Learning

“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?

Clarence Fisher on Remote Access has an interesting discussion of literacy. It starts with a quote from Bob Stein of The Future of the Book:

“We find when writing moves online, the connections between ideas and people are much more apparent than they are in the context of a printed book.”

Then he goes on in the post to say: “We like to pretend in schools that reading and writing are social actions, but we only want to go so far. We need individual grades after all.”

This whole discussion reminded me of a poem I wrote many years ago and re-read yesterday. It is about how the fiction I read changes my perception of the world and I wish that I could know the folks who are in those stories as well as I know the stories. (Yes, I know they don’t exist; I’m just saying.)

But really how is that different from wishing I had been able to know my grandmother when she was young or read the letter from Michener about her book or heard my friend give her talk in Seattle? I am not sure it is.

Did we teach that reading and writing are social actions? In my life (until that PhD in rhetoric) we didn’t talk about reading and writing as social but as individual. Yes, the author wrote a book and hoped a publisher would purchase it and an audience would read it, but the writing itself was seen as individual.

(Eric Flint’s ways of writing 1632 is the farthest from that which I have read on any regular basis. He writes with his fans and other authors about his world and follows the stories where the others think they should go.)

Reading was also individual. We had the SRA reading speed tests and the individual reading experiences. In school the only social reading I remember was A Wrinkle in Time read by my teacher, Mrs. Loomis. We all loved this reading (and I read the book to my sons at the same age because of this) but mostly our reading was individual. I certainly thought it was individual, when I was racing my way through books to compete with my brother in reading and get to go back to the library with my father.

Rhetoric teaches (correctly) that writing has an audience and a purpose. But I am not sure that this makes writing a social activity. At least not as it has been done in the past.

Perhaps now, with blogs and tweets and facebook pages, writing IS a social activity. I answer my friend’s status update and she likes. I post something on her wall. She reads it. Everyone else reads it as well. Perhaps they respond.

Fisher’s article concentrates on the difference in delivery. I don’t think ebooks versus paper books are such a big difference. I do think that writing responded to in process is a big difference.

I don’t think reading an ebook on my computer is a whole lot different socially than reading a book on paper. Both are done individually… Perhaps if we are reading it in class from the projection screen I will view it as different. (And I am going to be doing that this semester.) But if we are simply reading in a different medium, I am not sure that changes the literacy at all.

Fisher talks about concern that corporations are driving literacy. You know, corporations won’t make and sell kindles, nooks, iPads, and computers if folks are not interested in buying them. But if Amazon can sell books without having to send them through the mail (which it can and why aren’t they significantly cheaper since they don’t have that cost?), why/how does that make Amazon in charge of literacy? I still read what I want to read. Yes, some people will get on and download the free Kindle app to their computer and read all the free books and only the free books. Hey, the library does that too. Does that mean that the library is driving literacy? Not in any more nefarious way than it has since Benjamin Franklin’s day. And I don’t think that corporations are driving literacy any differently than publishers and libraries have and are.

As computing platforms diverge and seek to distinguish themselves from others, what happens to our ideas of literacy and our literacy skills when Apple offers one type of platform, Google another, Linux a third and Microsoft something completely different? Will we need a “Shakespeare by Google” class while another offers a “Shakespeare by Linux?” Will these two texts contain fundamentally different information? What happens when corporations sponsor the hardware in a school or district? Will students be illiterate when they transfer?

This is why open models are important.

Really? Apple has a platform. Folks use iPads and iPhones and Macs. Other folks use HP. Shakespeare by Google might be an interesting class, just because Google is showing so much content, but is it going to change Shakespeare? No. Not any more than any scholar, book, or publication does/will.

I don’t think that technical literacy should be conflated with reading/writing and information literacy. Those are very different skills.

An Associated Press article by Eric Gorski, Student Tracking Finds Limited Learning in College was sent around the listserv at my school. You might be interested in what it has to say as well.

A new study provides disturbing answers to questions about how much students actually learn in college — for many, not much — and has inflamed a debate about the value of an American higher education.

The research of more than 2,300 undergraduates found 45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing [emphasis mine] by the end of their sophomore years.

One problem is that students just aren’t asked to do much, according to findings in a new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” [sic] Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.

I know it is possible to get through your sophomore year with little to no writing. If you take a particular remedial writing course, you will write two essays and be graded on your class participation. If you take a similar freshman composition you will write three essays. If you don’t have to take those classes, you might get by with just a research paper and an essay in the next course. Some degrees don’t require sophomore literature. Some students take the teachers who don’t like to grade writing.

But really? I think it is far more likely that it isn’t that students aren’t required to think or write but that students aren’t transferring those skills from one class to the next. (I talked a bit about knowledge transfer here.)

And as for how much they wrote and read… My students don’t read 40 pages per week. But we read, in class and out of class, about 48 essays in a semester. That’s a lot of reading for a class that doesn’t emphasize reading. That’s besides the other reading in our second book and the online stuff.

My students might say that they didn’t write twenty pages of papers in the semester. But if you add up their research and their essays, they wrote more than twenty (between twenty and thirty). If you include their short writing assignments, they wrote about fifty pages. If you asked them about it, though, since I did not require a twenty-page paper, they might say no.

I am working on a paper for my college on integrating critical thinking, for our Quality Enhancement Plan for SACS. At this stage it is just a proposal. However, I thought I would make note of some of the sources I thought were useful before I close them out.

Critical Thinking Rubric

an entire series of rubrics, because why should you reinvent the wheel?

QEP intro from Florida A&M U

There were several other good ones, but I cited those in my paper.