Overheard…need more real world applications!

Standing in the cafeteria line today, I couldn’t help but overhear the two students behind me discussing the test in some unidentifiable class. One said, “I wish they would ban those simulations from the test, I aced everything else, but couldn’t do the simulation part and so I got a 76.”

I turned around and said something to the effect of “But don’t the simulations demonstrate that you can actually apply what you’ve learned?”

He said, “Yeah, but I knew all the vocabulary, that shows that I learned the material.”

I responded with, “But isn’t that like knowing all the terminology about playing tennis. Just because you know the terms doesn’t mean you can actually play the game when you get on the court, does it?”

He and his friend gave me that, “Quit bothering us, you are an idiot” look.

I think that what I really overheard today was a student saying, “If you really want me to learn something, you’ll have to test more than just the vocabulary. You have to test whether or not I can do something with it…and I’ll resent it if you do.”

It reminded me, I must design more application exercises, preferably real life kinds of simulationthat that utilize the knowledge I ask students to glean…if I can figure out how to. This little snippet of converation really reinforced for me the notion that educational best practices require intentional focus on active learning, critical thinking and problem solving. This is challenging for everyone at first, but useful and consistent with the real aim of 21st century education.

Wiki-gating Update

I’ve been using the wikigation assignment in two different classes…American West, which is an upper division history class, and World Civ, which is a lower division general education class. I have observed some interesting things.

Thing 1: Students do read the assigned wikipedia pages in preparation for in-class discussions. One student wrote in his learning log:

I really am enjoying the way this class is set up. It’s a really fun and interesting way to learn. These wiki hunts really make you think and you have to pick and choose what you believe is most important within the information then share that information with your group and once you hear what everyone else got out of the hunt you have learned the topic without a 60 minute lecture.

Thing 2: The critical thinking questions designed to help guide student reading toward critical thinking might get in the way of content acquisition. For instance a student wrote in her learning log:

This week, i think i got a hang of the WIKI hunts better and really found those helpful. i focused more on what the articles were saying and what i got from them. rather than on answering those questions we were given to help us. i think some of those questions confused me, therefore it made it harder for me to understand and focus on what i was reading.

This is something to grapple with in light of the intended outcomes for the assignment. What do I really want the assignment to do…provide an opportunity for students to think critically think or to gather information with which they will later have an opportunity to process (as in during the class discussion). I’m inclined at this point to think that it should be the latter. I think this was a case of not clearly thinking through the process necessary to achieve the outcome.

Thing 3: Some students are able to see that Wikipedia is a very uneven source that suffers from credibility issues:

The one thing that I would say that is bad or not effective is the second wikipedia hunt for this week. The Israel and Judah project is a little too much information and had too much contraversy to be discussed without a professor present to give some feedback. I would also think that wikipedia is not the source to go to to learn about it either.

Another wrote

Finally, a few more comments about Wikipedia. I still really do not care for it. I never feel prepared after having read the article, even after looking at the history and some of the links. For the Homestead Act which we will talk about on Monday, I went to other sources as well, and I feel like a have a much better grasp. The thing about most Wikipedia articles is that there is often little background information. The article is not contextualized. However, that is what the links are supposed to be for. But those links have no background either, and it’s just a vicious cycle. I mean, I can get the basic information, but I can’t really find out what I deem to be the really important stuff.

This was one of my upper division students. I encouraged her previously to get in and edit the entry if she found a problem…to be part of the solution rather than just railing against the machine. She then related:

I did start editing Wikipedia this last week though. I must say it become rather addictive. Once you decide to correct one grammar mistake, it is amazing how many more one can find. I actually ending up completely re-wording most of one article. There was a nice sense of satisfaction, but I wonder how the personal who wrote it originally felt.

She continued this a week later…

Finally, I have to say that making my first major edit to Wikipedia this week has been very rewarding. The article about the Lincoln County War truly was awful when I read it. It made absolutely no sense and, after I looked up information from some more reliable sources, I realized that the article provided no sense at all of the actual story. I’m pretty sure I’ve read freshman fine arts papers that were better than this article. (And that’s really saying something, because those papers are excruciating.) Anyway, the article is still not great. It doesn’t have any flow, because I haven’t yet made any changes to the end of the article. I couldn’t find the information I needed to do some fact checking. Several people on the discussion page had pointed it out. I’m debating if I should bother correcting the grammar there, or just wait until I get a certain book in on inter-library loan to check the facts. And the opening section about the beginning of the Lincoln County War is much too long, but I haven’t yet figured out how to create a new section within the article. There are a lot of buttons and controls that one can press and I haven’t quite figured them all out yet. But I just couldn’t help feeling a perhaps inordinate amount of satisfaction when my fellow class members starting talking about our topic for the in day in the terms that I had chosen to describe it. I had taken something that was confusing and made it understandable… then of course the evil part of my nature rather wondered if I shouldn’t have left it like it was and made those lazy boys figure it out for themselves. But overall it was a nice experience to not just complain about “whoever wrote the article” and then move on.

Something tells me this assignment has real potential. Here we see the power of wikipedia’s weaknesses to inspire and thus, like the Dao, reveal its strength.

Course Workload: What’s Reasonable?

What is normal (not excessive, reasonable to expect) in a General Education class?

In a General Education course, properly calibrated for a group of student’s level of ability, it would be normal for faculty to expect students to utilize and demonstrate critical thinking and effective communication skills in order to meet the minimum acceptable standard for completing an assignment or a course.

It would be normal, in a properly calibrated course, for students to engage in the work of learning along the following lines:

Students should understand that it is normal to be working together in class, on topic, for the number of hours equal to the number of credit hours assigned to the course. In addition, students should expect to do about 2-3 hours of work outside of class for every hour students are in class together. Taking those together, it would be normal, in a three (3) credit course, for a student to spend 9 hours a week engaged in doing the work necessary to achieve the learning outcomes of the course.
For a course with a lab, it would be normal to spend 2-3 additional hours engaged in solving the weekly lab problem.
When students are in engaged in courses where the delivery system is not organized by the standard semester, it would be normal to expect the work load for the course to require that the student engage in learning activities for 40-50 hours over the instructional term for each credit hour assigned to the course (class + preparation and demonstration time). (For a 3 credit class, it would be normal for students to spend 120-150 hours engaged in class related work over the term).

While there are a wide range of learning activities and a range of tempos by which students complete those activities,

It would be normal to expect students to read critically 10-15 pages (2500-4000 words) in an hour.
It would be normal to expect students to compose 300-700 words of reflective writing to standard in an hour.
It would be normal to expect students to research and compose to standard a research paper (essay with sources) at a rate of 100 words per hour.
It would be normal to expect students to utilize 1-2 sources per page in a research paper. For those who like algebra, the equation might look like this: Number of Pages(Number of Sources X 2)= Normal.
It would be normal for students to spend 50-75% of the time together in class engaged in active learning exercises that require them to collect and aggregate information (normally acquired outside of class) from one another and analyze it, either individually or collectively, in order to create knowledge for themselves.

Creating a common understanding among both faculty and students about what a reasonable workload is for a class has several advantages.

Faculty can evaluate the assignments they give and time frame in which they expect them to be done against some of the normal times it might take to complete the assignment.
If faculty are willing to commit to a shared set of criteria like these, will live by them when making assignments, and will communicate these expectations to students as the discuss assignments, it may have the effect of upgrading the overall educational culture of an institution. Some expect too little from their students and others too much. Evening that out might be beneficial for everyone.
Increasing workload from low levels to reasonable ones may increase student engagement in learning, but increasing workload beyond reasonable leads to diminishing returns in regard to student engagement and thus learning. If students trust faculty to make reasonable assignments, then perhaps students will be willing to engage the assignment. This may be particularly true for reading in preparation for class. I know that I have been guilty of making large reading assignments and then being frustrated that students didn’t read them. After talking with students, I’ve come to discover that if they see 100 page a week reading assignments plus weekly writing assignments, they won’t read. The load is too daunting. By the standards above, I would be expecting 10 hours of reading and a couple of hours of writing a week in addition to class time. That’s probably enough over the top to decrease student engagement in the course…exactly the opposite of what I want to do.

All of this is the fruit of putting together things I’ve heard over the course of my teaching career and then thinking though nuts and bolts and implications. I think it would be great for folks to collect some real data in order to firm up the data on how much one can read and write in an hour in order to make the “reasonable” expectations even more reasonable by conforming them to findings drawn from a larger data set.

Tribal Leadership in Education

Faculty members make up a tribe. Students make up a tribe. It may be that the students and faculty in a course make up a tribe. If you want to know how to make a tribe really work, then it is imperative that you read David Logan, John King, and Hallee Fischer-Wright’s Tribal Leadership. In brief, the authors say this:

There are five types of tribes that identify themselves by the way they talk about their place in the world, which in turn indicates the way they interact with their world. According to Logan, King, and Fischer-Wright, these tribes are in fact people who live in a worldview that can be upgraded one step at a time toward the goal of a self-actualized community. They categorize the tribal stages as follows:

Stage 1 tribes believe and say things like “Life sucks.” People in such tribes are often raging individuals who don’t think resorting to violence to get what they want is a problem.
Stage 2 tribes believe that the world is made up of the “haves” and the “have-nots.” Members of stage 2 tribes believe that they are among the have-nots and that their life “sucks” but they see all sorts of people around them whose lives don’t. If you ask them why their life sucks, they claim to be victims of the oppression impressed upon them by the “haves.”
Stage 3 tribes believe and say things like “I’m Great! (and you’re not).” Members of stage 3 tribes are individuals on the make. They are working hard to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are competent, in fact they want to be the most competent person in their line of work. It seems amazing that such folks can live in proximity to one another, but stage 3 tribal members are willing to get along with other stage 3 folks as long as the other has a different (even if subtle) area of expertise.
Stage 4 tribes are made of people who build teams that claim “We are Great! (and they are not).” Stage 4 tribal members have networks of communication that rely on groups of 3 (triads). Groups that work in this state are about 30% more productive than Stage 3 tribes.
Stage 5 tribes, the rare few, live in a magical world in which members claim that “Life is Great!” and don’t see others groups as competitors. They are out to change the world as we know it for the better.

How does this apply to education. First, listen to your students. What do they say? I taught a group of students who had failed their college orientation class (go figure!). I was stunned by the way they talked about themselves in context of the academic universe. For the most part they existed in a Stage 2 tribe. They weren’t succeeding, but it wasn’t their fault…that prof, that staff member, that…. A few of them were willing to make the cultural shift to Stage 3, but most were not…they were on their way out the door. The only thing holding them to the university was their connection to the athletic program. Maybe they were a Stage 3 athelete…I don’t know.

Many of my students are at Stage 3. They are competent students. They know how to learn, at least learn enough to get the grade they want without too much stress. Set the bar, show it to them, and they’ll figure out how to jump over it. Some of them are even highly competitive. They get their self-esteem from being able to say, “I’m great,” and, while looking around the room, muttering under their breath, “(and your not).” Faculty, and I’ve been one of them, figure out that some students can be highly motivated by messing with their “I’m great” self-image. Grade them down a little and they get stressed and work harder. Notice here the subtle claim by the faculty member…”I’m great, dear student, and, well, your not.” According the Logan, King and Fischer-Wright, Stage 3 tribal members exist in a symbiotic relationship with Stage 2 tribal members. In traditional education, the Sage-on-Stage needs those adoring and over-awed students who fawn after him or her…and the teacher’s pet needs the dumb kids.

According to the authors of Tribal Leadership, a few pockets in academia are conducive to Stage 4 tribal development, particularly scientific research groups. For them, the problems are too big for any one person to solve them, so a team of three or more is necessary to get the job done. This becomes the basis for the potential development of Stage 4 tribes. Of course, low on the totem pole grad students in a research group answer to Stage 3 senior grad students, who are themselves caught in between 3 and 4 as they relate to the god-like PI.

Stage 5…Life is Great. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a thing in education…maybe Jesus on the cross…maybe Paul’s “to live is Christ to die is gain”… I don’t know. But those aren’t really examples from education, are they?

The goal of 21st century skills proponents, though they might not know it, is to help students achieve Stage 4 tribal status. According to Tribal Leadership, that’s not going to be possible until those students not only pass through, but own and discover the inadequacy of stages 2 and 3 tribes. Finding ways to get students from Stage 2 to Stage 3 is imperative to getting them to Stage 4. Is that a too linear way of thinking? I don’t know.

I think it might be interesting to explore how upgrading tribal cultures among both faculty and students might be the real goal of 21st century education.

Upgrading Educational Culture: Rhee Plans Shake-Up of Teaching Staff, Training – washingtonpost.com

Michelle Rhee highlights a good practice for achieving educational excellence: train teachers to teach. She’s proposing to do this by 1) providing new teachers with a competent mentor whose task is to help the new teacher become competent, 2) only retaining teachers who demonstrate that in fact they can teach effectively, 3) making decisions based on evidence of results, and 4) supporting teachers with further training that helps them use best practices based on good research to guide teaching practice.

Here are some excerpts from the story in the Washington Post.

“[District of Columbia Education Chancelor Michelle] Rhee plans to move the District away from the regimen of courses and workshops that have defined continuing education for teachers. Borrowing from best practices in surrounding suburban districts, she is building a system of school-based mentors and coaches to help instructors raise the quality of their work. She also wants to import a nationally prominent Massachusetts consulting firm with a reputation for improving teachers’ skills.

“But budget uncertainties, labor tensions and the timetable for the program’s rollout have sparked questions from teachers’ advocates about its effectiveness. At the same time, Rhee has dropped the school system’s direct support for instructors seeking certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a rigorous one- to three-year teacher development program, citing a lack of evidence that the training improves student achievement.

“Rhee’s five-year plan flatly stated: “There is no comprehensive professional development program for teachers.”

“George Parker, president of the teachers union, said this is especially true for first-year teachers, who sometimes struggle. “Great teachers don’t come into the system pretty much as great teachers,” he said. “They are developed. It’s going to take a teacher around three years to hit a stride.”

“Under Montgomery [County]’s program, operated jointly by the school system and the teachers union, novice instructors are paired with master teachers who visit them in the classroom regularly and monitor their progress. Within the first five years on the job, most enroll in The Skillful Teacher, a program of six day-long sessions devised by Jon Saphier of the Massachusetts-based Research for Better Teaching program.

“Saphier said the program fosters teachers’ belief in their power to lift student achievement despite conditions outside school.

via Rhee Plans Shake-Up of Teaching Staff, Training – washingtonpost.com.

It looks like the Montgomery County school system, and under Rhee maybe D.C., is upgrading its tribal culture, as per the model articulated by David Logan, John King and Halee Fischer-Wright in Tribal Leadership (henceforth TL). whether they know it or not. To become successful, new teachers, who in their gut feel overwhelmed and incompetent, need to develop the skills necessary to be a competent classroom teacher in a hurry. They learned about some of those habits and practices in college, but they didn’t really learn them, because the were taught them in a largely de-contextualized environment. Pairing the new teacher with a master teacher helps upgrade them from stage 2 (my life sucks) to stage 3 (I’m Great) on the TL scale. The Master Teachers, if they are forming teams to promote system-wide best practices that get results, then these competent teachers are upgrading to TL stage 4 (We Are Great).

I wonder if upgrading the culture of the teachers translates into upgrading the culture of students. The last sentence about Jon Saphier seems to suggest that maybe it does. That goes to the expectation of nation-wide education reform…except in unique situations, only competent teachers can help make competent students.

With the emphasis on 21st century skills (teamwork, critical thinking, communication, etc), it will take this kind of teamwork to model for teachers what they want their students to be doing in class.

So What’s a College Student Supposed to Do in College, Anyway?

Ask a group of 18 year olds that question and one might get answers such as “get a degree so that I can be a xxxx,” “have fun and meet new friends,” “find a mate,” and the more self aware of them might say, “grow up.” When Arthur Chickering thought about student development, he created a set of ideas known commonly as Chickering’s Seven Vectors. Below are Chickering’s vectors and what they might mean for a person trying to figure out what a college student should be doing in college.

Chickering asserted that while in college, students continue to develop into competent adults along seven pathways. They learn to

develop intellectual, interpersonal and physical competence
manage emotions
move through autonomy to interdependence
develop mature interpersonal relationships
establish identity
developing purpose
develop integrity

Further discussion of Chickering’s Seven Vectors can be found in Education and Identity (Jossey Bass Higher and Adult Education Series).

If Chickering’s observations are right, then students who reap the personal benefits of a college education can expect to have some uncomfortable experiences and personal discoveries. They can expect to discover that

They are not as smart as or as good as they thought they were (based on their high school sense of themselves). In college, thought, they get to become even better thinkers (more analytical, better informed, wiser), savier and more mature in their relationships and able to relate to different sorts of people, and perhaps even more physically skilled as they have opportunity to participate in and learn new skills through college activities such as choirs, art classes, and intramural sport programming (how many high schools had classes in racketball or backpacking?).
The new situations, the new environment, the new demands of college, in which they don’t have the same kind of family and friend network, makes for some rough emotional times. Learning to recognize the range of emotions that situations can evoke and control them, channeling emotional energy into productive pathways, all by oneself can be really tough. Many students coming to college have experienced a couple of different kinds of emotional environments. Some have been told how to feel and what to do with those feelings by family and friends. College requires them to experience emotions and figure out what to do with them for themselves. Others have been cut slack by parents and teachers regarding their emotional outbursts. Many believe that adolescents are supposed to have nearly uncontrollable emotional drama and that it’s best to let them emote. College students learn that emotional drama is counterproductive to successful college life, but that the college experience can provide them support and opportunities to figure out how to develop a more mature emotional outlook.
Some students who come to college are good at school, others aren’t. Some students know how to be themselves, others have lived like chameleons. College provides opportunities for students to become individuals who know that they are personally competent even without lots of people telling them they are (or in spite of it). It also provides opportunities for students who are or become personally competent individuals academically to move to the next level…to learn to rely on others, building teams of academically competent people, to accomplish tasks too large for one person to accomplish.
In college, students from lots of different backgrounds come to live and learn in close proximity to each other. Faculty encourage active participation and critical thinking in classes. Some students find that their view of the world is not shared by everyone. Developing mature interpersonal relationships requires students to figure out how to tolerate and appreciate those different from them. Maturity in interpersonal relationships also means that students have to figure out how to develop healthy intimate relationships, with appropriate boundaries. Girls and Guys Gone Wild, stalkers, passive-aggressives, possessors, and other “bad news” kinds of improperly bounded relationships are legendary parts of college life. Good colleges help students develop mature interpersonal relationships that value individual worth and promote relational health.
Unstrung from the family social network, college students often struggle with “Who am I?” questions in profound ways. In college they often put on different kinds of identities in order to explore the comfort of the fit. An oft heard saying is that a college student will change his/her major at least three times in their career. That can be scary, but it’s natural and its just the tip of the iceberg of a whole gamut of issues that students have to figure out for themselves that include “(1) comfort with body and appearance, (2) comfort with gender and sexual orientation, (3) sense of self in a social, historical, and cultural context, (4) clarification of self-concept through roles and life-style, (5) sense of self in response to feedback from valued others, (6) self-acceptance and self-esteem, and (7) personal stability and integration” (Chickering and Reisser, 1993, p. 49).
Who will I be? is another question that seems urgent and alarming to many college students. This goes back to changing the major three times or more. One of the tasks of college in terms of developing a sense of one’s purpose revolves around participation in experiential learning opportunities, service projects, and developing networks of friends while in college that will continue to be important to one’s life network in the future. Faculty who actively mentor students contribute significantly to helping students discover and resolve how they will answer the question of who they will be “when they grow up.”
Developing integrity is one of the most important things that students do in college. Most come to college with a received view of world. Their parents played a significant role in shaping that worldview. Most leave college with one similar to what they came in with. However, part of the college experience at a good college is to put that worldview through the fire and refine it. College should help students learn to think openly and critically about ideas. Being willing to change one’s mind in response to sound, evidence based reasoning, even if it means giving up something one has held dear, is the mark of a mature person and a person who will be able to make the world a better place. A college education should provide students with opportunities to learn how to formulate good questions, gather sound information, analyze truth claims, identify assumptions and control for presuppositions, identify (develop) and apply useful conceptual tools, see the problem from other points of view, draw conclusions based on reasoning informed by this process and identify the implications that those conclusions have for a persons beliefs and actions. In addition to being able to think for oneself, which is fundamental to the well-being of a free society, one needs the ability make decisions within an good ethical framework…one that is less egocentric than most adolescents initially possess. In college, students learn that doing what is right means acting in a manner that values others, builds rather than destroys relationships, values life, encourages and takes individual responsibility and participates in the development of a just society.

So what’s a college student supposed to be doing in college? Growing up is part of it, learning to think, having healthy fun, making mistakes and learning how not to make them again, learning how to be a whole and real person, learning how to be true to oneself and one’s beliefs while valuing and respecting others are other parts. College students have their work cut out for them, and those who design college experiences do to.

Wikigate: A Wikipedia-Based Learning Activity

Wiki-gate: (v) an activity by which students begin reading a Wikipedia article, identifying and recording relevant information from the article and the begin following wordlinks or other links, repeating the activity, in an effort to aggregate information into a network of information.

Why? Students on campuses where laptops are prevalent often aren’t focused on the task at hand in class but instead distracted by social networking, youtube, etc. Faculty complain and students admit that they don’t read textbooks. Thus, finding a way to leverage student computer use and increase time on task should reap some learning benefits. Wikigation gives students an opportunity to use Wikipedia to aggregate information on the assigned topic.

I imagine doing this in two formats. For small classes (less than 30) assign students a topic for discussion and a starting wikipedia page. Starting at that page, they surf Wikipedia following links (paths of desire) and aggregating information they find along the way. At some point along the way, each student needs to read a discussion page in order to see some of the debate over content by page creators and maintainers. Each student will then summarize her/his findings indicating the most interesting, useful or significant parts. These summaries will serve as the foundation for continued class discussion.

In a large class, students will share their knowledge with fellow group members. Groups will discuss individual finding and synthesize them into a report that summarizes their findings. Group oral reports can then be used either to engage the class in further discussion or as the basis for a quick mini-lecture to tie loose strands together.

As a follow-up activity, students will write a short essay synthesizing the knowledge gleaned from the topic…a learning log perhaps.

Where I’m coming from….

This is a bit of my educational narrative created to capture my motivations for transforming the general studies program

Thought 1: Each generation teaches its offspring the lessons it wishes to teach to its parents.

I wasn’t around for the redbirding and bluebirding…or if I was, it was in reading in first and second grade. I seem to remember some groupings, I was in the middle one, and wanted to be in the top one, and I remember trying to figure out what I needed to do to get into that group…to read whatever it was they were. I later did get there, and about that time, those groups went away. For the most part, the small town west Texas educators of my childhood and youth were mainstreaming and pushing through the last elements of integration and trying to ensure that no one had better access to education than anyone else.

I don’t know if my teachers saw it that way, but I did. I sat next to kids who couldn’t really read, for whom English was not the language of their home. They weren’t going to college, they were going to work. I never thought that was because they weren’t smart enough, but rather because that was just what the economy and the environment required. There was no difference in their education and mine. Most of them passed with a C and a smattering of Ds. In terms of grades, I don’t remember very many children who attended Idalou ISD left behind. I do remember the teacher spending more time managing their antics than challenging those of us who could read and were curious to learn to learn more. Ever since, I’ve been rather curious about descriptions of rigorous, competitive academic environments and those free-form, individualized curiosity driven systems (though I imagine descriptions of both are somewhat romanticized).

I think that those teachers and administrators of my youth were fixing the problems that were rampant when they had been in school, little towns with three schools—the white school, the Mexican school and the Negro school. They replaced that with the integrated, egalitarian school. By the way, I think that was great.

I think it must have led to a kind of plain vanilla education that tried to educate everyone, but didn’t do it very successfully…maybe the one size fits all curriculum didn’t fit the needs of all those different kids or maybe in those real classrooms the bell curve was inverted and the curriculum was pitched at the bottom of the U, leaving the curious to learn for themselves and the disinterested lost, bored, and looking to create whatever bit of distraction they could. That state of education I think led the fifty something set of educational policy makers, with Laura Bush their champion, to attempt to put teeth in the educational system…to ensure that every student not only got an opportunity but was compelled as much as is possible to learn, and to place the onus on the teacher to make sure that no child failed to learn. If nothing else, to make turn the U into a bell. I can respect that, as frustrating as my colleagues in secondary education find that challenge.

But, while you can lead a horse to water,….

So how did this condition my philosophy of education?

First, I believe in educational opportunity for all. I want to make sure that there is opportunity for everyone to learn as much as they can and want.

Second, I want to be sure that the weakest students learn those things that are essential to making a life and a living in the 21st century. Education is not a panacea, but we can’t allow anyone to be intellectually disenfranchised by the system. On the other hand, as someone who believes that people have the right to make choices and should be given opportunities to exercise those choices, I don’t figure we can make anyone learn if they don’t want to.

Third, I want to make sure that the really curious students have an opportunity to explore the world as fully as they can. They need teachers that will serve as their guides and lead them or point them toward whatever, wherever it is that will slake their current thirst for knowledge. I don’t want to turn my back on them, just because there doesn’t seem to be that many students who fit that profile (and I think there might be more than is apparent, because these folks are often pretty good at conforming to the system to get as much as it has to offer them and then quietly finding ways to get more elsewhere).

In short, I sure don’t want a U curve, and I really don’t want a bell curve, instead I believe that we live in a world in which we should strive to create, reinforce, and reward a J curve in terms of student learning and performance.

So that’s what I want to say to my parents, what will my kids want to say to me?

That’s it for Thought 1.

General Education

What is the minimum that colleges and universities should expect of their graduates? That question is what educators have been asking for decades if not centuries. Good faculty ask it of themselves every time they teach a class and wonder about it as they sit in graduation ceremonies.

Here’s my list of minimum expectations:

1) Critical Thinking: upon completing a university degree, college graduates are able to critically evaluate the assumptions, presuppositions, and arguments (both subtle and direct) embedded in expressions of thought and culture by individuals and societies.

2) Problem Solving: College graduates can solve problems creatively by drawing upon appropriate principles, methods, and examples from a variety of disciplines, predict possible consequences (positive and negative) of a range of potential actions, evaluate (if appropriate) possible solutions in an ethical framework, decide upon the best solution, and successfully plan and execute the chosen solution. Of course, one would hope they come in with those skills, but since many don’t, college educators must remediate when necessary and help our students extend their abilities in this area.

3) Effective Communication: College graduates can construct rational arguments based on solid evidence acquired from appropriate sources and through the use of the best available methods and can communicate those arguments clearly and concisely using sound rhetorical strategies in both speech and writing. Of course, students come to college with elements of these skills in place. As with any skill, practice makes better. Students must practice and refine these skills so that good communication skills comes second nature. They can stand up and speak well at the drop of a hat if necessary or sit down and compose a text, using proper grammar and spelling, that argues of point or narrates an event.

4) Aesthetic Analysis: College graduates have the ability to critically evaluate artistic expressions, including the fine arts, music, drama, literature, media, and human movement (i.e., dance, sports), through the use of political, sociological, anthropological and aesthetic theories.

5) Science and Technology: College graduates can critically evaluate developments in science, technology, and health on the basis of elementary principles, good scientific practices, and the proper interpretation of mathematical models and statistics.

6) Global Perspectives: College graduates are able to interpret and contextualize current events in light of historical, geographical, sociological, economic, and political contexts.

7) Information Literacy: College graduates are able to consult various sources of information and critically evaluate the information and its source for veracity, authenticity and usefulness. They are aware of the wide variety of sources available for gathering information including library reference areas, paper and electronic finding aids, government issued documents, paper and online periodicals, as well as material revealed by internet search engines and are aware of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Of course college students learn many other things, but if they learned to do these across the board, I think we would all be pretty happy. Margaret Spellings would not be wondering if colleges were doing their job well enough for the federal government to fund them through student loans. Parents and students would know that their money was well spent. Employers would see increased productivity. That may be a little pie in sky, but I’m convinced this is doable. These expectations are reasonable and faculty and students should expect to accomplish them in the course of the college curriculum.