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<title>Changing Minds, Changing Lives</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/changing-minds-changing-lives/</link>
<comments>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/changing-minds-changing-lives/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 28 Jan 2015 16:41:15 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=101</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Long ago, when I was still in graduate school, I was a regular instructor of Introduction to Women’s Studies and I would sometimes worry about students who I seemed to not be reaching. Of course, as with many classes, one has to make a choice about which students are reached and which students are not (something I […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Long ago, when I was still in graduate school, I was a regular instructor of Introduction to Women’s Studies and I would sometimes worry about students who I seemed to not be reaching. Of course, as with many classes, one has to make a choice about which students are reached and which students are not (something I didn’t understand at the time). The concern I had was that some of the male students were being resistant and I was realizing how much time and energy, in class, I was devoting to them. And, in so doing, I might have been, ultimately, getting those students to a point where they were understanding the arguments but I was also not giving energy or time to the other students in the class. A fellow graduate student, listening to me talk about this said something that has stuck with me “you can change some students minds, but you can change other students lives, sometimes you need to choose which is more important.” Okay, she didn’t really say it this way (I’m pretty sure she didn’t say the last part) but this is message I took from that conversation.
I had to remind myself of this when after my J-term class one of the students complained (I use this word hesitantly, but it really was a complaint) that the class wasn’t ‘deep’ enough. Of course, this means nothing if you don’t know what the course was. It was a three week intensive (M-F 3 hours a day) class called Moral Fiction: Infinite Jest which involved reading, first, a chapter of Catherine Elgin’s Considered Judgment (one of my most favorite books ever by one of my most favorite philosophers and people) and a chapter from Mark Johnson’s Moral Imagination and then Infinite Jest. We spent 3 hours each day then discussing Infinite Jest, what it was pushing us to think about, how it was functioning as a text to get us thinking about things, how it was making us feel and what we were learning about ourselves (and society) by being forced to feel these things. Now, if you haven’t read the book, well, you should, but read it with others (it’s really difficult to read on one’s own). And, discussing this book, 3 hours a day, just allowed us to begin to scratch the surface (we read ~80 pages for each class meeting). The students reported it was the fastest 3 hour class they’d ever experienced and no one ever really left during the ‘break’ in the class. Everyone stayed and continued talking.
So, while I had one student (who is a philosophy major) voicing dismay at the lack of ‘depth’ in the class; others, non-philosophy majors, talking about how this book had changed their life, how this class felt like they had always dreamed a college class could feel like but never has, that they want to read everyone else’s final papers because they really want to know what everyone else wrote, a fear that the paper they were writing wasn’t doing justice to the book or the class. While I did, for a moment, feel like a failure as a philosophy professor because of the comments of the student wanting more depth (and he said that the course felt more like a book group than a class), I reminded myself of the other responses from students. And, I’m okay with it.
This is, however, a continual struggle for me. The feeling that I need to be doing ‘philosophy proper’ (which means, I think, theorizing, making distinctions, etc.) and my desire to change students lives by introducing them to a new way to see the world. When I’m reflective, I know that I want to be doing the latter, but my fears of not measuring up to other philosophers is ever present. I suspect something in Infinite Jest or other of DFW’s works speaks to this.
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<item>
<title>Telling dreams</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/telling-dreams/</link>
<comments>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/telling-dreams/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Sep 2014 15:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=98</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I dreamt last night (apropos of me thinking that students are really learning in my Ethics class) that I gave the students a brilliantly developed test on virtue theory and they rebelled because it wasn’t a ‘real’ test. With ‘real’ being defined as either multiple choice or short answer. I tried to explain, in the […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[I dreamt last night (apropos of me thinking that students are really learning in my Ethics class) that I gave the students a brilliantly developed test on virtue theory and they rebelled because it wasn’t a ‘real’ test. With ‘real’ being defined as either multiple choice or short answer.
I tried to explain, in the dream, that the point of the test wasn’t for them to get a good grade but for me to figure out where they were in their learning and what we needed to work on. They were not convinced and refused to take the test.
Happily, the actual course (that is, the non-dream version) is going much better than this. They have taken their first if-at quiz (it’s a 30 person course and took the quiz in groups of 4) and loved it. Loved the experience of taking it and have voiced the hope that they will get more of those as the semester progresses.
I have also, in this class, had them do a good deal of reading each others work. We are almost at the end of the first month of the semester and they’ve already had 3 classes which were devoted to them reading each others work. The goal of this exercise is, explicitly, to get them thinking about their own writing. They need, when reading their classmate’s work, to underline the thesis and then paraphrase/summarize each paragraph in the margin. The idea being that in doing so they are outlining the structure of the paper. In only 1 of these 3 classes (the 2nd class when they were taking the 2nd look at a paper) did they ask questions of the author of the paper they were reading.
I didn’t look at any of these papers and yet the students report that the activity made them much more aware of the problems in their own paper and why they were problems. This is a serious success in my ongoing quest to improve student learning in ways that does not improve my workload.
Another resounding success from this class is the fact that one student wrote in his journal that he is really excited because he feels, for the first time ever, that making mistakes in class is totally acceptable and, thus, he is far less restrained from talking in class.
More on other courses in the moderately near future.
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<media:title type="html">Gaughran</media:title>
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<title>IF-AT*</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/if-at/</link>
<comments>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2014/06/09/if-at/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 09 Jun 2014 21:53:06 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=65</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Why, yes, it has been a long time, a very long time. Aside from the usual activities of teaching, service and trying to do a little bit of reading/research/writing, I have also made it through the promotion process and am now a full professor. I’ll probably write something about that in a later post because […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Why, yes, it has been a long time, a very long time. Aside from the usual activities of teaching, service and trying to do a little bit of reading/research/writing, I have also made it through the promotion process and am now a full professor. I’ll probably write something about that in a later post because I was able to successfully make the case that the work I’ve done giving presentations, etc. at teaching and learning conferences constitutes promotion worthy work.
But, that’s not what I’ve been planning on writing today (and, not that it matters, but I do, fairly frequently, plan on writing here — clearly, follow through is the problem).
This summer I’m teaching a summer school class (which I stopped doing after my first sabbatical when I realized that downtime was, at that moment, more important than money but having bought a new house money is more important) and I’m enjoying the opportunity to try some new things. In my semester long course (this is my ethics course which is, essentially, an introduction to ethical theory), I’ve fine-tuned it for years, nay, decades and it is in form that works insofar as students appear to learn, basically, what I want them to learn. But, I still think they could be learning more if I were to just change some stuff up. However, when something is working moderately well, changing it is difficult because upon changing it, chances are it will, at least initially, be less good than the pre-change ‘moderately good’ even if, down the road, this change lead to a significant improvement. So, I have been hesitant to tinker.
But, as a summer school class, we meet three evenings a week for three hours each evening (contrasted with the 3 days a way for 50 minutes a day during the semester) and what works spread across 14 weeks in 50 minute instances was very clearly not going to work in this more intensive format. Thus, a perfect time to experiment.
One thing I’ve heard about doing and even recommended others do is use of “if-at” forms. These are forms that are basic multiple choice response forms with the only difference being that they are scratch off instead of bubbles to fill in. Students have to scratch off the silvery stuff covering the letter corresponding to their answer. I haven’t used them until now because they are expensive, but I bought a 500 sheets with 50 answers on each sheet and then I just cut them up to use 5 or 10 answers at a time. And, since I have the students working in groups, these could last for at least a couple years.
Here’s what they look like :
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I’ve used this once now in my class and the level of excitement over these was unbelievable. I put them into groups and then had them work together (how they did will have no impact on their grade whatsoever). Because they have to commit to scratching something off and can’t undo it, they were extraordinarily animated about figuring out the right answer. There was more discussion, real discussion, over the questions and possible answers. If they scratched off the answer and there was a star underneath, there were cheers of victory. If not, they would try to figure out why it was wrong and figure out which of the remaining answers was correct. After they finished, we then had a good long conversation about the confusions that became apparent in the taking of the quiz (or, answering of the questions, since it didn’t count toward anything and so might not, for that reason, be a quiz).
In fact, there was one answer that I put in the wrong place so that the right answer and the star didn’t line up. When I later noted that I’d made this mistake and that many of them had gotten it correct the first time, they appeared to feel slightly robbed because they hadn’t gotten that feeling of scratching off the silver and seeing that star peeking out.
The next class meeting I didn’t write up a quiz and they were really disappointed. I had to promise to do one for tonight’s class. Which I have.
Now, the task is going to be becoming better at writing the sort of multiple choice questions and mix of answers that really generate conversations that get at the deep issues.
ETA: The first time I did this, the quiz had 5 questions. The second time (the above was written immediately prior to the 2nd time), I had written 16 questions. Sixteen questions took a good 90 minutes for the students to get through (not because they were tough but because they really talked them through). This was too long and ended up being demoralizing for those who were consistently not getting any answers correct on the first try. Based on these two experiences, this is a ‘less is more’ situation.
* Apparently these are called “if-at” because of “if at first you don’t succeed, try again”
 
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<title>Connection btwn philosophy & education</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/connection-btwn-philosophy-education/</link>
<comments>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/09/26/connection-btwn-philosophy-education/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2013 13:50:10 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=38</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Some thoughts I’ve been having about the unique relationship philosophy has to education inspired, in part, by a talk David Concepcion gave about 5 years ago at an AAPT meeting. Also shaped by Amelie Rorty’s thoughts in the introduction of her book on Philosophy of Education, and thoughts from John Dewey. So, here’s my hypothesis […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Some thoughts I’ve been having about the unique relationship philosophy has to education inspired, in part, by a talk David Concepcion gave about 5 years ago at an AAPT meeting. Also shaped by Amelie Rorty’s thoughts in the introduction of her book on Philosophy of Education, and thoughts from John Dewey.
So, here’s my hypothesis (which may be mine, but it also may be Amelie Rorty’s — I know that I arrived it after reading the introduction to her book. Anymore I have a tough time figuring out when an idea is inspired by something and when it was just there for the taking). Philosophy is fundamentally a discipline about education. Of course, it may be more accurate to say that philosophy fundamentally ought to be a discipline about education but part of my point is a historical and sociological one so bear with me.
Philosophers have, historically, been teachers and haven’t served other public roles in the way that writers, scientists, social scientists, religious leaders have. Not only have we historically done this but the questions we ask are, plausibly, questions motivated by the act of teaching. This is particularly true with regard to epistemology — what does it mean for someone to know something instead of merely believing it? What counts as teaching as contrasted with indoctrinating? Ethics and political philosophy naturally comes up as well when one thinks about the proper relationship between teacher and student, the role of education in society, and, then the simple question of what we should be teaching and why.
Of course, Socrates was a teacher as was Plato. Dewey thought that education was applied philosophy and this idea was recently picked up by Kitchner but I don’t think anyone really followed up on Kitchener who hadn’t already been walking in Dewey’s footprints. And, the program *<a href="http://projectzero.gse.harvard.edu/">Project Zero</a>* at Harvard’s graduate school of Education was founded by Nelson Goodman (one of my favorite philosophers) and the program continues to have a strong philosophy influence.
Anyway, nascent thoughts bouncing around in my head.
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<title>A new semester</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/a-new-semester/</link>
<comments>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/09/24/a-new-semester/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2013 14:33:37 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=36</guid>
<description><![CDATA[As usual, the beginning of a semester has me feeling very hopeful. Nothing has gone wrong yet, students still like me, I still like them, I’m not behind in my work (thus, the fact that we still like each other). It’s a good place to be. Of course the trick is making it last […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[As usual, the beginning of a semester has me feeling very hopeful. Nothing has gone wrong yet, students still like me, I still like them, I’m not behind in my work (thus, the fact that we still like each other). It’s a good place to be. Of course the trick is making it last as long as possible. Key to this is staying on top of giving them feedback. Because of the choices I’ve made about how to organize class, choices that make good sense, there is a never ending backlog of student work I can be commenting on.
They keep on-line journals discussing the reading (this is the place where, I tell them, we can have one-on-one conversations). what I’ve realized in the last couple weeks is that what really indicates where a student is in her understanding is the type of question she asks. So, I’ve started making this point to my students (I try to be as transparent as possible as a teacher because I figure if they know why I’m doing what I’m doing and what I”m thinking, that they are far more likely to achieve that which I want them to achieve or they will be able to tell me that something simply isn’t working and I can change things). I’ve realized that students, or at least some students, believe that having questions is evidence of being less smart/good/studious/ etc.. So, I’ve been emphasizing the point that everyone, no matter what their level of expertise, will have questions. And, that I can tell where they are in their understanding by knowing what their questions are. I think (hope) that this will open things up for them and make them less inclined to use the journals and class time as opportunities to display what they know and, instead, will use them as opportunities to deepen their understanding. We’ll see.
I did have a student yesterday come in and tell me (a) that she was sorry about some less than generous claims she’d made about me during an on-line summer school class and (b) that she wishes that she’d taken my class her first semester and that my class has made her rethink her entire approach to school. After reading course evaluations while putting together the case for my promotion, hearing this was a very nice salve to the ego (not that the course evaluations were predominantly bad, but I tend to focus in, as I suspect most of us do, on the ones that are over the top negative.)
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<slash:comments>0</slash:comments>
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<title>Studentship</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/studentship/</link>
<comments>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/03/09/studentship/#respond</comments>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 09 Mar 2013 15:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=30</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Last semester I went to the ISSOTL conference in Hamilton, Canada and the one session that has stuck with me for the last few months is one that focused on the idea of ‘studentship.’ The presenter shared her experience of realizing that, in fact, her primary goal in her classroom was not that students learn […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Last semester I went to the ISSOTL conference in Hamilton, Canada and the one session that has stuck with me for the last few months is one that focused on the idea of ‘studentship.’ The presenter shared her experience of realizing that, in fact, her primary goal in her classroom was not that students learn particular content or anything else connected with her discipline, but, instead, that they learn how to be good students.
I’m sure she spent time articulating what she meant by ‘good student’ but that hasn’t stuck with me but this idea of cultivating studentship as the primary goal in a class resonates with me. It is less that I’m convinced of something new but that this idea has helped me to see a pattern in my approach to teaching that I hadn’t previously seen. Not only is this helpful as a way of developing what I’m doing in the classroom, but it also helps by giving me a way to explain to students what we are doing and why we are doing it.
This semester I’ve been very intentional about teaching students how to read. It’s amazing how grateful they are for the slightest amount of guidance on this front and how stunned they are when it makes a difference in their comprehension. We’ve even created a new verb for reading in a non-conducive to learning way: to Harry-Potter the reading. They sincerely do not know how to read text except for reading from the beginning to the end. I have, in the past, told students that reading to learn is more like reading a map than reading a novel, but this, clearly, wasn’t sufficient to change their habits (why I thought it would be is a mystery). Also, I have, for years, given students reading tips, but these tips invariably included things like “do the reading twice” which is akin to telling me to do my taxes as soon as I receive the relevant tax forms from my employer. It simply isn’t going to happen. And, I’d tell them things like “focus” or “take notes” which is a staggeringly unhelpful piece of advice when they don’t know what to be focusing on or taking notes about.
I heard <a href="http://appl015.lsu.edu/slas/cas.nsf/$Content/Saundra" target="_blank">Saundra McGuire</a> present at the most recent Lilly conference in Greensboro ((a) it was the 2nd time I’ve had a chance to hear her and have some conversations with her and she is quite fabulous and (b) the Greensboro Lilly conference is quite wonderful) and she shared some advice for reading that she gives to students which I then shared with my students (I’m not sure I’ve accurately remembered what Saundra but this is what I share with students, it may be completely what she shared or I may have adapted it — it’s unclear from the notes I took):
(a) Before reading a chapter, read the chapter title, section headings, italicized and bolded words, and the first and last paragraph of the chapter (and possibly the first and last paragraph of each section)
(b) Develop questions based only on what was read in (a)
(c) begin at the beginning and after reading each paragraph, stop and write down a paraphrase of that paragraph
(d) As more questions arise, write those down as well
(e) continue reading until all questions are answered.
Of course, this process takes longer but instead of getting distracted while reading and feeling like one is just missing everything and either ought to reread or just give up, it leads to significantly better engagement with the text. One student, a junior who self-identified as having a learning disability, told me that she’d never before come to class feeling like she could participate but she did after she did the reading this way. She said it took a bit longer, but the pay-off was huge.
And, in all honesty, if students learn nothing more than how to read (and, ask and then answer questions as they are doing the reading), I’d be incredibly happy.
Having started this approach in my classes, I now begin class by having students write on the board the questions they arrived at both prior to doing the reading and the questions that arose during the reading. And then either they get into small groups to select, from the questions on the board, what they, in the small group, view as the question that will be most helpful to discuss or we simply jump in as a large group. If they choose small group, they only spend about 20 minutes or less in the group and then we return to the large group.
I’ve been surprised at how well the discussions are going. They are referring back to the reading in their small groups, making references to specific passages in the text, truly engaging the text. Who knew that giving students a little bit of guidance on how to read could have such dramatic consequences?
They’re learning how to be good students and, quite frankly, the fact that it’s leading to more enjoyable conversations and general feelings of competence means that they’re simply more engaged overall.
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<title>Problem based learning</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2013/03/02/problem-based-learning/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 02 Mar 2013 18:41:18 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[I think my first introduction to problem based learning was an example in which a class (I think it was junior high but may have been high school) was given the task of building a playground for the local grammar school (after doing some reading it turns out this is more appropriately labelled “project based […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[I think my first introduction to problem based learning was an example in which a class (I think it was junior high but may have been high school) was given the task of building a playground for the local grammar school (after doing some reading it turns out this is more appropriately labelled “project based learning”). The idea is that completing the project will require students to learn a good deal, but the learning will be prompted by a real problem that they need to solve and they’ll seek the answers for themselves. This is different from teaching students all that they’ll need and then presenting the playground as an opportunity to apply the already learned material or as an assessment opportunity.
The primary appeal of this approach is the way in which it engages students. They have a reason to learn the material. Also, this approach forces students to figure out what they don’t know and what they need to know. Then, having determined this, they go and learn it.
It turns out that this doesn’t, entirely, fit the technical definition of problem based learning which requires that students are given a problem to solve as opposed to a project to complete (of course, it’s a fuzzy line since projects present problems). Both (and then there is also “inquiry based learning” “discovery based”) are in keeping with Dewey’s idea that students learn best when engaged in something that they really care about and when in control of the process.
The idea is that students must learn to formulate questions, identify their own gaps in understanding and then seek answers. The teacher, in general, is an ‘expert learner’ and so models the inquiry process. Sometimes the teacher provides guidance ‘just in time’ — that is, noting an option for students just at the time that the students might find it particularly helpful.
The challenge for me has been how to make use of this in my classes.
The task, for the teacher, is to come up with a problem that forces students to engage the material that the teacher wants the students to be engaging. The material provides solutions to the problems. But, do the humanities provide solutions?
Building a playground might lead to questions of fairness insofar as group decisions lead to questions of what sorts of decisions are fair, but the task of completing the playground is likely to overshadow spending considerable time investigating the questions of fairness.
And, even the problem of fairness can be easily generated (e.g., get a donation of money and the entire course revolves around how will we spend this money), moving into more theoretical areas takes more time.
Of course, it isn’t impossible, but it’s usually highly choreographed.
My own experimentation trying to engage students has gone the trajectory of using case and then I developed a 3 week role-playing game. The case studies worked adequately, but student engagement, even on the best of days, was limited to the intellectual since they weren’t personally invested the cases. The role playing game has been incredibly successful insofar as the students have enjoyed it and identified it as a helpful means of solidifying their understanding (this is an an introduction to ethical theory class). But, this gets them only to the point of applying the different theories and doesn’t get them to the deeper issues of really understanding the arguments (that is, moving up in Bloom’s taxonomy).
So, I’ve been wondering what sorts of problems help students get to philosophy as a natural place to go for solutions.
Last semester, I experimented with what I think is more appropriately labelled “project based” learning. I gave students in my interdisciplinary Moral Truth class 3 options for a final project and they had to choose one.
(a) develop an interdisciplinary ethics major that would, among other things, lead to majors being more moral than those who were not majors and being able to help guide conversation about morality
(b) figure out how the aspects of the university mission statement which make claims about fostering moral development in students could actually be accomplished
(c) come up with a 3 person team to send to an alien planet with the 3 person team having the task of determining (i) whether the aliens were moral and (ii) how we needed to treat them to be moral.
Admittedly, as with many of my assignments, I didn’t have a completely thought through notion of how each of these would force students to engage the material, but I’ve had good success with developing assignments and then telling students to complete assignments making use of course materials. I did however have a moderately thought through idea of how each of these would get them to engage the material.
I asked them, after the semester was over for anonymous feedback on these assignments, and those who chose the (a) & (b) said that it helped them immensely while those who chose (c) said that it was more fun than a project that forced them to engage the material.
This is, I think, significant because (c) is really the one that I had thought would require the most engagement with philosophical issues whereas the other two could end up more in the social sciences. My thought is that the reason students got less out of (c) is that they didn’t really see the philosophical issues (thus indicating a lack of learning on their part).
All this aside, my concern about all of those assignments is that they weren’t real. That is, they weren’t generated by the students and they didn’t have much investment in them beyond being class assignments. So, this semester I’m trying something different.
I emailed those who signed up for a class of mine* and asked them “if you could ask one, and only one question, and be guaranteed the answer to it, what question would you ask and why?”
From this I got 19 questions, most of which, not surprisingly, are philosophical in nature and are in keeping with what Daloz-Parks labels “big questions.” So, this semester, their task is to answer those questions and I’m trying to help them in a way that isn’t too prescriptive but also keeps immobilizing frustration from setting in.
 
More in a follow-up post because I’ve been working on this one for a long time and just need to publish it.
 
*the class is Paths to Knowledge and is an interdisciplinary course required for all students who are in the Honors Program. The class is supposed to foster and develop in them the ability and appreciation of engaging problems from a variety of perspectives. It isn’t supposed to be a philosophical epistemology course. Though it takes work for me to resist this.
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<media:title type="html">Gaughran</media:title>
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<title></title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2012/10/31/21/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2012 01:37:36 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[Clearly, the plan to post here regularly has not been followed. But, I am going to take this time to jot down some thoughts I’ve been having/share some classroom struggles. My current classroom struggle is dealing with a particular sort of student — the student who thinks he can teach the class better than I […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Clearly, the plan to post here regularly has not been followed. But, I am going to take this time to jot down some thoughts I’ve been having/share some classroom struggles.
My current classroom struggle is dealing with a particular sort of student — the student who thinks he can teach the class better than I can, knows more about philosophy & teaching than I do and has no self-censoring to suggest that he ought not to share these thoughts in class. For the most part, I can deal with any student but when they become combative (as this student is), I tend to be at a loss.*
But, the one thing that I have learned in my years of teaching is that I need to resist my impulse to spend the entire class focused on him. This presents its own challenge because when I decide to bypass this particular conflict and focus on the rest of the students (which is the responsible thing to do) it feels like I’m conceding something to the combative students. This, however, makes clear to me that some part of me views the classroom experience as a battle of wills where it is possible for me to ‘concede.’ Of course, I don’t think that I think of the classroom as a place where I am setting out to ‘win’ but as I reflect I realize that maintaining control of the conversation, the situation in the classroom is important to me and, apparently, not simply because it’s conducive to learning but because my ego has become invested in things.
Happily, Parker Palmer (author of Courage to Teach) relates a similar story where he, after he’d become a well-known speaker on teaching and was widely regarded as a spectacular teaching, was a guest teacher and faced a student who had a similar effect on him. He (Palmer) ended up focusing all his attention on this student and left the rest of the students behind. This, in itself, is an important lesson (don’t focus on one student and leave the rest behind) but the story continued with Palmer having an opportunity to speak with the student. It ended up that the student was Palmer ride to the airport and in the drive to the airport Palmer got to hear a bit of the student’s story and was able to better understand why the student behaved as he did in the class.
So, for me, a number of takeaway points, (a) don’t focus in on one student and leave the rest behind; (b) the way a student is behaving probably has little to do with me and more to do with what’s going on in their lives and I’ve simply presented an opportunity to ‘play out’ some area they are struggling with and (c) my ego can get in the way and I need to find a way to prevent this from happening.
 
 
*These students show up in my class very rarely — maybe 5 students in the last 20 years of teaching — and they have always been white men who are older than traditional college students.
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<media:title type="html">Gaughran</media:title>
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<title>Article about teaching failure</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2012/08/22/article-about-teaching-failure/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Aug 2012 16:57:15 +0000</pubDate>
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<description><![CDATA[A significant interest of mine is creating environments where students learn to take risks. And part of this is helping students to view ‘failure’ as something that is positive (or, rather, can be positive). This is an interesting article on this very point: Teaching to Fail]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[A significant interest of mine is creating environments where students learn to take risks. And part of this is helping students to view ‘failure’ as something that is positive (or, rather, can be positive). This is an interesting article on this very point: <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/08/21/essay-importance-teaching-failure">Teaching to Fail</a>
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<media:title type="html">Gaughran</media:title>
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<title>Support and motivation</title>
<link>https://aapttf.wordpress.com/2012/08/18/support-and-motivation/</link>
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<dc:creator><![CDATA[Gaughran]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 18 Aug 2012 14:21:27 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">http://aapttf.wordpress.com/?p=14</guid>
<description><![CDATA[I just finished facilitating a three day (rather, three morning) workshop on ‘improving teaching.’ In conversations the first day, it became clear that what most folks want are techniques to get their students to do the work that they assign and to do it well. One of the interesting conversation topics was the question of […]]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[I just finished facilitating a three day (rather, three morning) workshop on ‘improving teaching.’ In conversations the first day, it became clear that what most folks want are techniques to get their students to do the work that they assign and to do it well.
One of the interesting conversation topics was the question of how much we should do to help our students learn and how much we should sit back and view whether they learn or not as a product of their own willingness to suck it up and do the right thing. A handful of folks were of the “in the real world no one helps you succeed or cares about how you feel, so why should we?” frame of mind. Not surprisingly, this is not my view, at least not generally.
Another interesting conversation was prompted by the question of whether our goal, as teachers, is to make sure all of our students do well.
I’m fairly certain that all my cards are on the table, but in case I haven’t made it clear, I believe our job, as teachers, is to do our best to help all our students do well. Our job is not to be a gatekeeper to determine who is deserving of particular benefits that come from having been well prepared but to participate in the process of preparing them. Of course, there will be a small group of students who are simply not interested in being reached and the amount of time and energy it would take to get them on board would far exceed what is practical. The key is to get students to believe that they both can do the work and that the work is worthwhile. Sometimes we focus only on the latter and forget the former. This tends to convince students that they are simply not cut out for this discipline. I feel this way about being in musicals. I strongly suspect that musical theater is a remarkably fulfilling, but I also am fairly certain I will never partake because it’ll involve too much struggle and potential public humiliation.
The metaphor that come to mind as I think about this are captive animals. Students come to us after 12 years in K-12 and living at home with some serious supervision. And they have learned to survive or thrive under these circumstances. These are not skills that are actually all that useful once one is in the ‘real world.’ Students have learned to not do the reading, to parrot back what the teacher has told them, to do well on exams by cramming. In essence, to find the easiest route to the good grade. In all this, they are (like most of us) excellent problem solvers.
But, they’ve never really learned how to write well, how to read critically, how to have a productive conversation, how to take notes in way that will be helpful, how to ask good questions, and on and on. Nonetheless, I think we do very little to actually teach them how to do these things. At best we put them in circumstances that require these skills and those who are able to really pay attention and glean something, they are able to do well, but students shouldn’t have to figure out what we want. We should be providing much more support. We should be actually appreciating that they don’t know how to do these things and then really work to make visible what it is we are working to teach them and give them clear guidance on how to do accomplish the goals.
One thing that is enormously helpful is being transparent in what we are doing class. That is, telling students why we are doing what we are doing and why we are asking them to do what we are asking them to do. I think we sometimes treat teaching like magic — that if we let students in on what we are trying to accomplish that the goal will somehow be subverted. This simply isn’t the case. The more the students understand why something is happening, what the goal is, the more likely they are to actually reach the goal. Now, of course, there may be situations where surprising them is important, but we should be very deliberate about this and only keep the purposes or reasonings from students when doing so really is necessary.
The other thing that is helpful is providing students with support before, during and after tasks — giving them the preparation they need, the guidance they need and then the reminders they need. For example, being told what success looks like, what they already know that may be helpful, frameworks for thinking about things. All of these give students something to hold onto for support as they are moving into new ideas or ways of thinking or writing. Otherwise, they are only able to rely upon past experience (which isn’t always helpful and is sometimes downright unhelpful) or hit and miss.
I think of this as us, metaphorically, running along side them as they are learning how to ride the bike, or calling up to them as they are learning how to rock climb. Clearly, bike riding and rock climbing are, under most circumstances, things that one must do by oneself. However, they are typically learned with a great deal of support (physical and emotional).
Having this type of support all works to preserve hope for students and help them to believe in themselves. If they know that we believe in them, they will be much more likely to believe in themselves. Of course, if we ask more of them than they can reasonably do, now amount of us saying we believe they can do the unreasonable is going to help. There is a point where we have to also listen to the student who says “no, I can’t do this right now….it’s too much.” Then, it’s our job to recognize that the student is overwhelmed (a circumstance that eliminates all possibilities of learning) and back off enough to the point where amount of stress is manageable and useful
[I started this last week and am finishing it now. Any disjointedness should be attributed to that and my desire to post this instead of working to polish it up. So, any half articulated thought are there to encourage you to ask questions or tell me how you’d finish the thought]
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