The older I get and the more traveling we do, the longer it takes me to get over jet-lag. Some aspects of traveling have gotten easier with age (I have far fewer problems with my ears on landings, for example, than I did when I was young), but the jet-lag issue seems to get worse and worse. I’ve tried all the tricks and the remedies, and so far, no luck. We got back on Monday, and the last three nights I’ve had trouble getting through the night. I’m pretty beat this morning. Of course, I didn’t help my own cause by jumping back into a regular work-out regimen.
One advantage of being jet-lagged was that I woke up early enough to watch most of the women’s World Cup semi-final between Brazil and the USA. I’d been rooting for England in this tournament, of course, but once they were ousted I came back loyally to the Americans. Today’s game was a bit of a stunner; though the sending-off of Shannon Boxx was uncalled for, the USA was outplayed in virtually every aspect of the game by the creative Brazilians, whose women’s team is on the verge of being as dominant as the men’s. The decision to bench the wonderful American keeper, Hope Solo, for a frankly over-the-hill Briana Scurry was mystifying. Still, it was entertaining enough to watch.
On Tuesday, the college held its twice-yearly faculty “in-service education” day. The theme: “improving student learning outcomes” as part of the transition from a “teaching institution” to a “learning community.”
For the last decade, the administration has been eager to impress upon the faculty that we are not merely teachers but “learning facilitators.” Learning, we are told, is a collaborative process, more rich and democratic than the top-down method of traditional teaching. Few of us unblessed by graduate degrees from Schools of Education have any real idea what that means, and so the powers-that-be decree that we have these regular indoctrination sessions. The untenured faculty among us are advised to attend and feign earnestness, while the tenured folk hang around to see what sort of a free lunch will be put on. It’s rarely any good.
On Tuesday, I was handed a little yellow binder stuffed with handouts of articles from various education journals. I got a free pencil (alas, already sharpened) which had “PCC Flex Day 2007: The Passion for Learning” emblazoned upon it. In my folder was a little self-survey, so that I could discover my own unique learning style, and then share it with my colleagues during the stimulating “break-out sessions” that were sure to follow. After all, the educrats opine, we can’t really be effective “learning facilitators” until we become aware of our own learning styles — and how our own “ways of learning” may be obstacles to understanding the needs of students (sorry, “fellow learners”) who have different styles.
On the agenda for the day, the following:
Lunch (12:00-1:00)
Turn in your program assessment form at your food station to get your meal!
The Ed.Ds were on to us! They knew we came for free food, and so a crackdown had been implemented: no ticky, no lunchie. No self-assessment, no stir-fry over rice. Luckily enough, I had packed some trail mix, a nectarine, and a vegan protein bar, so the blackmail didn’t work on me.
Seriously, of course, the real reason for all of this wallowing in self-congratulatory edu-speak is that the community colleges, like most public institutions, are worried about accountability. Accountability is the buzzword of the decade; the taxpayers (and their duly elected representatives) want to know that they’re getting something in return for their billions. That’s not unreasonable; I’m no longer inherently opposed to being held accountable. (This is a new development in my life, as my parents, siblings, and ex-wives will tell you.) So the educrats have decided that the best way to prove accountability is to create measurable, testable, “student learning outcomes” (SLOs).
The longer I teach, the more convinced I become that worrying too much about assessing learning is one of the chief enemies of inspiring our students to want to learn. Look, I want all my students to pass their final exams, get good grades, and remember what it is that they’ve learned. But I’m teaching history, not providing a certificate in refrigerator maintenance. While my final exams assess what, on one given day, a student has managed to memorize, they don’t assess learning because real learning happens long after the student has left the class.
Especially in my gender studies courses, I know full well that it will take many of my students years and years to connect what they’ve learned in class to their own lives. Often, the epiphanies and break-throughs that matter will happen long after students have left this campus, long after they’ve moved out of reach of the educrats and their assessment tools. I always compare the job of a good teacher (I’m not a learning facilitator) to a gardener or a farmer. I know it sounds patriarchal, deeply Western, and unfashionably hierarchical, but there it is: I sow seeds in the soil of students’ hearts and minds. (Some of the time, my seed falls on rock, other times it ends up in the thistles, but some of it ends up in nice, loamy earth.) And here’s the thing: I don’t often get to see what blossoms and what doesn’t, because whatever flowers do bloom will generally do so months or years after the student has left my class.
So if the politicians and the educrats want to assess my skills as a teacher, they need to do more than look at my students’ test results. We all know that students can cram in information for a December final — and most of the facts they memorized will have vanished from their heads by Super Bowl Sunday. But a new way of seeing the world, of seeing, say, gender roles and relationships in a new light — that may well endure even though there are no reliable ways of assessing that sort of internal transformation. The most important things my students learn in my classes can’t possibly be measured by any government-provided instrument. I’ve been teaching long enough to have students come back years and years after taking a class; some just mouth platitudes such as “I really liked your class” but a few say wonderful, heartening, reassuring things; they tell me in detail how something I taught them helped change the direction of their lives. Most of the time, they’ll say something like “I didn’t realize it at the time, but when you said X, it started a whole new way of thinking about the world.”
There’s no SLO that can measure that.
Look, I know who pays my salary. If the state legislature and their Ed.D flacks want me to tweak my syllabi to emphasize the vocabulary of accountability, I’m happy to do it. But I’m still going to teach — primarily through lecture in an ancient, top-down, one-sided way. I’m going to pour out my enthusiasm and my passion, laboring in a field filled with rocky soil and pockets of rich earth. And for the most part, I won’t be around to see the harvest. That’s what it means to teach.
“…nice, loamy earth.” Yep that sounds a little like the student I was, or, am.
Ummm… this post really annoyed me. How about, stop whining and see if you can actually learn something from people who have learned about how people learn, says the “Educator.”
Do you test your students??
Then it is only fair to tell the “rocky soil” that your tilling in what the hell you are planting.
I think you are whining because you don’t get it and you haven’t been willing to be humble enough to be learn something new.
From your posts, I bet you are a passionate and enjoyable lecturer, but if this is true of your tests: “…my final exams assess what, on one given day, a student has managed to memorize…” Then you still have something to learn that will make your courses better for your students. You sound like a know it all kid in this post who doesn’t think anyone has anything to teach you.
The language about “break-throughs’ makes me wonder if there’s a frustrated therapist in there somewhere.
April, if my tone came across as whiny, that’s my error. I meant it to come across as bemused, but I fell short of the mark.
I teach seven classes with 45-50 students in each; I have no TAs and do all the grading myself. That’s 325-350 final exams which have to be graded in 72 hours every semester. There’s a limit to what sort of assessment tools I can employ in those conditions.
This is unrelated, but I just wanted to say how happy I am to see you back and writing again. This is one of my favorite stops on the web. Glad you enjoyed your trip, though.
I absolutely love the love affair of so many of our society’s hierarchies with (verbal assertions of) nonhierarchy. The top-down imposition (by administration upon teachers) justified as overturning top-down impositions (by teachers upon students).
It is the new passive-aggressive version of Authority. By all means increase control, but call it accountability. Confuse everyone with the language of egalitarian utopia, as you intensify inegalitarian structures.
It is the language of New Management as well, as we all know. Theoretically a change from old organization-chart thinking; in practice, Dilbert.
You say you’re “no longer inherently opposed to being held accountable.” No moral person should be; and yet, if the accountability is relentlessly upwards and increases the structural control of someone who subordinates you, surprise! your liberty may be at risk. And in this case, “liberty” equals academic freedom.
It is the turn of the Foucaultian screw. And I wish Foucault were alive to write about it.
I admit that I rolled my eyes when I read the term “learning facilitators.” Dear Dr. Purfumo, please spare us the the politically correct crap. You guys are professors and we are students. As I tutor, I consider myself a “learning facilitator” because my tutees and I are on the same level — we are both students at PCC trying to pass our classes, and I am paid minimum wage to help them out to the best of my ability. I like it when my professors are strict with us and draw clear boundaries between who is teaching and who is learning. It isn’t as patronizing as creating a “learning enviornment.” I wonder if they would disagree with your grading policy. Call it capitalist, but I it makes me work harder and I like it.
Having just gone to a lecture given at my university by Lana Guinier in which she discussed the type of classroom structure you’re dismissing in you post, I will admit my view has been a little biased. Nevertheless, I have to say that I think that there are considerable merits to the idea of teachers as “learning facilitators”.
I should give some background: I am an undergraduate in my final year at a liberal arts college. Last year, I studied abroad in Ireland. My experiences between the two universities have led me to prefer a teaching style more in line with “learning facilitator” than the traditional teacher, who “professes” what there is to learn from the material and the subject. I think of it more as a spectrum than as a dichotomy. Yes, the teacher should be recognised as as the authority. But I believe a healthy [large] amount of challenge to that authority is beneficial. When teachers act as discussion leaders, guiding and shaping the course of discourse, I find a higher yield in learning. But the classroom, most fundamentally, should be a site of discussion, not didacticism.
In Ms. Guinier’s lecture, she spoke anecdotally about her own experiences with research into the success of female law students. What she had learned was that learning was treated like a game; classrooms were like sports fields. The goal was to win. Most people, under this framework (the one fostered by traditional teaching), are losers. When, on the other hand, the classroom was treated more like a site of collaborative learning (the emphasis here on the inclusion of the professor under the category of learning), everyone gained more.
What frustrated me about your post is that you seemed to have dismissed an opportunity to learn. As a teacher, that’s remarkable. True, the training day seems to have been handled rather ridiculously (’learning facilitator’ is a term bound to inspire incredulity), but you didn’t try to look past how they were saying things to what they were saying. I think there’s more than a grain of wisdom in the approach they were trying to communicate. Your point about SLOs is apt, but should not be lumped in.
You care about being a gardener. Being a “learning facilitator” (still not a term I like) is not in opposition to this metaphor for teaching. Perhaps a different teaching style is like using a different type of tool to garden–it will get to different types of soil in a different way. And I think it would be worth pondering & testing, before bemusedly rejecting.
(This all wasn’t stated at well as I’d like, but as this is my means of procrastination on homework, alas, I run up against the limits of a justifiable tangent.)
Jessica, remember that I’m teaching seven sections (as are most of my colleagues) of 45-50 students each without TAs. I’m also dealing with a substantial percentage of first-generation students with limited English proficiency; if I open the class up for discussion, invariably the native speakers dominate and the foreign-born are more marginalized than they would be under the lecture method.
If I were teaching well-prepared law students, it would indeed be far more collaborative. Teaching fifty 18 year-olds who come from Armenia and Argentina, from Ghana and Guatemala, from China and Colombia, necessitates a simpler format.
“After all, the educrats opine, we can’t really be effective “learning facilitators” until we become aware of our own learning styles — and how our own “ways of learning” may be obstacles to understanding the needs of students (sorry, “fellow learners”) who have different styles.” I assume you are being facetious, but mockery from someone who makes his (and his spouse’s) MBTI type number 3 on the miscellaneous list describing himself?
Ok..more to the point.
The most important things my students learn in my classes can’t possibly be measured by any government-provided instrument.
I’m curious if any discussions come up about longitudinal studies on former students. While there are design issues to be sure, I think such studies might provide some objective insight into capturing the “future value” of today’s learning.
Col Steve, I would be very interested in some good longitudinal studies. The question is, do those shrieking “accountability now!” have the patience?
Hugo,
In the military, we often talk about “balancing near-term operational risk against future risk.” Of course, the here and now often wins out. Or, as Lewis Carroll Alice’s said, “But then, shall I never get any older than I am now? That’ll be a comfort, one way — never to be an old woman — but then — always to have lessons to learn!”
I suspect the answer to your question is not likely. Perhaps that issue should be raised by the wise, tenured professors instead of wondering what sort of “a free lunch will be put on?” Maybe there is some rich soil here and there among those rocky educrats.