SET+CORE+II+Nov.+2008

Session outline with notes
Enlist class scribe for the day. What will we do today? Think about integrated and integrative course design. How might we model, prompt, and assess integrative thinking? What does grading have to do with this goal?

Goal: to stimulate thought, to construct a scaffold for best use of specific tactics

Andy's notes: 1.   What will we do today? a.   Today’s topic is grading. We will talk about rubrics, but not in isolation. We will think about integrated and integrative course design. How might we model, prompt, and assess integrative thinking? What does grading have to do with this goal? b.   Goal: To stimulate thought, to construct a scaffold for best use of specific tactics. c.   Gardner’s thesis: if you’re thoughtful and have a rich conceptual context for your assignments, you will do well.

I. Discuss the prompt. (Whole seminar) Discussion of the prompt we received ahead of time: ·  “By ‘augmenting human intellect’ we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems. Increased capability in this respect is taken to mean a mixture of the following: more-rapid comprehension, better comprehension, the possibility of gaining a useful degree of comprehension in a situation that previously was too complex, speedier solutions, better solutions, and the possibility of finding solutions to problems that before seemed insoluble. And by ‘complex situations’ we include the professional problems of diplomats, executives, social scientists, life scientists, physical scientists, attorneys, designers--whether the problem situation exists for twenty minutes or twenty years. We do not speak of isolated clever tricks that help in particular situations. We refer to a way of life in an integrated domain where hunches, cut-and-try, intangibles, and the human ‘feel for a situation’ usefully co-exist with powerful concepts, streamlined terminology and notation, sophisticated methods, and high-powered electronic aids.” –Douglas Engelbart  What does it mean to read something carefully? To read something more than once, methodically, and to give it critical thought. Gardner adds: also to believe something is at stake--to //care// about what we read. Reading carefully helps us care, and if we care, we read more carefully. II. Address the question. (Groups of three--as it turned out, groups of four.)

III. Report out, discussion. Persistent question: how is the question of integrative learning (and the "integrated domain") related to the question of grading?  Group discussion of the prompt: o  Group One (Elizabeth, Steve, Zheng Zheng, Amanda): Spent some time at beginning clarifying the task and the concepts. This is an important part of integrative learning. Amanda gave her take on what this meant. Steve talked about mock trials being an effective way to do this in constitutional law class. These require judgment in the end, but this can’t be divorced from facts, concepts, laws. Students are required to judge between two sides by weighing legal concepts. Students must arrive at reasoned opinions to make a judgment; these are not based on mere opinions. We ask our students to write because writing is inherently integrative. o  Group Two (Christina, Matt, Tony, Andy): Christina (in education), in studying theorists, has students analyze based on Colberg’s prompt about a man whose wife is dying, but he has no money to pay for medical care. Has students view kids at different levels of development who are answering that question and then examine their capabilities to analyze complex situations. o  Other discussion: What do we do with issues related to memorization/learning fundamentals/learning basic information?

BREAK: 10 minutes IV. Guest speaker: Steve Greenlaw, University of Mary Washington (Entire seminar together) A. Steve reflects on his blog post. B. We ask Steve questions Discussion of Steve Greenlaw’s blog post: ·  Dr. Greenlaw’s thoughts while writing this blog post (via teleconference): Grades become like a game or contest where students try to figure out how to scope out the contest, rather than engage intellectually. For the typical type of tests we use, there is a disconnect between what we want them to do intellectually and how they approach tests. They figure out how to take your tests and not how to have a genuinely intellectual experience. Students feel this disconnect, too, if they’re thoughtful. They recognize that what they need to do for the grade is not necessarily completing the assignment the way it should be completed. He has a student right now who is very bright and wants to do just enough, but that’s all it takes right now. She will sheepishly admit that it’s what she’s doing and it’s undesirable, but she still does it. Steve starts from “what is it I want them to get out of this?” Then he tries to build assessment from his learning objectives. Another way to go is to turn the assignments inside-out, e.g. from his freshman seminar class, he gives students an essay grade, but they’re not done. He lets them re-write the essay as many times as they want until the semester is over. He gives them feedback on what would take to make it better. It’s a different experience for Steve as a grader. It’s a lot more like commenting on a colleague’s paper, not explaining why he took off points for this or that. This takes writing process to a new dimension. Some students are working on fourth draft at this point. It is fulfilling to see students wanting to do it better and then finding the way to do that. It requires them to think. ·  Question for Steve: Are we expecting, when we do this, students to neglect other classes for the sake of completing this type of assignment? Steve’s answer is that he can’t worry about that. He just wants students to buy into his system. Not 100% of students will buy in, but they have the choice. They can play the game or not play. ·  Question for Steve: Is student motivation affected by assignments that focus on process and not outcome? Absolutely. This is an approach to learning that they’ve never encountered before. E.G. in this course, he asks them to write a blog about anything course related. He’ll read what they write but not grade it. At end of semester, he has them submit a blog portfolio of their best posts that will show their intellectual development, and then they assess themselves in a reflective paper. This assignment stretches students, and they like it. ·  Question for Steve: We have eight graduate students, most of whom will spend a career teaching. Any advice for what is not an easy endeavor? You have to believe in what you’re doing. Have to decide that the way you perceive a job is that it’s worth doing regardless of rewards or where it puts you in your discipline. If you do this, you’ll be able to sustain it for a long time. V. Moving from strategy to tactics (B ack into groups) Gardner: This part didn't happen. The discussion flowed very naturally from Steve's speakerphone "appearance" to the issues I wanted to use to bring us to some closure in the session. So I pitched out the second stage of group work (easier to do with a group of eight!), pitched out the question below, and kept going with the discussion What kinds of assignments and evaluation could model and stimulate integrative learning //in your discipline// in light of what Engelbart and Greenlaw have said? (This question was not used. NB: the "in your discipline" idea didn't work so well on this day because we had five political scientists, an education student, a journalist, and a scholar of Spanish language and literature. I had hoped for a "hard" scientist or mathematician to push back on all the integrative stuff, but that wasn't to be. However, the pushback did come, from an unexpected angle--more on this below.) VI. Report out, discussion (Entire seminar together) ·  Other thoughts: Can we train scholars in this model of the integrative domain, or does the model cater to students who are going to have trouble? Or, if we’re only looking holistically at the progress someone is making, will we be pushing them toward excellence? How do we balance these concerns? There have to be consequences, and there has to be something at stake; you have to know some things. But, this teaching venture is difficult because you’re perpetually trying to navigate a course between the need to engage students and have them actually learn. (Reflection from Gardner: This thought--the entire bullet point--emerged after the conversation with Steve Greenlaw. I found I could not understand the question at first, since my own experience tells me that it's typically the best and most highly motivated students who actually go for the goal of an integrative experience, an integrated domain. Steve could still hear the conversation over the audio portion of Skype, it turns out, and he put the following text into the chat:  If he's asking can students [in an integrative classroom] learn what the discipline needs them to learn, a body [of] skills and content, then absolutely.

Steve understood the question right away. It's interesting that I did not. Unfortunately, I did not notice Steve's response until the session was over. ·  Story: if you give statisticians a statistics word problem in casual conversation (% of boys-to-girls born in a particular hospital, eg), they will mess it up and get it wrong. People can’t think well outside specific domains. But the very nature of strong learning is that you can apply what you learn in one situation to another situation. It’s the standing joke that the more you know, the less able you are to apply it. But for the best scholars, this isn’t so. How do you get it such that you understand something in a profound way for the exam, but then you can get it right again in a different context? ·  Question: Can you think of something in your own experience as a student, having to do with being graded, that was a genuine learning experience for you—“a light bulb” experience? o  Amanda: being asked to incorporate changes and re-write a paper, but she was the only person in the class that had to do so. It taught her how to challenge herself and to write better. o  Matt: gave a conference paper to a professor to look over, and she only put five comments on there. But they were questions, and they were foundational, causing him to rethink the whole thesis. The “grading” caused him to think about foundational issues. o  Both of these examples held in common that the comments were personal and showed personal concern. Both were grading processes that continued the process of inquiry. o  Elizabeth: undergraduate professor she had for a number of classes. Almost always, the grade for a paper was meaningless, but what was most important was going to his office to discuss the paper and track progress from semester to semester. o  Another commonality: all of these examples involve writing. o  It would be great if we could have individualized teaching and learning, but it can’t always happen with big classes and so forth. There are, of course, other ways, and we need to show students we’re always committed to engaging in conversation. VII. Wrap-up

VIII. Evaluation

IX. For further thought: Bruner on the act of learning. Bruner on learning a subject: Three “almost simultaneous processes”: Acquisition of new information—often information that runs counter to or is a replacement for what the person has previously known implicitly or explicitly. At the very least it is a refinement of new knowledge. Transformation: “the process of manipulating knowledge to make it fit new tasks. We learn to ‘unmask’ or analyze information, to order it in a way that permits extrapolation or interpolation or conversion into another form. Transformation comprises the ways we deal with information in order to go beyond it.” Evaluation: “checking whether the way we have manipulated information is adequate to the task. Is the generalization fitting, have we extrapolated appropriately, are we operating properly?” The “learning episode”: “In the learning of any subject matter, there is usually a series of episodes, each episode involving the three processes…. A learning episode can be brief or long, contain many ideas or a few. How sustained an episode a learner is willing to undergo depends upon what the person expects to get from his efforts, in the sense of such external things as grades but also in the sense of a gain in understanding.... With respect to the optimum length of a learning episode, there are a few commonsense things one can say about it, and these are prehaps interesting enough to suggest fruitful research possibilities. It seems fairly obvious, for examples, that the longer and more packed the episode, the greater the pay-off must be in terms of increased power and understanding if the person is to be encouraged to move to a next episode with zest. Where grades are used as a substitute for the reward of understanding, it may well be that learning wil cease as soon as grades are no longer given--at graduation." (Bruner, Jerome. //The Process of Education.// Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960. Reprinted with a new preface, 1977, 48-51.)    1.    Think about the proportion of Bruner’s three “almost simultaneous processes”: acquisition, transformation, and evaluation. How might the proportions vary across classes? Across units during a semester in a single class?    2.    How can evaluation be the climax for a learning episode in your discipline?