(Originally published on the nmc.org website February-September 2013)
In the Spring Semester of 2013 I embarked on an experiment to see if I could teach a government class based on the principles that I have been advocating:
- Create opportunities for collaboration and teamwork among the students
- Allow the students to explore the material for themselves
- Create an iterative, yet cumulative, format that allowed students to be creative, to take risks, fail without “failing” and build on that for later success in class
- Gamify the course to create positive incentives for the students to push themselves
- Focus on skills mastery rather than content mastery
This series of four blogs under the broad rubric of “Unbound” chronicle that experience and analyze the outcomes.
- Textbooks in a New Media Environment
- The Structure of the Class
- The Grader’s Dilemma
- Teaching Questioning Instead of Answering
Unbound: The Role of Textbooks in the New Media Environment
As I ponder my class in the upcoming semester, I am left with a serious conundrum. What is the role of the textbook in a New Media teaching environment? In the age of information abundance the textbook is a gilded box for information. Its monetary cost to students is significant, yet its benefit is questionable. While content is important, I question if textbooks, especially basic-level textbooks, provide an essential source of that content.
Furthermore, the number of students willing to engage with the traditional textbook format has never been high and may be dwindling as other, more accessible learning materials become available. My father, also a professor, always used to say that if the CIA ever wanted to hide national security secrets, they should put them in professors’ syllabi. No one would ever read them. I am often tempted to extend this joke to textbooks. We should therefore ask ourselves whether there is anything in this box central to the success of our students; if not, what should replace it?
The fundamental mistake here – like with many technologies we deal with – is confusing the means with the ends. The technology that is the textbook itself becomes an object. Professors are wined and dined by publishers. Authors are trotted around. Doctrinal battles emerge over one textbook versus another. Parallel to this, legislators, parents, and students complain about the costs involved. At a public community college, the cost of textbooks can often exceed the cost of classes. Yet very little of this discussion centers on the central question of whether textbooks contribute materially to 21st Century educational needs.
As someone who occasionally teaches a basic US/Texas Government course, I find that the content of basic textbooks is easily replicable. While I realize that there are significant differences in structure and emphasis between one American Government textbook and another, there is very little pertinent information that cannot be found elsewhere for free. Furthermore, in a course with rapidly changing content such as government, electronic information is more likely to be dynamic and up-to-date than anything in a printed book.
In subjects where there is little change in a 101 course, such as English Composition, Math or Science, I don’t see a lot of reason to constantly come out with new editions other than as a moneymaking exercise for the publishers. The argument here usually centers on providing new pedagogical tools to the instructors and, while this may have some utility, in the end none of these tools will replace the instincts of a good teacher. In other words, the demand for new editions relies on what are currently considered peripherals by the publishers and not on the actual content within the book.
Another fundamental issue here is dictating the narrative of a class. Experienced instructors who have developed strong narratives over the years often feel constrained by a narrative dictated by a textbook, which in many cases they don’t control at all. New teachers, however, can benefit from the scaffolding a textbook offers as a way of establishing a narrative for the class. For many years after I started teaching, vestiges of the first textbook I ever used as an adjunct stayed in my class. Yet the textbook narrative itself rapidly faded into the background as I gained confidence in how I wanted to shape the flow of my instructional narrative.
As an instructor I’ve always looked past the textbook because it is only one of many possible means for achieving learning in the class. In many instances it is also a barrier, and when this happens, I have always been ready to turn my back on it (as I would any other technology). Initially, I did this in the form of supplemental readings, and for a while I had a substantial collection of readings to supplement what I perceived as the shortcomings of the text. Eventually, those supplemental readings came to dominate what I was trying to teach and the textbook assumed, at best, a secondary role.
As a full-time faculty member who has participated in the textbook selection process, my experience with technology led me to constantly feel constrained by the structure of the traditional textbook. In Government textbooks, there is often one book that has an excellent presidential chapter but a weak congressional one. I have never found a book that was equally strong in all areas and was perpetually frustrated by our choices in this area as a result. My first thought as a technologist was, wouldn’t it be great if we could mix and match chapters to get the best out of all of the books? Some publishers offered this as a custom printing option, but it always significantly increased the cost to the students both in terms of initial cost and their ability to resell the books, and so it was dismissed as an option.
As time went on, I therefore found I used the book less and less to the point where the last time I taught, I told the students to not even bother with it. This violated several institutional rules, but it made little sense to me to force my students to buy a book the contents of which I would never test them on.
This brings me to another crucial issue around textbooks. An eternal struggle of educators is figuring out how to get students to read them in the first place and finding effective ways to demonstrate mastery of content. However, this ground is shifting as well. In many areas, memorizing content is increasingly irrelevant in a new media age where you can look up anything you need on demand.
I am very conflicted about this point because I recognize the importance of the discipline of internalizing a canon of content, and I believe that this goes to the core of what it means to be educated. I’ve read thousands of books in my lifetime, and I can recall important pieces of content from many of them (I’m pretty handy at Trivial Pursuit as a consequence). It is important to me personally to be able to retain knowledge; this is what makes me an educated person.
However, is this the most important thing I got out of college? I don’t think so. My most important lesson from college and beyond was the ability to creatively play with ideas with rigor using critical thinking. True, I needed to accumulate and build a foundation of knowledge to do this. However, I often look up pertinent facts as time goes on and I move further and further from my college studies. I also use information gleaned from my reading habits to create the basis for analyses such as this one. However, these are, for the most part, things I have read recently, not something I read in my sophomore year of college.
In the end, therefore, getting students to play with ideas is what matters most, and very few basic textbooks do this effectively. Ironically, this is also where my students have their greatest deficits – probably because most of their education up to this point has revolved around basic textbooks. The teacher becomes the one who is ultimately responsible for teaching the rigor involved in thinking about important ideas and concepts such as who is responsible for the fiscal cliff or the general dysfunctionality of our government. More advanced books do contain important ideas, but the basic textbook rarely goes beyond the descriptive stage. New media offers more compelling ways of presenting such information. Also, students’ curiosity is more easily stimulated when we push them to reach conclusions on their own rather than force-feeding them information via the mechanism of a textbook.
So that leaves me the fundamental question I started this thought exercise with: What exactly does the textbook do for me in the classroom in an age of information abundance? Do the negatives outweigh the positives? I believe they do.
However, this doesn’t give me a clear path forward. I am tempted by the notion of using bare bones reference works and then building – or even better – having the students build on that foundation through the creative collection of information and knowledge from a diverse range of sources. This also has the advantage of forcing me to make information literacy a central component of my teaching strategy. I have not, however, found a trustworthy source of this type for Government.
This semester I am using Wikipedia and my own notes posted online as a starting point. I will then task students to consider questions like “Who is responsible for the fiscal cliff, the president, Congress, or someone else?” These will be collaborative efforts, and the output will be a combination of a presentation open to critical response as well as an online blog entry subject to comment and response.
I realize that this amounts to yet another experiment in combining open content with an attempt at provoking intellectual rigor. My past attempts have not been altogether successful. Students are too comfortable learning with textbooks. They provide an easy metric — read the textbook, and I will test you on what you read. So students are often confused by any deviation from that standard formula and frequently rebel. With that said, I go into this world with open eyes and in the spirit of iteration. I have not divined the final answer on this one (of course, I could say that about teaching at large, which is a good thing). For now, I’ll just keep muddling through.
Unbound: Observations on the Structure of the Class
As you may recall from my column in January, I launched a radical redesign of my American Government class this semester. I always start out the semester with a certain spirit of optimism, but I felt it was important in this case to talk about what worked and what didn’t work as I tried to leverage New Media to reshape how I teach.
I structured this class with five goals in mind:
- Create opportunities for collaboration and teamwork among the students
- Allow the students to explore the material for themselves
- Create an iterative, yet cumulative, format that allowed students to be creative, to take risks, fail without “failing” and build on that for later success in class
- Gamify the course to create positive incentives for the students to push themselves
- Focus on skills mastery rather than content mastery
In this installment, I’ll focus on my pursuits to meet the first three objectives. In addressing the first goal, my aim was to create incentives for my students to prepare for the kind of collaboration that they are likely to encounter in the professional world. Very few things in the real world effectively reflect the individualism of what we ask them to do in class. With the interconnectedness of social technology, this is becoming even more pronounced. Therefore, with the exception of the final portfolio, I randomly assigned students to groups. I reshuffled those groups four times over the course of the semester.
So, how well did this work? Getting students to work effectively in groups has been one of my greatest struggles. There is a lot of data to suggest that peer learning is one of the most effective teaching methods. My own experience validates this. I had a class once (in a mythical fairy land – no really) that spontaneously formed study groups and pulled each other along. As a group, they made higher grades than any class I’ve ever taught, before or since.
This was a spontaneous result of the chemistry of the class. I have never been able to make this happen. More often, typical groupwork can be summed up with this graphic from Endless Origami.
To evaluate group work, I used ballots and self-evaluation techniques. However, students tended to inflate everyone’s grades, giving even the biggest slacker full points. This was not a good way to figure out who was pulling their weight in the group. So, in classic economic fashion (I am a social scientist after all), I introduced scarcity into the equation. I limited the number of points that any individual could give out to less than the number of other group members. It turns out that my students would have made excellent communists. Their response was to aggregate the points the group had as a whole and distribute them equally throughout the group.
Considering the self-avowed conservatism of most of my students, I think this sheds an interesting light on the relative value that they place on educational incentives. Grades are so disconnected from financial goals that they assume little or no value in the minds of most students. I could be reading too much into this considering the small sample size (and I’ve had other classes that behaved quite differently), but it’s a point worth considering.
The students’ unwillingness to give each other meaningful evaluations didn’t stop them from complaining about the efforts of the other members of their group who did not pull their own weight, making it extremely hard to evaluate the internal workings of a particular group. As a consequence most of the learning here was of a soft variety. It consisted mainly of counseling students about how to handle these kinds of situations based on my own experiences.
Regrettably, the group work scenarios did not inspire students through their shared sense of purpose or the competitive incentives I’d laid out to explore educationally. In other words, I once again failed to recreate the effect of the class that pulled itself along collectively.
The second major departure in the class structure I implemented was to eliminate the requirement for a standard textbook. Instead, I gave them information frameworks such as my class notes and Wikipedia and then encouraged them to explore more widely. My goal was to give them open-ended information with a basic structure to allow them to follow their creative impulses.
I set this up on the very first day of class, by engaging the class in a discussion of creativity, the role of information and education in today’s world. I then showed them Ken Robinson’s video on education and creativity.
We then discussed how we could construct the course so that artificial boundaries, such as those imposed by a standard textbook, did not limit our creative efforts. For structure I provided my standard Study Guide, which is simply a list of questions organized by topics from the course as well the class notes, which answer those questions.
As I discovered the last time I did this, giving the students the freedom to map their own intellectual journeys is usually a recipe for them not leaving home. While I set minimum work requirements, students continued to do the minimum necessary. For instance, they would post a random articles without meaningful commentary. Many students failed to even look at the basic starting points in my notes or Wikipedia. Then they complained about a lack of structure in the course. Over the course of the semester, the situation improved, although there were some students who never understood or took advantage of the freedom to let their curiosity guide their educational path.
This issue relates to a basic dilemma I seem to face every time I deviate from the standard course structure. Students are unprepared for novelty. They have been well trained in “this is what a college course looks like.” In theory, they love the idea of freedom from their shackles but relatively few of them know what to do with their freedom once it is given to them. This is a fundamental cultural issue we all face as we try to innovate our way out of some of the contradictions of the educational system we have created. Change in this area is likely to come slowly, especially among those students who have never understood the purpose of education or their responsibilities to their own educational enterprise.
The third structural element I built into the course comes from the insights of Dan Ariely’s work in The Upside of Irrationality and his discussion of motivation. He discovered that relatively meaningless tasks discourage people even if they are incentivized with extrinsic rewards such as grades (or money).
I tried to address this issue in two ways. First, I created a point system that was completely cumulative in nature. Students could accumulate points, but they were never taken away. No assignment was graded as a ratio of achieved points/possible points. Second, I constructed the course so that the pieces would theoretically build upon one another. The weekly assignments led to the four projects and the work produced in the course contributed to the Final Portfolio assignment, which I deliberately put in a format that was both public and would persist after the course was over. I also provided incentives for going back and citing earlier student work on Google+ in later postings or presentations.
Getting students to look above the individual task effort and to take a longer view over the course of the semester has always been a challenge. I usually attempt this in some form, but this is first time I explicitly wove it into the structure of the class. I was also hoping that the relative permanence and openness of the Final Portfolio would make it more of a tangible object than something that ends up in my filing cabinet.
It was a mixed success. On the negative side, students, like in my more traditional classes, failed to use the earlier parts of the class to gain insights into the later parts of the class such as recognizing how the priorities of Congressmen tend to undermine long-term goals in foreign or economic policy. Furthermore, almost none of them cited their fellow classmates’ prior work. Even when I relaxed the rules and allowed students to go back and post in earlier topics on Google+ in order to bring up their point totals, very few of them exercised that option.
On the other hand, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the effort on the Final Portfolios (web pages). On the whole, the students improved their performance as they created their individual web pages. No one did worse on this assignment than they had done previously in their presentations and Google+ postings and a significant number of them did considerably better. This is in marked contrast to the traditional finals I had given in previous iterations of the class where students did not typically raise their overall grades through that one assessment.
Overall, the structure of the course did not significantly improve learning outcomes, but it also did not harm them. The class did about as well as past classes did in terms of what they learned and retained from the class. It was my hope, however, that the strong emphasis on group work, the focus on creative exploration, and the open-ended structure of the syllabus would foster better outcomes. Although quite a few students commented that they liked the class and had more fun with it, this was not, for the most part, reflected in the quality of their work. In the future, I may build on the one clear success, the Final Portfolio/web page, to create more assignments like this.
I am still scratching my head, however, about how to incite peer learning and group work as well as how to propel students to outline their own educational journeys. In the next installment of this series, I will discuss my experience and related struggles in creating a more explicit assessment rubric with the goal of gamifying extrinsic motivators for learning.
The Grader’s Dilemma
In every class I teach, I struggle with some basic tenets of our industrialized education system, which inhibit creative exploration of the vast storehouse of human knowledge available to us today. Instead, the first question out of most student’s mouths is almost always, “How do I get an ‘A’ in this class?” or even worse: “How do I pass this class?” “What can I learn in this class?” is a question I have yet to hear. This should not surprise me because our students are well trained by the time they get to college. They have learned to beat the system and skid through to graduation on the skins of their teeth. For students, obsessing over grades is second nature to them (as it is to my own kids).
This construct is harmful to learners because it impedes true learning and creative thought. As someone who has always loved learning for learning’s sake, I find this particularly frustrating. Daniel Pink, drawing on decades of psychological research, shows fairly conclusively that external motivators like money and grades destroy our capacity for creative thought.
The industrialized educational system is always working against my educational goals. It is a lot harder to evaluate skills and assess final product when everyone is looking past that to what their final grade will be. A central part of my pedagogy is pushing grades to the background or at the very least to try to trivialize their effects, but it’s a little like trying to hide green beans in chocolate cake. I fight this battle with my own kids in K-12 and it’s hard with sustained effort, and even more difficult within the constraints of a 16-week class that meets once or twice a week.
I recently changed my focus to make “kinder, gentler” grading. I did this by implementing a cumulative point system. No one failed assignments. It was all a process of accruing points. Furthermore, I wanted to achieve a certain level of gamification using insights from Tom Chatfield such as creating many small rewards and providing them with rapid feedback.
To achieve these goals, I gave each student a code and created a spreadsheet, which, in turn, created a bar graph to show how many points everyone had accrued relative to the rest of the class and relative to the bars necessary to achieve a grade.
Achieving rapid feedback was a monumental task in itself. I couldn’t grade fast enough. Therefore, I don’t know if this aspect of the class was given a fair shake. It was also a major challenge developing a point system that did what I wanted to it to do. The delays in getting this finalized and workable put my grading way behind. On the bright side, the process should be more efficient in future semesters.
The other area that Chatfield mentioned, that of frequent, small rewards, required constant attention on the students’ part, and they were reluctant to take responsibility of their points. While we, as teachers, expect the students to put in consistent attention in the class, the reality is that most students want to be able to check in only on the week of a test or a paper deadline and essentially coast through the remaining weeks of the semester. Although my expectations seemed clear, I found that about 2/3 of the way through the semester, many had failed to accumulate enough points.
The point accumulations reflected posts on Google+ as well as their participation in in-class activities. They were prompted to post twice on Google+ per week as a minimum activity. One post was in response to a question or opinion. The other required them to bring in an outside source relating to the topic of the week. At that point in the semester (the 7th week), they should have had a minimum of 14 posts. No one had 14 posts and about 1/3 of the class had less than 5. I gave them opportunities to catch up point-wise by commenting on others’ posts but this was a real struggle for many of them. It would have been unfair to those who did the work on time to allow the slow starters to make up posts.
The second major part of my evaluation strategy was to articulate to students what I was evaluating I started this out with a frank discussion what kinds of skills should be practiced in college and how the course could facilitate that. I introduced them to the National Education Association’s: “Four C” rubric as I think it nicely encapsulates what I think is important to get out of college and suggested that we use these four variables (Communication, Collaboration, Creativity, and Critical Thinking) to evaluate their performance.
- Communication – How well did students present themselves? These points were given for the quality and frequency of posts on Google+, quality of presentations in-class, and the clarity of their portfolio website.
- Collaboration – How well did students work together to achieve the common goal of learning? These points were given for things like group self-evaluations for in-class debates, presentations, and commenting on Google+ posts.
- Creativity – How effective were students in pulling together evidence into an argument? These points were given for presentation arguments, debate arguments, and the creative use of evidence in Google+ posts.
- Critical Thinking – How reflective were students about the arguments they were presenting? These were the hardest points to earn. Students had to demonstrate self-awareness in arguments, an ability to see both sides of an issue, and to be able to integrate that into their presentations, posts, and portfolio.
The problem that occurred as I reached this level of granularity was that I had created a four-headed hydra trying to translate the Four-C’s into a workable grading scheme. This was one of the key reasons that I didn’t get feedback to the class as quickly as I wanted to. I essentially ended up developing a manual Learning Analytics system to translate the variables into points.
The net effect was that I forced myself into an incredibly complex grading system that took me half the semester to figure out. The extent to which I applied tech was limited to creating a complete 12-page workbook in Numbers (it did better graphing than Excel). Frequent rewards meant that I had to deal with extremely small numbers and never really achieved the level of finesse that I usually demand from my grading.
Over and above the logistical hurdles that I created for myself, I don’t think the grading system taught the students much, if anything, about their relative skills in the four areas. I did discuss how I was assigning points while discussing grades within the class. However, I could tell the students were almost entirely fixated on the total points, not how they could earn points in communication versus critical thinking, for instance.
My struggles with the grading system and my misstep in developing a more constructive system was perhaps the most disappointing result from this part of the experiment and goes back to my original dilemma. I never figured out how to move the discussion beyond, “How do I pass this class?” to “What can I learn in this class?”
It seems I’ll never be able to get beyond the fundamental realities of needing a final grade in the class as long as the larger educational system uses the transcript/degree as the final yardstick of educational achievement. Perhaps a more successful application of gamification principles would at least make this part of the class more fun and trivial.
The students themselves live with fundamental contradictions in their own attitudes toward their educational investments. On the one hand, they play the grading game with seeming indifference when it comes to the value of an individual class. On the other hand, they are totally fixated on their final grade as the only valuable thing they get out of wasting their time in a class they don’t want to take in the first place.
New Media may give us some routes forward but until it undermines these fundamental contradictions in assessment, technology’s transformative power will be very limited. Solving the grader’s dilemma may require adjustments beyond the capacity of any individual educator to achieve, but I’ll keep trying.
Unbound: Teaching Questioning Instead of Answering
While you may get the impression from my earlier posts that I am a big fan of radical experimentation, it may surprise you that in many ways I am deeply conservative when it comes to business of education. I am very concerned that our students come out of their educational experience deeply changed in the way that they view and interact with the world. I believe that discipline means rigor and a method of thinking rather than simply a subject matter. Most of all, I want students to become creative problem solvers. The final installment of this series focuses on whether or not I achieved these deep-learning objectives in the classroom experiments I carried out during the Spring 2013 semester.
Fundamentally, I judge the success or failure of my efforts through the lens of whether or not my students are better questioners at the end of the semester than at the beginning. I firmly believe that the real shortcoming of most of my students has nothing to do with their intellectual capacities but rather with their learning skills. Our secondary institutions, by and large, do a lousy job with this part of the educational process. There are people who take to learning naturally and approach knowledge with a deep intellectual curiousity, There are those, on the other hand, who struggle to understand the purpose of learning. For the latter population, it’s essential to establish what motives drive learning and the pursuit of knowledge at the very beginning of the course.
Therefore, the first thing I always do with my community college students is to open a discussion about purpose. I ask them “Why are you here?” and we have a wide-ranging conversation over the utility of a college degree. It was surprising at first how few of them had actually considered these questions before. Many of them were simply on autopilot: “Now I do college.” No one really tells them what the point of college is, in part, because so many of us have lost sight of what that is.
This is, in part, because so many in the educational community have bought into the notion that the primary purpose of higher education is to get a job. While this is true (to an extent), the line between getting a degree and a successful career is often less clear than is spelled out in the media, our promotional literature, or, most of all, in our students’ expectations.
My own story is one I like to relate to my students to illustrate this point. I graduated with degrees in political science and within a year found myself working for Apple Computer in a support role and then transitioned to a system administrator position with Motorola. I ask my students to imagine how my liberal arts education helped me in those positions. Simply put, I was prepared to think critically and ask questions. That is, the same methods of questioning and problem-solving used to explore the political notion of Ethnonationalism can also be employed to figure out why a Mac IIsi would not connect to the network.
It should also be pointed out that I seek these kinds of problem solving skills in my role as an employer. During interviews, I prompt applicants to figure out a troubleshooting issue. The truth is, I am not really interested in whether they get the technical details right. All I want to know is how they attack problems they do not immediately understand. The wrong starting point is to say, “I pull out the manual.” The vast majority of problems are not contained within the manual. Of the 20 or so applicants I interviewed last year, less than four were able to deal with that question effectively.
The ability to do creative problem solving is what marks an effective college graduate from someone who has merely absorbed a large quantity of data from lecture and readings. Without a doubt, students need foundations of knowledge, but what they do with that information once they have it is far more important than remembering every last detail. After all, once the skills are intact, the information can always be referenced. I think this is the critical factor in separating those who can get a job and those who are successful at sustaining a career. College should aim for the latter, but this is a lofty goal that is often hard to explain in concrete detail to my students.
Therefore, a primary focus of my redesigned class, as well as most of the classes I have taught for the last decade, has been on developing relevant skills rather than an undue focus on content mastery. This focus creates at least three serious challenges. First, that measuring skills is far more difficult than measuring content mastery. Second, students are trained to focus on content thanks to K-12’s regimen of standardized testing. Finally, skills mastery at this level is an inherently slow process and, within the context of a traditional semester-long class, is hard to measure.
As I discussed in my last post, I attempted to evaluate my students on three criteria: communication, collaboration, and critical thinking. From the grader’s perspective, I would argue that I got to 80% of where I wanted to get in terms of accurately evaluating them based on these criteria. In other words, the actions that they exhibited in terms of how well they communicated with me and with their fellow students, how well they collaborated, and their display of critical thinking skills were fairly accurately reflected in the final grades in the class.
Critical thinking points were the hardest to get. It’s fairly easy to do the quantitative work necessary to demonstrate communication (posting frequently is a good start); it’s a little bit harder to demonstrate that you effectively work with others; and it seems to be a lot harder for students to display deep thought when engaging in these other two activities. On the flip side, as I discussed in “Grader’s Dilemma”, it was an entirely different challenge to make sure that distinctions between the C’s were understood by the students.
For all of the aforementioned reasons, teaching critical thinking (and questioning) has always been my greatest challenge as a teacher, but it is also the Holy Grail of what I am after in my classes. I therefore made this particular “C” a focus of my class redesign.
The highly interactive nature of the in-person portion of my course was one of the key methods I used to generate critical thought. Debates and simulations are a good way of working through these skills in the classroom. I learned that presentations were less effective, especially at the beginning, because direct criticism of poor critical thinking is often counter productive and can easily embarrass presenters in front of the rest of the class. I may have to rethink this strategy the next time around. Debates fared a little better, but this class, in particular, was not passionate about the topics. This was at odds with my experience doing exactly the same exercise with earlier classes where the debates sparked lively competition and discussion. Again, this could be a matter of class chemistry. While reshuffling groups, which I did, can mitigate the chemistry problem somewhat, in this class that issue was never really overcome. The purpose of these exercises, however, was to exercise critical thinking and questioning skills with my immediate feedback.
I was hoping that the demonstration of these skills would come out more in the Google+ postings, but these were largely disappointing in their results. Online discussion points for critical thinking represented on average less than 8 points per student which translates into less than 5% of their total earned points. Although I was gratified to see that the web pages that were the final portfolio assignment demonstrated far better mastery of critical thinking skills than the preceding exercises in the class (average of 37 points or 31% of the average grade for the assignment). Perhaps the greater latitude for reflection in the assignment, as opposed to the posting (which was ongoing), resulted in a better thought through product. Alternatively, it could have been a reflection of the cumulative nature of learning on Google+ that resulted in better work on the web pages. In order to assess what is creating this level of critical thinking, I plan on adding a second web page project to future iterations of the class to see if I can rule out one of these two possibilities.
If it isn’t clear by this point, I am firmly convinced that if higher education is in the business of selling “scarce” content in an age of Google, MOOCs, and Wikipedia, institutions of higher learning will become obsolete. If our students’ ability is confined to memorized mastery of a subject whose currency is out of date the day they graduate, they are equally doomed. I am also not naïve. I know that
99.5% of the content I provide in my class is forgotten the day after the final exam. Since it is clear that providing the answers is not really a viable option any more, we need to instead focus on teaching questioning and our effectiveness should be measured as such.
As educators, we should always strive to teach a love for learning. If students are not self-motivated in their efforts to understand the problems around them, they will never be able to the do the higher-level work demanded of college graduates. A quote from Patrick Rothfuss seems to articulate my point concisely: “It’s the questions we can’t answer that teach us the most. They teach us how to think. If you give a man an answer, all he gains is a little fact. But give him a question and he’ll look for his own answers.”
As a teacher, I cannot predict the future but I can predict with high confidence that it will be very different from the present. In a rapidly shifting world, teaching our students to question effectively should be our ultimate goal as educators. I only hope that in some small measure I’ve been able do that with my students. One of these days I hope to figure out if I’ve succeeded.