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Drive out fear.
Fifty years ago, W. Edwards Deming identified fear as the greatest obstacle to quality in an organization. Though he was writing about industrial production processes, it applies as well to the educational production process.
The way I teach is based on my own learning, on watching my children learn, on watching two-year-olds learn language, and on my many years of teaching writing at two large state universities and one small college. I also read Plato and I enjoy watching Socrates walk away from his students, who learn well. After all that, I can say without hesitation:
Grades are the single strongest inhibitor of learning.
Let me rephrase that:
Fear of low grades is the single strongest inhibitor of learning.
Drive out fear. This catch-phrase of the Total Quality movement that Deming spawned isn't widely followed in industry and it hasn't made the least change in higher education. The phrase originated in Deming's famous Fourteen Principles, the eleventh of which reads:
Eliminate numerical quotas ... and numerical goals.
How does one professor drive fear out of the educational process?
I developed a pedagogy that I only later found out had a name: constructivism. Its premise is that learners actively construct their own knowledge and meaning from their experiences. People learn by doing and performing, not by listening to lectures and taking tests. At the time I started making webs, two essays helped shape my thinking.
The Shroud of
Lecturing
by Stephen E. DeLong
First Monday, Vol.2 No.5, May 1997
At a fundamental level, the Web challenges the authority of the professor in the classroom by democratizing information. It shifts the focus from production and delivery to customer and content -- from professor and lecture to student and information.
Teaching
for Understanding: Educating Students for Performance
Educational Issues Series
Wisconsin Education Association Council, 1996
Many teachers were educated in classrooms where the role of
the student was to memorize information, conduct well-regulated experiments,
perform mathematical calculations using a specific algorithm, and were then
tested on their ability to repeat these tasks or remember specific facts. All of
us -- parents, teachers, retirees, business people, citizens, employees,
students -- face a scale of educational change for which our experiences have
not prepared us. Our beliefs about "how schools ought to be" are in
tension with new expectations of "what schools ought to accomplish."
The ideas which are central to an education which defines competence as the
ability of the student to apply knowledge and skills to unfamiliar problems are
not new. These ideas were found in traditional apprenticeship programs, were
implicit in settings where daughters and sons learned life sustaining skills
from parents, and they were central to the successes of all traditional peoples.
For some background into what I'm trying to do with Ricci Street:
Using the World
Wide Web to Enhance Classroom Instruction
by Norman Mathew and Maryanne Dohery-Poirier
First Monday, Vol.5 No.3, March 2000
Taking full advantage of the potential of the Web requires teachers to think about learning and teaching in new ways, as well as to master the technology itself.
As Peter Doolittle notes about the pedagogical implications of the constructivist theory of learning:
Learning
should take place in authentic and real-world environments.
Learning
should involve social negotiation and mediation.
Content
and skills should be relevant to the learner.
Content
and skills should be understood within the framework of the learner's prior
knowledge.
Students
should be assessed formatively, serving to inform future learning
experiences.
Students
should be encouraged to become self-regulatory, self-mediated, and
self-aware.
Teachers
serve primarily as guides and facilitators of learning, not instructors.
Teachers
should provide for and encourage multiple perspectives and representations
of content.
In "A Constructivist Approach to Teaching" (1995), Earnest Von Glasersfeld writes:
Constructivism does not claim to have made earth-shaking inventions in the area of education; it merely claims to provide a solid conceptual basis for some of the things that, until now, inspired teachers had to do without theoretical foundation.
Thus the teacher's job is to provide the materials and to sequence the experiences. The Internet makes the social aspect much easier by giving the students access to each other and to the teacher outside of class.
We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our
exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first
time.
-- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets
Think about when you'll finally be the boss. Whom will you want your organization to hire right out of MBA school? If MBA's are going to help lead the organization into the future, they will have to keep learning to do things differently and to think differently. Part of my courses involve my structuring a safe environment for you to think in new ways about new ideas.
When I'm learning a new skill or taking in new information that challenges what I've always thought about something, I go through a sequence of thinking modes.
At first, I want to learn the bottom-line truth from an authority I can trust. I want to use the best way to find the one correct answer. Just tell me, and I'll do it.
A science teacher gave each of his
students a barometer and asked them to use it to calculate the height of a tall
building. All but three of them asked the teacher, "What do you want?" and the
teacher told them that the idea was to measure the barometric pressure at the
base of the building, measure it again at the top of the building, and estimate
the height. They all came up with roughly the same answer and received full
credit for the assignment.
The three who didn't ask "What do you want?" all came up with different numbers.
One stood the barometer on end and measured its shadow; he then measured the
shadow of the building. After measuring the height of the barometer, he
calculated the height of the building.
The second dropped the barometer off the top of the building, timing its descent
to the ground below. She then calculated the height of the building.
The third knocked on the door of the building superintendent and said, "I will
give you this fine instrument if you will tell me the height of this building."
Should these three receive full credit?
Soon I realize that with this skill or subject, as with everything else, uncertainty and ambiguity rule. It depends. So I try the anything-goes mode. I don't have any rules or enough experience I can apply to resolve conflicting ideas. All I can do is figure that everyone is entitled to their opinion and that my opinion is as good as theirs. Children figure this out around 6th or 7th grade and most of them stay there the rest of their lives.
Gradually, I learn to use appropriate criteria to see not black and white but shades of gray. But then that's all I can see, shades of gray. So I turn cynical in that mode and figure that it's all a game. Give 'em what they want. PhD: Pile it higher and deeper. Do whatever it takes, whine and wheedle, to get that A.
But games matter, don't they? If I apply my values, I can start to play the games well enough so that I sometimes win. As I win, as I realize that context is what matters, I start to play for real.
That's where I'd want to hire you just out of MBA school.
As you wrestle with graduate school, with marketing, with new media, and with the course project, you'll probably find yourself going through a similar set of thinking modes.
And you're supposed to do all that out-of-the-box thinking in nine weeks? While performing in written, oral, and digital form? And I'm supposed to be able to discern the difference so that I can rank you on a bell curve and pretend that there's a significant difference between a 90 that gives you an A- and an 89 that gives you a B+? I don't think so.
In a 1983 article, "Grades: One More Tilt at the Windmill," (in Bulletin, edited by A.W. Chickering. Memphis State University Center for the Study of Higher Education), Paul Dressel attacks grading as:
an inadequate report of an inaccurate judgment by biased and variable judges of the extent to which a student has attained an undefined level of mastery of an unknown proportion of an indefinite material.
Grading widgets or eggs makes a lot of sense. Grading people is offensive. Early in this century, the grading of widgets was applied to people because the people made the widgets. William Bagley published Classroom Management, a book that introduced business management principles to the schoolhouse.
The first and foremost requirement for a teacher: can he or she control the students?
Note how most classrooms still look like piecework factories. Replace the PC with a sewing machine and you're staring at the back of the heads of the folks in the row in front. Eyes on your own work, please. Collaboration is a waste of time, so let's call it cheating.
Today, that system is irrelevant to your growth. Raise your hand if you intend to get a bench job in a piecework factory. To many learners that system is harmful because it doesn't begin to measure how intelligent or knowledgeable they are.
In a piecework factory, the big trick is to survive until payday. You've been in classes like that. Just give me a grade, any grade, and let me outa here.
As Vicky Phillips wrote in an often-republished essay, Education in the Electronic Ether:
The idea that the American mind is best taught using a factory model -- where students sit in neat rows, holding up their hands for permission to speak, clock-watching their way through textbooks and lectures which are broken into discrete knowledge widgets -- has never been shown to be an effective way to learn. It has been shown to be a convenient way for colleges to transcript that a standardized body of knowledge has been dutifully delivered. The American factory model. Everyone on the assembly line is delivered the same standardized units of information (re: lectures and textbooks); they then all must pass the same quality inspection (re. objective exams).
A clear advantage of the factory model is that it scales. A teacher lecturing from a book can lecture to ten or ten hundred. Their multiple-choice tests can be graded by a machine. The current rage for distance learning is built around that scalability. The teachers who survive in that system will be the best lecturers, that is, the best entertainers.
This Industrial Age system has no place in a graduate school, especially one with small classes and motivated adult learners. If you aren't your own hardest grader by now, there's not much that more a teacher's grades can do.
Testing and grading as we know it were developed between World Wars I and II. What happened before that? We're talking before poor people, women, and immigrant children went to school and certainly before a quarter of the adult population had a college degree as they do now in the U.S. Back then, maybe ten percent of the population graduated from what we would now call high school. There were no true/false multiple-choice tests; there was no pretension of objectivity. A few students were given honors, some were asked not to return, and the rest just kept learning.
Most current grading schemes are statistically bogus, education's dirty little secret. Incentives To Excel (note: access-restricted URL), a recent camps-wide committee report at Duke University, concluded:
The problem with the GPA is that it is based upon the erroneous assumption that grades from different courses are comparable and can therefore be added and averaged. The GPA, as a consequence, can be a very misleading measure of how well students have actually performed relative to one another.
Grading in general is a crude power-play to keep the unruly masses in line. "It will go on your Permanent Record." Most college professors have no formal training in teaching. They have no idea how to construct a valid multiple-choice test. Those tests don't measure learning, anyway. They measure short-term memory retention. Seventy-two hours later, most students won't test nearly as well unless they cram again. A week later .... Well, use your own experience to finish that sentence.
From
Degrading to De-Grading
by Alfie Kohn
High School Magazine, March 1999
Researchers have found three consistent effects of using --
and especially, emphasizing the importance of -- letter or number grades:
1. Grades tend to reduce students' interest in the learning itself.
2. Grades tend to reduce students' preference for challenging tasks.
3. Grades tend to reduce the quality of students' thinking.
The preceding three results should be enough to cause any conscientious educator
to rethink the practice of giving students grades. But there's more.
- Grades aren't valid, reliable, or objective.
- Grades distort the curriculum.
- Grades waste a lot of time that could be spent on learning.
- Grades encourage cheating.
- Grades spoil teachers' relationships with students.
- Grades spoil students' relationships with each other.
Competitive
Grading Sabotages Good Teaching
by John D. Krumboltz and Christine J. Yeh
Kappan Professional Journal, February 1997
Students are not the only victims of the competitive grading system, Mr. Krumboltz and Ms. Yeh point out. It hurts teachers as well by skewing their values and ultimately robbing them of the satisfactions inherent in promoting student learning.
Academic and Occupational Performance: A Quantitative Synthesis
by Gordon E. Samson et al.
American Educational Research Journal, 1984 (not available online)
A review of 35 studies revealed that academic indicators (grades and tests) from college accounted for less than 3 percent of the variance in eventual occupational performance as judged by income, job effectiveness ratings, and job satisfaction. Moreover, these indicators had no predictive power whatsoever for M.D.s and Ph.D.s.
Doing
Well and Doing Good: The Careers of Minority and White Graduates of the
University of Michigan Law School
by David L. Chambers, Richard O. Lempert, and Terry K. Adams
University of Michigan Law School Law Quadrangle Notes, Summer 1999
There is a strong, statistically significant relationship
between LSAT [scores] and [undergraduate] GPA, on the one hand, and grades at
the end of three years of law school on the other, but no significant
relationship between the LSAT or UGPA with regard to what matters much more –
the achievement of students after graduation in terms of earned income or career
satisfaction.
There is a significant correlation, however, between [grades and scores] and our
index of [community] service: in all decades, those with higher admissions index
scores tend to contribute less remunerated service to society.
A’s Aren’t
That Easy
by Clifford Adelman
in The New College Course Map and Transcript Files: Changes in Course-Taking and
Achievement, 1972-1993
U.S. Department of Education, 1999
A five-year study of the records of 21,000 students from more than 3,000 universities, community colleges, and trade schools found that grades actually declined slightly in the last two decades.
The Dangerous Myth of Grade Inflation
by Alfie Kohn
The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 8, 2002
2001
Grade inflation got started ... in the late '60s and early '70s.... The grades
that faculty members now give ... deserve to be a scandal.
-- Professor Harvey Mansfield, Harvard University, 2001
1894
Grades A and B are sometimes given too readily -- Grade A for work of no very
high merit, and Grade B for work not far above mediocrity. ... One of the chief
obstacles to raising the standards of the degree is the readiness with which
insincere students gain passable grades by sham work.
-- Report of the Committee on Raising the Standard, Harvard University, 1894
Relevant Research on the
Effects of Grades On Learning
by Barbara Rogoff
University of California at Santa Cruz
Widespread attempts to apply standardized grades appeared around 1900, when the factory-efficiency model became the ruling approach for education (based on Taylor's time-and-motion studies of steelworkers for industrial efficiency). With the tenfold increase in number of college students from 1890 to 1940, a factory production model was attractive for "processing" mass numbers of students. Students were considered "raw material," and teachers were technical workers who were supposed to insert information into them, like an assembly line.
Confusing Harder With Better
by Alfie Kohn
Education Week, September 15, 1999
When you watch students slogging through textbooks,
memorizing lists, being lectured at, and working on isolated skills, you begin
to realize that nothing bears a greater responsibility for undermining
educational excellence than the continued dominance of traditional instruction.
...
John Dewey reminded us that the value of what students do "resides in its
connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater
strain it imposes." If you were making a list of what counts in education--that
is, the criteria to use in judging whether students would benefit from what they
were doing--the task's difficulty level would be only one factor among many, and
almost certainly not the most important. To judge schools by how demanding they
are is rather like judging an opera on the basis of how many notes it contains
that are hard for singers to hit. In other words, it leaves out most of what
matters.
Standardized Testing: Separating Wheat Children from Chaff Children
by Alfie Kohn
Excerpted from What Happened to Recess and Why Are Our Children Struggling in
Kindergarten?
by Susan Ohanian
McGraw-Hill, 2002
The phrase “high standards” by definition refers to
standards that everyone won’t be able to meet. If everyone could meet them, that
would be taken as prima facie proof that the standards were too low – and they
would then be ratcheted upward – until failures were created.
Despite its sugar-coated public-relations rhetoric, the whole
standards-and-accountability movement is not about helping all children to
become better learners. It is not committed to leaving no child behind. Just the
opposite: it is an elaborate sorting device, separating wheat from chaff. And
don’t ask what happens to the chaff.
Constructivist pedagogy is more appropriate for small, personalized classes as opposed to the large, impersonal classes at state schools that are ripe for replacement by instructional "systems" like distance learning, Blackboard, WebCT Educational Technologies, and WBT Systems' TopClass.
It's very easy for instructionist pedagogy to scale up and adapt to distance learning because it's already pretty distant from the students and their learning. The material will be covered by the teacher even if half the class flunks. Since most lecturers are boring, they can easily be replaced by technology. Given the economies of scale that interest administrators, it's safe to say that in many schools, lecture classes will be replaced by distance learning. Education will become another sector of the service economy that got re-structured and downsized.
Constructivist pedagogy doesn't scale and can't be replaced by distance learning systems. It can, however, use the Web to great advantage.
Plato as Distance
Education Pioneer: Status and Quality Threats of Internet Education
by Gary Klass, First Monday, volume 5, number 7, July 2000
Here's the conclusion:
Whatever the quality of the distance education products
developed by textbook publishers and course delivery software outlets, the
standards for these courses will be set by those who seek to enroll the most
frat boys.
And there's not much faculty can do about it and preserve their traditional
perquisites at the same time. "Rear-guard" efforts to control the
diffusion of distance education by setting university or discipline-wide
standards for online courses are likely to result in the same protests
concerning restrictions on faculty autonomy and academic freedom that David
Noble raised in opposition to distance education < http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue3_1/noble/
>.
On the positive side, those colleges and universities that do not depend on the
political economy of the cash cow and the large lecture hall, that provide a
"real" rather than a "virtual" education, that provide an
integrated four-year curriculum, with students taking small classes from real
professors in real classrooms, and that become more efficient by eliminating
functions and activities that are truly extraneous to ... education, may survive
the distance education revolution quite nicely.
The only thing I would add to Klass's list is right after "real professors in real classrooms". I would add Ricci Street, which is beginning to use the Web for student learning, not distance education. Big difference.
Neil Gershenfeld runs the Things That Think consortium at MIT's Media Lab, probably the most prestigious graduate school for new media studies. He writes in When Things Start to Think (p. 188):
One of the best predictors of a student's success [in graduate school is] their grades: I look to make sure they have a few F's.
In my courses, I use Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon nurturing approach.
That's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
What's your philosophy of learning and grading? Talk about it in the Bistro.
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