While I'm raising questions about common HE phrases, let me wonder a bit about the use of "transformation." There is no mystery about why "transformation" is a regular part of HE-speak right now. Everyone recognizes that we are in a period of substantial, accelerated change. "Transformation" is a way of describing that change, and expressing the hopes of higher education. Somehow our classes lead to "transformative learning." Or our campuses undergo transformations. Or we build partnerships that transform communities. Or students have transformative experiences--study abroad, service-learning, etc.
I wonder, though, if the tendency to talk about transformation points HE in particular directions, or perhaps masks the fact that we are failing to point in particular directions. What, for example, does transformation mean? Its usage includes two meanings: rapid, large change; and change from one state to another. So, a campus that transforms itself looks quite different than it did before. And a student who has a transformative experience is fundamentally different from who she was before. But to what end? On the question of ends, transformation is silent (though it sometimes has a liberationist tendency, i.e. "I shed my naivete once I was exposed to ________ and now I know I was wrong about _______")
How would HE be different if instead of seeking transformative change we sought restorative change? A couple of ideas:
1. a key task of change would be to re-assemble some sort of whole--unity among the disciplines, or in the experience of students, or healthy ecosystems of learning, or relationships between campus and community,
2. we would assume that students bring with them lots of skills/talents/interests that we can help them meet, rather than weaknesses that need to be fixed,
3. education would be based in a particular view of human nature--that people are at their core decent, and that one of the tasks of education is to defend and restore that decency,
4. that the main task of a community (be it a campus, a class, or a student group) would be to create the conditions (the ecosystem) in which people and relationships can be restored, and
5. ethical questions rather than those about scale or pace would be the central questions for the organization.
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
No more "teaching to learning"
For the past decade, the conversation in Higher Ed has been about shifting from a teaching or instruction paradigm (focused on what the professor does) to a learning paradigm (focused on what the student does (or can do)). It has been a powerful conversation, one that has been able to put all sorts of reforms--service-learning, undergraduate research, multicultural education, learning communities, writing across the curriculum, assessment, etc.--under the same umbrella. It is at least possible now to imagine a movement for holistic change in higher education.
I wonder, though, if the language of the shift to learning undermines one key component of higher ed's historic mission in the US--the civic component. Here is my thinking:
1. "Learning" in the new paradigm is potentially as individualistic as it has ever been. I know that learning advocates are constructivists and believe that learning is socially constructed. But that doesn't change the fact that what students do with their learning is personalistic. So, a student does a project in a group that results in powerful learning. Great. But what is the impact on the broader community of that learning? Not sure.
2. A significant thread in the learning literature focuses on students as agents in their own learning. Especially in technologically enabled learning, students learn at their own pace, determine their own goals, etc. Again, the learning is powerful, but all students moving at their own pace undermines the sense of community that can develop if a class is jointly engaged in learning.
3. "Learning" does not have a clear civic vision attached to it. Learning advocates often claim Dewey or Freire and their politics. And most faculty in HE are liberal and so assume that learning has liberal outcomes. But there is almost no civic language out there that focuses on learning and the common good. If anything, the civic language most connected to learning is economic. That is, advocates in the public sphere call for reform in education so that students can more successfully compete in the global marketplace, or owe less when they graduate, etc.
Now, it may simply be that the civic moment in higher education is past. (Or even more likely, that I am wrong.) But if that mission continues to matter, I'd suggest rethinking the language of reform. In the simplest sense, this means ditching the "teaching to learning" phrase and replacing it with "from consumption to creation." Here is why:
1. A focus on students as creators pushes learning one step further. It is not enough to show that one has "learned" the material, but instead that one can create with it. (I know that learning advocates assume that learning includes creation, but in my experience it rarely demands such a thing. Consider service-learning--too often students learn by taking a place in an already established partnership where they fill a pre-ordained role. Learning for sure, but hardly creation.)
2. Creativity (or production, if you prefer) does have a civic vision attached to it. In fact, it is the civic vision that first animated public schooling in the US. Education exists, in this view, to help people create a life--both in the spiritual sense but also in the economic sense. And that economic self-creation, in turn, animates politics and American culture. Consider Lincoln's call for free labor as the basis of abolition. Slavery was evil, in part, because it made it impossible for slaves to create their lives. But give slaves land and education, and they become free men and women, able to create and required to accept the risk of creation. Today, both Democrats and Republicans are consumption focused. But both the sustainability movement and the economic crisis suggest that we need more producers and fewer consumers--for the health of our local economies and our own spiritual health. (See for example Matthew Crawford's new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft.) So education as an act of creation connects to a deep thread in the American culture.
3. Creativity allows students to plug in to one of the most powerful social movements in the world--open source. "Learners" are encouraged to borrow from open source learning sites--watching lectures from great sages, taking MIT courses in their own homes, etc. But if students are creators, the greater work is not in taking advantage of those resources but instead contributing to them.
4. Creativity re-connects the acts of students and teachers. In the language of teaching to learning, teaching is all about the faculty, learning largely about students. (Think of the implication of these phrases "sage on the stage" and " guide on the side" as evidence of this assumption.) But from the shift from consumption to creation places the onus for education on both faculty and students and expects that they will make similar contributions. As creators, faculty members should harness their best skills--be they as speakers, writers, evaluators, questioners--to the end of creating a great class. Being on the side is fine if it is your best creative position, but if not, don't be there. And as creators students must do the same. So the class has common purposes because it has a common practice--creation.
I wonder, though, if the language of the shift to learning undermines one key component of higher ed's historic mission in the US--the civic component. Here is my thinking:
1. "Learning" in the new paradigm is potentially as individualistic as it has ever been. I know that learning advocates are constructivists and believe that learning is socially constructed. But that doesn't change the fact that what students do with their learning is personalistic. So, a student does a project in a group that results in powerful learning. Great. But what is the impact on the broader community of that learning? Not sure.
2. A significant thread in the learning literature focuses on students as agents in their own learning. Especially in technologically enabled learning, students learn at their own pace, determine their own goals, etc. Again, the learning is powerful, but all students moving at their own pace undermines the sense of community that can develop if a class is jointly engaged in learning.
3. "Learning" does not have a clear civic vision attached to it. Learning advocates often claim Dewey or Freire and their politics. And most faculty in HE are liberal and so assume that learning has liberal outcomes. But there is almost no civic language out there that focuses on learning and the common good. If anything, the civic language most connected to learning is economic. That is, advocates in the public sphere call for reform in education so that students can more successfully compete in the global marketplace, or owe less when they graduate, etc.
Now, it may simply be that the civic moment in higher education is past. (Or even more likely, that I am wrong.) But if that mission continues to matter, I'd suggest rethinking the language of reform. In the simplest sense, this means ditching the "teaching to learning" phrase and replacing it with "from consumption to creation." Here is why:
1. A focus on students as creators pushes learning one step further. It is not enough to show that one has "learned" the material, but instead that one can create with it. (I know that learning advocates assume that learning includes creation, but in my experience it rarely demands such a thing. Consider service-learning--too often students learn by taking a place in an already established partnership where they fill a pre-ordained role. Learning for sure, but hardly creation.)
2. Creativity (or production, if you prefer) does have a civic vision attached to it. In fact, it is the civic vision that first animated public schooling in the US. Education exists, in this view, to help people create a life--both in the spiritual sense but also in the economic sense. And that economic self-creation, in turn, animates politics and American culture. Consider Lincoln's call for free labor as the basis of abolition. Slavery was evil, in part, because it made it impossible for slaves to create their lives. But give slaves land and education, and they become free men and women, able to create and required to accept the risk of creation. Today, both Democrats and Republicans are consumption focused. But both the sustainability movement and the economic crisis suggest that we need more producers and fewer consumers--for the health of our local economies and our own spiritual health. (See for example Matthew Crawford's new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft.) So education as an act of creation connects to a deep thread in the American culture.
3. Creativity allows students to plug in to one of the most powerful social movements in the world--open source. "Learners" are encouraged to borrow from open source learning sites--watching lectures from great sages, taking MIT courses in their own homes, etc. But if students are creators, the greater work is not in taking advantage of those resources but instead contributing to them.
4. Creativity re-connects the acts of students and teachers. In the language of teaching to learning, teaching is all about the faculty, learning largely about students. (Think of the implication of these phrases "sage on the stage" and " guide on the side" as evidence of this assumption.) But from the shift from consumption to creation places the onus for education on both faculty and students and expects that they will make similar contributions. As creators, faculty members should harness their best skills--be they as speakers, writers, evaluators, questioners--to the end of creating a great class. Being on the side is fine if it is your best creative position, but if not, don't be there. And as creators students must do the same. So the class has common purposes because it has a common practice--creation.
Ceremony, Community, and Learning
Last night I attended the graduation ceremonies for City Academy, a small, urban charter high school in Salt Lake City. (I'm City Academy's Board Chair.) I couldn't help but compare that event with the graduation ceremonies at Pleasant Grove High School, where my daughter received her diploma a week ago, or those of BYU and Westminster College which I have attended over the years.
CA graduated 18 students. Of that number one was from Brazil, another from Germany, and three others from Latin America. Many had struggled to get to graduation, and all were thrilled to have made it.
I know these things because their advisor spoke about each of the students, and then each student spoke briefly. By the time the event was over, a close listener could begin to suss out the relationships that made their graduation possible. Most spoke of their families, two women spoke about their boyfriends, several mentioned a couple of challenging but inspiring teachers, and every one talked about how much they had appreciated the help of their faculty advisors.
The event was unceremonious by the standards of PGHS, BYU, or Westminster. The talks weren't fully prepared, the microphones squawked often, the refreshments came from home, parents crowded the stage to shoot photos of their kids, children ran around the room. Graduation events at all of the other schools would have limited this sort of stuff. And they would have been loaded with more ceremonial activities.
The relative absence of ceremony and symbol, and the presence of microphone feedback, homemade refreshments, and meandering kids were not a distraction because CA creates relationships that accept all of those things, because all of those things fit in CA's idea of itself.
CA's relationships are due in part to its mission, and to its faculty, and to its remarkable founder Sonia Woodbury. But they are due also to the school's size and the demands that it places on people. CA has to do everything that larger schools do (assessment, theatre, dances, state reports, etc.) and that means that all of the faculty and most of the students are generalists. That makes it possible for them to be connected to each other in varied, powerful ways.
Bigger schools lack those connections. At PGHS the Student Council did many of the things that all students at CA are responsible for. The same general point is true for BYU, which is so large that every task is completed by some small group or individual.
Westminster is on the cusp of moving from CA's model to that of the bigger schools. Our enrollment is larger than ever before, but even more to the point, there is a persistent sense that Westminster needs to strengthen its sense of community (even though that level of community is far stronger than any I've ever seen in higher ed).
I don't know exactly how a school strengthens its sense of community, but if the lessons from graduation mean anything, it is that ceremony for large schools takes the place of community at small schools. The question, then, is how to craft ceremonies that build community, and how to do it in a way that strengthens relationships rather than replacing them with empty symbols and pledges.
CA graduated 18 students. Of that number one was from Brazil, another from Germany, and three others from Latin America. Many had struggled to get to graduation, and all were thrilled to have made it.
I know these things because their advisor spoke about each of the students, and then each student spoke briefly. By the time the event was over, a close listener could begin to suss out the relationships that made their graduation possible. Most spoke of their families, two women spoke about their boyfriends, several mentioned a couple of challenging but inspiring teachers, and every one talked about how much they had appreciated the help of their faculty advisors.
The event was unceremonious by the standards of PGHS, BYU, or Westminster. The talks weren't fully prepared, the microphones squawked often, the refreshments came from home, parents crowded the stage to shoot photos of their kids, children ran around the room. Graduation events at all of the other schools would have limited this sort of stuff. And they would have been loaded with more ceremonial activities.
The relative absence of ceremony and symbol, and the presence of microphone feedback, homemade refreshments, and meandering kids were not a distraction because CA creates relationships that accept all of those things, because all of those things fit in CA's idea of itself.
CA's relationships are due in part to its mission, and to its faculty, and to its remarkable founder Sonia Woodbury. But they are due also to the school's size and the demands that it places on people. CA has to do everything that larger schools do (assessment, theatre, dances, state reports, etc.) and that means that all of the faculty and most of the students are generalists. That makes it possible for them to be connected to each other in varied, powerful ways.
Bigger schools lack those connections. At PGHS the Student Council did many of the things that all students at CA are responsible for. The same general point is true for BYU, which is so large that every task is completed by some small group or individual.
Westminster is on the cusp of moving from CA's model to that of the bigger schools. Our enrollment is larger than ever before, but even more to the point, there is a persistent sense that Westminster needs to strengthen its sense of community (even though that level of community is far stronger than any I've ever seen in higher ed).
I don't know exactly how a school strengthens its sense of community, but if the lessons from graduation mean anything, it is that ceremony for large schools takes the place of community at small schools. The question, then, is how to craft ceremonies that build community, and how to do it in a way that strengthens relationships rather than replacing them with empty symbols and pledges.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Learning from other high cost enterprises
Atul Gawande's piece, "The Cost Conundrum" in the New Yorker is startling. He describes McAllen Texas, one of the poorest, least healthy, and costliest (at least for health care) places in America. The cost isn't due to its distance from major cities, or its unique health challenges, but instead to four other things:
- McAllen physicians seem to be particularly entrepreneurial, seeking many ways to make money--through owning buildings, clinics, and stores instead of simply maintaining a practice.
- McAllen health care professionals are also particularly non-communicative, meaning that they are unaware of the high costs of health care in their town, unaware of what other physicians are doing, and unaware of the health benefits (or lack thereof) of particular medical actions.
- As a result of (1) and (2) above, McAllen physicians recommend far more tests and procedures than their counterparts elsewhere.
- As a result of (3), health care costs are unusually high in McAllen.
Physicians in healthier, less expensive places avoid (1) and (2) above, and therefore avoid (3) and (4). Instead they have created ways to share information about cost and treatment, and devote more time to patients as individuals, rather than patients.
The article got me thinking about cost in higher education. Education is one of the only other fields where costs have risen with a pace and force comparable to those in health care. And education, at least in many areas, follows the practices of McAllen physicians. We are entrepreneurial, non-communicative and non-cooperative (especially with colleagues from other institutions), and therefore our goal becomes to recruit and place students in programs (treatments) rather than meeting them where they are. (In addition, their funding streams are coming to look more similar every day, with the federal government paying out large portions of the cost of health care and education.)
Higher education lacks one thing that health care has--a clear measure of health. One of the things that physicians in low-cost high quality towns are certain about is how to help people manage their health. Educators lack this. We don't agree on what educational sickness looks like (is it the absence of a degree? a job? certain facts? certain habits of the mind?), and we don't agree on what educational health looks like.
In the absence of clear measures, can we learn from the story of McAllen? Can we focus on students as individuals with particular needs and desires? Can we shape education to meet those specific needs? Can we cooperate on outcomes and treatments so that we increase educational health and reduce its costs? And can we help students, parents, faculty, donors, legislators, and regulators think this through?
Prison Education
The Utah Legislature has mandated a change in prison education. Over the past few years prisoners could take courses that pointed them towards an Associate's Degree. The legislature changed that focus, and beginning on October prison education will be focused on trade skills (and substantially more expensive for prisoners.)
The move raises all sorts of questions, but perhaps the largest one is about the transformative power of education. Our popular culture is full of films in which inspiring teachers lead marginal students to embrace education and remake their lives (Stand and Deliver being the most famous.) And some prisons offer programs that do provide transformative experiences for prisoners. (See, for example, the Prison Dharma Network and Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship.) These transformative programs tend to focus on religion, though, or at least the power of a religious organization to provide structure and meaning for prisoners.
Defenders of the traditional liberal arts make the transformative claim for their content and approach to education. Utah's prison system, though, seems uninterested in these claims, favoring (in the past) a generic general education, or (in the future) job training. So, several questions:
The move raises all sorts of questions, but perhaps the largest one is about the transformative power of education. Our popular culture is full of films in which inspiring teachers lead marginal students to embrace education and remake their lives (Stand and Deliver being the most famous.) And some prisons offer programs that do provide transformative experiences for prisoners. (See, for example, the Prison Dharma Network and Chuck Colson's Prison Fellowship.) These transformative programs tend to focus on religion, though, or at least the power of a religious organization to provide structure and meaning for prisoners.
Defenders of the traditional liberal arts make the transformative claim for their content and approach to education. Utah's prison system, though, seems uninterested in these claims, favoring (in the past) a generic general education, or (in the future) job training. So, several questions:
- Is transformative education only for non-prisoners?
- Where does "transformation" lie on the hierarchy of human needs? Is the creation of a sense of self and humanity a luxury that comes after employment, or a necessity, that gives meaning to employment?
- Does the State of Utah (or any other state) care about transforming the lives of prisoners, if only for practical reasons, ie reducing recidivism?
- Is the State giving any thought to the prisons as a system, that is as an organization that has to provide a range of options if it hopes to rehabilitate real people?
- Where are Utah institutions of higher education on this question? Is our rhetoric about the power of education ultimately too expensive to implement?
Friday, April 3, 2009
Scaling Up
Activists, reformers, legislators, and education leaders all seem to believe that innovation in education is particularly desirable if it can be "scaled-up." By this they mean two things: that innovations that start small must get bigger, and that innovations that start in one place must be transferable to other sites.
I understand their desires. After all, there would be nothing more efficient than finding a reform that could be used anywhere to make learning more powerful. I'm skeptical, though, about whether scaling-up is usually possible. Being a historian, a localist, and a believer in communities organizing to solve their own problems (or provide their own satisfaction) I'm not sure that scaling up works or is even desirable. But being an administrator, I understand the imperative to scale up so that a whole institution works.
The latest reason for my uncertaintly about scaling up is this article that ran recently in Slate. It outlines the successes of KIPP--The Knowledge is Power Program that has spread to a couple of dozen schools in several cities.
KIPP sets up charter schools that follow an intense model--longer school days, saturday school, highly focused teaching and learning, rewards for success, penalties for failure--to make real headway among students who have struggled elsewhere. The author, Sarah Mosle, wonders why KIPP hasn't flourished everywhere, or why it hasn't tried to re-make an entire school district.
She suggests that part of the reason is that KIPP relies on a particular type of highly motivated parent, and a particular type of highly motivated teacher, to succeed. For this reason, it is unlikely that something like KIPP could scale-up (even though the folks at KIPP believe they can).
Commenting on the article, Bryce Bunting wrote the following:
It doesn’t seem surprising that when the commitment level of all of the stakeholders is high, we see good results. That makes me think that in our efforts to find ways to improve education we shouldn’t just be thinking about structure, but about how to increase buy-in for the inherent value of education. Really bad models can have moderate success with a group of committed people. Likewise, disinterested participants can make even the best model or system look bad. The question for me is what people who care about learning can do to bring about changes in the way people think about and view education. What are the tipping points?
Bryce is right, I think, about the power of commitment. I remember reading a study in which students said the most powerful influence on their learning was the enthusiasm of their teachers.
This article on the Hawthorne Effect suggests the same thing--people (including students) respond positively to attention from others.
What does this mean for scaling up? It leaves me with a bunch of questions:
I understand their desires. After all, there would be nothing more efficient than finding a reform that could be used anywhere to make learning more powerful. I'm skeptical, though, about whether scaling-up is usually possible. Being a historian, a localist, and a believer in communities organizing to solve their own problems (or provide their own satisfaction) I'm not sure that scaling up works or is even desirable. But being an administrator, I understand the imperative to scale up so that a whole institution works.
The latest reason for my uncertaintly about scaling up is this article that ran recently in Slate. It outlines the successes of KIPP--The Knowledge is Power Program that has spread to a couple of dozen schools in several cities.
KIPP sets up charter schools that follow an intense model--longer school days, saturday school, highly focused teaching and learning, rewards for success, penalties for failure--to make real headway among students who have struggled elsewhere. The author, Sarah Mosle, wonders why KIPP hasn't flourished everywhere, or why it hasn't tried to re-make an entire school district.
She suggests that part of the reason is that KIPP relies on a particular type of highly motivated parent, and a particular type of highly motivated teacher, to succeed. For this reason, it is unlikely that something like KIPP could scale-up (even though the folks at KIPP believe they can).
Commenting on the article, Bryce Bunting wrote the following:
It doesn’t seem surprising that when the commitment level of all of the stakeholders is high, we see good results. That makes me think that in our efforts to find ways to improve education we shouldn’t just be thinking about structure, but about how to increase buy-in for the inherent value of education. Really bad models can have moderate success with a group of committed people. Likewise, disinterested participants can make even the best model or system look bad. The question for me is what people who care about learning can do to bring about changes in the way people think about and view education. What are the tipping points?
Bryce is right, I think, about the power of commitment. I remember reading a study in which students said the most powerful influence on their learning was the enthusiasm of their teachers.
This article on the Hawthorne Effect suggests the same thing--people (including students) respond positively to attention from others.
What does this mean for scaling up? It leaves me with a bunch of questions:
- Is passion for a program (or a pedagogy, or any other ed innovation) as important as the program itself?
- If success is so dependent on passion, shouldn't we be working on passion rather than programs?
- What are the right areas of passion? Is it possible to build passion about topics/approaches that are also likely to be successful?
- If your job is to change an institution to educate better, but scaling up blunts the impact of innovation, what do you do?
- Are lots of small innovations, if they fit their contexts, better than a few big ones?
Personally, I'd like to see more schools (esp. colleges and universities) modeled on community organizing. Gather people who are passionate about something. Have them focus on a problem. Have them build a response. Respond, tracking the success of the response for the problem and for the learners. Start again. (Whatever this all means...) The process, not the program, scales up.
Open Learning Blog and Legislation
Bryce Bunting, observant as always, sent me this link to a great blog on open content and learning: http://opencontent.org/blog/
Also from Bryce, this link to proposed legislation requiring federal bureaucracies to develop open learning resources for the STEM disciplines.
Also from Bryce, this link to proposed legislation requiring federal bureaucracies to develop open learning resources for the STEM disciplines.
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