Looking back at our class

Here are a few of my own observations of the class - some which you've heard before while others are new.

There probably should have been a couple of "take stock" type of sessions in the middle of the course. We did this intensely early on. The session about the blogging last week was quite informative. The twenty minutes or so we devoted yesterday to talking about our class was also informative. One or two other sessions of that sort in the middle of the course might have allowed for a further recalibration.

I do wonder a lot about take aways - what if anything of the course will remain with you next year, and beyond that into the future? When I taught the CHP version of econ principles, I had a goal of influencing students outside reading after the course had concluded - both newspapers and books related to economics. I know I succeeded in that with a couple of students, because I heard from them after the course. So on that score, below is a reading list I included in the first mailing I sent to those registered at the time, which was at the beginning of the summer. If you are looking for reading during the break or sometime into the future, go for it.

Experience and Education by John Dewey
A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership by Steven Sample
The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schon
And for those of you taking the course for Comp II credit,
The Best American Essays of 2009 (or 2008 or 2007 or the twentieth century).

If you have any readings to suggest to other members of the class that are consistent with course themes, please suggest those in the comments to this post.

There was a way where the class project had a fundamental conceptual issue underlying it that we didn't fully confront and perhaps we didn't confront it at all. The Campus is quite democratic in the opportunities it provides for students. Regarding outcomes, however, the results are far less democratic. We established that in our very first class session. The conceptual question, using a Drucker frame, is whether the Campus obligation should extend only to providing opportunities for students, or if it should include outcomes as well. Then switch to a Senge frame where there is an interaction between individual behavior and the system. Finally note that you are not outside observers operating under Rawl's veil of ignorance, but rather intense insiders who have for the most part benefited enormously from the current approach. So one might reasonably ask if your own conclusions on this matter are fundamentally sensitive to being an insider and, if so, how one might think this through to compensate for that.

Let me be more specific about that and focus on lectures. Some time ago when I got into Myers-Briggs Personality Typing, I found out from a Web site at Murray State that my type, INTP, which is the Absent Minded Professor or Architect type actually has a predilection for lecture. I've explained that to myself this way. INTPs live to understand why things are the way they are. They want to come to a deep understanding of that and they are happiest when they are working through some such understanding. Lecture provide fodder for such processing. Armed with that fodder, INTPs can do the rest on their own.

I don't know whether INTP is the only type with that ability (or even if MBTI is sufficiently reliable to make arguments this way) but I do believe that certain people have the ability to take information that is presented to them and internalize it in a productive way where the information gets incorporated in their world view or, what happens on occasion, where the information conflicts with their world view so where their world view modifies to take account of that conflict.

Not everyone is so skilled at internalizing information that is presented and for the less skilled lecture is not all that useful. Studies about the effectiveness of lecture create a fairly grim view on that score. Instead, as the forward to the NSSE report by Russ Edgerton that I mentioned in a previous post, what matters is the activities that students do. Get students engaged in activities that promote learning and, lo and behold, they will learn. So the experimental view of teaching that I suggested is about finding those activities and then getting students to partake in them. I don't know that peer mentoring can do much about the former, but it sure should be able to help with the latter, while lecturing doesn't help at all on either count.

Let me turn away from our class project and to you, the students in our class. What is it that you learned from the course. Using Argyris as our guide for this part, I'm guessing you learned something about your espoused theories. Did you learn anything about your theories in use and about bringing your espoused theories closer in line with your theories in use? Think of that in terms of your blogging, in terms of your working in groups, in how you learn on your own, in those things that you value, and in your future direction(s). I don't know those things about you. Perhaps you wrote something about that in the evaluation forms submitted yesterday. If so, great. If not, sometime after the course had concluded and the grades have been posted, perhaps you could send me a note about that. I'm quite curious about what you got out of the class.

Finally, let's consider mountains and molehills. There were a variety of suggestions offered yesterday about how the class might have been done better - get started on the class project from the get go, have lesson plans for every class session, etc. I appreciated hearing those. I had a few obstacles of my own of which the one i want to note here is the dividing of the class into 395 and 396 with additional course work for the 396 students. Though my own workload would have increased as a consequence, I would have preferred it if all students were in 396 and/or even if they registered for 395 they'd have been obligated to do the writing projects, which I believe would have made the class more cohesive because everyone would have gone through a common experience. I wonder if any of the 395 students would have taken the course under that scenario.

Dialog, Discussion, Debate - What's in a Word?

Before today's class session - Dave B., Joe, Tyler and I met with Professor Clancy in what I thought was a very interesting session where I learned that in other units undergraduate students mentor/TA first for course credit and then, if they show their worth in some serious ways the reward switches to a tuition and fee waiver. This model has been embraced in some of the sciences and engineering. But it hasn't been embraced much if at all in the social sciences or humanities. Instead, they've relied exclusively on using doctoral students as TAs. If you think of doctoral education as primarily about preparing the graduate students for lifelong work in that field of study, then one measure of success of such programs is how they place students into jobs in the field. By that measure, there are too many doctoral students in many of these fields. Quite a few of those with a PhD don't find positions in their field of study and have to go into some other line of work.

The question then is why the system persists. One answer is that the undergraduate teaching obligations are so great in these departments while the revenues are comparatively meager that the only way they can make it work is to have lot of inexpensive teachers, i.e., TAs. Another answer, more cynical than the first, is that the faculty prefer to teach doctoral students rather than undergrads, so they can teach about their research. In this view the doctoral students are around so the faculty can teach them, which means somebody else has to to teach the undergrads.

The system has been breaking down for a while and budget morass is speeding it up. Professor Clancy said that her department is committed to a smaller doctoral program and one where students get their degrees in a timely fashion. (This is a related to the issue of having too many doctoral students.) Lets say they are successful at doing that and that similar changes are made in other social science and humanities departments. What happens then to the undergraduate teaching burden? Some of it will be met by having fewer course offerings in the doctoral program so faculty spending more of their teaching time with undergraduate courses. Does that offset completely the reduction in the number of graduate students? (It doesn't. It was a rhetorical question.) So an alternative models is needed.

I wish the entire class had heard that conversation. We hashed through how peer mentoring might work as part of that alternative model. I thought it was a very interesting conversation. There are a lot off hoops to be gone through to get something that flies, among them that many of the mentors would likely be in MCB not Anthro, so how would you give a tuition and fee waiver in this case?

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I thought our discussion on reflections was interesting, in significant part since there was substantial variation in response from among those who spoke. When we discussed adhering to the prompt or not, it occurred to me that this was pretty much Senge had in mind when he talks about giving the assumptions some air during dialog. Applying Senge's analysis to what we said, my interpretation is that I come off to some of you as either unclear or as quite defensive (or both) so you respond with compliance qua adhering to the prompt. Especially when you are not personally invested in what the prompt is about, this leads to writing that is "going through the motions" only, not something that gets your motor running.

I also thought the part about not knowing how to comment was very interesting and here, while I won't claim to be an expert, the stuff we read about experts and novices is worth reconsidering, especially on the part where experts don't understand what is difficult for novices. Earlier in the semester we did have a post where we talked about whether you can give good criticism - there was a lot of dancing around that topic - and most of you ultimately concluded you couldn't. So here is a bit of an aside about how I learned much of what I know about this.

Faculty write research papers that are then subject to peer review. So they gain experiences of what its like to receive a review on their paper and they also write reviews of other papers. There is learning by doing in this. You learn as an author what you'd like from a good referee report (of course, you want the referee to say that the paper is brilliant, but since that won't always be the case, you want the referee to explain where the referee struggled with the presentation, what the referee disagreed with, and any out and out mistakes that were found). So in the language of today's class, you'd like the referee's report to be part of the discussion. The author wants to win and the referee wants to win too. They both win when the referee likes the paper enough to recommend it for publication. My experience is that this often is iterative with the first referee recommendation of the form - revise and resubmit - meaning there are some interesting ideas in the paper but it is not publishable in the current form.

On the other hand, I've received referee reports that are very far from the standard. Sometimes they show they didn't read the paper. Other times they show they didn't understand what they read. But this isn't always the case. Referee reports can be good an useful to others, with good suggestions on how to improve the paper.

I learned from the experience. I also came to conclude that new Assistant Professor are still learning how to write a paper that will get accepted for publication, so the review process is part of their professional education. I came to feel responsible for writing reports for them in a way that would help them along.

When you do enough of this you may not be an expert, but you are pretty accomplished. With the blogging it is similar, but the comments are meant in part to help with the writing of the subsequent post. You won't revise and resubmit the current post, though you might very well respond to the comments.

The vexing question after all of that is - you learn by doing, but some of you were reluctant to do so because you didn't know how, so how is this vicious cycle broken? I could have required comments to coerce you through that reluctance. But do note that I did require the posts and yet all was not rosy on that side of the street. Consider some of the remarks during the discussion about when the prompt didn't excite you. If I had made commenting required too, wouldn't some of you have reacted that it was even more make work?

We did talk a lot in the course about motivation so I wonder whether there is some way to tap into intrinsic motivation that would encourage commenting that was good and insightful. If you have thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them. During the semester there were posts and comments on posts about being form an immigrant family and the implications of that. Some students shared a bond that way and we got some empathetic commenting as a result. That particular bond was coincidental. It couldn't have been planned for before the course started. But perhaps the creating of some other bond could be designed into the course.

I'll close with one last point. There is learning in struggle and failure. The fruits of that learning may not be realized till sometime in the future. While it is happening, the struggle and failure may not be much fun, either to participate in or to watch. I think one reason why so many instructors are very directive in what they ask from students is that it makes it easier for them. I'm not sure, however, that it makes it better for the students to be so directed.

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If there are masochists in the crowd who want to struggle and flail with the blogging even after the course concludes, I'm happy to keep reading and commenting - no prompts and no grades, just ongoing conversation.

The Whole And (the) Some Of The Parts

The last couple of weeks there has been an odd confluence of my regular work and our course. Given that we're doing Senge now and he wants us to look at the whole, I thought it might be useful for the class to view things through my eyes. A nagging question, I'm sure, is why aren't we talking about instructors changing their approach to teaching? What's all the commotion with peer mentoring when it should be the instructor side the of the equation where the real action is?

Most of my regular work deals with the instructor side of the equation. So over the years I've given it a fair amount of thought. In the mid 1990's when I got started and using the Internet to help with teaching was a pretty new concept (though on our Campus we had Plato well before that) there was a pretty naive view (not surprising given how little people understood about the impact of the Internet in general) that the technology itself would create a paradigm shift (got to love that jargon) in learning. The group I got hooked up with, a bunch of grantees from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant program on learning at a distance, had some intellectual foundation based loosely on Network Nation (the authors, Roxanne Hiltz and Murray Turoff were among the grantees) but mostly it came from the Sloan grant officer, Frank Mayadas, a former engineer at IBM, who among other things had been one of the drivers on Project Athena. At the time Frank came over to Sloan, IBM had gone through a substantial round of layoffs and one of the big questions was how could these talented employees get re-educated to find fruitful new employment. Because of his engineering background Frank conceived of the online classroom as a bunch of nodes in a network, with each node contributing to the functioning of the whole.

Frank's conception didn't match the face to face classroom at all, at least in my intermediate microeconomics class. So there had to be a reconceptualization of the teaching to make his idea an organic part of the classroom. I soon came to learn that the true power with most innovations is not from the direct impact of the innovation itself, but rather from this reconceptualization, which occurs with some substantial lag after the innovation has been introduced. So in our little unit that supported online learning we developed a mantra - it's not the technology, it's how you use it, something I still believe today. But some of the rest of my thinking has evolved since then. On the faculty rethinking their teaching, where does that come from? The best answer I've come up with is that its not one big gestalt, but rather the instructor's point of view about teaching goes through a gradual change over time, once the instructor comes to the conclusion that part of the job is to learn about what makes teaching effective. In the language of Senge, teaching is an area where the instructor should obtain personal mastery. (There is no metamorphosis otherwise.) This gradual maturation is facilitated by ongoing experiments in method.

So I came to the conclusion that effective teaching involves ongoing experiments of some sort. The experiments need not be drastic, but they do need to reflect the instructors current view of his teaching and where things could be improved. The model I had in mind was a cycle of reflection on past teaching experience, from that generating an experiment to try in the next round of teaching, the experience from trying out that experiment, and then reflection anew. All of this was firmly developed in my thinking before our course was even a rough concept. I'll get back to it in a bit.

What was obvious at the time, however, is that such a cycle of teaching experiments was not the norm for instruction. On the content of a course there might be innovation, with the instructor revising the syllabus from time to time, but on method there really was very little change. For most faculty the technology didn't encourage this sort of experimentation at all, quite the contrary. Faculty had class Web sites because other faculty had class Web sites. Otherwise, there was remarkable inertia. Senge would term college teaching a balancing process.

There are many reasons for this, some of which we've talked about, notably faculty incentives as determined by what factors matter for promotion and tenure, also for salary review. At research universities like ours that depends mostly if not exclusively research output.

But incentives are not the whole story. There are other important factors as well. There is an academic culture that revolves around the research workshop or seminar, a series that promotes the intellectual life in the unit. Papers are presented by their authors (from on Campus or by invited guests) and discussed and debated. Participation in the workshop represents a substantial commitment of time and is one of the main ways faculty learn and keep up with developments n their discipline. There are some tepid attempts at doing something similar for teaching, but participation by the faculty is much lower in those and for many of the participants, the commitment level is less. Mostly, the targeted audience is brand new faculty.

A further factor is the nature of doctoral education, which is in many respects quite like the apprentice model. Doctoral candidates are made in the image of their advisors. So the teaching model doctoral students learn is based their own graduate education. If there is training in undergraduate teaching for the doctoral student, it typically comes from outside the doctoral program. Outside training is valued less, because it is not otherwise part of the culture.

So it is a tough nut to crack to introduce experimental cycles about the process of teaching into the current system. It is something akin to introducing Argyris' Model 2 in the management setting. Indeed, the comparison with Argyris is useful in many respects. The experimentation in teaching would almost certainly move the instruction in the direction of the students and teacher in an ongoing negotiation and away from the notion of the instructor as oracle and the students sitting at the oracle's feet awaiting the wisdom he will spew. If teaching and learning were negotiation of some sort between the participants, undoubtedly it would make teaching a liberal art a la Drucker. That is the direction in which I believe we should head.

But since it is a tough nut to crack, in addition to direct approaches, we should try indirect approaches as well. This gets us closer to what we are actually doing. Several years ago when I first started working on learning technology in large classes, I learned some interesting facts about logistics. The campus has a huge number of undergraduate courses, in excess of 1500 with enrollments at least 10. The size distribution of those enrollments is very skewed. The top 20 or 30 courses in size constitute about 50% of all the enrollments. If you could make a significant impact in those courses, you'd impact the entire student population.

Another factor is even more indirect. Suppose students developed a taste for a negotiated approach to instruction (contrary to the suppositions of the Disengagement Compact). What impact would these student attitudes then have on how upper level, lower enrollment courses are taught. Faculty do try to meet student expectations. So changing those expectations is a potential path toward the desired outcome.

Obviously, this won't happen over night. But I hope it does give you a sense of where all of this is heading.

Then, on the nuts and bolts of our current project, it turns out that about 4 years ago on a campus committee for learning technology, Deanna Raineri (CIO of LAS) and I were pushing Blended Learning pretty hard. We got language in the first version of the Campus Strategic plan on Blended Learning. And we got some funds from the Provost's office ($20K as it ended up, we asked for $60K initially) to initiate some pilots in Blended Learning. By the time the money was awarded I was headed to the College of Business. I agreed to let LAS have the funds because they were more strapped for cash. There were two pilots planned. One in a meteorology course. The other in Anthropology. The latter one stalled because the instructors didn't have the wherewithal to do something. But now we have the pilot with Professor Clancy. She got on board after being made aware of the earlier efforts. So some of my old eggs are coming home to roost, quite a connection for me.

On student views of course requirements - in the major and elsewhere

There were some animated posts this week. Many in the class reacted strongly to the prompt. I want to do a bit of analysis of the issues and try to tie that both to the posts themselves and to what will be upcoming in the class.

Let me begin by introducing some metaphors that may be unfamiliar at first, but that should be readily apparent when properly considered. The first is the issue of lock-in and its causes. There is a very famous paper by the economic historian Paul David, Clio and the Economics of QWERTY. This paper is quite readable by non-economists and I strongly encourage reading it. It details the history of the typewriter keyboard, originally designed to slow the typist down so the keys wouldn't jam. The original design was optimal given the state of the technology then. But as the technology improved it was no longer optimal. However, it persisted. The explanation is interdependencies. So many people already knew the QWERTY keyboard. They didn't want to switch. There were training programs in place for teaching people how to touch type with QWERTY. The training programs didn't want to switch. Efforts at introducing other keyboards failed. Those other keyboards, if learned fully, would have allowed for faster typing. Nevertheless, they didn't prevail.

Lock in to socially undesirable approaches is a fact of life. The issue is how widespread it is. A different example is the academic calendar. The summer term, which is asymmetric with the fall and spring terms, resulted because when our economy was more agrarian students needed to participate in the planting and the harvest. That need no longer exists, but the calendar persists. Most education experts would argue a symmetric calendar would be better, to fully leverage the summer time for learning. But we don't do that.

Several, if not most, of you argued that the requirements are determined by experts who have the educational well being of the students at heart. Some of you raised minor issues with that. (I'd call them warts rather than fatal flaws.) Kim's post was the first to talk about redundancy in instruction. That idea was echoed in other posts, such as this one. One reason for the current pattern is that the formal approach to verification of whether a student knows x is to ask if the students has taken a course on x. An alternative approach (I'd call this proficiency-ing out) would be to take a test on x and if the test is passed then the student would be said to know x. In Dave B's post, there was some discussion of testing as an "end of pipe" thing, where he gave specific mention to the Professional Engineering Exam. One could envision testing of quite a different sort, on specific skills, where students who demonstrated proficiency could just go on but students who did not would have to remedy that deficiency. That we don't do this in a big way I would say is a consequence of lock in. (The providers of the pre-requisite course may be none too keen on certifying proficiency in this other way. So that inertia would have to be overcome.)

There may be a different sort of lock in with the curricula itself. Some courses may be selected more as a rite of passage than because of their usefulness as a complement to the other courses students take. Fred posted on this. He must not have viewed it as a serious problem, because he came down for not changing the requirements. But he did acknowledge the possibility. Reflecting on this possibility from the point of view of teaching intermediate microeconomics, there is an interesting question of how much of the course should be devoted to the insights of David Ricardo and Alfred Marshall, giants in the discipline but who lived long ago, versus spending more time on recent developments. There is a parallel question of how technical one should get on the exposition of the content. If a course is taught with a lot of technique and detail on very old stuff, one could argue that's a consequence of lock in. ("That's the way I learned it in graduate school way back when, so that's the way you are going to learn it today.")

Now I want to switch to a related idea - what you might call intellectual lock in. Senge calls this "mental models" and discusses those as an impediment to learning. The idea is that if a person has a certain framework for seeing the world, then that framework blocks the person from seeing those things that might be inconsistent with the framework. For the person to see what is happening, the person must first let go of the mental model. We should talk about this specific issue on Wednesday when we begin to talk about Senge.

I believe I saw several examples of mental models in place. One was that students need course requirements imposed on them because in the absence of course requirements students will opt for softy alternatives. Angelica posted on this. She wrote:

Unfortunately, many students view college just as a set of requirements that must be taken to obtain a career. There must be a motivation that must be in students to reach out and find other forms of learning and challenge. The students must see the big picture when it comes to their personal development. If students do not see this big picture, then they can start short changing themselves

Senge would argue to consider this issue from a "systems perspective." Do we in fact encourage students to ignore the big picture by imposing the requirements? Is there a self-fulfilling prophecy created by the approach that is taken? We should discuss those questions in class.

Let me return to lock in but do so in a different area. The broad question is whether "professional education" should be at the baccalaureate level or if it should be as graduate education. Since nobody in class is pre-law, let's use it as an example. In the U.S. law school is for graduate students only. Tuition is high and the curriculum, pretty much, is exclusively law courses. (Some students get joint degrees and there may be individual courses in other curricula, MBA for example, that are relevant but they are minor exceptions.) On the other hand, in the U.K. law school is an undergraduate degree. Why is it one thing here and a different thing there? Without knowing the details I'd say that history matters in explaining that.

We have a mixed system where in some professions the education is at a graduate level (law and medicine come to mind) and in other professions it is at the undergraduate level (engineering and business are represented in our own class). One thing should be clear enough. If professional education happens at the undergraduate level, it competes with liberal education for the student's attention. So it seems reasonable to ask, based on the goals of such degree programs, whether self- containing undergraduate programs are ideal or if there should be some graduate education as a significant component, in which case the undergraduate piece could have more liberal education. It is also possible to envision multiple alternatives with this. Further, as I argued in commenting on Dave L's post, there is an issue of the timing of such graduate education. Should it happen immediately after the bachelor's is earned or with several years of work experience interspersed between the rounds of formal education. A significant issue with professional education is how to keep pros in the field current with recent developments. I would expect to see alternative approaches to address this question as the "right answer" is not obvious.

Finally, let me make one more observation that is not about lock in, but about your own reading of the prompt. Nobody argued that "roundedness" might actually emerge from taking courses in the major. I thought this was a little surprising since we talked about this a little in class, particularly on what learning to learn means. (And on this point, there may be lock in of a different sort in instruction, since folks my age were formally educated in a pre-Internet era where information was scarce and education was conceived of as information transfer, which is almost certainly inappropriate for our current situation where information is abundant. The teaching model, however, may not yet have adjusted to that change.) I would have liked to hear from some of you about whether you believe learning to learn skills have been part of your coursework in your major. I certainly hope that is happening, though I've got little sense of the degree to which it occurs.

Framework and Summary of Class Discussion on 10-28

I am going to try to write this in a neutral way where questions are posed but answers aren't offered up. So the conclusions could go either way. But at least in some cases I will try to list the set of possible conclusions from which to choose. Also, I will belabor some things because some students missed the class and this written explanation may help more than the recording of the session.

We started by talking about meta skills that all students need to learn and what we hope all students will have acquired at some level of proficiency by the time they graduate. On this I asserted the categories, more or less. A few students offered up others which either were subsidiary categories (I will illustrate below) or were different labels for the same categories. The three we ended up with are:

1. Communication

2. Learning to learn

3. Citizenship

We didn't talk much about Communication because we already heard about it from the College CIOs visit and because the class is in agreement that it is a fundamental skill of high importance. We did talk about learning to learn. Somebody (sorry, I won't give attribution because I can't remember who said what) talked about Critical Thinking, to which I responded that is the inside academia name for learning to learn. You may say they are not identical. For this purpose, let's say they are. Somebody else talked about information technology skills to which I responded that is subsidiary to learning to learn. I think we got agreement on that. Somebody else talked about research skills in a particular field. My response there was that you can't become skilled about learning to learn skills in the abstract. You have to talk about those skills in reference to some field. There is the question of whether the learning to learn parts translate to other fields. It's the part that do translate that are the meta skills. Some things you learn about a field are quite specific to that field, no doubt.

We then talked a bit about Citizenship. Here we talked about group work, we talked about leadership, and we mentioned responsibility and ethics. Someone asked whether ethics was a citizenship thing or its own separate category. My answer in class was to leave that as a pending question. But I'd like to amend myself on this and say it is part of citizenship for this purpose. We're better off having a shorter list of meta skills, where each member of the list is distinct but itself broad. I think the list above does that.

We then talked about how the meta skills are learned. One place for learning them is in class. I believe it is the aim of the Campus for the education offered up to significantly enhance student meta skills. We also said, however, that students can very well learn these skills from experience. We talked about experiential learning as an alternative to formal instruction, in some ways superior to formal instruction. (I don't like the jargon, but experiential learning is said to be "authentic". I do take the point to which the jargon refers.)

We then talked about typical places for students where experiential learning occurs. Members of the class offered up the two obvious categories - internships and RSOs. We also talked a little bit about service learning and then lumped everything else into a category called "other."

We then asked whether experiential learning gets course credit and the why or why not of that. It does in some instances that are well orchestrated, student teaching in schools was mentioned, as was a program in Applied Health Studies (though here my memory fails as to the specifics of the program). But much experiential learning does not receive course credit and some that does is only available in a capstone course setting. The reason for this is that the university must "certify" that specified learning objectives are met. That certification comes from a faculty member on campus. It's hard for a faculty member to do this when the experiential learning happens outside the university and outside the experience of the faculty member. If this certification were to occur beyond the faculty member's normal work, it would require substantial effort. The student teaching works because the relationship is conceived as a triangle from the get go between teacher in the school, the faculty member on campus, and the student teacher who operates in both places. Other types of experiential learning where the faculty member is not so integrated in are much harder to monitor. Alternatively, integrating in the faculty member itself often takes substantial work, which may not be the sort of work the Campus rewards. This is why much service learning is only available as a capstone offering.

At this point we brought in Drucker, focusing on chapter 5. We talked about Social Problems and divided those into two categories, problems created by society as a whole or problems created specifically by the enterprise as it goes about achieving its mission. Drucker says the enterprise is responsible for fixing those latter problems. Regarding the former problems, the enterprise may or may not have the responsibility, according to Drucker, depending on whether it has the competence to provide a solution. The enterprise should not extend beyond its competence to fix social problems created by society as a whole.

Drucker talks about possible solutions to the social problems. The first is to abandon the activity that causes the problem. This is best if the activity itself is not tied to what the enterprise produces. The second is to make a new business out of solving the social problem. This is a good solution when it is possible. The third is to introduce regulation to best manage the social problem, when creating a profitable business is not possible.

Up till this point, much if not all of the above is definitional in nature, and I think everyone in class got this much. What follows is beyond definitional and I think there was some substantial confusion.

We talked about the disengagement pact, who has responsibility to solve it, and then whether the solution could turn into a "profitable business." Faculty disengagement, where it occurs, is clearly the responsibility of the Campus, since faculty are employees of the Campus. Student disengagement, where it occurs, may be a societal problem caused by the rigidity of approach in K-12, in which case the Campus role to address this issue depends on its competence to do, which may explain some of the tepid programs we do see. Alternatively, it may be caused by the high enrollment courses first-year students take, in which case the Campus does have responsibility to fix it.

We asked whether a possible solution to the student side of the disengagement pact issue can be profitable. We asked what does it mean for a solution to be profitable, since Campus is a not-for-profit institution. I suggested to view this on straight economic terms. A profitable solution either raises revenues or it lowers costs (or both). I did note that the profit so generated would be used to offset other areas on Campus that are less profitable. The Campus is looking at a significant budget shortfall in the future given the state government's budget deficit. If profit could be generated, it surely would go to help make up the shortfall.

At this point it is worth being extremely skeptical, but with that to consider possible alternatives. It may be that the status quo is the best alternative. It may be that some change is better.

One idea that was mentioned was to get students involved in Campus sanctioned experiential learning activities as freshmen. If such experiential learning was educative in terms of helping learn the meta skills, and if a faculty member on campus could reasonably certify that was the fact, then that activity might reasonably substitute for taking some large classes as Freshmen. There is an expression, with enough "ifs" you can put Paris in a bottle. So the assumptions need to be challenged. We talked about some internships being low level grunt work. Those internships are not sufficiently educative. We talked about if the faculty member is not involved, verifying whether the activity is educative can be difficult. We also talked about if the faculty member is involved it can nonetheless be costly. On that last point, some would say the solution lacks scalability. A profitable solution would not stumble on any of these points. That is a stern requirement.

We didn't have time but could equally talk about a solution where the Freshmen volunteer for experiential learning opportunities outside of a class session. This becomes an add on for them. There doesn't need to be faculty verification in this case. This seems to me pretty much the status quo. One wonders why there would be broad uptake by the students, since it doesn't seem to be happening now.

We didn't spend much time in class today on this, but the logical follow up would be on looking at peer mentoring the same way. We need to ask whether for the mentors the activity is educative in terms of producing the meta skills, whether the activity can be monitored effectively by a faculty member to certify that, and whether if so it can substitute for other courses the mentors might otherwise take. We also need to ask from the mentee side of the equation whether the mentoring actually does something of substance to address the disengagement. On that point many of you are skeptical based on your own prior experience with mentoring. I would argue here that those experiences were set up so they weren't sufficiently intensive. For something to work on both sides of the equation it needs to be quite an intensive activity. In class today there was some discussion to the effect that even if it did work on all these counts, it could still not substitute for courses in the major, which are essential toward the intellectual maturation of the student as the student learns the discipline. I argued that could go either way. It would be very good to put more flesh on that bone. So I hope some (or all) of you write about this before our course concludes. One particular issue that should be fleshed out is whether the peer mentoring is an option, creating another path for the student or if instead it became a requirement for all students and which of those alternatives makes more sense.

We didn't talk about it substituting for gen ed requirements, only substituting for courses in the major, but perhaps that should be considered here too. Some of you might argue that all course requirements are essential. Others might take a different position. I do want to note that the Zemsky proposal for a 3-year college degree forces one to take a side of this argument, one way or the other, quite apart from considering the disengagement pact. I don't know whether we can fit this into the class project or not, but having some writing on that argument would really help to set the full context of the project.

The last point to mention on whether the solution could be profitable is that the peer mentors could also volunteer (or do just for general course credit, not to substitute out of other specific requirements). We noted in class that most students don't have a lot of free elective time, at least that is so for the students in our class, so the course credit approach might help in some cases but not broadly. We didn't talk about students volunteering to be mentors and the issue of what non-course time would have to be given up to enable being a peer mentor. (I'm assuming here that the mentees, otherwise disengaged, have time on their hands to be a mentee. That assumption also needs to be challenged.) Potentially this avenue should be explored vigorously as well. A strong volunteer program might work better than trying to have a program where other course requirements are dropped. It remains, however, how to generate the strong volunteer program.

This, I believe describes all the possibilities for the question of whether there is a profitable solution. Which you think is best (including the status quo) depends on how you think the questions should be answered. We should argue about that. It may be that no alternative other than the status quo is profitable.

There is then the question of whether a non-profit oriented and regulated solution to peer mentoring might make sense, which is what Drucker recommends to look at if the profitable solution comes to naught. One can look at this as an intra-campus college issue on our own Campus. Suppose an individual college wanted to encourage peer mentoring to combat student disengagement from the large classes it offers, and to make things concrete suppose that college is LAS, since it offers the bulk of the Gen Ed courses. LAS reduces course requirements in the major for those who do mentoring. But LAS can only do that for those majors within the college. Since LAS is a net importer of students for Gen Ed, it will need peer mentors from other colleges. But those other colleges haven't changed their course requirements. So there aren't enough peer mentors. There is the further factor that if the other colleges went along then rightfully this would be a net income transfer to LAS, because the peer mentoring would be for work done in LAS. The other colleges won't want that net income transfer to LAS because they lose money on that deal. So any solution would have to be at the Campus level to deal both with getting mentors from outside LAS and on the income transfer issue so the other colleges would play along. It's the sort of regulation that would be necessary. The Faculty Senate and the Provost's office would both have to see it this way to make this happen.

There might also be inter-campus issues about implementing such a program. If Illinois did this but Michigan did not would some students perceive Michigan to be more rigorous because it has retained all the within major course requirements. If you can't make this move because of the impact on recruiting (incidentally, this issue also could be there on the intra-campus single college implementation) then it would have to be implemented everywhere in order for it to happen at all. To get it implemented everywhere, the accrediting agencies, both the general ones and the ones for the specific disciplines, would have to take up the call.

The above framework is perhaps a lot to digest. I would appreciate comments of the form - I understand what is said about x, but I don't get what this means about y. Then we can use class time to follow up on this.

One last point in case this is not obvious. I don't believe the status quo is the best available alternative. This would not be a good project for a course on effective change if it were. Also note that as an economist I believe in tradeoffs and making a cost-benefit analysis on proposed solutions. If, for example, taking away some requirements in the major and substituting peer mentoring created some loss in terms student preparation in that major, but the peer mentoring created a win with student engagement, then if the size of the win is big enough I'd say that alternative is better. If you didn't allow for tradeoffs and instead insisted that the win has to occur in all dimensions, that approach tends to make the status quo triumph.

Fear and Good Cheer

Many of this week's reflections had a similar ring - blogging is frightening, especially so for the novice who has yet to find his or her own voice. With that, naturally, there was some discussion about others like a potential employer or a graduate admissions committee, who might come back to your blog later and come to some judgment about you based on your blog, because it speaks about you in some way that the normal applications material do not. Some of you said you are modifying your writing a bit as a consequence. That's ok, though my guess is that the worry is about something that is highly improbable. The stories you hear about young people losing a job because of what they've posted on Facebook are not stories where they wrote something thoughtful but of a different ideological bent from their potential employer, who then rejected them for that reason. If we heard stories of that sort, they would speak as poorly about the employer as about the applicant. The stories we do hear about entail an open depiction of debauchery showcased in Facebook, which apart from the behavior itself demonstrates a lack of discretion on the part of the applicant for having posted it. That a potential employer would not want to hire an immature kid with a lack of discretion is reasonable and doesn't speak poorly of the employer at all. In any event, the online writing we are doing for our class lies entirely outside this domain.

Nonetheless, the fear that many of you wrote about is real enough and I believe is grounded in the here and now. It's the sweaty palms and white knuckle variety. It's the type of fear that distracts you from doing other things and makes you feel as if there is an illness within. You don't have to be a psychologist to understand the fear of being naked and on stage, not infrequently the object of our dreams. Everyone is capable of having this sort of dream. I conjecture, without doing a research project on it, that these sorts of dreams are all the more frequent in high achievers, because one obvious reason for the high achievement is that these people as a routine place high and sometimes extraordinary expectations on themselves. In the dream they are both the person who is naked and a member of the audience watching.

If this is even remotely close to what is going on, then one reason for why the blogging is frightening is because it is new. Fear of the new is very real. It is unreal to expect to be very good right off the bat at something that is new. So fear of the new is tied at the hip to fear of failure. What does it mean to fail at blogging? I don't know. Not having clear ground rules about what success and failure is may be part of the problem (er, part of the issue). Maybe my occasional correcting of grammar or word usage is counter productive because it contributes to the fear, if not of that person than of others in the class who read the comments. (Incidentally, I had hoped that somebody would post about the benefit for students of reading my comments about other student posts, but obviously with The Force there is also The Dark Side.)

Students and instructors don't tend to talk about fear very much when we talk about learning, either out of shame or because culturally it seems improper. But it obviously is important and beyond recognizing that, we probably should work through a bit what we think about it, because it will have bearing on how the our class functions for the rest of the semester and it will also have bearing on the recommendations we come up with as part of the class project. In the rest of this post, I'm going to give a start in this direction. The goal is to get issues out on the table, not to be definitive on any of them. Before doing that I want to thank those of you who talked about being afraid with the blogging, because it gave me license to move in this direction.

It may be natural to think of fear as a disease (I'm not sure that is right, but I do think it is natural to have this view) in which case the next thought is to look for cures. I'll get to that in a bit. First though, a different way to think of fear, really any of our emotions, is as some Darwinian trait that emerged via natural selection because it is helpful with survival. If there is a real threat, being afraid of it is a good thing, much better than ignoring the threat entirely. The fear that emerges because of a real threat I would term a rational fear. Those you don't want to cure. Rational fears should be respected and then acted upon.

I believe some fear is learned the way Pavlov's dog learned to salivate. There was a rational fear based on an experience with a real threat. Over time, however, that rational fear gets converted into a pathology. It's the pathology for which the cure is sought. The child is right not to touch the hot stove a second time. If the child stops exploring altogether things that are entirely different from stoves,because of the memory of pain from burning his hand, that is a problem, one that needs fixing.

One "cure" to the fear of the new, obviously, is experience. I joked in a comment on Angelica's blog where she indicated her reluctance to offer up criticism of her peers, just wait 30 years and you'll have no problem with offering criticism at all. Of course, conquering fear via experience begs the question, how much experience is necessary? Apart from offering up the obvious - it will take as long as it takes - I don't really know. But I do want to point out something else that might not be so obvious. Often, one overcomes fear via experience by developing numbness to the stimulus. The ideal is to conquer fear while maintaining sensitivity. That's a tough one. Sometimes it's one or the other.

There are other ways to overcome fear. Sometimes a sense of urgency does it. Something else comes up that is more important and demands your total attention and commitment. In carrying it out, you confront something you've been fearful of and this time you just crash through the barricade, as if it wasn't there at all. Knowing that is possible, I'm not sure how helpful it is as a model for you, though if there is a subject that you feel urgent about and you choose to write about it in one of your reflections, the intensity of your own emotion will almost certainly carry through in the writing, making it much more compelling to read (provided you slow down enough to produce something that is coherent).

Other emotions can also enable you to overcome fear, both joy and anger. I bring up the latter, in particular, because even when fear is a pathology one has to wonder if the cure is worse than the disease. Let's admit that as a possibility.

This, in turn, gets us to consider that other pathologies may emerge as a consequence of looking for self-protection against fear. Alienation that leads to nihilism can be one outcome from looking for a a cure to fear of the new. Nihilism can seem sophisticated where eagerness to participate according the rules can seem painfully naive. But the nihilism constitutes a type of caving in while the participation is an affirmation of being for something. I won't elaborate, because the thoughts are still painful after more than 30 years, but do know I transferred from MIT to Cornell because I thought too many of my dorm mates had gone down the nihilistic path, I was being likewise infected, and thus I needed to be in a different environment for my own well being.

On this, rather than on conquering fear per se, I did ultimately find some peace with myself, which was to do something I had always done, but to make more of a point of it, enjoy the peccadilloes and the personal idiosyncrasies, as much or perhaps even more than the accomplishments. In the blogging mine are manifest with the word play and rhymes (fear and good cheer). I can't say that it makes the fear go away entirely. But it does make it seem that many of the worries are not of such grave consequence. And when the amusement with self comes from the mild transgressions or the just as mild victories (this summer I was able to get Educause, the international academic IT organization, to do surveys like we did in class using Google Docs at an institute I was part of rather than use paper surveys as they've traditionally done, an accomplishment I found extremely satisfying I must say) that helps on figuring out what else is important and what is less so. With a better sense of balance on what is important, the fear of the new changes. It doesn't vanish, but it does help to figure out where you're willing to give it the old college try.

I wonder what sort of follow up we should do on this. I'd appreciate suggestions on how to proceed.

Mixed expectations

We've had some exposure to pretty highbrow theories of effective change in the course. For a change of pace I thought I'd lead with something quite different, a quick tour of Murphy's Law and corollaries. Outside the setting of our course, my favorites are Paul's Law - you can't fall off the floor - particularly apt for new parents, Persig's Postulate - The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite - we actually teach something like this in microeconomics, and Young's Law - All great discoveries are made by mistake - which perhaps the eccentric needs occasionally to justify his departure from the beaten path. Even if Murphy's Law is meant as goofball satire, these are worth pondering for real.

Returning to our course theme the idea we know as Murphy's Law, if anything can go wrong it will, serves as an interesting model for design, because it leads to a "weakest link" approach to analyzing potential solutions. In engineering solutions that have a chance to be better, to borrow a term we've almost certainly overused in the course already and will likely continue to do so in the weeks ahead, the weakest link approach offers us a way to focus our thinking. I note that there actually is a weakest link approach to design, with a key example the fuses or circuit breakers in buildings made deliberately to protect the rest of the electric system, and that at least in some approaches to engineering there is an explicit idea to put in sufficient funding to shore up the weakest link.

People really don't have much problem thinking about weakest links when it comes to physical systems, but when we are talking about human interaction, then sometimes folks get idealistic, sentimental, or too enamored with success had with small numbers and then focus their attention on the potential upside when things go right instead of concentrating on what likely will go wrong. You get quite different designs with the first attitude than with the second. Then when the idealists confront the realists there is a mismatch and a tendency for the views to remain dissonant rather than converge.

I had the feeling I was witnessing failure of the weakest link as students in the class described their experiences with peer mentoring, advising, etc. in our session on Monday. It wasn't all doom and gloom but surely that was the norm. The Senior Sibling program within CHP didn't score well with the class, with many class members having played both roles at some point in their time here, but frequently where the connection between the more experienced student and incoming student was weak, even nonexistent in at least one case. I also recall some discussion of "leaving the nest," as if mentoring is a crutch and the able and aware student can maneuver without it.

It was likewise for official advising about courses, where the academic advisors were depicted as ill prepared and not particularly knowledgeable and where students could "look it up" on Web pages, almost surely a more efficient way to get the information. On this one the class got an early warning from a reflection written by one of our students that dealt with the advising system in LAS, again a system with a degree of dysfunction, where the project the student was engaged with aimed at reform.

Some students did talk about very positive mentoring relationships with faculty, folks from the Career Center, and at least one story of such mentoring from within CHP leadership. These things do happen, but they seem to occur by unplanned means, which enable the mentor and mentee both to come at the relationship willingly, an ongoing conversation of mutual interest and benefit.

I thought about this a bit and compared it to our course, not the course goals but rather the functioning of the course itself. We as a class are more relaxed and confident with each other now than we were at the start, where I didn't know you and vice versa and none of us knew what to expect about our processes and what we might gain from them. So we flailed around for a while in an attempt to find a good process and we got to know each other while flailing. Aspirations were articulated in the process. That experience created a bond common to all members of the class. I can't imagine having any trust with others without forming a bond first.

Many of you seem to frown on "forced" pairings of people and feel that goes for naught. There is, however, a forced element in being part of this class. Apart from dropping, there really isn't an option to be in the class but not participate. So you were part of the flailing because you were enrolled and did it even if you didn't like it. The sense of coercion is short lived as the forming of the bond doesn't take forever. Your sense of perspective changes while the bond is formed and it continues to change afterwards too. When you are relaxed you can be more open about your interests and concerns.

I believe that just about every student, here I'm referring not just to our class but to the entire campus, is deeply interested in the existential questions, which for the sake of brevity I'll pose in this simple sentence.

What should you do to be you?

And it is not just students who are drawn to answer that question. I know that since reading this post about the Japanese Retirement System, where people retire at age 60 not to leave the workforce, but to do different work that is more appropriate for where the person is in the life cycle, I've been thinking about what I'll do with the rest of my work life. But some of the related questions are different or more important for students, where the existential questions are wrapped around questions of personal identity.

What are you for? Why are you for it?

Some of the reflections and other writing from students in the class have snippets on these questions. The snippets are there integrated with course themes. So we are getting some of this discussion in class, even though the class itself is not mentoring and the class is not primarily about addressing the existential questions.

The flailing I mentioned was accompanied by a certain intensity and commitment. A lot has been written online in this course. A certain tone was adopted. A point was made to do this in a way that you know that your classmates know that I know, etc. (The reflection this week asks that you write about this in more depth.) The intensity mattered for making the bond. It continues to matter for the ongoing conversation once the bond has formed. I don't understand wanting to leave the nest once such a bonding experience has happened and open discussion about existential question is possible. Leaving the nest is perfectly understandable in the absence of that.

Returning to the weak link, expecting a strong relationship to develop in the absence of a way for a bond to form seems like delusion to me. In the case of the Senior Sibling program, perhaps the aspirations are modest - CHP has limited resources and the need exists only till the young student gets acclimated. In the case of advising, I believe the issue is more problematic. If it is an important function that the institution is short changing, then that would seem to contribute to the Disengagement Pact that we are trying to remedy. If it is not an important function but it's on the books as necessary, that's got it's own issues. And then, with whom does the student have discussions about the existential questions?

So there are two weak links we should consider in anything we design. The first is the bonding experience. How can that be made an integral part of the program? The other comes from noting that intensity of commitment takes time. If time is spent on the program we design, what else stops that the student would have been doing otherwise? Programs that add on to everything else have a built in weak link. We need to talk about subtraction as well as about addition. That may not be fun, but it is necessary.

Before we get there almost surely members of the class will ask, why are we bothering with this? It will be very hard to make anything work and where is the payoff for the mentees even if it does work? My sense is that with regard to the existential questions many students on campus are like stroke patients - the ideas are in their heads but they can't get the words out of their mouths. They desperately want to speak but are unable to do so. That's what our program aims to enable.

Contrasting Student and Working Professional Volunteerism

Yesterday in class we didn't ask whether any of you have a part time job and/or how such a job contrasts with participating in a volunteer activity. We also didn't ask questions about students need for income, for spending money or to contribute to pay for college expenses. One might reasonably conjecture that where the income need is strong, finding work to satisfy that need will trump any good works that might be done via volunteering. In Drucker, where the focus is clearly on the working professional, the assumption is implicitly made that the individual's income needs are already met, including providing for other members of the household. Volunteering in this case comes out of what otherwise would be termed "leisure time." It is not an alternative to a second job.

Another part of being a student is trying on hats. How can you know what you want to do with the rest of your life if you don't do that? Working professionals may do this too, but probably will do less of it than students. If a working pro commits to a voluntary activity, the commitment is ongoing. As someone said yesterday in class, student status is by its nature temporary. Many student commitments end with graduation and a change in location as the student enters the workforce or enters graduate/professional school. This experimental motive would tend to make students volunteer more than working pros.

In contrast, the presumed ongoing presence of the working pro on the job and in the community where the working pro lives encourages voluntary activity that improves quality of life in these locations. That incentive is much weaker for students, who are in a transient state for the most part regarding their residence. On this point, there may be substantial gender differences. With young kids at home, many families might prefer that work is part time. Finding good part time jobs is hard, however. Barring that, one spouse might continue to work full time and the other withdraw from the world of work for a time. That decision is definitely not gender neutral. Then, the stay home parent might look to volunteer, in part, as a way to diversify the set of activities, to interact with other adults, and to improve the environment where the kids go to school. Once these behaviors are learned, they may continue well after the child care needs have been dramatically reduced or eliminated entirely.

One motive that seems similar for both student and working pro is the volunteering for the credential. Participating in a professional organization in a way that is visible to one's boss or to one's potential future employer is similar if not identical to student volunteer activity that helps on a application to grad school. There is perhaps a small difference here in that some of this sort of activity for the working pro takes them physically away from their job and hence requires approval by the person the working pro reports to. So there is some organizational embrace of the volunteer activity (which means it is a little less like volunteering). But otherwise, the motives are similar.

However, there is an aspect of the participation in the professional organization that really is not replicated with students, which is a kind of giving back so the next generation have it as good as the current generation. This reason to volunteer as an extension of the work we do, requires being a mature pro. It is a tribute to the experience already obtained.

I've written this up to expand on the discussion in class yesterday. Drucker focuses exclusively on volunteering that is not an extension of work, but is apart from work. He also seems to focus on paid work that is not of the service kind - doctors, social workers, teachers, etc. One might wonder whether those whose job is service oriented also volunteer in activities that are apart from work.

I believe you can get more out of what we discussed in class yesterday, and out of Drucker, if we keep these sort of distinctions in mind.

Jargon and Terminology

I haven't done a jigsaw puzzle in quite a while, but my recollection is in doing some of those without knowing what it is supposed to look like when it's finished. You begin assembly by finding edge pieces with a certain color and shape and see if you can fit together the borders. Then you work your way inward. After a while but well before the thing is finished, you begin to get an idea of what it will look like when its done. That idea of the whole is different in kind from the idea of fitting the pieces together.

I don't know where we are in the course vis-a-vis the above metaphor, but I have a feeling that some of the terminology is blocking us from seeing the whole picture. In today's interview with the deans, we used the expression "Disengagement Pact" to refer to a set of issues. That evoked a certain response. We might have used some other language, perhaps "surface learning" versus deep learning," or we might have talked about maturity and commitment of students toward their studies. Would that have altered the discussion? I don't know; perhaps it would. Would we have been talking about the same big picture? I think so.

With all of this, the general goal is to try to get a handle on what problem it is that we are solving, or what set of issues we are trying to address. One that we didn't talk about today but that is definitely a big part is the idea (think of it from the perspective of the mentor) is that general education shouldn't stop once the gen ed requirements are completed. So the question comes up how to do that. More coursework is almost certainly not the answer. Something else is needed. What that something else should be remains a mystery.

As the big picture of what the issues are starts to fill in, invariably thoughts will turn to potential solutions and what to make of those. Jargon matters here as well. I encouraged use of the expression peer mentor, but I've heard others outside our course talk about peer tutors or undergraduate TAs or in the case of Business 101, section leaders. Are those all referring to more or less the same thing or does each pertain to something different? If there are distinctions, just what are those?

Before getting to that let me make an aside that I think relevant. As I've mentioned previously, I've had something of an epiphany with this class in contrasting it to my prior teaching of economics. Since the subject matter in our course is of my own creation and not externally prescribed, I've had much more of a chance to look at each of you as learners and get a sense of your strengths as well as what you need to work on. The main pathway for that has been the weekly reflections, but also the in class discussion, and in a few cases other writing. On the one hand, you're all the same, CHP students, as we learned today not a random cross section of the broader student body. But if you drill down (by now you know that is one my favorite bits of jargon) then there are remarkable differences between you and what you need to work on, particularly in the writing, which is quite idiosyncratic. By trying to meet you where you are (I may not be doing that well, but I am trying) rather than to force you to where I think you should be, there is a different sort of coaching going on in this class than I've experienced in my other teaching.

So a big issue is whether the subject as codified in the syllabus dictates the agenda or if the students and where he or she is with the learning dictates the agenda. If there is a struggle in each case, then I'd associate tutoring with the former and mentoring with the latter. Mentoring could still be driven by the subject matter. For example, in today's session Dean DeBrock talked about having students discuss New York Times articles that are relevant to the economics being studied. The mentoring could be all about that sort of thing, making the connection between the in class topics and the out of class news. Students might not otherwise make those connections on their own. And doing that might unearth the deeper structure in the economics that many students don't get.

Another aspect of the terminology is describing the setting where the interaction takes place. There was mention today of discussion sections. In my day we called them recitation sections (I still do). Often as not, they are smaller version of lecture except, at least in economics, the TA works problems rather than teaches new theory. Students can ask questions in the process sure, but the mode of discourse is really not discussion. Our seminar is discussion, much of the time. Our seminar is unlike TA sessions I've been part of. Those sessions are much more like lecture.

Still another part is what makes it happen, both the motivation and the logistics. Does the mentee seek out the mentor out of a desire for the relationship? Or is there some form of coercion involved? And when does it happen? At a time scheduled and sanctioned by the Campus or at a time that is mutually convenient for the parties? Likewise, it matters whether the interaction is in small groups or one-on-one. The language might suggest one answer over the other. Don't let that make you rule out ahead of time a possible alternative that is otherwise promising.

* * * * *

I thought it ironic that Dean DeBrock made that comment about using first names with students and that he used mine repeatedly during the session. On the other hand, his suit and tie are part of the required "uniform" for the job. I flip those, with "Business Casual" my preferred model for the style of dress at work, but retaining the label Professor when talking with students. Sometimes, its just what you are comfortable with, rather than choosing to do things based on an appeal to some rule.

Larry and I use nicknames rather than first names when sending emails or talking with each other one-on-one. It is weird, I don't have a better word for it, to have a strong friendship that is long standing and that precedes the business relationship, to have the latter seem more appropriate than the former for determining the right tone in certain settings.

Push the Button

I've been scratching my head about recent faux pas I've made. You know about one of them. Before class on Monday, I brought my laptop, connected it to the audio port on the side of the cabinet, set the microphone level down to 5 (very low, for the last class it was around 10 which is also low but still too loud), launched the program Audacity which is what is used to record the audio, made a test recording and played it back to see that the recording was working well, and erased the test recording so we'd be ready to record for real when the session started. All the preparation was correct. I missed just one thing. I didn't push the record button for the actual session.

It's easy enough to understand why. There were multiple things going on - making the guests comfortable, worrying about whether Beth would arrive, hoping the team doing the interview was on its game, general antsy-ness. The fact remains that the recording didn't start because of my omission.

Yesterday, as part of my regular job, my team and I were doing a noon-time seminar about how to make micro-lectures online. My task was to demonstrate a particular application called Jing, which makes good fidelity short screen movies. It also has one click publishing, either to a site called screencast.com, which is run by the company that makes Jing, or to YouTube. As part of my presentation I wanted to contrast the plusses and minuses in publishing to either of these sites. I tried this out in my office ahead of time, to be prepared. Yet during the presentation itself, when I got to the YouTube site, something appeared on the screen that wasn't what I had practiced, so I looked quickly to get my bearings but didn't find what I was looking for and thus flubbed that bit.

In case you guys haven't figure this out about me yet, my habit is to take experience that jumps out at me and turn it into a metaphor for other experiences I may not have considered this way before. I know I didn't feel very good about those experiences and I wondered a lot whether they realistically could have been prevented. (The answer to the latter in this case is yes.) So I've been wondering when I see missteps with the class what I could have done to avoid those - suggestions in advance that if adhered to would have prevented the problem. I've also been wondering how to grade a situation that has such a misstep, a high grade for all the preparation or a low grade because the transaction wasn't completed. That one, I still don't have an answer for.

But I do have a simple enough suggestion for in advance that I hope will improve the reflections. It is this. Worry for a bit about your title. Then choose a title that is descriptive of your post. For the last couple of weeks I've been wondering why this hasn't occurred to you on your own, but mostly it hasn't. Instead, many of you have been counting the weeks. If you read that misc. post about school being a prison, that's a thing you do when you're in prison. If as social commentary you mean to do that for real, keep at it. But if there is no intent with the action, just no prior thinking on it one way or the other, the try out this title choice. It will impact your writing by now encouraging it to connect to the title. And it will create a loop of sorts because you'll have to ask, is there a simple idea that unifies what I want to write about.

Incapacities

I never could ice skate. They'd flood the asphalt tennis courts and let it freeze, turning them into a skating rink. My dad would take us kids on a Saturday. We'd have the skates and hot chocolate in a thermos. My older sister was ok at it. We had home movies to prove the point. So when I got old enough, I had to give it a try. It wasn't the falling. Though I was poor at it, I could roller skate after a fashion. And later I learned to skateboard. It was the ankles. The roller skates and the skateboard had four wheels. The ice skates had blades. My ankles caved. So I walked with the outer part of my boot touching the ground along with the blade also touching the ground at an angle. I had some balance this way. But it wasn't skating. And it wasn't fun.

Growing up, the incapacities came first, before I found something I was good at. Fine motor skill was a problem. What other kids found ordinary, I found a challenge. I needed coaching to overcome this. I got a lot of that at pre-school and some in summer camp. It helped. I improved. But you can't get coaching in everything and there are some things you're just supposed to be able to do. What's the big deal? Put on the skates and skate.

If truth be told, I also had some incapacities at school, even after it became clear I was an elite student. I didn't know how to look into a microscope - take the glasses off or leave them on, what was I supposed to be seeing versus what I actually saw, was it the stuff on the slide or a reflection of my eye? And I had no clue about poetry. That was totally opaque to me.

I can write about this because it was a long time ago. It is much harder to write about those incapacities that are relevant to the present. I'm afraid much of that remains concealed rather than being brought out into the open.

* * * * *

In the 1970s when the Miller Brewing Company came out with Lite Beer, a product pitched at women for when they were out with men who were drinking beer, they came up with an ad campaign that caught the national attention. The ads included a lot of high testosterone types, many former professional athletes, engaged in a mock argument - tastes great versus less filling.

A couple of the ads featured Steve Mizerak, who was the next generation great pool player, following in the shoe steps of Willie Mosconi. This tribute video has the ads, one at the beginning, which will give you a flavor of the type of commercials they were making (I wonder if you know anyone of the people featured in it) and another one, "just showing off" at the very end. I believe that last one took over 100 takes to get it right.

Very good pool players are like peacocks. They strut their stuff. If you're good and you know it, why not? Others will be impressed. After a while that may become habit. You do it because it feels like the thing to do. Maybe you do it because the expected affirmation is like the sugar that makes the medicine go down, so you are comforted and need not confront your own incapacities.

But what if the audience you are performing in front of is also the group where your incapacities come to bear? Then they may not be impressed at all. The habitual strut becomes the cause of the problem. You may sense this possibility in advance so dread the situation even more than you would otherwise. And you don't see a way out of the dilemma.

So you bluff your way through it, taking control of the situation because you have the authority to do that. There is a conceptual error that underlies it all. Your authority derives from your expertise. The error is to assume that expertise in some domain implies expertise in all. Internally you know that is false, but because of the authority and the incapacities you wish to shield, you act externally as if it is the truth.

This, I believe, is the source of Argyris' Model 1. When we get to Senge, he will talk about something similar, treating the symptom rather than the cause. It seems like human nature to do this. It takes an enlightened view to do otherwise.

* * * * *

Though this course is of my own design, I'm beginning to question my capacity to teach it. I will illustrate with two issues. The Ross article from Scientific American seemed to grab most of you. So we now have the notion of deliberate practice, which seems to convey that learning is a struggle. My own view is that is correct, but it is not the full picture. There is a different view, that learning is play. (If you had Legos as a kid, that's a good example to illustrate.) My view is that most of the time learning has to be play, but then we hit plateaus and to get on the next growth path there must be struggle, until the next growth path is found. I'm not sure what the right balance is for the class, but I sense I'm making it too much of struggle and getting some of you neurotic (or more neurotic than you already are) in the process.

The other issue came out in the discussion yesterday. It was interesting for me to hear that at least some of you prefer a blunt, direct approach to communication. Perhaps that is only confined to situations with conflict, but maybe the scope of the preference is broader than that. I, in contrast, have a preference for subtlety, most of the time, and then asking for clarification when necessary. It is my way of dealing with the complexities of life. In writing and in film making and I suspect in may other creative arts, leaving important points to the reader's (or viewer's or listener's) imagination is part of the craft. So as an aspiration, subtlety seems the appropriate goal. But making some sense of a situation would appear better than making none at all. So a straightforward approach, especially at first, does have its advantages. Most of the time, however, I'm not conscious of when I'm doing one or the other.

Attempts at introducing subtlety, especially when the class isn't ready for it, looks like showing off. With that we have the ingredients for the class to turn into Model 1.

Someone suggested a while back that we try breaking into smaller groups. That might be an interesting alternative to what we have now. When we're done with the student led discussions, I think we should give that a try.

Slowing Down

I am grateful that we've gotten through this week, with the the readings from the National Academy volume and Bruner's book, for we now have the right language to talk about our own learning issues and how the class functions. So I believe we recognize that for deep learning students need to understand the underlying structure of the situation. The discussion on that point went well yesterday.

I thought the discussion about rote learning and drill was less sharp, which is why I introduced some examples other than arithmetic (more on this in a bit). There was some agreement that too much drill can end up masking a search to find the underlying structure. I'm sure we all agree. I also believe we mentioned, but I'm less sure we all agreed, that some drill is useful. (And if not drill what instead?) The issue is that the learner needs to become familiar with the situation before the structure can be identified. In what other ways can the learner become familiar with the situation?

Some of the early student reflections from this week suggested the becoming familiar issue was a concern with the readings for the course and that as a result of the lack of familiarity students are not seeing the connections between the readings and the discussion in class. They are wondering whether they shouldn't use their reflections to blog about the readings in advance of the class discussion. From where I sit, that's a fine thing to do.

But I wonder what would be done instead if we didn't have the weekly reflections requirement for the course. Students would still need to get familiar with the readings. How would they do that? And what checks would they put in place for themselves to establish they are sufficiently familiar? What I'm really asking about here is habits of mind. Is there a routine you go through to get familiar with what you are reading, going through a mental checklist, if you will, of steps to take to establish the requisite comfort with the subject matter?

In class we have something of a routine at this point. I pose a question to elicit your responses about some experience. Students give their responses and we see if there is concurrence or disagreement with those. When there is concurrence, I try to distill some lesson, a part of the structure we're trying to identify. That is a conjecture based on the discussion. The distillation has to be consistent with the experience you describe.

But in our routine we are not yet testing that conjecture in some other circumstance that we haven't yet discussed. And we are not yet asking whether the conjecture is consistent with the readings. We probably should do both. I believe doing so would give students in the class a feeling of standing on firmer ground with the ideas under discussion. But to achieve this, we''ll have to cover less. There doesn't seem any other alternative to me.

I should also note that in the first part, where I elicit your responses, I have some guess as to what you'll say, but I do not know for sure. So it is a challenge to allow the flexibility that you want in giving your responses and being able to tie those immediately into the readings. I need some time to reflect on that myself to establish the connections. So perhaps we also need to better tie one class session into the next, where part of one is an early exploration and part of the next is making ties to that. I wonder if that structure might not be better than what we have now, where we pretty much wrap things ups by the end of class, with some important connections not being made.

Returning to the issue of habits of mind, I believe that most if not all of you need to form new habits of the following sort. If we think we've identified structure then that structure should apply in multiple contexts and one way to validate that our conjecture about structure is correct is to generate additional contexts that seem parallel and see if the conjecture applies well in those new circumstances. So part of the process is generating other contexts and going through this text. I believe you need to develop a habit where it becomes instinctual for you to do that. If you did that while you were reading, then there might not be a need to blog about it to get the familiarity that is needed. Until the habit takes hold, however, blogging about it might be a good way to establish the habit, with only occasional refreshes necessary thereafter.

Blogging about the reading without going through the exercise of generating contexts and testing structure with them, may be less beneficial for this purpose. My fear is that you will treat the reading as a thing unto itself (which is how my former students used to treat their intermediate microeconomics textbook) instead of as an aid for considering real world phenomena.

Yesterday in class the discussion couldn't get past the arithmetic example. It is a good and powerful context for making the points about structure and rote learning. But it is only one context.

As a teacher I want you to maintain your individuality and learn to fully express yourself, accounting for your personal strengths and interests. But in some small ways I want you to imitate me. Developing a habit to generate multiple contexts as you consider the structure of a situation is one of those. If you end up doing that I will be flattered and, intellectually, the course will have accomplished a great deal.

Follow up from Wednesday's class - some movies to consider

Here's a bit of connecting the dots from the discussion in class yesterday.

The core way of framing the issue is this. We observe something (doctors who use chaperons, for example). We ask: what explains this observation? (Gawande himself explains this as both a deterrent to illicit behavior and as a signal to the patient that there is no intent of illicit behavior.) Are there unintended consequence? (Gawande says yes. The chaperon can make the patient feel uncomfortable.)

While we should take Gawande at his word, in general there can be more than one plausible reason that "explains" what we observe. Then the question is whether we have additional evidence that lets us sort between the candidate explanations (which is why I've pushed some of you on drill down, so you can get to some of that evidence). The reason you want to do this sorting is that if what you observe appears to be a problem, then addressing the problem requires addressing the true cause.

We discussed cheating on tests at some length yesterday but rather than consider it specifically let me take on malfeasance and serious crime more generally. There are two basic possible explanations for malfeasance; one places the onus on "the system" the other identifies the source as personal weakness or, more seriously, out and out evil present in the offending individual. One can then build up more complex explanations via interplay of the two basic explanations and interaction of those with other factors. Making ever more complex explanations helps in getting to the nuance of the particular circumstance, but it makes it harder to identify among the candidates.

A really great movie from the Depression era, I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang, is an indictment of the penal system in Georgia at the time. The story, which is based on fact, is about an innocent person getting mistakenly sent to prison, finding that horrible so he has reason to escape, and then with great irony turning into a thief because that was his only way to survive.

In contrast, movies with a prison theme based on stories by Stephen King, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile are two excellent films in this genre, offer up morality plays where the characters are either good or evil. These characters shape how the system operates, not vice versa. The stories are all the more interesting because they feature role reversal where it is the prisoners who are cast as the virtuous ones.

Returning to our discussion, for cheating you might very well ask which of the two is the primary explanation and are there interaction effects? Our discussion yesterday observed that class size matters. To the extent that the same individual cheats in a large class but not in a small class, that suggests a system explanation. Our discussion also suggested that absent instructor commitment to deterrence (diligent proctoring) students will cheat. I don't believe we pushed this enough to ask whether all students will cheat in this case or only some. If only some, you can explain the difference in student behavior via personal weakness. In turn, you can do a similar analysis to get at why the instructor doesn't proctor.

We did also talk about unintended consequence. Most students in the class who talked about it said they preferred informality with their instructor and produced their best work in that circumstance. (There was a dissenting view on this where I believe we concluded that some formality can help in setting ground rules that facilitates good work to be done.) The need to create distance between instructor and student to enforce the deterrents in the large class setting can then have a pernicious (alienating) effect on student learning.

I also mentioned, right at the end, a different sort of system impact because the large classes are typically taken early on. At some later point in the semester I'd like to discuss, either in the full class or at break, how you see AP classes. If you had the opportunity to take those courses here in a small class setting rather than in High School, would there have been value from that?

Let me close by bringing up a movie I mentioned yesterday The Paper Chase (the full movie is here with some commercials) which casts Harvard Law School circa 35 years ago as something of a Darwinian competition among the students, with the faculty personified in the character of the Contracts Professor Charles Kingsfield, quite willing to let the students agonize in his classroom by calling on them when they weren't prepared and otherwise indifferent to the emotional stress that approach created. The author of the novel, John Osborn, was actually a student in Harvard Law School a few years earlier and wrote the book while a student, perhaps as a way to cope and to critique the experience he was going through.