| Ricci Street
< Port 80 < Boardwalk || search | sitemap | help gazette | theater | bistro |
| | |
 |
|
Let's examine more closely another of the core processes: teaching and learning. The fancy word is pedagogy.
Can you imagine an institution of higher education that would market mediocre, uninspired teaching? No, the brochures all say the school is student-centered and that it employs only the best teachers. That's not true, though if you define teaching very carefully, it is somewhat true. Regardless, few institutions of higher education (Alverno is an exception) have a coherent model of learning, much less one that integrates the courses, drives the curriculum, or determines what happens in the classroom.
The teaching process is also well-established. The key to its longevity is its "good enough" success and its avoidance of the learning process. Most teachers teach up a storm regardless of learning. They tell rather than show. They're responsible for the tidy process of didactic, top-down instruction and the students are responsible for the messy process of learning.
The higher education industry is consciously modeled after an effective machine. It is a teaching machine. It uses scientific methods to measure, test, and sort students. Is it effective? Is it convenient? As Vicky Phillips writes in an often-republished essay, Education in the Electronic Ether:
The idea that the American mind is best taught using a factory model -- where students sit in neat rows, holding up their hands for permission to speak, clock-watching their way through textbooks and lectures which are broken into discrete knowledge widgets -- has never been shown to be an effective way to learn. It has been shown to be a convenient way for colleges to transcript that a standardized body of knowledge has been dutifully delivered. The American factory model. Everyone on the assembly line is delivered the same standardized units of information (lectures and textbooks); they then all must pass the same quality inspection (objective exams).
This factory passes on the traditional and accepted
knowledge, information, and values. It prepares students for their prescribed
place in the society. It rewards highly structured classrooms in which content
and processes are highly standardized.
teacher-centered
curriculum and classroom. It is usually the faculty member front and center who
does most of the talking.
decontextualized study
of information; facts presented in isolation
asking students to
accept knowledge and perspectives of the teacher and the mainstream, canonical
textbooks as given and irrefutable. The sage on the stage.
an emphasis on
memorization and regurgitation. The material is covered whether or not the
students learn it.
lecture, recitation,
multiple choice tests and concern for getting the one "right" answer.
A fixed body of knowledge.
This system depends on student fear: fear of flunking out, fear of not being prepared, fear of low grades, fear of wrong answers, fear of "mistakes". The faculty feed this fear and use it to isolate and control students. They mistrust the process and the students, so they create conditions in which cooperation is punished ("Do your own work") and cheating is endemic. They do it in the name of "rigor" and "standards". They prepare students for a world that was -- hoarded, scarce information -- not the world that will be -- shared, plentiful information.
Involving students in discussion fosters retention of information,
application of knowledge to new situations, and development of higher-order
thinking skills -- and discussions do this much better than lectures do. ... Yet
70 to 90 percent of professors use the traditional lecture as their primary
instructional strategy.
In a
study of 155 class sessions at four different institutions, questioning of
students comprised 0.2 percent to 9.2 percent of class time.
In most
courses, transmission of facts from teacher to students and discussion that
requires only the recall of facts are the dominant class activities,
regardless of discipline, the number of weeks into the semester, or size of
institution. In one study, 89.3 percent of questions asked by the faculty
required only recall to answer, not comprehension of concepts.
source: Doug Madden's Summary
based on
Why We Must Change: The Research Evidence
Where is the Factory Model vulnerable to the driving force of the Internet? What parts of this process are most likely to be disintermediated? Where will new business models reintermediate?
An alternative model is far older than higher education. It is how humans learn. It is how two-year-olds learn the hardest thing they'll ever have to learn: language. They learn it without lectures, without tests, and without classrooms. They learn by repeated failure. And almost everyone learns it ... in spite of repeated failure? Or because of it?
This model continues as humans age. Although there has traditionally been a gender split which probably limited everyone, basically girls learned from older women the crafts of feeding, clothing, and sheltering the community. Boys learned from older men the crafts of tool making and then using the tools to make things and to hunt and to protect the community.
The wisdom here is that people learn by doing and by making mistakes. They learn in close intimate contact with teachers who guide them and show them rather than tell them.
In spite of the pretensions of higher education, most learning is still done this way. After students get their degrees, then they really learn -- on the job from an older, more experienced worker.
How does this apply to higher education? After the Industrial Revolution broke down the apprenticeship system, it took until the middle of this century for higher education to vocationalize. Now, much important higher education is done this way: languages, arts, and medicine. Can you imaging learning French, painting, or surgery without doing it?
The arts especially confound the factory model because they don't scale. One professor can teach accounting to a hundred students in a lecture hall. One professor cannot teach painting to a hundred students in a lecture hall.
As a result, painters can't get a Ph.D. in painting (though they can get it in the history, aesthetics, chemistry, marketing, or psychology of painting). They can't become full professors at most institutions. They don't conduct traditional scientific research. They rarely attract corporate sponsors, though they do attract the occasional commission. And they don't get paid nearly as much for teaching.
Why should they? According to the Factory Model, what they do hardly qualifies as teaching, regardless of the learning that may be going on.
This Apprentice Model is also called constructivist
or critical inquiry or explore and discover. It sees education as human and
experiential. It lets students learn through doing and in their own ways
according to their own agenda. Going back to Socrates, it is a process of asking
questions, exploring a range of answers, and developing a critical perspective.
It sees education as a process through which teachers and students create
knowledge together in a variety of contexts, and generate and address critical
questions about the knowledge they produce in the natural world and in the
simulated natural world within the classroom, often called the studio.
The faculty (white sphere) are coaches who stand in for society (four unmeshed
gears) to draw the knowledge through the students.
student-centered curriculum and classroom. The teacher is the guide.
contextualized study of information; facts presented in authentic
situations
asking students to question the knowledge and perspectives of the
teacher and to reflect critically on mainstream, canonical knowledge
an emphasis on exploration and application
discussion, group work, alternative assessment rewarding multiple
answers and multiple ways to get them challenging the status quo
This model rests on student surprise, joy, and delight: the surprise of curious discovery and synthesis, the joy of exploring the unknown and the unprepared for, the delight of wrong answers about A that bring insight when connected to B. The faculty feed this delight and use it to motivate students and to encourage community. They don't try to measure it very scientifically because they trust the process; cheating is impossible. They prepare students for a world that is and the world that will be.
The Apprentice Model recognizes that education gets minds to do things they are badly designed for: written language, mathematical calculation, the very large and very small spans of time and space in history and science. This education will always be a tough slog, depending on disciplined work on the part of students and on the insight of skilled faculty who can stretch stone-age minds to meet the demands of alien subject matter.
For anything more challenging than absorbing new information, we need to be coaxed, cajoled, precipitated, pressurized and tricked into really difficult learning. Certainly, if one is talking about someone who has already convinced themselves that a certain type of learning is impossible for them (as I used to frequently find as an adult literacy tutor), teaching has more to do with developing resilience, confidence and strategies than imparting knowledge.
source: Life in the Fourth Millennium by Steven Pinker
Where is the Apprentice Model vulnerable to the driving force of the Internet? What parts of this process are most likely to be disintermediated? Where will new business models reintermediate?
other pages in this Higher Education web
overview | industry
portrait | stakeholders
history | present and
future pressures | distance education
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
