Osmotic learning?

I have completed the experiment with my junior-level engineering course. It was a project-based course ("canned" project, invented by my teaching partner and me) that constituted 50% of the students' course load this quarter. We did not lecture at all, but loaded all the foundational content onto MOODLE. I implemented a series of self-quizzes that they could complete on their own. They had 3 chances to pass the quizzes without penalty. We told the students that the material supported their project learning, and gave them the entire quarter to complete it. There was a GREAT deal of autonomy in the course; students were largely allowed to manage themselves each class period after about 15-20 minutes of checking-in and managing logistics. My colleague and I presented ourselves as coaches to the work.

This is what I found: I was able to monitor students' access to the material. They were quite active on the quizzes during the first 3-4 weeks of the quarter, after which their attention naturally shifted to their team projects. It made me nervous that students were not (apparently) mastering the content, but I could see that they were engaged in the projects more significantly than we faculty have ever witnessed (my colleagues has 5 years of teaching this course...this is my second).  The projects also illustrated a creativity that we have not seen before--in previous years, most students defaulted to some kind of mechanical test.  This year, students did things like create a scaled up,  rapid-prototyped model of a cochlea with a simulated cochlear implant surgery.

 I was nervous that I had no indicators of individual learning (test scores).  I noticed my tendency to want to say this aloud to this class of 50+ students. But I refrained because I could see that I was managing to my own fear of something insufficient about their learning or my teaching. Every 2 weeks or so, I gave them some statistics on the quiz completion rates just to feed back information--there was no pressure to do anything different, only information about the status of the class's investment in the quizzes.

By the end of the quarter, all students completed the individual "quizzes" with a 84-100% "correct." The projects that were completed reflected group effort, so I cannot speak to individual contributions. (Again, I am nervous about this, because I somehow feel that my job as a faculty member is something about "quality assurance" of student learning--I need to think about this).

With the exception of 1 in 12, the projects represented a depth of integration of science, math, social factors that I have never seen before in junior-level students. I was truly amazed and could see that students had integrated some of the foundational knowledge that they "gained" through the quizzes. I would like to conclude that there is something about the way we did the course that contributed to their apparent learning success. It may be simply that we have a very unusual batch of students. I can't deny that as freshmen, they showed signs of greatness.

My comment about osmosis...I do worry about the quiet students, the about 20 students who so silently worked...what did they learn?  Can learning happen by osmosis?  Does it really matter? In the project-based learning that I have been doing (sometimes badly) in the past 8 years, this is my persistent question...are individuals learning what they need to learn?

Transparently inadequate

I have started about 5 posts…none deemed good enough for publication. Then I ask, what does “good enough” mean anyway? This one is for sure not “good enough” for publication.

I want to write about two related (unrelated) issues. First, it is my desire to live a congruent, transparent life, but I am so far from that aspiration. Secondly, I often feel as though I am falling short.

I am going through some chaotic issues in my own life. At some level I want to share these with everyone, I want to be heard, yet at another level the possibility or being misunderstood, or judged, keeps me from being 100% open. What does a transparent life look like?

Related to this, these chaotic issues are probably affect my teaching and participation in other activities. I am slow at grading and getting students feedback; I always have a long list of “to do’s” for my committee work and joint research. I could blame these shortcomings on my chaotic life, or I could just say that I am completely incompetent. The reason isn’t really the point. The point is that I feel as though I am often falling short. Does everyone feel this? Is it a feminine characteristic?

the illusion of "working"

Our learning experiment began at our institution in a rather unintentionally high-profile way. So I am not surprised when I run into people on campus and they ask me how it is going.

It is going a lot like that Zen story about the farmer. The story is that a farmer's horse runs away. His neighbors say "Oh, bad luck." He says, "Maybe." The horse then returns, bringing with it another horse.  His neighbors say, "Oh, good luck!"  He says, "Maybe." The farmer's son decides to tame the new horse and in the course of doing so, he is thrown from the horse and breaks his leg. His neighbor's say, "Oh, bad luck!" He says, "Maybe." Then a war begins and all eligible young men are taken off to fight in the war. His son is not taken because he has a broken leg. The neighbors say, "Oh, good luck!"...anyway, it goes on like this,  what looks good can be bad and vice versa. Or perhaps it is false to separate into good and bad because everything is intimately related and thus neither good or bad (or both).

Anyway, I say this because I really can't tell how it is going.

Community Projects - a trial baloon

I have three groups of five students working with community organizations on three separate projects. Two groups are working with the food bank in Oceano. One of these groups is looking for ways to help them become more efficient. The other is helping to design a brand new facility that might serve as the first iteration in the process of developing a new food bank. The third student team is working with a grass roots community group to develop a supply chain distribution system for gleaning in the county. The two groups that are working with the food bank are moving ahead beautifully. The director of the food bank, Rob, has embraced the students and they have all spent many hours already helping sort food and talking with the volunteers. During our weekly team meetings, the students repeatedly tell me the value they see in actually doing the work. They also really enjoy the senior volunteers. The two food bank projects couldn’t be going better. The Gleaning project is another thing altogether. There isn’t anyone in charge in the traditional sense. There is no individual to ask questions of, but a whole cadre of people who have been thinking about this for a while. The students feel overwhelmed with the amount of work that seems to be needed. In addition, the students are constantly worried that the project wont fulfill the requirements of the class. This project is a bit unusual, but the students are learning much. I do want to make sure I am covering the learning objectives of the course, but beyond those, the learning can be of many types. I am seeing how changing the traditional form of the project makes students nervous. It is funny how expectations influence our perceptions.

the tiny oases in the valley of doubt

This is roughly week 4 of my experiment with Trevor on coaching students through a junior-level, largely self-directed learning experience. The course is organized around a single project for improvement on a biomedical device and represents 50% of students course-load, meeting 12 hours per week, and 100% of their materials engineering education for this quarter. There was an institutional conflict this quarter, so that we are only meeting 9 hours per week, 3 hours are "on their own."

We almost entirely stopped lecturing. We do take course time to collectively check in, explain procedures or points of confusion. For the most part, 12 teams of 4-5 students are autonomously pursuing design improvement projects of their own interest. Each individual has the responsibility of learning the posted foundational content on non-crystalline materials and structural materials.

This is the point in the quarter where I usually fear that students are not learning enough.

Metaphor

I am wondering about the metaphor of your teaching. What is the fundamental frame or metaphor of your teaching? Thinking this way is based on a split in linguistics from the syntactic model in Chomsky to a semantic model developed by Lakoff and others.

As an example Lakoff analyzes the fundamental metaphors of the 'conservative' and 'progressive' political landscape. In this he distinguishes between a 'strict father' model (conservative) and a 'family nurturing' model (progressive). He has written a couple of books on this (that include reflection on the deeper structures of brain activity involved in animating such metaphors). There is also an historian and sinologist (Edward Slingerland) who has used this sort of method to explore non-action. He does an analysis of the basic metaphors of self when considering action and non-action.

The method of 'public humiliation' seems to me an expression of some particular frame. Certainly it seems to involve not only an assertion of objective reference to 'right' and 'wrong', but also how to procedurally go about teaching that. So I am wondering, what is your basic frame or metaphor for teaching?

Topsy Turvy

I want to be a good teacher. I want to use some of the concepts Daniel Pink writes about: Autonomy, Mastery and Meaning, and use contextual and emergent principles of learning. But it seems so easy for me to slip from a teacher that wonders with the students about things, to one who tells them the answer and gives assignments. Maybe these paradigms can exist together, but I am wondering. I have to say that since I have been participating in this learning initiative and hanging out with Linda and Roger, I have had a crisis in my teaching.

In some ways I am a good teacher. I use authentic projects often. I use active learning techniques in the classroom. I establish relationships with students. All of this has helped me get excellent students evaluations. All of this I now question. I don't know what to keep and what to throw out.

Yesterday in class I told my (graduate) students that they were very luck to have me for a teacher. I told them that developmental theories show that many do not make it to the "contextual knowing" (Baxter Magolda) stage of development until they leave school. They are lucky, because I make so many mistakes they know for sure I am not an expert and they must take nothing I say as fact. Luckily, I have a good respectful relationship with them and they laughed.

I guess this is exactly what I asked for....learning things with students, emergent and contextual.

scaredy cat exposed

It's been brought to my attention in various ways, that I am a scaredy cat. It is pretty evident that I am fearful to push myself outside of some invisible walls that I have made for myself. I have multiple examples to call upon:

Let's begin with my new workout routine: I sweat while working out, and have considered pushing myself to the limit, but was confronted by two events: a) I can push myself to the point of throwing up, which isn't an activity I associate with getting in shape, so I don't (it's about the lactic acid, nothing more. I promise I don't have an eating disorder.) b) a fellow gym compatriot that said I wasn't working hard enough if I wasn't sore or laying on the gym floor exhausted after workout. In other words, I am a sissy pants. Scared to go to the physical point beyond what I'm used to. Our conversation hung in the back of my might this morning as I shlepped heavy weights across the floor and completed my various workout routines.

what happens when you free students to learn

I was astonished by the depth and breadth of learning that the students brought to class today. Trevor assigned these 50-some juniors in groups of 4-5 to review a biomedical device implant case. The format was something called "grand rounds" in the medical profession. An individual reviews a patient case with salient facts and decisions and procedures administered. They were given the weekend to chose from among seven different cases, each approximately 100 words or less. We told them that after presenting the case (usually 1-2 minutes), they would be asked questions about their decisions in the case. Students from each group would be chosen at random to speak when it was their team's turn to present.

This is only the 6th day of class.  Without exception, each of the 11 presenters was able to answer a wide range of questions about the medical device that was implanted, the operating procedures, the post-operative risks, and the rational for their choices--using correct medical terminology throughout.  It was clear that they had freely researched far beyond the initial 100-word text to create a more complete and individualized understanding. They possessed a level of sophistication in their knowledge that was dramatically higher than in the past.

A big difference this year is that we have stopped lecturing at them almost entirely.

the humiliation method of learning

I've been thinking about what Pete and Liza said about learning physics since our meeting last Thursday.  They described it as the "humiliation method." They recounted the common occurrence of teaching freshmen physics: in every class, they experience a few "arrogant" individuals who believe they know physics when then in fact don't. The only way to "break" these students of this mindset is through "public humiliation," which Pete says is done in a playful manner. Pete asserts that this must be done in order to correct their misconceptions.

I keep thinking about this process. It occurs to me as violent. In fact, it is disturbing to me because it normalizes "humiliation" as part of the educational culture.