• TED: Joe Smith on How to Use a Paper Towel

• Granted, but (Mar 29)

• http://clickercentral.net

(I just dropped it on the new server, and was rather surprised when it ran flawlessly. I’m still suspicious. If you find anything amiss — broken links, missing figures, etc. — please let me know. Thanks!)

Enjoy!

As to the first article, by Clark, Kirschner & Sweller: My dismay was largely unfounded. A thorough read of the article itself reveals that the authors are not promulgated transmission over active engagement, but rather “guided instruction” over “discovery learning”. I have no problems with that. Guiding instruction, after all, is what teachers are supposed to do.

The second article, by Barak Rosenshine, is more interesting. I find it well argued and very reasonable-sounding, and have made some notes about changes to make to my own teaching. However, it also makes me very uncomfortable, and I fear that the article is framed in such a way as to bury something critical.

One source of my unease comes from my sense that Rosenshine’s arguments are pushing me inexorably towards a “drill and practice” model of instruction: small chunks of teaching at a time, explicit modeling, heavily scaffolded and guided practice, extensive rehearsal, etc. These things all make sense for teaching very specific, well-defined skills and performance tasks, like training students how to solve stock physics problems. However, I don’t see physics as about training students to solve stock physics problems.

To put it another way: What learning goals are Rosenshime’s best practices the best practices for? Do they really help students develop both dimensions of “adaptive expertise”, or only the “efficiency of problem solving” dimension? Maybe they do, or maybe they *can* depending on the implementation. If so, this is a very critical point to make explicit. Rosenshine’s article never uses the word “transfer.” (The Clark et al. article does, but with no discussion of exactly what kind and degree of transfer they mean.)

A second source of unease for me is the fear that although the kind of instruction Rosenshine advocates may be effective for developing specific, well-defined knowledge and skills, it may be very ineffective at developing students’ motivation, their developing identity as “the sort of person who does physics” (or whatever the discipline in question is), and other aspects of what Joe Redish calls the “hidden curriculum” and David Perkins calls “playing the whole game”. I’m afraid that this is exactly the kind of reductionistic thinking — getting better and better at teaching more and more decontextualized, fine-grained, formalized “knowledge” pieces at the expense of the really big picture of “why students are in this class in the first place, from their own perspectives rather than ours”.

A third, related source of unease is that it seems to push us way from student ownership of and initiative within the learning design, instead further entrenching the synchronous factory model of instruction. I wonder what Alfie Kohn would have to say.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into Rosenshine’s article. I would, at the very least, like to see some discussion about how to implement his best practices in the service of whole-game learning, the fostering of intrinsic motivation and self-regulated learning, the development of adaptive expertise, and so on.

So here’s a completely crazy, hare-brained idea. Every day, I go into class and just kind of weave a web of ideas, following them wherever they lead. Sometimes students will ask about whatever aspect of the physical world has caught their attention. Sometimes we’ll analyze something out of the news, or the physics behind a bit of technology. Sometimes I’ll toss out a puzzle to figure out, or a thorny real-world situation for them to try making sense of. We’ll pull in some math, some problem-solving strategies, and of course all kinds of physics concepts and principles as we go. The overarching, underlying, and through-running theme is “We live in a really interesting world, and we encounter some pretty powerful ideas when we think about it carefully.”

I encourage students to do reading on their own, sometimes choosing from various bits and resources I’ve marshaled, sometimes following their own curiosity. Problems and scenarios that come up in class get followed up outside class, and students report back another day to discuss what they figured out or where they got stuck.

There’s no specific, must-cover list of topics (though of course I can pretty much guarantee that the “big ideas” will come up again and again).

And what about grading? Throughout the course, students keep a journal or assemble a portfolio of what they’re learning. At the end, they write a reflective essay summarizing and weaving together what they think they’ve learned during the course, backing up with the journal/portfolio. That’s the basis of the grade. Maybe they even suggest the grade they feel they’ve earned, along with self-critique and suggestions to themselves for future learning.

We don’t have to think or talk about the friggin’ grades all semester. Students don’t have to worry about learning what they need to learn for the test, rather than what they want to learn or think would be most valuable for wherever they’re headed in life. I don’t have to worry about whether we’ll get through the syllabus: no “death march through the textbook.”

It couldn’t possibly work, right?

I want a course design that communicates very clearly to students, in every aspect of its framing and detail, that learning is something they must willfully pursue, not something that just “happens” if they’re obedient hoop-jumpers.

I want a course design that communicates very clearly to students what specific actions they can be taking to learn the course content — including the “cognitive actions” that make things like “textbook reading” effective.

I want a course design that gives students clear feedback on whether they’re really “getting” the things they’re supposed to be learning, and at a level adequate to build subsequent learning upon. This feedback should come “automatically” through engagement with the learning tasks, not only when I deliberately assess (formatively or summatively).

I want a course design that helps students really learn what thorough “understanding” feels like, so that they’ll know when they don’t yet really understand something.

Is there a problem-based learning or project-based learning design that accomplishes these things? Because telling students that “you should be reading the book, and working through the accompanying workbook, and doing the homework, and seeking help from me or other students when you need it” doesn’t seem to be adequate for a distressingly large fraction of my current class — even with the best in-class clicker-supported “active learning” that I can manage. And with standards-based grading.

(In fact, SBG may be hurting: The notion of reassessment seems to have been widely interpreted as “It doesn’t really matter how abysmally I’m doing, because I’ll be able to reassess everything eventually.” To the point that in this morning’s class, as I introduced the impulse-momentum theorem with a worksheet motivating impulse, a student asked me “What is the relationship between acceleration and velocity?” <face-palm/>)

Maybe I need to just stop introducing anything new?

I have to break my habit of putting sneaky bits into exam questions (which I do out of an urge to “stretch” even the best students to their limits, hoping they will [a] come to learn where their limits are, and [b] learn from them). Or at least, figure out a better way to do it. As is, it tends to obscure my understanding of whether students get the basic idea, which is what I need to know to assign standard-mastery levels. I should get in the mind-set of wanting them to master standards (so I can stop worrying about re-assessing) them!

I need to get better at “factoring” problems by standard. Grading is a pain when scores for standards depend on multiple problems, and problems combine multiple standards. (I also need a way to check/motivate “putting it all together”, though.)

I’m finding it difficult to include the “Yes, but can they think?” style of questions I’m fond of. Should I have a standard for “I can think my way out of a paper bag”?

In the spirit of Understanding by Design’s “backward design”, I need to do more iterative development of standards and assessment questions: Brainstorm some standards, try to write assessment questions for them, use what I’ve learned about assess-ability and factorization and “Whoops, they’ll also need that” to revise the standards, iterate again on the questions, etc. I’m finding that locking in my standards, and then starting to think about assessment questions is decidedly non-optimal.

A rapid pace through standards, with little time to revisit and develop, sends the “You really need to get this the first time” message that SBG is supposed to avoid. Instead of communicating “Learning is a process of reflecting, identifying what you need to work on, and spending time on that”, all I’m really saying is “This is learning as usual, except that if you’re lucky you might get a second crack at a few topics.”

(I still think I’ve got too many fine-grained and overlapping standards, though. That does cause headaches.)

One thing I’ve realized while developing assessments for this first “unit” of the course — kinematics and vectors — is that my choice of standards can make assessment harder or easier. Some specific realizations:

• Too many standards makes it hard for me to adequately assess, and re-assess, them all. Fewer is better (though too few loses the laser-sharp-feedback quality of SBG).

• Standards that are too “basic”, and which are necessary steps towards the harder ones, aren’t necessary to articulate as standards on their own; students must learn to do them anyway in order to do the higher-level ones. Having them in the list simply clogs up assessments. Example: I can draw or interpret motion diagrams (strobe diagrams).

• Standards that don’t “factor” cleanly are difficult to assess and give separate mastery ratings for. Example: I can use 2D/3D constant-acceleration kinematics (graphical analysis and/or formulae) to analyze an object’s motion, working with numbers or variables and it’s too-close cousin, I can use the projectile motion model to analyze physical situations. I can articulate a distinction between these two — make the second be about recognizing the independence of the two coordinates and the acceleration in each, and the first be about “doing” the subsequent kinematics — but it’s awkward and unclear.

• Some really seem to belong as part of a larger standard, not hanging out on their own. Example: I can determine or reason about an object’s instantaneous acceleration.

So now I’m rewriting my unit 2 standards. (With fewer standards in later units, I’ll have to add some weighting factors to avoid overly-counting kinematics in the final grade.)

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:CongressLookup

(Be persevering with the senators’ and congressmen’s forms: They seem to be under a heavy load today, and took me a while to load and submit. Good!)

Thanks.

Why? For one thing, I’m already a full day behind my planned schedule. Ugh. 50 minutes is so short! Something’s gotta give. I’m feeling the voices of 100+ standards screaming at me to assess, reassess, reassess!

For another, I think I’ve been so concerned about my SBG implementation that I’ve lost the forest for the trees. I forgot to introduce students to what physics is all about and why it’s worth studying, beyond a 3-minute definition (okay, three definitions, including “Whatever physicists feel like studying”). Wait, what’s the point of all these kinematical vector thingies?

You’d never know from my teaching that I recently read Perkins’ Making Learning Whole.

Pondering what to do on Wednesday (and thereafter) to save this course without looking incompetent and losing students’ confidence…

• Teachers Matter (NYT)

It’s not “the system” or “the curriculum” or “the standardized tests” that we should be paying attention to, except insofar as they get in the way of good teachers trying to do their thing.

Some initial thoughts about my experiences with and realizations about SBG:

Choice of specific standards is absolutely critical, and one key choice is “grain size”. I could identify a few larger, more general capacities to assess (extreme example: “I can use work and energy ideas to analyze situations and solve problems”). Alternatively, I could unpack those into a plethora of highly targeted standards (“I can draw velocity vs. time graphs for constant-acceleration problems based on a motion diagram”, “I can draw acceleration vs. time graphs for constant-acceleration problems based on a motion diagram”, “I can draw acceleration vs. time graphs for constant-acceleration problems based on a velocity vs. time graph”, etc. etc. etc.). Somewhere in between these extremes is a sweet spot that optimally balances specificity of feedback to the student with practicality of assessment and tracking.

I seem to be on track to have a bit over a hundred standards in this course, at a rate of about 6-8 per chapter. That’s 3-4 per class meeting, more or less. That seems like a lot, and more than many other SBG practitioners seem to have — but I’m having a great deal of difficulty combining them into more coarsely-grained standards without doing violence to my sense of what the “things” to be learned really are. To put it another way: The topics seem to naturally cleave along certain lines, and allowing that gets me to where I am.

Despite that last sentence, standards can be divided along various lines, and different ways of grouping sub-elements can align more or less well with the organization of my textbook and accompanying workbook, easier ways of assessing, etc. I initially brainstormed a list of standards, but have been doing some refactoring as I went through and correlated them with textbook sections and daily class plans.

SBG drives me to assess (and reassess) EVERYTHING I want students to seriously try to learn, rather than allowing me to sample a subset of the learning goals. I suppose I could simply not assess some of the standards and let them drop out of the grading scheme, but I currently feel that if it’s on the standards list, I ought to assess it. And that’s a lot! Which leads to my next realization:

Articulating learning standards makes me much more aware of what I’m actually asking students to learn (more than I would be with a traditional by-topics list), and there’s a freaking lot of stuff for intro physics students to learn. Wow. No wonder physics is hard!

If I want a relatively simple grade calculation — each student gets a 0-4 mastery rating on each standard, and the final grade calculations consists of averaging all those ratings and then mapping to a letter grade — then the number of standards per general topic had better be proportional to the topic’s importance, since that determines its weight in the overall grade. I find it tempting to split early chapters into many fine-grained standards (e.g., specific kinematics graphing skills, specific types of motion, etc.), but leave later chapters as more holistic standards (use the Impulse-Momentum principle to analyze collisions). Unfortunately, that overly weights the early stuff. I can either weight different standards differently, or unpack the later standards into finer-grained components… which is probably beneficial to both me and the students, but darn, it’s hard work!

Unless I want to box myself into having to assess each standard multiple times, in different ways (for different levels of mastery), or having different mastery scales for different standards, I’d better construct my standards such that only one assessment probe is necessary for each. That can mean peeling “advanced” mastery levels off of the top end of the mastery rubric and creating new standards specifically targeting those. For example: Instead of having the top mastery rating be reserved for “Can recognize need to apply this within a complex scenario and figure out how to connect to other principles” (which takes a different exam question than “Can apply to a straightforward situation when prompted”), I can have a separate standard for “Identify which principle(s) apply to a complex situation” and “Combine multiple principles to solve a problem”. Put another way: If every standard has an “above and beyond” level, I need to assess every student for that level of mastery on every standard, and that’s probably unrealistic. Better to have a few explicit “above and beyond” standards.

Reassessment is the heart of SBG — it’s what makes assessment formative, and lets students learn from their mistakes and keep making progress — but it’s also looking like the hardest part to implement, at least in my context (60 students, three 50-minute classes per week, the fact that giving up my free afternoons/days to a stream of reassessing students would kill my research efforts). I’ve been very cagey about not promising anything specific about reassessment yet in this course, but I can’t keep that up much longer.

The other big question, of course, is whether students really will do the work –reading, workbook, homework, etc. — without having those be graded. Most students do end up in the trap of running from deadline to deadline, only focusing on whatever is “due” next and prioritizing tasks by grade impact.

Stay tuned. This is very much a work in progress.

I find myself wondering about the feasibility of some kind of two-tier system, where (1) authentic, multifaceted, ill-structured PBL-type performance tasks are unpacked into (2) component/requisite “learning standards”; the learning standards are individually assessed, re-assessed, and hopefully mastered; and the overarching PBL-type performance task is then completed and assessed in its own way. Somehow, both levels would contribute to feedback and grading.

But, I worry about ending up with some Frakensteinian horror when the two are grafted together. “80% of the credit for ultimate standard mastery, 20% for one-time project grades” seems antithetical to SBG, and inconsistent. Building an additional “level of mastery” onto each granular standard to indicate “successfully used in a project” seems kludgy, and poorly aligned with the holistic nature of PBL.

Thoughts from experienced SBG implementers — or anyone else, for that matter? (Preferably not about SEO, though. Thanks. )

Last night I leafed through the first four chapters of Knight’s Physics for Scientists & Engineers — everything up to but not including forces — and scribbled down some potential “standards”, were I to be so bold as to try SBG next semester when I teach General Physics I w/Calculus. It’s definitely not a final set, but here’s the unedited list, presented for discussion.

Note 1: Some of these “standards” span or relate to more than one Knight chapter. I’m listing them here under the first such chapter.

Chapter 1: Concepts of Motion (i.e., “Basics”)

1. Convert quantities between different units.
2. Know and (where appropriate) employ SI units for all physical quantities used.
3. Report and interpret numerical values for calculations or measurements, including appropriate units, unit prefixes, scientific notation, and significant figures.
4. Determine values of kinematic variables corresponding to described, depicted, or observed motion, and interpret values by describing or depicting the resulting motion (including proper use of algebraic signs for direction).
5. Produce, interpret, and interrelate graphs and motion diagrams of an object’s motion.
6. Know and apply the definitions of fundamental kinematics quantities.
7. Make reasonable order-of-magnitude (Fermi) estimates of physical quantities.
8. Identify correct and incorrect expressions via dimensional analysis and/or limiting-case arguments.

Chapter 2: Kinematics in One Dimension

1. Use the particle model and constant-acceleration kinematics formulae to produce a complete description of an object’s motion (numerical or symbolic) from partial information. [1D for chapter 2, 2D or 3D later.]
2. Use basic calculus (derivatives and integrals) to interrelate functional forms for kinematic quantities.
3. Use “free-fall” as a model to analyze real physical situations.
4. Use the “inclined plane” as a model to analyze real physical situations.

Chapter 3: Vectors and Coordinate Systems

1. Define and use a Cartesian coordinate system to describe an object’s location and motion.
2. Interrelate the values of kinematic variables in two different coordinate systems (including translations, rotations, and Galilean relative motion), including “relative velocity” problems.
3. Execute vector algebra (addition, subtraction, components, magnitude and direction) both graphically and algebraically.
4. Represent, interpret, and interconvert between vector representations (graphical, component n-tuple, component unit-vector, magnitude & direction).
5. Apply vectors and their properties where relevant when “using physics”. [Ick! But see note 3 below.]

Chapter 4: Kinematics in Two Dimensions

1. Use “uniform circular motion” as a model to analyze real physical situations.
2. Use “accelerated circular motion” as a model to analyze real physical situations.
3. Use “projectile motion” as a model to analyze real physical situations. [See note 4 below.]
4. Use angular kinematics in direct analogy to linear kinematics.

Note 2: All standards should carry the implicit rider “…and justify the applicability of the tools used, or identify when and why the task is not possible given those tools.”

Note 3: I’m unsure how to work in “applying” a specific thing (e.g., vectors and vector algebra) in addition to “knowing” it. I’m driving at the difference between active and passive vocabulary here: Yeah, so a student can do a vector algebra problem when presented with one, but will she identify the need to do vector algebra within an authentic context and apply it properly there? I could add a specific standard for that, but am afraid of proliferating standards.

Note 4: “Apply XXX as a model to analyze…” should be interpreted to include applying it to a piece or portion of a system or of an object’s motion, and stringing together multiple models or tools as necessary to solve a multi-part problem. (For example, inclined-plane as a model for a skier on a slope, followed by accelerated circular motion for a curved ramp at the bottom, followed by projectile motion for sailing through the air.) Or, should there be a separate standard for “Analyzing situations that require combining multiple ‘models’ or ‘kinds of motion’”?

I spent nine class days on these four chapters last time through the course (including an integrative pre-exam review day), so that comes to a hair more than two standards per day. Reasonable? Excessive? Thoughts about the grain-size of these standards?

Update: Since posting this, I’ve switched from Textile to Markdown for writing on this blog, since the best Textile plugin I could find for WordPress had some ugly bugs. Unfortunately, one of those bugs affected list numbering, with the result that the 21 standards above were numbered 1-21, rather than having the numbering reset for each chapter’s list. (The former may be preferable for this particular post, but the latter is technically correct.) So, numbers in the comments below may not correctly identify the standards they were meant to indicate. Apologies…

At the moment I’m more interested in lessons we can learn from video game design and take into more traditional, classroom-based instruction than I am in creating an actual video game that teaches physics. (The latter, however, is also a fascinating challenge to contemplate.)

In that vein, a definition by Bernard Suits (quoted in Jane McGonigal’s excellent book Reality is Broken) caught my attention:

Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. (p.22)

The key word here is “voluntary”. McGonigal makes a case that if it isn’t voluntary, it isn’t a game, and many of the remarkable phenomena associated with game-playing disappear. The entire psychology changes.

Yes, attending university is in principle a voluntary choice, as is one’s major; but beyond that, we pretty much tell students what courses they must take and what they must do along the way to succeed, and keep them in line with grades and transcripts. Does that doom any attempt to make learning more deeply game-like?

What I’m getting at is that the very structure of our educational system frames learning activity as an externally-motivated, externally-directed, authority-laden series of tasks and assessments. I’m concerned that trying to embed a novel learning micro-environment — say, a gaming-inspired self-paced learning activity — into such a matrix could be doomed to failure, not because of the micro-environment’s worth but because of drastic dissonance with the matrix.

If I’m even more ambitious and try to construct an entire course as something analogous to a game, I still have to assign a grade at the end, and students know it.

Those of us who would like to experiment with gaming-inspired alternative paradigms and challenge some of our fundamental assumptions about what instruction should look like, and who don’t have the luxury of creating an entire parallel educational system to do our testing in, need to worry about such things.

“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.” — Bernard Suits, quoted in Jane McGonigal’s Reality is Broken

Is learning physics a game? Is doing physics a game? Does it depend on how obligated we feel to do any particular task? Is attending university voluntary (or compelled by social and/or economic considerations), and if so, does that make the whole endeavor a game? Taking any particular course may or may not be voluntary; doing homework, lab reports, etc. rarely is.

Why does this matter? Because in general, people like games, and often reach their best performance (think flow state) while playing games. Perhaps we ought to be learning from the game design industry.

Perhaps the human organism is well-adapted enough that if we can give learners the freedom to pursue their own learning, with an adequately rich and suitably organized and accessible array of resources, they would naturally find a highly optimal balance of these factors?

In other words, maybe people know how to learn better than we know how to teach, and we just have to figure out how to let them do it. And stop convincing them that learning something like Physics means doing it “the school-like way.”

Afterthought: I suspect we can’t do this because so much of the educational enterprise is designed to get learners to learn things they’re not particularly invested in learning. Maybe we need to revisit that?

• http://bit.ly/beatty-aapt-2010

Update: Here’s another link, in case bit.ly goes under:

• http://goo.gl/XPgM

If you don’t know the meaning of the term “yak shaving”, you should:

• Seth Godin’s explanation
• Wiktionary’s definition

(For me, writing this post is not an exercise in yak shaving; it’s outright procrastination.)

Timing: towards the close of a unit on magnetism, after gravitation and electrostatics have been taught. (No guarantees that they’ve been learned, though.)

Question: If you were a superhero, which power would you rather have?

1. Change the mass of things.
2. Change the charge of things.
3. Change the magnetization of things.

Why is this a great question?

For one thing, it’s pretty obvious that even if the instructor might have a preferred answer (which he didn’t), there’s no “correct” answer in an absolute sense. So, students can relax a little and explore what they actually think.

I generally run this one without a small-group discussion phase before the poll. When the poll has been taken and students begin voicing their choices and reasons in the whole-class discussion phase, it rapidly becomes clear that there are many different ways to think about the question.

And then the shift happens. Students stop thinking about their goal as “come up with the most correct thing to say” (or worse, “come up with the thing the instructor wants to hear”), and start thinking about it as “come up with the most clever thing to say”. The interaction has been reframed. Score!

Somebody picks “mass” so that they could make a bullet harmless by dropping its mass to near-zero, or so they could throw a pebble and then increase its mass hugely so that it would punch through a wall. Someone else says “Wait a minute, if you increased its mass, would its velocity stay the same, or would its velocity become tiny so that its momentum was conserved?” Everyone looks at me, and I shrug and say “I guess it depends on how this superpower works, eh?” I couldn’t care less how it would work, but I’m very happy that the connection between mass, inertia, and momentum has been articulated. Score!

Someone else says they picked “charge” because they could make lightning zap things. I ask if anyone picked “charge” for a different reason, and someone else says that if they could control charge, they could make things attract or repel, which means they could make things (including themselves) levitate or fly. “Mass affects gravity, which is only for attracting; charge affects the electric force, which can attract or repel.” Score!

Then another student piggybacks on that, saying “But wait, the magnetic force can make things twist and turn as well as attract or repel. Wouldn’t that be more useful?” Someone replies “Huh?”, and a short clarification dialog ensues. I smile. Then a student asks whether the power means that non-magnetic things could be made magnetic, or only that magnetic things could be made more or less magnetic, or have their polarities switched, or what. I shrug again, happy that the distinction has been voiced. Score!

Then one student who’s been quiet all along speaks up. She says “I think I want to control charge, because that’s what brain cells use to communicate, so I could alter people’s thoughts. Maybe I could alter computer programs, too.” Eyes widen throughout the room. Score!

In the resulting silence, I innocently inquire whether she’d need to be able to sense all the charge patterns flowing around — and even harder, interpret them — to make that power useful. She looks nonplussed, and then says “Well, at least I could scramble someone’s head pretty well, maybe give them amnesia!” Laughter.

The actual discussion doesn’t flow quite this smoothly and efficiently, of course; a fair number of less interesting, or less defensible, or less comprehensible assertions are made, and I do a little prompting and steering to bring out some of these points. Nevertheless, I’ve accomplished three very important tasks: We’ve compared and contrasted gravity, the electrostatic force, and the magnetic force, and the roles that mass, charge, and magnetism play within those; I’ve engaged the students in creative, open-ended thinking to apply abstract physics ideas to real-world (okay, comic-book-world) things; and I’ve gotten the students to enjoy physics class. Triple score!

This one question nicely instantiates all four principles of Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA):

• Motivate and focus student learning with question-driven instruction (QDI);
• Develop students’ understanding and scientific fluency with dialogical discourse (DD);
• Inform and adjust teaching and learning decisions with formative assessment (FA); and
• Help students develop metacognitive skills and cooperate in the learning process with meta-level communication (MLC).

For more about TEFA (probably far, far more than you really want to know), see Beatty & Gerace (2009), Technology-Enhanced Formative Assessment: A research-based pedagogy for teaching science with classroom response systems, Journal of Science Education and Technology 18(2):146-162.

BTW, my inspiration for this question was a biology question by Cathy Wanat of Northampton (MA) High School (since retired). It showed a photograph of a long buffet table loaded with different food dishes, with lines of people moving along both sides as they added food to their plates. The question was “Which of the following is most like this picture?”, and the answer choices were various parts of the digestive system: mouth, esophagus, stomach, small intestine, etc. She said the resulting class discussion was mind-blowing. Thanks, Cathy!

Maybe that’s what it feels like to be a high school teacher?

An intriguing research result is that formative assessment may actually be counterproductive if the teacher doesn’t have adequate strategies for responding to that information. Here’s a quote about that from a paper by Dylan Wiliam:

What is less clear is what exactly constitutes effective classroom assessment. Although the studies cited above indicate that assessment for learning can improve learning, several studies have found conflicting results. For example, in a study of 32 fifth-grade teachers in Germany, Helmke and Schrader (1987) found that teachers who had an accurate knowledge of their students (as measured by the teachers’ ability to predict achievement test scores) were associated with higher levels of achievement only when the teachers also showed a high range of instructional techniques. Students taught by teachers who had a high knowledge of their students’ achievement but lacked a range of instructional techniques actually performed worse than students taught by teachers who did not know their students’ achievement. This study seems to indicate that collecting data if one cannot do anything with it is counterproductive.

Furthermore, even when teachers do manage to use information about student achievement to adjust or individualize their instruction, teachers may lack the ability to do so effectively. For example, in a 20-week study of 33 teachers in elementary and middle schools, Fuchs, Fuchs, Hamlett and Stecker (1991) found that teachers who received feedback on the achievement of students with learning difficulties in their classes made more adjustments to their teaching programs than teachers not given this information. However, the achievement of these students was improved only when this feedback was accompanied by advice from a computerized “expert system”, because the teachers not given the feedback from the expert system tended to re-explain how to do problems with the same algorithms that had led to previous failure.

Source: Wiliam, Dylan. “Keeping Learning on Track: Classroom Assessment and the Regulation of Learning.” In Second Handbook of Mathematics Teaching and Learning. Edited by Frank K Lester. Greenwich, CT: Information Age Publishing, 2007. pp. 10-11. [PDF preprint]

It is my intention that comments be open to the public. If you want to comment on a post and find you can’t, by all means please drop me a note (ian [at] ianbeatty [dot] com) and I’ll try to fix it. (Again.)

Of the forty-some teachers we’ve worked with to some degree or another, by far the number one difficulty they’ve reported is the challenge of regularly creating effective clicker questions to use in class. The characteristics that make a question “work” — meaning engage students in quality classroom discussion and promote learning — are not obvious, and typical back-of-the-chapter or quiz-type questions will fail miserably. In the project’s professional development meetings, we’ve spent a great deal of time talking about question creation, and I’ve developed various frameworks in an attempt to help make it more science and less art.

This semester, in prepping my own Conceptual Physics class, I’ve run into exactly the same difficulty. “Today I’m teaching topic X, and I need some good questions. Um, ah, hmm…” Not so easy, even with all the frameworks and such.

One flash of insight I had recently is that, at least for me, it’s not really creating questions that’s tough. The hard part is figuring out what I want my students to learn from the class, and casting that in terms of what I want my students to be able to do. I’ve been trying to shift my thinking from “the material” to “the demonstrable, assessable learning outcomes” (cf. The Myth of Coverage).

Once I can articulate what I would like my students to be able to do after the class, it’s generally relatively easy to invent a few good clicker questions. I just formulate a question asking them to do that (in a particular context), and then much of the class activity is me helping them struggle through the process as they learn how. (This is the principle we’ve called “Question-Driven Instruction”, as articulated in Beatty & Gerace 2009 and elsewhere.)

Which all means that when someone says “Creating good clicker questions is hard”, I’m now inclined to hear that as “Thinking in terms of demonstrable student learning outcomes rather than topic coverage is hard.” And I agree. I also think it’s one of the many desperately needed shifts to how we conceive of this whole enterprise we call organized schooling.

I’m not saying that this is the only difficult aspect of creating good questions, but it’s definitely key for me. I’m curious what others think. If you’ve taught with a classroom response system, what do you think? Does that ring true? Do you have any similar or conflicting experiences to share? Comments are open…

Last January, I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina, and started a new job as a Physics professor. Spring was largely transition, teaching one light course here and making several long trips back north to keep the research project there going. Then came the summer, with a greater-than-usual blitz of travel and urgent work.

This fall, I started here for real. Now I’m really teaching! (And quite a lot of work it is, too.)

I’ve taught before, sort of: lots of labs and discussion sections as a TA, an outdoor leadership program for high school students, short and long teacher professional development programs… but that’s not the same has having responsibility for a full-scale university “lecture” course with ~60 students and 3 contact hours per week.

This fall, I’ve been teaching Conceptual Physics, a general education course with 55-ish students, drawing from all four class years (most heavily from freshmen and seniors) and almost every major on campus except Physics. I have, of course, been using a classroom response system (CRS, a.k.a. “clickers”). I cannot imagine teaching a course even a third this size without it; it would be like teaching without a whiteboard or a data projector. It would like becoming deaf in the classroom.

It has been interesting to see how all the pedagogical theory that I and my colleagues have been developing has fared. It isn’t easy! I’m encountering many of the same difficulties that the high school teachers in our project have voiced — problems I’ve tried to help them resolve with all kinds of sage advice.

I am finding, of course, that it isn’t quite as easy as I’d thought. (I’m envisioning many of our teachers nodding with a small smile of vindication, and thinking “See?” Touché.) It’s not so much that I’ve been wrong, as that I’m seeing new dimensions and nuances to the problems and the solutions. In fact, having to go through many of the same CRS learning issues as my teachers is really quite instructional.

I’ll try to document some of those insights in forthcoming blog posts. One question that I’m wrestling with, however, is this: just how much should I “let it all hang out” in a public forum that my students might quite possibly discover?

Maybe I shouldn’t worry about that. I find that my faith in my basic pedagogical principles and outlook are being strengthened, not weakened, by the experience. If anything, I’m entertaining even more radical thoughts about how we can re-envision the educational enterprise. (That might scare some of you who know me well.)

Anyway, the next post will focus on my latest insight about what makes creating good CRS questions difficult, at least for me. Hint: It’s not actually about the questions, though it initially appears that way.

• Iowa woman’s photo sparks push for new cloud type (Yahoo! News)

A thoughtful post by sciencegeekgirl.

Until New Year’s Day, 1995, when an oil rig in the middle of the North Sea recorded a 100-foot wave going by during a storm. Oops.

By examining where most rogue wave reports come from (many off the SE coast of South Africa), some bright scientist figured out that when big waves and wind meet an oncoming current (such as storms from the South Atlantic moving up towards the Indian Ocean, meeting the warm narrow fast Aghulas Current flowing the other way along the African coast), waves can become much larger and steeper.

Okay, problem solved, scientists happy. Shipping industry happy too, because now they can just tell their captains what to steer around.

Until March 2001, when two cruise ships in the middle of the South Atlantic each met 100-foot rogue waves, only days apart, and were almost destroyed. There were no currents or other local features to explain the occurrences.

So an intrepid scientist in Germany got access to a radar satellite capable of measuring wave heights with sufficient precision, and started scanning satellite data for evidence of waves so high they shouldn’t exist. To everyone’s surprise, including her, she found dozens within a three-week window. All over the place.

A physicist in Italy (but with a notably American accent) thinks that ocean waves can be modeled by the “nonlinear Schrödinger equation”. One of his model-generated solutions looks almost exactly like the profile of the 1995 New Years’ Day wave that was recorded by the oil platform. If he’s right, it means that there are two kinds of waves out there: the normal sinusoidal “linear” waves, and — hidden among them — some scattered nonlinear waves with subtly different shapes. These rogues are usually indistinguishable from the linear waves, but every once in a while they go into a strange mode where they suck energy from their adjacent neighbors and rear up into monsters for a little while, then subside again.

Mariners have described this as a “rogue sea”. I swear I’ve seen this phenomenon myself, when watching a stormy ocean from shore; every now and then an unusually large wave seems to rise up somewhere, then drop again.

Part of what fascinates me about this story is the utter faith that “scientists” (as a monolithic entity, granted) had in the “linear model”: so much that they flat-out rejected numerous and continuing eyewitness accounts of rogue waves. (Let’s assume that the program’s representation of prevailing attitudes is accurate.) And the shipping and ship-design industries had complete faith in what scientists said, and built and navigated their ships accordingly. The world’s fleet of ocean-faring vessels can generally withstand 40-foot seas, but not 100-foot waves with steep faces and deep troughs. Because, after all, those can’t exist.

It took the incontrovertible evidence of the 1995 New Years’ Day wave recorded by the oil rig to cause a reexamination of the belief that such waves can’t happen, and further in-your-face evidence (literally, for too many crew and passengers) to cause a reexamination of our model for ocean wave dynamics in general. The unexplained disappearance of one ship per week was insufficient.

I suppose that shouldn’t be too surprising. One of the earliest findings of educational research was how firmly entrenched “misconceptions” are, and how emotionally difficult it is for students (or anyone) to let go of a model that has proven at least partially successful for them.

I gather that the Schrödinger model is not yet firmly established, but the existence of rogue waves is. Personally, I’ll think twice next time I consider taking a boat out in rough seas… Or next time I hear a scientist arguing that some piece of data “must” be spurious because it doesn’t fit the model we “know” is true.

The question is, what do **you** believe so strongly that you might be rejecting contradictory evidence?

My team — the UMass Physics Education Research Group (UMPERG) — is moving! The University of North Carolina at Greensboro wants to build a robust, interdisciplinary, inter-departmental effort in science and math education research, outreach, and teacher preparation, and they’re serious enough to put some resources behind it.

To kick things off, they’ve hired my mentor and my group’s senior member, Bill Gerace, to fill the newly-created post of Helena Gabriel Houston Distinguished Professor of Science Education (a chair generously endowed by the C. D. Spangler Foundation — thanks, folks). He retired from UMass and began at UNCG this past summer. I’m moving in January, and my other colleague, Bill Leonard, starts at UNCG next summer. Whee!

(For those of you not fully up-to-date on UMPERG’s status, Jose Mestre moved to UIUC a few years ago, and Bob Dufresne has been primarily occupied with his Reading Recovery publishing business for a while.)

We’ve got the ambition and the mandate to do some big things at UNCG, such as building an inter-departmental “center” for science and mathematics education research and outreach, and creating a graduate degree program in Physics Education Research and/or Science Education Research. So, if you’re a potential graduate student, sabbatical visitor, collaborator, or faculty hire — or if you’re just curious — stay tuned.

The inevitable disruption is a partial explanation for my relative silence on this blog of late. 2008 has been a very, very tumultuous year, in both good and bad ways, for many reasons. My list of ideas for blog topics is getting longer, though…

Well, I recently learned that Stephen has died, apparently the victim of medical mismanagement of a serious and unpleasant, but eminently treatable, problem. (If you must get sick, I advise doing it somewhere other than Kampala, Uganda.) The world is more impoverished for his passing, and the schools of Uganda especially so.

I don’t know if Stephen managed to retain his sense of mirth to the end; if anyone could, it would have been him. But I’m quite sure he’s laughing now, taking hysterical new delight in the great and beautiful joke that is life — without in the least diminishing its sanctity, pathos, or grandeur.

Here’s to you, Stephen Oluka.

I think there’s a huge opportunity for a trusted media source that takes on spin from all quarters and throws it back in the face of the spinner. (link)

I wonder whether it’s humanly possible to be spin-free. Granted there’s such a thing as deliberate, deceitful spin, and that it is in principle possible for all people to eschew that. But where is the dividing line between “spinning” something and “presenting it as I interpret it from within my world-view”?

In other words, bias is an inseparable companion to different world-views, one person’s honest “as I see the truth” is another person’s nauseatingly biased spin.

Shall we define “spin” as a conscious biasing of presented fact? Well, if I’m aware of multiple ways of interpreting something, and choose to present the most persuasive case possible for the interpretation I believe is sound (i.e., resonates with my world-view and preconceptions), that’s conscious… So is it “spin”?

(Yeah, it’s from 1999, but I just discovered it today — thanks to Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project.)

1. Read a book on the subject, cover to cover, to get my head around the “big picture”;

2. Try one or two little toy projects as a “proof of concept”, just to make sure I have all the pieces to at least get started; and

3. Throw myself into an ambitious, real project that is well beyond my skill level, and figure things out on the fly by frequently going to the text and other relevant documentation as needed.

I find that wrestling with the big project provides the motivation and the context to help me bring it all together.

This contrasts with the way that most academic subjects at most educational levels in most parts of the world are taught: leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time. My gut and my personal learning experiences tell me that we’d be better off “throwing students into the deep end”, as I argued in _Travel, Teaching, and Intellectual Saturation_. The problem is that I don’t have a clear idea of what this would look like in practice, and I don’t have any _evidence_ that it would actually work. (Perhaps students would be too frustrated to persevere?)

Well, at a meeting today with several high school teachers participating in my current research project, one teacher gave me a glimpse of how it might be implemented, along with reason to believe that it can work.

Darcy (not her real name) is teaching 9th grade algebra, with heterogeneous (mixed achievement level) classes. Largely as a result of our project, she has been experimenting with her teaching style. Today she reported that with one class in particular, she’s been developing a class dynamic where she gives the students a problem to figure out, and then lets them spend perhaps 3/4 of the 90-minute class working together on it. The whole class works cooperatively, with small-group side conversations splitting off and rejoining the main discussion. Sometimes students go to the board to draw something, and sometimes another student will go to another board to disagree. When students look to Darcy for input, she puts on her best poker face and ignores them.

Remarkably, all but one or two students engage. I asked whether a few know-it-all students dominate the discussion, and she said no, all students’ contributions seem to be valued.

Eventually, when the class has reached a solution, Darcy will retake the helm, explore their solution, and often suggest alternative ways that they could have reached it.

Here’s the kicker: I asked Darcy whether she had trouble covering material at a sufficient pace when devoting so much time to student-directed discussion (cf. _the myth of coverage_). She said that quite the opposite happened: this class was ahead of every other 9th grade algebra class in the school. When my eyes widened, she explained that she’d rearranged the curriculum, starting off with the “hard topics” that were usually saved for later in the year. These provided the problems that students collaboratively wrestled with as described above. Then, later on in the course, she’d bring in the “easy” material that she’d skipped earlier, and the students could chew through that at a high rate — perhaps four sections per day.

Yes, it’s anecdotal evidence, but the story does illustrate one way of teaching by “throwing students into the deep end”. And it supports the rather counterintuitive idea that students learn faster when we put the hard stuff first.

I suspect that in addition, the _learning_ skills they develop are more useful in the “real world”…

The central process driving this is not globalization. It’s the skills revolution. We’re moving into a more demanding cognitive age. In order to thrive, people are compelled to become better at absorbing, processing and combining information. This is happening in localized and globalized sectors, and it would be happening even if you tore up every free trade deal ever inked.

The globalization paradigm emphasizes the fact that information can now travel 15,000 miles in an instant. But the most important part of information’s journey is the last few inches – the space between a person’s eyes or ears and the various regions of the brain. Does the individual have the capacity to understand the information? Does he or she have the training to exploit it? Are there cultural assumptions that distort the way it is perceived?

The globalization paradigm leads people to see economic development as a form of foreign policy, as a grand competition between nations and civilizations… But the cognitive age paradigm emphasizes psychology, culture and pedagogy — the specific processes that foster learning…

Excerpted from David Brooks, “The Cognitive Age”, in the NYTimes of May 2, 2008.

Korb Eynon and tribal fame: “Driving home late last night, I realized he’d done it again, 19 years after I left his classroom for the last time. Korb hadn’t impressed his thinking on me – he’d shared something that caused me to explore my own line of thinking. In other words, he’d taught. Just like he’s been doing for five decades. Thanks, Korb.”

Ask an educational researcher for his “teaching philosophy” and you’re likely to get a puzzled look and a long pause. These can be interpreted as “How do I condense years of research, literature reading, and theoretical development into a short answer?”

grounding

My philosophy of teaching draws from several research and philosophical traditions, as well as from the teaching experiences of myself and my colleagues. First and foremost, I am a constructivist (von Glasersfeld, 2007; Peschl, 2006). That term means many things to many people, but to me it means simply that knowledge and understanding cannot be “transmitted” between people; it must be constructed over time by each individual. In other words, learning is a deliberate process of sense-making that inevitably includes times of confusion, struggle, and reconciliation of difficulties. This relatively simple recognition has deep implications for instruction.

One implication is that communication cannot be taken for granted. All communication involves the sending of symbols that have no inherent meaning; meaning is intended by the sender and inferred by the recipient, and what meaning the recipient infers depends on his or her pre-existing expectations, assumptions, model of the sender, knowledge, and so on. As a teacher, that means I cannot presume that my spectacularly clear explanations communicate to the students what I intend them to. I need to model their interpretations as they model my intentions, and I need to “close the loop”, asking them to communicate back to me what they think they understood.

Another implication is that I do not “teach” so much as engineer a productive environment and set of stimuli for students to learn within, and provide coaching as they do so. (Note that this does not mean that lecture, or direct explanation, is always bad. Sometimes it is the appropriate stimuli to provide; nevertheless, I must remember that such lectures or direct explanations are not simply absorbed, understood, and immediately ready for future use.) Vygotsky’s notion of the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) — that productive learning occurs within the space of challenges that students can succeed at with scaffolding, but not alone — suggests that I must continually tune the learning environment to students’ evolving capacities.

A third implication of constructivism is that students do not enter my classroom as blank slates; pre-existing knowledge, perceptions, perspectives, and experiences shape the understandings they construct in response to the environment and stimuli I provide. Thus, attempting to model their initial state, and track its subsequent evolution, is as important a component of my teaching job as designing my instruction.

Out of this perspective has grown the conceptual change tradition of educational research (Scott, Asoki & Leach, 2007), which studies the mechanisms by which students’ understanding of concepts evolves, the role of “misconceptions” in learning, and the like. More recent research, in what might be termed the knowledge in pieces tradition (Scherr, 2007), suggests that attending to what knowledge elements students have access to, and what contextual elements help to activate them, is more productive than considering what knowledge (or misconceptions) they “possess” (Redish, 2003; Hammer, Elby, Scherr & Redish, 2004; Dufresne, Thaden-Koch, Gerace & Leonard, 2005).

I am not just a constructivist, but a social constructivist informed by the sociocultural tradition of educational research (Carlsen, 2007; Mortimer & Scott, 2003). I see social interaction as essential to the internal knowledge-construction process, including student-to-student interactions as well as instructor-to-student ones. As Vygotsky observed (1987), the tools students use for internal cogitation are appropriated from social interactions. This implies that the classroom should be a place for exhibiting and exploring modes of thinking and argument, where students can see the process of “thinking science” modeled and where they can try it out themselves. Also, as Bakhtin observed (summarized in Wertsch, 1991, pp. 93-118), learning science largely means learning the social language of science (including conventions for thought and argument as well as vocabulary and grammar), and students must practice speaking a language to develop fluency. Thus, the classroom should be a place for students to practice “talking science”, with enough scaffolding from me to help them along, but not so much that I do the talking instead of them. In the very act of struggling to articulate their fuzzy thinking, students clarify their understanding of what they know, identify what they don’t, and often reach insights.

This has strong implications for what should occur in my classrooms. I do not see the classroom as a place for the dissemination of declarative content knowledge or the exhibition of proofs; those are more efficiently done through textbooks, multimedia, or other online resources. My classroom should be a place for dialogue and interaction, for exploration and confrontation and resolution. (In a large lecture hall, this is greatly facilitated by use of a classroom response system.)

My outlook is also shaped by the literature on student motivation and self-regulation (Koballa & Glynn, 2007; Wilson, 2006), and on the significance of students’ epistemological framing of the learning activities they engage in (Hammer, 1996; Hammer & Elby, 2003). Students are not black boxes, to whom instructional stimuli are applied and learning results; how they engage in learning activities matters tremendously, and as an instructor I must probe, model, monitor, and seek to influence that.

principles

Over time, I have distilled the practical implications for these (and other) pedagogical positions and educational research findings into four principles to guide instruction. These principles form the core of the “technology-enhanced formative assessment” (TEFA) pedagogy that my colleagues and I promote through in-service teacher professional development, and I would adhere to them in my own teaching.

The first principle is “Motivate and focus student learning with question-driven instruction.” This means posing tough, rich, meaty, often messy questions to students in order to contextualize and motivate subsequent learning, and often in order to catalyze or precipitate learning. It is grounded in the conceptual change tradition. It is motivated by an understanding that students perceive, process, and store information differently in response to a need, and that they “get” ideas by wrestling with the application of those ideas (Bransford et al., 1999, p. 139).

The second principle is “Develop students’ understanding and scientific fluency with dialogical discourse.” This means engaging students in discussion in which multiple ideas and ways of thinking are explored and contrasted, and in which students articulate and explore their own thinking. It is grounded in the sociocultural tradition.

The third principle is “Optimize teaching and students’ learning with formative assessment.” This means making students’ knowledge and thinking visible in order to adjust and optimize subsequent learning and teaching. It is motivated by an understanding that effective instruction requires detailed and current information about the specific students being taught, and that effective learning requires accurate self-knowledge (Wiliam, 2007). According to a seminal literature review by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam (1998), “innovations” involving formative assessment produce learning gains that are among the largest ever found for educational interventions.

The fourth principle is “Help students cooperate in the learning process and develop metacognitive skills with meta-level communication.” This means communicating about communication, about cognition, about learning, and about the purposes of instructional experiences. It is grounded in literature on student motivation and self-regulation. It is motivated by an understanding that learning works better when students frame their participation appropriately and understand what they are supposed to be paying attention to.

I do not consider these four principles to be independent and arbitrary beliefs; they interlock and reinforce each other in a highly synergistic way. This can be seen in the way they are enacted in the TEFA “question cycle” — one specific way out of many of realizing the principles — which has been described elsewhere (Dufresne et al., 1996; Beatty, Leonard, Gerace & Dufresne, 2006).

references

Beatty, I. D., Leonard, W. J., Gerace, W. J., and Dufresne, R. J. (2006). Question driven instruction: Teaching science (well) with an audience response system. In Banks, D. A., editor, Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases. Idea Group Inc., Hershey, PA.

Black, P. and Wiliam, D. (1998). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 5(1):7-74.

Bransford, J. D., Brown, A. L., and Cocking, R. R. (1999). How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School. National Academy Press, Washington, D.C.

Carlsen, W. S. (2007). Language and science learning. In Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., editors, Handbook of Research on Science Education, chapter 3, pages 57-74. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

Dufresne, R. J., Gerace, W. J., Leonard, W. J., Mestre, J. P., and Wenk, L. (1996). Classtalk: A classroom communication system for active learning. Journal of Computing in Higher Education, 7:3-47.

Dufresne, R. J., Thaden-Koch, T., Gerace, W. J., and Leonard, W. J. (2005). Knowledge representation and coordination in the transfer process. In Mestre, J. P., editor, Transfer of Learning from a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective, chapter 5, pages 89-119. Information Age Publishing.

Hammer, D. (1996). More than misconceptions: Multiple perspectives on student knowledge and reasoning, and an appropriate role for education research. American Journal of Physics, 64:1316-1325.

Hammer, D. and Elby, A. (2003). Tapping epistemological resources for learning physics. Journal of Learning Sciences, 12:53-90.

Hammer, D., Elby, A., Scherr, R. E., and Redish, E. F. (2004). Resources, framing, and transfer. In Mestre, J. P., editor, Transfer of Learning: Research and Perspective. Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT.

Koballa, T. R. and Glynn, S. M. (2007). Attitudinal and motivational constructs in science learning. In Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., editors, Handbook of Research on Science Education, chapter 4, pages 75-102. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

Mortimer, E. F. and Scott, P. H. (2003). Meaning Making in Secondary Science Classrooms. Open University Press.

Peschl, M. F. (2006). Modes of knowing and modes of coming to know: Knowledge creation and co-construction as socio-epistemological engineering in educational processes. Constructivist Foundations, 1(3):111-123.

Redish, E. F. (2003). A theoretical framework for physics education research: Modeling student thinking. In Vicentinni, M. and Redish, E. F., editors, Proceedings of the Varenna Summer School, “Enrico Fermi” Course CLVI. IOS Press, Amsterdam.

Scherr, R. E. (2007). Modeling student thinking: An example from special relativity. American Journal of Physics, 75(3):272-280.

Scott, P., Asoki, H., and Leach, J. (2007). Student conceptions and conceptual learning in science. In Abell, S. K. and Lederman, N. G., editors, Handbook of Research on Science Education, chapter 2, pages 31-56. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ.

von Glasersfeld, E. (2007). Key Works in Radical Constructivism. Sense Publisherss.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). Thinking and speech. In Rieber, R. W. and Carton, A. S., editors, The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky. Plenum Press.

Wertsch, J. V. (1991). Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action. Harvard University Press.

Wiliam, D. (2007). Keeping learning on track: Classroom assessment and the regulation of learning. In Lester, F. K., editor, Second Handbook of Mathematics Teaching and Learning, pages 1051-1098. Information Age Publishing, Greenwich, CT.

Wilson, T. D. (2006). The power of social psychological interventions. Science, 313:1251-1252.

All of a sudden, Amazon becomes the 800-pound gorilla in the world of commercial web hosting.

I’m not particularly glad to know that it needs to be worried about. Is this considered acceptable “collateral damage” from the “tough on crime” front of the political wars?

I think that’s one of the reasons I like travel, especially adventurous travel to exotic places and cultures and conditions. Drop me into a totally unfamiliar environment, and I’m happy as a bug trying to figure out how to function. It also might explain why I’ve gone through a whole string of hobbies and enthusiasms and sports and professional interests: once the terrain gets too well mapped, so to speak, the appeal fades. Some people like exercising skill and expertise; I like acquiring it.

I may be somewhat extreme in this regard, but I doubt that I’m wired completely differently from most of the human race. I suspect that we learn most efficiently, and are most captivated by the learning, when we’re tossed into the deep end and have to figure out in a hurry which end is up.

In my experiences as a student, a teacher, an educational researcher, and a teacher of teachers, one of the things I’ve noticed is how reluctant most teachers (myself included) are to leave students behind. We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time; any student who stumbles, strays, or straggles and gets left behind will be lost. Thus, being conscientious of our responsibility to all students, we put great effort into ensuring that every one (or at least every one who tries) is with us for the whole journey.

And this, I think, has disastrous consequences. To prevent any from being left behind, we must keep all together in a tight cluster that moves more slowly than most need. Which means that we are nowhere near saturating most students’ capacity to absorb new ideas. Which means that many students get bored, and turn their excess capacity towards “off-topic” matters, such as side conversations, crossword puzzles, daydreaming, or social posturing. And which also means that few students learn as much or as rapidly as they are capable. Perhaps more insidiously, it means that few students have the opportunity to develop the intellectual skills essential to sense-making in a fast-and-furious environment.

At the root of all this is a fundamental misconception about pedagogy. Above, I said:

We conceptualize instruction as leading students along a carefully-engineered path to understanding, one step at a time;

As soon as we think this way, we’ve lost. That’s the “transmissionist” view of instruction, the idea that we transmit knowledge to students. That idea has been pretty thoroughly discredited in educational research circles, in favor of the constructivist view that students must construct their understanding through a sustained and effortful sense-making process. Knowledge isn’t a set or sequence of facts that can be presented in a logically optimal order; it’s a messy, complex, massively interlinked network of ideas and connections and perspectives and ways of thinking that can only be fully appreciated through extensive and repeated revisiting and re-contemplation. It’s not linear. As Jay Lemke observes (Lemke 1990, p.17),

In fact, it can be difficult or impossible to teach a thematic pattern one piece at a time because it often takes a mastery of the whole pattern before any of its parts seem to make sense. It is not just in science that we find concepts that can only be fully understood in terms of one another: Each piece of the puzzle makes sense only if you already have all the other pieces. This is one of the fundamental problems of science teaching, and indeed of teaching and communication generally…

What is the alternative? Throw students into the deep end. Engineer a rich, thorny, messy, meaty problem or question for them to wrestle with, dump on some ideas and tools that they haven’t yet mastered, and then let them struggle. Scaffold and coach, yes, but don’t try to lead them through. And definitely don’t try to force all students to follow the same path to comprehension. (This is, in essence, what my colleagues and I at UMPERG call Question-Driven Instruction.)

And maybe, if we can bring ourselves to do this, our students will thrive on school the way that I thrive on travel.

References

Lemke, Jay L. (1990). Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values. Ablex Publishing, Westport CT. ISBN 0-89391-566-1. (Amazon)

One of the ideas in the story was not proposed in reality until 2002. This is the idea that the FBI and Microsoft will keep the root passwords for your personal computers, and not let you have them.

The proponents of this scheme have given it names such as “trusted computing” and “palladium”. We call it “treacherous computing”, because the effect is to make your computer obey companies instead of you. This was implemented in 2007 as part of “Windows Vista” ; we expect Apple to do something similar. In this scheme, it is the manufacturer that keeps the secret code, but the FBI would have little trouble getting it.

What Microsoft keeps is not exactly a password in the traditional sense; no person ever types it on a terminal. Rather, it is a signature and encryption key that corresponds to a second key stored in your computer. This enables Microsoft, and potentially any web sites that cooperate with Microsoft, the ultimate control over what the user can do on his own computer.

Vista also gives Microsoft additional powers; for instance, Microsoft can forcibly install upgrades, and it can order all machines running Vista to refuse to run a certain device driver. The main purpose of Vista’s many restrictions is to make DRM that users can’t overcome.

The whole story is worth reading. I think it connects to my earlier blog entries about normalcy, Incarceration Makes Me Crabby and Waiting. But it’s got a new twist: a slow evolution to our sense of what is “normal”, and therefore acceptable, can be insidious.

(Tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for the link to Stallman’s article.)

Suggestions and opinions are welcome!

I probably need help with my Facebook profile, too.

Apologies.

Mike and Petrit,

Your comments are thoughtful and deserve an equally thoughtful response. I’ve been flat-out barely-hanging-in busy for the last few months, and I didn’t want to toss a shallow response at you, so I haven’t said anything.

Unfortunately, time is still a far scarcer commodity than I’d like. So I’ll offer a brief sketch of a response here, and try to find time for a more careful one later.

Mike: Rather than make a weak and amateur attempt at apologetics, let me direct you to the many writers who have made a career of bringing rationality to Christianity and Catholicism. C.S. Lewis was one of the best, and was seminal to my own change of mind and ultimate conversion. God in the Dock is a good place to start.

In a nutshell, my argument for Catholicism over other forms of Christianity is simple: primacy. Once I grant the historical evidence for Jesus as the Deity incarnate (cf. Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ), I have to take pretty darn seriously the church he established, with Peter as its head. That church has survived some two thousand years (AFAIK, the only formal human institution to do so), Avignon Captivity and the like notwithstanding. So, as I see it, I need a pretty darn strong argument against the Catholic church before I can view other Christian denominations as more than well-meaning but astray splinter groups. (Exception: Catholics acknowledge the Orthodox, Eastern-rite churches as equally valid sister churches, differing in superficials but not core theology.)

(I also think that no other church has as much richness and depth of theology and apologetics as the Catholic Church. This isn’t a proof of correctness, but a pointer.)

Petrit: Let me assure you that I am familiar with Dawkins’ ideas from prior writings, not just from a “third-party report of a speech at Pop!Tech.” I’ve always thought he was a little overly inclined to foam at the mouth, and to give people of faith less credit than they deserve. But the details of Dawkins’ arguments are actually not so central to my post, or at least to its intention: my primary aim was to plant a flag in the sand and say “Hey, I’m intelligent, well-educated, and thoughtful, and I’m also Catholic. I may not be right, but don’t write me off as an ignorant wacko.” I don’t mind that Dawkins disagrees with my world-view. I mind that he’s insulting.

And sure, much of the world may be relatively unthinking in its beliefs (religious, ethical, political, racial, or otherwise), but I may not be as idiosyncratic as you think. Many people would be surprised by how many sincere theists can be found in a univeristy Physics department, even in a highly secular university in a highly secular region of a highly secular state. (I certainly was.) Who do you think I did my arguing and debating with when I was still a rabid atheist?

Finally, regarding the “lack of strong empirical evidence for supernatural intervention by a loving god”, I’d argue that there is evidence, but one must go looking for it in good faith to see it. As to why there isn’t more in-your-face can’t-be-missed can’t-be-misinterpreted evidence, well, the short answer is that there can’t be without wrecking The Divine Plan. You’re touching on what’s known as “the problem of evil”, and tomes have been written on that by people much smarter and better informed (and probably less busy) than I… Including by the aforementioned C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain) and Lee Strobel (The Case for Faith).

The answers aren’t simple, because the reality isn’t simple. To my mind, that’s one of the many small, supporting bits of evidence that this whole Christianity thing is true, and not just the product of human imagination. It’s not simple, but it’s not arbitrary or self-contradictory, either… Though it may appear so, especally after being filtered through myriad finite, fallible, idiosyncratic human minds.

Apocalypse 69% Dr. Doom 63% Dark Phoenix 56% Venom 49% Magneto 48% The Joker 46% Juggernaut 45% Lex Luthor 43% Mr. Freeze 42% Riddler 40% Mystique 37% Green Goblin 37% Poison Ivy 31% Kingpin 26% Catwoman 24% Two-Face 21%

You believe in survival of the fittest and you believe that you are the fittest.

Click here to take the Super Villain Personality Test

Superman 70% Spider-Man 60% Iron Man 55% Green Lantern 50% Robin 47% The Flash 45% Hulk 45% Supergirl 40% Wonder Woman 35% Catwoman 30% Batman 30%

You are mild-mannered, good, strong and you love to help others.

Click here to take the “Which Superhero are you?” quiz…

• http://flickr.com/photos/ibeatty/sets/72157603711090388/

Makerere University is an interesting place. It’s considered one of the premier universities in Africa, especially when one discounts South Africa. The place may look a little run down by first-world standards, but it has a vibrant energy that doesn’t really come through in the pictures.

(Apologies for posting these so many months after the trip. First I was traveling elsewhere, then buried in work upon homecoming, then traveling more, then buried more, then learning to process photos with Aperture, then waiting for a computer fast enough to actually handle Aperture… You get the idea. I’ve still got a huge backlog of images from six months in Africa. So if you like this kind of thing, stay tuned. I’ve got more from Uganda, as well as South Africa, and a two-week safari through the Caprivi regions of Namibia, Zambia, and Botswana — including Victoria Falls.)

(Go on, it’s not that long.)

For the record, I’m Catholic and very serious about it. I’m also a trained and practicing scientist with a Ph.D. in Physics. I was raised atheist, and converted while in graduate school because Catholicism made too damn much sense not to agree with. This was no sudden Road to Damascus conversion, but a long, careful, suspicious, examined, intellectual decision. (To mimic the star of one of Dawkins’ anecdotes, “I was wrong for 26 years.”) And I find no irreconcilable disagreements between modern science and Catholic theology; they talk about different things. Apparent incompatibilities usually arise from a flawed understanding of one or both.

I apply the same rigorous standards to knowledge of both the material and spiritual worlds, because they’re two sides of the same coin, and they’re both just dimensions of “what is”. The primary difference is that one can build a decent model of the material world by looking only outwards, but must look into the human psyche (one’s own and others’) for evidence about the spiritual.

Science is just “best practice” thinking. It should be applied to everything that’s worth knowing, because thinking is the only way anything is ever known. You get the evidence, the clues, wherever you can find them.

That means I subject beliefs — my own and other people’s — to challenge and scrutiny. It also means I have the humility to admit that finite minds will never completely understand the natural or supernatural worlds. All understanding is just a “working model”.

Contrary to Dawkins’ characterization, “faith” does not mean closing one’s ears to evidence or argument. That’s “denial”. Faith is having the guts to bet something you care about on the partial understanding you’ve got, even though you don’t have all the answers. And faith means accepting challenges to your beliefs with confidence that those beliefs will either be strengthened or corrected.

It is regrettably true that a great many religious believers refuse to examine their beliefs analytically and impartially. It is also regrettably true that a great many unbelievers make the same mistake.

(David Weinberger pretty much pegs Dawkins.)

I though the first half was about as bad as any movie I’ve seen in a long time (which, granted, is a fairly small sample), and the second half was surprisingly decent. Rather than write yet another movie review, I’d like to consider why I thought this.

What struck me as most horrifically bad about the first half was the pacing. There was no set-up, no accumulating tension, no dramatic build towards set-piece conflicts. Words scrolling into space at the beginning — a Star Wars tradition — summarized the situation and conflict, dispensing with the need to actually build the story. Instead, we are dropped right into action that would be climactic for most movies. In essence, we join the story halfway through. (I’m not talking about what happened during Episodes I and II; significantly new stuff happened in those scrolling words.)

And once the movie began, it rushed on in a rather breathless fashion, a near-continuous assault of exotic sets, ferocious combat, and narrow escapes. For me, at least, life-and-death struggle isn’t very gripping when it’s the norm, the baseline, the standard. It needs to hover around as a possibility, gradually growing in menace and import, until it bursts forth.

(The second half of the movie spent a little more time doing this right, dwelling on Anakin’s psyche and turn to evil. We know something really bad is going to happen, but not how or when. Or what new action-figure merchandizing opportunities might be revealed.)

Did you catch those key words two paragraphs ago? “For me, at least…” That’s what kicked me into Think Twice mode. Was it a bad movie, or a good movie made for someone else?

For several years now I’ve been noticing that television programming for children and teens has been evolving. Segments are shorter, cuts between camera shots occur more rapidly, and the whole has a much more “in your face” effect: a frenetic flurry to grab and hold attention. I noticed it first in MTV music videos, and later in advertisements and regular television programming. It’s elsewhere, too: billboards, print media, commercial establishments, videogames.

And I’ve been wondering what the effects are on young people’s cognitive habits and attention spans. The obvious hypothesis is that kids raised in an environment of sensory blitz will be (a) better at filtering out unwanted stimulus, and (b) easily bored in stimulus-lean situations.

I think it’s safe to say that most physics classes are stimulus-lean situations, at least when compared to music videos and first-person shooter videogames. Is anyone surprised we have trouble holding students’ attention? Maybe Revenge of the Sith isn’t so bad after all, if you’re in the right demographic. But it’s probably bad news for teachers.

And that raises some very interesting questions that I don’t have answers to. How can we adapt instruction to optimize it for students who are very very good at scanning and filtering massive sensory assault, but very very bad at pondering and cogitating? Should we even try, or should we stand our ground and try like heck to help them develop the mental muscles for pondering and cogitating?

I’m an educational researcher by profession. I tend to believe that I know a lot about how to teach well, especially physics. I’ve read the literature, attended the conferences, conducted research, engaged in countless discussions about teaching and learning, and published some papers. Yes, I’ve even designed and taught physics courses, though not much since finishing my Ph.D. (I’m on a research position, not a teaching one. Unfortunately.)

Which is why the following anecdote is acutely embarrassing.

This past July, my colleague, group leader, and travel buddy Bill Gerace and I spent two unexpectedly hot, humid weeks in Vitznau, Switzerland. We went to teach physics to hospitality management students (as we did in Singapore the previous summer). Does that seem bizarre? UMass has partnered with hospitality management schools in Singapore and Vitznau to offer a UMass baccalaureate. Students must fulfill regular UMass degree requirements, including “distribution” criteria of so many literature classes, so many science classes, etc. The partner schools used to ship their students over to UMass for a year or so to take all those courses, but someone figured out that it’s cheaper to send UMass faculty over to teach two-week intensive courses in various subjects. So, UMass asks its faculty for volunteers.

Knowing a good thing when he sees it, Bill jumped on the opportunity. He used the stipend to pay my travel expenses, so we both went more or less for free, inveterate travel junkies that we are. Bill taught, I helped out with computer tasks and improvised experiment/demo equipment, and I telecommuted to fulfill the duties of my “real” job. (Lest you think I’m a slacker, know that we committed to this trip before the big research grant providing my real job had been awarded.)

Back to the humility thing. A few days into the course, we reached the topic of “conservation of energy.” I have a way of explaining the concept that I think makes a whole lot of intuitive sense and should be brilliantly clear to students, so I asked Bill if I could teach that segment. He agreed, and I did. I tried to, anyway.

So I started, and introduced my analogy between conservation of energy and financial accounting, making the point that money is never created or destroyed, but moved from one account to another, to cash in your pocket, to credit (or less debt) on your credit account, etc. This is is just like energy: it gets shifted around from one form to another, one “place” to another, but the total amount remains the same. (Nobody asked about governments that print money.) This should be really accessible to students also taking management classes, right?

As it goes on, I get increasingly uncomfortable. Eyes are glazing over. A crunch on classroom space has pushed us into the computer lab for this class, and more than a little key-pecking and monitor-glancing is happening. I ask questions and get very little response; the answers I do get are tentative and unsure, more like guesses than opinions.

And then it hits me. I’m doing it: the classic IRE triadic pattern of classroom discourse, in which the instructor “initiates” with a question, the students “respond” with an answer, and the instructor “evaluates” the correctness of the response. No “uptake” or chaining of responses to responses, no true dialogic discourse or exploration of points of view. This is quizzing, not discussion. I’ve just read an entire damn book about patterns of discourse, nodding in agreement as the authors expounded upon the futility of IRE-based teaching, and here I am torturing perfectly nice foreigners with it.

It’s not that I don’t really understand the theory or the arguments against IRE. I very much do, to the point that it seems self-evident. Rather, IRE-style teaching is so deeply ingrained in me from 20-odd years of being a student (not counting preschool or the interminable stretch of my dissertation work) that I fell into it without even thinking.

So I bailed. I tag-teamed off to Bill almost mid-sentence. No one can improv physics like Bill, so he picked up smoothly and continued the lesson (with significantly less IRE and eye-glazing).

Licking my wounds later and reflecting on the experience, I realized I had been doomed from the very moment I first desired to teach that lesson. I began by thinking about what was inside my head — the cool analogy I was going to make — rather than about what was inside the students’ heads. Rule #1 of teaching:

It doesn’t matter what comes out of your mouth (or shows up on your PowerPoint slides). All that matters is what happens in the students’ minds, so find out what that is and interact with it.

The myth of coverage is a corollary of this.

The morals of this story?

1. There’s a huge gap between knowing and doing. We generally do what we’re patterned on, not what we would choose if we thought about it. Especially under stress or on the spot.
2. If we really want to impact the way science (or anything else) is taught, we must change the formative learning experiences of our future teachers. It’s a bootstrapping problem.
3. Don’t lose sight of the goal for even a moment: in this case, developing students’ understanding. Teaching cleverly is not synonymous with making learning happen.
4. Self-monitoring and reflection are very powerful learning tools. I learned more from that one experience than from dozens of learned papers and discussions. (Bill likes to say that “All learning is through trauma.” He’s using learning in a narrow, strong sense and trauma in a general, cognitive one.)

I’ve got several thoughts and anecdotes to write up; the problem is that I’ve been so flat-out plastered with work that I haven’t had the mental space to write anything thoughtful.

Apologies to my regular readers. (If any are still left, that is.)

(If you click on the title links, the relevant “slide” should open in a new browser window. Subsequent slides should open in the same window, so if you resize the window to something about 1024 x 768 and drag it to the side of the narrative in this window, you should somewhat recreate the effect of the talk. Except for the part about me being rattled by technical problems and talking way too fast. Hopefully, your display is working better than my projector did during the talk. The slides are HTML, not PDF or images, so fonts and layout and such may vary.)

Title & Authors

Good evening.

This is the kind of talk where I tell you about a current research project, because it’s good for professionals to know what their colleagues are up to. It’s also the kind of talk where I slide in my own pedagogical opinions, because, well, I want to change the world.

If you hear anything brilliant in my talk, credit probably belongs to my colleagues in the UMass Physics Education Research Group. They’ve been thinking about this for longer than I.

Classroom Response Systems

How many of you know what a “classroom response system” is? Also known as an “audience response system”, “voting machine”, “polling system”, or “clicker system”? [Probe audience and adjust talk as appropriate.]

Briefly, for those of you who haven’t: A classroom response system provides a supplemental, technology-mediated channel of communication between instructor and students. [1]

It is a combination of hardware and software that allows an instructor to:

* Present a question to students in class;
* Have them submit answers;
* Immediately aggregate the responses; and
* Share the results with the whole class, usually as a histogram.

[Pause.] Are classroom response systems effective?

[Pause.] Please raise your hand if you think they’re educationaly effective… Who thinks they’re not so hot?… Who’s still sitting on the fence?…

That was a trick question.

Assessing Instructional Technology

This session is about “assessing the educational effectiveness of technology”, but technology doesn’t have educational effectiveness. At least not by itself.

What is the culinary effectiveness of a wok?

[Pause.] If you know how to use one and you’re trying to make a nice stir-fry, it’s quite effective. But if you have no clue what you’re doing in a kitchen, or you’re trying to make a quiche, it’s pretty darn useless.

Any evaluation of instructional technology must ask four questions:

* For what purpose is the technology being applied?
* How is it being applied?
* How well is the user doing it?
* How well does the technology enable or enhance the attempt?

Only the fourth is about the technology itself.

[Pause] That perspective motivates the project I’ll be describing.

Uses for Classroom Response Systems

Classroom response system can be tremendously powerful instructional tools, but they’re not a silver bullet. We’ve seen them used completely ineffectually, horribly abused, or used well for ends we don’t see much merit in.

Some of the different goals people use classroom response systems for include:

* Taking attendance
* Administering quizzes
* Provoking engagement [2]
* Checking for progress
* Promoting knowledge diffusion [3]

All of these typically involve sprinkling response system questions throughout “normal” instruction. The approach we at UMPERG have developed is, I think, considerably more radical. [4]

The Question Cycle

The core idea is that we structure class time around an interactive question cycle [5], iterated three times per hour, more or less. The question cycle serves as the primary vehicle, the primary engine, for instruction. It’s not an add-in; it’s the meat of the class.

We use the question cycle to:

* Reveal and explore students’ thinking,
* Introduce new ideas,
* Refine and extend students’ understanding, and
* Develop students’ analysis and problem solving skills.

A classroom response system is not strictly necessary for this, but it sure helps.

Classroom Dynamic

There’s a lot more to our approach than the question cycle, but that would require a few more ten-minute talks.

What do we call it?

We’ve called the approach by various names at various times, depending on what aspect we’re focusing on.

* Question Driven Instruction (QDI)
* Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment (TEFA)
* Assessing to Learn (A2L)
* Agile Teaching (AT)

I’ll use the first one, “Question Driven Instruction” or “QDI”, tonght.

So back to the project. We want to make a really strong case for the efficacy of classroom response system coupled with the QDI pedagogical approach. That means doing a large-population study of student learning impacts, a so-called “scaling study”, rigorous enough for the What Works Clearinghouse.

But, we can’t evaluate learning impacts fairly without a cadre of teachers who are trying to do QDI, and doing it competently.

Scaling Study Preliminaries

So, we need two things first.

* We need a professional development program that can efficiently and reliably move teachers to a state of QDI competence.
* And we need measures of implementation fidelity that tell us when a teacher is, in fact, doing a reasonable job at it.

If we don’t have the first, we won’t have any QDI to study. If we don’t have the second, we won’t know whether negative results — that is, poor learning impacts — indicate that QDI doesn’t work, or that it just isn’t happening.

So the project we proposed to The National Science Foundation, and that we’re currently working on, is a preliminary study that sets up a scaling study.

TLT Project Goals

Our project is called Teacher Learning of Technology Enhanced Formative Assessment. We are studying teacher learning, not student learning. There will be no measuring of student learning gains.

The project has three general goals:

# To better understand how teachers get from novice to expert in the use of a classroom response system and QDI.
# To refine our methodology for teaching QDI to teachers, and “package” it so that others can do the professional development.
# To prepare the measures, instrumentation, design, and general know-how for a “scaling study” on student learning impacts.

TLT Design: Professional Development

Our plan is to work with the entire science department at a high school, so that teachers can learn collaboratively and support each other, and so that students get a consistent learning experience from class to class.

During the first treatment year, we’ll conduct an intensive two-semester professional development course. The course will focus on the skills that go into successful QDI, including:

* Using classroom response system technology,
* Designing effective questions,
* Navigating the question cycle,
* Moderating classroom discourse, and
* Integrating QDI with curriculum goals and external constraints.

[Pause.] Change doesn’t happen overnight. For all three treatment years, we’ll facilitate a collaborative action research program for the teachers. This will:

* Support the ongoing evolution of their teaching practice, and
* Provide a forum where the teachers can set the agenda and come to terms with QDI.

TLT Design: Data Acquisition

We’ll collect longitudinal data on teacher change over the three treatment years, plus baseline measurements. We’ll gather data from classroom observations, and from interviews and surveys, in order to track changes in:

* What teachers do in the classroom;
* How they approach lesson planning;
* How they perceive knowledge, learning, and teaching;
* What aspects of teaching occupy their attention most;
* What difficulties they wrestle with;
* What supports and assistance they find helpful;
* How they perceive their own QDI skills; and
* How their students perceive the classroom environment.

We’re developing most of the research instruments ourselves, since existing instruments don’t really address the variables we want to track. We are, however, incorporating pieces of established instruments to aid comparison with other research.

TLT Timeline

We’ll be working with two schools, staggered by one year so that we’re taking baseline data in school 2 while teaching the PD course in school 1.

Our first school is fairly small, with eleven participating teachers. This includes most of the high school science faculty, as well as some of the math and junior high science teachers. We’re planning on a larger cohort for school 2, with over 20 participants.

Where are we now? We’re just wrapping up baseline data collection for school 1. Next week, we’ll kick off the PD course with a three-day workshop. We don’t have any results yet, but come back next year for some fascinating preliminary findings!

Links & Credits

If you want to learn more about the project, come chat with me and see our poster during tomorrow morning’s poster session.

Or, visit our web page about the project. (It’s a little sketchy right now, but I’ll be augmenting it soon.)

If you fell asleep in the middle of this talk and want to see what you missed, I’ll post the narrative and slides to my personal weblog, hopefully tomorrow.

And by the way, our graduate student Colin Fredericks is giving a talk at ten tonight, right here, about a different but also interesting project. So please stick around a little longer.

Thanks for your time. Any questions?

¹ Ian D. Beatty (2004) Transforming Student Learning with Classroom Communication Systems. Educause Center for Applied Research (ECAR) Research Bulletin ERB0403.

² Robert J. Dufresne, William J. Gerace, William J. Leonard, Jose P. Mestre, Laura Wenk (1996). Classtalk: A Classroom Communication System for Active Learning. Journal of Computing in Higher Education 7, 3-47.

³ Mazur, Eric (1997) Peer Instruction: A User’s Manual (Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ).

⁴ Ian D. Beatty, William J. Leonard, William J. Gerace, Robert J. Dufresne (2006). Question Driven Instruction: Teaching science (well) with an audience response system. In David A. Banks (Ed.), Audience Response Systems in Higher Education: Applications and Cases (Idea Group Inc., Hershey, PA).

⁵ Robert J. Dufresne, William J. Gerace, Jose P. Mestre, William J. Leonard (2000). ASK-IT/A2L: Assessing Student Knowledge with Instructional Technology. UMass Scientific Reasoning Research Institute technical report Dufresne-2000ask.

I travel a lot. (This comes as something of a surprise to me, since I never associated globetrotting with physics, educational research, teaching, or being a computer geek. My world-wandering fantasy career was National Geographic Photographer, with Indiana Jones overtones.) Most of my travel is between continents, so jet lag is something I’ve had to deal with a lot. And at this point, I’ve pretty much got it beat. Here’s my recipe:

1. Build up a backlog of far too many things that must be done before you depart (or, for return flights, before the end of your trip). That allows you to:
2. Spend your last several days before the flight in a frenzy of stressed multitasking and sleep deprivation, skipping indulgences like workouts, downtime, and social activity. This will insure that you will:
3. Be completely exhausted when you board the plane, able to sleep regardless of the time of day in your accustomed time zone. You are now in a position to:
4. Stay awake (using any requisite force, but not caffeine) during whatever portion of your flight aligns with daytime at your destination, and:
5. Determinedly sleep (faking it as much as necessary) through whatever portion of your flight aligns with night at your destination. As a result:
6. When you arrive, you have already begun adjusting to the new time zone. It is now crucial that you:
7. Don’t blow it! Absolutely refuse to give in to the temptation to nap or go to bed abnormally early, for several days. Forcibly adhere to a reasonable local sleep schedule.

Some helpful aids:

• Pack an inflatable neck pillow, blindfold, and squishy foam earplugs to make the world go away if the airlines’ idea of a desirable sleep schedule, or your fellow travellers’, doesn’t match yours.
• If you’re a laptop-lugging road warrior, an extra battery and a set of plug adapters (for charging up during layovers in various airports) does wonders for making the don’t-sleep time period pass quickly. Some of my best writing has been done in-flight. (Well, at least it seemed like my best at the time…)

That’s it! I find when I adhere to this plan, I have only a weak jet lag effect when I arrive, one I can easily push through — whether I’m traveling east, west, or south, a few time zones or twelve. However, the times I’ve succumbed to a brief nap in the first few days, it has set me back the better part of a week. Big, big mistake.

Here’s my theoretical analysis of why the approach works: stress, frentic activity, exhaustion, and sleep deprivation leading up to the trip put me in a state where my body is reeling, confused, and disoriented. It’s lost its bearings. In the insulated environment of the airplane, it is then willing to shrug and accept whatever schedule I forcibly impose on it. It’s too confused and wounded to object. After arrival, however, a nap at the wrong time undermines all this, reinforces the subdued but not destroyed pull of the old time zone, and invites biorhythmic war within your skin.

Extending the “biorhythmic war” metaphor, I guess I could call this the “shock and awe” jet lag strategy.

(Thanks to Ethan Z for the link.)

So why was I surprised to find that Uganda is different?

The geographically erudite reader will note that the African countries I’ve previously visited are all in the southernmost portion of Africa, more or less between 17 and 34 degrees south latitude. Uganda is smack on the equator. My southern African countries all have a history of colonial rule, and the one I’m most familiar with — South Africa — is still recovering from the brutality of Apartheid. Uganda was a British protectorate, never a colony. Uganda has different ethnic groups, different languages.

Uganda is different. Duh!

If I stopped there, this essay would be a simple self-smacking of the forehead. In the “Think Twice” spirit, however, I’m going to dig a little deeper. Is there a moral here, aside from the always-apt “beware the trap of hubris”?

I think there is, and it has to do with the nature of knowledge, and the many kinds of knowing. I “knew” in an abstract, conceptual, and logical sense that Africa is variegated, but not in a deep enough way to affect my unexamined expectations. Perhaps this parallels the distinction between “passive” and “active” vocabulary. (A person’s “passive” vocabulary with a language is all the words she understands when she hears or reads them. Her “active” vocabulary is all those that come to mind, unprompted, for use when speaking or writing.)

Educational researchers know (heh) that there are many kinds and degrees of knowing, and that we don’t fully understand all that’s involved in the thing we blithely call “knowing” [Redish-2003tfp]. It’s complicated. For useful knowledge, we need to have the right “mental resources” in our heads, and we also need to have the right associations and triggers in place so that those resources are “activated” in the appropriate contexts.

When do I understand the concept of “force”? When I can spell it? When I can quote a definition? When I can recognize the presence of one in simple and familiar situations, or in subtle and novel situations? When I can use the concept as a tool to reason with in familiar contexts? In unfamiliar ones? I doubt there’s a person on the planet who can do all of these things in all possible cases, infallibly, so does anybody really understand “force”?

If that doesn’t hurt your brain enough, consider metacognitive knowledge: knowledge about your own knowledge. To quote my colleague and former dissertation advisor, Bill Gerace: “Sometimes you know something. Sometimes you know you know something. And sometimes you know you knew something, but don’t any more.” What’s going on there?

And, as Uganda has reminded me, sometimes you only think you know something.

I’ve been in Uganda for the last week, visiting my good friend and colleague Silas Oluka at Makerere University in Kampala. Tuesday we met up with Silas’ brother Stephen in order to visit a couple of rural schools. Stephen runs the government office charged with periodically inspecting the 3000-odd schools of Uganda’s Central District for quality assurance — a daunting task, given that his office consists of eight inspectors and one motorized vehicle.

The most immediately noticeable thing about Stephen is his size. He is very, very tall: the well-proportioned kind of tall that one doesn’t notice until someone else stands next to him or he dips down to pass through a doorway. The second most immediately noticeable thing about him is his joviality. He laughs frequently, deeply, and authentically: not the sniggering of the cynic or the giggling of the juvenile, but the gleeful peals of one who finds life to be an endlessly delightful comedy. He can be both jovial and serious at the same time. I saw him very gracefully and cheerfully, yet very pointedly, reprimand and warn a school headmaster when he found a stick prominently visible by the headmaster’s office door. “That’s a pointing stick, right? Used only for pointing?” (Said with laughter in the voice and steel in the eyes.) To me, the stick looked just about perfect for delivering a serious, no-messing-around hiding.

Stephen may be an extreme case, but joviality seems to be a common and general trait of the Ugandans I met and observed. Silas articulated the world-view succinctly: “It is better to laugh at problems than to be unhappy. What does unhappiness accomplish?” (Apologies if I didn’t get the words quite right.)

The Makerere University Guest House is not exactly a high-end establishment, though you wouldn’t immediately suspect this based on their prices. My last morning in Uganda, I was in a hurry to rise, shower, shave, dress, eat breakfast (something of a fiasco), pack, and meet Silas. Spending a half-hour in the shower wasn’t part of my plan, but the Guest House had other ideas. Just after I’d thoroughly coated myself hairline-to-toes with a good soapy lather, someone upstream of me turned on another shower. Or so I hypothesize; all I really know is that my shower suddenly faltered from a warm and adequate (if not exactly invigorating) stream to a cold and pathetic little dribble. Uh oh.

So I waited for my water pressure to return. And waited. And waited. At one point, it returned (glory hallelujah!), but petered out again after a ten-second tease. It even disappeared entirely for a short while. I don’t know exactly how long I stood soapy and hopeful, but I’d estimate somewhere around 25 minutes. When my errant water finally returned, I was moments away from screwing up my courage to rinse the now-gummy soap residue off in the agonizingly cold dribble, and punting on the shampoo. (“Agonizingly cold” may be an overstatement, but anyone in my family will affirm that I’m a wimp about cold water. I’d choose boiling oil first.)

While I waited, I got progressively colder, and progressively angrier. I’m no stranger to the vagaries of third-world travel, so I was initially unperturbed, willing to roll with the punches. Then a little disquieted. Then increasingly irritated, until I was fuming at the temerity of a hotel that charged first-world rates for a spongy saggy bed, lumpy pillows, criminally negligent breakfast service, and a water supply that could apparently only support one shower at a time within a bank of nine rooms.

And then I remembered Stephen. I pictured him in the same situation, and knew he would be in hysterics, shaking the walls with laughter.

It didn’t make me laugh, and it didn’t entirely dissipate my irritation, but it did make me realize that I, not the shower or the hotel or Circumstance, was the source of my unhappiness. And that, at least, helped me to put my umbrage back in the bottle. Even if I was irritated, I was conscious of the fact that I didn’t have to be.

When I told Silas this story, he laughed — predictably — with a perfect blend of amusement and sympathy. Then he said that Stephen would have gone to the hotel desk to inform them of the problem, and done it in such a way that he and the staff all had a good laugh together. And then he told me a Ugandan aphorism: “If you turn the tap and water comes out, or you flip the switch and the light goes on, you’re not in Africa.” Said, of course, without a hint of self-pity.

So here’s my question: is umbrage a choice? Are irritability and joviality merely choices that become ingrained habits? Can a taciturn Yankee like myself simply decide to adopt Stephen’s stance towards life and then achieve it through perseverence, or does one’s brain get irrevocably wired with emotional reflexes early in life?

Either way, I’m looking forward to visiting Uganda again. With or without water pressure.

Congo Watch: Friday, March 18, 2005

I’m a big fan of the way recent applications have been replacing the “filing” metaphor with a “tagging” metaphor. In traditional email applications, I stick messages someplace in my mail folder hierarchy (e.g., a folder for a particular project), and if I want it to appear in another folder as well (e.g., all mail from a particular person), I have to duplicate the message. By contrast, Gmail lets me stick as many tags as I want onto a message. Each tag can act like a folder, except that a message can be in multiple such “folders” simultaneously. And, I can search on the union or intersection of tags. (I just did that: looked at everything “starred” relevant to a particular project.) Apple’s Mail gets something of the same functionality with “smart folders”, but it’s still a folder-based rather than tag-based system at heart.

Flickr also uses the tag metaphor to great effect. Both Gmail and Flickr, however, have a “flat” tag space; I can’t create nested tags the way I create nested folders, which limits the size and complexity of the tagging system I can set up. Better would be some kind of hierarchical tag system, where tags (e.g., “project x”) can have sub-tags (e.g., “instrumentation”) and sub-sub-tags (e.g., “instrument y”). I read that Apple’s new pro-level photo-editing application Aperture has this, though I haven’t seen it myself.

So, why not chuck the hierarchical-folders metaphor for my computer’s document filing system in favor of a hierarchical tagging system? No more need for “aliases” or “shortcuts”! And throw in a powerful search system, so that files don’t need to “be” anywhere. Let’s ditch the entire idea that a file is “somewhere”, as if it were a piece of paper. All documents will live within my document repository, easily accessible either by search or by various tag-based views I construct. No more nested-folder walls.

But — never easily satisfied — I want more from my document repository. Why should I have to duplicate and rename files to keep old versions around? Build in robust, automatic, always-on, fine-grained version control of the type that Writeboard has. Now I can roll back if needed, or just peek back to see what I said the first time around. We’ve broken down the wall of time as well, or at least as much as mortals are likely to.

If we’re doing away with filing system and temporal walls in my document repository, why not do away with spatial walls as well? Give me an internet-based file respository I can access from any connected computer anywhere, along with local caching and behind-the-scenes synchronization so that I have the illusion that I’m working on a local file system (even to the extent of working off-line) that just happens to miraculously exist and be always identical on every computer I use. (Okay, I’ll accept the occasional bit of latency for updating, but keep it brief. We’ll need smart, anticipatory caching and synchronization scheduling here.) Box.net is already taking a step in that direction, and Google is supposedly cooking up something similar under the catchy name G-Drive.

Mmm… We’re on a roll. Let’s do away with the “mine” vs. “yours” wall as well. Why are files “mine” or “yours”, anyway? Working on a multi-person collaborative project, most of the project files are really “ours”. At the present, we can all keep our own copies, emailing updates back and forth, but that leads to the inevitable problems of “Do I have the latest version?” and “Uh-oh, we both made changes to that doc.” Programming teams have addressed this problem long ago through versioning systems like cvs and subversion. That, however, is far from seamless, and not so accessible to non-geeks. Another possibility is to maintain a project web site that acts as a central file store, uploading and downloading files as necessary with a “content management system” like Plone. This is slow and cumbersome, with the result that most of us keep local copies anyway. The web site simply serves as the “authoritative” repository (and only works well as long as we’re all disciplined enough to upload the latest versions, keep older versions there, and label everything well enough to identify version history).

Instead, let’s have all our files live in a big “cloud”, each tagged by the person who created it as well the people who have the rights to delete or rename or edit or re-tag or read or even be aware of it. This need not be a management nightmare. Imagine I assign files a tag that marks them as belonging to a specific project, and that I tag all the people on the project team as well. (Or all of a subgroup such as “developers”.) Then, with a tag-based permission system, I assert that all documents in this project can be edited (or whatever) by all people on the team. Low-maintenance: any time I want to add a new document to the project’s document cloud, making it available to all the relevant people, I just stick the right tag on. And the file is still “on my machine”, or at least looks that way thanks to all the fancy caching and synchronizing that’s happening.

Getting fine-grained is easy with hierarchical tags. For the tags I attach to people, I’ve got a project tag, and sub-tags for various groups that should have various access privileges. And project sub-tags for documents of various classes (“draft”, “public”, “instrumentation”, “publicity”, etc.). Now, at the same time as I’m making these various documents easy to find and view in various ways, I’m making them easy to share with the right people.

Let’s see… We’ll need a new kind of file-browser to navigate and search this cloud of location-agnostic, potentially group-owned documents. Something better than and different from both Apple’s Finder and Microsoft’s Windows Explorer (not hard). With “smart folders” that can, for example, readily provide all files with certain tags, tag combinations, or search characteristics. And with seamless viewing of various file formats, probably via an extensible plug-in architecture and smooth interop with various applications. Now, if some of these document formats support hyperlinks to documents elsewhere in the cloud, and communicate with the file browser to follow them, I can traipse from document to document if I want to: another way of finding stuff in the cloud. A seamless integration of document filing, document browsing, and link following… Does this start to sound like the future of the Web?

Oh, and I want it next week. Thanks.

Evidence of myth: How often the verb “I taught” is used interchangeably with “I presented to my students”.

Fact: “What the instructor covers” differs from “what the students learn”, often drastically.

Evidence for fact: Stop teaching and check for understanding. If you really pay attention, you can’t miss it.

* * *

Why is this so difficult for people to get?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to explain this. Usually, I’m extolling instruction that focuses on developing students’ understanding and ability to reason with ideas, rather than simply rote-learning and regurgitating facts and procedures. I’m getting into the importance of earnestly probing to see what students actually understand, and not proceeding until they “get it”. Of taking the time to build a solid foundation, rather than building on sand. And then, almost inevitably, a teacher says “But in reality, that’s too slow. We have a certain amount of material to cover. If we don’t finish the syllabus, the students won’t be prepared for the [exam/next course/whatever]“.

What good, I ask, does it do to “cover” something if students don’t actually learn it? I usually get dead silence at this point. The person I’m talking to doesn’t have an answer, but doesn’t like the conclusion either.

I think the reason this is a difficult idea for many instructors to swallow is that swallowing it leads to a very uncomfortable line of thought, one that challenges their very role as a teacher.

If what my students learn cannot reasonably be assumed to match what I present, and my responsibility is to teach (i.e., cause or facilitate learning), then I have to stop focusing on syllabi and lesson plans and lecture notes and beautiful PowerPoint slides, and start focusing on my students’ knowledge and learning and difficulties and pre-existing conceptions. I have to get out of my own head and into my students’ heads. And that requires a whole new set of skills, a whole new role.

It’s much less threatening to think my responsibility stops at summarizing the contents of a textbook, assigning homework, and setting exams. And if the students aren’t meeting my expectations, then obviously they’re either lazy (their fault), stupid (nobody’s fault), or underprepared (their previous teachers’ fault or “the system’s” fault).

* * *

Coverage does not necessarily imply learing, and therefore does not necessarily imply teaching. I keep “covering” this point, and yet, somehow, my listeners don’t learn it.

If you want to find out whether someone understands something — a concept, a procedure, a perspective — don’t just ask whether they understand. The chances of a false positive are too high. Why?

1. The learner may think they understand, when they don’t, or at least not fully. The more complex the topic, the more likely this is. “Yes” can often mean “I think I get a little something of what you just said” (the optimistic approach).
2. The learner may know they don’t understand, but have framed the interaction as “trying to give the instructor the answers he/she wants.” This is distressingly common in authoritarian educational systems that stress drill-and-practice, which includes much of the world. Especially anyplace the British have been.
3. The learner may be saying whatever it takes to get you to leave them alone and go away, or at least pick on someone else in the class. The more completely lost they are, the more likely this response becomes.
4. With multiple learners, you’ll hear from the few bravest, most confident students. Even if they get it, that doesn’t mean the rest do.

In some cultures and contexts, you’re virtually certain to be told “yes” no matter what is going on in the learner’s head.

So how do you ascertain understanding? Ask the learner to use the idea, procedure, perspective, or whatever it is. Not just parrot back what you’ve said, not just mimic something you’ve demonstrated; actually apply the thing in a way that demands actually “getting it.”

A side benefit is that using knowledge will help the learner get it, and get it better, and keep it.

South Africa has a phenomenon called “yellow line driving”. To get this, the first thing you need to know that in South Africa, roads — or at least those that are tarred and line-painted — are marked differently than US roads. SA roads have a yellow line down outside of the outermost travel lane in each direction, along the shoulder. The double line down the middle of the road, separating northbound traffic from southbound (or whatever), is white.

The second thing you need to know is that the vast majority of South Africa’s roads, even of the long-haul limited-access highways, are two lanes wide. And SA has a lot of open space, so one an drive for a long, long, long time on a two-lane highway.

The third thing you need to know is that on highways, the speed limit depends on vehicle type. It’s generally 120 km/h for cars, 100 km/h for “combis” (minivans, typically overstuffed, serving as privately-owned mass transit), and 80 km/h for lorries (the big trucks). Not that everyone obeys the limit, of course, but SA’s traffic police have devilishly effective speed traps. They’ll sit under a tree by the side of the road with a combination radar gun/camera on a tripod. As you zip by faster than you should, they’ll clock you and take a picture that shows both your license plate number and your speed. Some time later, that picture, along with a citation and a fine to be paid, arrives at the mailing address of the car’s registered owner. And at present, local police get to keep the money they collect via traffic fines, so there’s a certain motivation for them to be, shall we say, zealous in their enforcement of the law.

This means that if you drive any distance here, you’re virtually certain to get stuck behind a slow truck on a two-lane highway. Frequently. Possibly for a very long time.

The solution that has evolved is called “yellow line driving”. Many truck drivers will cheat over onto the shoulder, spanning the yellow line, to make room for faster traffic to pass. Some trucks do this as needed; others just hang out on the yellow line for kilometer after kilometer. Take it from someone who’s always in somewhat of a hurry: yellow line driving is a very welcome thing indeed.

Yellow line driving isn’t just for trucks, either. The driver of vehicle is likely to slide over into the shoulder to give you passing room. When you start to pass, an oncoming vehicle will slide outward as well, temporarily redefining the two-lane road as a three-lane one. (It takes a certain amount of faith to drive down the middle of a two-lane highway on the assumption that the oncoming car will in fact notice you and adjust. And that when she does, nobody behind her will suddenly do exactly what you’re doing. I know enough physics to calculate how much kinetic energy is converted to heat, noise, and “internal degrees of freedom” — e.g., rearranging your anatomy — when two tons of metal collide at a relative speed of over 240 km/h…)

I have a photograph of a truck being passed by another truck being passed by a car being passed by another car, while a third truck comes the other way from over a hill. I took the picture through the windshield of a car that was directly behind the four-vehicle phalanx. Fortunately, this particular section of highway had four lanes, so the only casualty was my composure. (Sorry I can’t post that photo here; it’s a 35mm slide on the other side of the globe at the moment.)

The informal custom of sliding over to make room for a passer, whether from behind or oncoming, isn’t limited to South Africa. I’ve encountered it in other southern African countries, in Jamaica, in Costa Rica, in Argentina and Chile, and elsewhere. And that’s what taught me something about my home culture. Specifically, about American drivers.

Americans are hung up on their rights in many ways, and this is beautifully manifest in their driving habits. If I’m stuck behind a slower vehicle on a no-passing road in most countries I’ve visited, chances are good the driver will be helpful and try to let me by. In the US, it’s virtually certain he’ll ignore me, and I’ll be sucking exhaust until a passing zone appears. “It’s my right to drive in this lane at this speed. If you don’t like it, that’s your problem.”

And if I do (ahem) pass someone in the US by cheating into the oncoming lane, and a car comes towards me in that lane, that car won’t coolly slide over and give me room. Instead, the driver will freak, lean on the horn, flash the headlights, and generally communicate “Oh my God, you idiot, you’re trying to kill me!” (I know. I’ve tried it. Please don’t tell my mom.)

As a generalization, I’d suggest that American drivers are preoccupied with their rights. Foreign drivers, at least in the developing world, are just trying to make it work for everyone. With much less umbrage.

Not, mind you, that I’m objecting to the having or valuing of rights. Quite the contrary. But there’s a difference between having a right and aggressively, unnecessarily exercising it at the expense of kindness and consideration.

The most beautiful part of yellow line driving, as practiced in South Africa, is what I call the “South African salute”. As I pass someone who drove the line for me, I flash my hazard lights once or twice, which means “thank you”. The other driver flashes her headlights briefly, signifying “you’re welcome”. Civilized, no?

In the US, if I blazed by someone in a no-passing zone and then flashed my hazards like that, they’d probably think I was cussing them out. In Los Angeles, I’d probably get shot.

The sad part about this is that yellow line driving is dying out in SA. Many trucks now have signs something to the effect of “This vehicle is not allowed to travel in the yellow line”, though the drivers don’t always comply. (I’ve even seen “No, I won’t drive on the f***ing yellow line!”, though I failed to get my camera out in time.) It seems there have been several horrific accidents in which trucks hit bridge abutments, slipped off an eroded shoulder and overturned, or ran over children when they suddenly needed to get back into the travel lane and couldn’t, trapped by a passing car. I’d suggest that driving full-time down the line, over blind hills and around curves, is probably unwise. The backlash, however, seems to be inhibiting all yellow-line driving.

Also, I’ve noticed a general decline in the average courtesy level of SA fourteen years I’ve been visiting. During and shortly after apartheid, drivers were a small, elite, and congenial fraternity. Traffic congestion was rarely a problem. Since then, vehicle ownership has skyrocketed. The influx of new drivers alone would probably disrupt the propagation of any existing road culture, and nightmare stop-and-go commuting in the greater Jo’burg-Pretoria area could sour anyone’s sense of camaraderie.

Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to popularize the South African Salute in the US. If you happen to squeeze over so a green Subaru Outback can pass you, and the driver blinks his hazard lights a time or two, please don’t shoot.

I appreciate straight talk!

My most scarce commodity, by far, is time. Given my goals, resources, and lifestyle, I’m neither cash-limited nor opportunity-limited nor knowledge-limited. I’m time-limited. There just isn’t enough time to do a quarter of the things I’d like to do. And so I maximize efficiency, trying to make every minute count. Call it temporal frugality, if you will.

I really, really hate wasting time. If I’ve got a ten minute wait before my ride home is leaving, I’ll find something productive to do. (“Productive” can be defined fairly broadly; poking about the web counts, if I’m informing myself about something I’d like to know more about.) I arrive 30 seconds to three minutes late for almost every meeting and appointment, since I aim to arrive exactly on time and I usually overlook some speed bump or another; arriving early would mean (gasp) waiting. And even my recreational outings and vacations are planned and executed with brutal efficiency, for optimal satisfaction per unit time.

I may be a little more hyper this way than most of my associates — okay, significantly more hyper — but in my social context, a concern with temporal frugality seems rather normal. Most of my friends and colleagues are similarly time-limited. Even the retired ones are busy with all kinds of travels and entertainments and worthy projects. Heck, I’ve seen people get busier when they retire.

So when I travel about southern Africa, as I am this semester, I am truly nonplussed by the multitude of people I see waiting. Just waiting. Sitting by the road, or under a tree, or on the step of a shop. Some are waiting for a bus. Some are waiting for a friend. Some are waiting for a random passer-by to stop and buy a mango. Some, such as security guards, are getting paid to just be there. And some, as far as I can determine, are just killing time. (Ouch.) I’m pretty sure that many of these waiters are in it for the long haul… hours, probably.

It would absolutely rend me to wait like that. I’d probably need trauma counseling. So how do people here stand a life so full of waiting, of doing nothing? As I suggested in my last post: for them, it’s just normal.

And I wonder what my pace of life would look like to them. Equally intolerable, perhaps?

Saying South Africa has a crime problem is a bit of an understatement. The World’s Most Dangerous Places (5th edition, 2003) gives SA a danger rating of three stars out of five for having the highest per capita crime rate in the world. Murder, rape, mugging, and car-jacking are rampant. Leaving something in plain sight in your car or yard here is pretty much equivalent to placing it by the road with a big “help yourself” sign, or so I’ve been told.

I’m not a sociologist, but the general causes of this crime epidemic seem obvious enough.

1. Start with years of apartheid, resulting in two distinct but symbiotic societies: one affluent and first-world, the other deeply impoverished and third-world. The underclass has been systematically brutalized, marginalized, relocated, and disenfranchised.
2. Suddenly change the political system, give political power to the underclass, and dissolve long-standing economic sanctions and boycotts. This results in an explosion of economic growth and consumerism and a new middle class, but with high unemployment and a still-impoverished underclass.
3. Open the borders to even more impoverished, desperate people from the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. Then try to shut down the massive inflow, mostly unsuccessfully, resulting in hordes of impoverished, desperate, and now illegal people.
4. Mix in an HIV/AIDS epidemic that devastates family structures and creates entire subcultures of orphans raising orphans.

Is it any wonder the social contract breaks down?

(If you read this, Mom, remember that I’m spending most of my time in a small town in the boondocks. Crime, especially the violent types, is much less prevalent here than in the cities. Jo’burg and Cape Town vie for the title of murder capital of the world, and little Alice isn’t even close. However, what what I’m about to say applies here as well.)

One consequence of rampant crime is a proliferation of locks, keys, gates, fences, razor wire, alarms, unfriendly dogs, private guards, and signs that say “24 hour armed response” (usually with a silhouette of a gun, just to make sure you get the point even if you don’t read English so well). I wouldn’t be surprised if a secondary consequence is lower back pain and a tertiary one is boom times for chiropractors, since most people carry around several tangled gobs of keys big enough to anchor an offshore oil rig. The locks in doors and gates tend to be the old-fashioned type (with keyholes that go all the way through, with that stereotypical “keyhole” shape), meaning that many of keys are long, thick, and heavy.

What both amuses and disturbs me is that most doors and gates lock from both sides. A key is required to enter or to exit. Most locks are kept locked all of the time. As a visitor, even a long-term one, I have few keys. (Probably a good thing, from an orthopedic perspective.) All of which, taken together, means that my ability to get out of any building I find myself in is questionable.

The only way out of the university building in which I have my temporary office is to travel the length of a hallway, up a flight of stairs, down a flight, along a short hallway, dog-leg left, along a much longer hallway, through a gate into a kind of entrance hall, and through a final set of doors and gates to the great outdoors. There are several closer doors I could exit through, except that all are locked full-time. From both sides, of course. The closest door to my office is never locked, but the security gate over it is actually welded shut.

I’ve been told this cuts down on theft. I believe it: I couldn’t carry a computer that far, much less do it without being noticed.

The first-floor windows are all barred. My only way out is locked at some unspecified and unpredictable time during the evening, so if I work late, I must telephone the main guard office and request release. And if a fire starts somewhere between my office and that gate, well… Let’s not go there.

So what is “normal”? In the US, it is normal to have egress from any place, any time, unless you’ve had the misfortune to end up on the wrong end of the justice system. In South Africa, it is normal to massively restrict movement to minimize theft. We optimize on convenience and fire safety, they optimize on physical and material security. Each is rational in its context.

More interesting, perhaps, is my reaction to finding my sense of normalcy violated. When I want to exit someplace and am thwarted by a locked door, indignation surges. How dare it! Somewhere, deep in the freedom-loving recesses of a brain raised on the Bill of Rights and the unbridled pursuit of personal convenience, I feel I have an inalienable right to go outside. (Sounds more dignified to call it “freedom of movement”, eh?) Rational or not, it boggles my mind that people voluntarily live like this. The difference between a fortress and a prison, as has oft been observed, is mighty slim.

How many other unconscious expectations, not shared by others on this planet, do I hold? How do people’s unspoken and conflicting models of “the normal” impede communication and understanding? It’s easy for me to learn how someone lives differently than I do, but it’s a whole lot harder to learn how they think differently. You know that old saw about “walking a mile in someone’s shoes”? I may learn a lot about their shoes, but it’s still me doing the walking. How do I walk a mile with someone else’s feet?

I’ve met people who live in conditions of poverty and deprivation that I would find absolutely unbearable. If I were forced to live that way permanently, without hope of escape, I suspect I’d be depressed and bitter until the day I died. And yet these people are not only not depressed, but often quite upbeat. Why?

For them, it’s just normal.

Are you brave (or desperate) enough to use a laxative named “Surge”?

The world of educational research has long since figured out that although information can be transmitted and memorized, knowledge must be constructed by each individual. Learning (in the knowledge sense) is an ongoing process of sense-making as new ideas are integrated into the individual’s existing mental models of the world. And — here’s the kicker — how a person goes about that process, how she interprets new information and evidence, and even what she pays attention to in the first place are governed by the models she already holds. In other words, what you think you know largely determines what you see and what you will learn from it. (This perspective is called constructivism.)

In fact, humans are flat-out incapable of knowing “the truth”. From before birth we observe, model, observe more (filtered by the model), interpret (from the perspective of the model), and, when backed into a corner, revise the model. Our cerebral machinery processes and reprocesses the data of our limited senses before even the most rudimentary awareness intrudes on our conscious mind. We have no direct access to the raw stuff of reality. The best we can hope for is a collection of mental constructs that are not too fragmented, not to inconsistent, and close enough to “reality” that we can function without doing anything too stupid. If you talk to a physicist who is careful with his language, he won’t tell you about nature. He’ll tell you about models that explain, as completely and economically as possible, the observations we can make about nature.

(Are you religious? If you object to the previous paragraph on the grounds that it contradicts the notion of “divinely revealed truth”, please reconsider. Do you really believe the infinite deity and the wonders beyond this mortal coil can be perfectly, accurately, completely captured by any finite human mental constructs? We’ve been told as much about the divine as we need and can handle, no more or less.)

So it’s no wonder that people who feel President Bush is the devil incarnate can find copious evidence to strengthen their opinion, whereas those who believe he is protecting us against fanatical enemies from without and moral decay from within see many reasons to fortify theirs. We all filter, we all interpret, and our models are all self-reinforcing. We can’t help it. That’s just human nature.

Hmm… Sounds like a problem, eh? Aside from wallowing in existential angst, what can we do about this damnably inconvenient limitation?

Well, that’s why I named this blog Think Twice.

• Everybody’s world view makes sense to them, and very very few people are deliberately evil. If someone’s thinking seems obviously flawed or ill-intentioned, it’s a safe bet I don’t really understand it. And until I do, it behooves me to be very, very cautious about criticizing it. So when someone says something I disagree with and I’m inclined to condemn or ignore it, I should think twice.
• Alas, I am just as human as the rest of you (despite what my fourth college roommate said about physics majors). People I passionately disagree with are just as sure of themselves as I am of myself. Annoyingly, many of them are just as bright, well-educated, and well-informed as I. Perhaps more so. It would be hubris to think that my confidence is better founded than theirs simply because I’m me. I filter and interpret, too. So, when I think I’m right about something, I’d better think twice.
• What we know is merely an approximation of what really is, and reality is infinitely richer and more subtle than we’ll ever appreciate. When I think I understand something, I’d be wise to think twice.
• The most powerful tool we have for pushing back the limitations of the mind is awareness of those limitations. So I think, and then think about my thinking. People who like big words call this metacognition. (Once in a while, just to be careful, I think about how I think about my thinking.) Think twice! (Or three times, or…)

That’s the primary reason I named this blog as I did, but not the only one. I’m an oddball. People who get to know me in a limited context and try to place me in a convenient box — liberal, conservative, religious, rationalist, hyper-intellectual, impulsive, compulsively organized German, moody Celt, whatever — are invariably wrong. Or rather, they’re 10% right and 90% wrong. For that reason I very much dislike labels. Even labels that are technically correct, because I fit the strict definition, tend to be so encrusted with inaccurate connotations and assumptions that they rankle. So if you think you’ve got me pegged, think twice.

I wonder how many of us really do fit into nice neat boxes. Next time I stick a label on someone, perhaps I should heed my own advice. The problem is, labels are so darned convenient…

The title of the article pretty much says it all: Outsourcing Torture:
The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. According to Wikipedia:

Extraordinary rendition refers to an American extra-judicial procedure… of sending criminal suspects, generally suspected terrorists or supporters of terrorist organisations, to countries other than the United States for imprisonment and interrogation.

Typically, the CIA abducts a suspect in a foreign country and whisks him off to a US ally whose intelligence agency is known to employ means of persuasion that US law prohibits the CIA from practicing. That is, torture: brutal, barbaric, revolting physical and psychological torture. Suspects so abducted often stay “disappeared” for months or years. Some are eventually released without charges. Some wind up at Gitmo. Some never resurface.

As I understand it — and I leave open the possibility that I have been misled by inaccurate or incomplete reporting — the US Government does not deny the practice of extraordinary rendition. Rather, its defense of the practice seems to have two components. One is a rather flimsy-sounding legal argument that (a) the intent of delivering suspects to unsavory allies is not to obtain information through torture, but rather via more culturally-informed, native-language interrogators; and (b) the practice only violates international law (specifically the UN Convention Against Torture, Article 3) if US operatives believe it “more likely than not” that torture will result. Which, we’re told, they don’t.

The other component of the defense is the emotional one: an assertion that “we have to take the gloves off” in the war against terror. In other words, America’s agents don’t have time for slow, psychological, rights-respecting interrogation tactics. In the race to discover and disrupt terror attacks before more (American) lives are lost, some moral scruples must be sacrificed.
It is this latter argument that deeply, deeply disturbs me. It’s taken me the better part of a day, and a couple of hours arguing with a friend, to articulate why.

I supported the invasion/liberation of Iraq, and I continue to. Why? Not because of the danger of weapons of mass destruction, nor the potential for an Iraq-al Qaeda link. Rather, for the sake of the Iraqi people, especially the poor much-abused Kurds. I think of myself as a “benevolent interventionist”: I believe the US, the UN, the EU, and other powerful nations have an obligation (not a right) to intervene elsewhere in the world to prevent groups weaker than us from brutalizing groups even weaker than themselves. To put it metaphorically: if I’m walking behind a school and encounter a 14-year-old beating up an 8-year-old, I have a moral obligation to break it up. Even though they’re not my kids.

Maybe I’ll explore that position in a future post, but not here. I’m presenting that now only for context. Questionable US government justifications for the Iraq invasion/liberation didn’t disturb me terribly because I recognize that many Americans are “selfish interventionists”: they only think the US should spend its resources and the lives of its soldiers to protect itself. I figured US leaders were trying to do the right thing from a “rescue the downtrodden and spread democracy and freedom to the world” perspective, and were just being expedient about motivating the American electorate to go along. Less than saintly, perhaps, but not exactly evil either.

Accusations about Halliburton notwithstanding, I’m still inclined to give people the benefit of the doubt and think that most (if not all) of our elected and appointed leaders are trying — with varying degrees of clarity and competence — to do the right thing, at least as they see it, within the constraints of a ravenously unforgiving political context.

So why does extraordinary rendition shake me so deeply? Because we are in a war — a military, cultural, and intellectual war against fanaticism and contempt for basic human rights — and I suddenly wonder whether my nation’s leaders, my public servants, are on the same side I am.

As I see it, one of the greatest causes of evil and misery in the history of the world is the human tendency to partition people into “us” vs. “them”, the “in group” vs. the “out group”. This tendency will take advantage of any convenient fault line along which to divide: religion, ethnicity, social class, language, sports team, profession, even operating system. (As far as I know, nobody has ever died for Windows. Not so for the others.)

If the US is willing to sacrifice morality… to violate the most basic human rights of unconvicted suspects… to torture in an attempt to head off potential attacks on American citizens, then this is just one more “us vs. them” struggle. It’s not right vs. wrong any more, but just “my thugs are better than your thugs.” We’ve lost the moral high ground.

And I don’t believe a war of values can ever be won that way. The problem, you see, is that even if you eventually do eliminate the enemy, you’ve lost. In the process, you’ve become the enemy.

Disclosure: I’m a Catholic by conversion (formerly an atheist), and I believe we’ve been shown very very pointedly that doing what’s moral and right, without compromise, even if it leads to death, is the only path to victory.