and the first two chapters of Ellen Langer’s Mindful Learning, I kept thinking about a book I recently read called In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms, by Brooks and Brooks. As described in this book, students construct their own understanding of the world and transform new information based on prior experiences.

The book describes 5 principles of constructivist classrooms:

• Teachers pose problems that are relevant
• Teachers build lessons around primary concepts
• Teachers seek and value the views of their students
• Classroom activities challenge students’ uncertain beliefs
• Teachers assess students in daily activities

A common element in these five principles is the importance of questions. To pose relevant problems, teachers ask questions about topics and problems that are relevant to the student. To identify and build ideas around primary concepts, teachers ask questions and provide materials that help students identify their own concepts. In seeking the views of their students, teachers ask students to describe their point of view to better understand students’ reasoning, existing beliefs, and perspectives. To incorporate aspects into the curriculum that challenge students’ misconceptions and suppositions, a teacher first needs to understand what those misconceptions are through questions and feedback from students. And to assess students in daily activities, teachers ask questions to better understand the type of help the student needs.

And while questions are not the only aspect of constructivism or constructivist classrooms, they are an important part. Questions are an important part of learning, and questions should be an important part of education. However, the only two questions typically asked in classroom settings by teachers are: what is the answer? and are there any questions?

These two questions do not inspire, do not encourage, and do not invite participation. So how can we inspire? How can we encourage learning, discovery, and exploration? And how can we create a dialogue instead of a monologue that students mindlessly repeat?

Horace Mann, “Father of the Common School Movement,” is credited with saying:

Education then, beyond all other devices of human origin, is the great equalizer of the conditions of men, the balance-wheel of the social machinery.¹

Historian, Educator and Dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education (1917-1933), Ellwood P. Cubberley, wrote of Mann,

No one did more than he to establish in the minds of the American people the conception that education should be universal, non-sectarian, free, and that its aims should be social efficiency, civic virtue, and character, rather than mere learning or the advancement of sectarian ends.² 

I could end the post now and have made my point. Educational reform is mired in a lack of clarity of vision and an unsure foundation. Mann, being the pioneer and reformer that he was, made his intents on implementing common education very clear. Now 155 years after his death, our goals seem much different. The former system was founded on principles of equality and societal benefit. The current system operates more on degree pursuit and personal benefit.

There is also prevalent within the system a sort of elitism that shuns the trades and glorifies the arts. A strong statement, sure, but nonetheless true. Tradesmen and women have lost prestige within society in lieu of graduates from four-year institutions. There is great need to restore the value of trade education.

We do students disservice in many ways, one such way is our assembly-line method of running students through primary and secondary education, assuming all students equal and promoting university attendance for all. Administrators and teachers ignore individual aptitude in lieu of further education. Instead of advising and enabling students to pursue their interests and natural talents, they are instead told that university education is a necessity. Instead of promoting studies in auto mechanics, mechanical engineering is promoted. The result is a university ripe with students not interested in their studies and confused about their purpose. Continuing the trend of holding all students on equal ground, without acknowledging aptitude and differences, faculty in higher education have to adjust grading scales and expectations, ultimately leading to perpetual grade inflation.

We need to recalibrate, reminding ourselves of what true education is: enabling students to be successful in their pursuits through critical thought. In tandem, we need to restore and revalue trade education, certification, and apprenticeship. These degrees are no less important than those awarded at four-year institutions. This would be a firm foundation from with further reform in teaching methods could stem. So before we really delve into anti-teaching and mindful learning, we need to realize that our classrooms are filled with students better suited elsewhere. Only then will we begin to understand why so many students are distracted and uninterested.

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¹ http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/12/the-decline-of-the-great-equalizer/266455/

² Ellwood P. Cubberley, Public Education in the United States (1919) p. 167