Month: February 2019

Innovative Pedagogies

Differentiated Instruction

Missy Alexander

In the K-12 world, there is a great deal of focus on differentiation of instruction.  Teacher education programs are grappling with ways to support the diverse needs of their students, understanding that what makes perfect sense to one, may be baffling to another.  This expectation is the essence of moving from teacher/content centered to student/learning centered education.

Now this is no small task.  Already charged with knowing something about everything (just look at an elementary education program and you’ll see what I mean), the teacher must also be comfortable enough with the material to present it in many different ways.  Take, for example, my own children. One  of them seemed to have been born with an intuitive knowledge of phonetics.  One small explanation of how they work and it was clear Alex would master reading  quickly.  Michael, not so much.  Phonetics made no sense until many years after he had begun to read.  Reading came to Michael at a  different pace and different strategies were needed. It was also important to ignore arbitrary deadlines about what Michael should do when. That’s just two folks.  Think of figuring that out for 15-30 students.

But this differentiation isn’t just needed in K-12.  We need to grapple with what it means in higher ed.

We’ve made some adjustments in terms of students who may have some gaps  in their reading  and math skills.  At WCSU we  have what we call P courses. These are courses are assigned an extra credit hour and in-class tutoring to help students meet the learning outcomes.  The structure acknowledges that students who do not place into Writing 101 or Math 110 can reach a the outcomes expected in those courses if we adjust our  teaching strategies.

Now, the extra credit buys the time, but it also directs our attention to the way we organize curriculum.  The co-requisite or embedded remediation approach encourages us to think about filling in particular gaps in knowledge instead of requiring a one-size fits all preparatory course.  In the case of writing, that might mean the student just needs some help with a particular grammatical construct (often true for the many students at WCSU for whom English is not a first language). In the case of math, it may be that a few foundational pieces of algebra need to be reviewed, instead of an entire course.  This is helping our students not get stuck in the remediation loop, never progressing to their college curriculum.  It also honors what they do know, instead of designing entire courses as if they know nothing at all.

This targeted (perhaps adaptive) learning offers a good start to a conversation about differentiated instruction.  But it is important not to think that computer generated adaptations are all that is needed. I recall my own experience of taking statistics.  I enrolled in an online course to add the skills that statistical research can give to my qualitative inquiry repertoire.  I was an adult with a PhD.  I knew how to take courses and how to study.  I passed college math a long time before that so I was probably rusty on some fundamentals, but I thought I could learn as I went along.

Unfortunately, this online course had no interaction in it.  There was a book, a set of exercises, several exams and that was all.  Well, there was a concept that eluded me.  I needed a different approach, an alternate explanation, a new way of looking at the concept.  I got none of this, just instruction to re-read the passage in the text and try the exercises again. This is the pedagogical equivalent of speaking louder and more slowly to a person who doesn’t speak your language.  Some instructional differentiation was in order and it needed to be from someone who could hear what was troubling me so that the adaptation was more targeted to me. I passed the class, but I never understood the concept.

Math may be the most advanced discipline in terms of developing adaptive tools to support differentiated paths through a curriculum.  Unfortunately, the tools are frequently seen as a substitute for the human interaction that the professor brings.  Leaving students alone with the tools is likely to leave them passing a course but not necessarily understanding the material. We need to be looking at these tools together with the instruction.  Yes, modify the questions for the level of the student, but also modify the interactions between student and teacher.

What I’m trying to say is that it is time to be truly learner-centered, modifying and adjusting our explanations and exercises until we meet the needs of everyone in the room.  Instead of arguing about the importance of the credit hour, we should be arguing about how to best achieve relative mastery of a concept and then think about the time necessary to do it.  Instead of arguing about competencies, we should be looking more closely at what we need to do to move students from foundational skills to higher order  thinking and what practice they need to get to that point.  Instead of trying to determine what “regular and substantive interaction between students and faculty” should be, we should by trying to imagine how to create enough freedom in our scheduling and curricular constructs for students and faculty to rely on each other as needed. And yes, we need to discuss outcomes, but those outcome should not be kept at the foundational skill level.  They must contain a true understanding that comes from the holistic experience of education.

In other words, as we engage with the higher education landscape and the perceived threats to academic integrity, we should not get distracted with what was, but instead plan for what should be.  It is clear to me that the faculty-student relationship is still at the heart of this enterprise.  But it is also clear that the way in which learning unfolds has to shift. This is hard work, and it will require us to re-imagine all that we do at the university.  Like our K-12 counterparts, we’re going to have to think about systematic differentiation of instruction. But just think how satisfying it will be to know that we’ve done that hard thinking and we’re finding new ways to teach the students we have, not the ones we imagine.

Dialogue, equity, Inclusion

Diversity in the Curriculum: What do students see?

Missy Alexander

Like many universities, WCSU has identified cultural understanding as an important core value.  We have indicated this in two of our values statements:

  • Dialogue. We value the conversations that explore diverse perspectives and encourage shared understanding.
  • Respect. We value the  right of all people to be  treated  with dignity and fairness and expect this in our policies, classrooms, and community.

We have also included Intercultural Competency in our general education requirements:

Intercultural competence is defined by the following general characteristics: (1) knowledge about cultures, including knowledge about issues that can arise when members of diverse cultures interact; (2) receptive attitudes to learning about and maintaining contact with diverse others; and (3) skills required to draw upon both knowledge and attitudes when learning about and/or interacting with others from diverse cultures.

These statements are great, but what are we doing about it? Do we foster understanding and dialogue enough to support these learning goals and values? In several of my earlier blogs I have asked questions about whether or not our curriculum is sufficiently diverse. Today, I’d like to focus on student input into this conversation.

Now, I’m guessing that most students have not spent much time thinking about our values statements.  They arise more from the vision of faculty, staff, and administration, than from our students, and they serve as a guide for how we should conduct ourselves.  All of our students should know that their general education curriculum requires a course in Intercultural Competency, but many of them may not think about looking at the entirety of their education through a cultural lens.

I think it is time we ask our students what they think about our curriculum, as it pertains to ongoing interactions with ideas from cultures other than their own. Here’s what I’d ask:

  1. How many of the classes required in your major include cultural perspectives that are different from your own? List all relevant courses.
    • Did you know this from the course descriptions?  Please paste the relevant passages here.
    • Did you discover this in the syllabi? Please paste relevant passages here.
    • Did any of the courses have an Intercultural Competency (IC) label? Please list those courses.
    • If a course was an IC course, do you remember how the learning outcomes were addressed?
  2.  Have you taken courses outside of your major that included cultural perspectives that are different from your own? List all you can remember.
    • Did you know this from the course descriptions?  Please paste the relevant passages here.
    • Did you discover this in the syllabi? Please paste relevant passages here.
    • Did any of the courses have an Intercultural Competency (IC) label? Please list those courses.
    • If a course was an IC course, do you remember how the learning outcomes were addressed?
  3. Thinking about the classes you’ve taken so far, how many of them included opportunities to discuss cultural perspectives different from your own? List all you can think of.
  4. How were those discussions approached? Check all that apply.
    • Debates
    • Presentations
    • Small group discussions
    • Part of routine class discussion
    • Other (please describe)
  5. If you were to look for a course that included discussions of cultures different from your own, how would you go about finding that course? Beyond the IC label, are there specific words that indicate a cultural perspective different from your own?
  6. Looking at all of your responses above, do you think there are sufficient opportunities to learn about cultures different from your own in the WCSU curriculum?  Please explain your answer.
  7. Are there ways that WCSU could improve on the opportunities to learn about cultures different from your own?

This survey could form a baseline read on our success at living up to curricular goals and university values.  It might help us create better titles and course descriptions.  It might reveal that there are gaps in our offerings.  It might also give us some insights into what students are perceiving even before the register for a course.  The question of the impact of these experiences should come later.  First, we have to understand what our students are seeing in the curriculum.

You may notice that I haven’t asked if students want to learn about cultural perspectives different from their own.  Given the diversity on our campus, the diversity in the workplace that students will experience after graduation, and the questions of cultural perspectives that arise within the political landscape both locally and nationally, I’m willing to commit to the need for this kind of education.  I’m just not sure we are achieving the levels of exposure and engagement with cultural perspectives that we are hoping for.

There is one more thing that I should consider asking about though.  I haven’t included a question about the cultural group the respondent identifies with.  I probably should at the very end.  I don’t want it to shape the responses, but it may be very telling in terms of their perceptions of our curriculum. We have a wonderfully diverse student body at WCSU, and that question might be really important to the interpretation of the results.  So, I’m thinking about it.

What I do know is that I must provide a definition of a “culture different from your own.” That will be a project in inclusiveness, but I’m ready to take it on.

Credit Hour, Higher Education, Innovative Pedagogies, Uncategorized

A Smart New Deal

Missy Alexander

Last week I attended two events focused on education.  The first was hosted by Inside Higher Ed entitled “Higher Education and the New Congress.” This event consisted of a day long series of presentations about proposed updates to the Higher Education Act.  The second was a workshop in my local K-8 school district, where I am a member of the Board of Education. This day focused on re-designing physical spaces to support new pedagogies.  Heidi Hayes Jacobs (Bold Moves for Schools) spent the day discussing the ways in which the layout of classrooms (and schedules) reflect and shape the learning.

All of these conversations got me thinking about how we approach the design of educational experiences in higher education.  Despite years of research about pedagogy and outcomes, we have a tendency to avoid consulting the literature.  We make our decisions based on the past (how we learned, how we’ve taught so far), not on research.  Some of us run small experiments with a new technique, but the experiment is generally not followed up on with the entire university.  We operate on beliefs and intuition, not on systematic analysis.

Don’t get me wrong, lots of good learning experiences do occur on college campuses, and on mine in particular. Faculty earnestly design and redesign their courses based on the outcomes of the semester before.  That first hand experience and effort should not be discounted.  Faculty want their students to succeed and they tweak assignments, try new readings, and occasionally experiment with new technologies. But these efforts never become a university strategy for teaching excellence.  They are done one by one, only occasionally consulting the literature on teaching, and with little impact on the university overall.

To be fair, faculty are constrained by the environments we have created.  The physical spaces tell a story. Are the chairs moveable? If yes, we can collaborate. If no, we are set up for individual learning. Are the rooms large or small? The answer will determine the range of activities available to the professor.  The physical spaces constrain the pedagogies available.  Faculty are also constrained by semesters, time, and credit hour definitions, leaving little room to imagine curriculum in different chunks than those standardized units. Most faculty would be surprised to be asked to even think about those constraints. We have come to see them as a natural precondition for curriculum planning.

They aren’t natural, nor are the written in stone tablets.  The space and the time structures of education are made by us and they can be revised.  However, to do so will require careful planning across academic areas and they must draw from well structured research. We don’t want to undo our good traditions in favor of the new, without any justification and evidence that the new will improve things.

Here’s what I mean about time structures.  We may find some compelling research about how much time we should spend working on quantitative reasoning each week if we want to improve our students’ engagement with this essential analytic skill.  If that time is different from what we have allotted in our traditional course structures, we may wish to make an adjustment, but that change could impact student and faculty schedules in complex ways.  The evidence from the scholarship may be compelling, but we may not move forward because of the complexity of how we’ve organized time.

Let’s be clear, not all things are best learned in long blocks of time.  Some things are better done in short bursts of discussion followed by quick applications and then a break.  Other topics (or students) need intensive engagement for long periods.  These differences do not necessarily fit into our current structures.  We are fitting square pegs in round holes.

I say all this for two reasons.  First, in the meeting with Heidi Hayes Jacobs, she started with two simple questions: “How can we prepare our learners for their futures?” and “What pedagogy best serves engagement?”  These questions drove our conversation as we looked at building design.  It was a wonderful opportunity to discuss some of the research on the connections between pedagogies, spaces, time, and learning.  We rarely get to think this way about space and time, when we approach building design.  We moved into discussions of places where some pretty radical changes have taken place (Finland for instance) and how much more fluid those environments were. Faculty and students were able to change course and adjust time and space throughout the year to improve the experience. They weren’t trapped in a structure beyond their control. This kind of conversation has to take place in all levels of education. Instead of relying on projected enrollments and few pet projects (a lab, perhaps), we should be looking at the holistic and the research on learning.

The second reason is that much of the higher education environment is encoded in the Higher Education Act, and it too, is based more on tradition than science. The shape of that document reflects assumptions about teaching and learning that can be traced back at least 150 years (or to antiquity).  While the heart of a good liberal arts education may still share some assumptions with Socrates, the ways in which we can achieve that education have broadened and shifted with increased access to both information and college. Indeed, this access was spurred on by the HEA.  The result is a need for more research (and more funding).

The discussions I heard in DC last week nibbled around the edges of the HEA.  Some of the proposals were scary, some were interesting, all seemed to have been shaped by political considerations rather than educational ones.  Convenient statistics were quoted, but bodies of scholarship on pedagogy were not.  Like our building structures and our schedule structures, our elected officials are viewing this document as if it arose from nature or was presented on a stone tablet.  It needs a much bigger overhaul.

It’s time for all of us to change course.  Let’s consult the research, compare approaches to teaching with other countries, imagine funding strategies that support student success,  and create a comprehensive plan for research and development in education.  Let’s not leave this to the good graces of our entrepreneurs (thanks Bill & Melinda Gates) or for-profit publishing and technology corporations. We need public investment in this public good.  Let’s shift the paradigm from education by intuition, tradition, and hope (and politics) to education by strategy, experimentation, and design. And let’s drive that experimentation and design with those two questions asked by Heidi Hayes Jacobs.  “How can we prepare our learners for the future? and “What pedagogy best serves engagement?”

Those two questions can take us a long way.  With funding attached, they could a Smart New Deal.

 

 

equity, Higher Education, Inclusion, Innovative Pedagogies

Cognitive Dissonance and Equity

Missy Alexander

It’s been a tough couple of years for higher education, and I’m not talking about funding or enrollment. Whether we point to the pulling down of Confederate statues, to heated discussions about racism in our academic organizations, to photoshopped recruiting materials that exaggerate campus diversity, it is clear that things are not going as we had hoped. We have reached a point of cognitive dissonance, with our sense of ourselves as fair and equitable routinely contradicted in academic and main stream media. And that cognitive dissonance is making us very uncomfortable.

Good. We should be uncomfortable. We should be questioning our ability to support inclusive educational experiences that grapple with hard questions and take honest looks at discriminatory narratives and inequitable social structures.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about diversity (or the lack thereof) in our curricula. I argued that we should get started with looking at our syllabi, course offerings, and majors with eyes toward greater inclusivity. The importance of this task cannot be overstated. Regular exposure to that diversity has the potential to weaken pervasive stereotypes or what Banaji and Greenwald call “mindbugs.” (Their book, Blind Spot (2013), by the way, would be an excellent text for a psychology course addressing our biased social constructs around race, gender, and age.) When we are not intentional about creating curricula that draw on excellence from all groups, we are supporting discriminatory narratives and inequitable social structures. There is no time to waste on this project. It is time-consuming, but it is the easiest of all the tasks associated with creating an inclusive learning environment because it is entirely within our control.

But there is more to do. Our next step is to work harder at supporting dialogues that address systemic inequity. This is much harder than updating our curriculum. Let’s face it, leading those conversations is fraught with risks. There is a chance we may get the words wrong and inadvertently offend someone. There is a chance that our students will not wish to participate. There is fear that administrators like me will not understand the complexity of the situation when a conflict does emerge in a class. These are all valid concerns, but we do no good avoiding difficult subjects. So, what do we do?

I have one suggestion to get us started. Let’s see how far we can get by adopting a debate across the curriculum model. We can identify classes in every major that will include structured debate. It is important that we don’t default to debate in general education and ignore all of the other areas where these arguments should take place. Students need to see the value of this investigative strategy in all disciplines. It would be great to lay foundations in general education and then follow up in majors so that the form of inquiry supported by this pedagogy becomes a habit. I’ve selected courses from nearly every discipline at WCSU where I’d love to see debate included:

  • ED 206 Introduction to Education
  • NUR 301 Nursing Leadership in Health Care Organizations
  • HPX 200 Introduction to Community Health and Organizations
  • SW 210 Social Welfare as an Institution
  • ACC 340 Business Law I
  • FIN 370 Financial Institutions
  • JLA 100 Introduction to Criminal Justice I
  • MGT 251 Human Resources Management
  • MIS 307 Social Media in Business
  • MKT 200 Principles of Marketing
  • AS The American Dream: Visions & Revisions
  • ANT/SOC 204 Culture and Personality
  • AST/ENV 134 Extraterrestrial Environments and Intelligence
  • BIO 200 Ecology
  • CHE 102 Everyday Chemistry I
  • COM 190 Introduction to Mass Communication
  • CS 110 Website Production
  • DIMA 200 Storytelling for Digital and Interactive Media
  • ECO 211 Principles of Macroeconomics
  • ENG 108 Introduction to Literature
  • HIS 148 American History: To 1877
  • HUM 110 Moral Issues in Modern Society
  • MAT 110 Great Ideas in Mathematics
  • MTR 240 Climatology
  • PHI 100 Introduction Philosophy
  • NWC/HIS 115 Latin American and Caribbean Civilization
  • PSY 202 Abnormal Psychology
  • SS 201 Researching Social Issues
  • SOC 100 Introduction to Sociology
  • WS 200 Introduction to Women’s Studies
  • WRT 171W Craft of Writing I: Conversations with Predecessors
  • ART 101 History and Appreciation of Western Art: Renaissance to the Present
  • MUS 100 History & Appreciation of Music
  • THR 180 Introduction to Theater Arts
  • All introductory language courses

In some cases, the debate should be, “why is this a category?” (Non-Western Cultures and Women’s Studies come to mind). In all cases, the debate topic should include some question of equity and students should be required to find evidence for their arguments from a body of literature that represents a diverse group of contributors. This will require us to consider evidence from marginalized voices and people who do not have access to the traditional scholarly outlets associated with higher education, but I think we can do that.

The value of this approach is that it allows us to guide challenging conversations without taking a position on the topic. This is important because our positions frequently leave our students feeling like they can’t disagree. Instead, we can focus on teaching about asking good questions, finding follow-up lines of inquiry, discovering contradictions, and evaluating evidence. Our students will take the lead in the debates, learning about the contributors to their position and anticipating the arguments of those who disagree. It’s a great approach for developing knowledge of a discipline and the structure of argument. It also helps us all become better listeners.

As students and faculty dive into this curriculum, we will be cultivating a habit of listening. We will be hearing points of view we have never considered. We will be considering diverse bodies of evidence that we may not have encountered before. And we will be discussing questions of equity as a regular practice, not as an add-on to our courses.

Learning with our students, about all of things we forgot to consider as we shaped our understandings of our disciplines and of education more 1!generally, seems to me to be the best path to reconciling the gap between who we thought we were and who we want to be. This step toward resolving our cognitive dissonance will be imperfect and require further review, but it is does offer a way forward and I’m ready for the first step.

Banaji, M. and Greenwald, A. (2013). Blind Spot. U.S.: Delacorte Press.