Shockingly, although I had taken part in discussions of interdisciplinarity before, I had not really considered my own disciplinary affiliation in those discussions. At least, I had hitherto failed to contend with the fundamental question Do I even have a discipline? Watching Matt Cheney’s ID video a couple times woke me from my dogmatic slumber.
In libraries, information is the coin of the realm, but it is rarely minted in the realm.
Of course, a body of scholarship exists describing the information-seeking behaviors that go on in libraries, but librarians most often deal in others’ intellectual domains: education, economics, kinesiology, the life sciences, eg.
Library science, or information science, is at once everything and nothing. Put that way, it sounds like I am coveting a mystique–the pretentious pedant that I am (a job requirement for all librarians).
Contemplating Matt’s framework–content (what), method (how), and epistemology (why)–I began to notice something. The same fascination that attracted me to librarianship also drew me to TWP.
The tenets of critical thinking, problem solving, and information fluency drive at those epistemological questions: What counts as evidence? How do we value that evidence?
This metaphysical curiosity is why I am excited to engage with students in their educational journeys: to interrogate facts and probe our assumptions.
As Matt quotes Cathy Davidson, you reward faculty and their students “for constantly rethinking options.”
Not only is this constant rethinking integral to indisciplinarity, but I daresay it’s essential to each one of the four Habits of Mind.
“To fill a gap in my teaching I hadn’t realized was there.”
The toad of wisdom. Campton, NH.
Personal Connections
A fringe benefit of my CPLC involvement has been the happenstance connections I’ve made with other faculty and staff. I’ve met several interesting and talented people from diverse disciplines and far flung places.
During that first session on June 4, when we brainstormed PSU values, I was talking with Chen Wu about how those values related to traditional Chinese culture. It was a lesson in contrasts and a spontaneous reminder of the significance of one of our HoMs: integrated perspective.
Education Scholarship
How Humans Learn. Joshua Eyler (2018).
But the deepest and most influential results of my participation in the Learning Community came from reading Joshua Eyler’s How Humans Learn: not just reading the book, but taking many scholarly detours through the research he cited, drawing connections between them, and trying to articulate the ideas here in this blog (all links in this post are to my other posts).
That exploration led me to numerous evidence-based and expert-endorsed concepts and methods that I will incorporate into my teaching.
The Power of Stories
The chapter on sociality led me to Louis Cozolino of Pepperdine University and Dan Willingham of the University of Virginia. Through their work, I came to appreciate the power of story-telling, the psychologically privileged place of narrative, and the ingredients for incorporating stories in effective pedagogy. I will use these ideas in my TWP section.
The Scientist as Child
From the chapter on curiosity, I learned about Alison Gopnik‘s ideas on child and adult learning. Kids are eager learners. Gopnik suggests that youthful alacrity predisposes children to scientific investigation.
She challenges the conventional notion that education is a process of replacing childish thinking with grown-up ideas. Instead, we can harness our pupils’ natural learning tendencies and, in the process, salvage some of the curiosity that is often lost in school.
Asking the Right Questions
Perhaps most notably, How Humans Learn led me to the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a classroom method created by Luz Santana and Dan Rothstein for a dropout prevention program in Lawrence, MA.
I was drawn to the QFT because it promised to fill a gap in my teaching I hadn’t realized was there. The technique provokes inquiry and reflection; instead of passively responding to the questions I hoped would spark their interest, students in the QFT will drive their own investigation. Participants become agents of their own discovery while, at the same time, they are compelled to practice meta-cognition. The QFT also connects nicely to our four Habits of Mind.
So enthusiastic over the QFT’s potential, I conducted a session with my faculty colleagues in the library. That experience was positive, so I decided to propose a University Days presentation on it. Even though there were several compelling breakout sessions happening at the same time, 17 people attended my QFT session. The participants were deeply engaged and the vocal feedback was very encouraging.
The official reviews were few, but entirely positive:
“helpful and informative”
“Great workshop! Learned a new technique to start discussions and get students asking more questions.”
I’m excited to employ the QFT in class. It could be a powerful catalyst in the production of their group projects.
Takeaways
The concepts mentioned above are noteworthy, but not the only ones I gleaned from my CPLC reading. Others include the experiential learning theory of David Kolb and peer instruction from Eric Mazur.
For a relatively inexperienced teacher like me to attempt to absorb so many scholarly methods in three months was challenging. But, I had two powerful motivators working on me. The aspiration to succeed in TWP led me from the front, while the risk of disappointing my CPLC colleagues pushed me from behind. With the carrot of successful pedagogy and the stick of CPLC deadlines, I achieved nearly everything I set out to accomplish. While this sounds like the end, I know it is only the beginning.
“We do not create artificial assignments for babies. There are no lectures on how to eat. They grab an actual spoon, fling some food around, and experiment until they get it in their mouths.”
Eyler, Joshua. (2018). How Humans Learn.
The word authenticity may turn off the more jaded academic reader. Admittedly, it carries an air of pretension and buzzwordiness. The term could easily succumb to overuse or inspire eye-roll-inducing conference talks. Yet, there is good reason for educators to understand authenticity and how it relates to teaching and learning.
Authentic learning is grounded in the constructivismof Piaget and other theorists, emphasizing the active acquisition of knowledge through practice and experience. Evidence suggests authentic learning gets better results than passive approaches like traditional lecture.
Benefits of Authenticity
Julia Hayden Galindo, from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, writes “students who take part in classes with an authentic learning component, make higher academic gains” than students in similar classes that lack an authentic learning component. She cites studies by Mayo (2010) and Power (2010) to support this conclusion.
In a large meta-analysis, Freeman, et al (2014) found significant benefits to active learning, a genus of authentic approaches that also emphasize real-world experiential constructivism.
The meta-analysis looked at 255 studies of courses in STEM fields, finding that overall “average examination scores improved by about 6%” in the active learning sections over those based on traditional lecture. The meta-analysis also found “students in classes with traditional lecturing were 1.5 times more likely to fail” than their active learning counterparts.
What is authentic?
So authenticity delivers results, but what does it mean to be authentic?
“Realism lies at the heart of any discussion of authenticity.”
Eyler, p 152
Authentic learning must resemble, as much as possible, the real-world application of the knowledge to be gained. In some disciplines, it is the real-world application of knowledge. In chemistry, for instance, authentic learning may involve working with chemical reactions or the phase changes of matter. In aviation, on the other hand, a simulator provides an authentic flight experience.
Whether fully real or merely simulated, an “authentic learning experience must have ‘as much fidelity as possible to what students will encounter outside of school in terms of tools, complexity, cognitive functioning, and interactions with people'” (Eyler, p 153).
Inauthentic Experience
To appreciate authenticity, consider its absence. Inauthentic experiences suffer two distinct drawbacks: ineffectiveness and inattention.
Teaching methods that lack realism are less effective because they fall victim to “the problem of inert knowledge”, an idea that traces back to Alfred North Whitehead. Inert knowledge may be regurgitated, but cannot be applied outside the artificial confines in which it was absorbed. A student who can recite electrical formulas on an exam, eg., but can’t complete a circuit suffers from inert knowledge. A student who can recount the events in 1930s Germany but can’t contrast fascism with other political movements may also suffer from inert knowledge.
Inauthentic teaching is also prone to student inattention. As Eyler points out, “if the brain registers a situation as being artificial or unimportant, it will allocate cognitive resources elsewhere” (p 170). That’s a tactful way to describe boredom. Students who become thus disengaged may be worse off than those with inert knowledge; they may even fail to be able to apply knowledge in the artificial setting of a classroom.
Why is authentic learning important?
What makes authenticity work in education? The answer may have to do with how humans are predisposed to learn from an early age.
In an earlier post, I discussed Eyler’s chapter on curiosity and the ideas of psychologist Alison Gopnik. She suggests children possess an innate science-like method of testing and theorizing about the world around them. This view presupposes authenticity; our evolutionary development took place between the earth and sky, not a desk and whiteboard. Authentic learning harnesses our natural learning patterns.
Experiential Learning Theory: a framework for authenticity
In 1984, educational theorist David Kolb proffered a theory of experiential learning. His Experiential Learning Theory (ELT) gives us a framework for understanding the role of authenticity in learning. Kolb’s theory contains a cyclical model consisting of four parts:
Concrete experience: active participation in a task, such as lab or field work, rather than passive observation
Reflective observation: thoughtful consideration of the experience, including positive and negative outcomes
Abstract conceptualization: sense-making and informal theorizing drawing on reflection as well as external information
Active experimentation: planning to apply new understandings to future experience
Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle described for health workers
The four stages take place sequentially, then the cycle begins anew. Kolb’s experiential learning model may serve as a guide for educators wishing to enhance the authenticity in their classes. If a class activity incorporates each of the four stages, it is likely an authentic experience.
To further explore authentic learning and the experiential learning model, I plan to peruse this ebook: The Experiential Learning Toolkit by Colin Beard (2010). It contains about 50 activity ideas that may make a class more authentic.
Peer Instruction is a teaching method invented in 1991 by Eric Mazur, a physics professor at Harvard University. Mazur found that, in spite of his award-winning lectures and his students’ high test scores, the students failed to grasp the concepts he was teaching.
They could crank out formulaic answers by rote, but couldn’t explain the principles they were using or apply them in new contexts. Peer Instruction, or PI, arose during a flash of inspiration (or a bout of desperation) during a lecture on Newton’s third law.
Eric Mazur explains how he came to invent peer instruction.
Frustrated by his own repeated failures to get the idea across, Mazur told his students to discuss the problem-at-hand with one another. What followed evolved over time into the extremely effective, evidence-based method of instruction PI is today.
Peer Instruction Described
The Peer Instruction Process. (Rochester Institute of Tech Teaching and Learning Services)
PI begins with a brief explanation (in other words, a lecture) by the professor. This explanation should be in the neighborhood of 10 minutes. The professor then confronts the class with a multiple-choice problem to solve, also called the concept question. Each possible choice should seem plausible.
The students spend a couple minutes attempting to work out the solution individually. The professor then holds a vote: collecting each student’s answer as close to simultaneous as possible. Voting can be done using clickers, but less sophisticated means, like flash cards or show of hands, can be used as well.
The next step is determined by the distribution of answers. If most students were right, briefly affirm the solution and then move on. If the answers were predominantly incorrect, the instructor should provide a new explanation or hint, then repeat the individual phase.
If, on the other hand, the answers are more evenly divided, the special sauce is then added. The students break into groups of two or three and attempt to persuade one another of their answer. As professor Mazur found, and as numerous studies have since confirmed, the proportion of correct answers and the comprehension of underlying concepts rises dramatically.
Peer Instruction Flow Chart
Butchart, S., Handfield, T., & Restall, G. (2009). Teaching philosophy, logic and critical thinking using peer instruction. Teaching Philosophy, 32(1), 1-40.
Why does PI work?
A key reason PI is more effective than traditional lectures is what’s called the curse of knowledge: the inability of the expert to appreciate the obstacles faced by the non-expert. Paradoxically, the professor’s subject mastery becomes a barrier to effective teaching. Students who explain concepts to other students are keenly aware of the hurdles they just recently cleared.
Another force at work in PI, a constructivist mechanism, lies in the process of explaining. The very act of articulating ideas correctly fleshes them out and firms them up in the mind of the explainer as well as the listener. “Students learn best when active learning takes place” (Butchart, Handfield, & Restall, 2009).
Is Peer Instruction suited to Wicked Problems?
PI was invented in the physics classroom and has been applied successfully in numerous STEM fields over the years. Questions in math and science tend to be convergent: zeroing in on one definitive answer. What happens when the problem-at-hand doesn’t have a fixed answer? Can PI help us navigate the murkier waters of social science, humanities, and Wicked Problems?
Butchart, Handfield, & Restall (2009) insist “the opportunities for student discussion and active engagement offered by PI can be achieved even with open-ended questions which do not have a unique correct answer.” The authors present the following example concept question:
“Which of these outcomes is worse?
Five people contract a fatal disease that can only be treated at great cost and with difficulty. They are not treated, and die of it within a year.
A person murders a completely innocent stranger. The murderer feels no guilt, but never re-offends.
Neither: they are equally bad.”
Because this question hinges on ethical values, the answer cannot be clear-cut. Nevertheless, using PI in such cases can prime the students for discussion. It can also get the constructivist juices flowing: prompting students to solidify the rationales behind their answers, however subjective they may be.
Using one of my own Wicked Problems as an example, here is what PI concept questions might look like:
What would have the greatest impact on cyberbullying?
Nationwide laws and regulations to punish cyberbullies
A grassroots, nonprofit advocacy and awareness campaign
State-by-state funding for anti-bullying programs in schools
Social norms will take shape naturally as technology becomes settled
What, if any, threat does Artificial Intelligence pose to mankind?
None. Even strong AI will be confined to machines with no means to rule or enslave us.
Little. It may affect our quality of life some but Terminator scenarios are overblown.
Significant. Runaway AI is a unique and unprecedented risk that can be managed only with proper oversight.
It’s over people. This genie isn’t going back into the bottle.
I’m excited for the possibilities Peer Instruction provides. Time will tell whether questions like the ones I’ve created above will advance the learning objectives of my TWP section.
Without first building a social classroom, it will be more challenging for any of the other teaching strategies to take hold.”
Eyler, Joshua. (2018). How Humans Learn.
In How Humans Learn, Joshua Eyler extols social pedagogies, a concept found in Bass and Elmendorff: course designs that make the representation of knowledge to an authentic audience integral to the construction of knowledge (p. 82). That’s a dense definition, so let’s unpack it.
The representation of knowledge is student work in any amount or form that exhibits the students’ understanding: an explanation, a presentation, a policy proposal, an architectural design, a research paper, a mini-documentary, a diorama, or anything else suited to the challenge.
An authentic audience is comprised of those with an interest or stake in the matter under investigation, whether inside or outside the classroom.
In other words, social pedagogies are designed by teachers to encourage students to share their newfound knowledge with the world beyond the classroom.
Eyler seeks to extend this definition of social pedagogies to include such teaching approaches that leverage our innate human sociality to further a class’s learning objectives.
Before we can make productive use of social pedagogies, we must create what Eyler calls a social classroom, one in which healthy interactions foster social learning. A social classroom is free of corrosive interactions and harmful social dynamics. Eyler says there are at least three elements that make up a social classroom.
Three components of the social classroom:
A sense of belonging
Pro-social classroom management style
An instructor who models intellectual approaches
I will summarize these elements now.
Sense of Belonging
“College students benefit when they understand that challenges in the transition to college are common and improvable”
Yeager, et al. (2016).
Carissa Romero describes belonging as when students feel “socially connected, supported, and respected. They trust their teachers and their peers, and they feel a sense of fit at school” (2018).
Romero expounds: “Instructional practices that promote trust and enhance belonging also have long-lasting effects on student outcomes.” In discussing the existing research on social belonging in higher education, Yeager, et al, write “college students benefit when they understand that challenges in the transition to college are common and improvable and, thus, that early struggles need not portend a permanent lack of belonging or potential” (2016).
Interestingly, a look at several studies on belonging interventions reveals mixed results. A complex interplay of variables such as size, type, and culture of the school may confound efforts to draw straight-forward conclusions about such interventions. One variable, however, stands out: student ethnicity. Students from minority and under-served populations, such as African-Americans, derive an unequivocal boost from belonging interventions.
For example, social psychologists Walton and Cohen (2011) studied the effect of belonging on the academic careers of 92 African-American (49) and European-American (43) students. Half of each population were given information intended to buttress their sense of belonging. It did so by framing social adversity as common and transient.
For three years, Walton and Cohen observed health and academic outcomes of the African- and European-American students in both the experimental and control groups. In white students, the difference between control and experimental groups was negligible, but black students in the experimental group benefited significantly. Those students closed the achievement gap with their white classmates by 79 percent. They also reported less illness and fewer medical visits over the three-year period.
Joshua Eyler’s words on social belonging are particularly salient to Plymouth State: “Colleges and universities should certainly be paying close attention to the degree to which students feel like they belong, particularly since this factor seems to affect decisions related to the much-ballyhooed retention, progression, and graduation rates” (p 85).
His lesson is that the institution can take steps to give students a sense of belonging in the community, but professors are the ones who influence belonging in the classroom.
How belonging relates to classroom norms in a public school setting
The second necessary piece of a social classroom is a prosocial management style or, in other words, one that fosters community building. Traditional classroom management consists of the rules, discipline, policies, and expectations established by the teacher so learning can occur relatively unimpeded. This standard is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a prosocial learning climate. The instructor also must exhibit Social and Emotional Competence (SEC). According to Patricia Jennings and Mark Greenberg (2009), SEC is comprised of five traits:
Self-awareness
Social awareness
Responsible decision-making
Self-management
Relationship management
Jennings and Greenberg have laid out a model (figure 1) to account for the complex interplay between SEC and outcomes for both students and teachers. Teachers with higher SEC, Jennings and Greenberg assert, tend to produce healthier teacher-student relationships, enjoy fewer class disruptions, see higher grade attainment, and suffer lower burnout rates. Teachers with high SEC know how to “use emotions such as joy and enthusiasm to motivate learning in themselves and others.”
The authors point to a body of research that suggests “teachers’ SEC supports their classroom management efforts and may in fact be an essential component linking this new orientation toward classroom management, healthy classroom climate, and positive student outcomes.”
SEC influences a surprisingly diverse array of outcomes: for both students and the teacher, both inside and outside the classroom, and in the short- and the long-term. In other words, those who are socially and emotionally competent are cognizant of their feelings, those of others, and of how the expression of one’s feelings affects the other. Those with SEC also make decisions thoughtfully and take responsibility for their actions.
The benefits of SEC are manifold, but for the purposes of the social classroom, it creates a healthy atmosphere for social teaching and learning: “teachers higher in SEC are likely to demonstrate more effective classroom management; they are likely to be more proactive, skillfully using their emotional expressions and verbal support to promote enthusiasm and enjoyment of learning”.
Third and last in Eyler’s non-exhaustive list of qualities that make a classroom social is an instructor who models intellectual approaches.
Modeling as a scholarly study began in the 1960s, when Psychologist Albert Bandura devised a theory of social learning. Bandura’s social learning theory helped to bridge the behaviorism dominant at the time with other methods of explaining behavior and motivation. Bandura “stressed the importance of observational learning and modeling” (2005).
Modeling in Albert Bandura’s social learning theory. Lynda.com video by David Hogue
Whereas behaviorism is predicated on conditioning via the rewards and punishments experienced by an individual, social learning theory posits a sort of vicarious conditioning. That is, people observe the actions of others and unconsciously work out how and whether to imitate the observed behavior. When people notice positive outcomes, they will be more likely to model such behavior in anticipation of the same outcomes.
Bandura’s work has been very influential and serves as, well, a model for college instructors. Joshua Eyler implores us to model these intellectual approaches in the classroom:
Show positive regard and empathy for all students
Explore diverse perspectives on scholarly issues
Use logical argument
Limit our agonistic approach to other scholars’ work
Cite our sources orally and visually
Demonstrate methods for productive and collegial disagreement
Offer constructive criticism
Find value in the contributions of students
Listen
If we embody these traits in front of our students, they will notice the positive outcomes and, quite naturally, model them in the future.
In summation, the three characteristics outlined above tend to produce a social classroom:
Sense of belonging
Classroom management style that is prosocial
An instructor who models intellectual approaches
Successfully bringing about a social classroom will allow us to implement social pedagogies, which include collaborative learning, peer instruction, and discussion-based learning. I’ll delve into some of these more in a later post.
“Place our social natures as human beings front and center in the learning process”
Eyler, Joshua. (2018). How Humans Learn.
In his book How Humans Learn (2018), Joshua Eyler devotes one chapter to each of five attributes he says are key to human learning:
Curiosity
Sociality
Emotion
Authenticity
Failure
In a couple of previous posts, I’ve attempted to digest his most significant takeaways on curiosity from chapter one. Now I’m turning my attention to chapter two: sociality. For our purposes, sociality refers to the depth and extent of human social interactions that have the potential to help or hinder learning inside and outside a classroom.
Eyler opens chapter two with a circumspect discussion of primate social traits, evolutionary biology, imitative learning, and mirror neurons. This builds up to the crux of the chapter: the biological underpinnings of social learning.
Natural Pedagogy
Csibra and Gergely (2009) put forth the idea of natural pedagogy to explain the human facility for knowledge transfer. More so than our primate relatives, humans are capable of rapid and efficient skill transfer through observation and imitation. Not merely imitative, however, human learning is facilitated by overt communication, which Csibra and Gergely call “ostensive signals”. According to Csibra and Gergely, evolution has bestowed on us a keen sensitivity to these signals. Natural pedagogy, in their view, is a unique human adaptation for social learning. Ostensive signals accompany the observed behavior such that the observer gains some generalizable knowledge about the world. Naturalpedagogy has become a highly cited idea in the social psychology of learning.
Some scholars, however, including Amy Skerry and colleagues (2013), have been cool to the supposition that evolution specifically selected for natural pedagogy. They consider more wide-ranging and disparate explanations for humans’ adeptness at social learning.
Regardless, whether it stems from a singular adaptation or arose through multiple factors, our predilection for social learning remains readily exploitable. In Eyler’s words, the debate over natural pedagogy underscores “the significance of teaching as an augmentation of our sociality” (p 76).
Social Pedagogies
Eyler suggests that, as the social realm precedes the pedagogical realm, all teaching and learning takes place within a social context. Teaching, therefore, is subordinate to sociality. A classroom’s social dynamics can help or hinder learning, so we as teachers must be mindful of those dynamics.
He refers to the work of Bass and Elmendorff (2011) on the subject of social pedagogies, which they define as “design approaches for teaching and learning that engage students with what we might call an ‘authentic audience’ (other than the teacher), where the representation of knowledge for an audience is absolutely central to the construction of knowledge in a course” (2017).
This definition echos many of our themes in Tackling a Wicked Problem, such as the authentic challenge component of project-based learning.
Eyler adds to this definition, saying social pedagogies “would include those strategies that maximize the characteristics of sociality” and “place our social natures as human beings front and center in the learning process” (p 83).
Since all teaching is intertwined with and dependent on social factors, Eyler exhorts us to foster what he calls a social classroom. A social classroom is comprised of three elements:
Sense of belonging
Classroom Management philosophy that privileges community building
An instructor who models intellectual approaches
According to Eyler’s reasoning and the studies he adduces, when each of these three elements is strongly present in a classroom, social learning can thrive. He says, “without first building a social classroom, it will be more challenging for any of the other teaching strategies I’ll be discussing to take hold” (p 83). I will explore the meaning and evidence behind Eyler’s idea of a social classroom in my next post.
“The impulse to repeatedly tell and listen to stories appears to be a lock-and-key mechanism of intergenerational information transfer.”
Cozolino, L. (2013). The social neuroscience of education : Optimizing attachment and learning in the classroom (First ed., Norton books in education). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Storytelling, easily dismissed as the domain of fantasy and frivolity, may in fact be a potent teaching tool.
Stories are, in the words of Daniel Willingham, “psychologically privileged” (2009). Cognitive scientist at the University of Virginia, Willingham explains “the human mind seems exquisitely tuned to understand and remember stories” (2009). Louis Cozolino, professor of psychology at Pepperdine University, adds “it is very likely our brains became as complex as they are precisely because of the power of narratives to guide and organize our thinking” (2013).
Psychologist Louis Cozolino talks about stories and learning
Stories, then, seem imbued by evolution with the power to pass knowledge from parent to child, teacher to student, down through the ages. Indeed, an oral tradition has been a universal feature of human civilizations.
That’s fine for minstrels and children’s authors, but what can teachers do to harness the mind’s natural affinity for narrative? A couple things, it turns out. One, we can incorporate storytelling elements in our class activities. Two, we can cast ourselves as guides to the students as heroes in the archetypal mold of Joseph Campbell’s myth. Let’s delve into the first of these two possibilities.
Storytelling in Pedagogy
Tales and legends from The Odyssey to Star Wars have captivated audiences for millennia: interesting characters locked in struggle, persevering through adversity, striving to fulfill their chosen destinies or the fate thrust upon them.
To take advantage of the brain’s predilection for stories, lessons can be presented with some of these elements. But teachers need not compose an epic poem or write a best-selling novel to incorporate storytelling into their instruction. We can simply try to weave in one or more of these four elements.
The core components of a tale, in Daniel Willingham’s account, are the four Cs:
Character: they posses traits and goals the audience can identify or sympathize with
Causality: a chain of events connected in time and space
Conflict: strife and struggle among or within characters
Complication: characters do not simply triumph over adversity; unexpected events (and other characters) compound the struggle
Now that we know the power of stories and have seen which components to use, we can try to adapt our material accordingly. But some subjects (and some teachers) lend themselves to storytelling better than others. History and statistics, for instance, are reputedly dull subjects to many students. Can this be overcome with story elements? In his book, Willingham provides examples of doing exactly that to teach the attack on Pearl Harbor and the z-score in probability. He gives us other examples in this blog post and this interview.
Willingham also urges instructors to employ “medium-difficulty inferences” to connect the elements in the way storytellers do. A narrative containing exhaustive detail bores an audience, so the storyteller (and the teacher) should leave small gaps between story points. Students traverse these gaps using their reason and imagination. Willingham cites a scene from Star Wars in which Han Solo and Luke Skywalker handcuff their friend Chewbacca. The director leaves it to viewers to decipher the reason for this seemingly strange act. Han and Luke haven’t turned on their furry companion, but rather have concocted a ruse to fool their enemies. Such medium-difficulty inferences pique curiosity, which (as we know) motivates learning and memory.
A character trying to handcuff his companion is a “medium-difficulty inference”
For my part, I plan to incorporate a story into each weekly segment. Throughout my section of TWP, we will explore several wicked problems connected to technology, so I’ll have the opportunity to open each new discussion with a story. Here’s what I mean:
I won’t just say “Welcome to class, I hope you all read the article on cyberbullying. Let’s talk about ways of solving that.” Instead, I will begin with a real-life narrative, complete with character, conflict, causality, and complication, drawn from a news source or scholarly article. I hope to thus prime the students’ interest and set the stage, so to speak, for discussion- or inquiry-based exercises.
I hope to explore the second method of using stories in pedagogy, students as the heroes of myth, in my next post.
References
Cozolino, L. (2013). The social neuroscience of education : Optimizing attachment and learning in the classroom (First ed., Norton books in education). New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? : A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
I stumbled across a provocative tidbit while reading sections fromWhy Don’t Students Like School? by cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham.
“College professors typically get written student evaluations of their teaching at the end of every course… Researchers have examined these sorts of survey to figure out which professors get good ratings and why. One of the interesting findings is that most of the items are redundant. A two-item survey would be almost as useful as a thirty-item survey, because all of the questions really boil down to two: Does the professor seem like a nice person, and is the class well organized? Although they don’t realize they are doing so, students treat each of the thirty items as variants of one of these two questions.” (50)
Willingham, D. (2009). Why don’t students like school? : A cognitive scientist answers questions about how the mind works and what it means for the classroom (1st ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
When I’m done with my current mission (investigating the power of stories in education), I’d like to find the studies upon which this claim must be based.
“Our methods often presume students can pivot effectively from an information need to information discovery. The QFT does away with that presumption.”
I’ve devoted a fair amount of time to studying a classroom activity that has the potential to strengthen a soft spot in my teaching. The Question Formulation Technique (henceforth referred to as “the QFT”) works to empower students in the middle stages of their research from conception to conclusion. And, it promises to do so in harmony with the TWP’s overarching philosophy.
Tackling a Wicked Problem seeks to engage students by giving them a hand in their own practical education. This approach follows from the belief, supported by data, that students are more accountable when they help determine their own learning objectives. In addition, people are more motivated when working together toward a real-world outcome.
In short, students learn better when they have agency and work harder when it matters outside the four walls of the classroom.
Several pedagogical ideas are invoked in pursuit of this philosophy: open pedagogy, project-based learning, design thinking, and wicked problems.
But these methods often presume students can pivot effectively from an information need to information discovery. The QFT does away with that presumption.
The Question Formulation Technique in a High School Science Class
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the QFT combines “authentic practice” with “metacognitive reflection” (Eyler, 2018), motivating students not just to investigate the content, but to gain insights and self-awareness they can transfer to other classes and challenges. It does so by following these steps:
Determine the question focus
State the rules for producing questions
Produce questions
Categorize the questions
Improve the questions
Determine next steps
Reflect
The following describes each step in detail. The intervals shown are recommended by the Right Question Institute, a nonprofit organization directed by Dan Rothstein and Luz Santana, originators of the QFT. However, as with many activities, the QFT will take longer the first time (about 45 minutes) than with experienced groups.
Determine the question focus
Determining the question focus is the one step performed by the instructor and is done before the QFT session begins. They can and should, therefore, craft the focus carefully while keeping in mind the types of questions their students are apt to generate.
The question focus, which QFT practitioners often abbreviate as QFocus, is typically the same for the entire class. The QFocus is never itself a question.
The focus is often a statement that is clear and incisive, but can be something else, such as a photograph. Whatever form it takes, it should stimulate thoughtful interest in the subject of investigation. For example:
“In the digital age, some students are not asking questions.”
Because the rules are fixed, this is sometimes not listed as a discrete step, but instead included in the next step. Either way, the rules are:
Write down as many questions as you can related to the question focus
Number each question
Do not stop to answer, judge, or discuss the questions
Record the questions exactly as they were asked
Change any statements into questions
Students may find it difficult to adhere to some of these rules, so it is worth going over them early (even before announcing the QFocus), and handing a copy to each group.
Produce questions
4 minutes
If the class has not already formed groups, divide the students into teams of 3 to 5. Instruct each group to designate a note-taker.
The teacher should visit each group to ensure they are following the rules and that they continue producing question throughout the time allotted. Encourage group members to generate a volume of questions without pausing to evaluate them.
Improve the questions
5 minutes
In this step, students will fine-tune the questions to lead to better results. First, the groups will mark each question as open-ended or closed-ended. Closed-ended questions are those that can be answered with one word. Yes/no questions fall into this category. All other questions are considered open-ended.
Next, ask each group to brainstorm some advantages and disadvantages to each type of question. This metacognitive task prompts the students to reflect on their current and future thinking.
Finally, instruct each group to change one closed-ended question to open-ended and vice versa. Allow them to switch additional questions if they feel inclined.
Prioritize the Questions
3 minutes
The students will now identify one or more priorities and pinpoint the top three questions that serve each priority. Some example priorities:
Which questions most interest you?
Most important questions
Those that will be most helpful in your project
The ones you need or want to answer first
Remind the students to keep the QFocus in mind when selecting three questions for each priority.
You can have the students report some of their questions to the class. For example, you could ask each group to share the questions they changed from closed to open and vice versa.
Another approach is to have them read their priority questions and then observe for the class where in the list they came from. That calls attention to how early or late in the process the priority questions came up.
Determine next steps
2 minutes
At this stage, each group will have a list of fine-tuned and prioritized questions. They then must figure out how to go about answering them. For example:
Conducting an experiment or survey
A Google search
Contacting a reference librarian
Scheduling an interview with an expert in the field
Reflect
3 minutes
The final step prompts students to contemplate the QFT. Because the QFT is detailed and transparent, students can focus their reflections on any specific part of the process. The teacher might choose to prompt the groups to discuss and answer some questions:
What did you learn?
What is the value in learning to ask your own questions?
What are you going to take with you going forward?
Conclusions
The Question Formulation Technique upends the traditional model in which teachers ask questions and students answer them. Empowering students to ask questions gives them agency to take their project work in directions they find authentic. Formalizing the process of finding questions not only leads to better results, but it fosters metacognition. The QFT also connects to our Habits of Mind: purposeful communication and problem solving.
I’m excited to use the QFT to further the methods and philosophy of TWP.
On April 5, 1968, third-grade teacher Jane Elliott launched a controversy that still simmers today. More on that in a minute.
The subject of chapter two in How Humans Learn is sociality, a term whose definition I’ll get to in a subsequent post. For now, it’s enough to know that the classroom is steeped in the social environment surrounding it.
Class activities occur within the context of myriad human relationships: teacher-student, student-student, parent-student, student-society, and so on.
Jane Elliott describes her infamous exercise in racial discrimination.
Never was that fact driven home more forcefully than on that April day in 1968. History buffs will recall that Martin Luther King Jr had been assassinated the day before. Riceville, Iowa teacher Jane Elliott changed plans to help her third-graders understand how racial discrimination permeates the lives of those who suffer from it. She sought to show them the social context surrounding King’s activism and his murder.
Elliott divided her all-white class by eye color and explained how she would begin treating the blue-eyed students worse than the brown-eyes students. The next day, she reversed the exercise to give every student a chance to experience prejudice. Needless to say, the activity became highly controversial and has remained so ever since.
An article in Smithsonian magazine notes “When the exercise ended, some of the kids hugged, some cried. Elliott reminded them that the reason for the lesson was the King assassination, and she asked them to write down what they had learned.” One third-grader wrote:
“I felt like quitting school. . . . I felt mad. That’s what it feels like when you’re discriminated against.”
In the ensuing five decades, Elliott has been both lauded as a racial justice hero and condemned as a sadistic child experimenter. Undoubtedly, her exercise would have a hard time clearing any institutional review board today. Nevertheless, it serves as evidence that learning is never isolated from the personal and social relations among students and the larger society.
