This weekend I drove up from Huntington Beach back to Palo Alto to work as a coach at the Challenge Success fall conference. It's a long drive, and I must admit it was somewhat surreal being back on Stanford's campus for the two days of the conference. Stanford is the kind of place that exists in a bubble, mostly out of time. The inside of the School of Education building, in particular, looks almost exactly as it did when I first arrived at Stanford in 2009, and it probably looked the same in 1979. My sense of awkward familiarity was aided, of course, by the presence of my picture on the "current doctoral students" wall and my still-extant mailbox in the basement (it even had mail in it). Since I'm technically "on leave" I shouldn't have been surprised, but I've become so invested in my new job at LePort that it's hard to remember that part of my identity which is, still, Paul Franz, Stanford PhD Student.
This dual identity was particularly in play while coaching. It is my Stanford background, not my teaching background, that brought me to Challenge Success. Being a teacher has made me a much better coach and facilitator, but it's my connection to educational research and best practice that makes me a quality - and indeed even minimally qualified - coach for CS sessions.
Challenge Success is a non-profit co-founded by Denise Pope, Madeline Levine, and Jim Lobdell. It grew out of what was at the time a very small but poignant strain of research which suggested that "successful" students around the country were actually stressed-out, unhealthy, and unhappy, and furthermore often engaged in manipulation and cheating. Denise's Doing School is an excellent ethnographic study that chronicles the problem. The goal of CS is to address this issue by coaching schools through a process which will help them implement research-based practices to reduce student stress and increase overall well being. At its core, this implies a culture shift away from a strict, zero-sum mentality in which success equals GPA and elite college enrollment to a more holistic view which includes honoring balance and non-academic (or non-traditional academic) achievements.
The suite of policy changes which Challenge Success schools have implemented over the past 10 years is expansive. For example, schools have switched to block schedules or added late days, implemented policies limiting homework, moved towards more authentic or project-based assessments, set aside more time for faculty collaboration (because it's not only successful students that can be over-stressed), started regular parent education programs, and countless other efforts.
It's truly inspiring to be even a small part of a conversation at a school trying to make radical cultural or structural change. The school I coached last year has been trying very hard to implement a test calendar and associated policies, and is now looking to start a series of regular teacher-to-teacher observations with a particular lens on how homework assignments are used in class, all in an effort to increase the quality of homework while decreasing its quantity. My new school this year already plans to pilot a block schedule, but their larger goals are deeply cultural: they want to take on the zero-sum culture of success that they feel has harmed their school community and taken the joy out of learning for their students.
Part of what is so effective about Challenge Success is that, as a coach, it is not my job to advocate wholesale restructuring on day one. Coaching is a process of gently guiding teams towards solutions that will most address their particular contexts, and which will have the largest impact while still remaining feasible in implementation. Tackling a deep-seated school culture problem starts with minor reforms, and with building a community of parents, teachers, students, and administrators who can work together to reach larger goals in the long term. Ultimately, it is the commitment of schools and the stakeholders therein (and, indeed, all of the stakeholders therein) that leads to the success of reform efforts.
As you might imagine, participating in this kind of conference required a pretty significant mind-shift for me after my first month teaching 8th graders. I was amused by how similar running a discussion with administrators, teachers, parents, and students was to running one of my literature discussions, but the content is so different, and the objectives so differently scaled. In my class, I'm trying to make a deep impact on each and every one of 13 students. As a coach, I'm trying to facilitate a process which will impact potentially hundreds (or thousands) of students, and many hundreds (or thousands) of adults, but my particular impact on any one person is immeasurably small. Both kinds of efforts - deep and narrow, and shallow and broad - are important, I think, and they are equally difficult to do well, but the concern with the individual that lies at the heart of teaching simply can't express itself in the same way in the coaching environment.
I'm satisfied that I get to experience both. I'm particularly satisfied because, after spending the weekend talking to people from schools other than LePort, I have an even deeper appreciation for how special my new employer is. Almost every significant, research-based solution that Challenge Success advocates is already in effect at LePort. We use a block schedule. Teachers have time to prepare and to plan, and are engaged in a culture of near-constant observation, feedback, and growth. Homework is minimal and always purposeful, and students have an hour-long homework period at the end of the day after classes are completed. Parent communication and education is one of LePort's greatest strengths. Above all, an emphasis on allowing each student to define their own success - rather than holding every student to the exact same, externally determined standard - is one of our core tenets. I may be the only person who has any kind of intimate knowledge of both Challenge Success and LePort, and it strikes me how much they share for two organizations with no contact. Then again, I likely wouldn't have ended up at LePort if it didn't embody the philosophies and employ the policies that I came to hold dear in my time at Stanford and with CS.
After even a month at LePort it has become easy for me to take for granted that LePort is how a school runs, but returning to the outside world - and returning, in particular, to Stanford at a conference attended by many of the best independent and public schools in California - I was reminded that, if LePort is not wholly unique, it's close. Even most elite schools still carry with them, at the end of the day, the legacy of "this is how education is done" and "this is what success means." I'm fortunate to teach somewhere that doesn't need to attend a Challenge Success conference because they got it right from the start.
On a personal note, I also took heart from a conversation I had in passing with Denise during the busy conference day. Often I felt somewhat out of place, this weekend, because I was no longer a researcher. Wandering around Stanford, it was easy to get caught up in Stanford's culture of success: high-quality, impactful, well-funded research leading to a tenure-track position at an elite institution. That's a path I've put aside, and however much I am satisfied with my choice, a part of me still wants to paint my decision to leave Stanford as a failure on my part, instead of as a healthy response to an untenable emotional situation. When I ran into Denise she sent me the message I needed to hear, surrounded as I was by the Academy writ large. In so many words, her message was that success isn't just about a degree from a prestigious university. She asked me how I felt about teaching, and I told her that I was having a blast, and loving it every day. "Good," she said, "I always knew you would. I'm so happy you found your place." I replied, with a smile, "Me too."
Showing posts with label denise pope. Show all posts
Showing posts with label denise pope. Show all posts
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Thursday, February 2, 2012
On Choosing to Learn
In my Learning Sciences and Technology Design seminar we recently read a draft of an upcoming book by Dan Schwartz, a Professor here at Stanford. He argues that we need to reconsider our assumptions about assessment in order to better capture the things we actually care about as educators. Instead of evaluating student knowledge, understanding, or even skills, he argues, we should try to assess student choices. That is, what a information or skills a student knows, and even her ability to learn further information or skills is not as important as the decision to learn.
That choices are central to how we move through the world is perhaps obvious, but it is striking how infrequently choice is a core part of any assessment framework (multiple-choice tests certainly do not count as "choice" in the sense that Dr. Schwartz means it). Even forward-thinking educators tend to focus more on acquisition of skills or overly-ambiguous notions of "metacognition" or "critical thinking" than on the specifics of decision making. And specifics are the keys. "Making good choices" is as bad a curricular goal as "being able to organize the following events chronologically." A better option is a synthesis of the two, perhaps something to the effect of: "Given the task of explaining a historical event, choosing to organize parts of that event chronologically."
It seems to me that little education - indeed, even little of my own education, excellent though it has been - is organized around this kind of formulation. I believe that the most successful students end up adopting good strategies and making good choices, but Denise Pope's Doing School (about which I've written previously) suggests that a great many of our most successful students (if grades are our standard for success) in fact make terrible choices, ethically, academically, and even physically.
For my own part, I am struck by how often the schools I've attended - even Stanford - have not only tacitly accepted but in fact actively encouraged poor choices and unhealthy habits. And I don't just mean ambiguous moral choices, but concrete habits of mind and academic practice. For example, in spite of Stanford's ostensible lack of concern over grades, their various administrative policy practically forces students to waste hours of time engaged in a gamey calculus over which courses to take credit/no-credit, and which to take for a grade. If I choose not to engage in this practice, I put myself at a disadvantage in terms of various small-scale political interactions that are inevitable in a graduate school. On the other hand, the process itself, besides consuming intellectual energy better spend elsewhere, has undesirable effects on the way students engage with the particular courses they are not taking for a grade and the way professors engage with those students.
In other words, by separating this seemingly administrative cultural artifact from the curriculum, we've set up a situation where knowledge and skills are within the purview of the course, but where the most important actual decision making is made at an institutional level. In graduate school - which is at least theoretically preparation for a life in the academy - this is perhaps not overly troubling, but as we shift our gaze to undergraduate or k-12 education, it's easy to see that students are often well-taught to make bad learning choices by the broader curricula and institutions in which they find themselves. My rule of thumb for this kind of supposition is simple: if Stanford's graduate programs have a fundamental pedagogical or curricular problem, odds are that same problem can be found - and, indeed, is probably worse - at earlier stages of the education system.
So what is there to do? Unfortunately, it seems to me that this problem is virtually intractable in our current education system because it is endemic not merely to our curricula and pedagogy, but to our very culture, our policies, our institutions, and even our economics. That is, there is a good reason we teach bad choices in schools: because our political, economic, and social systems are built upon the majority of people making bad choices.
That choices are central to how we move through the world is perhaps obvious, but it is striking how infrequently choice is a core part of any assessment framework (multiple-choice tests certainly do not count as "choice" in the sense that Dr. Schwartz means it). Even forward-thinking educators tend to focus more on acquisition of skills or overly-ambiguous notions of "metacognition" or "critical thinking" than on the specifics of decision making. And specifics are the keys. "Making good choices" is as bad a curricular goal as "being able to organize the following events chronologically." A better option is a synthesis of the two, perhaps something to the effect of: "Given the task of explaining a historical event, choosing to organize parts of that event chronologically."
It seems to me that little education - indeed, even little of my own education, excellent though it has been - is organized around this kind of formulation. I believe that the most successful students end up adopting good strategies and making good choices, but Denise Pope's Doing School (about which I've written previously) suggests that a great many of our most successful students (if grades are our standard for success) in fact make terrible choices, ethically, academically, and even physically.
For my own part, I am struck by how often the schools I've attended - even Stanford - have not only tacitly accepted but in fact actively encouraged poor choices and unhealthy habits. And I don't just mean ambiguous moral choices, but concrete habits of mind and academic practice. For example, in spite of Stanford's ostensible lack of concern over grades, their various administrative policy practically forces students to waste hours of time engaged in a gamey calculus over which courses to take credit/no-credit, and which to take for a grade. If I choose not to engage in this practice, I put myself at a disadvantage in terms of various small-scale political interactions that are inevitable in a graduate school. On the other hand, the process itself, besides consuming intellectual energy better spend elsewhere, has undesirable effects on the way students engage with the particular courses they are not taking for a grade and the way professors engage with those students.
In other words, by separating this seemingly administrative cultural artifact from the curriculum, we've set up a situation where knowledge and skills are within the purview of the course, but where the most important actual decision making is made at an institutional level. In graduate school - which is at least theoretically preparation for a life in the academy - this is perhaps not overly troubling, but as we shift our gaze to undergraduate or k-12 education, it's easy to see that students are often well-taught to make bad learning choices by the broader curricula and institutions in which they find themselves. My rule of thumb for this kind of supposition is simple: if Stanford's graduate programs have a fundamental pedagogical or curricular problem, odds are that same problem can be found - and, indeed, is probably worse - at earlier stages of the education system.
So what is there to do? Unfortunately, it seems to me that this problem is virtually intractable in our current education system because it is endemic not merely to our curricula and pedagogy, but to our very culture, our policies, our institutions, and even our economics. That is, there is a good reason we teach bad choices in schools: because our political, economic, and social systems are built upon the majority of people making bad choices.
Monday, March 1, 2010
Building Curricula Backwards
Reading back over the curling post from the other day, I'm reminded why it's not a good idea to try to write in a place where other people are having conversations. Not that it is impossible, but it does lead to a certain wanderlust in the writing style which comes across as somewhat elementary-schoolish.
Anyway, in the midst of the end of an exceptionally busy quarter - even busier than last, I believe - I wanted to talk a little about the great fun I've been having building curricula. I'm enrolled in, as I've mentioned, a Curriculum Construction class with Dr. Pope, and in addition to the class's final project (a curriculum), I'm writing two curricula of my own for summer workshops I'm planning on teaching in June.
The curriculum for class I'm writing is a group project. Or was. While there are some finishing touches to apply, we're just about finished. In comparison to my own curricula, our progress was quite rapid, I suspect because we could divide the busy-work parts of the process amongst ourselves. The curriculum is a web-search module for a larger journalism curriculum, with a focus on teaching searching tools and strategies through the lens of assessing bias and credibility in the debate on copyright. Everything in the curriculum is built around addressing one of those three issues (that is, search skills, credibility and bias of sources, and copyright issues), and most activities address more than one (or all three).
In true "backwards design" form, we began with a key goal, then built our three lesser goals, then built a final assessment, and then built the actual lesson plans. Working backwards like this was pioneered by Wiggins and McTighe (first names, I suppose, no longer necessary), the former of whom is a graduate of St. John's, Annapolis. I find it fitting that modern curriculum construction theory was devised and propagated by Johnnie.
Anyway, for our final assessment (or "anchor task"), we're asking students to role-play a hearing on copyright law, after doing group research. The research portion covers the searching and credibility assessment goals, and the content is, of course, the copyright portion. What's more, our anchor task is much richer than a test or quiz, and should therefore encourage more buy-in from students. Granted, even the best of lessons can be ruined by class dynamics (and vice versa; poor lessons can be turned to everyone's benefit by resourceful students and teachers), but we feel we've given implementing teachers every chance to succeed.
As for whether our curriculum actually gets implemented anywhere, we'll see. There are, in fact, a few schools we've made contact with - private and public - who are interested, so it's entirely possible that our work was not merely theoretical.
I should say, one of the key issues with our curriculum is standards. Because web-search is a technology issue, it is covered in the most ancillary of ways by current standards. What's more, standards-based instruction would scoff at our "authentic assessment" model, where we try to get students engaged instead of beating them into the ground with multiple choice tests. But I digress into a subject of a future post (or posts).
My own curricula are quite different, not only from our web-search curriculum, but from each other. Anyone who knows me won't be surprised to hear that, of course, nor will they be surprised to discover what the topics of each curriculum are. The first, and more serious of the two, is a poetry curriculum. The second a sabermetrics curriculum. Since both of these will be elective summer workshops that I'll get to teach in June, it occurs to me that one will likely be mostly (or all) girls and the other mostly (or all) boys.
The poetry curriculum places strong emphasis on writing and discussion. The anchor task is an original piece of poetry, not just written, but read aloud and recorded. Along the way, fortunately, students will get to read a collection of excellent poems that I am even now agonizingly selecting. Authors will range from Whitman (of course) to Gabriela Mistral to, in a touch of Paul, Schiller and Beethoven. In preparation it is likely that I'll get into depth about some of the works in my curriculum in this space in the coming months, so be forewarned.
The sabermetrics curriculum is going to be inquiry-based, and will hopefully introduce students to the radically fast-moving world of baseball statistics research. As a student at in a graduate program, I'm actually in a research community, and it is not hard to tell that the current sabermetrics world is much faster moving, more creative, and more vibrant than the education research world. Call me young and naive, but I suspect it has something to do with the essentially non-existent barriers to entry. Baseball research is not centralized in any institution, so any intelligent and hardworking person can "publish" something meaningful (and potentially get hired by a real MLB team, as has happened frequently of late). The result has been an explosion in our understanding of how baseball works and what truly makes a player valuable.
The point of my curriculum is essentially for the students to have fun and maybe covertly learn some math along the way.* But there will undoubtedly be an undercurrent of my patented contrarianism. In other words, the point isn't just to inculcate students to a new way of thinking, but rather to encourage them to think critically about conclusions they hear anywhere.
*And to help them obliterate their foes in their fantasy leagues, of course.
Which is also the point of the search curriculum and, on some level, the poetry curriculum. I would argue that, maybe, that's the point - or at least one of the points - of education. I asked one of my TAs in Dr. Pope's curriculum class this quarter "how far backwards" backwards design really goes. That's a rhetorical question; it goes all the way back if you let it.
Anyway, in the midst of the end of an exceptionally busy quarter - even busier than last, I believe - I wanted to talk a little about the great fun I've been having building curricula. I'm enrolled in, as I've mentioned, a Curriculum Construction class with Dr. Pope, and in addition to the class's final project (a curriculum), I'm writing two curricula of my own for summer workshops I'm planning on teaching in June.
The curriculum for class I'm writing is a group project. Or was. While there are some finishing touches to apply, we're just about finished. In comparison to my own curricula, our progress was quite rapid, I suspect because we could divide the busy-work parts of the process amongst ourselves. The curriculum is a web-search module for a larger journalism curriculum, with a focus on teaching searching tools and strategies through the lens of assessing bias and credibility in the debate on copyright. Everything in the curriculum is built around addressing one of those three issues (that is, search skills, credibility and bias of sources, and copyright issues), and most activities address more than one (or all three).
In true "backwards design" form, we began with a key goal, then built our three lesser goals, then built a final assessment, and then built the actual lesson plans. Working backwards like this was pioneered by Wiggins and McTighe (first names, I suppose, no longer necessary), the former of whom is a graduate of St. John's, Annapolis. I find it fitting that modern curriculum construction theory was devised and propagated by Johnnie.
Anyway, for our final assessment (or "anchor task"), we're asking students to role-play a hearing on copyright law, after doing group research. The research portion covers the searching and credibility assessment goals, and the content is, of course, the copyright portion. What's more, our anchor task is much richer than a test or quiz, and should therefore encourage more buy-in from students. Granted, even the best of lessons can be ruined by class dynamics (and vice versa; poor lessons can be turned to everyone's benefit by resourceful students and teachers), but we feel we've given implementing teachers every chance to succeed.
As for whether our curriculum actually gets implemented anywhere, we'll see. There are, in fact, a few schools we've made contact with - private and public - who are interested, so it's entirely possible that our work was not merely theoretical.
I should say, one of the key issues with our curriculum is standards. Because web-search is a technology issue, it is covered in the most ancillary of ways by current standards. What's more, standards-based instruction would scoff at our "authentic assessment" model, where we try to get students engaged instead of beating them into the ground with multiple choice tests. But I digress into a subject of a future post (or posts).
My own curricula are quite different, not only from our web-search curriculum, but from each other. Anyone who knows me won't be surprised to hear that, of course, nor will they be surprised to discover what the topics of each curriculum are. The first, and more serious of the two, is a poetry curriculum. The second a sabermetrics curriculum. Since both of these will be elective summer workshops that I'll get to teach in June, it occurs to me that one will likely be mostly (or all) girls and the other mostly (or all) boys.
The poetry curriculum places strong emphasis on writing and discussion. The anchor task is an original piece of poetry, not just written, but read aloud and recorded. Along the way, fortunately, students will get to read a collection of excellent poems that I am even now agonizingly selecting. Authors will range from Whitman (of course) to Gabriela Mistral to, in a touch of Paul, Schiller and Beethoven. In preparation it is likely that I'll get into depth about some of the works in my curriculum in this space in the coming months, so be forewarned.
The sabermetrics curriculum is going to be inquiry-based, and will hopefully introduce students to the radically fast-moving world of baseball statistics research. As a student at in a graduate program, I'm actually in a research community, and it is not hard to tell that the current sabermetrics world is much faster moving, more creative, and more vibrant than the education research world. Call me young and naive, but I suspect it has something to do with the essentially non-existent barriers to entry. Baseball research is not centralized in any institution, so any intelligent and hardworking person can "publish" something meaningful (and potentially get hired by a real MLB team, as has happened frequently of late). The result has been an explosion in our understanding of how baseball works and what truly makes a player valuable.
The point of my curriculum is essentially for the students to have fun and maybe covertly learn some math along the way.* But there will undoubtedly be an undercurrent of my patented contrarianism. In other words, the point isn't just to inculcate students to a new way of thinking, but rather to encourage them to think critically about conclusions they hear anywhere.
*And to help them obliterate their foes in their fantasy leagues, of course.
Which is also the point of the search curriculum and, on some level, the poetry curriculum. I would argue that, maybe, that's the point - or at least one of the points - of education. I asked one of my TAs in Dr. Pope's curriculum class this quarter "how far backwards" backwards design really goes. That's a rhetorical question; it goes all the way back if you let it.
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Allusions Confirmed
Since most of my woefully small readership are friends and family, I suppose I owe something of a "what's going on" update at some point. Of course you've heard of my impending wedding on the 21st of March, but odds are you know nothing - or close to it - of my coursework here at Stanford this (and last) quarter, except what I have alluded to in my posts.
Stanford's quarter system is different from what I am accustomed to, and the result is the proverbial "fire hose" that many graduates treat with nostalgia. While the environment here is not as immersive as that at St. John's - perhaps because not everyone is reading the same books at the same time - it is more hurried, more demanding. Most courses meet once a week - twice at most - for ten weeks. That's only ten meetings to get a whole curriculum across.
Fall quarter was exceptionally busy for me, this quarter has been even more so. First quarter I was enrolled in a somewhat ambiguous number of classes. By that I mean, I was enrolled in three "proper," 3+ unit classes, but also three 1 unit classes and a 2 unit class. Seven classes in total is a lot, but since four of those did not ask for much work outside of showing up every week, it was a manageable load, and on the whole I logged 16 units (which put me comfortably below the 18-unit maximum). It would have been more manageable had I not been simultaneously applying to the PhD program that links to my Master's program.
This quarter is different. I'm enrolled in fewer classes, but my units add up to 18 even. I'm noticing that 18 units is quite a lot, especially because 17 of those come from classes, and only one from my 10-hour-per-week internship. Ten hours of internship to one unit of credit is not a favorable ratio.
Besides my internship - which is split oddly between a local private, Catholic high school and Stanford's own charter school - I'm taking four proper classes. One of those classes is in the English department, and I am happy to visit twice a week with a collection of students who are, without exception, English or Modern Thought students. The course is called "Biography and Life Writing," a source of amusement for people like me who know some Greek. The Professor - Carol Shloss - is a Pulitzer finalist and National Book Award winner, and so the experience has been tremendous, if different from what I'm used to (the discussion is heavily weighted towards our professor). This class, however, constitutes five units of my 17, because it requires essentially one book's worth of reading each week. That's not so much that it's undoable, but it has certainly been more than enough given my other courses.
My most enjoyable education class - and my 3 unit, and therefore "least work" class, in theory - is called "Understanding Learning Environments." Co-taught by Ray McDermott and Roy Pea, it's a romp through the modern history of learning theory. Of course, in ten weeks we can only go into so much depth, but the actual point of the class has been not so much to digest and debate the history of cognitive sciences, but to understand Ray's peculiar characterization of culture, what learning really is, and why we education students bother at all.
I am also taking a four unit "Introduction to Data Analysis" course focusing on the use of statistics in education and social sciences research. On the whole, the course has been more or less a review of my AP Statistics class from high school, but seeing as it has been a while since then, the course has been worth the time its lengthy assignments require. From a professional standpoint, at the very least, it is valuable to have taken a quantitative research course (I took an introductory qualitative research class first quarter).
Finally, I'm enrolled in a course taught by Denise Pope for the second straight quarter. Denise is the author of Doing School, a phenomenal piece of research that blows up a number of assumptions our culture makes about high achieving students. On top of being an excellent researcher, Denise is an excellent teacher as well. Her course this quarter is "Curriculum Construction," which is, of course, at the heart of the educational process. What makes the course great, however, is the active meta-cognition that Denise and her TAs engage in. Her course is a living example of curriculum construction, and as we strive to build our own curricula - the capstone project for the course - for a real-life site, we are encouraged to reflect upon the curriculum of the course itself, as well as other courses we know of, are taking, have taught, and so on.
Of course, all four of these courses assign a significant amount of reading, and so I'm spending a significant portion of my time pouring over biographies, old psychology articles, and academic debates about curriculum design. On top of that, there's my internship, which, early in the quarter anyway, involved some politics that I think I had better not speak of too loudly. Beyond even that, I've taken on writing two curricula (in addition to the required one for my Curriculum class) on the side for summer workshops I'll be teaching come June. I'm actually quite excited about those curricula, because one is a kind of Johnnie-esque writing curriculum designed for high schoolers who are interested in diving deeper into their own experience with language, and the other is an introductory sabermetrics course designed for, well, nerdy baseball fans. Exciting though those are, they remain an added bit of work on top of an already full plate.
If you've done the math, you'll note that I haven't mentioned one unit of my 18 yet, and that is because I haven't mentioned my LDT Seminar. Seminar is not much work, for the most part (occasional readings, and a lot of housekeeping), but it is also worth mentioning that by the end of this quarter I have to write a draft of a proposal for my Master's project. Drinking from a fire hose indeed.
Stanford's quarter system is different from what I am accustomed to, and the result is the proverbial "fire hose" that many graduates treat with nostalgia. While the environment here is not as immersive as that at St. John's - perhaps because not everyone is reading the same books at the same time - it is more hurried, more demanding. Most courses meet once a week - twice at most - for ten weeks. That's only ten meetings to get a whole curriculum across.
Fall quarter was exceptionally busy for me, this quarter has been even more so. First quarter I was enrolled in a somewhat ambiguous number of classes. By that I mean, I was enrolled in three "proper," 3+ unit classes, but also three 1 unit classes and a 2 unit class. Seven classes in total is a lot, but since four of those did not ask for much work outside of showing up every week, it was a manageable load, and on the whole I logged 16 units (which put me comfortably below the 18-unit maximum). It would have been more manageable had I not been simultaneously applying to the PhD program that links to my Master's program.
This quarter is different. I'm enrolled in fewer classes, but my units add up to 18 even. I'm noticing that 18 units is quite a lot, especially because 17 of those come from classes, and only one from my 10-hour-per-week internship. Ten hours of internship to one unit of credit is not a favorable ratio.
Besides my internship - which is split oddly between a local private, Catholic high school and Stanford's own charter school - I'm taking four proper classes. One of those classes is in the English department, and I am happy to visit twice a week with a collection of students who are, without exception, English or Modern Thought students. The course is called "Biography and Life Writing," a source of amusement for people like me who know some Greek. The Professor - Carol Shloss - is a Pulitzer finalist and National Book Award winner, and so the experience has been tremendous, if different from what I'm used to (the discussion is heavily weighted towards our professor). This class, however, constitutes five units of my 17, because it requires essentially one book's worth of reading each week. That's not so much that it's undoable, but it has certainly been more than enough given my other courses.
My most enjoyable education class - and my 3 unit, and therefore "least work" class, in theory - is called "Understanding Learning Environments." Co-taught by Ray McDermott and Roy Pea, it's a romp through the modern history of learning theory. Of course, in ten weeks we can only go into so much depth, but the actual point of the class has been not so much to digest and debate the history of cognitive sciences, but to understand Ray's peculiar characterization of culture, what learning really is, and why we education students bother at all.
I am also taking a four unit "Introduction to Data Analysis" course focusing on the use of statistics in education and social sciences research. On the whole, the course has been more or less a review of my AP Statistics class from high school, but seeing as it has been a while since then, the course has been worth the time its lengthy assignments require. From a professional standpoint, at the very least, it is valuable to have taken a quantitative research course (I took an introductory qualitative research class first quarter).
Finally, I'm enrolled in a course taught by Denise Pope for the second straight quarter. Denise is the author of Doing School, a phenomenal piece of research that blows up a number of assumptions our culture makes about high achieving students. On top of being an excellent researcher, Denise is an excellent teacher as well. Her course this quarter is "Curriculum Construction," which is, of course, at the heart of the educational process. What makes the course great, however, is the active meta-cognition that Denise and her TAs engage in. Her course is a living example of curriculum construction, and as we strive to build our own curricula - the capstone project for the course - for a real-life site, we are encouraged to reflect upon the curriculum of the course itself, as well as other courses we know of, are taking, have taught, and so on.
Of course, all four of these courses assign a significant amount of reading, and so I'm spending a significant portion of my time pouring over biographies, old psychology articles, and academic debates about curriculum design. On top of that, there's my internship, which, early in the quarter anyway, involved some politics that I think I had better not speak of too loudly. Beyond even that, I've taken on writing two curricula (in addition to the required one for my Curriculum class) on the side for summer workshops I'll be teaching come June. I'm actually quite excited about those curricula, because one is a kind of Johnnie-esque writing curriculum designed for high schoolers who are interested in diving deeper into their own experience with language, and the other is an introductory sabermetrics course designed for, well, nerdy baseball fans. Exciting though those are, they remain an added bit of work on top of an already full plate.
If you've done the math, you'll note that I haven't mentioned one unit of my 18 yet, and that is because I haven't mentioned my LDT Seminar. Seminar is not much work, for the most part (occasional readings, and a lot of housekeeping), but it is also worth mentioning that by the end of this quarter I have to write a draft of a proposal for my Master's project. Drinking from a fire hose indeed.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
What's the Problem?
Kumu Keahi, a friend and teacher in Honolulu, gives a lesson to his students about his "Problem-Solution Algorithm-Matrix." I'm not sure exactly if I have the hyphens in the correct places, but you get the idea. The goals of this lesson are many, but the most important bit is the end, where he implores students to be leaders because it is leaders who act, rather than simply sitting back and arguing or contemplating forever.
Keahi says there are five steps to problem solving, and ties each to a level of thinking and development. The steps are as follows:
1) Recognize that there is a problem - "This is something even a cockroach can do," Keahi says. "You turn on the light, and the cockroach says, 'whoa, that's a problem,' and scurries into the corner."
2) Identify the problem and its source - This is, as I recall, high school-level thinking. More on that in a second.
3) Enumerate possible solutions - This, Keahi says, is more college-level thinking.
4) Select a solution - You can see where this is going; this is graduate school-level thinking.
5) Act - Here, of course, is where Keahi springs the leader bit on his students. Those previous levels do not mean that you need to go to grad school, because leaders are the most important thing.
I don't think Keahi means to insinuate that we should act without doing a good job identifying problems or selecting solutions, because it is something of a truism that action without reflection or strategy often results in making things worse. It is no accident, too, that educated people often struggle to act, because one of the marks of education is a recognition that simple solutions - solutions that are easy to act upon - often have unintended consequences. A simple example would be the standards movement in education: standards were designed as a way to make sure every student was reaching a certain baseline of knowledge. The real outcome, however, has been a high-stakes, test-based system that reinforces socio-economic boundaries rather than blurs them. That was never the intent, but it has been the outcome.
While I think Keahi's lesson is quite valuable for teenagers, I'm not convinced the problem-solving process is actually so linear (nor am I convinced that Keahi would claim it is). The second step, in particular, is trickier than it seems. Identifying the problem is a matter of much nuance and skill, and in fact failure to so properly is the cause of many failed solutions.
The "d.school" at Stanford believes in user-centered design, and emphasizes identifying the problem, not by simply contemplating, but by asking users. One might cynically suggest that this kind of design thinking leads to "discovering" problems that don't really exist (consider the Snuggy, or any other infomercial product) by mis-emphasizing needs,* but on the whole it's a fairly good system. There's a certain attractive subtlety in asking users what they want, and then comparing their words with their actions and emotions to determine their needs.
* What I mean is, it's easy to watch someone with a blanket and decide that they really don't want to get out from under it when answering the phone. Indeed, the person might even be able - with prompting - to articulate this need. More interesting, however, are the unarticulated needs that are perhaps subtler and larger-scale. I believe the d.school would be interested, not in reinventing the blanket, but in reinventing the phone. But I don't really know. Either way, you can see that defining the problem here is tricky; which is why it is treacherous to let marketing decide the problem for you.
User-centered design, however, does not always work in education. Indeed, formal education would not exist if the "users" (students) could articulate their needs. Educators believe, by necessity, that they not only have material that students need to learn, but that the students will not be able to identify what that material is on their own. That might sound draconian, but think of it this way: what second grader would choose, of his own free will, to learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic, and to share? Perhaps those things would come naturally by contact with a literary, mathematical, and socially complex culture. But perhaps not.
As we get further along - as students are given more choice in the form of "elective" classes - there remains an external push for students to continue taking math, English, foreign language, and - in some blessed schools - art and athletics courses. While much could be said about how those courses fail, it seems fair enough to say that educators as a whole have a better sense of how important those subjects are to future happiness and success. From the other perspective, there are many students who wish they'd paid more attention in Spanish class. There's a certain irony here: students only realize how much teachers have their best interests in mind after they're out of school. Regardless, there seems to be general agreement that teachers can identify the problems of education better than the "users" can.
The contrarian in me, however, wants to point out that this has lead to an under-emphasis on student opinion. A great deal of education research and policy concerns teacher practices, administrator opinions, community biases, impersonal standards, and parent involvement. Where, in all of that, are the kids? User-centered doesn't have to mean students know what they need to learn. It could, alternatively, mean that students have a good sense of why they aren't learning. Indeed, they might have more to say about themselves than tests ever could.
The challenge, here, is that students have a hard time articulating what they dislike about school. What's the problem? School sucks. That's not a good dialogue. Rare is the researcher who, like Dr. Denise Pope at Stanford, decides to follow students around and comes up with a mutually agreeable conclusion.
Pope's Doing School highlights one of the great many problems in education - and this is the bigger issue; there is never only one problem. Where much research focuses on what's wrong, Pope's research question was the opposite: what's going right at good schools, and with good students? She followed around five students over the course of the year, shadowing, doing interviews, and avoiding teachers, parents, and administrators. She wanted the student perspective, and she got it.
What did she get? Well, she went in trying to find out what was right, but she saw instead something deeply wrong. All of these "excellent students" she followed were unhealthy and unhappy. They cheated. They competed mercilessly with their classmates. They never actually remembered the material they were meant to be learning. They were, in short, "doing school."
In a competitive education system, it's easy to look at the people who fail. Competition necessitates failure,* and it is easy to see the racial and economic biases that predict that failure. Many education researchers and reformers, therefore, target the failing schools. What they ignore is the successful schools and successful students where, as Pope discovered, students are miserable, and not learning a thing.
* And don't you forget it. A great deal of hand-wrangling is done over "failing schools." Standardized tests are designed to produce a curve. Schools, in short, are supposed to fail. Either policy-makers who make a big deal of this are very clever, ignorant, or both.
I know, I know. Poor kids! They aren't happy! But they still get to go to Harvard and Yale and make a good living when they're older. Ah, but that's the issue, really. They are not really being prepared to succeed later in life. While there is perhaps some corporate value to employees who know how to "do school," there is also value in students who love to learn. Indeed, beating the love of learning out of students - teaching stress, frustration, and cheating instead - produces future employees who don't know how to work together, who are wary of each other's success instead of doing good work themselves, and who are afraid to be creative and take risks for fear of losing their secure spot. Companies across the country are complaining that there aren't enough good employees graduating from America's schools, despite the fact that school admissions are getting more and more competitive. So how do we define the problem?
I've looked at one particular issue here, but hopefully you can see how this is much broader. In any social structure there are almost always problems, but defining those problems can be very difficult. Indeed, there are often contradictory problems at play, or problems that are contingent upon a certain ideology (for example, the price of health care might seem a problem to one person but not to another, depending on ideology).
At the moment, I am meant to be identifying a "learning problem" to design a solution around for my Master's project. This, I'm finding, is a terribly complicated process. There are so many problems, many of which interrelated, that it makes narrowing difficult. I'm not worried about finding something - indeed I can see a great many small-scale things I could work on - but I am worried that whatever I do settle on will be either too broad or too narrow. I feel I need, more than anything, a broader sense. While I might articulate a small, sub-problem, I still need to define the big problem that most motivates me, and I find myself vacillating on that issue continuously. I might as well ask why I am in education at all. My answer is to multitudinous to define in a sentence.
The burden of complexity is that it is, well, complicated. "What is the problem?" is too simple a question.
Keahi says there are five steps to problem solving, and ties each to a level of thinking and development. The steps are as follows:
1) Recognize that there is a problem - "This is something even a cockroach can do," Keahi says. "You turn on the light, and the cockroach says, 'whoa, that's a problem,' and scurries into the corner."
2) Identify the problem and its source - This is, as I recall, high school-level thinking. More on that in a second.
3) Enumerate possible solutions - This, Keahi says, is more college-level thinking.
4) Select a solution - You can see where this is going; this is graduate school-level thinking.
5) Act - Here, of course, is where Keahi springs the leader bit on his students. Those previous levels do not mean that you need to go to grad school, because leaders are the most important thing.
I don't think Keahi means to insinuate that we should act without doing a good job identifying problems or selecting solutions, because it is something of a truism that action without reflection or strategy often results in making things worse. It is no accident, too, that educated people often struggle to act, because one of the marks of education is a recognition that simple solutions - solutions that are easy to act upon - often have unintended consequences. A simple example would be the standards movement in education: standards were designed as a way to make sure every student was reaching a certain baseline of knowledge. The real outcome, however, has been a high-stakes, test-based system that reinforces socio-economic boundaries rather than blurs them. That was never the intent, but it has been the outcome.
While I think Keahi's lesson is quite valuable for teenagers, I'm not convinced the problem-solving process is actually so linear (nor am I convinced that Keahi would claim it is). The second step, in particular, is trickier than it seems. Identifying the problem is a matter of much nuance and skill, and in fact failure to so properly is the cause of many failed solutions.
The "d.school" at Stanford believes in user-centered design, and emphasizes identifying the problem, not by simply contemplating, but by asking users. One might cynically suggest that this kind of design thinking leads to "discovering" problems that don't really exist (consider the Snuggy, or any other infomercial product) by mis-emphasizing needs,* but on the whole it's a fairly good system. There's a certain attractive subtlety in asking users what they want, and then comparing their words with their actions and emotions to determine their needs.
* What I mean is, it's easy to watch someone with a blanket and decide that they really don't want to get out from under it when answering the phone. Indeed, the person might even be able - with prompting - to articulate this need. More interesting, however, are the unarticulated needs that are perhaps subtler and larger-scale. I believe the d.school would be interested, not in reinventing the blanket, but in reinventing the phone. But I don't really know. Either way, you can see that defining the problem here is tricky; which is why it is treacherous to let marketing decide the problem for you.
User-centered design, however, does not always work in education. Indeed, formal education would not exist if the "users" (students) could articulate their needs. Educators believe, by necessity, that they not only have material that students need to learn, but that the students will not be able to identify what that material is on their own. That might sound draconian, but think of it this way: what second grader would choose, of his own free will, to learn to read, to write, to do arithmetic, and to share? Perhaps those things would come naturally by contact with a literary, mathematical, and socially complex culture. But perhaps not.
As we get further along - as students are given more choice in the form of "elective" classes - there remains an external push for students to continue taking math, English, foreign language, and - in some blessed schools - art and athletics courses. While much could be said about how those courses fail, it seems fair enough to say that educators as a whole have a better sense of how important those subjects are to future happiness and success. From the other perspective, there are many students who wish they'd paid more attention in Spanish class. There's a certain irony here: students only realize how much teachers have their best interests in mind after they're out of school. Regardless, there seems to be general agreement that teachers can identify the problems of education better than the "users" can.
The contrarian in me, however, wants to point out that this has lead to an under-emphasis on student opinion. A great deal of education research and policy concerns teacher practices, administrator opinions, community biases, impersonal standards, and parent involvement. Where, in all of that, are the kids? User-centered doesn't have to mean students know what they need to learn. It could, alternatively, mean that students have a good sense of why they aren't learning. Indeed, they might have more to say about themselves than tests ever could.
The challenge, here, is that students have a hard time articulating what they dislike about school. What's the problem? School sucks. That's not a good dialogue. Rare is the researcher who, like Dr. Denise Pope at Stanford, decides to follow students around and comes up with a mutually agreeable conclusion.
Pope's Doing School highlights one of the great many problems in education - and this is the bigger issue; there is never only one problem. Where much research focuses on what's wrong, Pope's research question was the opposite: what's going right at good schools, and with good students? She followed around five students over the course of the year, shadowing, doing interviews, and avoiding teachers, parents, and administrators. She wanted the student perspective, and she got it.
What did she get? Well, she went in trying to find out what was right, but she saw instead something deeply wrong. All of these "excellent students" she followed were unhealthy and unhappy. They cheated. They competed mercilessly with their classmates. They never actually remembered the material they were meant to be learning. They were, in short, "doing school."
In a competitive education system, it's easy to look at the people who fail. Competition necessitates failure,* and it is easy to see the racial and economic biases that predict that failure. Many education researchers and reformers, therefore, target the failing schools. What they ignore is the successful schools and successful students where, as Pope discovered, students are miserable, and not learning a thing.
* And don't you forget it. A great deal of hand-wrangling is done over "failing schools." Standardized tests are designed to produce a curve. Schools, in short, are supposed to fail. Either policy-makers who make a big deal of this are very clever, ignorant, or both.
I know, I know. Poor kids! They aren't happy! But they still get to go to Harvard and Yale and make a good living when they're older. Ah, but that's the issue, really. They are not really being prepared to succeed later in life. While there is perhaps some corporate value to employees who know how to "do school," there is also value in students who love to learn. Indeed, beating the love of learning out of students - teaching stress, frustration, and cheating instead - produces future employees who don't know how to work together, who are wary of each other's success instead of doing good work themselves, and who are afraid to be creative and take risks for fear of losing their secure spot. Companies across the country are complaining that there aren't enough good employees graduating from America's schools, despite the fact that school admissions are getting more and more competitive. So how do we define the problem?
I've looked at one particular issue here, but hopefully you can see how this is much broader. In any social structure there are almost always problems, but defining those problems can be very difficult. Indeed, there are often contradictory problems at play, or problems that are contingent upon a certain ideology (for example, the price of health care might seem a problem to one person but not to another, depending on ideology).
At the moment, I am meant to be identifying a "learning problem" to design a solution around for my Master's project. This, I'm finding, is a terribly complicated process. There are so many problems, many of which interrelated, that it makes narrowing difficult. I'm not worried about finding something - indeed I can see a great many small-scale things I could work on - but I am worried that whatever I do settle on will be either too broad or too narrow. I feel I need, more than anything, a broader sense. While I might articulate a small, sub-problem, I still need to define the big problem that most motivates me, and I find myself vacillating on that issue continuously. I might as well ask why I am in education at all. My answer is to multitudinous to define in a sentence.
The burden of complexity is that it is, well, complicated. "What is the problem?" is too simple a question.
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