teaching practice Archives

Who you callin’ a MOOC?!

My first job out of college was at a classical record store. It was one of the best record stores in the city–hands down. That includes rock stores. By standards of stock, we were unmatched. The store manager was a composer who had studied with Maxwell Davies and the assistant manager was a mean fiddle and bouzouki player who recruited me into his celtic rock band, The Hooligans. We had fun. The store had some basic tenets. We were open every day from 9am until midnight. No matter what. We had–in stock–every record in print and often several records that were out of print. It was a haven on South Street in Philadelphia. You know. Where all the hippies meet.

It was around that time that digital audio tape was still around. Digital cassettes were new and already fading. Laserdiscs were still being bought and sold (for good reason). Super Audio Compact Discs were becoming the rage for the audiophile set. It was a growing set.

People wanted def. Hi def. They mos def wanted as much def as you could get. They paid for it, too.

A typical new release cd was selling for $14.99. That’s $16.04 after the (formerly) 7% sales tax. On sale it would be $11.99 ($12.83). Yes, I still remember 7% of most retail price points–do not even mess with me. Super audio compact discs (SACD) were selling at above $20 which was a stretch for a lot of consumers. Most were around $22.99 which after tax is pushing $25 and pushing a lot of people away from the idea of high definition.

There are some things that you need to understand about the recording process–or any creation process–in order to understand why these quality standards were, in many ways, a farce. That is not to say that there was any deception. But there was surely a misperception. The misperception that a SACD of George Szell’s famous Beethoven Symphonies may sound like they were recorded using today’s technology–noiseless, bright and alive. Often times, it was just the opposite. These super-recordings often emphasized the faults of recordings or the editing process was very recognizable. The end result in the early digital age of music left us longing for our vinyl records and tube amplifiers.

Many failed to read the disclosure statements and the labels on the backs of cds. I do not even know if they are still there. We ‘in the industry’ knew the ages of the recordings and the quality of recordings from experience, Schwann or Peterson’s guides, or from complaints heard when a recording was returned. Overall, you got what you paid for. That $7.99 Great Performances on Sony? Yes. It is a great performance. A great performance that sounds like someone in the percussion section is frying up some sausages. You see a perfect 24-bit digital copy of an analog recording is only as good as the original recording quality.

Cut to: MP3s, file sharing, portable digital players, voila! the iPod.

Apple taught us an important lesson.

file size is more important than sound quality.

Any engineer, mechanic, electrician, or team leader will tell you the same thing. You set your tolerances based on the weakest of the components. Back in the SACD 80’s, you would be well set to have a noiseless digital recording playing through your hand-wired amplifier and playing through your active crossover full range of home speakers in a room with an integrated bass trap. It would be lovely. Someone asks you to keep it down and you plug in a $9.99 pair of COBY headphones from Funk-O-Mart and you have broken the chain. All of those other components cannot shine. The same would be said of any other link in that file chain being compromised.

We lowered our high definition standards in the name of fashion and convenience. Portability was also pretty cheap. Easy access was worth it. Chip away. File sharing? Don’t mind if I do. 8-bit? No that’s too low. You Tube? Oh look, video. Chip away. We have enormous televisions and we opt to watch screens inches wide that make videos look really sharp. Chip away, chip away.

So why do I bring this up and what does it reveal? We sacrifice a lot for many reasons. We make a series of decisions that influence the types of options and the types of decisions that follow. Eventually, hopefully, we raise our eyes and look around. We see where we are and realize that we are far off from the road we began. Take inventory. Is this the quality that you expect from yourself and from others? Are the sacrifices in one area worth the gain in another?

If not, what’re you? Some kind of mook? mooc?

Pedagogy and its Discontents pt.2, Lead me where?

“It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement–that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

Let us not make any bones about the situation. The teacher is at the front of the room and hold the keys. There are places that students cannot go. There are places that students can go. There are places that students may only go if the teacher takes them there. Say what? This is the 21st century. This classroom is flipped. We are unlearning. Delearning. Relearning. It is our new pedagogy. You can’t front on that.

Or can you, Biz? Will you front on that? Is it the content, the context, or the process that is of value in the classroom? Some mix of the three, perhaps. Maybe, even, a fourth entity–the interaction of them all. In the same way that you may not separate nature and nurture, it is unlikely that you may separate the content from the context or either of them from the process that brings them to light. Further, it is unlikely that by explicitly valuing one part of the mix that a teacher or student will be sure to have the desired influence over those components.

Do you follow? If I, as a teacher or student make explicit statements of value, the reaction of students may be to value or devalue or, perhaps, to have no change in their valuation of the component. Some rebel while some draw near. It depends on how that serves their needs for safety, belonging, esteem, or actualization. Remember Maslow? Not to oversimplify, but if you have ever tried to teach a hungry student, you are probably missing more than my point.

Getting back to the matter at hand, students respond to the content, context, and process–along with the demonstrated valuations by the instructor in a given manner. They may follow, rebel, or have no change in their value of the experience. The teacher, assessing the response, may ‘course-correct’ mid-stream-of-thought BUT what may happen is not entirely predictable! Change on the part of the teacher–either re-emphasis, over-emphasis, or a decreased emphasis–may result in a different overall response.

The most significant (read risky) overall response may be an overarching loss of interest should the instructor effectively abandon ship on the premise or the beliefs that were held at first. Any teacher still holding the torch of pedagogy as a method of a priori distribution of information should probably have a widow’s walk built and learn a new lament. The kids are alright.

“And yet, in making any general judgement of this sort, we are indanger of forgetting how variegated the human world and its mental life are.”

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

At Seventeen

I learned the truth at seventeen
that love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear skinned smiles
Who married young and then retired — Janis Ian at seventeen

The words of Janis Ian sting. They conjure images of bullied, ignored, thoughtful, and lonely kids. Seventeen is a hard age to learn those truths expressed in her hit song from 1975.

When I hear this song or when it becomes an earworm for days on end, I cannot help but think of my own time in middle and high school. Or undergrad. Graduate school. So on. Present day. Sometimes.

That is not to say that I was friendless or lonely. I place a mental pushpin every time in my life when truth is revealed. Signposts. Bread crumbs. Regardless of what or when, it always seems too early and too often that we learn a hard truth. In education, that is–as an educator, the pins drop like needles on songs. One after another whether you like them or not. Heavy rotation. Top of the pops. Hits. We take a lot of hits.

awkward teens — awkward teenagers lol
by ~JonathanTheSmex

Remember those veteran teachers scorning our eager, go-get-em attitudes with warnings? Their threats seemed so far-fetched. Trite. “Someday, you’ll be just like me.” We laughed them off. We worked hard. We came in early. We stayed late. We graded and prepped during late nights, weekends, and holidays. Grading parties. Thank God for TiVo. “I’m always a teacher so I always do teacher work,” we say. We learn a truth. Get a peek behind the curtain. See that all those appreciations we enjoyed were more fair-weather than once thought. We thought that we were on top of our game and have our legs cut out from under us. We are seventeen again.

Remember those who win the game, they lose the love they sought to gain

A decision is made. We will continue to do it for the kids. Of course we will. The kids. The only convolution is that we are not as resilient as we were at seventeen. Those wounds heal more slowly. Calluses thicken. Eyes look to the floor. We begin to have regrets. Begin to feel all those eyes that gaze.

Assessment Pt. 2: Problems of Scale

Measurement is a curious thing. Everyone is talking about it. A lot of people are doing it. With all that talk and all that measurement, it causes even more people to do it. I mean, it must be important, right?

Contagious shooting.

Offsides. They jumped first. We all jumped.
Strong words. Actions. Open doors. Imply permission.

Buzz. Some are testing because everyone else is doing it and they do not know why they are doing it themselves. It is contagious and it is killing us.

There are a few problems that are typical of assessment culture. They differ in severity. Jim Croce used to talk about causing trouble in Chester, PA where they would cut you four kinds of bad: long, deep, wide, and often. Who would think that I would ever talk about assessment and Jim Croce in the same paragraph? I like Jim Croce. I like assessment. I do not like the abuse of assessment and data. It gives an essential part of education a bad name. Yes I said essential. When it is done well and done correctly, it is good stuff. Don’t mess around with Jim. Errr, Slim.

The effect of non-educational and non-assessment pertinent information on our students is referred to in the testing field as “unintended consequences.” We need to consider them. Seriously.

1. Long
Rather, length. Any assessment that causes the facilitation of learning to be interrupted is too often long and disruptive. It is important for the assessor to consider what is actually being tested when distributing a test with 120 items. My first assumption is that they are assessing attention and fortitude. Stubborn constitution? While it may be clear to the test creator that each of these items has a clear purpose, I pose this question–has the need for coverage been obscured by the other challenges that are presented before those questions are asked?
The length of a test is one of the first things that a student checks when it is delivered to their desk. Flip through and count the pages. See if they are multiple choice, short answer, long answer, or essay. Matching? True/False?

2. Deep
It is often that the coverage of an assessment is haphazardly accounted for by length. Oops. Depth of an assessment can be addressed with a shovel or with a scalpel. Do you investigate like an excavator or a surgeon? While there are several questions that could get to the bottom of a student’s understanding of a novel, mathematical concept, or science theory; is it possible that there is one question that could be used to demonstrate understanding of the larger constructs? The answer is usually yes and the rationale that is usually defended is depth.
When quality inquiry includes necessary skills, we begin to scratch the surface of depth. A complex skill often trumps less complex skills–not always the case but often the case. You have heard the saying, “You have to crawl before you can walk.” If your child went straight to walking without crawling, would you intervene? Neither did I. It is not a completely common phenomenon but it happens and aside from toddler locomotion, there are not really any good reasons to crawl. Either way, I would bet that you could learn it later.

3. Wide
Breadth of assessment is key. It probably means something completely different than what you think, though. The wideness of assessment does not have to include every aspect of what is being taught. Variations in the width of coverage is often a factor of interests that our students have that either narrow or widen their take on the material. That is fine.
As educators, we must widen our assessment in order to provide every opportunity for our students to demonstrate competence and understanding. If this goal is achieved by one student through a presentation and another through various and typical testing procedures, why should that prove an issue?
BECAUSE in college, they will get scantron tests so they need to get used to it!
That is not a reasonable answer. I do not care who says so, either.
If you want students to get better at scantron tests because that is what they will encounter, that is fine and in some contexts a reasonable goal. There is, however, no reason to restrict a student in their demonstration of competence and understanding in the process.
You will often hear about differentiated instruction but I am telling you that the need for citizens of our age is to be given the opportunity for differentiated assessment. You see, differentiated instruction is an appealing concept but its goals are achievement on typical assessment procedures–if you teach them differently, they will all be able to achieve in the same way!
No. The teaching is probably not the issue. I will put myself out there and say that you are probably a good enough teacher. It is more likely that a student is capable of demonstrating understanding in a way that is not being assessed.

If I hear “they know the material but they cannot pass the test” one more time I will scream. Twice.

4. Often
The frequency of assessment is not simply a problem of testing too often. It is also a problem of failing to assess often enough. Notice that I am referring to testing specifically and assessment in general. The “movement” to get rid of testing and assessment and measurement and grades aside, please understand that we are constantly assessing, judging, and measuring. After all that we act, stop acting, or change the methods and manner of acting to meet the assessed need. If you want to attach a letter, number, or whatever to that–fine. Do not think that by doing away with scantrons, letters, and numbers that you have put the assessment monster out of the room. It is still there. Boo.

Ecological validity is an issue that is at the forefront of research these days. Developing methods of observation and assessment that fit and make sense in the context of the learning scenario can be challenging. Is it possible to measure some aspect of learning within the context of that learning using tasks that make sense within that domain? If not, that is an issue of ecological validity. Think about the NFL combines that are used by professional teams to assess the viability of future draft picks. These sets of skills are supposed to be indicators of the athletes’ ability to do well in an NFL game. We know, though, that the only way to know if an athlete is capable of playing professional football is to have them play professional football. Ecological validity.

Slightly more than a rant.
Pt. 1 coming soon!

Yeah, Jim got his hat.
Find out where it’s at.
Not hustlin’ people strange to you.
Even if you do have a 2-piece custom-made pool cue.