Teaching for Transformation

We humans seem to resist change even as we yearn for the ability to make change. Look around at the stacks of self-help books on the bestseller lists today on making change and you’ll see that they talk almost as much about how to overcome our resistance as they address how to make change in the first place.

Recently, I came across a website committed to helping us make the change we’d like to make in any area of our life. “Join our FREE community” it said and “create a profile, set your goal, receive encouragement, find inspiration” and then “Live the life you were meant to live!”

I was struck by the open-ended, generic nature of this call that seemed to say: we know you want to change your life from its current state to a new one and whatever the specifics of your goals and journey of transformation, we’ll help you get there.

The notion of transformation fascinates me although transformation – as I’ve sometimes experienced it – isn’t necessarily a comfortable thing.  What, then, makes us morph from one state to another? And who prompts that transition?

As a teacher I think about transformation as a process of entering new states of being and am struck by its power particularly as I witness it in the classroom.  The world of education – of teaching and learning – has an implicit goal of transformation. The process of acquiring knowledge and skills and preparing oneself for one’s future, at the very least suggests a change from a current state of not knowing to knowing and being prepared to engage the future.

So what does it mean to intentionally teach for transformation?

Looking back at my own experiences in teaching it seems important to design the moments and experiences where transformation can occur.  When we have experiences that touch our humanity at a deep level, transformation is likely to occur. In four recent teaching experiences, I watched students at the University of Minnesota go through a transformation of sorts.  The transformation was a kind of movement where they were learning to move between worlds, while simultaneously opening up new dimensions in their own skills and capacities.

• On a Global Seminar to India that focused on the sacred and the sustainable, a physical journey, meeting and working with school children among the urban poor in India and starting to build using local methods on a sacred site there were profound experiences.  Here, it was being in two completely different geographies and cultures of US and India with radically different ground realities that triggered the transformation.

• In a design studio and seminar course on homelessness I co-taught at the College of Design, spending a day in the life of a homeless person, designing to meet the needs of a homeless person in the street and then designing an upgrade for the space in a local shelter, created powerful experiences. The students interacted with and had their own work reviewed by homeless persons in Rapson Hall. Here, it was the encounter of an alternative life, the meeting of and working for people that often exist as stereotypes that triggered the transformation.

• With a visiting Canadian colleague, I taught a design studio that brought graduate and undergraduate students together to work with a local Mendota Dakota community. Here, the impact of understanding history from a contemporary perspective, getting to know members of a Dakota tribe, understand their traditions, being mentored in their skills, and designing and building for their sacred ceremony created a transformational experience.

• And in a recent design thinking based class I taught, freshmen connected to an expanded view of design, engaging their own creativity and visited other places and units within the university’s Twin Cities campus that supported creativity and design.   Here it was the on-going reflection across multiple contexts that led to transformative insights and experiences.

In all of these above stories, the students moved from their current states and ways of seeing the world to new ones. In the process they uncovered new passions, skills and capacities that seemed to empower them enough to want to continue the journey. As I reflect on these stories, a few principles stand out for me:

Principles supporting teaching for transformation

Connect to Life in all its diversity
We often limit our lives and connecting to Life in all its fullness and diversity opens us up in ways not experienced before.

Involve the whole body
Embodied beings that we are, teaching and learning that involves the whole body, engages all the senses and crosses the three realms of body, mind and spirit triggers transformation. Teaching and learning experiences that engage the whole body push our abilities and our comfort.

Connect self to community
We are individuals but embedded in the collective, whether we accept this or not.  Experiences that connect the two are really helpful towards transformation.

Connect to purpose
We each have a sense of purpose and a desire to make a difference and teaching and learning that taps into that can be transformative.

Connect to creativity
We are all creative beings and experiences that lead us to re-discovery our own creativity in different ways helps us transform.

Using the above principles as we plan our teaching and learning experiences will spark questions such as these:

• Does this course experience try to connect to life in as much of its diversity as possible? 
• How does learning in this course involve the whole body?
• Do the experiences of the course foster ways for students to connect self to community?
• How does the course overall help students connect to their sense of purpose?
• And finally, how does the work foster creativity, the development of valuable and original ideas?

Continuing my journey in teaching for transformation

In my continuing journey – especially when I encounter discomfort – I seek inspiration from others on this path of working with transformation.  On this journey, I not only look to my students – their work, comments and transformations – but also to other teachers who empower us to discover ourselves and live creative lives to our fullest potential.

Some of my favorite in-print teachers:

• Frederick Franck, a sculptor/painter/doctor/artist and author of The Awakened Eye, relentlessly helped people to truly see while they also learned to draw and in so doing transform themselves.
• Jean Houston, scholar, philosopher, researcher in human capacities, primary founder of the human potential movement and author of The Possible Human helps anyone interested in transforming themselves towards capacities they never dreamed of.
• Michael Gelb, authority on da Vinci, and author of How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day teaches people to unlock their creativity using principles from da Vinci’s work.

My creative and diverse thinking colleagues here in the university community are those I seek for conversations and brainstorming in person or over a phone call.  As I develop and re-design courses, I seek out teaching conversations with my colleagues at the College of Design, School of Architecture and the Center for Sustainable Building Research; I brainstorm with colleagues across disciplines from the coordinate campuses; I meet with colleagues through the incredible opportunities provided by the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Center for Writing and the Global and Strategic Program Alliance’s Internationalizing the Curriculum network.

In my conversations with these colleagues I am reminded to not be bound by the confines of my own discipline and to approach teaching for transformation in a fluid and inclusive way.  And then, lest I get comfortable with my role as a university teacher, conversations with teachers from among my community partners in the community-based research and outreach I am involved in across Minnesota remind me to ask the central question:

What does it mean to teach for transformation, in the university and in the world?

By Virajita Singh, who teaches and learns at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design and the Center for Sustainable Building Research. Write to her at singh023@umn.edu with your thoughts or ideas about teaching for transformation or anything else.

Additional Resources – in suggested order for review

1. Frank Coffield.  Just Suppose Teaching and Learning Became the First Priority.  2008.  The “Back to Basics” section develops a robust definition of learning, suitable to transformative learning and teaching practices.
2. Jean Marrapodi. “An Overview of Adult Learning Theories.”  2002.  This slide presentation opens with a focus on Transformational Learning as one of five adult learning theories.
3. Kelly McGonigal.  ”Teaching for Transformation: From Learning Theory to Teaching Strategies.”  Sets out challenges along with links to teacher-generated strategies from a range of disciplines.
4. Stephen Brookfield.  “Adult Cognition as a Dimension of Lifelong Learning.” 2000. Addresses student and teacher discomforts with transformative learning as part of adult learning processes and practices.

Engineering Concrete Footings: Foundations for Sound Pedagogy – SUCCESS in Teaching, Part 3

The Latin derivative of concrete means “to grow together, harden,” and my first image of this term usually conjures up a block of cement or a sidewalk. I am drawn quickly to the “already hardened” image, the belief that I have cemented down an idea when I know something deeply. Concrete language and images are clear and tangible, and that’s why they are remembered and understood—cemented down in our memories. But what can we make of the more dynamic image, the process of fusing together that precedes hardening?

Aggregate I

The fine and coarse aggregates that comprise actual concrete need water to initiate the hardening phase and become rock-like. The chemical reaction is dramatic and permanent—a fusing or growing together of the individual components. For students, solid images, rich examples, and colorful language comprise the aggregates that fuse course material over time. Instructors need presentations, class assignments, and projects that are embedded with these aggregates to deepen the impact of the course experience.

In Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (2008), authors Chip and Dan Heath note that of the six principles that characterize their model, “concreteness is perhaps the easiest to embrace. It may also be the most effective of the traits” (p. 129). Why? Because concrete language is the “universal” language” (p. 115) that all of us relate to. Across a day, we regularly and fluently speak concretely, and students in particular crave the concreteness of real-life examples to give meaning to course content.

Concrete ideas are grounded in the senses—what we see, hear, and touch—and this characteristic makes them firmly rooted in memory. Visualize the concept of a bicycle; contrast the clarity and speed of accessing that image with the difficulty of accessing the concept of transportation infrastructure. No contest.

This doesn’t mean instructors should avoid talking about abstract concepts.  Instead, we need to be a bit more creative in creating the bridge toward concreteness; we need to look to the aggregate material, the layered series of concrete examples that build toward abstract understandings.

Aggregate II

Typically, the term concrete is contrasted with abstract, and university courses are full of abstract concepts. Imagine an undergraduate course in philosophy in which the concept of truth is under debate. The conversation can easily spin into a fascinating set of propositions as one teases out its essence through argumentation and theory.

Consider next a criminology course in which truth is also under examination but in a radically different way: students are shown a police video that demonstrates stumbling behavior and slurred speech in a field sobriety test of a driver who may be under the influence of alcohol. The criminology students are experiencing a truth of concrete evidence and weighing what may be necessary to demonstrate if the case comes to a jury trial.  Looking back to that philosophy course, might the abstract conversation also be layered – scaffolded – through a series of life scenarios to make use of the concrete to understand the abstract?

Aggregate III

Think of an instructor’s language on the first class meeting in which the syllabus is being reviewed.  Compare the following two ways that outline student success in this course:

Abstract: “To succeed in this class, you’ll have to work hard and be committed. You need to put a lot of effort into each assignment and prepare well for tests ”

Concrete: “Students have told me over the years that they need to do four things to succeed in my class: a) go to every class, b) do all your reading before you go, c) write several drafts of each paper, and d) review your notes regularly for each class.”

Which would students need to hear, particularly those who may be uncertain or anxious about their ability to achieve at a high level?  How else might instructors use concrete experiences with past students to inform and enrich the learning experiences of their current students throughout the course?

Description with Petter Duvander’s photo: “Concrete pig, with a twist …thingys that are supposed to be disturbing traffic are called concrete pigs in Swedish. On our largest island, Gotland, rams are kind of mascots, so of course their pigs are rams instead.”

Aggregate IV

Becoming more concrete as a teacher can also involve the skilled use of imagery. In my disciplinary field of kinesiology, we leverage the principle of concrete heavily and regularly. For example, the meaning of an abstract idea such as “aesthetics” in a sport philosophy class can be visualized in reference to the pure athleticism of dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov, the simultaneous power and grace of tennis player Serena Williams – frankly, in reference to world-class athletes in any sport who we see grow from novices to nimble professionals across a career. The ability of our students to recognize useful examples and generate their own is a direct reflection of their immersion into the language and imagery of this highly concrete discipline.

For any university course, consider the following tangible ways that students can show their capability to know and understand course material:

1. Providing a demonstration/performance associated with a course assignment
2. Displaying one’s understanding through a diagram or figure (e.g., concept map)
3. Designing and conducting a mini experiment to test a hypothesis
4. Taking a series of photographs that symbolize the focus of a class assignment
5. Writing up a real-life story or narrative on a topic
6. Solving a specific problem that is implied by a course objective
7. Bringing forward a three dimensional artifact that supports a thesis or conjecture
8. Shooting a video that captures the essence of a class project

Certainly, each of these eight tools are fully available for instructors to use as well in the design and delivery of a course.

Aggregate V

To come full circle on the meaning of concrete and its Latin origin: Solidify course material for students through clear language, vivid imagery, and memorable examples. This dictum is difficult to ignore for instructors in virtually any university course. And for those of you who have always been “true believers” in the importance of leveraging the concrete principle:

• Push yourself to use language that helps students bridge the gap between complex ideas and their concrete manifestation.

• Leverage the power of examples whenever possible as they are a primary way in which students make sense of difficult ideas and concepts.

• Develop multiple concrete examples to spark conceptualizing processes and practices across a full, broad range of learners.

• Invent or uncover stronger and more relevant ways to represent your disciplinary content using more of the eight tools listed above.

Resources

• SUCCESS in Teaching – Simply an Introduction and a First Principle: http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-9X
• Active Learning will not (in itself) lead to SUCCESS in Teaching – Part 2, Unexpected: http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-am
• Photos: Making Concrete series – HEA Engineering Subject Centre’s photostream, and Concrete Pig by Petter Duvander used under Creative Commons Attribution/Non-Commercial licenses.

Blog Post by David Langley, CTL Director.

Active Learning will not (in itself) lead to SUCCESS in Teaching – Part 2, Unexpected

Active learning is NOT associated with student learning, according to recent research published by the American Society of Cell Biology.

Not an assertion you were expecting us to feature?  

Nope.  So, do read on, letting this unexpected bit of information unwind:

The ability to gain and keep people’s attention is essential to teaching.  In their book, Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath suggest a number of methods for gaining and keeping your students’ attention. One approach for gaining attention is to break the expected pattern of starting a class.  For instance, a typical large statistics class might begin with an instructor saying, “In today’s class, I’d like to cover the topic of probabilities.  Let’s start with the pigeonhole principle.”

However, an unexpected way to start the same class might begin with the instructor saying: “All right, let’s make a wager.  I’m willing to bet that at least two people in this lecture hall share a birthday. If you don’t believe me, then make a bet of a dollar and if there aren’t at least two people in this room who don’t share a birthday, I’ll pay each of you two dollars.”

While taking money from one’s students may not be ethical (and most certainly does not reflect an endorsement by the author of this posting, the Center for Teaching and Learning or the University of Minnesota), starting a statistics class with the birthday paradox will get their attention.

A technique for keeping attention is to make people curious, perhaps by using cognitive disequilibrium to highlight a counterintuitive finding, like, for instance, research that asserts that active learning methods don’t work.  So, why in the classrooms studied and in similarly contexted classrooms did active learning strategies not lead to more student learning?  First, some background on the study:

Drawing on a sample of 33 different instructors from 28 schools and more than 8,000 students, the article authors (citation and link to article below) assessed beginning of the term pretests and end of the term posttests to assess how much students had learned about natural selection in introductory college biology classes.  Instructors of the related courses provided lists of the types of active learning exercises that they used and the frequency with which they used them.

Analyzing the data gathered, the researchers did not find an association between the frequency of active learning exercises and how much students learned about natural selection.  In short, giving students lots of clicker questions or asking them to participate in think-pair-share activities on its own did not lead to more learning.

So does that mean that we should use a chalk-and-talk approach to teaching?

No.

What the authors advocate is a more careful and deliberate use of active learning since those who say that they use active learning in their classrooms are not necessarily effective in using active learning as a pedagogic strategy.  For instance:

• An instructor may use active learning strategies in her/his classrooms but only solicit one answer from the class, thereby failing to expose students to a range of ideas from students.
• Or, the instructor may not provide sufficient time for students to process their thoughts.
• The instructor may also simply misuse a technique, even a “simple” one  like think-pair-share: one study cited suggests that 63.5% of instructors reported using the technique but 83% of those who used it did not used it as suggested by the researchers.

The article also recommends using not only more pretest/posttest assessments to assess overall effectiveness, but also more formative assessments to measure ongoing learning.  Finally, the authors recommend that teachers directly confront students’ preconceptions about content, since those preconceptions can interfere with learning new material.  The authors’ decision to test students’ knowledge of natural selection is particularly apt because students are more likely to benefit from engaging and processing in such a difficult and long misunderstood topic.

However, if instructors do not directly address students’ preconceptions, students are unlikely to be able to transfer and apply that knowledge in an accurate manner, hence the lack of improvement in their posttest results.

As the authors conclude, “Simply adding clicker questions or a class discussion to a lecture is unlikely to lead to large learning gains.  Effectively using active learning requires skills, expertise, and classroom norms that are fundamentally different from those used in traditional lectures.”  Instructors therefore need to be savvy in making course planning decisions about why and how as well as when and in what ways to apply active learning approaches to their teaching; otherwise, they may very well be investing a significant amount of time and effort in deploying these strategies in ways that do not lead to animating and deepening student learning.

Resources

• Andrews, Leonard, Colgrove, and Kalinowski.  ”Active Learning Not Associated with Student Learning in a Random Sample of College Biology Courses.”  CBE – Life Sciences Education 10.4 (1 December 2011): 394-405.  http://www.lifescied.org/content/10/4/394.full.pdf+html
• SUCCESS in Teaching – Simply an Introduction and a First Principle - http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-9X

 

 

Blog Post by Paul Ching, Lead for the Center for Teaching and Learning Consultation Group

Pigeons in flight photo by Danko Dubric; used via Creative Commons ShareAlike/Attribution License.

SUCCESS in Teaching – An Introduction and Principle #1, Simple

Introduction

What, exactly, is SUCCESS in teaching?

For me, whether I am teaching a history, literature, composition, women’s studies, american studies or Preparing Future Faculty courses, SUCCESS is achieved when the course both provokes and sustains more learning for more students.

For etymologists parsing the Oxford English Dictionary, SUCCESS happens in the sequel; the termination (favourable or otherwise) of affairs; the issue, upshot, result.  It is something that happens over time, as part of a process, and emerges as the prosperous achievement of something attempted.

For  brothers, academics and authors Dan and Chip Heath, SUCCESS in teaching involves six core principles – listed below – which we at the UMinn Center for Teaching and Learning propose lead to practices of Savvy Learning and Teaching:

Throughout February and March, the Techniques in Learning and Teaching blog will address the principles and practices of SUCCESS in teaching through a series of posts.  Each post will focus on one principle, setting out core components of that principle, offering select examples, culling a few follow up resources.  The writers of each post are CTL staff members who incorporate these ideas in on-campus workshops for instructors, and in seminars and courses on teaching in higher education.

First Principle – SIMPLE

As the opening words for descriptions of Simple, Dan and Chip Heath share this sentence: “Simplicity isn’t about dumbing down; it’s about prioritizing.”  It’s also about building generative analogies, key phrases, and remembering what it’s like to not know something.  What’s “in there” for us to consider as teachers in higher education settings – whether we are meeting on campus, online, in community settings?

Simple is about choosing. In news reporting it’s making determinations about the look of the front pages of each section, about what will be the day’s headline stories, and what will be the wording of lede paragraphs in stories at the top of each page.  In teaching, simple is about planning for learning and teaching through thoughtful course design, about mindfully determining student learning outcomes, and about  prioritizing the outcomes – what’s in and what’s out – in order to set a learning course for the semester.

Simple is about visualizing and enacting the complex process of course design, which – on its own is a rather simple schema, as you can see below:

The Intended Learning Outcomes - these are the lede of news articles, the principle concepts, content and concerns that readers, or for our purposes, students and colleagues, need to understand if the rest of the article, the course being taken, is to make sense and come to a successful resolution – a deepened understanding – when the reader, the student, reaches the end.

From the outcomes, the assessments and learning/teaching activities follow – or as the Heath brothers say it throughout their work on sticky teaching - we stage the learning across units, topics, days so that we build with our students the complex understandings needed for success in a particular course.

The assessments – like a good photograph – capture aspects of learning as it happens, allowing teachers to respond to learning as it happens, and inviting students to view the products of their learning alongside viewer’s/teacher’s comments as part of re-seeing, reflecting on the original shot, the original substance of the assessment.

The learning/teaching activities – like articles in a solid investigative journalism series – build each day, aim to interact with actual and diverse audiences while building new insights or sources of information over time.  The layering of assessments and intertwining with feedback/responses invites participation from the journalist/teacher and reader/student alike in building complex ideas.

Savvy Learning and Teaching – with Simple in Mind

For the purposes of designing courses, I see three core principles for the practice of Savvy Learning and Teaching with Simple in mind:

1. Define learning – as a personal construct, as a principle guiding course design, as a practice to convey to students from day one.
2. Enact mindful course design – as reflected in the visualization and analogy above, as a practice of organizing learning and teaching for the era we’re in, which is one in which we cannot ever again aim or hope to “cover the content” in a world that moves at paces that will require students to be able to uncover, co-create, invent the content every day of their lives.
3. Consider multicultural learning and teaching as everyone’s everyday work – as part of living in a world requiring divergent thinking that welcomes dissent and creativity in order to take on the dense, complex, multi-pronged “wicked” problems of contemporary life, we need to understand the richly rigorous ways of thinking our many students bring to the classroom.

For the purposes of delivering courses, I see  three core principles for the practice of Savvy Learning and Teaching with Simple in mind:

1. Be sure students see learning – as a core component of student outcomes reflected in your syllabus, as a process they will be expected to practice/engage throughout a course, and as something they record daily:  what I learned today, and that I learned today – simple notations of how learning happens each day is how students and their teachers will recognize learning at work.
2. Be part of the learning – flip the classroom, as my K-12 colleagues say: have students do the reading, hear the lecture, complete the homework, collaborate with a peer and/or send an integrative question to you ahead of class so that when they are with you the class session begin with doing work together, begins with work at a next level of difficulty that you can all engage and discuss.
3. Provide simple structures for learning – slide presentations that show thinking at work, lecture outlines that invite engagement, Twitter hashtags to facilitate sharing of resources, assignments that layer learning so that students build insights as they would do as practitioners in your field of study.

Resources

• Teaching Backward: Course Design with No High Heels Required - http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-6g
• Cultivating Learning - http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-1L
• Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides – http://wp.me/p1Mdiu-40