Pedablogy: Musings on the Art & Craft of Teaching

Sometimes progress comes where you least expect it. Checking my twitter feed this morning, I noticed several tweets from someone I didn’t recognize. I clicked on the new tweeter, one Chris Jobling, and discovered that he teaches at the Swansea University in Wales. I thought I only knew one person at Swansea, Paul Latreille, who I met in conjunction with the Developments in Economics Education Conference in Cambridge (UK) last fall.

I went to Chris’ blog site (listed on his twitter profile page), and discovered that he is a long time blogger. In a recent post, he writes:

Swansea University, where I work, has quietly established a WordPress blogging system that anyone who has a University login can use to create a blog.

At the DEE Conference, I gave a presentation on using social software in teaching economics. I pointed out that the presentation was constructed on our homemade umwblogs system, and spent a fair amount of time talking to Paul about umwblogs.

Could my conversation have catalyzed Swansea’s adoption of a similar in-house Wordpress blogging system? I wonder.

This is the question that a group of my colleagues, led by Mark Maier of Glenwood Community College (in California) and Scott Simpkins of North Carolina A&T University, have been exploring for the last three years. It is generally known that science education has taken the lead in rethinking undergraduate education for the 21st Century, and physics has been particularly innovative. I blogged about Carl Wieman’s work in this area here. Economics, regretfully, continues to be wedded to that 19th pedagogy we euphemistically call “chalk & talk,” where the professor dispenses the information and the students take notes.

Last week, I was privileged to be invited to join Mark and Scott as they visited the Physics Education Research Group at the University of Colorado. The photo shows the group: Bill Goffe (SUNY-Oswego), Mark, me and Scott outside the student union.

The basic approach used by the Colorado physics faculty has two elements: making the lecture sessions much more interactive, and replacing the traditional recitation sessions with tutorials.

During our visit we attended a first year lecture, several first year tutorials, and a junior level course. The “lecture” sessions do not involve the instructor presenting the material from the text. Instead, students are expected to get the basic content from their own reading. Class sessions are organized around a series of questions (called ConcepTests) which the instructor presents one at a time. Students respond to each question using ‘clickers’ and then the frequency distribution of the results (in multiple choice format) is projected on the screen. When there is no consensus on an answer, the instructor asks students to form small groups and rethink the question. The instructor and teaching assistants (more on these later) interact with the groups until the instructor calls for a new response to the question. Over the course of the session, the group explores five or six questions. After class, the instructor provides students with the problems and correct answers for review. You can get a richer sense of the course by checking out this course website.

I found myself comparing this approach with that of more traditional lectures. With this approach, there was good engagement by students with around a third of the students actively participating in the open discussion. Another thing that struck me was how students were encouraged to work through their arguments in depth, even when their arguments were not going to lead to the correct answer. The thinking appeared to be that students still benefit from the reasoning processes, and there didn’t seem to be any stigma attached to getting the answer “wrong” in a public forum. The ethos seemed very much to be inquiry-oriented. Another observation: a substantial proportion of the class session was spent on what might be considered review. For example in the first year lecture, the class spent the first 30/75 minutes doing a quiz on the readings (presented as a ConcepTest), and discussing a “Question for Thought” offered at the end of the previous class. Most students seemed to have no difficulty with these, so the format seems to have induced them to do the preparation for class. The “new” material was only begun after that.

The first year tutorials consisted of groups of 20 students with two TAs supervising. Instead of the TAs solving problems on the board, as was the norm in the previous recitation sessions, the students work in small groups using workbooks whose lessons are based on what physics education research has found to be misconceptions in student understanding of the course content. The TAs work with the groups, much as they did in the lecture sessions, until they complete the workbook exercises. One interesting observation was that the groups are not asked to present results to the tutorial as a whole—the thinking here is that groups are responsible for doing their own work—they can’t simply wait for some other group to present the results at the end. Another observation was that instructors do not participate in the tutorials, since experience has found that the group work breaks down when the instructor is present as the students expect the instructor to provide them with the answers. Students leave the tutorials with an assignment similar to the workbook tasks, which they must turn in the following week.

Colorado has developed a very interesting program of Learning Assistants, science majors who support instructors and teaching assistants in science courses (which they have already taken). As an integral part of the program, the learning assistants take a course on teaching using the Colorado physics methods. These positions are very selective, accepting only about a third of the applicants. We attended the weekly teaching class for the LAs, where we learned from the instructor that this is actually a stealth program for recruiting K-12 science teachers for the state. A larger proportion of LAs go on to become science teachers than science majors generally, so the program is considered to be successful. In the class session, I asked several students if the program has altered their perspective as students. They all agreed that they are no longer able to view their own courses as they used to, that the program has imposed a metacognitive frame on their own learning.

Where do we in economics go from here? What are the concepts that students need to learn in our courses? What are the misconceptions about those concepts? How can we design exercises to reveal those misconceptions? There is much for teaching economists to do.

Some weeks ago, I blogged about a new way of curving exam grades which I’m trying in my principles course. Monday I handed back the second exam, which is the most difficult of the year, primarily because it covers the most analytical material. The average grade was 63%, which is normal for this exam. This week the students have been coming by my office for the ‘do-over.’ Their charge is to explain orally why the correct answer on the problems they got wrong is correct. This shouldn’t be that difficult, since they have several days to re-view the problems and re-think the answer. For each problem which they correctly explain, I give them half credit.

I’ve found this to be an interesting (and different) sort of assessment. Not only do students have a chance to explain their reasoning (which they don’t on the multiple-choice exam), but I give them more than one chance by prompting for more information. When students still don’t understand the reasoning behind the correct answer, it is very clear. Whether that is due to lack of preparation, or a true lack of understanding I’m not sure, but I have no trouble denying them credit.

I think I like this was of curving exam grades because it reinforces that exams should be opportunity for learning as well as assessment. Additionally, I think it has the incentives right, unlike my past practice of using a traditional curve. Here, they get more credit if they get the problem right the first time, so there’s a disincentive to just blowing off the in-class exam. After all, 62.5% (assuming 25% randomly correct) is not a very good grade for someone able to get all the questions right orally.

My last post outlined the plans for finishing my senior seminar with a bang rather than a whimper. Monday, I expect to finish the course content. From that point on, we will be collaboratively writing our final project.

The last topic of the course, which we started Friday, is to figure out what we’ve learned this semester. Given the various perspectives we’ve explored, what do we think is the best way to model the macro economy?

For the weekend, I asked the students to post a brief summary of their latest reading (which they’ve already blogged) on the course wiki by tonight. Then the two students assigned to take notes on this topic, are supposed to take the readings summaries and turn them into a coherent statement of where we stand on the state of modern macroeconomic theory.

In short, we are pilot testing the approach we will use to complete the final project, though I haven’t revealed it as such. One of the things we will do this week is debrief and debug this weekend’s assignment to make the final project work more effectively. Stay tuned for more details.

On the way to the NITLE Summit it occurred to me what a good time it was to take a break from school, if only for a few days. This is the time in the semester when my students and I are so buried in our work that we have forgotten what we are trying to accomplish in our courses. For the last few days I have thought about how to make the best use of the remaining weeks in the semester.

In my advanced macro seminar, I’ve worried that the freedom the seminar-format allows has enabled students to coast, not doing all the readings, not blogging and reading and commenting on each others’ work. This has been a collective failure, as I have fallen behind in reviewing their work, and I haven’t been as prepared for class (e.g. rereading the texts) as I would like to be. It is that time of the term (see last item), when faculty pretend to teach and students pretend to learn, driven by the tyranny of the syllabus and the calendar. But what are we gaining from this? We may be learning the last few facts, but we’re missing the big picture. Surely this doesn’t promote deep learning.

Instead of working harder to win the battle (while losing the war), I’m going to change the focus of our remaining efforts, encouraging the seminar participants to slow down and reflect on what we’ve learned. This doesn’t mean we won’t get caught up, but rather that that won’t be the central focus of our efforts for the rest of the course. Think of this as an ‘end around’ instead of a ‘frontal assault.’ (Private joke)

One of our goals for the seminar was to turn the work created into a reusable text, where each student has the final responsibility for a “chapter”. The students have recently written first drafts of their chapters. I’ve decided this weekend to refocus the seminar on an explicit production and peer review of this product. If every student reads and comments on every chapter, this should reinforce the seminar content more effectively than asking them to review it more traditionally. (I will also remind students that they are supposed to have read and blogged on at least one reference from each of the course topics, and encourage them to get caught up on this by the end of the semester as that’s part of what their grade will be on. But they will be doing that on their own schedule, rather than marching mindlessly lockstep together.)

An important part of the peer review process will be to think about how the various chapters relate to the whole work, and how to make the writing understandable to the audience: economics majors who have taken the prerequisite but not this course. We will also think about how to build links between the various chapters. With luck, this effort will have a deeper impact on their learning of the material than just banging our collective heads against the stone wall which is the course schedule. At a minimum, I hope to end the course with a feeling of accomplishment, rather than a sense of exhaustion and relief that it’s over.

Perhaps I’m in a funk but recently, I’ve felt compelled to criticize the thinking of some of my favorite class of colleagues: instructional technology folks.

In a recent post, the Cog Dog argued that instructional technology staff, and by that I mean the ones who work with faculty in developing their teaching (ITS’ in UMW parlance), are generally expected by administrations and faculty to provide discrete solutions to teaching problems (or discrete improvements to teaching issues). Cog Dog calls these (fish) nuggets. He proposes, instead, that ITS’ teach faculty to fish, teaching them enough about new technology tools to get started, but then encouraging them to explore those tools to answer their own questions.

I’m not unsympathetic to CogDog’s plaints, but let me give a faculty perspective.

The basic problem here is substantially bigger: Ph.D.s are rarely trained to teach. At some level, they are insecure about their teaching, but they mask this by assuming that their teaching is beyond reproach. The culture of Ph.D.s says that teaching is something we Ph.D.s all know intuitively how to do. It’s not something we talk about except in generalities. Sometimes risk-taking junior faculty may consult with senior faculty about some aspect of their teaching. (E.g. How do I get my students to participate effectively in a class discussion?) But the notion of consulting with someone other than a faculty member is unthinkable. After all, only faculty know how to teach, and that by virtue of their Ph.D.

So the problem Cog Dog raises is really one of cultural change, moving from a culture of solitary work, where faculty are the sole teachers in their courses (albeit supported on selected narrow technical issues by IT folks, librarians, etc.) to one of collaborative work, where the teaching is provided by a team of experts. What the faculty member brings to the table is content expertise, and certainly more or less teaching experience. But the other members of the teaching team bring their own areas of expertise, which a wise faculty member will take advantage of.

Another part of the problem is technology. I believe that faculty (and administrators) find it too easy to dismiss what our ITS’ are doing by writing it off as merely technology, instead of thinking of it correctly as instructional design. After all, many faculty think, “I don’t do technology.” I’m still trying to get our ITS’ to emphasize the I in what they do over the T.

My take is that all teaching incorporates technology, though the technology may be traditional and low tech, like lecture and chalk board, or it may be cutting edge and higher tech, like Second Life. There are, indeed, a wide range of possibilities that need to be considered. So dismissing ITS’ because they preach technology is a red herring. The real question, and this is one that ITS’ can help faculty with, is how to design a course to achieve one’s instructional goals? One part of that, but only a part, is the appropriate technologies to use. It will only be when faculty (and the administration) begins to think of ITS’ as Instructional specialists, that we will make substantial, broad-based progress towards Cog Dog’s goals.

Terry Dolson at the University of Richmond is a thoughtful commentator on liberal education. Her recent post “On Faculty Development and Small Colleges” provides a compelling reason for developing intellectual community among faculty who value teaching. How you do it, is a more difficult question. Sounds like a good charge for our new Center for Teaching Excellence.

One of the new frontiers in economics is Behavioral Economics, for which Daniel Kahneman and Vernon Smith won the Nobel Prize in 2002.

Here’s a thoughtful and funny video which describes behavioral economics in contrast to the more traditional neoclassical paradigm. What does it remind you of?

I’ve been nearly silent in this space this semester. I went six weeks without a post, though in truth, it feels longer than that. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to blog, but in January I was feeling totally buried in my work. I chose to hunker-down, first subconsciously, and then consciously, with my teaching and the FSEM planning.

I am teaching three courses that I love. Having a reduced course load really does enable one to do a better job with the remaining courses. I hope to be able to blog more regularly during the second half of the term.

Shannon has another stunning post that I really want to see students respond to. But I don’t just want the usual suspects. That’s why I’m going to send a challenge to my first year advising group and see if they’ll rise to the challenge.