Learning

College teacher Siobhan writes a post entitled Fail Better about how her students were failing to succeed because they thought they could not succeed. It was a harrowing time for a teacher, trying to get a point across to students who would not even try.

“But you can do SOMETHING, if you stop worrying about doing it wrong. If you sit there for two hours and write a bunch of notes and come up with a thesis statement or a literary device or anything, I’ll give you any points I can give you. Then, when you take it home later to revise, you’ll have something to start the next draft with. You might fail this essay. But if you fail the essay, THE WORLD WILL NOT END.”

She talks about their reactions, her response, and her attempt to help them find meaning in the difficulty. It’s a good, personal example of how teaching is not always simple.

In the post, she refers to a New York Times article What if the Secret to success is Failure?

The long essay talks about a group of people deciding that character is important and attempting to figure out how to teach character in school. They came up with a list of seven character traits they thought would be essential for success:
zest,
grit,
self-control,
social intelligence,
gratitude,
optimism,
curiosity

Their focus on character traits has helped their students. And that focus has added fuel to the students attempts to improve themselves.

One day last winter, I was speaking with Sayuri Stabrowski, a 30-year-old seventh-and-eighth-grade reading teacher at KIPP Infinity, and she mentioned that she caught a girl chewing gum in her class earlier that day. “She denied it,” Stabrowski told me. “She said, ‘No, I’m not, I’m chewing my tongue.’ ” Stabrowski rolled her eyes as she told me the story. “I said, ‘O.K. fine.’ Then later in the class, I saw her chewing again, and I said: ‘You’re chewing gum! I see you.’ She said, ‘No, I’m not, see?’ and she moved the gum over in her mouth in this really obvious way, and we all saw what she was doing. Now, a couple of years ago, I probably would have blown my top and screamed. But this time, I was able to say: ‘Gosh, not only were you chewing gum, which is kind of minor, but you lied to me twice. That’s a real disappointment. What does that say about your character?’ And she was just devastated.”

They have made a difference in the students by not only having a list, but explaining the list and showing how each of those character traits will help them succeed. When the students get off track, calling attention to how they are missing the boat reminds them of their need to succeed.

Many students who are from affluent areas, with helicopter parents and teachers focused on self-esteem never learn what it takes to succeed when things are difficult:

the struggle to pull yourself through a crisis, to come to terms on a deep level with your own shortcomings and to labor to overcome them

That’s what the article says is important. Because no one can be good at everything. No one can find everything easy.

“The idea of building grit and building self-control is that you get that through failure,” Randolph explained. “And in most highly academic environments in the United States, no one fails anything.”
…
Randolph wants his students to succeed, of course — it’s just that he believes that in order to do so, they first need to learn how to fail.

So, failing is the beginning of success.

If we have students who are failing, we can encourage them with the knowledge that failure in an instant is not failure in everything. If we can ingrain that into their psyches, then we will have given them a springboard for success.

Daniel Pink defines symphony as the ability to look at the big picture. How do we teach that? I am not sure.

How can we learn to know it when we see it? I suggest that we need to start looking for it.

Scientific American’s slideshow Creation of the City 1870-1965 might be an example.

How can we look at the parts and encourage our students to look at the whole?

I have been listening to A Whole New Mind. While I have only heard the theoretical chapters, for some reason, those have expanded in my head and I see all kinds of relevance and practical applications in my teaching and my own work.

One of the elements of the conceptual age is play.

I think that The Tempered Radical has a great idea for encouraging innovation and, in part, it involves play.

Christensen and company argue that the most innovative thinkers often force themselves to find metaphorical connections between their fields and seemingly unrelated objects.

We used to do this with our family while driving in the car. Fun times!

The authors of the book write:

“Start a collection of odd, interesting things (e.g., a slinky, model airplane, robot and so on) and put them in a curiosity box or bag…Then, you can pull out unique items randomly when confronted with a problem or opportunity…

When brainstorming for new ideas, odd, unusual things often trigger new associations. It may sound silly, but seemingly silly things can provoke the most random associations, literally forcing us out of our habitual thinking patterns.”

One of the teachers at my old college does this. She even gave me one of her curiousity box tokens. I don’t know if she used it quite like they suggest, but she would pull them out when she needed help thinking.

I think that this could be an interesting and engaging process. What if, for example, everyone had to pull three things out of their car or dorm room that were unique or odd? What would they bring? How would that relate to their writing assignments?

I am seriously considering engaging this aspect of the conceptual age in class. I think it might be a great way to jumpstart their thinking.

Tempered Radical also provides handouts! (Yay! I don’t have to make them up.)

Update: Tempered Radical wrote more on the topic.

A twenty-second exercise: How does a gryphon relate to teaching college English?
A mix of various parts. Often dismissed. Folkloric. Unsure of how to grow or feed it. Interesting mix makes for long-term captivation of thoughts and ideas. Design matters. All the disparate parts have to work together.

Update:
First, I explained the Conceptual Age idea, including a brief history of the Industrial Revolution and the Information Age. They were able to explain why we are seen as being in the information age.

Then we talked about what kind of jobs are being outsourced.

Then I presented the Conceptual Age elements of Daniel Pink (and Innovation, which I added because of Tempered Radical).

Finally, I took a box of clever toys (and not so clever ones) as well as a few simple things (pinecone, lock, empty glass Coke bottle, and a spatula) and passed one out to every student.

I did this twice. The first time, the students had three minutes to come up with some way in which their item was like a class they were in.

The second time they had to either say how the second item was like their major or their experience (in the last 2.5 weeks) of college life.

Got a great response on many things. The ones I remember:
pinwheel = exercise science, Need to keep moving. Need to work together.
ViewMaster = psychology, So many thoughts that I have to figure out how to see.
slappy hand = required intro to college class, which is not as the student expected
Silly String = scary but no reason, fun afterwards– about college experience

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” — Isaac Asimov

Yes, yes, yes.

For me, too.

That’s why there is paper everywhere and I often transfer paper writing to the computer.

Typing keys (while useful, helpful, fast, and efficient) is not the same. I must write. You may call me medieval if you must, though I do consider that a compliment you know, but I need to slide a pen across paper for my thoughts to get out of my head and into the rest of the world.

HASTAC has an interesting post on learning.

I really came to focus on the relevance/impact of my education as a Duke student. To make a long story short, I came to find that when I was really honest with myself and thought about what I have learned at Duke that I can apply in law school, to my career, to my life, etc. I came up with nothing. Until I reflected on what I had learned as a student in TYBI.

This is Your Brain on the Internet is a course the student is in now. I like some of the ideas that are promoted in the next paragraph.

I’m using my “online brain” to remind myself to come back to this later.

An award-winning study of nine adult students who persisted at a Western community college finds that connecting with an instructor – not with campus activities — made the difference, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Rosemary Capps followed older students who started in remedial reading, a high-risk group, for her 2010 University of Utah dissertation.

Now an academic developer at the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of California at Davis, Capps said colleges need to reach adult students ”in their classrooms.”

says Community College Spotlight’s “Why Adult Students Persist”

Capps said in an interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education:

if colleges want to reach adult students with their retention efforts, they’re going to need to reach them in their classrooms, and not through the traditional kinds of advising centers and activities.
…
One of the strong patterns in my data is that knowing students personally and validating them can make a huge difference. I also believe strongly in faculty advising. You see that at elite colleges, and you see that in graduate study, but I think it should happen more at community colleges. Sometimes adult students don’t have time to go to an advising center—they have to rush out of class to get to some other obligation. But they might take three minutes at the end of class to talk to a faculty member they trust. “Do you have any ideas about what classes I should take next?” So I think it’s important for faculty to get familiar with general-education requirements and the major requirements in their fields, because students who feel comfortable with them are going to come to them first with those questions.
…
Colleges could do more to highlight the stories of their successful adult students. They could set up mentoring programs in which persistent adult students could reach out to adult students who are just starting out. I think that could be very heartening for everyone involved.

I think this last would be great. I think that maybe we could get the students involved with this by touting their success and how this mentoring/encouragement role, even just in speaking to a class for ten minutes later on, can be helpful in getting a job. If students have experience mentoring those who are coming behind them, they are going to be more successful in training and management.

One thing I am trying to emphasize in my developmental classroom is how far the students in it have already come, how far they’ve already gotten ahead, just by making it into the college classroom. I am not sure how successful I am with that, but I hope that hearing it helps.

What ways do you validate your students?

And on a totally different, but completely related, topic:

My data suggest that developmental classes have benefits that go beyond their academic content. Making sure that students have experience in a small class with a caring teacher before they get into the harder content and higher expectations of credit courses—for the nine students in my study, that process seemed to make a difference. Their developmental-reading instructors were champions for them.

SCORE!

That’s what I am trying to do in my developmental classes and I think I need to concentrate on doing it earlier, too, even before I’ve managed to get down pat all 75 students’ names.

Finishing the post, I changed the title. Even now it is not as long as I wanted. I think this should be entitled “Finding Passion and Taking Advantage of It: Accessing Student Passion in the Classroom through Group Work.” But here are the thoughts that brought this blog post into being…

What are you passionate about? What do you talk about when the work is done and the relaxing has begun?

My husband will tell you I talk about school, about my students, about my assignments, about things that did and didn’t work. I also talk about papers I am writing, research I am doing, and conferences I am preparing for. And I read and talk about science fiction and fantasy. I suppose, based on those indicators, that these are what I am passionate about…

Finding Passion, by math professor Dr. Robert Talbert, is an interesting introduction to thinking about passion… in our lives and in our classroom.

He asked the question, or made the statement, that got me thinking about this post.

How can you tell what a person or small group of people are passionate about? It seems to me that there’s a two-step process:

Give those people a break and let them do whatever they want. Remove all the programming you have planned for them, just for a little bit. And then:
See what it is they talk about when there is no structure.
Whatever gets talked about, is what those people are passionate about — at least at the time. If they don’t talk about anything, they aren’t passionate about anything.

Then Talbert tied this to the classroom for instructors. Do we schedule the heck out of our students so that they don’t have time and energy to be passionate about anything?

In considering this question I made a discovery about how my own teaching has evolved that I think is a positive thing.

When I first began teaching, I avoided group work like the plague. I hated it for myself, because I always ended up doing the bulk of the work, and I hated it as an instructor, because I couldn’t tell who had done what.

However, in the interest of retention, I need to get my students involved with each other and in a community college, the only way that will happen is if I make it happen. So I began scheduling group work, in class, that requires a small bit of reading and writing.

In literature classes, I will give each group (or all the groups) a poem and ask them to read it and discuss it and write down their best analysis. You might be amazed at how good some of that can be, especially when students are bouncing ideas off each other and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which often happens.

In writing classes, when we have a reading (which we do periodically), I have the students get into groups to answer questions about the reading. I read it to them here, since I think many in the community college do not have sufficient skills to read and reading it aloud allows me the opportunity to explain the vocabulary as we go. Then I have them read the questions, significantly shorter than the essay itself, and answer them in groups. One person writes, but they all talk. If I give them sufficient time, which I don’t always do, they spend time working on it and writing excellent responses. Then it’s an in-class grade and everyone gets full credit, unless the work didn’t get done.

In humanities, I have them split into groups to discuss pre-tests on the topic we are going to be studying. It gets them pulling out what they already know on the topic, which is very useful, and helps me see what level their knowledge is at before I start teaching. They enjoy it and it gives me a break and a chance to hear how they think as well, since they negotiate their answers, usually, since none of them are experts on the topic.

Perhaps I need to be even more purposeful in adding space for the students to talk and think about their projects. Today might be a good day to talk about the frustrations and triumphs of the controversial essay, for example. Since they have gotten back a graded research paper and are revising it for a final grade on Monday.

Okay, I know the title is a bit simplistic, but that is, in fact, what researchers discovered. I think we as teachers (and long time students) know that. But it is interesting to have it confirmed.

According to the Chronicle of Higher Ed‘s article by Peter Schmidt, New Studies Show How Life’s Tough Turns Can Derail Students:

The subset of students that Mr. Cox and Mr. Reason examined included about 700 identified as white, 700 as Asian, 600 as black, and 600 as Hispanic. The two researchers focused on data from the students’ sophomore year of college, basing their assessment of stressful life events on how many students had responded yes when asked if they had experienced any of 14 family setbacks, such as a parent dying or losing a job, a brother or sister dropping out of school, an unwed sister becoming pregnant, or a member of the immediate family going on public assistance or becoming homeless.

The analysis found that, for each racial or ethnic group examined, graduation rates dropped off sharply with each additional stressful life event outside college. For example, among Hispanic males, those who had not experienced any of the specified life events had a predicted graduation rate of 69 percent. But the rate dropped to just under 64 percent for those who had experienced one life event, 58 percent for those who had experienced two, and just over 46 percent for those who had experienced four. Women and black and white respondents of both genders followed a similar pattern.

What they also found out, and what was not highlighted as much in the article, is that life does not have to get in the way of school.

[I]t appeared that students identified as Asian experienced less-precipitous declines in their graduation rates as the number of life events they reported increased. The two scholars did not offer any explanation as to why Asian students might be more academically resilient.

Based on the many discussions and studies of the importance of education in Asian and Asian-American culture, I would guess that students overcome the stressors in their lives because they see education as more important.

It took me a long time to get my PhD. I was actually granted a one-semester extension on the twelve year limitation. But I got it. Because it was important to me. So, a marriage, three moves, two children, three emergency surgeries, and countless other real and perceived stressors later, I graduated. I even went back to school and walked! (The boys, who were seven and eight, were slightly bored, but very good.)

I am NOT saying that life does not get in the way. It does. But sometimes life becomes the reason not to finish, instead of the reason you took so long.

The two researchers’ paper suggests that colleges take steps to encourage students to report life events, and train faculty members to be more alert to signs that students are in distress.

This can be a significant issue, especially among populations such as the ones my school serves. The students always have significant life events.

One of my students went to take care of her grandparents’ business, because they were killed in a car wreck and her father was already dead. Dang! Who can deal with that and school? This student missed a week and a half of school, but came back working hard and got the paper done that we worked through while she was gone.

It can be done. But many students do not have the cultural background to commit to education no matter what. Everyone has hard things in their lives. We still go to work, though perhaps not, as Mary Kay envisioned, giving make-overs immediately upon learning that our child was killed in an accident or our husband is leaving us for his significantly younger secretary. I taught the day I found out my mother was dying. I taught the day she died. It was my job. It sucked. But I did it.

Perhaps our students need help to see their educations as their jobs.

Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year 2006

A sense of calling is often associated with teaching, that teaching is more than just punching the clock: in at 8 and out at 5 (or earlier). Teaching involves working with others, helping students learn and prepare for their careers. It involves relationships of trust and respect (see What Works in Teaching).

The calling of the professoriate is evident in Bardiac’s blog post about a student having to “jump through a hoop” and how the student did not realize that the hoop was supposed to help. It’s also about how it wouldn’t have except that Bardiac took the time to actually help the student. And it’s a post about what we hope we can do as teachers. We hope we can change our students lives. That is the fantasy that we all dream about, isn’t it?

This reminded me of Dr. Lee Skallerup’s What I Learned as an Undergrad post.

One of the commenters falls in line with how I think of Bardiac’s fantasy life.

Even the stuff we did learn in a classroom sometimes takes years to sink in. Like your example of the books you were “forced” to read. @enkerli talks about planting time bombs when he’s teaching, stuff you can’t assess during that semester but you hope will sit in the back of your students heads and have an impact later on.

How do you embed future learning in your students’ education now?