What the Best College Teachers Read?

I wanted to like Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do.

But I got tripped up by the circular logic evident in the first few chapters, and I never quite untripped myself.

To say that there were methodological flaws in the study would be unjust--I didn't really glean enough information about the details of the study from the book.  Bain spoke in generalities, broad brush-strokes throughout.  It seems possible, though, that the selection critera pre-determined the findings of the study.  From the first few chapters, I got the sneaking suspicion that they selected professors that used language about learning that they liked, and then discovered that those professors . . . used language about learning they liked.

That suspicion tainted, somewhat, the rest of my reading.

But somewhere in the middle of it, I stopped thinking of it as a study of college-level pedagogy, and started thinking of it as an apologia for liberal arts education.  In the end, it was a collection of (modestly) inspiring ideas about education as something more than degree-granting and -getting, more than job training and income boosting, more than gate-keeping and hoop-jumping.

It was, in short, a reminder that education is about forming adults, a project that is only partially complete if we content ourselves with transmitting knowledge (even important knowledge).  That's why I got into teaching--to change lives, not to administer entrance and exit exams.

One of the things I found myself doing as I read was jotting down and sorting through pedagogical ideas that I had already come up with but hadn't yet put to paper, or hadn't yet figured out how to build into course design.  There weren't too terribly many good, specific tactics or tools described in the book itself (again, too many generalities and big-picture thinking), but I did feel encouraged in some observations I've made over the last few years.  Often, that encouragement came in spite of what Bain was actually encouraging rather than as a result of it.

For example, in the midst of my annoyance at his encomiums to activities I've always found somewhat trendy or childish ("think-pair-square-share" and "the McEvoy minute") and often unsuccessful, I began to realize that he had put words to a genuine problem I'd been noticing in my classes: passive learning early in a course or a class period becomes habitual.  It has been my practice to try to give students something to discuss, and then ask them to discuss it.  I build this pattern into individual class periods and into course structures as a whole.  My starting point has always been that my students really don't know anything, and most of them don't care that they don't know anything.  And so I have to introduce thoughts for them to think so that they can start learning how to think. 

But they've been conditioned by a lifetime (to them) of passivity and edutainment, and they don't know how to contribute to their own education.  This is not how I approached my theological studies.  I would have four days of brilliant lecture classes, and by Friday, when all the TAs held discussion groups, I was bursting with things to talk about.  This is not how my undergrads experience their own education.  I've been starting to realize that I have to get them talking early, if I ever want them to talk at all.  Early in the course, early in the class period, early in our relationship, early in any office visit--they have to get used to talking so that they can do it.

I'm not sure Bain's book really gave me workable strategies to do that, but he has strengthened my resolve to look for ways that will work for me.

Or with regard to motivation, I found his language about "giving students a choice" and "refusing to exercise control over the students' learning" disingenuous.  He made the observation that grades represent both feedback to the student and "objective" evaluation to society-at-large (those who want to know whether or not the nursing student learned anatomy, for example), but then followed it with the idea that the latter should be all but dropped.  That seems problematic at best, at the college level.  (I wish I could absolutely require such an approach at the elementary school level, and I think secondary schools could certainly move more in that direction.)

Still, I found myself brainstorming ways to build some kind of choice or ownership over the material, particularly in upper-level courses.  Might ethics students choose a "focal" issue to return to over and over during the course of the semester?  Could some of the readings in a Bible class be selected by students?

Finally, his language of "authenticity" profoundly annoyed me.  By this he meant that coursework should look like "real life," that projects should be constructed along "real world" lines wherever possible, and that connections with how the student might use the course's skills and content in "the real world" should be prevalent.  I found myself kicking against all but the last point. 

I kept mentally returning to sports and music metaphors: there's nothing "authentic" about scales and practice drills.  Scales and etudes and fingering drills and breathing drills are not musical.  But musicianship absolutely requires them.  Fartleks and shark-fin drills and suicide drills look nothing like race-day running or swimming or like a basketball game.  But you won't be successful during the match/meet/game unless you've done the artificial drills.  The drills produce transferable skills.

But it's true that students sometimes need help with the transfer process.  So musicians have student recitals before they have performances at the Met.  And the varsity basketball team plays scrimmages against the JV team before their matches, and high school basketball (still, so far) comes before a career in the NBA.

It's been fairly easy for me to make connections between my area of study and "the real world," and I do drop these connections into my everyday contact with students. 
"Hey, some day, the town you're living in is going to pass some idiot regulation, and you're going to want to be able to make a persuasive speech to the town council why it's unjust or imprudent." 
"Hey, some day, some issue that's important to you will hit the newspapers (if we still have such things), and you're going to want your voice to be heard, and you're going to want to be able to write a letter to the editor (or a HuffPo blog post) that gets accepted and that makes people think."
"Hey, some day, one of your friends is going to ask you to drive him to a bank, and he's going to come running out, waving a gun and shouting 'DRIVE, DRIVE, DRIVE!!!!' and you're going to want to have some practice at saying no, so that's why you should never say yes when your friend asks to copy your homework."

But I haven't done much work at building those connections into my assignments.  I've been all scales and etudes and no recitals.  Instead of telling them that they should master this or that material or technique so that some day they could write a good letter to the editor, why don't I assign a letter to the editor?

So, I was inspired and encouraged by this book, even when I found myself disagreeing with it or annoyed by its trendy, jargony tone.  It fed my own brainstorming about pedagogy, even when its few specific suggestions were unpalatable or inapplicable to me.

I do recommend it, even if I didn't really love it.  Because I do really love teaching, and a conversation with someone who feels the same is always worthwhile.

Why You Should Care, or Project Plagiarism Matters

I keep forgetting to show my students stories of why and how academic citation matters "in the real world."

I'm going to start collecting them here, so that I have somewhere easy to point to.

I've spoken before about why I think plagiarism--or, rather, the habits of academic honesty that plagiarism violates--is a big moral deal.

It certainly is a big deal in academia, and the big deal that it is can properly be called a moral deal because the procedural standards are oriented toward properly moral goals--honesty, diligence, courtesy, etc.

Whether it is a big deal, moral or otherwise, outside the academy is worth pondering.  I don't believe that my students believe my insistence on proper attribution does them any good outside of the classroom or has any goal not restricted to the "academic" part of academic integrity.

I came across several examples this week that might be useful for Project Plagiarism Matters.  Just one will have to suffice for this post, however.

I wouldn't have noticed this one but for my colleague at Huntingdon, Dr. Jeremy Lewis, who reminded me that students are protected, as well as imperiled, by proper citation.

When College Students Plagiarize You, You Must Have Said Something Worth Saying

Yes, it's the college student who got in trouble here, but the person whom he plagiarized is a writer, who has a stake in having her work acknowledged.  She also has a stake in having her work benefit herself, rather than some privileged white dude.  ("Lord, prosper the work of our hands!")

It seems worth reminding students that they might some day write for a living--incidentally to whatever employment they find or as a substantial part of their careers.  They learn proper citation now as part of a system of proper attribution that protects writers from having their work stolen for others' benefit.

This system is especially important for those of us in the essentially charitable enterprise of education.  We accept a modest salary in exchange for bettering the lives of others by passing along ideas that we have learned from others.  There are only a few concrete ways we can augment that modest salary, and almost all of them have to do with generating ideas worth sharing and publishing them in income-producing ways.

But even for those of us outside academia, the protection of our intellectual and artistic work--enacted legally by copyright protection, but morally by accusations of plagiarism--still matters.  My students might not go on to be researchers or authors, but they might go on to be bloggers.  Many of them are already users of content-sharing social media--instagram and such.  They might go on to be technical writers of some kind.  They might be speech writers or website designers or nurse-educators or anybody else who would create something with words.

They might like to know that some fussy old fuddy-duddy of a professor like me is training those who come after them not to plagiarize them.

Is It Schadenfreude If They Deserved It?

I never take joy in the suffering of others, even when that suffering is deserved.

But . . . sometimes . . . I allow myself a hearty nod of approval when someone is given the gift of logical consequences:

Paper Mill Ghostwriter Loses His Law License

Opinionation

Pace Stanley Fish, who is always worth reading, even when he's wrong, plagiarism is a big moral deal.

Fish offers several cogent arguments to the contrary in his recent "Opinionator" piece, "Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal," the most insightful of which is that professional standards are not the same as moral imperatives.

This resembles the principle that appears in legal theory as the difference between mala prohibita and mala in se: that is, the difference between merely procedural crimes (e.g., driving down the wrong side of the road) and crimes that are morally objectionable in themselves (e.g., murder).

In the latter case, the law recognizes acts of moral significance. In the former case, moral significance (if there is any) is the creation of the law--if there were no traffic law, there would be no moral significance in choosing which side of the road to drive down. This is part of why traffic violations that result in no harm to person or property are minimally punished. They're not a big deal. We punish them only because having a system of traffic regulation is, overall, a good thing, not because there is an eternal moral imperative to drive on the right side of the road.

Fish wants us to view plagiarism as something like a malum prohibitum: something that violates the merely procedural dictates of a self-contained community.

But my language begins to betray me already.

Fish does not use the word "community" in reference to academia--only in reference to golfers. Academia is "our house," a "guild," a "context of practice," a language game which students must learn to play.

It is no accident that Fish does not call academia a community. A community is more morally weighty than a guild or a "context of practice."

Fish's overall point, by the way, is not that plagiarism shouldn't be punished--it is that there is no philosophical warrant for valuing originality. And in this, he is correct.

But codes against plagiarism are not about protecting original work. Standards of proper citation do not exist to protect the originator of an idea. That's the difference between plagiarism codes and copyright law.

Standards of proper citation exist to cultivate habits of worthy discourse within the academic community. (And, yes, I am just silly enough to pretend that something called "the academic community" exists, or at least could.) They exist to train us to participate in the tradition of academic discussion.

Proper citation trains us in courtesy--we acknowledge our intellectual debts both for the sake of our intellectual parents and for the sake of our current conversation partners. In the former sense, our intellectual parents may have a stake in the conversation in which we are quoting them; proper citation courteously invites them into that conversation, as it were. In the latter sense, citing our sources allows our current conversation partners to understand most fully what we are saying. We do our conversation partners the courtesy of aiding their investigation into our arguments.

Proper citation trains us in truth-telling. As the previous point suggests, when we acknowledge our intellectual debts, we allow for the fullest possible understanding of our claims and arguments. This transparency may make our arguments vulnerable; perhaps the scholar whose phrasing we found so felicitous was known for eliding fact and assertion, or perhaps the "varied" studies we are marshaling to prove our points were all funded by the same super-conglomerate. Proper citation is a kind of full disclosure, the kind of openness that is necessary for excellent discourse.

Proper citation trains us in respect. Acknowledging our intellectual debts is a kind of justice--giving someone her due, as Thomas Aquinas put it (more or less, somewhere-or-other). If we have been taught, our teacher has earned something from us--not the recognition of his originality, but the recognition of his generosity in teaching us (however remote or impersonal the mode of teaching).

And proper citation trains us in diligence. Students and scholars who plagiarize are not, in general, trying to claim false credit for original thoughts--they are trying to get out of doing hard work. Charitable description, thoughtful analysis, and persuasive rhetoric are difficult practices to master; proper citation is itself, as Fish acknowledges, a kind of skill that one must master. Anti-plagiarism codes are designed to identify and, yes, even weed out those who do not care to do that work, to learn those skills.

Respect, truth-telling, courtesy, diligence--these are all morally weighty terms. If Fish is right that originality is not a terribly interesting or valuable thing, he misses that it is the least of the things proper citation is designed to cultivate.

Children With Home Computers Likely to Have Lower Test Scores

Children With Home Computers Likely to Have Lower Test Scores

The title of the above article is completely misleading and false, so ignore it. A better title might have been "Access to Computers Not a Cure-All; May Even Cause Harm."

The findings of the study are interesting: children from disadvantaged homes who gained access to computers performed measurably worse on end-of-state testing than children from disadvantaged homes who had no computers.

Not only is access to technology not a panacea, it actually exacerbates the educational disadvantage. The researchers were appropriately modest in their conclusions--"In disadvantaged households, parents are less likely to monitor children's computer use and guide children in using computers for educational purposes"--but I think one could reasonably draw several stronger inferences from the study.

1. Parents matter most. Again and again, failed educational reforms and scientific studies have shown that parental involvement is the one factor that can never be ruled out. Any educational reform (I would even expand this and say any reform, because I'm an ethicist and we like to sensationalize like that) that doesn't involve strengthening the family will probably fail.

2. Parenting well requires setting limits. Presumably, the children in the disadvantaged households used the computers as they saw fit. They were wrong. Children do not have infallible instincts for what they need, what is good for them, what will bring them safely to adulthood. Children need parents who guide them not only through positive modeling and suggestions but also through limit-setting. Saying yes to what's good is vital, and parents do well to phrase things as positively as possible. ("Oh, sure, you can play that game--just as soon as your homework is done." "Umm . . . let's find a more appropriate show to watch." "Well, let's make a date for you to play x-box with your friends on Saturday instead of today.") But saying no to what's bad is just as vital. ("You must never, ever surf the internet when I'm not at home.")

3. Technology is rarely the answer. Technology cannot fix injustice, historical or actual; it cannot redress wrongs; it cannot make us more moral people. If we are not already the kind of people who will raise our children conscientiously, who are intellectually curious, who have self-discipline, who are generous with the needy, who will pay a just wage, technological advances will at best fail to alleviate--and will sometimes positively exaggerate--our social failings.

4. This particular piece of technology--computers--comes pre-programmed, as it were, with a tendency toward harm. The irony is too delicious not to enjoy: information technologies tend to make us less intelligent. Absent some sort of external, imposed structure (a parent's insistence that we finish our homework first, a determination to balance our checkbooks by hand anyway, a conviction that "some things just shouldn't be blogged"), we are worse off with computers than without. It behooves us, then, to develop and pursue practices of restraint with regard to their use and proliferation.