Suggestions Sought for How a Small and Diverse Group of Faculty Could Learn to Teach Better.

As a stimulus for getting educators to think about how better to lead discussions, I find Stringfellow Barr’s “Notes on Dialogue” really useful.

http://www.stjohnscollege.edu/about/dialogue.shtml

I don’t have any specific suggestions, but it does make me think of one thing. My brother owns a small business (~15 people) for which the employees are mostly college students, of college age, or just slightly older. One of the things that he has been doing for the last couple of years, on his own initiative is getting faculty from the university to offer a short class (3-6 weeks, meeting one night a week) open to whatever employees are interested (with some social pressure on people to go to the entire course if they start) . It’s outside of work time, but attendance is free — the business pays both the faculty and for whatever texts are needed.

He started this program for various reasons — personal interest, a feeling that it would be a nice benefit to offer, and also because they thought it would be good for the business. He believes, as someone who had attended an interdisciplinary college, that collaborative academic experiences are a way to learn specific skills about thinking and working together that are valuable in the workplace.

In doing this he definitely has developed opinions about what contributes to a good class when you have instructors who are teaching material that draws on their discipline but is targeted at people who may or may not have any interest or background in that discipline. It’s also encouraged him to think that there are strengths (as well as weaknesses) to doing something in the general form of a college class outside of the college setting.

I don’t feel like I can summarize his thoughts but if any of that sounds like it might provide useful food for thought for your situation e-mail me, and I’d be happy to put you in touch with him, or try to get more specific information.

Here’s a link to Engel’s essay.

Harry, I can’t tell you how grateful I am to read about faculty members who want to become better teachers. May I suggest that you include discussions of grading and evaluation in your project.

This looks useful. Via good article here.
A visit to a good primary school class might be worthwhile. Small children are aliens of course and not everything that works with them will be relevant to 20-year olds, who are alien in their own way. Thinking about the differences and parallels would be interesting. Deliberate disruption must be unusual in HE, but holding attention is the same problem.

Oh goodness — I will be teaching our equivalent course this coming year, and am really interested to see how it works. I second Ahistoricality’s suggestion of the Wineburg. I also have been thinking about something for our majors, and may expand it to a campus-wide thing, if colleagues are interested. I actually got the idea from a Wineburg essay in the Chronicle — he put a bunch of faculty from different fields in a room and asked them all to work on a primary source. What this demonstrated is that historians really DO read differently and use different critical tools than people in other fields, and was an eye-opener for thinking about assuming that students know what we are looking for.

So anyway, most of my departmental colleagues are willing to offer skills workshops, where we all work with students and each other, so that students can see where we also struggle a little, and that we are not necessarily all experts in each other’s fields, and most importantly, participate in the process of working through difficult sources. I have to admit, I’ll be really interested in how my Americanist colleagues deal with some of the documents (in English) I bring in! This isn’t just for the student’s though; my hope is that it helps my more self-reflective colleagues see where we can improve.

Oh — also (and this is an informal faculty-driven thing, too) several of our newer faculty have asked if others would be interested in an observation exchange, with any faculty interested in observing a particular kind of class (lecture, discussion, group work, etc.) could come and observe and/or be observed and get informal feedback. I’ll be interested to see how these things work.

“A visit to a good primary school class…”

For maximum effect, I suggest a mildly dysfunctional classrooms full of 12 and 13 year olds (that may or may not be redundant), with the provision, of course, that the professor be a participant that prepares and gives a relevant lesson.

http://www.faa.gov/library/manuals/aviation/aviation_instructors_handbook/media/FAA-H-8083-9A.pdf

DCA – thanks. Astonishing. We need the FAA to put out a College instructors handbook.

This is not a reading, but an activity that I believe can be useful in addressing the dropout portion of your goals. Bring in the 4th year students and let them talk very honestly and openly about their friends who dropped out: why they did it, what went wrong, what they could have/should have done differently. I know it’s not a particularly novel activity/structure, essentially a panel discussion, but so many of the things that mess students up are the result of a lack of experience and example. Often, there are steps first years can take to solve or treat problems before they snowball into catastrophes, but they don’t take the initiative because they don’t know where to start or feel like they deserve to fail because of their ignorance.

There’s a huge difference between hearing this stuff from faculty and advisers and hearing it from people who are only recently through the same experience, and close to completing their goal. Something as simple as “make an appointment to talk to somebody in the financial aid office” can be eye-opening when it’s said by a student who had a problem and got it solved.

These programs probably are great for some students, but not for those interested in math and science. When you lock together a group of students, you force all of them into the lowest level classes. Incoming science and math students usually have backgrounds that call for more advanced first year classes. Looking over the list of FIG options, only two are for “nerds” and only one of these includes calculus.

I long for a day when universities allow technically oriented students to ignore the liberal arts as much as liberal arts students are allowed to ignore math and science. My university has 4 distribution requirements: writing, foreign language, “culture”, and math/science. This may be fine for the philosophy major, but for the physics major, all that liberal arts junk is just a waste of a year.

College is too short to waste a year like this.

lgm — three courses in the first year of one’s college experience affords plenty of opportunity to do more science and math. I’m not involved in course selection, but I’d be surprised if lots of science and math courses were proposed and rejected; and I imagine that the advisory would be very enthusiastic about getting more proposals from them.

Of course, if you think that learning philosophy, history, economics, sociology, etc, is all a waste of your time, its probably because you’re a very brilliant man — but most of the rest of us have to make do with more modest attributes.

harry b said in part: “Of course, if you think that learning philosophy, history, economics, sociology, etc, is all a waste of your time, its probably because you’re a very brilliant man.” Quite the opposite. I’m a borderline dyslexic, which is beside the point.

One shouldn’t use “ignorant” to describe someone who would rather read Walter Rudin (famous Madison math writer) than, say, Ann Althouse (Madison blogging law prof). One might even side with C. P. Snow (“The Two Cultures”) who puts the question: “Can you explain the second law of thermodynamics?” at the same level as: “Have you ever read anything by Shakespeare?”

One can take the view that the second law of thermodynamics is as great part of our cultural heritage as the writings of Shakespeare. If that’s true, it should be equally permissible to ignore one as to ignore the other. Life is too short to know both well.

“a very brilliant man.” Quite the opposite. I’m a borderline dyslexic”

I’m pretty sure the one is hardly relevant to the other, let alone in opposition.

If that’s true, it should be equally permissible to ignore one as to ignore the other.

And it is — one can go through college, at nearly every college and university in existence, without touching Shakespeare. Without touching fiction writing, even. I think Harry’s point about economics, sociology, philosophy, history, etc holds — it’s a question of how narrowly or broadly we are being dismissive.

I do think breadth-level mathematics (e.g. math for poets) is fundamentally different from breadth-level coursework in other disciplines, except maybe writing, in that there’s strong pervasive anxiety over the subject matter in the population — and I think empathy with sufferers of that anxiety transmutes into institutional reinforcement of that anxiety. Calculus isn’t required or even acknowledged as a comparable breadth option because it’s really hard and scary, apparently. My current students didn’t know what calculus was, but had this impression that it must be an inconceivably hard course. They also don’t know what historiography is, but have no such common judgment of the difficulty of Historiography 101. It’s not social stigma per se, but it is social misinformation, which leads to math aversion, which leads to generalized avoidance of anything which requires mathematical tools to comprehend deeply, etc.

On the other hand, I feel pretty comfortable assuming that the FIGs won’t suffer from this aversion; heck, “Engineering, Communication, and Design” is the advertised group on the website, and “Space Exploration: Science, Engineering, Economics and Social Impact” has calculus as one of the interwoven courses. I’m really excited to see that.

Harry, there’s a potentially useful article I’ll send over email, a kind of classical (or at least widely referenced) article in mathematical pedagogy about how to teach concepts in linear algebra, well; it mostly attempts to generalize away from that specific topic into how abstract information is processed in a learner’s mind through concrete examples and perturbations of those examples, and how we as teachers can exploit the particular ways this process tends to work in order to maximize learning. Very Vygotskian stuff. Might be useful, might be too-specific junk.

“As you point out, I’m not agreeing with Snow all the way. But like him (and science majors across the country) I chafe at committees dominated by liberal arts professors who declare that you have to take X liberal arts classes to be “educated” while not knowing or caring a lick about science.”

I’m not sure about the composition of these committees, but there is probably some truth to your point. I think, as Snow points out, the ignorance/un-caring goes both ways. It’s just that there is an asymmetry in attitudes about it. There is perhaps both a stigma attached to ignorance of the liberal arts and conversely an unseemly pride in ignorance of the sciences.

On the other hand, I think part of the asymmetry in requirements is due not to a surplus of liberal arts professors on the committees, but a self-imposed shortage of math and science professors. Surely the economic power in most universities resides in the hard sciences and harder social sciences and not in the classics department.

I think that while liberal arts professors see it as part of their mission to try to educate everyone (possibly as a way to compensate for the lack of obvious quantifiable economic value of their research output), science and math professors simply aren’t interested in teaching students outside of their disciplines.

I’m entirely sure that there is any real value teaching calculus to liberal arts majors, but they could certainly profit from some fundamental coverage of what science and math is all about, how it works, and why it’s important. Philosophy of science, if you will, but taught by someone largely sympathetic to its goals, devoid of all but the faintest sliver of continental philosophy or Feyerabend.

Surely NYU could pull this off. I mean they have the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, named after a guy who wrote the book “What is Mathematics?”. Plus Alan Sokal.

I freely admit that I say all this with very little in the way of evidence.

JLR, you had me until the fourth paragraph…

science and math professors simply aren’t interested in teaching students outside of their disciplines.

Nawwwwwwwwwwwwwww. Ok, you said you freely admit that you say all this with little evidence. But my anecdata shall totally pwn your anecdata. Witness:

Lots and lots and lots of ‘science for poets’ classes exist. Absolutely, categorically no ‘poetry for physicists’ classes exist.^1^

In fact most of our discussion as a department (the part where we grad students have a say anyway) is about the math-for-poets courses: how do we do this, how do we do this well?

I’m not entirely sure that there is any real value teaching calculus to liberal arts majors

Now, see I wonder, do you say that having taken some coursework in calculus and mathematical physics? Or is it pronouncing the worthlessness, or at least inapplicability, of a topic with which you haven’t become acquainted? (It’s ok either way. But as an English major who discovered tools to think about books more deeply through thinking about calculus, I have to stand up for the crossover potential here.)

At this university we have a ‘calculus for poets’ (and biologists) course, three math for poets courses total, and the potential for exploration, logical tinkering, creativity, and so on is really exciting. Maybe not every liberal arts student would be optimally served by such a course, it is true. I would settle for one third.

^1^Actually, I am hoping to be proved wrong, because ‘poetry for physicists’ would be awesome.

“pronouncing the worthlessness, or at least inapplicability, of a topic”

Banish the thought. I thought I made clear that I’m decidedly not in favor of ignorance of either side of the ‘two cultures’ divide.

I’m just thinking about optimizing the limited educational time/interest of students by taking account of tradeoffs between most generally useful or amiable subjects across the divide.

I think that dropping most liberal arts majors into a calculus class is going to provoke the same WTF response and hostility that dropping hard science people into a hardcore critical theory class would. I understand that it is critically important that students get exposure outside their comfort zone, but past a point, I think it’s counterproductive.

Now, I have my biases, but I think an ideal introduction for science people to what really happens in humanities scholarship would be a historiography class. It’s a discipline that is evidence-based, and so not completely foreign to scientists, but on the other hard it involves interpretive techniques that are fairly prototypical of the humanities in general. It’s a good hook and provides a gentle slope to more foreign modes of thought. The outer bounds of historiography edge into critical theory, for instance.

Half-relevant to various things that have popped up here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/steven-strogatz/

A Prof at Cornell blogging on mathematics, but for people who never really “got” maths. Really good reading, and a fair model of how to explain complex ideas at a beginners level. (Start at the beginning, there aren’t many.)

I add a note that only professors can propose FIGs, and since science professors teach far fewer courses on average that social sciences and humanities professors that would be one explanation of the paucity of proposals from them (my own department was willing, in current circumstances, to release just one prof-taught course for this purpose for next Fall).

Have you folks evolved beyond Chickering and Gamson already? If not, this isn’t the original source, but a good gloss:
SEVEN PRINCIPLES FOR GOOD PRACTICE IN UNDERGRADUATE EDUCATION
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/7princip.htm

lgm — yes, interesting (though distracting — I’m really trying to figure out what to do, but there are lots of good suggestions here). Also, I’ll see if there’s anything to be done about broadening the offerings that hasn’t already been tried.

[Aside to SLB – well, true, but the stats department isn’t the math department. I dunno what they do, really. Our general math for -poets- liberal arts class includes lessons on probability in its proportionality unit, and has a statistics half-unit sharing exam space with ‘visual representations of frequency’ half-unit.]

It’s not that they can’t read a graph—they can’t, but that can be course content—it’s that they aren’t ready to learn how to read a graph. Not just Cartesian graphs in x and y, but… any graph. They don’t have the prerequisite skill set.

At some point, doesn’t this have to be laid at the door of the admissions department? If they couldn’t read a line of poetry — in the sense of resolving the squiggles of ink into words — you presumably wouldn’t hesitate to say that they were not qualified to set foot in your hallowed halls. The idea that math, *specifically*, is infinitely disposable is part of the problem, isn’t it?

High schools (at least middle-class and above ones whose parents expect their children to go on to college) respond to what college admissions departments are expecting. If you lower the bar, so will they, and vice versa, no?

Colleges can’t directly go back in time and give their students better math education from the elementary-school level on. But over the long term, they can affect the incentives to do so.

But then, that advice is probably useless in the short term, so please pardon my ranting.

I really really don’t want to clutter up this thread with this, but–

At some point, doesn’t this have to be laid at the door of the admissions department?

Nope. We’re a public university with (i) a responsibility to serve our state and (ii) hardly any second-tier university structure at all, unlike U. of Wisconsin which can tier admissions requirements across its university system. But I wasn’t complaining about the remediation. I agree with the cited administrator: we need to provide a support structure (and we’re continuing to work on doing so).

If they couldn’t read a line of poetry—in the sense of resolving the squiggles of ink into words—you presumably wouldn’t hesitate to say that they were not qualified to set foot in your hallowed halls.

That’s a tad bit unfair. There’s a difference between being able to resolve “2x + 3y = 8” and read off the symbols, and being able to graph that equation and explain how to interpret its slope.

Taking the statement less literally: facts not in evidence, dude. It’s not like our students are particularly gifted writers all, either.

In fact, many math professors here quite often assert that their students would be doing much better in math if their literacy improved — the students often know more math content than they are able to show on exams, because they lack the reading skills necessary to parse carefully phrased questions.

The idea that math, specifically, is infinitely disposable is part of the problem, isn’t it?

Not really. See above. It’s not like we require a verbal SAT of 1200 and a math SAT of 600, or something. Standards are set so that we can adequately serve the population we have.

High schools (at least middle-class and above ones whose parents expect their children to go on to college) respond to what college admissions departments are expecting.

Well, …that would cover, like, one county around here, and we’re a state school serving the entire state, etc. Even to be cynical about it and set aside our purpose in existing, which I personally believe in quite fervently and unshakably, I think “let’s not serve anybody rural” is not a winner when appealing to the state legislature to not slash our funding.

To bring this back around to the thread a little: one thing I really like about Harry’s reflections is the focus on what the purpose of a public university is and can be. Thinking through those first principles carefully seems quite appropriate when attempting to improve quality of instruction — it’s a nontrivial epiphany to realize that any pedagogical evaluation is predicated on characteristics of the audience. (Which characteristics?)

I teach quite differently because of where I anticipate my students are going, what I anticipate they will do with their lives. Without a complete picture of that, I rely rather heavily on data about where students at this university have tended to take careers, and try to put emphases in accordingly.

To what extent is this anticipating probable student interests, and to what extent is this reinforcing existing patterns which might not serve my students well? That’s something for us to continue to think about.

Well, I was trying to avoid sidetracking into how the U.S. educational system is a means of perpetuating our class system by providing opportunity to some, disguised as a means of providing opportunity to everyone.

Yes, let’s avoid that sidetrack, as I’m pretty sure most of us here are working rather diligently to counteract this. We’ve come a long way since the days of boarding schools’ predominance.

Anyway… aren’t you trying to address a problem that belongs at the high school or even middle school level?

It’s completely irrational for me to be as irritated as I am that you haven’t read my previous comments on previous CT education threads where we have talked and talked and talked about this. I’m probably being unfairly irritable right now. So, sorry if this response sounds snappy.

But look, two things. One, we educators have jobs to do, as educators. Sitting around saying, “oh but if only the student population was better prepared before they landed in my hands” is not doing our job. We work with the students we have, not the students we envision as ideal.

Two, I’ve talked many too many of Harry’s CT threads to death going on and on about what we try to do, in my program, to improve high school and middle school education. Fergawdsake, I teach teachers for a living. And talk about it on CT more loquaciously than sensible people have patience for. But not here. Because that’s not what this particular thread is about; it’s narrowly about professional development.

—————————–

Speaking of which, to offer an on-topic thought, I wonder if the participants would be interested in producing a cross-discipline document advising graduate students on how to teach and teach well. The idea is, by developing advice for graduate student teachers, one could (i) profitably reflect on what makes for good instruction and (ii) give graduate students more resources to use. Having a concrete project like this as a final result clarifies the end goal and streamlines the thinking process.

Participants could discuss what they would advise graduate students in their major to do, both immediately as instructors, and as future professors.

This would let folks explore what is specifically true about their department’s expectations, and what the departments seem to share in common. By exploring what we want to see in our graduate students’ future teaching, we can indirectly contemplate we want to see in our own classrooms.

Also: it also creates a proxy situation, which I think is good. Advice is not being offered directly from one person to another — coming up with advice and guidelines for the hypothetical third party graduate student would free up participants from some constraints of etiquette, and open them to brainstorm in ways they might not feel comfortable doing when discussing each other’s roles directly.

One can discuss what makes for mediocre but passable (in the sense of not disciplining the individual) teaching, and what folks have seen in their graduate students’ teaching that wowed them, or concerned them.

(I assume you all have to do sit-in evaluations and stuff. Might as well put those hours spent in evaluating grad students to a second use.)

And just to repeat, regardless of whether this discussion topic suggestion gets incorporated somehow, if there’s any kind of concrete document that spins out of all of this, graduate students could benefit from having access to it. Ok, as a graduate student myself, I have an ulterior motive. But it’s a noble ulterior motive; reflection is more valuable when shared! :-)

One, we educators have jobs to do, as educators. Sitting around saying, “oh but if only the student population was better prepared before they landed in my hands” is not doing our job. We work with the students we have, not the students we envision as ideal.

Fair enough. That’s sort of what I was getting at with my initial acknowledgment that what I was saying was probably useless in the short term.

In that case, I apologize for being off-topic.