Design is a word in the air these days, but today I want to think about “re”-design.. Many of us are (re)designing familiar courses for full or partial remote delivery and trying to find ways to make our syllabi “disruption resilient.” Keeping in mind the motto that I want to “transform and not just transfer” my classes for remote construction, I have been at nearly every aspect of courses I have been teaching and tweaking for years. As I have been doing this, some ideas that I have been hearing about for some time—active learning, backward design, course alignment, flipped experiences—are taking a stronger foothold than they did when it was business-as-usual. I am also more sensitive to research that tells us that learning is not just cognitive, but social and emotional as well. And to still more research that tells us average adults have an attention span of roughly 15-20 minutes. All these ideas jangle around in my head as I try to figure out ways to engage students in classes that—in my case—I am redesigning for hybrid delivery.
I spent an afternoon recently thinking about Student Learning Outcomes for my courses, making sure I had concrete, measurable outcomes that I was clearly aligning with the instructional activities and course content. I realized how much I try to do with students, and how much I struggle with putting aside some content to allow students to grapple authentically with the work they need to do in the course. Real learning, it turns out, is time-consuming. As they say, “the person doing is the person learning,” so I realize that I need to make time for students to do things, not just muscle them through the semester..
Education is undergoing a shift (and not just because of COVID-19 or the impending takeover of the workplace by robots). We are shifting from an externally measured, standardized, competitive model of education (one by the way the frequently rewards speed) to an internally motivated, self-paced style of learning that emphasized deep, authentic learning (not just memorization). It’s a lot to take on board, especially because I have internal barriers to this shift.
I have personally lamented that in a novel course I now teach only four or five novels across the sixteen-week semester. When I was in College, I read ten novels for a similar course (in the snow!). The part of me that laments this change is the part of me that feels we are not challenging students enough. We cater to their preferences and attention spans too much because college has become a business and they are—in a sense—customers (though, of course, most faculty I know detest such language).
Similarly, today I was reading about ungrading. I like the idea a great deal, but that other part of me whispers into my ear that grades are important; they represent standards. That same voice says we’re turning higher ed into a nursery school where all work is celebrated and warmly encouraged.
And then, I think: well, what is wrong with that? Isn’t the goal to motivate students to be learners, not embarrass or discipline them into being “good students.” And what do students who are supposedly “good students” really learn? Research says, not much. Most students forget what they learned to pass a test less than a few weeks later. Real learning happens when the learning is self-motivated, authentic, and applied. Read: real learning takes time.
My mind goes into loops around this time, but more and more I’m landing (and with firmer and firmer footing) on the side of student learning done by the students. It is staged by me; I guide, I coach, I advise, I aim to inspire, I try to make connections and articulate relevance and context, but I can’t learn for them—and I’m not sure how being a “tough” teacher or grader will help them learn either. It may have once made me feel “serious” and “rigorous” but that’s about me, not the students. Hmmmm.
Grappling with issues like this allows me to realize that Ph.D. or not, full professor or not. I am still learning too—and that’s a wonderful feeling.