Thinking About Rethinking: Part Two

My last post summarized what I found interesting about Keeling and Hersh's argument in Losing our Minds. I really think this book struck a chord with me. In some ways, it brings me back around to ideas I was exploring in the very first post on this blog.

In that post, I discussed the importance of two books -- What the Best College Teachers Do and Teaching with Your Mouth Shut. Returning to the classroom after all those years in administration, I have the freedom to re-imagine my pedagogy and think about what I really want to see happen in the classroom. It's a very different approach than where I started 31 years ago. While these books and the others I mentioned on Monday are all influential, there's something about how K&H present their argument that clarified a number of things for me. I'm seeing implications everywhere I look. I'll list a few here. I'm certain this list will grow.

1. The book has helped me articulate something I've been toying with all year. If we aren't focused on learning, where is our focus? I'm thinking that the enemy of learning is COMPLIANCE. We set benchmarks, deadlines, rubrics, processes, measures, and the like and substitute those for Learning. What does a student think when seeing the Intro to Soc assignment about writing a paper on Sociology and Christianity? "I have to write a paper by May 7th. It has to be this long, and is supposed to cover the questions in the handout that Dr. Hawthorne handed out. It says in the syllabus that this paper is worth 10% of my final grade. So I have to write something." Honestly, I wasn't thrilled with the papers. Too many of them failed to deal with the rubric questions, took the easy way out, or were basically rush jobs. I take the blame for that in that I didn't do a good job of setting up the assignment initially or devote enough time to it early in the semester. But if what I wanted was for students to engage the question, why did they not do that (even at a Freshman level)? Because it was a task on their to-do list that had to be cleared so they could move on to the next thing. What's the alternative? I think it will require me to be more upfront about the purpose of assignments, articulating the value I think they hold in terms of learning, and require personal interaction around the assignment (even e-mail would help). My own conversations about a paper assignment need to move from "what do you have to do" to "why this is of value". This morning I ran across this wonderful piece by John Warner in Inside Higher Ed. He illustrates how he lays out his course to focus on student learning (and references What the Best College Teachers Do in the process). I don't know if I'll write my syllabi this way in the future, but I want to devote more time to elaborating the pedagogy that I've done to date. By the way, the focus on learning also deals with faculty to faculty interactions or dialogue between administration and faculty. We also need to focus on the value of shared learning and not on simple deadlines, rubrics, or avoiding being the last one turning in the catalog copy.

2. A focus on learning shifts our measurement strategies away from grades to something more important -- change over time. One of the common concerns on college campuses is about grade inflation. We had that conversation at Spring Arbor in one of our last faculty meetings. Here is a nice piece from last summer that gives an overview on grade inflation nationally. It examines the impact of the Vietnam draft on the initial burst of grade inflation. Other articles highlight the impact of a consumer culture, a focus on retention (because we can't afford to lose students), the general pattern of grading in secondary education ("I've always been an A student"). Add to this the data on how little time students spend studying outside of class. The argument against grade inflation is that if students aren't doing work but are getting good grades, then our standards as faculty must have collapsed. But that argument seems too similar to the data on hating congress and liking your particular representative ("Some of you out there aren't holding to standards"). But K&H make me think that we'll never be successful chasing the statistics. It's not the grades, it's the learning. If the vast majority of my students are demonstrating learning, they should receive appropriate grades (actually it would be better to not have grades, but that's too far even for me). Think of the unemployment rate. We don't (shouldn't) pursue policies that lessen the unemployment rate. We should pursue policies that strengthen the economy in ways that indirectly lessen the unemployment rate.

3. It matters what we talk about. I ran across this nice tribute to the work of Walter Kimbrough, new president of Dillard University in New Orleans.  The author, Marybeth Gasman, is a professor higher ed at Penn who specializes in HBCUs. She has a list of ten significant accomplishments that Kimbough attained at his previous institution and offers them as a model that other presidents could emulate. It's a good list that many administrators would admire. I've focused on some of these myself in past administrative settings. But I realized that none of the these ten good things spoke directly to student learning. Colleges should be using the bully pulpit of administrative speaking to address goals for seeing enhancement in learning. Marybeth told me in an e-mail exchange that Kimbrough has spoken and written on learning and I'm glad to hear it. But we need to over-communicate on the importance of learning gains. Every year, the Higher Education Research Institute surveys incoming freshmen from across the country. One key question they ask is "why did you come to college?" Here's their summary for Fall 2011:

The thing that strikes me about this is not the data over time but the the questions. Are these really the things we expect out of higher education? (And do 60% of students really put general education as a key goal?) There is a key component of the college experience that involves emerging adults coming into their own, moving out of their safe environments, and learning who they can be and the vast amounts they can accomplish. One of the things I love about teaching is being able to track the growth of a student from the point of arrival to the verge of commencing forth. That a story we have to focus on because at the end of the day it's the measure of our stewardship as educators.

Back in the Saddle Again

It was August the last time I posted here. The sky was clear and it was about 50 degrees warmer than it is now. But once school started, it was hard to find the time and energy to stop and reflect on my return to the classroom after all these years. Besides, I was waiting to see how things came out. (I don't have my course evals back yet so I won't write on the quantitative stuff.)

This is the night before I jump back in with a three week social problems class. Social problems can be depressing enough over the course of a semester but we're doing it in 14 three-hour class sessions. That's all. One course. Problem after problem after problem. But somehow I want this experience to be hopeful -- to focus more on what we might do together and avoid the fatalism that comes from wallowing in what's wrong (you can tell I've been feeding my politics addiction, can't you? Welcome to primary season.).

This fall I taught three classes: 1) Criminological Theory, 2) The Christian in Contemporary Society (CORE), SAU's senior capstone class, and 3) Spirituality, Faith, and Justice (SFJ), a capstone for sociology and social work majors. Each of the classes was different due to complexity of content, abstractions involved, or connection to personal experience. Each required something different from me. I'll say more about that in a bit.

Here are my takeaways:

1. I have really missed students!   I enjoyed my years working with faculty and cabinet members, but there's something intrinsically rewarding about spending time with students, exploring ideas together, taking risks, constructing sociological jigsaw puzzles. I had forgotten the wonderful sense of trust that relationship engenders (the opposite of administrative work). In a mid-course review, I accused my criminology class of just being exceptionally polite because they felt sorry for me, but I came to see that we really were working collaboratively in exploring theoretical material. Even the students in the Core class who said "you know, this isn't my favorite class" were acting out of a place of safety. That made me happy. A bonus to this point -- along the course of the summer and fall, I've regained contact with a number of former students from decades back. Somehow the continuity between their warmth and what we did in class became very clear.

2. I fight my control issues now more than ever. I've long struggled with issues of control: commencements, meetings, vacations, kids. I think I should be able to manage things. One of the big lessons I learned this semester was the need to abandon control. That doesn't mean that I didn't prepare for class. But when the discussion in SFJ was really engaging, it was clear that I needed to get out of the way. What I had prepared to present or the discussion outlined on the next PowerPoint slide just really wasn't that important in the long run. I've really enjoyed the freedom to change my plans when the situation called for it.

3. Stream of Consciousness can make life very interesting. The first day of the semester in my very first class, I followed my train of thought into a cogent argument on why gay marriage wasn't deviant in New York state. That was nowhere in my notes! Over the course of the semester, I advocated bike theft, said "drugs are good", and suggested that parts of the Old Testament were ethnocentric anthropological stories. But because all the discussion except the first happened in terms of the trust relationship I mentioned earlier, they were sources of bonding not inflammation.

4. Students can tackle big issues. In an earlier post, I mentioned Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do. One of the principles in that book is that students are capable of meeting high standards in they are provided support and encouragement to get there. In two of my classes, students had to write a personal paper outlining what they'd take away from SAU (CORE) or how they made sense of Justice and action (SFJ). Individual students in both classes wrote me notes saying it was the most difficult paper they'd had to write. They weren't all excellent but even the B papers really tried to push themselves. In the SJF class, they were reading Michael Sandel's Justice and a book on Reinhold Niebuhr. They were required to post their reflections each week and comment on two other students' posts. From the beginning, I was struck with how deeply they engaged. Our class discussions reflected that as well. In my first years of teaching, I would have felt obligated to "teach the books". I'm glad I didn't.

5. Abandoning Control leaves you vulnerable but that can pay dividends. About three weeks before Thanksgiving, I hit a particularly frustrating period. Classes were going okay, but I didn't feel like we were were we should be. I was talking too much, my timing was off (usually cramming too much into the time), and I didn't feel like I was communicating. In my earlier days, I would have doubled down and tried harder. I would have spent hours more looking for just the right hook. But this time I didn't. Somehow, I decided to relax and do less. It relates to the idea of "flow" my friend Lou Foltz introduced me to in Oregon. Those last few weeks really came together. I decided that what they were doing was more important than what I was doing, which of course was always true.

5. Teaching changes ME. Lou Foltz used to have this wonderful speech he'd give at a prospective student session. He'd tell a student named Jeff that he might be taking four courses in a semester but that he was really taking four versions of a course in "Jeff". I used Lou's approach often at such events (and credited him most of the time!). In the same way, I learned that my three classes were all about things I was putting together. We ended the CORE class looking at Gandhi and MLK. The close of the Criminology course was on how we could effectively respond to crime without destroying communities. We ended the SFL class with my personal statement on Justice (and a great children's book). There were four students who had me for two of the classes (different combinations) and in talking  to them I realized how much the three classes converged in my thinking. My own ideas about justice, community, crime, response, arrogance, sin, and grace all took on a renewed sense of reality. And for that I'm grateful and humbled. And can't wait to get at it again tomorrow.

"No Fixing, No Saving, No Advising, No Setting Each Other Straight"

The title of this post is the primary rule for Parker Palmer's "Circles of Trust" from A Hidden Wholeness that I mentioned previously. It was developed over years of running workshops in which individuals could give voice to their "true self". Palmer argues that we bottle up our true self out of fear of what others might think. We surround ourselves with such noise, distraction, and quiet compliance to expectations that we forget what it's like to venture out of our existential caves.  Think Punxsutawney Phil on Feb 2nd but on a much more significant and personal scale. If we gain the courage to poke our nose out and sniff the air, a "fixer" in the crowd can push us deep into the cave thinking long and hard before ever crawling out again. Believe me, it won't be six weeks before you come back out -- more like six years, if that!

Palmer's book on finding the safe space to let your true self speak and to listen to what you really think when unfettered affected me deeply. As I've said, it's been a long time since I thought of myself primarily as a sociology professor -- and administrative life leaves its share of bruises -- but I'm eager to let my true self speak.

Palmer's book isn't about the classroom -- it's far too much of a contrived and unsafe environment for the deep work he imagines. But I've been thinking about the students who will be in my classes. Even within the great confines of a Christian University, they have been pushed to academic success by learning to hold their true self in check. It is far better to jump through the professor's required hoops and to stay mildly disengaged. This brings out the strategic and bulemic learner responses I discussed last time.

But I've heard faculty for years say that we want Christian liberal arts education to make a difference in how students live their lives, not simply while in class but for generations afterward. If that's not our core mission, we have a hard time defending our existence. What Palmer helps me realize is that students can only make those deep changes if they can take the risk of incorporating the lessons learned in class into the individual identity. Way too much of education in America works directly counter to those goals. It strikes me that the first task in my classes is to engage students in the conscious process of setting aside the "taken for granted" nature of education they've become so good at. Only then can we really work together in educating the soul. If I break Palmer's rule in discussion or in paper comments or in a hallway conversation, I set back our goals and suck the life out of the educational enterprise.

This idea of Palmer's shares some deep commitments with Ken Bain's "Best Teachers".  There is much in his wonderful book that I'll need to re-read on a regular basis. But some lessons I can appropriate on the first day of class in September.

First, the best teachers "set high expectations and conveyed a strong trust in their students' abilities to meet them". They are challenging and encouraging simultaneously. They stand in stark contrast to those professors who measure their own ego by how tough they were on students "who didn't belong here". My task for three hours per week is to give the student permission to engage the class material in truly significant ways.

Second, the best teachers "start with the students rather than the discipline." Where are they in their journey? What do they care about? What questions have the framed already? Only then should we make a connection to sociology or liberal arts or criminological theory. It's not that this is more enjoyable; it is. It's that there is a proven connection between past schemas and new learning. Such an approach validates who these students are while building upon that with new perspectives. This is so much better than the strategy engaged in by those who think the professor's job is to show students that their past knowledge was woefully inadequate. Is it really surprising that students in those aggressive settings 1) become strategic learners, 2) build defensive walls around the ego, and 3) forget everything when they sell back their textbook (if not sooner)?

Third, the best teachers "displayed not power but an investment in their students." One of the points of greatest commonality between Palmer's writing and Bain's teachers is that the best teachers don't need to exercise their authority for all to see. I do have a Ph.D. in sociology and I'm proud to have it. I believe I have something to share and I want others to be as thrilled with the topic as I am. But it's not important that I be Dr. Hawthorne or Professor. Those are part of who I am, but not the driving part. I'm reminded of one of the best sociology presentations I ever heard, given by Ray DeVries of St. Olaf. Ray was talking about "structural evil" but instead of talking about the normal issues of race, gender, and social class, he challenged us to consider the ways in which we can exert power in a classroom to make students do whatever we say. He suggested that we name that as the evil manipulation it is, repent, and build relationships. At least that's what I took away -- it was over 20 years ago but I've held on to the message even when I failed to live it out.

If my students live in fear of sharing of themselves, are concerned about their ability to repeat "the Hawthorne view of the world", or don't believe they can perform, real damage is done to their true self. That damage may not be great (it's only three hours a week, after all) but it's still there. More significantly, a chance to heal some of the past damage has been lost.

My pastor, T. Scott Daniels, is working through a year-long series on the book of Mark. The one message in Mark he says (and he's right) is "the Kingdom of God is at hand." He says that we are living in a time of two Kingdoms, one of principalities and powers and the other of Grace given by the Spirit. I pray that my classes will operate according to the values of the coming Kingdom. Maybe my students will find healing and courage on Monday and Wednesday afternoons beginning in September. That is, if I don't mess it up by trying to fix everybody!