I’ve been asked to contribute to a collective statement about our teams values. Sigh. I know how these things go. First everybody takes time to come up with a set of values they believe in, then everybody talks as a group to come to a consensus. The result is a set of generic values that could have been found by quick internet search. Then the list is put to one side and never consulted again. So, as you can guess, I’m not going to spend much time on this. I did suggest that we take the UofG values and show how we embody those as a team, but I’m not going to get off that lightly. So here’s an exercise from Brene Brown that I think is worthwhile doing as an individual. She suggests that we start with her list of 50 values (and add your own if you want), circle those that you think are the most important and whittle them down to two core values. As she says, this is HARD – I can get to a shortish list, but choosing the final two takes time. Anyway, here’s my initial list:
Transparency/openness
Accountability
Responsibility
Integrity
Authenticity
Honesty
Reliability
Collaboration
Ethics
Reflection
When I look over my list, most of them can be summed up by one value: authenticity. I’ll choose collaboration as my second value.
I was contacted this week by a professor in my old Philosophy department (where I spent many happy years as a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant), wanting to know how I made the move from philosophy into learning and teaching. That’s something I am always happy to talk about – I’m genuinely interested in how people can take experience and expertise in one area and use it in another.
In my case it happened something like this. I was teaching a lot of tutorials in level 1 philosophy and trying my best to find ways of getting more students to do more than sit passively while the few confident students dominated the conversation, or tutorials turned into mini lectures. A friend (now my husband) suggested that I start to look at learning and teaching events as a way of finding inspiration – and told me that the UofG learning and teaching conference would give me a nice, free lunch if nothing else. I attended the conference, saw a talk by a lecturer (Steve Draper) about Jigsaw Classrooms, and realised I’d found a model that I could use. So I contacted Steve and met with him, applied for and received a small grant from the HEA (as it was then), and spent the next year developing my model of Jigsaw Tutorials. I immersed myself in educational research, wrote papers, presented at conferences, and developed materials that others could adopt or adapt for their own teaching. In short, I became an expert in Jigsaw and realised that I wanted to work in learning and teaching. So when a part-time, short-term post was advertised in the Learning and Teaching Centre I was excited to apply, and over the moon when I got the job. A full-time post came up as a learning technologist and I was again successful, the Uni approved a fee waiver for me to begin a PhD in Education and the rest, as they say, is history. I was not sure how useful my experience would be to others wanting to make a similar move – but I was more than happy to share my success story.
Over a short phone call, however, it became obvious that she was not interested in my story, because she thought of what I’d done not as a positive move from a subject that I’d grown tired of into an area of research that interested me a lot more – and which I felt was important as it made a practical difference – but as a downwards move by a failed researcher. It’s always lovely to get an insight into how others see you. She told me of a colleague who she was meeting later that day who, in her words, had ‘come to the end of the line’ in philosophy after a series of short-term contracts, and who she was going to suggest move into learning and teaching – hence her enquiry to me.
I gave some advice. I said that if a colleague was genuinely interested in making the transition from disciplinary research into the scholarship of teaching and learning then there were communities that I could introduce them to, and colleagues who had also made the move who could help them to make the move. I said that it was not easy, that it was a career path with at least as much importance as disciplinary research, and that SoTL was as rigorous as any other subject. But she was not really listening. In her mind I was a loser, I had failed at Philosophy so I’d gone off to work in a dead-end service job with a lot of other losers, and she wanted to know how her loser colleague might scrape a meaningless existence with us.
I know, on one level, that research is more highly thought of than teaching, I know that I work at a research-intensive university, so maybe this should not have been a surprise. But it was.
“Gold star” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
Recently I’ve heard two different people say the following about assessment:
Assessment is the driver for all learning (in HE)
Active learning and assessment are the same thing
I think that both of these statements are obviously wrong, or they ought to be.
I can, sadly, understand how assessment becomes the motivating factor for many students because the stresses of being a student and the pressure to always get the best grade override any joy that there might be in learning for the sake of learning, so I can appreciate (1) being said, at least as an observation about the current state of affairs in HE.
The last semester that I taught undergraduate philosophy was particularly fraught, with many tutorials being cancelled due to union strikes and others snowed off, but one event stands out, even now. A particularly bright student went off at a tangent, and I suggested some reading that might interest him, probably some Wittgenstein. After the tutorial, a group complained to the course convenor that I was wasting their time by talking about materials that would not be needed for the final exam. This wasn’t the only reason that I handed in my notice and walked away from that post, but it was a contributing factor.
However, (2) just strikes me as bizarre. Putting to one side my issues with the term ‘active learning’ (I don’t believe that learning can be passive – for learning to be happening, there must be something active ‘in the learner’s head’), then I think that we could reasonably assert that a student who is working on an assessment is actively learning, but that does not entail that all (active) learning is or involves assessment. When I reflect on the times that I have learnt the most, they have usually had nothing to do with assessment. The serious fun that happens during experiences such as #CLMooc, #DS106 and the rhizos have led to some of the most meaningful learning that I’ve ever experienced – and assessment most definitely had no part in those experiences.
The bright student in my story above might have ended up using the ‘extra’ learning he had done as part of a future assessment, or he might not – learning is not contingent on past or future assessment. All of this shows that active learning and assessment are not the same thing, and that there can be learning without assessment. And I think I am going to go further and assert that there can also be a type of learning that happens despite assessment. If students are over assessed, as they sometimes can be, then any extra curricula activity – and the meaningful learning that happens as a result of serendipity – will have to be fitted in somehow. And if there is pressure, from whichever direction, to teach to the test, then the keen student who strays beyond the required materials will be learning despite assessment.
Assessment has its place, and accreditation is important. But assessment is not the whole picture, and we should firmly resist anyone who suggests that it is.
My Granny taught me a lot about cooking. She’d read a recipe – say for pork chops with apple – and say that she thought she’d make it for tea, and maybe alter it a little bit, because she realised that she had some lamb chops and apricots that would make a good combination. Whatever she made was delicious – she was a great cook.
I thought about this today when I attended a seminar which was advertised as being about Team Based Learning (TBL). TBL is a very structured approach to active learning, and it has a fairly formulaic recipe. Some proponents say that it should be followed to the letter, others say that there can be some leeway in modifying it – but my experience today got me wondering: when does a learning design stop being a modified version of the original and start being something else altogether? The version I was told about today was an interesting type of active learning, but it was very removed from being TBL. It was not bad teaching and learning, in fact I think it was very good – but I don’t think the presenter had understood what the original design was all about.
So where do we draw the line? If I tell you that I am making you a Shepherd’s Pie, but actually I substitute the original filling with apple and the topping with meringue, is it still a type of modified Shepherd’s Pie? Surely not. How about if I keep the original filling and top it with meringue – is it now a not very palatable Shepherd’s Pie? Possibly.
To return to Granny’s cooking, of course in the example above she wouldn’t have told us that she was giving us pork chops with apple – she’d present the dish as her own, maybe as inspired by the original. And, importantly, my Granny understood cooking – she understood why the original elements worked together and why her substituted ones would also work together well. I think that’s the same for teaching and learning – before we can start swapping bits in and out of a successful design, we need to understand how and why the original design works.
Some people might say that TBL is poorly named, and that others can be excused for not understanding that it is a particular type of design. That might be so, but I don’t think that’s much of an excuse.
