|
|
Teaching
other sections
personal | scholarship
service |
mentoring
welcome page: table of contents
this page
development of
my teaching
splitting the veil of authority
factory-model pedagogy
self-evaluation
limits of my
pedagogy
future of my teaching
Medaille asks all faculty to be generalists, to teach broadly in their disciplines. At other schools, in large departments with dozens of sub-sub specialists, this breadth would be unnecessary and unthinkable, institutionally redundant and professionally perilous.
|
The two processes common to all my courses: |
One of the characteristics of Medaille I have found most congenial is this lack of specialization. Personally, I don't feel as though I have a discipline in the sense that most other faculty seem to. My situation is parallel to that of the writing courses. What will the students write about? What do I write about? On occasions other than when I am writing about writing, whatever I'm writing about comes from another discipline.
|
As a result, I have over the years, usually as a last-minute response to a desperate chair, taught a variety of courses across the traditional disciplines: humanities, social science, education, honors, gen ed, new media, and business. (See complete list of courses on CV.) I don't know whether I've taught a greater number of different courses than other Medaille faculty, but I am confident that I have taught more widely across Medaille's curriculum than anyone else.
In twenty-three years at Medaille, I have taught almost two hundred course sections in the Humanities, General Education, Social Sciences, Education, and Business departments to almost three thousand students. For what it's worth, that averages to about fifteen students per section.
In reference to the box on the left about the features of my courses, over the years the clear thinking feature has stayed fairly static. I don't know much more about problem-solving and decision-making than I did twenty years ago. However, the other three are changing all the time: a tsunami of new information sources, some fascinating new models developing from human behavior on computer-mediated networks, and a plethora of affordable media tools once reserved for the rich and powerful.
In 1977, I entered the higher-ed teaching profession as a T.A.
(teaching assistant)
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Based on my educational
experience at the University of Texas at Austin, I was high-church, the
equivalent of the Pope offering Roman Catholic Mass in St. Peters.
The teacher
was the most important person in the room, the fount of authority, the person
who spoke the most, often in a language that the students did not understand.
The high-priest teacher judged the students with old-testament rigor, upholding
age-old standards. The students sat in rows facing the lectern, listening
reverently, and staring at the back of each others' heads.
During
my career over the last quarter-century, I moved metaphorically from Rome to the far northern end of
Europe. My teaching is now low-church, closer to a meeting in a home in the
wind-swept Hebrides without a minister, altar, liturgy, sermon, collection,
organ, or symbols such as crosses. As the teacher, I am the least important
person in the room. After a point, the less I speak, the 
more the students
learn. The process is more important than the product, and I trust the process.
I ask a lot of questions.
While I evaluate a lot, I rank order as little as possible. When I taught MBA
courses and every student had a laptop, we sat in a
semi-circle around one of the students' laptops projected onto the largest wall.
I was the only person in the room without a mouse in my hand and an open Internet
connection. Mine isn't the lowest of low-churches, but
it's a long way from the high-church pedagogy of my undergraduate experience.
How did I get from Rome to the Hebrides?
The veil of authority began to split while I was in graduate school. I came there believing that
textbooks and teachers were authoritative
their tests were scientifically sound
their
grades were statistically valid
Three experiences de-mystified that sacred academic trinity: a graduate course in the student-centered constructivist teaching of writing as a process, a part-time job with Prentice-Hall creating test banks for textbooks, and the giving of grades myself.
While I haven't taken any formal courses since graduate school, I have learned much. Learning how I learn and watching my children learn have reinforced my ideas and informed my practice.
|
The composition program at UMass gave me a taste of low-church teaching according to the ideas of Donald Graves and Peter Elbow. Then my first job, composition instructor at Texas A&I University, forced me back to Rome. The English Department at Texas A&I (and the other "Border universities") used high-church pedagogy as a cover for racism, so much so that in the late-1980's, the Texas state district courts (in LULAC v. Richards) and the Texas state legislature broke up the University, revoked its charter, renamed it Texas A&M - Kingsville, and assigned it enlightened supervision from College Station. I was on the faculty when the court case was in its early stage, and I was asked to testify under oath.
At the hearing, I listened as the fancy out-of-state expert witnesses established the case for lesser and poorer education at Texas A&I. They demolished the textbooks and teachers as racist, the tests as vile instruments of oppression, and the grades as statistically bogus. While the texts, teachers, and tests could be improved, listening to professional statisticians demolish typical grading policies made me realize that grading was the most insidious and objectionable part of any educational system. Could it be that fear of low grades inhibits learning? The high-priests on the witness stand, including my department chair, had no defense. They looked weak and silly when the light of reason shone on their arcane craft of grading. The university's lawyers had only tradition to fall back on: "We've always done it this way. And the courts have always been reluctant to interfere with the internal workings of higher education institutions."
With great relief, I found when I came to Medaile in 1985 that the pedagogy in Medaille's composition program was closer to the Hebrides than the Vatican. However, much of the rest of the College was, and still is, high-church.
The second split in the veil came when I understood that we haven't always done it this way.
Education
and the Cult of Efficiency (1962), by Raymond Callahan, explained the historical
origins of the factory system of education in the early 1900's and set me on a
successful quest to verify Callahan's claims from original sources.
Final Exam: A Study
of the Perpetual Scrutiny of American Education (1995) by Gerald W. Bracey
provides a history of stand
ards, outcomes, and
assessment. It examines the two predominant philosophies of learning in the US:
"all children can learn" and Jefferson's "aristocracy of worth and genius".
The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould explained in scientific and
mathematical detail the inherent flaws in so-called objective testing.
Finally,
several introductory statistics texts showed me the limits of grading,
amplifying what I had learned from the expert witnesses in Texas.
The third split in the veil came when I discovered the Web as a means of dismantling authority and distributing information. The genius of the Internet is that it is stupid. It has no central authority. All the intelligence is in the ends. Not only did the Web give me an analytical framework for critiquing high-church pedagogy, but I could now offer a rich low-church alternative. The Web also let me find communities of teachers whose practice is closer to mine than that of my colleagues at Medaille.
In the scholarship section of this portfolio, the page on teaching webs discusses what I did when I got to the Hebrides.
The question of "how effective is your teaching" comes from the
factory model that rose in the pre-World War I era in response to the efficiency
experts who had made American manufacturing the best in the world. Are teachers
assembly-line foremen or skilled craft workers? High-church priests or
low-church lay ministers?
As a factory foreman, I am adding value to raw materials (students) ordered by customers (society). I am sorting the more desirable commodities (A's) from the less desirable (B's and C's).
As the master in an apprentice model, I am providing opportunities, setting an example, and giving feedback. In my mind, I am the chief learner. I am still learning the content and after twenty-five years, I am still learning to teach.
Over the past two decades, as I developed my low-church apprentice-model pedagogy, many of my students have been frustrated because they have succeeded in a high-church factory-model system. My teaching ignores many of their hard-won political skills. Until just the last year or so, there were always students who experienced inordinate anxiety about the paperless nature of the courses. Some of them want me to be the authority, they want convergent knowledge, and they want zero-sum one-dimensional testing and grading. They don't want to be creative. Other students, however, seem to understand and welcome my low-church pedagogy, and indeed thrive in the apprentice role.
These two major functions of educational institutions -- social sorting and student learning -- are often at odds. Many teachers value their effectiveness in terms of upholding rigor and standards by how well their grade distribution sorts students. In my experience, students sort themselves, and arbitrary top-down sorting as commonly practiced works against what I see as the more important function: student learning. I don't teach; I foster conditions in which students can learn. Thus, I measure my effectiveness by the extent to which I can foster those conditions.
To tell how well it's going, I watch and listen to the students. Do they use the vocabulary, develop the insights, demonstrate the skills, convey the attitudes?
Learn more about my philosophy of grading and learning: drive out fear.
Learn more about my pedagogy:
Higher Education: Where teachers meet learners
by Douglas Anderson
Ricci Street, February 2002
The driving forces of my pedagogy are my staunch low-church, apprentice-model, student-centered beliefs and practices, my web-supplemented classroom, my flexible pedagogy, and the students' desire to learn. The restraining forces are the structural and infrastructural elements of the top-down, high-church institution and the educational outcomes, student-as-factory-product expectations of the public, especially the organizations and parents paying the tuition bills.
To its credit, Medaille College, for a while, at least, gave me some of the means to my ends: small classes, adult learners with laptops, and wireless online classrooms. Now, however, with the closing of the evening program and the on-campus MBA program, I have large classes of traditional-age students often without computers.
Would I be willing to teach in an institution that gave me twice the salary but ten times the number of students in the same number of courses? I would be forced into the factory model of lectures and tests, and I like to think that I would turn down the larger salary.
The two biggest problems that
I have with my pedagogy:
No assessment
of the learning in my courses carried beyond my courses
The knowledge and skills that I teach are not totally learned in just my courses. I know what the students did for a final project for me, but I have only a fuzzy, partial, second-hand idea of what happens after that. I don't know how the learning in my courses are affected, augmented, or conflicted with what's happening in subsequent courses. That blinds me to adjustments that I should be making.
Many students
don't know how to learn independently
In fact, they do. Most of them learn pop culture or their sport just fine without teachers, lectures, textbooks, and tests. But after a dozen years in the factory -- where, as I discuss above, they have had varying degrees of success -- they are very unsure of themselves and mistrustful of me because I always have the power to whack them even if I profess that I'm not going to.
While I have always had these problems, the recent shift of my teaching from the MBA program to the traditional undergraduate factory focus on seat time, retention, and graduating "on time" has made these problems worse.
Where I'm using the high/low church and factory/apprentice
metaphors, professional educators speak of instructivist and constructivist. An
influential essay from the mid-1990's calls it the Instruction Paradigm evolving
out of the
Learning Paradigm:
A New
Paradigm for Undergraduate Education
by Robert B. Barr and John Tagg
Change Magazine, November 1995
The constructivist model's drawback is that it is a messy, non-standardized, individualized, hard to measure process, the opposite of the instructivist's continual standardized stress-testing of the student widgets. From my point of view as the teacher, I have learned that I can trust the process. In fact, the process is more important than the product. For example, I encourage mistakes. In order to learn how to do something correctly, it is a great help to have done it incorrectly several times in many ways. It's as important to learn context and what something isn't as it is to learn what something is.
My classroom is a critical part of the students' learning process. Since everything that I would lecture about in the factory model is available online, the face-to-face classroom has to add unique value. The students must get something there that they don't get elsewhere.
My classes are paperless. I don't give paper; I don't take paper. All
of my work is online, as is the students'. I assign a lot of reading, all
online. During class, if we aren't looking at a page off the Web, we're looking
at a web page or spreadsheet or video that a student made.
|
When I taught adult graduate students, I shot videos of all of them and had conferences with the students to look at the video. I have found that almost all students are far harsher critics of themselves than I am of them. Thus, I focus on what they can do differently for their next presentation. Even though I tape final presentations, I seldom review them with the students because the course is over. However, the graduate students all took several courses with me, so they could benefit from seeing their final presentation from the previous course.
I have several mottoes for my courses. Explore and discover is the most important. I am not asking my students to master a convergent knowledge base or skill set. I am asking them to explore an information space, the small one I make with my course webs and the vast one of the Internet, and to follow their own interests within the fairly rigid confines of my syllabus.
The portfolio section on my evaluation/change cycle discusses my teaching effectiveness in more detail.
At the beginning of every section of MBA 504, the introductory course in the MBA program, I asked the students to complete a learning style inventory, an on-line form. The students whose profiles were different from mine were often the least satisfied with my courses. The inventory places the students on four scales:
active <--> reflective
sensing <--> intuitive
visual <--> verbal
sequential <--> global
Personally,
I am strongly active, intuitive, visual, and global. About a fifth of the MBA
students were reflective, sensing, verbal, and sequential. I also asked them about
risk-taking, which I am eager to do. The same fifth of the students tend to be
the most
risk-averse.
It is those students who struggle in my classes where so much emphasis
is on them, not on me. What others see as my flexibility, they see as
disorganization. What others see as a refreshing break from the lecture
/ test / paper textbook pedagogy, they see as a risky experiment that
may jeopardize their real learning and their career chances. What
others see as an opportunity to explore and discover with an emerging
technology, they see as a threatening, chaotic wilderness, a dangerous
departure from the familiar, the tried and true. They look as anything
other than high-church pedagogy as not getting their money's worth.
I make it a special obligation to try to work with the students who are unlike
me. A Jungian typology classifies me as strongly perceiving as opposed to
judging, which often frustrates those students even more. At the end of MBA 504
when we had our conference, I pointed out our differences and anticipated the
difficulties ahead because they had to take at least two more courses with me.
Sometimes this helped. Since my pedagogy seems to work for most students, I'm not
sure what to do about the others beyond articulating the differences and
offering to work with them individually.
This ongoing pedagogical research has led me to conclude that my courses are
least effective for those who:
expect
the familiar instructivist pedagogy and zero-sum factory model grade rank ordering
with which they have succeeded in the past
work
for a company that is still paper-dependent and whose IT department has
inculcated a learned helplessness toward computers
don't
use the Internet much at home and work and don't have a clear mental model of
its architecture and protocols
claim
that they would never under any circumstances buy anything on-line
castigate
the Internet as a den of pornographers, virus infecters, spam mongers, and
identity thieves
Coming in, maybe a quarter of the MBA students fit four of those five,
especially the first three. Their experience with computers and networks had
been uniformly negative. They would rather use the laptop's touchpad than a
mouse, although they would most prefer not to use a computer at all. They have
no Internet access at work and only dial-up access at home. They check their
email maybe once a week.
Of the four scales on the learning styles inventory above, the fourth --
sequential / global -- is the biggest difference. Students who want clear
step-by-step instructions and see every process and document as self-contained
and unique are disoriented and frustrated if not angered in a non-linear
always-on everywhere environment where information is modular, reusable,
linkable, plastic, searchable, perfectly reproducible, and instantly transportable. These
students have tried-and-true assumptions about the necessity of control, the
inevitability of hierarchical authority, and the fixed (ink, paper) nature of
information. Those assumptions don't work online or in my classes. They want
corporate training and I offer them an education. Having been controlled and in
control for so long, they see total anarchy as the only alternative to total
control. Richard Dawkins' observations
about the "tyranny of the discontinuous mind" are relevant here.
Those assumptions do not help the students develop the vision and leadership
skills to manage change in organizations or to start their own ventures inside
or outside an existing organization. Thus, I make it a point to have those
students confront their fears. Given that courses last only weeks, not years, this
confrontation is often incomplete and inconclusive and leaves dissatisfied
students. We can have some intense disagreements. Some of the students change over the
years. Others don't, and I can accept those limits to my pedagogy.
The above section discusses mostly pedagogy and process. The
content of my courses also poses special challenges for me and the students.
When I taught in the MBA program, I wasn't teaching one of the traditional business disciplines based on the silo
structure of many organizations: accounting, operations, HR, IT, etc. For that
matter, I don't teach a traditional liberal arts discipline, either, a discrete
set of knowledge and skills that are administratively isolated into a department
or program.
At its core, what I taught in MBA 624, my highest-numbered Business course, is
very similar to what I taught in WRT 150, my lowest-numbered Humanities course.
I teach two processes:
how
to find and think about the evidence that helps people make decisions and solve
problems
how
to organize and present their thinking
My courses combine written and oral communications skills (information design),
visual design, psychology (usability, marketability), computer technology in the
broadest sense, and change driven by the Internet. The models, case studies,
simulations, and projects came from the business world, but they could have come from
any other degree program at the College, and the rest of my course content would
work equally well. In that sense, I was a liberal arts teacher in a professional
program.
Between 1998 and 2006, I taught only four MBA courses (and several last-minute
overload sections of
MGT 110, ECO 201, and WRT 200):
|
e-skills - MBA 504
e-business - MBA 600
e-commerce (marketing) - MBA 604
e-future - MBA 624
All four were moving targets because the Internet is an ongoing disruptive force.
Compared to the pop music industry, for example, education is just beginning to
feel the disruption. As old business models are destroyed and newly created
business models replace them, as laws and social norms change, too, it was my job
to keep the students close to the cutting edge of that change worldwide. I can
barely keep up with it myself, but it was my responsibility to keep current and
keep urging my students to develop a more accurate vision of the present and the
future.
The only thing I'm sure of is that in the future, my pedagogy and course content
will continue to evolve as I continue to learn. What I expect to endure are some
hard-won principles:
pedagogy
an
online classroom to supplement the paperless physical classroom
constructivist
rather than instructivist pedagogy
an
overall emphasis on the students' learning process, not on the teachers' oral
transfer of an information product
content
worldwide
digital networks will cause change over the next hundred years as surely as the
printing press led to the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and, indeed,
what we call the Modern Era.
my
students will work in that world, not the world in which I grew up.
This web, offered in fulfillment
of
the requirement in the handbooks of
Medaille College, Buffalo, NY,
Volume IV: Faculty Handbook,
section 4.5.4.3 Faculty Portfolio,
is © 2007 and licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
web established: February 2007
page last modified: September 2008
by Douglas Anderson
http://toLearn.net/portfolio/teaching/index.html
