Archive for June, 2006

737. Preparing Future Faculty and Multiple Forms of

Thursday, June 29th, 2006

Folks:

The posting below looks at the state of Preparing Future Faculty programs. It is from Preparing Future Faculty and Multiple Forms of Scholarship by Jerry G. Gaff in Faculty Priorities Reconsidered, Rewarding Multiple Forms of Scholarship, by KerryAnn O’Meara and R. Eugene Rice. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741[ www,josseybass.com]. Copyright ©2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: THE NEXT POSTING WILL APPEAR ON SEPTEMBER 5, 2006.

Tomorrow’s Academic Careers

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Preparing Future Faculty and Multiple Forms of Scholarship
Jerry G. Gaff

The Preparing Future Faculty (PFF) program was launched more than a decade ago to develop alternative doctoral programs for preparing graduate students to do the kind of work expected of faculty at most colleges and universities, namely, to teach and advise students; conduct and evaluate research; and perform service to the department, institution, and community (Gaff, Pruitt-Logan, & Weibl, 2000). More than 4,000 doctoral students participated in PFF, a collaboration between the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Council of Graduate Schools, before the program ended in 2002, after a decade of fruitful work. Two grants from the Pew Charitable Trusts supported creation of campuswide PFF programs at 23 doctoral-producing universities; grants from the National Science Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies supported partnering with 11 disciplinary societies in the natural sciences, and humanities (Gaff, Pruitt-Logan, Sims, & Denecke, 2003). Each society awarded grants to departments in its discipline to develop model PFF programs and highlighted the work of PFF in its meetings, publications, and other activities, as leaders advocated these new approaches. Through these programs, 44 departments established PFF programs, each of which included a cluster of diverse institutions. (For more information, see www.preparing-faculty.org.)

A central feature of PFF programs was that they brought together the “producers” of doctorates (about 150 research universities) with the “consumers” (the approximately 3,500 colleges and universities that hire new faculty), which have quite different missions, student bodies, and expectations for faculty. Thus, each PFF program involved a “cluster” of institutions with diverse missions, such as private liberal arts college, a public comprehensive university, and a community college. Faculty members and administrators from the “partner institutions” and their colleagues in graduate education discussed what they needed in new faculty, and the answers always included effective teaching and the ability to work well with the kinds of students they enrolled. The partner institutions gave graduate students as opportunity to work with a “teaching mentor” and to teach part of a course, attend faculty or committee meetings, meet with undergraduate students-and then to reflect on the meaning of these experiences. In short, doctoral students learned to teach, gain perspectives on faculty life, and envision careers in institutions other than research universities.

The cumulative experience and assessments of PFF programs have been very positive (Pruitt-Logan, Gaff, & Jentoft, 2002). Almost all participants queried have responded that they would recommend PFF to others. Graduate students and alumni have cited a number of benefits, such as learning to teach diverse students, understanding faculty roles in different institutions, and deciding on a career and finding a position that is a “good fit” with their goals. Most credit involvement in PFF as a key factor in securing their first faculty position.

From the outset, PFF was intertwined with the
initiative to promote multiple forms of scholarship. R. Eugene Rice served on the original advisory committee that oversaw the launch of PFF, and he made presentations on the broader definitions of scholarship and changing roles of faculty members to enthusiastic graduate students and faculty members as the early working conferences. Leaders as PFF clusters frequently included ideas about multiple forms of scholarship in their new programs.

In my experience, innovative faculty members are drawn to and make good use of a variety of innovations in their academic work. So it was no surprise that PFF was cross-fertilized with the initiative that is the subject of this book. Every PFF program emphasized the scholarship of teaching and learning, whether or not it was called that. Some PFF programs included courses on general aspects of teaching and learning, such as setting learning goals, designing a course, choosing instructional methods that engage students, creating an inclusive climate, understanding student learning styles and developmental stages, and assessment and grading. Other programs included courses focused on teaching in a discipline. These discipline-specific courses also included discussion of how to deal with common challenges in teaching a particular subject.

Some programs also offered an opportunity to teach with supervision and feedback, be mentored by a faculty member, and prepare a teaching portfolio. An alumna of the PFF program at Duke University spoke for many when she said, “My participation in PFF broadened my education at Duke beyond focused lab experiments and classes by providing a forum to discuss education beyond basic research. PFF enabled me to cultivate skills that may not have developed within the framework of the traditional graduate school experience.”

Of course, research is central to any doctoral program, and PFF students gained opportunities to observe the kinds of research done at the various institutions in their clusters. For example, they discovered the undergraduates were frequently involved in research, that some faculty studied community problems and tried to find solutions, and that others derived satisfaction from connecting ideas across fields in interdisciplinary research and teaching. In short, PFF students saw for themselves that faculty members were engaging in multiple forms of scholarship and finding satisfaction in doing so.
Let me end by reflecting on four questions:

1. How does the new generation of faculty react to multiple forms of scholarship? My impression is that the “new” generation is more similar to the “old” than different. Yes, it has more women, and faces some difficult working conditions, including fewer tenure-track jobs, higher expectations for success, and more limited resources. But as with previous generations, individuals are eager to learn about the profession they seek to enter, want to determine where they might best “fit”, and are ready to do all they can to prepare themselves. Like many current faculty members, future faculty have wide-ranging intellectual interests, and their agile minds are uncomfortable about limiting their curiosity to micro-specializations and research agendas defined by old-fashioned ideas about the scholarship of discovery. Many are excited about seeing their interests in the scholarship of engagement, integration, and teaching validated.

2. How did PFF and multiple forms of scholarship affect individuals from underrepresented groups? Anecdotal evidence suggests that both were more congenial to underrepresented groups than traditional approaches. For example, Julio Rojas, a psychology graduate student as the University of Georgia, was not attracted to a career in the academy, which he thought was primarily concerned with intellectual abstractions far removed from his community. He wanted to find a career enabling him to “give back” to his community, as many Hispanic and other minorities do. His professors encouraged him to participate in PFF, where he learned that through service-learning and community-based learning he could advance both good education and community development. To cite another example, in 2002, the Howard University mathematics department awarded four doctorates to African American women, two of whom had been directly involved in PFF. During the previous year, only six such degrees were awarded to African American women in the entire country. Further, nearly all PFF programs included components on teaching for an inclusive classroom. Both PFF and broader definitions of scholarship seem to have been more encouraging of and attractive to minority students.

3. How can the concept of multiple forms of scholarship further penetrate the academy? One of the best ways is to include it in doctoral programs that prepare future faculty. When graduate students are forming their ideas about research and scholarship and developing their professional identities, it is important that they take a broad view of scholarship. They must see the intellectual value of connecting to real-world problems, and gathering theoretical insight from practice. They should also learn about the mysteries of communicating their specialty to nonspecialists, which is to say, to teach the subject so that others can learn. And they should understand the range of scholarship that can lead to discoveries and can be done with the constraints of different kinds of institutions. By understanding the breadth of the intellectual terrain, graduate students can find their own niche, where they can contribute to teaching and research and derive satisfaction in their own careers.

4. Will institutions support and reward multiple forms of scholarship if the new faculty come with such expectations and capacities? This, I fear, is the crux of the matter, and the jury is still deliberating. My impression is that there are crosscurrents but no clear trends. For example, I know of several research universities that point proudly to faculty members who gained tenure based not on their research but on their teaching or technological prowess, but those individuals are still few in number. On the other hand, some liberal arts colleges have raised the bar for research in order to get tenure. And leaders at a comprehensive university I visited that had recently done a great deal of new hiring were enthusiastic about their ability to recruit researchers from top-rated departments, but when they launched a review of their undergraduate general education program, they realized that the new faculty were neither prepared to help nor interested.

Both faculty and administrations are responsible for the systems to support and reward faculty, and either or both can be swept away with visions of research and publications glory defined in old and narrow terms. Conditions can change with the appearance of a new president, a new provost, or a new strategic plan.

We can only hope that the current generation of academic leaders will find the wisdom and courage to forge support and reward systems that provide incentives for faculty members to pursue their ideas, wherever they may lead. If they do, we can be optimistic that the next generation of professors will be able to learn about the breadth and complexity of modern scholarship in their formative years, so that they can contribute to multiple forms of scholarship and gain satisfaction in doing so throughout their academic careers. But I fear that success will come only because academic leaders create a more effective reward structure, one institution at a time. This promises to be a long, hard process. We have no time to delay.

References

Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Princeton, NJ: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Diamond, R. M. (2002). Field guide to academic leadership. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Gaff, J. G., Pruitt-Logan, A. S., Sims, L., & Denecke, D. (2003). Preparing future faculty in the social sciences and humanities. Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools and Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Gaff, J. G., Pruitt-Logan, A. S., & Weibl, R. (2000). Building the faculty we need: Colleges and universities working together. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities and Council of Graduate Schools.
Glassick, C.E., Huber, M. T., & Maeroff, G. I (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Pruitt-Logan, A. S., Gaff, J. G., & Jentoft, J. E. (2002). Preparing future faculty in the sciences and mathematics. Washington, DC: Council of Graduate Schools and Association of American Colleges and Universities.

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736. Keeping Discussion Going Though Questioning,

Tuesday, June 27th, 2006

Folks:

The posting below looks at how to promote effective discussions in class through questioning. It is from Chapter Five, Keeping Discussion Going Though Questioning, Listening, and Responding, in the book Discussion as a Way of Teaching: Tools and Techniques for Democratic Classrooms, by Stephen D. Brookfield and Stephen Preskill. Published by Jossey-Bass. A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741[ www,josseybass.com]. Copyright © 1999, 2005 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All Rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Preparing Future Faculty and Multiple Forms of Scholarship

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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Keeping Discussion Going Though Questioning, Listening, and Responding

We emphasize throughout this book that democratic discussion is open and fluid, building on the diverse experiences and interpretations of its participants. Although teachers have some responsibility for guiding the discussion, no one person controls its direction entirely. Consequently, good discussions are unpredictable and surprising. They reveal things about the discussants and the topic under examination that are illuminating and eye-opening. At the same time, however, because democratic discussions have a life of their own, they can falter and even expire quite unexpectedly.

Even when discussions gets off to a good start and seem to have momentum, a variety of circumstances can intervene to bring group talk to a grinding halt. Sometime the teacher or one or two students assume too dominant a role. Sometimes the question or issue to be discussed just isn’t controversial enough. Often the pace seems too slow, or the process for exploring the question lacks variety. In other cases, the students may not be ready to explore a topic in a large group setting or for some reason have lost their enthusiasm for the subject. Although it is frequently difficult to pinpoint the reasons why attention is wandering or commitment to the subject is waning, action needs to be taken to reinvigorate the conversation when these things happen. Part of the secret of dealing with these situations lies in refusing to panic or to berate oneself for allowing things to get off track. Fortunately, it is often possible to revive discussion and regain the sense of “controlled spontaneity” (Welty, 1989, p.47) characteristic of good conversation.

This is not to say, however, that we regard discussion as a panacea for tuning bored, disinterested, or hostile students into enthusiastic advocates for learning. Neither do we believe that simply talking about problems leads inevitably to students’ deciding to take action to address pressing social concerns. As we argued in Chapters One and Two, discussions, in general tend to increase motivation, promote engagement with difficult material, and give people appreciation for what they can learn from one another and for what can be accomplished as a group. But we want to acknowledge that we have both been responsible for classes where discussion failed miserably, inducing boredom, resentment, and confusion. We have no magic formula to guarantee success, just some ideas that have proved useful to rejuvenate conversations that seem to be stuck.

Sometimes a discussion can be considered successful even if the original intentions of the leader go unrealized. When participants learn that a problem is more complex than they had thought or when their appreciation for existing differences is deepened, these can be counted as significant accomplishments, even though they might be different from the teacher’s anticipated outcomes. We can say unequivocally, however, that discussion fails when participants avoid similar dialogical encounters in the future or when they lose interest in the topics under consideration. If part of the point is to keep conversation going, to stimulate people to keep talking in the future, then discussion that inhibit this desire must be regarded as counterproductive and miseducational.

The question remains, what conditions inhibit dialogue and what measures can be taken to overcome them? This chapter and the next will focus on a variety of ways to make discussion a process of continuous discovery and mutual enlightenment. Getting students to view problems more critically and creatively helps keep discussion fresh. How teachers maintain the pace of the discussion, how they use questioning and listening to engage students in probing subject matter, and how they group students for instruction all affect how the discussion proceeds and how motivated the students are to participate in similar discussions in the future.

Questioning

To reiterate, an important focus of democratic discussion should be on getting as many people as possible deeply engaged in the conversation. Whatever the teacher says and does should facilitate and promote this level of engagement. As a number of commentators have pointed out, at the heart of sustaining an emerging discussion are the skills of questioning, listening, and responding (Christensen, 1991a, 1991b, Jacobson, 1984; Welty, 19898). Of the three learning to question takes the most practice and skill (Freire, 1993; Bateman, 1990). Although it is certainly true that the kinds of questions one asks to begin a discussion set an important tone, it is equally true that subsequent questions asked by both the teacher and the students can provide a powerful impetus for sustaining discussion. Indeed, as Palmer (1998) has noted, how we ask questions can make the difference between a discussion that goes nowhere and one that turns into a “complex communal dialogue that bounces all around the room” (p. 134).

Types of Questions

Once the discussion is moving along, several kinds of questions are particularly helpful in maintaining momentum.

Questions That Ask for More Evidence
These questions are asked when participants state an opinion that seems unconnected to what’s already been said or that someone else in the group thinks is erroneous, unsupported, or unjustified. The question should be asked as a simple request for more information, not as a challenge to the speaker’s intelligence. Here are some examples:

How do you know that?
What data is that claim based on?
What does the author say that supports your argument?
Where did you find that view expressed in text?
What evidence would you give to someone who doubted your interpretation?

Questions That Ask for Clarification
Clarifying questions give speakers the chance to expand on their ideas so that they are understood by others in the group. They should be an invitation to convey one’s meaning in the most complete sense possible. Here are some examples:

Can you put that another way?
What’s a good example of what you are talking about?
What do you mean by that?
Can you explain the term you just used?
Could you give a different illustration of your point?

Open Questions
Questions that are open-ended, particularly those beginning with how and why, are more likely to provoke the students; thinking and problem-solving abilities and make the fullest use of discussion’s potential for expanding intellectual and emotional horizons. Of course, using open questions obliges the teacher to take such responses seriously and to keep the discussion genuinely unrestricted. It is neither fair nor appropriate to ask an open-ended question and then to hold students accountable for failing to furnish one’s preferred response. As Van Ments (1990) says, “The experienced teacher will accept the answer given to an open questions and build on it” (p.78). That is, as we all know, easier said than done.
Here are some examples of open questions:

Sauvage says that when facing moral crises, people who agonize don’t act, and people who act don’t agonize. What does he mean by this? (Follow-up question: Can you think of an example that is consistent with Sauvage’s maxim and another that conflicts with it?)

Racism pervaded American society throughout the twentieth century. What are some signs that things are as bad as ever? What are other signs that racism has abated significantly?

Why do you think many people devoted their lives to education despite the often low pay and poor working conditions?

Linking or Extension Questions
An effective discussion leader tries to create a dialogical community in which new insights emerge from prior contributions of group members. Linking or extension questions actively engage students in building on one another’s responses to questions. Here are some examples of such question:

Is there any connection between what you’ve just said an d what Rajiv was saying a moment ago?
How does your comment fit in with Neng’s earlier comment?
How does your observation relate to what the group decided last week?
Does your idea challenge or support what we seem to be saying?
How does that contribution add to what has already been said?

These kinds of questions tend to prompt student-to-student conversation and help students see that discussion is a collaborative enterprise in which th e wisdom and experience of each participant contributes something important to the whole. Too often discussion degenerates into a gathering of isolated heads, each saying things that bear no relationship to other comments. The circular response exercise (see Chapter Four), which requires students to ground their comments in the words of the previous speakers, gives students practice in creating discussions that are developmental and cooperative. Skillfully employing linking questions can also help participants practice discussion as “a connected series of spoken ideas” (Leonard, 1991, p. 145).

Hypothetical Questions
Hypothetical questions ask students to consider how changing the circumstances of a case might alter the outcome. They require students to draw on their knowledge and experience to come up with plausible scenarios. Because such questions encourage highly creative responses, they can sometime cause learners to veer off into unfamiliar and seeming tangential realms. But with a group that is reluctant to take risks or that typically answers in a perfunctory, routinized manner, the hypothetical question can provoke flights of fancy that can take a group to a new level of engagement and understanding,
Here are some examples of hypothetical questions:

How might World War II have turned out if Hitler had not decided to attack the Soviet Union in 1941?
What might have happened to the career of Orson Welled, in RKO Studios had not tampered with his second film, The Magnificent Ambersons?
In the video we just saw, how might the discussion have been different if the leader had refrained from lecturing the group?
If Shakespeare had intended Iago to be a tragic or m ore sympathetic figure, how might he have changed the narrative of Othello?

Cause-and-Effect Questions
Questions that provoke students to explore cause-and-effect linkages are fundamental to developing critical thought. Questions that ask students to consider the relationship between class size and academic achievement or to consider why downtown parking fees double on days when there’s a game at the stadium encourage them to investigate conventional wisdom. Asking the class-size question might prompt other questions concerning the discussion method itself, for example:

What is likely to be the effect of raising the average class size from twenty to thirty on the ability of learners to conduct interesting and engaging discussions?
How might halving our class affect our discussion?

Summary and Synthesis Questions
Finally, one of the most valuable types of questions that teachers can ask invites students to summarize or synthesize what has been thought and said. These questions call on participations to identify important ideas and think about them in ways that will aid recall. For instance, the following questions are usually appropriate and illuminating:

What are the one or two most important ideas that emerged from this discussion?
What remains unresolved or contentious about this topic?
What do you understand better as a result of today’s discussion?
Based on our discussion today, what do we need to talk about next time if we’re to understand this issue better?
What key word or concept best captures out discussion today?

By skillfully mixing all the different kinds of questions outlined in this chapter, teachers can alter the pace and direction of conversation, keeping students alert and engaged. Although good teachers prepare questions beforehand to ensure variety and movement, they also readily change their plans as the actual discussion proceeds, abandoning prepared questions and formulating new ones on the spot.

References

Welty, W. “Discussion Method Teaching.” Change, 1989, 21(4), 41-49.

Christensen, C. “The Discussion Leader in Action: Questioning, Listen-
ing, and Response.” In C. Christensen, D. Garvin, and A. Sweet
(eds.), Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership.
Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1991a.

Christensen, C. “Every Student Teaches and Every Student Learns: The
Reciprocal Gift of Discussion Teaching.” In C. Christensen,
D. Garvin, and A. Sweet (eds.) Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership. Boston: Harvard Business School, 1991b.

Jacobson, R. “Asking Questions Is the Key Skill Needed for Discussion.”
Chronicle of Higher Education, July 25, 1984, p. 20.

Welty, W. “Discussion Method Teaching.” Change, 1989, 21(4), 41-49.

Ferrier, B., Marrin, M., and Seidman, J. “Student Autonomy in Learning
Medicine: Some Participants’ Experiences.” In D. Boud (ed.), Devel-
oping Student Autonomy in Learning. New York: Nichols, 1988.

Baetman, W.L. Open to Question: The Art of Teaching and Learning by Inquiry.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1990.

Palmer, P.J. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s
Life. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Van Ments, M. Active Talk: The Effective Use of Discussion in Learning. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1990.

Leonard, H. “With Open Ears: Listening and the Art of Discussion Lead-
ing.” In C. Christensen, D. Garvin, and A. Sweet (eds.), Education
for Judgment: The artistry of Discussion Leadership. Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 1991.

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735. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Review)

Thursday, June 22nd, 2006

Folks:

The posting below is a review of the popular book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell who also wrote the best seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The review is by Phyllis Grummon, which originally appeared in Planning for Higher Education, December 2005- February 2006. The Society for College and University Planning Copyright (www.scup.org) © 1998-2006. http://www1.scup.org/PHE/FMPro?-db=PHE.fp5&-lay=Home&-format=home.htm&-FindAny Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
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Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Reviewed by Phyllis Grummon

Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of a new book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Gladwell’s previous book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, introduced readers to the principles of epidemiology in the context of social influence and idea adoption. In Blink, Gladwell uses his journalistic style to engage readers in the process of rapid cognition-what happens in our brains when we first perceive a situation. Specifically, Gladwell explores how we transfer meaning and action from our past experiences into a moment, sometimes to our benefit and sometimes not. He also provides insight into how experts and novices differ in their interpretations of the same experience: experts have the ability to gain significantly more meaning through “thin-slicing” than do novices. There are a number of areas in integrated planning and design where the lessons of Blink can shed light on our work.
Gladwell seeks to explicate how and why “the power of the glance” is both a significant strength and a potential problem when we are approaching a situation, particularly a novel one. More importantly, Gladwell maintains that we can train or retrain our unconscious judgments to make them more helpful to us. While not an expert himself, Gladwell weaves together research that creates a compelling argument for his conclusions.

The first lesson Gladwell presents is that, particularly for experts, it takes very little time-often only seconds-to apply their knowledge to significant problems. Gladwell presents a variety of examples of this phenomenon. One of the most powerful is based on the work of John Gottman, a highly regarded researcher on marital relationships. Gottman began videotaping conversations between husbands and wives more than 20 years ago. At first, he worked on coding all the negative and positive interactions during a 15-minute period. Over time, he learned that raters really only needed to pay attention to one type of exchange to be able to predict with nearly perfect accuracy which couples were most likely to divorce or break up. The thin slice Gottman needed was that of contempt. If one or the other partner expresses contempt during their discussion, it is very probable that the relationship is doomed. If Gottman hears contempt, then “blink”, he knows what is likely to happen.

Thin slicing can also predict how likely it is that a medical doctor will be sued for malpractice. Surgeons who have never been sued average three minutes longer with each patient than those who have. One study reported by Gladwell found that raters could correctly predict which doctors were likely to be sued simply by listening to two 10-second clips of their conversations with patients and rating the doctors on the level of dominance they displayed. Doctors who sounded dominant were significantly more likely to be sued.

Thin slicing, of course, is nothing new in our world. We all practice it when we receive a first impression from a person, object, or place. What Gladwell adds to our understanding is just how little sensory input we use to make those judgments and how often they are right regardless of how quickly we make them. Our unconscious processes information and acts on it in ways that may never be available in our conscious decision making. One example Gladwell gives of this phenomenon is the use of scrambled sentence tests that prime us to behave in certain ways through the words included in the test. One set of 10 scrambled sentences includes words that subconsciously remind test participants of being old or of aging. After completing the test, participants walked more slowly down the hall than they did when they walked into the room. None of the participants were conscious of this change. Likewise, participants primed to be polite waited up to one half hour to talk to the experimenter when he was engaged in conversation with someone else. In a number of cases, the participant never interrupted. Subtle cues carry powerful messages within our brains.

What allows these cues to be so powerful? To say they are ingrained by a life immersed in a particular culture tells at least half the story. In order to negotiate our daily lives, our brain makes many decisions without our needing to think about them. The light is red and we stop. We see something that looks inviting and we approach. We see a crumbling building and we cross the street. More insidiously, we meet a tall, handsome stranger and assume he is smart and competent-before he even opens his mouth. Until this election, in fact, the taller candidate for president always won. Gladwell reminds us that these characteristics, tall and handsome, gave us Warren G. Harding-often cited as our least competent and most corrupt president. The instant decisions our unconscious makes can lead us astray, just as they keep us from drowning in our cognitive vacillations. These decisions are most likely to take us to the wrong places when we do not reflect on them and when our passions-but not necessarily our training-carry us there.

Whether John Gottman or a professional food taster, experts have an extra set of filters based on their experience. “Whenever we have something that we are good at-something we care about-that experience and passion fundamentally change the nature of our first impressions” (p. 184). This reality has direct implications for our work on campuses. As experts in planning, our ability to “see” issues and solutions is often far different from that of the people with whom we work. Walking onto a campus, we are likely to have immediate, visceral responses to how welcoming it feels, how safe, how accommodating, and how well-planned it is. While the design may seem chaotic or purposeful to us, less well-schooled visitors likely do not even have the idea of design anywhere in their experience to use as a way to gauge their reactions. In most cases, people are both unaware of what drives their emotional reactions to a place and convinced that their reactions are rational. Experts have reactions, but then can reflect to identify the specific attributes of the thin slice that created them. As experts, then, what do we do to help those we work with overcome their “blink”?

Gladwell works to convince the reader that our naive first impressions can be retrained to be more reflective. How does that happen? First, we need to help those with whom we work to sort through what created their impressions. Creating opportunities for the unconscious to come to awareness is a first step. Asking clients what feelings were evoked by a proposed building, actual landscape, or new academic program can help us link those feelings to the assumptions about place that may or may not be accurate from our expert point of view. The feelings and actions that follow a first impression are real to clients, but not necessarily the appropriate basis for future decisions. Experts need to help those less trained to interpret immediate responses in more global ways. We need to give our clients a vocabulary for their impressions, words that allow customers to find meaning they can use as they consider the future. When they tell us that the design or proposed organizational change “just feels wrong,” we need to help them identify more deeply what characteristics might create that reaction. We cannot just dismiss them as resisting change.

Expert planners understand that first impressions cannot be ignored, either their own or those of others. “This does not mean that when we are outside our areas of passion and experience, our reactions are invariably wrong. It just means that they are shallow. They are hard to explain and easily disrupted. They aren’t grounded in real understanding” (p. 184). Our job as planners, then, is to understand our own grounding and to communicate that in a way that creates understanding in those with whom we interact. Gladwell’s book offers insights into how a variety of experts do that for themselves and for us. Its contents are easily accessible since Gladwell acts as a boundary spanner between research on first impressions and our own naive views of how those impressions occur. For those of us who wish to enhance our ability to help others with the translation between an expert “blink” and an un-trained one, this book offers a good start.

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734. A Whole New Mind for a Flat World

Tuesday, June 20th, 2006

Folks:

The posting below looks at some of the challenges facing engineering education in the global economy.. It is by science educator, Richard M. Felder of North Carolina State University. It first appeared in Chem. Engr. Education, 40(2), 96-97 (2006) and is reprinted here with permission. Felder’s website with terrific information for science educators is: http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (Review)

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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A Whole New Mind for a Flat World

Interviewer: “Good morning, Mr. Allen. I’m Angela Macher-project engineering and human services at Consolidated Industries ”

Senior: “Good morning, Ms. Macher-nice to meet you.”

I: “So, I understand you’re getting ready to graduate in May and you’re looking for a position with Consolidated…and I also see you’ve got a 3.75 GPA coming into this semester-very impressive. What kind of position did you have in mind?”

S: “Well, I liked most of my engineering courses but especially the ones with lots of math and computer applications-I’ve gotten pretty good at Excel and Matlab and I also know some Visual Basic. I was thinking about control systems or design.”

I: “I see. To be honest, we have very few openings in those areas-we’ve moved most of our manufacturing and design work to China and Romania and most of our programming to India. Got any foreign languages?”

S: “Um, a couple of years of Spanish in high school but I couldn’t take any more in college-no room in the curriculum.”

I: “How would you feel about taking an intensive language course for a few months and moving to one of our overseas facilities? If you do well you could be on a fast track to management.”

S: “Uh…I was really hoping I could stay in the States. Aren’t any positions left over here?”

I: “Sure, but not like ten years ago, and you need different skills to get them. Let me ask you a couple of questions to see if we can find a fit. First, what do you think your strengths are outside of math and computers?”

S: “Well, I’ve always been good in physics.”

I: “How about social sciences and humanities?”

S: “I did all right in those courses-mostly A’s-but I can’t honestly say I enjoy that stuff.”

I: “Right. And would you describe yourself as a people person?”

S: “Um…I get along with most people, but I guess I’m kind of introverted.”

I: “I see….” (Stands up.) OK, Mr. Allen-thanks. I’ll forward your application to our central headquarters, and if we find any slots that might work we’ll be in touch. Have a nice day.”

* * *
This hypothetical interview is not all that hypothetical. The American job market is changing, and to get and keep jobs future graduates will need skills beyond those that used to be sufficient. This message is brought home by two recent books-Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat and Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind -that I believe should be required reading for every engineering professor and administrator. The books come from different perspectives-the first economic, the second cognitive-but make almost identical points about current global trends that have profound implications for education.

An implication for engineering education is that we’re teaching the wrong stuff. Since the 1960s, we have concentrated almost exclusively on equipping students with analytical (left-brain) problem-solving skills. Both Friedman and Pink argue convincingly that most jobs calling for those skills can now be done better and/or cheaper by either computers or skilled foreign workers-and if they can be, they will be. They also predict that American workers with certain different (right-brain) skills will continue to find jobs in the new economy:

* creative researchers, developers, and entrepreneurs who can help their companies stay ahead of the technology development curve;

* designers capable of creating products that are attractive as well as functional;

* holistic, multidisciplinary thinkers who can recognize complex patterns and opportunities in the global economy and formulate strategies to capitalize on them;

* people with strong interpersonal skills that equip them to establish and maintain good relationships with current and potential customers and commercial partners;

* people with the language skills and cultural awareness needed to build bridges between companies and workers in developing nations (where many manufacturing facilities and jobs are migrating) and developed nations (where many customers and consumers will continue to be located);

* self-directed learners, who can keep acquiring the new knowledge and skills they need to stay abreast of rapidly changing technological and economic conditions.

Those are the attributes our students will need to be employable in the coming American engineering job market. The question is, are we helping them to develop those attributes? With isolated exceptions, the answer is no. We still spend most of our time and effort teaching them to “Derive an equation relating A to B” and “Calculate Z from specified values of X and Y.” We also offer them one or two lab courses that call on them to apply well-defined procedures to well-designed experiments, and we give them a capstone design course that may require a little creativity but mostly calls for the same calculations that occupy the rest of the curriculum. Nowhere in most engineering curricula do we provide systematic training in the abilities that most graduates will need to get jobs-the skills to think innovatively and holistically and entrepreneurially, design for aesthetics as well as function, communicate persuasively, bridge cultural gaps, and periodically re-engineer themselves to adjust to changing market conditions.

Why don’t we? It’s because people as a rule don’t want to leave their comfort zones, and engineering professors are as subject to that rule as anyone else. We are all comfortable deriving and solving equations for well-structured single-discipline systems, but most of us are not so sure about our ability to handle ill-defined open-ended multidisciplinary problems or to teach creative thinking or entrepreneurship. So, despite a crescendo of headlines and best-sellers about the growing exodus of traditional skilled jobs to developing countries (including high-level research and development jobs, which are increasingly moving to India and China ), many engineering faculty members vigorously resist suggestions to make room in the curriculum for multidisciplinary courses and projects or anything that might be labeled “soft.” Even though most of our alumni in industry-95%? 99%?-assure us (as they have done for decades) that they haven’t seen a derivative or integral since they graduated, the traditionalists still insist that we can only produce competent engineers by devoting almost every course in the curriculum to deriving and solving equations, analytically and with Matlab. The same professors are no less resistant to efforts to move them away from the traditional “I talk, you listen” pedagogy toward the active, cooperative, problem-based approaches that have been repeatedly shown to equip students with the skills Friedman and Pink are talking about. (See bibliography below.)

So far we’ve gotten away with it, although sharply declining engineering enrollments in recent years should be a red flag. We can’t count on getting away with it much longer, however. The relentless movement of industry to computer-based design and operation and offshoring of skilled functions and entire manufacturing operations is not about to go away. On the contrary, as computer chips get faster and developing countries acquire greater expertise and better infrastructure, the movement will inevitably accelerate. The American engineering schools that respond by shifting toward more multidisciplinary problem- and project-based instruction-the way Olin, Rowan, Rose-Hulman, the Colorado School of Mines, and a number of others have already started to do-will survive. The schools that try to stick with business as usual may not.

Bibliography

Effective Teaching Methods and the Research that Supports Them

Bransford, J.D., A.L. Brown, and R.R. Cocking, eds., How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2000. On-line at
.
Felder, R.M., D.R. Woods, J.E. Stice, and A. Rugarcia, “The Future of Engineering Education: 2. Teaching Methods that Work,” Chem. Engr. Education, 34(1), 26-39 (2000). On-line at
.
Woods, D.R., R.M. Felder, A. Rugarcia, and J.E. Stice, “The Future of Engineering Education: 3. Developing Critical Skills,” Chem. Engr. Education, 34(2), 108-117 (2000). On-line at
.

Active Learning
Felder, R.M., “Random Thoughts” columns in Chemical Engineering Education:
(a) “Learning by Doing,” .
(b) “How About a Quick One?” < http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Columns/Quickone.html>.
(c) “It Goes Without Saying,” .
See also .
Prince, M., “Does Active Learning Work? A Review of the Research,” J. Engr. Education 93(3), 223-231 (2004).

Cooperative Learning
Felder, R.M., and R. Brent, Cooperative Learning in Technical Courses: Procedures, Pitfalls, and Payoffs, . See also
.
Two meta-analyses of research on cooperative learning vs. traditional instruction can be found at (University of Minnesota) and
(University of Wisconsin)
A Web site with links to CL-related papers and to what must be every cooperative learning site in existence is Ted Panitz’s site, .

Problem-Based Learning
Prince, M.J., and R.M. Felder, “Inductive Teaching and Learning Methods: Definitions, Comparisons, and Research Bases,” J. Engr. Ed., 95(2), 123-138 (2006). On-line at

Duch, B.J., S.E. Groh, and D.E. Allen, The Power of Problem-Based Learning, Sterling, VA: Stylus, 2001.
University of Delaware Problem-Based Learning Clearinghouse, .
Ted Panitz’s site () and Deliberations, a site managed by London Metropolitan University () are good sources of both information about PBL and links to other PBL-related sites.

Posted in Tomorrow's Teaching and Learning | 1 Comment »

733. Personal Philosophies of Teaching: A False Promise?

Thursday, June 15th, 2006

Folks:

The posting below looks at the pros and cons of personal philosophies of teaching statements/. It is by Dan Pratt, University of British Columbia and it first appeared in ACADEME, American Association of University Professors, 91(1), 32-36, January-February, 2005. http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/index.htm

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: A Whole New Mind for a Flat World

Tomorrow’s Academic Careers

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Personal Philosophies of Teaching: A False Promise?

Increasingly, faculty at universities and colleges are being asked to articulate their personal philosophies of teaching as part of the review process for reappointment, tenure and promotion (Schonwetter, et al 2002). For many faculty members the request to produce a statement of one’s personal philosophy of teaching can be an unfamiliar and daunting task, requiring them to articulate what they normally take for granted — their beliefs about knowledge and learning and the implications these have for their role as a teacher. Few within the academy argue against it. Most simply assume it is a worthy and appropriate task, assuming perhaps that it will provide better understanding and more equitable judgment of teaching. While many institutions use the requirement of a personal philosophy of teaching statement to good and fair purpose, there are some (my own included) that offer more of a false promise than fair purpose in requiring such a statement as part of the periodic review process. The purpose of this article is to examine those false promises and disentangle the assumptions that lie behind them.

Two Promises

As worthy as it may be, the requirement to produce a philosophy of teaching for periodic review holds within it at least two implied promises: (1) That the review process will be open to more than one philosophy of teaching; and (2) that one’s philosophy of teaching will be given serious consideration within the review process. As with the tantalizing aroma of freshly ground coffee beans, the implied promises may suggest more than can be delivered.

Four Assumptions

Within the implied promises are four unspoken assumptions that are part of understanding how we might use a personal philosophy statement for evaluative purposes: First, is the assumption that there is agreement as to the form and substance of an acceptable philosophy of teaching statement; second, that all acceptable philosophies of teaching should be ‘learner-centered’; third, that the reviewers’ own philosophy of teaching will not prejudice them against other philosophies of teaching; and fourth, that student evaluations of teaching will have fair regard for a plurality of acceptable philosophies of teaching. Each of these assumptions will be examined in turn.

Assumption 1: There is agreement as to the form and substance of an acceptable philosophy of teaching statement

While trying to find a structure that would help faculty articulate their orientations to teaching, Maddin (2002) scoured the Internet to see what others had used. She searched for sample statements, definitions and guidelines, hoping to find something that would provide common guidance, while also allowing for personal variation. She was trying to find structures that would be helpful without being too deterministic as to would be acceptable statements of teaching philosophy. Initially, many of the samples and guidelines looked similar. As she looked closer, the reason for this became clear: Many university web sites had borrowed their guidelines from another university (often with due credit given). For example, within the U.S., Ohio State University (2002) provided more than a dozen sample statements and was cited as a source by a number of other university internet sites. Within Canada, the University of Guelph (2002) provided fewer samples but was a source of guidance for other universities. In the UK, the University of Nottingham’s site (2002) provided guidance and structure for other universities. Nottingham’s site was different from most others in one important respect: They asked faculty to reflect on values, beliefs and the underlying question of ‘why’ in their teaching. These three universities were not, of course, the only ones cited; nor were they used only by universities within their own country. They do, however, represent a sample of sites that were widely adopted or adapted by other universities and, thus, contributed to an emerging consensus as to how faculty were to think about the form and substance of a philosophy of teaching statement. With the exception of a few sites, such as Nottingham’s, the substance of resulting sample statements was often less than would be necessary if the statement was to be used in a critical review of teaching. More often than not, sample statements focused primarily on the aims of teaching and the means by which those aims might be achieved. Little was said about underlying values or beliefs that would give justification to either the aims or the means. Although the guidelines often encouraged faculty members to say what they believed to be the nature of learning, and many samples did say something about learning, seldom did faculty members talk about the nature of knowledge in their field, profession or discipline, or the imperatives that guided their teaching. For the most part, sample statements and guidelines were more concerned with describing what and how, than about building a rationale that would justify particular aims or means. As a result, while there was convergence on the form and substance of what should go into a philosophy of teaching statement, the result was often less than would be useful in any rigorous evaluative review. Although the request was for a ‘philosophy’ statement, the product was more often descriptive than analytical in its substance. This could be critical if a person’s approach to teaching differed from the norms within a department. If it is to be used for evaluative review, the substance of a personal philosophy of teaching should help reviewers (and students) better understand both the logic and the heart of someone’s teaching. More than a mere description of aims and means, a philosophy of teaching statement should reveal the deeper structures and values that give both meaning and justification to an approach to teaching. As of yet, we see little to suggest that there is agreement as to the substance that would be useful in rigorous peer reviews of teaching.

Assumption 2: Acceptable philosophies of teaching should be ‘learner-centered’

Across North America and increasingly elsewhere, there is a move toward a single, dominant philosophy of teaching, usually labeled ‘learner-centered’. The argument for a learner-centered philosophy of teaching is, at least in part, a reaction against teacher-centered instruction that dominated much of higher education for the past forty years or more. To some, this makes infinite sense; to me it is troubling. The commitment to learners and to learning, itself, is not troubling since a discussion of learners and learning should be an essential part of any philosophy of teaching. However, the way in which this view of teaching is constructed and promoted in higher education assumes that we are in agreement as to what ‘learner-centered’ means, and that our personal conception of learner-centered is (or ought to be) everyone’s conception of learner-centered.

This dominance of one view very quickly approaches an orthodoxy that excludes variations on ‘good teaching’ that don’t fit within that particular view. Consider, for example, societies with long honored views of teaching that conceptualize learning and learners quite different from our own prevailing views. According to the work of several authors (e.g., Watkins and Biggs 1997; Marton and Booth 1997; Pratt, Kelly, Wong, 1999; Wong 1995) Chinese faculty and students commonly understand ‘learning’ in terms of four stages that students are to move through: memorization, understanding, application, and questioning or modifying what is to be learned. All four are important, but the sequence is equally important. Learning is a matter of moving through the four stages in the prescribed order. Therefore, each stage is a valid form of learning for it prepares the learner for the next stage. Within these stages, memorization is the most often misinterpreted by westerners, especially when contrasted with our own preferred notions of learning. Yet, from a Chinese point of view, memorization serves a legitimate function. Through drill and repetition (as a means to memorizing) students are beginning the process of understanding and, hence, initiating the second stage of learning. For example, students may read the same material several times, each time making the content more familiar, while also focusing on different aspects of the text each time it is read. As such, memorization is not an end, but a means toward understanding the content as it is authorized. From this perspective, understanding can be a gradual process, or it can come suddenly through an “ah-ha!” experience. Either way, understanding the material in authorized forms is only achievable through diligent, repetitive study.

Some teachers in North America produce confusion and frustration in foreign students when they disparage of memorization and encourage students to move quickly toward the far end of this chain (questioning and critique). Foreign students often find it difficult to provide their own structure and guidance through the earlier steps of learning that seemed both useful and legitimate in their home country. It is not that they are incapable of doing it; they are simply not used to starting at this further stage of learning without having been guided through more preparatory stages. In addition, for many learners it may seem disrespectful to challenge and question the text (or teacher), especially when they have little assurance that they understand that which they are to critique.

In this version of ‘learner-centered’ (or ‘leaning-centered’) teaching, professors are responsible for guiding students through their content, down a well-defined sequence of steps, toward mastery and then application of the knowledge, fully confident that they, the teachers, are in control of the knowledge and the stages of learning. Students, in turn, are to be willing and compliant recipients of the teacher’s authority. Together, teacher and students enter into an equally well-defined set of reciprocal roles and relationships that give further meaning to learning and alternative forms of effective teaching.

Finally, current notions of ‘learner-centered’ may also exclude many of our own memorable teachers, those whose passion for a subject ignited our interest and redirected our lives. In short, ‘learner-centered’ has become the mantra of faculty development across our institutions without acknowledging variations on its meaning and corresponding views of effective teaching.

Assumption 3: The reviewers’ own philosophies of teaching will not prejudice them against other philosophies of teaching

Most departments either have, or are in the process of considering, ways to conduct peer reviews of teaching. This is founded on the assumption that one’s peers are the best judges of how well the discipline or profession is represented in course readings, lectures, tests, assignments and so forth. This is an important, but often neglected part of the evaluation of teaching. (Pratt, 1997) Yet within disciplines or professions there can be serious divisions of thought about what is to be learned and the central role and responsibility of a teacher. Within these divisions some teachers see their primary responsibility as transmitting an established body of knowledge accurately and efficiently. Other teachers see their primary responsibility as one of socializing students into behavioral norms and professional ways of working. Still others see their primary responsibility as one of awakening students to privilege or oppression that is embedded in the discourse and practices of a field or profession. (Pratt and Associates 1998) These differences are fertile ground for prejudicial judgment in peer evaluations of teaching.

As a result, if peer evaluations of teaching are to genuinely accommodate different philosophical orientations, the process must involve a discussion and consideration of what content, questions, issues, debates and authors are included or excluded from a course, what is emphasized or minimized, and what forms of knowledge are valued through the evaluation of learning and how these decisions are connected to a person’s philosophy of teaching. (Shulman and Hutchings 1995) Unfortunately, in all too many evaluation schemes, there is little or no discussion of such issues and, therefore, little guidance to direct peer evaluation. Instead, there seems to be an unspoken assumption that those who have passed the test of tenure will be able to judge the teaching of others. For example, when Henderson (1997) reviewed the evaluation procedures and policies of post-secondary institutions in British Columbia, she found no precautions against peer reviewers having different orientations to a discipline or field of practice and how such differences might be discussed within the evaluation process. Nor did she find any attempt to encourage evaluators to make explicit their own beliefs, commitments or philosophy related to teaching and learning during the evaluative process. Across most of the institutions she surveyed, almost nothing was provided in the way of guidance or caution to see that reviewers would be open to different ways of thinking about a discipline or different philosophies of teaching. Nor is there evidence of any change since that study was completed that peer reviewers are encouraged to disclose their own views of ‘effective’ or ‘good’ teaching, or to be cautious about the possible intrusion of those on the evaluative process. In sum, there is little to guard against the reviewers’ own philosophies of knowledge and of teaching prejudicing them against alternative views of what should be taught or how it should be taught. Without such precautions and guidelines, the process of evaluation is open to bias and may be skewed in a direction where reviewers look only for a reflection of their own philosophies of teaching.

Assumption 4: Student evaluations of teaching will have fair regard for a plurality of acceptable philosophies of teaching

Most universities place high regard on student evaluations of teaching and usually rely on questionnaires as the most common form of gathering data (Marsh & Roche 1997). Such questionnaires are either constructed in-house or ‘borrowed,’ and perhaps slightly modified, with little thought given to the underlying values represented in the constructs that define teaching. Seldom, if ever, do those charged with gathering student data on teaching step back from the procedure to consider the epistemic and normative values embedded in the items or the conceptual models of teaching that make up those instruments. For example, in one study that involved six departments across four universities within Hong Kong, we found nothing in university policies and procedures that questioned the universal application and fit of teaching evaluation questionnaires across disciplines. As well, in our surveys and focus groups, no faculty member or administrator raised the issue of possible bias in student evaluation questionnaires. Across hundreds of respondents, we found not one instance of concern for how procedures might be examined and adjusted in response to individual faculty members’ philosophies of teaching. (Pratt, Kelly, Wong 1999) There is reason to suspect that these findings are more common than uncommon in universities across North America and around the world. For example, Henderson’s (1997) review of post-secondary institutions in British Columbia showed a similar absence of concern or awareness that there may be a misfit between personal philosophies and student evaluation instruments. Indeed, part of the reason that student evaluation forms are so widely adopted as the primary (and often the sole) source of data on teaching is that they are easily administered and yield averages, allowing expedient and numerical comparisons within departments and across an institution. It would seem that the expediency of student evaluation trumps any epistemic arguments of faculty who would be so courageous as to draft and submit their own philosophies of teaching.

Conclusion

I fear we are building a very narrow view of what counts as effective teaching and giving false promise to the belief that personal philosophies of teaching will receive serious consideration when used for evaluative purposes. My hope is that we will be vigilant and not naively yield to those who believe that there is but one single and viable perspective on good teaching. I wish to honor those teachers who were memorable but different; those whose teaching was instrumental to our learning and our professional path, without necessarily fitting within yet another orthodoxy of teaching. (Pratt, 2002) I am not arguing that all philosophies of teaching are equally good or acceptable. That kind of solipsism is neither defensible nor practical. I am arguing against merely substituting an old orthodoxy with a new one; and I am arguing for acknowledging a plurality of acceptable philosophies of teaching. If we are to acknowledge and respect a plurality of views of teaching, we must avoid both extremes of ‘anything goes’ or its opposite, ‘one size fits all’. My argument is derived from more than a decade of research in several countries, studying hundreds of teachers in adult and higher education (Pratt and Associates 1998). Across a wide range of disciplines, contexts, and cultures, my students and I found a plurality of good teaching, not all of which rest on the same values or principles. Our findings are not unique. They correspond to those of many other researchers around the world, as far back as Fox (1983) in the UK and as recently as Grubb and Associates (1999) at Berkeley. Across all these varied studies and sites of practice, no single philosophy of learning or teaching dominated what might be called ‘good teaching.’

As I watch the mounting pressure on faculty members to produce philosophy of teaching statements, I see strategies ranging from genuine reflection on commitments that clarify and justify specific educational aims and means, to simple borrowing of ideas and texts from available samples and sites. For those involved in the review of teaching, it may be difficult to discern genuine reflection from simple borrowing unless we move these documents from the periphery to the center of the review process. If such documents continue to be peripheral to the substantive aspects of a review, there is little incentive for people to opt for the genuine rather than the borrowed as they craft their own statements. And there is every reason to assume that reviewers will have difficulty telling the genuine from the contrived, the sophisticated from the naïve, and the profound from the prosaic. In any case, the power and purpose of a personal philosophy statement lies not in its eloquence or its fit with some current discourse of teaching, but in its ability to reveal what is hidden, yet essential, to understanding someone’s teaching. At its best, it can be an advance organizer for peer reviewers and students, a map to the deeper structures of a teacher’s values, revealing both origins and destinations of teaching. If teaching philosophy statements are to live up to this potential, they must not be left on the periphery as unsuspecting instruments of false promise.

REFERENCES

Fox, D. (1983). Personal theories of teaching. Studies in Higher Education, 8(2), 151-163.
Grubb, W. N. & Associates (1999). Honored but Invisible: An Inside Look at Teaching in Community Colleges. New York: Routledge.
Henderson, M.M. (1997). The evaluation of faculty in British Columbia Colleges. Unpublished masters thesis, The University of British Columbia.

Maddin, G. (2002). Philosophies of Teaching: Can the web provide guidance? Unpublished masters paper, The University of British Columbia.

Marsh, H.W. and Roche, L.A. (1997) Making students’ evaluations of teaching effectiveness effective: the critical issues of validity, bias, and utility. American Psychologist, 52(11), 1187-1197.
Marton, F. and Booth, S. (1997). Learning and Awareness, New Jersey: Laurence Earlbaum and Associates.
Ohio State University (2002).
[http://www.acs.ohio-state.edu/education/ftad/portfolio/philosophy/]

Pratt, D.D. (1997). Reconceptualizing the evaluation of teaching in higher education, Higher Education, 34: 23-44, Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Pratt, D.D. and Associates (1998). Five Perspectives on Teaching in Adult and Higher Education. Malabar, FL: Krieger.

Pratt, D.D., Kelly, M., Wong, W.S. (1999). Chinese conceptions of ‘effective teaching’ in Hong Kong: Towards culturally sensitive evaluation of teaching, International Journal of Lifelong Education, 18(4), 241-258.

Pratt, D.D. (2002). Good teaching: one size fits all? In Jovita Ross-Gordon (Ed.) An Up-date on Teaching Theory, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Schonwetter, D.J. Sokal, L., Friesen, M. and Taylor, K.L. (2002). Teaching philosophies reconsidered: A conceptual model for the development and evaluation of teaching philosophy statements. The International Journal for Academic Development, 7(1), 83-97.

Shulman, L. and Hutchings, P. (1995). Exercise I – teaching as scholarship: reflections on a syllabus, in Hutchings, P. (ed.) From Idea to Prototype: The Peer Review of Teaching — A Project Workbook, Washington DC: The American Association for Higher Education.
University of Guelph (2002). [http://www.tss.uoguelph.ca/resources/teachres/tpstatements.html]

University of Nottingham (2002).
[http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/pgche/reflection/philosophy.php]

Watkins, D. A. and Biggs, J.B. (eds.) (1997) The Chinese Learner: Cultural, Psychological, and Contextual Influences (Hong Kong Comparative Education Research Centre: University of Hong Kong).
Wong, M. (1995). Apprenticeship Teaching Among Chinese Masters. Unpublished masters thesis, The University of British Columbia.

Posted in Tomorrow's Academic Careers | 1 Comment »

732. Whatever Happened To Undergraduate Reform?

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006

Folks:

In this month’s Carnegie Perspectives looks at what is happening to reform in undergraduate education. It is by Theodore J. Marchese former vice president of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and editor of Change magazine. It is #26 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the CFAT. The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Personal Philosophies of Teaching: A False Promise?

Tomorrow’s Academy

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Whatever Happened To Undergraduate Reform?
By Theodore J. Marchese

In 2000 I left my post at the American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and the Change editorship to become a search consultant. This year, hoping to catch up with the issues of undergraduate reform I’ve cared deeply about throughout my career, I signed up for several higher education conferences. I heard smart presenters talk about the importance of general education, the necessity of assessment, the imperatives of diversity, the need for civic education. What I seldom heard was anything I hadn’t heard back in the ’90s. It felt as though time had stood still. Since then, I’ve been asking colleagues: Whatever happened to undergraduate reform? Has that effort, once so vigorous and far-reaching, run out of new things to say? Has it stalled? Did it die?

The final two decades of the last century-the ’80s and ’90s-were a remarkable period for innovation in undergraduate education. In the prior two decades, huge gains in access to higher education spawned institutions swollen in size, often with less well prepared student bodies. A new generation of faculty and administrators saw that old routines of “tell ‘em and test ‘em” just didn’t work anymore. Many of our newest entrants were being “chilled” out of the system; completion rates stalled; the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed how underprepared college graduates were.

The search for better ways was fueled by a series of reports that came out in the mid-’80s, notably those from the National Governors Association (Time for Results) and the National Institute of Education (Involvement in Learning), buttressed by Ernest Boyer’s widely read book, College. “Accountability for results” became an issue, and by 1988 several states and all accreditors were insisting on assessment.

Many of higher education’s earlier waves of reform had focused on curricular issues, on what should be taught. But the new reformers by and large ignored curriculum and went to what they considered the heart of the matter, the how of teaching and learning. A host of pedagogies, new and old, sprang to the fore, including collaborative learning, problem-based learning, case-method teaching, classroom assessment, competency-based education, service learning, and undergraduate research. Capstone courses, freshman-year programs, living-learning units, leadership learning, peer tutoring and supplemental instruction, writing and math across the curriculum, and technology-assisted instruction all flourished. To prompt reflection and metacognition, student journals and portfolios were introduced. Teaching for “critical thinking” and “problem-solving” became a mantra. Half the universities in the country set up teaching and learning centers. Important new ideas-the scholarship of teaching, the ethic of continuous improvement-emerged. New tools like the National Survey of Student Engagement and the electronic portfolio were introduced. In 2000, the National Academy of Sciences published a landmark report, How People Learn, lending support to those who would make learning the centerpiece of teaching. There were so many mini-movements that their partisans were all but in competition with one another for faculty time and administrative support.

Fueling these movements was a massive infusion of foundation dollars, especially from Pew, Kellogg, and Atlantic Philanthropies. By the late ’90s, these foundations were pumping tens of millions of dollars into various projects designed to improve undergraduate education. Every innovation seemed to garner foundation support or a FIPSE grant, which meant that it had champions funded to spread its message, newsletters and Web sites, demonstration campuses, workshops and retreats, even now and then some research. Organizations like AAHE and the Association of American Colleges and Universities played important roles in spreading the word through their publications and conferences. In short, there was almost no way not to hear about portfolios and capstones and service learning-and, of course, assessment. The improvement of undergraduate education seemed on a roll, bursting with energy and new ideas.

*******

So, what happened? The short version is that the sponsoring foundations withdrew from higher education grantmaking (and FIPSE got overwhelmed by earmarks). Compounding that, AAHE-it, too, had been a major recipient of foundation monies-lost those monies, entertained other agendas, and eventually went out of business, wiping out a major platform for undergraduate reform. The events of 9/11 certainly had a chilling effect on optimism for reform. Or perhaps you believe (I don’t) that all these innovations went through an inevitable cycle of rise and fall and, in the end, were fads.

This is not to say that important work on undergraduate reform has ceased-far from it. Those teaching and learning centers are still there, technology continues to drive course redesign, the Freshman Year Experience people just attracted 1,700 to a 25th anniversary conference in Atlanta, FIPSE is back in business, and assessment is more rooted than ever. The point, again, is not that good things are not happening but that, for whatever combination of reasons, new ideas now seem in short supply. Take assessment, for example. Go to a conference session on the topic these days or listen to the buzz around the National Commission on the Future of Higher Education, and you’ll hear people announcing insights that were old news a decade ago. The education press reports as ever on legislative battles, policy proposals, campus scandals-but seldom these days does it find anything to report about developments in the classroom. For many readers, out of sight becomes out of mind and the imperatives for undergraduate reform fade from view.

What’s at stake? Does this matter? Does it matter that university completion rates are 44 percent and slipping? That just 10 percent from the lowest economic quartile attain a degree? That figures released this past winter show huge chunks of our graduates who cannot comprehend a New York Times editorial or their own checkbook? That frustrated public officials edge closer and closer to imposing a standardized test of college outcomes? Does it matter that we look to our publics like an enterprise more eager for status and funding than self-inquiry and improvement?

*******

All of this may have a bit of the elephant about it-the one the blind men see so differently depending on where they lay their hands. The fact is, it’s hard to know for sure where we are with undergraduate reform, hard even to know what evidence would assess our progress. But of this I’m sure: Any industry-be it computer chips or potato chips, airlines or banking or healthcare-needs a constant bubble of questioning and innovation to stay fresh and move ahead. When our absolute core function-undergraduate teaching and learning-runs on yesterday’s ideas, it runs on empty. Good as yesterday’s ideas may be, I fear we are not asking hard, new questions about that function, producing new intellectual capital, and hatching new idea champions.

So I present the reader with these questions: Is the hypothesis correct? Are we indeed lacking new ideas? Have undergraduate reform efforts stalled? If so, what would it take to change that?

______________________________

Theodore J. Marchese is a senior consultant with Academic Search Consultation Service. He previously served as vice president of American Association for Higher Education (AAHE) and editor of Change magazine.

© 2006 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
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Posted in Tomorrow's Academia | No Comments »

731. Challenges to the Academy – New Colleges, New Students, New Challenges

Thursday, June 8th, 2006

Folks:

The posting below looks at some of the challenges currently facing undergraduate higher education. It is from Chapter 1 Learning Communities and Undergraduate Education Reform, in Learning Communities, Reforming Undergraduate Education, by Barbara Leigh Smith, Jean MacGregor, Roberta S. Matthews, and Faith Gabelnick. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com. Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Whatever Happened To Undergraduate Reform?

Tomorrow’s Academia

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Challenges to the Academy – New Colleges, New Students, New Challenges

In the last four decades higher education in the United States has been transformed through a dramatic increase in the number and types of colleges and universities and the corresponding increase in student enrollment. The expansion of the higher education system has created unprecedented opportunities for place-bound students. Enrollment in two-year colleges went from fewer than half a million in 1960 to four million in 1980 (Kerr, 1990). Half of all students in the United States today spend their freshman year in a community college. At the same time, institutions of all types have become more comprehensive and wide-ranging in their curricular offerings. Although state-supported colleges and universities educate a growing proportion of all students, new types of institutions have also appeared. Nontraditional progressive colleges, for-profit colleges, and universities, and institutions that use technology as their primary mode of instruction have emerged. In addition, many existing colleges and universities have reexamined their missions. In America’s research universities, where one-third of all undergraduates earn their baccalaureate degree, undergraduate education has clearly become a greater priority although the reach of the reform efforts falls well short of our aspirations (Reinventing Undergraduate Education, 2001; O’Connor and others, 2003). Many other four-year colleges and universities have crafted new mission statements. The result has been the identification of new sectors in higher education-from “the urban university” to “the new American college” to “the public liberal arts college” (Spear and others, 2003).

As higher education has expanded, the student body has become much larger and more diverse in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and cultural background (Marcy, 2002; Newton, 2000). Now only 16 percent of the student population may be described as “traditional”-that is, ages eighteen to twenty-two, attending college full-time, and living on campus. Many now attend college part-time. More that 70 percent work, and 41 percent are over the age twenty-five (Marcy, 2002). Many of these new students are the first generation in their family to attend college. The majority of the new students are women.

Patterns of college attendance have also changed. Largely commuter institutions have become a pervasive force in higher education, raising pressing issues about how to create a meaningful academic community in a nonresidential, transitory setting. Even more problematic when it comes to maintaining academic community and coherence is the precipitous decline in the number of students who attend only one college for all four years. Few students now graduate from the institution at which they began college career.

The fates of the two-year and four-year colleges have become intertwined, and issues of transfer and interinstituational articulation are increasingly important. To complicate matter further, recent studies show that students do not flow logically from high school to college or from two-year to four-year institutions (Ewell, 2002c; Adelman, 1999). In fact, there is substantial lateral movement across four-year schools. Meanwhile, relationships between colleges and high schools have become increasingly complicated. Widespread reform efforts in primary and secondary education are aiming for higher levels of student achievement, and a number of “early college” efforts are demonstrating ways to integrate the high school and college experiences and increase college attainment rates (Hoffman, 2003). At the same time, expectations for students are rising as our society becomes increasingly dependent on the kinds of knowledge and skill that are gained through higher education. In fact, the Association of American Colleges and Universities asserts that we are verging on universal college attendance as a college degree becomes the equivalent of a high school education one hundred years ago (Greater Expectations, 2002).

The challenges of educating a new generation of learners become apparent when we tackle the issues of student preparation and achievement, the mismatch between student and faculty expectations, and the differences between what colleges this is important and what parents and employers want. Although American higher education is often said to be the envy of the world, the level of student achievement and preparation needs to improve. Many statistics indicate this to be the case:

Although high school graduates may have taken the correct number of courses to graduate, more often than not they are not the right courses for pursuing postsecondary education. “About 50 percent of all first-time community college students test as underprepared for the academic demands of college-level courses…This percentage…has not changed significantly across the United States in at least two decades” (Roueche and Roueche, 1999, p. 5).

Students’ academic preparedness is down on a variety of measures, but students’ confidence in their abilities is higher than ever (Hansen, 1998).

“While participation rates in higher education have increased, the gaps between high and low income levels and college completion rates have not changed” (Roueche and Roueche, 1999, p. 3), In addition, “numerically, minority students are less equal now than they were thirty years ago on the criterion that really matters: college graduation” (Renner, 2003, p. 40).

As Karen and Karl Schilling point out, we need to look at expectations for effort and engagement if we are to improve student learning. Their research at seven institutions demonstrates a substantial mismatch between student and faculty expectations for academic work outside of class, with faculty expecting three times more time of task than students report actually undertaking. Perhaps most significantly, the patterns of first-year student time investment seem to be durable across the four years, implying that freshman year is a n important place to set expectations and study habits (Schilling and Schilling, 1999). The 2002 Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) annual national survey of students corroborates these findings that students are studying less than ever, declining to an all-time low of 33 percent devoting six or more hours per week to studying (Higher Education Research Institute [HERI], 2003). This recent CIRP survey also indicates that trends among students show “grade inflation, increasing financial concerns, heightened stress, academic and political disengagement, declining social activism, and record-level volunteerism” (HERI, 2003, p. 16).

There is a growing demand from employers and parents and from inside the academy itself for a new kind of education that has higher expectations (Greater Expectations, 2002; Jones, 2003). Many are calling for a practical education that increases students’ capacities for dealing with a rapidly changing world. They emphasize teamwork and collaboration and developing problem-solving skills rather than memorization and the accumulation of facts that will soon become obsolete. Often referred to as “lifelong learning” or deep learning,” these capacities have become imperatives in our rapidly changing society. In fact, the new research in cognitive science suggests that lifelong learning is also fundamental to our long-term health (Quartz and Sejnowski, 2002).

References available on request.

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730. How to Win a Graduate Fellowship

Tuesday, June 6th, 2006

Folks:

The posting below gives some excellent advice on applying for graduate fellowships in the sciences. It is by Michael Kiparsky is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California at Berkeley. The posting first appeared as a May 11, 2006 column in the CATALYST series of the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2006/05/2006051101c/careers.html
Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Challenges to the Academy – New Colleges, New Students, New Challenges

Tomorrow’s Research

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Career Advice for Scientists

Trying to win a graduate fellowship can sometimes feel like playing the lottery — long odds for a big payoff. I remember well the stress of the application process, and my surprise when I actually landed a National Science Foundation fellowship while some of my academically superior peers did not. I credit equal parts good luck and good strategy.

In the sciences, the best fellowships pay tuition and a stipend of up to $30,000 a year, for multiple years. Some also provide money for research expenses.

Many students learn the ropes of fellowship writing through long, hard experience — if they learn them at all. What I learned from the application process is that you can tweak the odds in your favor. I would like to offer some tips here to help you get a leg up on your competition.

Make Time

Writing fellowships is not easy. But like any large task, it can be broken down into smaller, more manageable elements. For successful applicants, applying for a fellowship is not a one-weekend, or even a one-month, endeavor. As with any writing project that demands a substantial, polished, well-thought-out product, cramming at the last minute will not produce your best work.

Plan well ahead of your deadline, and build extra time into your schedule. Many people budget considerable time over their summer and fall for a November due date. One winner I know worked on his proposal for over a year.

If you’re a first-year graduate student, you should consider taking on fewer commitments from the enticing new menu before you in order to have time to work on fellowship proposals. Count your proposal writing as equivalent to a hefty seminar.

Do Your Homework

Most universities have a fellowship office that can get you started answering your first question: What opportunities for financial support are out there? Set aside a couple of afternoons to browse through binders of information. Don’t forget to talk to the staff members in that office; they often have a wealth of experience and knowledge, and can point you to workshops on grant writing.

On the Web, a good place to start looking for fellowships is at GrantsNet. Among the biggest names in the business:
* the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program,
* the NASA Harriett G. Jenkins Predoctoral Fellowship Program,
* the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship,
* the Environmental Protection Agency’s Science to Achieve Results (STAR) Fellowships
for Graduate Environmental Study,
* the Hertz Foundation, and
* the U.S. Education Department’s Jacob K. Javits Fellowships Program.
Spending some time searching around the Web or at your fellowship office may reward you with a more obscure, less competitive source of money in your discipline.

Once you’ve decided which fellowships to apply for, it’s time to gather information. Find out which topics are most often supported, and which rarely get the nod. Don’t forget to read all of the material supplied by the grant agency.

Tailoring your proposal to the interests of the agency or foundation is critical. Parse the call for proposals thoroughly, and make sure your proposal deals with all the criteria.

Read as many successful proposals as you can find. University fellowship offices may have archived proposals, organized by agency. Hit up previous winners in your department for their proposals, and ask for their advice. They may represent potential editors for your drafts.

Narrow Your Focus

A few students enter graduate school knowing exactly what they want to study. If you are one of them, so much the better — build on what you have already done.

Many students don’t have such focus, although most have some idea of the areas that interest them. Being faced with a blank piece of paper on which to describe your earth-shaking future research can seem daunting.
The first step, then, is to find out what people have already done in your areas of interest. Make use of your university librarian, and be as systematic as possible. Note that no matter how clear you are about what you want to pursue, you will need to demonstrate your understanding of the existing literature. So keep track of what you read — you will be evaluated partly on the citations in your final proposal.

The Idea

The crux of the application is the research question you will investigate. It can be of your own design; indeed, developing your own good idea is very satisfying. But there are other paths to identifying your research question, as well.

Finding a question that follows logically from an existing line of inquiry is a great way to go. That is where your reading will pay off. Proposing to fill an existing void in the research — even an obvious one — has formed the basis for many successful proposals. Often you can find next steps and research gaps directly laid out in the conclusions of research papers.

An equally valid approach is to look to your adviser or another professor for a topic, or merely for guidance on a topic you’ve identified. You will develop the idea into a solid proposal, and own it by the time you finish.
Make sure you have a hypothesis — or more than one. Failure on that seemingly obvious point has sunk many an applicant. You need to be able to boil down your research goal to a specific question you propose to ask, rather than discussing a general examination of a topic. Explicitly laying out your approach as a test of null and alternate hypotheses will force you to clarify your thinking about the research you plan to pursue, and it will help you explain it unambiguously.

Try using your course work to help you on your fellowship proposal. Doing your research as part of a class can be helpful. Taking a seminar on your topic of interest can provide structure and focus for your literature review, and a captive audience to evaluate your ideas as they develop. It is also a chance to enlist the support of an interested professor.

Know Your Audience

Your proposal will be read by busy scientists who probably are not expert in your exact area of interest. They read hundreds of proposals in a sitting, with the goal of quickly eliminating those that don’t stand out as excellent. Make it easy for them to choose yours. How?
* Write clearly. The most brilliant idea can easily be swallowed by stilted prose. Re-read
The Elements of Style.
* Minimize your use of jargon. Remember, you are not writing for someone who knows your
topic fluently. State things simply in common terms, and define your terms clearly if you
must use nonstandard language.
* Format appropriately, but don’t overdo it. Underline your hypothesis, italicize key
points, put big ideas in boldface type, use bullets. Those tricks will help readers who are
skimming your proposal, and will make the main concepts stick in their heads for that
extra moment.
* Use figures and graphics where appropriate. If you have preliminary data, relevant
information from another source, a map of your study area, or a simple graphic to
represent your ideas, by all means include it. It will probably count toward your page
limit, but a strong visual element can be well worth the words you trade for it.

It’s All About You

Don’t forget that most graduate-student fellowships are intended to support a person, not an actual product.
Your main task is to demonstrate that you can conceptualize and present a strong potential research path. Many students I know who received an NSF grant are conducting research different from the project they proposed, and the NSF is generally fine with the switch.

Remember that your entire application counts, not just your research plan. Don’t neglect the other essays you are required to include. For example, the section on your background should justify why you are qualified to carry out the research you propose, and the section on career goals should show how you plan to use the skills you will develop during your schooling.

Successful proposals seem to have a few elements in common. Some of those characteristics are:
* A focus on a “hot” area of the discipline. The scientists evaluating your proposal will
have a broad familiarity with the field, and may know what the spicy topics of the
season are. You will impress them if you are on the ball enough to address an active
debate and controversy.
* A “doable” scope. That means the project should be doable by you, on a dissertation
time scale, with the resources you expect to have available. The scope of most
proposals is too large at first, and needs to be narrowed.
* Clear knowledge of the subject. Demonstrate your familiarity with the system, field
site, organization, organism, star cluster, or whatever you intend to study.
* Relevance to the grant agency’s goals. Private foundations might have programmatic
areas of interest you can contribute to. Even the NSF, which promotes basic research,
seeks applicability in the work it finances. In some cases, such as the EPA’s STAR
fellowships, relevance is essential. Be shameless about emphasizing how your project
will further social goals or have policy implications.

Drafts, Drafts, and More Drafts

Don’t be afraid to start writing the proposal before you feel ready. Rewriting again and again will tighten your prose, clarify your ideas, and polish your proposal. It will also help you ferret out typos. I found four in my final proposal when I reread it the other day. I got lucky in spite of that. You might not.

Ideally, professors in your field will carefully read and improve your drafts. Others who are not as expert, including friends, family, and peers, can evaluate your writing and logic. If what you are trying to say is unclear to a fellow student, chances are it will be unclear to the evaluation committee.

Prep Your Recommenders

Fellowships can require four or more glowing statements about what a wonderful and brilliant person you are. To get this far, you probably have developed and maintained relationships with people, hopefully professors, who can attest to your best qualities.

It’s important to offer evidence that your work has the support of your department or university. Grant agencies want to know that faculty members are invested in your success. Even if you are a first-year graduate student, your advisers should understand their function in this regard, and if they don’t, it is completely legitimate to politely let them know.

It doesn’t hurt if your recommenders are prominent in your field of interest. However, it is more important to have someone in your corner who writes well and wants to be your champion than to choose a big name who is not invested enough in your success to put the effort into writing a glowing appraisal.
Some applicants actively cultivate, and even coach, their recommenders. One student in our department actually lays out a list of important points, respectfully asking each letter-writer to attest to an aspect of her qualifications (quantitative skills, creativity, language skills, etc.) that supports her application.
Give your recommenders copies of your draft proposal well before they write their letters. Better yet, give them a copy of it well before it is due, and solicit their feedback. The more they invest in you, particularly if you might work in their research group, the better off you are.

Apply, Already!

The odds may seem against you, but this is a worthwhile exercise. A month before submitting my NSF proposal, I was deeply distressed. Everyone else applying seemed so much more in control, confident, and focused. I came pretty close to chucking the whole thing. I’m glad I didn’t.

The reason I stuck with it was that I shifted my attitude from an all-or-nothing, win-or-lose mentality. I relaxed, accepted that my chances were slim (everybody’s are!), and approached the process as an opportunity to explore an idea that I actually wanted to pursue, without attachment to the notion of a big payoff.
However your fellowship application turns out, you will gain valuable experience and a much deeper understanding of a field of interest to you. You might also get a dissertation topic out of it, or, equally valuable, the knowledge that you don’t want to explore that topic. You will also gain a template for future proposals.

Some fellowships will even send you copies of reviewer’s comments, which will help you recraft your proposal for resubmission to that agency or elsewhere. And maybe, just maybe, you will be rewarded by a life-changing letter.

Michael Kiparsky is a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow in the Energy and Resources Group (ERG) at the University of California at Berkeley.

Copyright © 2006 by The Chronicle of Higher Education

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729 Playing as Pedagogy

Thursday, June 1st, 2006

Folks:

The posting below looks at role-playing in the classroom. The article features Stanford University award-winning art history teacher Wanda Corn, and is written by Barbara Palmer in Stanford Report, May 17, 2006, Volume XXXVIII, No. 28. http://news-service.stanford.edu/] Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: How to Win a Graduate Fellowship

Tomorrow’s Teaching and Learning

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Playing as Pedagogy

Wanda Corn, the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History, was a bit daunted when she was asked to speak at the Center for Teaching and Learning’s “Award-Winning Teachers on Teaching” series, she confessed during her May 4 presentation.

The recipient of a 2001 Phi Beta Kappa teaching award and a Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities, Corn is an expert on American art. She described herself as a self-taught teacher. During more than three decades of teaching-including 26 years at Stanford-she has never had so much as a single class on pedagogy, she said. “I had very few of what I would call fine teachers in my college years or even-if I must admit it-in graduate school,” she added. She said she used the sermons of her father, a Congregational minister, as models and relied on intuition and trial and error for the rest.

But Corn, who earned her undergraduate and graduate degrees from New York University, used the invitation to talk as an opportunity to dig around in her old notes and recreate her own growth as a teacher, she said. As she did, she discovered that she had used role-playing as an instructional tool over the years, and adopted it as a kind of “homegrown” pedagogy. Her talk, “Playing as Pedagogy,” served not only as an exposition of Corn’s interactive classroom techniques but also as a mini-retrospective of her teaching career.

She was terrified during her first year of teaching at Washington Square College, where she barely lifted her eyes from her lecture notes, Corn recalled. “I mimicked my teachers, who rattled on for a hour,” she said. “They always came in suits-they were always men-and it was a formal occasion.”

After earning her doctorate, Corn traveled west with her husband, history lecturer Joe Corn, to the University of California-Berkeley for his doctoral studies. Their arrival on the Berkeley campus in 1969 came at a “charged moment,” when experimentation was not only in the air, it was de rigueur, Corn said. Her husband’s PhD constituted a “second education” for her and inspired her to think about art history in ways other than as a “rhetoric of connoisseurship,” Corn said. “There was a concern then that the way we were teaching art history was not accessible.”

Corn’s own use of experiential teaching began at Mills College in Oakland, where Corn taught from 1970 to 1980. Mills was undergoing its own transformation, from a “girl’s school” to “women’s college,” Corn said, and the faculty was “very much intent upon reshaping every aspect of the education our students got.”

In her art history classes there, Corn asked students to figuratively step inside the minds of 19th-century French neoclassicist and Romantic painters by imagining how Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix might have composed a history painting, and then staging live tableaux. Students learned about cubism by creating cubist works and immersed themselves in surrealism by participating in “Surrealist Nights,” complete with costumes, student artwork and cutouts of pictures of disembodied eyeballs and mouths presented as canapés.

Despite student enthusiasm for such assignments-and her view of her Mills years as “magical”-Corn put such playful experimentation behind her when she began teaching at Stanford in 1980. The times had changed, she said. “I wasn’t at Berkeley anymore. We had gotten past what people called the sixties-which was really the 1970s.”

Or so she thought. Over the years, little by little, pieces of those assignments kept popping up alongside more traditional lectures and assignments in her art history classes at Stanford, she said.

For example, Corn asks students to take a position and re-enact the debate between the regionalists and the abstractionists when teaching about 20th-century American art, or to re-argue the 1878 libel case the American painter James Whistler brought against the critic John Ruskin. She’s asked students to write in the voice of the French philosopher Denis Diderot and to create prose portraits of painters in the style of Gertrude Stein, which they then read, imitating Stein’s distinctive elocutionary style.

For her course Transatlantic Modernism: Paris and New York in the Early 20th Century, Corn pulls out all the stops. She dresses like Gertrude Stein and invites her students and their guests to come in costume for an evening “Chez Stein,” with a student-created, modernist portrait as the price of admission. “We’ve had a Josephine Baker in a banana skirt, and there is always a Marcel Duchamp or two-or three or four,” she said. One year, she even borrowed a white poodle from a friend, in honor of Stein’s pet poodle.

Such assignments, which Corn introduces mid-term and which she usually doesn’t grade, require students to think outside the academic box, she said. Most are shared or group assignments, so that students have an opportunity to learn from each other.

They also make some students extremely anxious, she said. “I don’t remember anyone at Mills wondering how they would be evaluated on such assignments, but I do remember a lot of Stanford students asking me that question.”

Although there are as many “ordinary” days as extraordinary ones in her classroom, Corn has noted that the things her students have learned experientially tend to stay in their memory banks, she said.
And she has had the pleasure of a former student re-introducing herself with the words: “I was the student in the banana skirt.”

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