Life lessons from completing a 1000-piece puzzle

We are now trying to together create the matrix of "courses" that would be needed in order to accommodate 100 freshmen students in up to 66 different majors. I think Liz called this a "puzzle" in an earlier post, by which she may have meant a "wicked problem."  :)

I had the occasion to complete a 1000-piece puzzle a couple of weeks ago. I don't do this very often, probably because I don't very often have a major surgery that renders me incapable of doing anything but sitting and staring at little pieces of cardboard. In any case, I learned so much from this activity that applies to the puzzle that we find ourselves trying to complete together:

At a distance

I have been gone on the East Coast for most of last week. I found myself missing my colleagues in SUSTAIN-SLO. Could it be that we are creating a real community? I have learned so much here about adult development and action inquiry, I cant wait to share it with you all.

The Thursday 28 April 2011 meeting was productive, and personally educational. With Linda away, Liz and Roger guided the group's effort to identify courses which can be taught collaboratively and/or through projects. The group used the sticky blue board (hereafter SBB) to support this exercise.

On large index cards, each member wrote down topics/learning objectives from an example course in his/her field. The index cards would be placed on the SBB classified by (i) collaborative to independent, and (ii) project based to independent. Initially, Liz organized the SBB so that largely collaborative and project based topics would be placed on the respective edges, with the independent topics overlapping in the middle. Perhaps foolishly, I suggested that we change the SBB organization so that collaborative and project based topics would overlap in the middle of the SBB, with the independent topics on the edges. I made this suggestion so the group could easily identify topics that are both collaborative and project based. However, my suggestion did not allow for an easy identification of the independent/independent topics.

While we conducted the exercise using my suggested organization, I was not happy unable to simultaneously identify topics that overlapped as both collaborative/projects and independent/independent. I suggested that we consider alternative methods to visually identify natural groupings. The group suggested several alternatives, and Roger asked the group to investigate alternative organizations.

I like doing research. I don't mind sorting through 75 abstracts to find 2-4 papers that are tacitly related to the perceived topic area. In the end, I found two experimental papers loosely related to what I was looking for. Each paper contained examples of different SBB organizational structures, including one that Chance had suggested!

An invitation to all authors--why?

Hi all, we met with the group of researchers who is watching our work unfold.  They asked us why you chose to be engaged in this.

I know people have different reasons. Kathryn shared hers and I'd like to invite you all to share yours if only in a "tweeting" kind of "comment" way...no editing required...

Why did you choose to engage in this initiative?

Hubris

When I first heard about this project, back in the fall, I was astonished by the hubris of the faculty involved. They circulated a document that listed courses that would be offered as part of the project, including a few in my department. Yet I had not been approached about participating, nor had anyone in my department. I talked with others in my college and in CSM, and they, too, had been surprised to learn that their courses were being targeted without any consultation. I can't speak for the others, but for me the issue brought to the surface the ways in which the liberal arts and humanities are often deemed an "afterthought" on this campus. We offer GE courses to be tolerated rather than valued, and our disciplines aren't seen as important in their own right. And so this lack of consultation read more like a hostile takeover than an invitation to collaborate.

When Linda approached me again in winter quarter, inviting me to participate, I agreed to do so for a couple of reasons. First, I don't want English to appear stubborn or obstructionist; we aren't. We have partnered with other disciplines before and so aren't against such collaboration. And second, I wanted to learn more about the project to discover what sorts of ways we might be able to participate.

I've thought a lot about the differences in disciplines since I've been at Cal Poly, because this is the first time I've been on a campus that doesn't inherently and explicitly value the liberal arts. I attended a small, liberal arts college as an undergraduate and did my graduate work at UNC where, like many universities, the liberal arts shared a college with the sciences (College of Arts and Sciences) and thus were afforded more respect. Coming to Poly was a dramatic shift in my understanding of what a "university" was, and the last 14 years have caused me to become more defensive in my professional life. I often feel like I have to justify and defend my discipline, in large part because so few seem to understand what it is we do. We teach grammar, yes, but that is so small a part of what we do--most people, though, think that's all we do. The first thing someone says after hearing what I teach is almost always, "I'd better watch what I say since you're an English teacher." This sort of thinking about my field limits and narrows it, and it's difficult not to react badly to statements like this. But I also realize that I need to do a better job of explaining what my field is and why it's important. Perhaps it's hubris in me that expects others to innately understand my discipline.

Creating social fabric

I just read this in a book by Peter Block, "Community: The structure of belonging," (Berret-Kohler Publishers, San Francisco) and recognized it as the process we're in:

"The social fabric of community is formed from an expanding shared sense of belonging. It is shaped by the idea that only when we are connected and care for the well-being of the whole that a civil and democratic society is created...what makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought were incidental...If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of must become. The need to see through the eyes of the artist reflects the intimate nature of community, even if it is occurring among large groups of people.
     The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend.  For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?
     What this means is that theory devolves down to these everyday questions out of which community is actually lived: Whom do I chose to invite into the room? What is the conversations that I both become and engage in with those people? And when there are more than two of us together at the same time, how do we create a communal structure that moves the action forward?
     It is in these kinds of questions that accountability is chosen and care for the well-being of the whole is embodied.  Individual transformation is not the point; weaving and strengthening the fabric of community is a collective effort and starts from a shift in our mindset about our connectedness."

Making progress

We had a really great meeting today with the faculty collaboration. Roger helped us use the "sticky wall" to try to solve the puzzle involving.....

Course and projects
Projects and Topics
Students and Projects
Faculty and Topics
etc.......

After a lot of discussion we looked at a ridiculous project of "playing basketball for 2 hours a week" to see if even such a seemingly meaningless project could incorporate the topics from our course. A bit of a disclaimer in case someone misunderstands this example. We want to have students working on meaningful community based projects like described on our SUSTAIN SLO blog, and we are not saying Basketball is meaningless. This is just an illustration.

We all became energized around this. Below are some really great contextual examples around basketball.

Physics - acceleration, motion, collision of elastic and non-elastic objects.
Math - varying rates of movement. Balls traveling in a parabola. Maximum and minimum points using derivatives
Statistics - Free throw percentages, is there such a thing as a "hot" shooter? Probability of making a shot from different points on the floor.
Economics - Diminishing marginal returns, opportunity cost, consumer choice model, institutionalization of basketball, wage comparisons
English composition - Anything mentioned in economics can be formed into an argument, Analyze the voice, Analyze trash talk.
Communications - verbal and non-verabl communications, strategy of movement
Audience analysis, who sits where and why (i.e. Jack Nicholson)

Next week we will discuss various models of illustrating the interplay between course, students, time, projects, faculty, and anything else that matters. There are many ways to look at this, a request was made of the group in general to bring your favorite model to share.

I think we are making progress.

Capturing the process of collaboration

I've been thinking that I want to capture what it is like to collaborate with the faculty group. So far, we are faculty from English (2 women), Agribusiness (1 man), Physics (2 men), Engineering (2 women, 1 man), Biology (1 man), Economics (1 man), Communications (1 woman), Math (1 woman), Statistics (1 man). There is a woman from soil science and a man from history who have not been able to participate.

Ha. I've just finished typing this and I notice that I've separated people into disciplinary categories, making that the most prominent feature...I suspect doing this is a symptom of the disease of being an academic: we divide the world that way.

First, it is so refreshing to sit down with colleagues and think together.

There is something about their eyes...

I know this is going to be an odd entry, but I want to record it, maybe to free others to say some "unsayable" things about teaching.

Last week we had our annual department banquet where it is a tradition for students and faculty to perform skits. These are usually hilarious caricatures of our "selves." The students see so much more than we imagine. One has to laugh.

I am rarely confident that I have given or have anything to give to the students in my "teaching."  At this banquet, I was visiting with a group of about 8 of them and one volunteered that the class I wrote about in the blogs below was the best class they've ever taken.  I have to be fair...he may have been ever so slightly  intoxicated....I'm not entirely sure it is true in any way for them, but I'm reporting what happened. The others immediately joined in with enthusiastic agreement. In thanking them, I caught the eyes of one young lady who had GREAT difficulty in the class because of the dynamic of her group. I spoke with her group with honest ( but kind ) assessments of how I felt they were capable of more. I thought for sure she would report that it was the worst class experience of her life. She occurs to me as "hard bitten." But in her eyes was a humble sincerity that reminded me of the privilege of "teaching."

I am finding that in teaching in this new way,  I am seeing something in their eyes.  Perhaps I am seeing them and before I was too distracted by my self.  The meeting of that something in their eyes occurs to me as mystical and "otherworldly." I feel very humbled by this experience, because I can feel the place of honor in their lives.

I hope I can carry it responsibly.

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?