Pedagogishness

Importance Is Not a Thesis

2012-03-11T10:16:00.001-04:00

In a nutshell: Students often evade thinking critically about a text by identifying a topic or theme as "important" rather than explaining how and why it is important. Teachers need to intervene.

As literature teachers, we ask students to read not only for pleasure and profit, but also for comprehension. Yes, we want students to recognize important topics or themes. But what we really want them to do is explain how and why they are important. For students, this can be a difficult task. How can we help?

Step one is understanding the problem. Consider the title of this post: "Importance Is Not a Thesis." Our students, however, tend to think it is, at least until we teach them otherwise. For example, ask students to write about women in literature, and many will submit an essay that begins, "Women are very important in literature." Yes, indeed, they are. Importance, however, is not a thesis. What happens once "Women are very important in literature" becomes "Women ~~are very important~~ in literature"? Put that on your dry erase board, complete with strikethrough, and ask your students what to do next. What do you do, Dear Student, when confronted with "Women in literature"?

Ask your students to brainstorm. After blank stares and icy glares, your students will try to retain the verb "to be" and slip another meaningless verbal complement past you, like "prevalent" or "frequent" or "often seen." Nice try, but those are just synonyms for "important." Before I propose ruling out the verb "to be," entirely, let's revisit that classic 1975 statement of what "woman" can be.

Woman can be strong, wise, enduring, triumphant, invincible, flexible, determined, resilient, and more. Any of these would make for a better, more critically thoughtful thesis than "important." A thesis using a predicate adjective other than "important" (or one of its sly substitutes) is a good start.

In another post, we will consider the possibility of banning the verb "to be" from our thesis development entirely. What happens when you cannot simply say that women "are" this, that, or the other? What other verbs can we put in that space? More blank and icy stares will greet you. What we need to do at this point is listen to 12 seconds of Frank Sinatra:

Do, be, do, be, do: How do we get students to move from making "be" statements to making "do" statements?TO BE CONTINUED...

Low-stakes Writing as Test Prep

2012-02-29T08:17:00.001-05:00

In a nutshell: A low-stakes writing exercise can serve as a way of reviewing for an exam and can even allow students to participate in developing the test.

Before I make up essay questions for a midterm or final exam, I sometimes like to take the pulse of my students as to what they think the major themes of the course have been. If we are on the same page, great. If we are not on the same page, something needs to shift, perhaps on the part of the students, perhaps on my part as the teacher, or perhaps both.

You can make this "same page" a literal page by giving your students a low-stakes writing exercise in which they identify themes of the course. To make this exercise a little more creative, a little more real-world, and a little more useful for everyone, you can make it a task. For example, I gave my World Lit II students the following question as their Daily Write yesterday:

Write your own essay question for the midterm! Think of a question that relates to (a) the themes of the course, and (b) the texts we have read. Your question should include the theme or themes you want the student to focus on. It should be a question that can be answered using examples from three of the texts we have studied. My objective here is twofold: (1) to give you a chance to participate in designing your own midterm, and (2) to use this as an opportunity to discuss the themes of the course at the midpoint in the semester.

I usually collect the Daily Writes after 5-10 minutes, then lead a discussion of the question they just wrote about. In this case, I let them keep their papers, and we went around the room (we sit in a circle in this class) and read each answer (some students summarized instead of reading verbatim). As they spoke, I jotted key thematic terms on the dry erase board.

In effect, the Daily Write became a brainstorm for essay question topics. In addition, it served as a midterm review. My students were spot on in terms of the major themes of the course (Yay for them! Yay for me!). Of course, I will use their input judiciously in developing the actual essay questions for the exam. That being said, they will indeed see their own input and ideas reflected in the essay questions. That, I hope, will give them a (justified) sense of collaboration and participation in a student-centered learning process. Within the limits of the teacher-student hierarchy (I do make up the test and assign the grades, after all), this helps destabilize the traditional education "bank," to use Paolo Freire's metaphor, and contributes to a student-centered learning environment.

I notice this post is not pulling in large numbers of readers. Perhaps a video will help? Julia Sapin of the Center for Instructional Innovation at Western Washington University defines low-stakes and high-stakes writing and explains how each is used in her classroom.

Critical Pedagogy in My Classroom

2012-02-25T17:55:00.005-05:00

In a nutshell: What I care most about in the classroom is increasing students' awareness of social justice, categories of privilege and oppression, the connection between knowledge and power, and their own potential as champions of freedom. Here I explore how that hopey changey thing is workin' for me.

I like the definition of critical pedagogy in Henry A. Giroux's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Lessons from Paulo Freire." Giroux calls critical pedagogy

[an] educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action.

This semester I am teaching classical mythology, European literature since the Renaissance, and a proseminar for literature grad students. Except for the graduate course, I have not explicitly mentioned critical pedagogy in the classroom. But my goal, as always, is to find opportunities to raise issues of social hierarchies and their justice or injustice. Some interesting things have happened in both of my undergraduate courses. One of the nicest surprises has been the way the use of an online discussion board has facilitated relevant discussions.

In my mythology class, the greatest energy has swirled around the issue of sexual double standards. In brief, the male heroes of Greek mythology can sleep around as much as they want regardless of marital status, while unmarried women must remain virginal, and wives must remain faithful to their husbands. Many of my students are particularly offended that Odysseus gets to have sexual liaisons with the witch Circe (for a whole year) and the nymph Calypso (for seven years!) while his wife Penelope is home alone in her bed, pining for her absent husband and fending off the scores of suitors who are pressing her to choose a new husband, since most Greeks assume that Odysseus, having failed to return from the Trojan War with the rest of his comrades, must by now surely be dead.

Now, there is only so much I can beat this horse in the classroom without turning my mythology course into a course on sex and gender dynamics, which is not what my students signed on for. Online, however, discussion of the sexual double standard can proceed apace, even resurfacing from week to week in the context of newly read texts. Moreover, those students who are particularly interested in the issue can stick with it, while other students can move on to other topics. Discoveries can emerge from the students' own reading, thinking, and experience, without my having to intervene in any heavy handed kind of way. On the other hand, at apt moments, I can poke my head into the discussion and draw their attention to notions like "patriarchy" and its implications. Even better, students who have taken a women's studies course can explain patriarchy and its relevance without my having to lift a virtual stick of chalk. I was literally thrilled when one of my students brought Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique into the discussion! Now, that's the sort of thing I'm always champing at the bit to do, but again, I feel strongly about staying off my many potential soap boxes so that students do not get turned off to the subject they came to learn about.

In my European literature since the Renaissance class, the injustice of social hierarchies is all over the place, in ways that are immediately relevant to my students' own daily life--but it has taken them weeks to warm up to that idea. The perennial problem is the tendency of students to say that "back then" (the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantic era, the Victorian era) society was hierarchical and oppressive and discriminatory, but of course, we are lucky enough to live in the United States in 2012, when none of that happens anymore. I must breathe deeply into my rising blood pressure while I ask, "Do you think the racism that confronts Othello is no longer relevant here, in Columbia, SC, in 2012?" Of course, no student will ever insist that their own world is completely free from racism, sexism, religious intolerance, etc; but they cling to the belief that theirs is a world whose justice is only limited by each citizen's own commitment to hard work and Christian values.

In this class, too, an online discussion board has provided opportunities for discussion of sex-, race-, and class-based privilege and oppression more extensive than would be possible or appropriate in the classroom without risking abuse of academic freedom. In both classical mythology and European literature, I am finding that, as the semester proceeds, posts to the discussion board are becoming more sustained, discursive, and analytical, as well as venturing more opinions and raising more issues for further discussion. Indeed, what started out as a discussion board in name only--more a collection of serial monologues--is becoming a discussion board in fact.

I will end with a plug for Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and His Master as a superb text for practicing critical pedagogy. Voltaire's Candide is probably the more natural choice as a go-to text to represent the French Enlightenment. But I remembered loving Diderot in my college French classes, and I was eager to share this road less taken with my students. To be sure, they did not immediately warm up to Jacques, and some of them remain resistant as we approach our fourth and final class meeting devoted to this text. But for others, this quirky, highly unconventional, quite experimental meditation on the fundamental conflict between the Rights of Man and the Great Chain of Being has proven revelatory.

To be sure, my students are still at the point of arguing among themselves about rights versus responsibilities, the comfort of stable hierarchies versus the anarchic thrill of freedom. They are not about to march out of the classroom and reboot the Occupy Columbia movement that has been on hiatus since December 23, when the state Budget and Control Board passed emergency regulations that ended the two-month encampment on the State House grounds, mere blocks from our classroom. Nor is that my objective as their instructor. Rather, I simply want them to engage with the issues of social hierarchy, privilege, oppression, and justice, thinking for themselves, making their own decisions, and learning to become fully enfranchised citizens of a democratic society. In the words of former New York City mayor Abe Beame: "How'm I doin?" I don't know. You'll have to ask my students.

Excelling While Black

2012-02-25T12:23:00.002-05:00

From the Education Pages of The New York Times

To Be Black at Stuyvesant High

By FERNANDA SANTOS

Published: February 25, 2012

Rudi-Ann Miller is one of 40 blacks among the 3,295 students at New York’s Stuyvesant High School. The experience can be isolating, but she has had no regrets.

Tackling Education in Africa

2012-02-17T23:57:00.001-05:00

See the end of this post for the latest updates on education in Africa.

How do you fix education in Africa, where students have far fewer opportunities than their counterparts in other parts of the world? There are two schools of thought on the subject: do you invest bottom up? Or top down? Listen to a report about competing approaches to building education infrastructure in Africa on the Voice of America website, which also has a story on how Africa is dealing with a surge of secondary school students.

There's so much to say about this vast topic, whose surface I have barely begun to scratch. Here's a video designed to show schoolkids in the UK what it's like to go to school in Ghana, produced by Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO), an international development charity that works sort of like a non-governmental UK version of the Peace Corps. In fact, it is It is the largest such NGO in the world.

Latest education news from Harare - Zimbabwe's coalition government spent three times more on foreign junkets for top government officials in 2011 than on schooling, Education Minister David Coltart said on Friday.

Really, flipped classroom!?!

2012-02-16T19:58:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: The flipped classroom purports to be the latest in student-centered learning, but I suspect it is really the latest in media software marketing. Read on...

As far as I can determine, the so-called "flipped classroom" (also called "reverse teaching" or the "backwards classroom") was dreamt up by a screen capture and recording software company called TechSmith (to which I am NOT providing a link) to drive uptake of their product, Camtasia Studio (ditto the no link), a softward package for creating videos. I first encountered the term on a perfectly laudable blog, Flipping the Latin Classroom. When I started poking around the Internet to learn more, however, I discovered a site called The Daily Riff, which aggregates education-related content, but also accepts advertising (and so, once again, no link). The Daily Riff posts a number of articles on the flipped classroom, several of which include teacher testimonials in video format, in all of which the teacher concludes with the earnest declaration, "I love Camtasia Studio."

On the face of it, the flipped classroom may sound innovative. Didactic presentation of course content moves outside of the classroom to the Internet, where it can be studied at home or in the library or computer center. The classroom becomes a place for greater student-teacher interaction, individualized attention, group work, collaborative learning, and all those nice things we encounter under the rubric of student-centered learning. But I cannot escape the suspicion that the flipped classroom is really a ploy for TechSmith to sell Camtasia and for The Daily Riff to sell advertising. Which leads me to say, à la SNL's late great Weekend Update Team of Seth Myers and Amy Poehler, "Really, flipped classroom!?!"

To understand the spirit of that emphatically exclamatory interrogative, I invite you to watch what I believe to be the first installment of the Saturday Night Live Weekend Update feature, "Really!?! With Seth and Amy" (apologies for the ads; they are inevitable without pirating the content):

Flipped classroom, really! So the days of the teacher as "sage on the stage" are numbered, and it's time for the teacher to become the "guide on the side." Really! Flipped classroom, if we teachers create videos for our students to watch at home, that will allow our students to get more individual attention from us in the classroom, or engage in more collaborative learning with their peers. Really? You see, it's called the "flipped classroom" because what used to be done in class (the lecture or other didactic presentation of course content) is now done at home via teacher-created videos, and what used to be done for homework is now done in class. Really! Flipped classroom, you're telling me that my students are going to just sit back and watch my lecture on quadratic equations, catalytic conversion, mass-energy equivalence, iambic pentameter, horizontal perspective, or the civil rights movement, and come to class the next day ready to write, draw, analyze, solve problems, or conduct experiments in the chemistry lab. Really!

Of course I'm all for student-centered learning and innovative pedagogy, but I'm not convinced the flipped classroom is anything more than a software marketing campaign in thin disguise.

Banned in Tucson: Critical Race Studies

2012-02-11T09:29:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: Young Mexican-American students in Tucson are under attack by right-wing, reactionary forces for trying to understand the matrix of oppression and privilege in which their lives are embedded.

UPDATE: March 8, 2012. Judge rejects request to reinstate TUSD class
By The Associated Press
Published: March 5, 2012 at 4:40 pm

UPDATE: Feb. 22, 2012. Read this excellent op-ed piece in the Bellingham Herald on "Why Arizona banned ethnic studies."

Scroll to the end for a new postscript and a new video about the latest in cross-border lawlessness: librotraficante!

Scroll to the end for a new video of a Mexican-American Studies student testifying at the first meeting of the Tucson Unified School District Board since the books were removed from the classrooms (held on Feb. 14, 2012)

This story is so overwhelming, I scarcely know where to begin. Let's start with a video from The Real News website about walkouts and teach-ins staged in recent days by Mexican-American students to protest the suspension of the Tucson school district's Mexican American studies program.

More at The Real News

Here's more background on the story. This video from the PBS program Religion and Ethnic NewsWeekly aired on December 17, 2010.

Watch Ethnic Studies in Arizona on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

As you can glean from the video embedded above, ethnic studies had been part of the high school curriculum in Tucson since at least the early 2000s (so far I have not been able to date it more precisely than that). What made this story news was the ethnic studies ban passed by the Arizona legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer in May 2010.

According to a fact sheet for House Bill 2281, the bill expressly prohibits public schools from including courses or classes which promote the overthrow of the federal government, as well as courses that promote resentment towards a race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular race or ethnic group, or "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals."

The law, evidently drafted to order by John Huppenthal, the state superintendent of public instruction, gives the school's superintendent the authority to determine violations of the law, and requires the school district to come into compliance within 60 days of any such determination, under threat of a ten percent monthly cut in state funding to remain in effect until the districts rectifies its erroneous ways.

Passage of the law gave Huppenthal the opportunity he had long been waiting for to shut down ethnic studies--in particular, to shut down the Mexican-American studies program. In June 2011, Huppenthal deemed the program to be in violation of the law. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, the Tucson Unified School District appealed the ruling. On December 27, an Arizona administrative law judge ruled that Mexican American studies program violated the law, giving Huppenthal not only legal but now also judicial cover to shut the program down (as reported in the Los Angeles times, among other sources).

What is really going on here is a right-wing, conservative, reactionary opposition to critical race studies.

While the ethnic studies program in the Tucson school district includes African-American studies and Asian-American studies, among others, the Mexican-American studies program was a particular target of Huppenthal, for obvious political reasons. As best I can tell, it was the Mexican-American studies program that was deemed to be in violation of the law, and it was on behalf of the Mexican-American studies program that the legal challenge was brought.

As stated on the school district's Mexican American Studies website, the goals of the program are as follows:

Advocating for and providing culturally relevant curriculum for grades K-12
Advocating for and providing curriculum that is centered within the pursuit of social justice
Advocating for and providing curriculum that is centered within the Mexican American/Chicano cultural and historical experience
Working towards the invoking of a critical consciousness within each and every student
Providing and promoting teacher education that is centered within Critical Pedagogy, Latino Critical Race Pedagogy, and Authentic Caring
Promoting and advocating for social and educational transformation
Promoting and advocating for the demonstration of respect, understanding, appreciation, inclusion, and love at every level of service

Key inflammatory words: advocating, culturally relevant, social justice, Mexican American/Chicano cultural and historical experience, critical consciousness, Critical Pedagogy, Latino Critical Race Pedagogy, Authentic Caring, social and educational transformation, respect, understanding, appreciation, inclusion, and love.

Them's socialist words!

On one level, this is an attack on the ideas and writings of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (1921-1997), in particular, his influential book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, first published in Portuguese in 1968 and in English in 1970, which virtually single-handedly gave birth to the fields of both critical pedagogy and critical race studies. But of course it's much more than that. Pedagogy of the Oppressed is the message, and Freire is the messenger, but the targets of this tragic conflict are the young Mexican-American students in Tucson who are trying, with the help of their teachers and their public school system, to come to grips with their own socially constructed and historically specific identities, to understand the axes of oppression and privilege that form the matrix of their existence, and to become agents of change and social transformation, beginning with themselves.

A pending federal lawsuit (Acosta v. Huppenthal, CV-10-623-TUC-AWT), charges that the state’s ruling and decision to shut down the program is a violation of the First Amendment, free speech rights of the students enrolled in the program to learn about the full breadth of American history. On March 7, the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies (NACCS) and 26 education and civil rights organizations filed a friend of the court brief in the case (as reported by the Sacramento Bee). Stay tuned....

Okay, I think my job here is done for now. I have little more to say about this other than that it is wrong and bad and more people should be talking about it and doing something about it. Start by sharing this blog post on facebook and twitter, and take it from there.

Postscript: One of many no doubt. People are finding creative and resourceful ways to protest this injustice. Learn about the latest in cross-border lawlessness...

Postscript: Nico, one of the Mexican-American Studies students in Tucson who witnessed the confiscation of his text books, testifies before a meeting of the school board.

Teaching Mythology with Music Videos

2012-01-28T08:54:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: Might those modern goddesses of love, Pat Benatar and Bonnie Tyler, have a place alongside the Greek goddess Aphrodite in the classical mythology classroom?

In the mythology classroom, we have a number of objectives. We want our students to learn about gods and goddesses, heroes and maidens, and aspects of classical culture represented in myth. We also want our students to learn about the persistence of classical myth in contemporary culture. One approach we can take is to use lecture and discussion to get at the mythological text and its social, cultural, and historical context, while using film clips or videos to illustrate mythological figures, imagery, or themes in contemporary culture. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, Aphrodite's ability to compel gods and goddesses to fall in love with mortals is described in military terms like "subdue" and "master." Love, you might say, is a battlefield, and Aphrodite is strong.

Zeus, however, is pissed off by Aphrodite's shenanigans, and compels her to taste some of her own medicine, that is, to fall in love with a mortal, in particular Anchises, a venerable Trojan descendant of Zeus. Aphrodite gets a little bit nervous, a little bit terrified, a little bit helpless--you might even say she falls apart, experiences a total eclipse of the heart.

I'm sure my students were quite surprised when I projected not one but two classic 1980s music videos in the middle of a lecture on the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Frankly, I did this in a spirit of fun and experimentation. Much could be said about how the sex and gender dynamics dramatized in the Pat Benatar video correspond to those of classical mythology. Even richer, perhaps, are the bizarre action and imagery of the Bonnie Tyler video, with its candles, full moons, red curtains blowing in the wind, and schoolboys dancing around in a dark, cavernous hall clad only in satyric loin clothes. I touched on these points, asking my students to brainstorm images from the videos and words from the songs that resonated with the text we were studying; but I did not dwell on this kind of analysis during this particular class session. I mostly wanted to convince myself that it could be done, and shake up any complacency my students may have been feeling about what they could expect from me. Be that as it may, I think these power balladeers of the 1980s stood up pretty well alongside the Homeric hymnist, and I look forward to using music video in the classical mythology classroom again, perhaps next time with somewhat more sustained analysis of the videos as mythological texts in their own right.

The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling

2012-01-21T13:58:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: The musical number "A Spoonful of Sugar Helps the Medicine Go Down" from the film Mary Poppins helps students understand the Horatian principle of pleasure and didacticism in literature.

We generally credit the Roman poet Horace (65-8 BCE) for introducing the idea that poetry has the dual objective "to please and instruct" in his Art of Poetry (Ars Poetica), lines 333-4:

Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae
aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae.

Poets wish either to profit (prodesse) or to delight (delectare) or at the same time to say things both pleasant (iucunda) and suited to life (idonea vitae).

In English literary theory, this idea resurfaces in the writings of Sir Philip Sydney (1554-1586) and John Dryden (1631-1700), among others. Parallels can be found in the other vernacular Renaissance literatures as well.

In recent decades, didacticism, particularly in the form of moral instruction, has fallen out of fashion as an objective of literature--as well it should have. On the other hand, this cultural change has had problematic consequences for pedagogy. Since the era of New Criticism (roughly speaking, post 1945), English teachers, and other professors of literature, tend to use close reading as their pedagogical approach: narration, description, characterization, plot, rhyme, rhythm, the many forms of metaphor, the operations of irony, and the whole range of literary and rhetorical devices--all of these have become the focus of literary analysis and also of classroom instruction.

This focus on literary devices and explicating the text is fine. We do a disservice to our students, however, if we do not ALSO alert them to the long history of pleasure and didacticism as competing/complementary objectives of literature. In particular, it is difficult, if not impossible, for our students to understand most literature prior to the twentieth century if they do not grasp the ancient Horatian construct and its modern legacy. Moreover, while our students tend to come into our classrooms thinking that any poem, story, or play we give them to read has a "moral" to which it can be reduced, they do not realize that they themselves intuitively embrace an Horatian concept of pleasure and didacticism in literature.

How do we bring to life for our students the idea of pleasure and didacticism in literature? For those who tend to think in terms of "the moral of the story," how do we get them to recognize the element of pleasure? For those who want to know from nothing besides Harry Potter, Percy Jackson, or more grownup versions like Scott Turow and Barbara Taylor Bradford, how do we get them to recognize that even these pleasure fests are replete with implicit meanings and values, including moral ones?

In my Classical Civilization classroom, I began approaching this important concept through what I christened The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling. I use the term "storytelling" instead of "literature" because I want students to apply this concept to ancient epic poetry, tragedy, and even history and philosophy, as well as to contemporary poems, stories, plays, film, television, etc.

As you may already have guessed, The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling states that "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." There is nothing brilliant or original in my citation of this sagacious dictum. What I do think is innovative, however, and what I have found to be successful in the classroom, is actually using Mary Poppins and the "Spoonful of Sugar" number from the 1964 Julie Andrews film to teach this concept.

First, I will ask my students, in the midst of a discussion of virtually any text (Homer's Odyssey early in a Classical Civilization semester, Boccaccio's Decameron early in a World Literature semester), what they think was the author's objective or purpose in composing or writing the text. Some students will obligingly say, "To teach a lesson." Others will say, "Because it's a good story." In fact, more students tend to say "teach a lesson" and fewer tend to say "good story" because, again, they come into the classroom assuming that I, the professor, am there to shove didactic lessons down their throat, even if they can't articulate it quite as elegantly as that.

Once I've got "teach a lesson" and "good story" out on the table, I will say, "That's what I refer to as The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling." And they will go glassy-eyed, cuz what the fudge is Dr. Broder doing talking about Mary Poppins in the middle of Classical Civ or World Lit or Intro to Myth??? So I wait. A beat. Or two. And then ask (cuz they are, after all, only 19-ish years old), "How many of you are familiar with Marry Poppins, the movie?" Many, if not most, will raise a hand.

Then I will ask, "So, can anyone tell me what The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling is?" And, because I have already gotten the ideas of instruction and entertainment out there, it is very likely that a few students will murmur, half under their breath, "A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down." Or perhaps, "A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.....????" If so, great, and I will call on the murmurers to say it again, NICE AND LOUD. I have never taught a class where at least a third of my students were not familiar with the movie and the song. This is where, in the best of all possible worlds, you go to your Smart Console and press play on this YouTube video, which you have all queued up and ready to go. If not, you can post it on Blackboard and have them watch it before the next class.

What makes the video work especially well is the part about the robin building his nest, because "He knows a song will move the job along." I started teaching The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling in the context of Homer's Odyssey, and I had already taught my students that epic poetry was sung, not spoken, more like contemporary song than poetry. So Homer is the robin, and the Odyssey is the nest. The job is communicating social values and cultural practices. The fun is song and story. Moreover, they have learned that for the ancient Greeks, poetry and song are the gifts of the Muses, divine inspiration, almost a kind of magic. So when Mary Poppins starts snapping her fingers and the beds make themselves and the toys put themselves away, it resonates with the idea of divinely inspired poetry and song. Finally, the brother and sister start to get in on the act, seeking to snap their own fingers and reproduce the musical magic, as it were. The little girl is an expert finger-snapper from the get-go, and has wooden soldiers marching into toy chests in no time. The poor little boy, however (ah, boys), can't quite get the mechanics of finger-snapping down, and is very evidently quite distressed. Mary Poppins, then, is the Muse, the little girl is divinely inspired, like Homer, and the little boy, well, he's trying, but not everyone has the gift of the Muses. Finally, of course, he starts to get the hang of it. But his imperfect finger-snapping has untoward implications for slamming doors and flying balls, suggesting that the power of poetry requires considerable effort to master and can be dangerous if uncontrolled.

OK, I think I've given you the idea, and brevity remains the soul of wit, so I'll leave it there. But I beg you, once again, to make Pedagogishness an interactive forum, and leave comments, positive or negative, yay or nay, about The Mary Poppins Theory of Storytelling and its pedagogic potential.

Give us this day our Daily Write

2012-01-16T09:43:00.000-05:00

In a nutshell: A daily low-stakes writing exercise is a good way to monitor attendance, incentivize students to keep up with the reading, and develop critical thinking skills all at the same time.

From 2007-2009, I was a CUNY Writing Fellow at York College in Jamaica, NY. Writing Fellows support the Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program at 19 CUNY campuses including undergraduate campuses (4-year senior colleges and 2-year community colleges), the CUNY OnLine Baccalaureate program, and the CUNY Law School (you can learn more about the WAC program at CUNY here). As a Writing Fellow, I learned about the WAC pedagogy that has evolved since the 1980s to promote writing as a mode of learning and an activity central to the development of critical thinking skills (the Bridgewater State University website has a nice definition of WAC).

In my experience (others may disagree, and WAC proponents are a vocal lot), WAC pedagogy addresses three major issues, often posed as binary contrasts:

"writing to learn" and "learning to write"
low-stakes writing and high-stakes writing
informal writing and formal writing

I would argue that the most important innovations of WAC have to do with the left-hand side of each of the oppositions listed above: writing-to-learn, low-stakes writing, and informal writing. WAC has much to say about learning to write, high-stakes writing, and formal writing, too, but the Composition and Rhetoric (comp/rhet) folks should be able to handle those issues at least as well as the WAC folks (although, to be sure, at many institutions, these two groups are the same people). Incidentally, the Bedford/St. Martin's website as a lovely page on the history of rhetoric and composition studies, going back to classical antiquity and leading to the rise of comp/rhet in the 1990s.

I can spend a few posts discussing WAC pedagogy if you like, but for now, I would simply like to describe one low-stakes, informal, writing-to-learn tactic that I have been using in my classrooms for going on two years now. I call it the Daily Write. For the first five to ten minutes of class, my students answer in writing a provocative question about the day's class content. In previous semesters, this was always a question about the day's assigned reading. This semester, I have started using questions that are more diagnostic or reflective, like "What do you already know about [insert topic of day's class meeting] and what would you like to learn in the next 75 minutes?"

The Daily Write has actually evolved into a low-stakes, informal, writing-to-learn exercise from something quite different, a very simple objective quiz using a matching format (names of characters 1-5 on the left, one- or two-line identifications A-E on the right, place the letter of the correct identification in the space provided next to each item). My Daily Quizzes were instituted, quite simply, as a way to make sure that students came to class every day and on time, especially in a core-curriculum general-education course on classical civilization at 8:00 am at Brooklyn College. No one quiz counted for very much, but cumulatively they would account for something like 20% of the course grade, and could not be taken late or made up, making it quite incumbent upon my students to be in class every day and on time as much as humanly possible.

The Daily Quiz worked, but after a year or two of using it, I got bored. More importantly, I believe my students were getting bored. To be sure, I knew very well that the quizzes were incredibly easy for anyone who had done the reading. In fact, in addition to encouraging timely and regular attendance, another objective of the quizzes was to encourage students to complete the assigned reading on time, and to reward those students who did so. These simple matching quizzes also rewarded students whose forte was objective details like "Telemachus is the son of Odysseus and Penelope." Finally, it provided an opportunity to succeed for my many English language learners who were compulsive about their reading, fierce in their attention to detail, but had difficulty expressing themselves in English, orally or in writing, particularly in conceptual terms.

Nevertheless, despite the many advantageous features and benefits of daily quizzes (can you tell I used to be in pharmaceutical marketing?), I decided to make the switch from Daily Quizzes to Daily Writes. For one thing, Daily Write sounded cool. For another thing, I found that the very idea of a daily quiz caused undue stress to my students; or, rather, it caused due stress, which I wanted to minimize or eliminate if possible. In fact, the Daily Write is a quiz, in the sense that it is a brief, targeted assessment tool that counts toward the student's final grade. I hope, however, that by avoiding the word "quiz," I am minimizing the test-related stress. To date, I have no objective evidence that I have succeeded, but I also have not had any expressed complaints.

Now, those of you familiar with WAC pedagogy may be raising your eyebrows at the idea that I call the Daily Write a low-stakes writing activity while counting it towards the course grade. I know, I know. Nevertheless, I do not believe that "low stakes" has to be "no stakes." In a class that meets 28 times per 14-week semester, students have 28 Daily Writes, give or take. Cumulatively, they account for perhaps 20% of the course grade. However you do the arithmetic, no one Daily Write is worth very much; that is, each Daily Write in isolation is a fairly low-stakes activity. In addition, in calculating course grades, I drop the three lowest or missing Daily Write grades from the Daily Write average. Despite the (can I get away with saying "airy-fairy"?) WAC dogma about low stakes and writing to learn, I find that students prefer to do things they get credit for, things that count towards their final grade; if it doesn't "count," then why should I waste my time doing it? This may be an attitude more characteristic of the business-and-technology oriented 2000s than it was in the early decades of WAC, but these are the times we live in, and the times we live in are the times we teach in (no, I will not change that to "in which we live," but don't you just love the way Paul McCartney has his prepositional cake and eats it, too, in the lyrics to "Live and Let Die"?).

This post is getting t-o-o l-o-n-g, so let me just say a final word about feedback. Feedback is key. I have to read these things, for real, not just put a check on top of the page and mark the assignment as completed in my grade book (which in fact used to be an Exel spreadsheet and is, as of this semester, the Grade Center on Blackboard--yay for me and digital technology!!!). In past semesters, I graded on a 5-point scale and students could receive full or partial credit, depending on how completely they addressed the question. Starting this semester, for various reasons including my insane workload, I am switching to a completion grade: 1 or 0, you hand in the piece of paper with some words on it, you get the credit. Nevertheless, every student writes something, and I do my best to give some kind of concrete and specific feedback. Yes, sometimes I just write "good" (or "good!") at the bottom of the page. Other times I underline some key words in the student's response, like "enjoyed" or "confused," mostly to indicate that a real live human being did in fact read what you wrote. At my best, I will write a brief comment, like, "Good use of a specific example to support your claim," or, alternatively, "Good point, but could you give a specific example to support your claim?"

One of the main objections raised by teachers who are new to WAC pedagogy is that low-stakes writing takes a lot of time: time to develop the assignment (even the simplest assignment takes time to develop), time to administer, and, perhaps most annoyingly, time to GRADE, especially if the teacher gives FEEDBACK, which every WAC expert or would-be expert will say is MISSION CRITICAL. To all of this I say: Yes, it takes time. You, the teacher, have to decide if you have the time; if the benefits in learning outweigh the risks to your own sanity; if you are really committed to a student-centered, critical-thinking centered, writing-centered pedagogy--not just in principal, but in practice.

OK, enough. Back to reading, commenting on, and grading my Daily Writes.

Learning objectives

2012-01-08T03:00:00.000-05:00

Introduction
The issue of learning objectives connects with two other pedagogical issues that have become important in recent years, (1) assessment, and (2) student-centered learning. Assessment means how we measure what our students are learning. The idea is, in order to assess learning, you have to start with specific learning objectives that you can measure (i.e., you can determine whether students achieved the objective or not). Student-centered learning is the idea that education should be primarily about students learning, not teachers teaching. Learning objectives are not only important because of assessment and student-centered learning; they are also useful to you as a teacher, because they help you organize your course design and your class design (my newly coined alternative to "lesson planning" because anything with "lesson" in it sounds finger-waggy to me).

Learning objectives are based on something called Bloom's taxonomy. Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999) worked with a group of cognitive psychologists at the University of Chicago in the 1950s to define cognitive processes and types of knowledge (or types of learning) as the basis for a system of learning objectives. Like many educators, I've learned about Bloom's taxonomy from secondary sources available on the Internet, rather than from the book that Bloom and his colleagues first published in 1956, The Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. To be fair to myself, I have viewed a video of a lecture by Lorin Anderson, a former student of Bloom's and one of the members of the team that revised the taxonomy in 2000. The result of this revision was A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, often referred to as Anderson and Krathwohl (for co-author David Krathwohl). Most people who refer to the system, even using the revised terminology, continue to call it Bloom's taxonomy.

Bloom's taxonomy is important, but I find that it is widely misapplied. I hope this post will both explain the basic concepts and help teachers write good learning objectives.

Ideally, a learning objective coordinates two“dimensions” of learning: (1) cognitive processes and (2) types of knowledge.

Cognitive processes

Cognitive processes are the skills of what we often call "critical thinking." In the list below, the terms in parentheses reflect the revised terminology of Anderson and Krathwohl. I tend to prefer Bloom's original terminology in most cases. The order of this list also comes from Bloom, and represents what he and his colleagues believed to be a hierarchy of cognitive processes. Anderson and Krathwohl flipped evaluation and synthesis (which they renamed "creating"), but again, I prefer Bloom's original ordering.

OK, so here are the cognitive processes:

Knowledge (remembering, recognition, recall)
Comprehension (understanding)
Application
Analysis
Synthesis (creating)
Evaluation

Types of knowledge

The types of knowledge are the objects of learning:

Factual knowledge
Conceptual knowledge
Procedural knowledge
Metacognitive knowledge

That is, we can know facts (e.g., Zeus is a Greek god); we can know concepts (e.g., the Greek gods personified aspects of nature and humanity); and we can know procedures (how to do something, like knit a sweater, build a robot, or build a movement for grassroots social change: what the ancient Greeks called technē). Metacognitive knowledge is a bit more obscure. Metacognitive knowledge is knowledge about knowledge, and about cognitive processes in general, as well as awareness of one's own cognitive processes. Metacognition was added to the original taxonomy by Anderson and Krathwohl. In fact (pedagogish insight #3), the best illustration of metacognitive knowledge I can think of is the lyrics to the Talking Heads song "Once in a Lifetime" ("You may ask yourself, 'Well, how did I get here?'").

Now, some sources, including, unfortunately, Anderson and Krathwohl, will lead you to believe that you can join any of the six cognitive processes with any of the four types of knowledge and come up with a perfectly good learning objective. But I do not agree that allcognitive processes are equally relevant to all types of knowledge. Or, to put it in more positive terms, I believe that certaincognitive processes are particularly relevant to certain types of knowledge.

How cognitive processes mediate types of knowledge

The natural fit between cognitive process and type of knowledge, I think, is clearest for the first three types of cognition: factual knowledge, conceptual knowledge, and procedural knowledge. That is:

We want students to know (remember, recognize, recall) facts.
We want students to understand concepts.
We want students to apply procedural knowledge.

So, for example, we might, in a course on the legislative process in the United States, expect students to "List the steps by which a bill becomes a law." That is a lovely learning objective that combines knowing as a cognitive process (what Anderson and Krathwohl prefer to call remembering, recognizing, or recalling) with factual knowledge. Then, we might ask students to "Explain the role of compromise in the legislative process." This is a lovely learning objective that combines comprehension (or understanding) with conceptual knowledge. Now, not only are these two learning objectives quite lovely, but I do not think they would be nearly as lovely if you switched them around. That is, I would not want to ask my students to list the role of compromise in the legislative process; nor would I want them to explain the steps by which a bill becomes a law. We should list facts and explain concepts, not vice versa. As for procedural knowledge, what we do with procedural knowledge is apply it; we do not list it or explain it. Thus, I might ask my American government students to "Lobby their congressional delegation in support of a legislative priority." I mean, you won't find "lobby" on any list of action verbs typically suggested for expressing learning objectives for applying knowledge; but a lobbying trip would, in effect, be a way to demonstrate procedural knowledge relevant to the legislative process in the United States.

Metacognition: Analysis, synthesis, evaluation
I would argue that cognitive processes 4 through 6, that is, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, are all metacognitive processes. This makes metacognition a qualitatively different type of knowledge than factual, conceptual, or procedural knowledge. We can know facts, understand concepts, and apply procedures. But what can we do with metacognition? Kind of squidgy, don't you think? But not useless. In fact, quite useful. We simply need to recognize that metacognition is itself a process, almost like a subset of procedural knowledge, and very different from factual or conceptual knowledge. Thus, if I ask my American government students to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a bill; or evaluate the prospects for passage of a certain piece of legislation; or draft a piece of sample legislation ("draft" is one of the verbs you will typically find on lists of action verbs suggested for expressing learning objectives for synthesizing [or creating] knowledge), then I am asking them to engage in metacognition.

Wrapping up
Now, I believe that what I said in the last couple of sections, about certain cognitive processes having a natural fit with certain types of knowledge, and about metacognition being a type of knowledge that is itself almost another cognitive process, and about the natural fit between metacognition as a type of knowledge and analysis, synthesis, and evaluation as cognitive processes (Whew!) is sort of new, and not to be found in other sources on cognitive processes, types of knowledge, or how to develop learning objectives. But I would like you, dear readers, to let me know: Do you think these observations and claims are in fact new? Do you think they make some sense? Do you think they need to be expanded upon? Please use the comments feature to tell me what you think.

And that's enough for now.

Is gaming f-u-n-damental?

2012-01-05T08:40:00.004-05:00

Sipped my coffee this morning while reading about "The Pedagogy of Play and the Role of Technology in Learning" on the PBS Mediashift blog. The author, Aran Levasseur, is a middle school history and science teacher and the Academic Technology Coordinator at San Francisco University High School. He writes about the video game Civilization, in which players create a civilization and maintain it by managing its military, science, technology, commerce, and culture. His main contention is that you learn from this game, as from any game, not by accumulating information from books, but by playing.

"You start by exploring the world with curiosity and begin to develop a hypothesis of what you're supposed to do. Through trial, error, pattern recognition, logic and chance you continually reformulate your trajectory."

Levasseur argues for the importance of play, particularly digital play, as a pedagogical "keystone" for the current century. Citing Stuart Brown's book, Play, he claims that

"play is vital for normal cognitive, social and emotional development. It reduces stress and increases well-being. Absence of play leads to maladaptive behavior."

Play, he argues, is about “exploring the possible," adding,

"Our systems of education haven’t prepared us to think and act playfully, nor do our institutions of work by and large encourage this behavior. Yet it is this kind of playful disposition that is the muse of all great thinkers, artists and innovators.”

This is all great news, but some caveats are in order. Caveats, moreover, that bring us back to cognitive psychology and Bloom's taxonomy. What Lavasseur describes as play is in fact an application of procedural knowledge, knowledge about how to do something, like knit a sweater, build a robot, or build a grassroots coalition for social change. Procedural knowledge is important, but it is only one type of knowledge, and it is a relatively high-level type of knowledge that is only possible once other types of knowledge have been mastered, including factual knowledge and conceptual knowledge.

Lavasseur points out that you learn to play the game Civilization by playing the game, not by reading Gibbons's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. While that is quite true, what it implies is that once you have learned to play the game, what you know how to do is...play the game. You have mastered one very particular sort of procedural knowledge. Perhaps you could learn more quickly and easily how to play another, similar game. But could you knit a sweater? Could you build a robot or a grassroots coalition for social change?

I'm excited about the prospects for digital technologies, including games, as pedagogical tools. But we need to keep in mind that we as teachers need to use these tools responsibly. We cannot just put a game in our students' hands and call it a day, go home, let them have at it. We need to design our courses in terms of facts and concepts as well as procedures. And we need to ensure that we are giving our students opportunities to practice recollection, comprehension, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation, as well as the application of procedural knowledge that seems to predominate in play.

Blaming teachers, again

2012-01-04T08:00:00.003-05:00

An article on school reform in phillyBurbs.com today repeats some oft-heard criticism of teachers, their unions, and other professional educators for the failure of public schools.

"A major contributor to public education’s problems is the hiringof teacher college graduates. Those who enter America’s teachercolleges are exposed to a curriculum that is light in academicsubstance, one that is held in contempt by professors and studentsof serious study."

I tend to doubt that this is really the problem. On the other hand, I would like to know more about the potential connection between teacher education and student performance in public schools. I have personally taught students in college classes who were among my lowest performers and, lo and behold, planned to become public school teachers. On the other hand, one of my best students approached me last summer for a letter of reference as he was beginning his student teaching experience as a New York City public school social studies teacher. So it clearly goes both ways.

A part of the article that I found more compelling connects, in a way, with my interest in learning objectives and critical thinking:

"The public school system’s obsession with the rejection ofmemorization makes the retention of knowledge impossible. No onehas ever been able to replace memorization and retention ofinformation as the basic method of learning. Despite the educationestablishment’s rejection of traditional education, no one has beenable to replace the mental need to make connections based onacquired information."

A basic tenet of cognitive psychology is that learning begins with knowledge of facts and then proceeds to higher-order types of cognition such as understanding concepts, implementing procedures, and engaging in analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. What concerns me about the attitude expressed above, however, is that it seems to suggest a call for memorization of facts as the basis of public education, with little awareness of the rest of Bloom's taxonomy or the need to include other types of cognition and learning in the educational mix--too much emphasis on the "acquired information" part and not enough on the "make connections" part.

Welcome to pedagogishness

2012-01-01T03:00:00.000-05:00

If it's 2012, this must be pedagogishness. Yes, in 2012, I am starting a pedagogy blog. I thought of calling it paedagogus (Latinate) or paidagogos (transliteration of the Greek), but neither was available as a subdomain on Blogger, so I went whimsical and decided to call it pedagogishness. In the end, I think that was a good thing. Pedagogy itself is like that sometimes: you think you are going to do something in your course design or your classroom, and circumstances force you to do something else, and the something else turns out to be better than you could have hoped for or imagined, and better than anything it would ever have occurred to you to plan. So, pedagogish insight #1: Take innovation whence it comes.

So what is a pedagogy blog, and what business do I have writing one? Well this blog, at any rate, is going to be a place where I share ideas and insights based on my own experience in the classroom. I can't help using that phrase, "in the classroom," but the fact is (pedagogish insight #2), good pedagogy begins W-A-Y before you ever set foot in the classroom. So course design is going to be a big part of this blog. And for the moment, what I'm thinking of as course design is not so much the topic of the course (although I may get to that at some point, too) as things like learning objectives, assessment tools (i.e., quizzes, exams, writing assignments, etc), planning assignments, incorporating writing, and so on.

Another big topic, linked somewhat to that of learning objectives, is critical thinking and the prospects for teaching it. Lots to say about that, in due time.

Another thing I'm interested in might be thought of as the flip-side of learning objectives, and that is teaching objectives: why do I want to teach this course? Or, more likely, why do I want to teach, period? As someone who resumed work on a long-deferred doctorate after more than a decade in a successful corporate career, and upon earning that doctorate, quite in mid life, embarked on a full-on academic career--well, I think I may have a thought or so on why we teach.

OK, this post is supposed to be an intro, welcome, etc, and here it is, getting on the long side, so let me wrap this up. Expect to see my next post in about a week, on a topic yet to be determined, but I'm leaning towards learning objectives, about which much to say. For now: finished!