Thinking Through Practice: Community College Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Slogging through the Constructivist Quagmire

Confusion about what is meant by constructivism (in education) is not endemic only to our seminar conversations. The terminology, it seems, is used a lot as a catch phrase to refer to any kind of teaching that is not based on the old “banking model” (now also often referred to as the "transmission model") of teaching and learning.

I get email from a listserv called “Tomorrow’s Professor” which originates with the Stanford University Center for Teaching & Learning. Here’s a quote from recent article they posted by Jack Meacham, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor, University at Buffalo-State University of New York. The article is from the Fall, 2006 issue of Peer Review, Volume 8, Number 4. Peer Review is a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Meacham’s use of  the term “constructivist” is a pretty common example of how the word has become a sort of catch-all to describe a range of currently popular pedagogical approaches. Meacham writes:

“Once we move beyond a transmission model of teaching and learning, in which students are passive, to a constructivist model of liberal education, in which students are actively engaged, curious, reflective, and thinking critically, the best learning technology becomes the posing of a problem, issue, or question for the students (and this is real, not magic).”

Meacham’s phrase “constructivist model of liberal education” is vague and it reminded me of a similar fuzziness in how we have used the term in the seminar when we have talked about or tried to define certain practices as “constructivist pedagogies.”

Since constructivism is not a kind of teaching, but rather a theory about learning, when we talk about constructivist models of teaching (or pedagogy, or “liberal education”), we mean those informed by constructivist theories of learning. Almost all the articles and websites that try to define constructivist theories of learning say something like this:

“Constructivism's central idea is that human learning is constructed, that learners build new knowledge upon the foundation of previous learning. This view of learning sharply contrasts with one in which learning is the passive transmission of information from one individual to another, a view in which reception, not construction, is key.” (“The Practice Implications of Constructivism.” By Wesley Hoover, http://www.sedl.org/pubs/sedletter/v09n03/practice.html).

This “definition” also feels pretty vague to me and it shares with many of its fellows the need to define “constructivism” negatively, or in contrast to the “transmission” model.

If I had to put it in my own words I might say something (equally annoying) like: Learning is not memorizing a series of facts that a teacher tells you (or that you read in a book) and being able to recite them back on a test. It is rather the ability to integrate new knowledge with what you already know (or believe,) in ways that make sense to you. An important piece of this (which sometimes gets lost) is that this also involves the ability of new knowledge to transform existing (wrong, incomplete or fuzzy) beliefs.

Since this seminar is not a class in educational psychology or philosophy, I think its OK/advisable NOT to belabor Piaget, Dewey, Vygotsky, et al, and instead to do what most of these definers also do (including the first article I gave you on using constructivist pedagogies in an economics class), which is to move quickly from trying to say what constructivism is to trying to define what a teacher who thinks about learning this way might do to promote learning in her classroom.

Again, attempts to describe what constructivist pedagogies might look like vary widely and encompass a lot of generalities (like Meacham’s, “…actively engaged, curious, reflective….” )

Here’s one list (linked below) that comes from a website on technology and school reform that I think is pretty useful because it is more concrete than most, though it suffers a bit from inconsistencies in parallel construction and other grammatical oddities.

http://www.edwebproject.org/constructivism.basics.html

I like this list because it encompasses several issues and practices that have come up already in our conversations, some of which are controversial (i.e. we don’t all agree on their value or place in the classroom or we are concerned about the risks and trade-offs associated with them.

I’m not sure which ‘learning cycle model’ he is referring to in #12; because there are a lot of them out there. I couldn’t find other references to this on his website, but most models are variations on: Challenge/question (presented by teacher or generated by students in response to course material) ->reflection (what do I/we know? What do I/we need to know?)-> Research ->solution(s) or knowledge/creative products-> share and compare.

For your blogs in the next two weeks I would like you to pick two things from this list to try in your class (preferably things that you don’t already regularly do.) Think about specific ways to incorporate them into your teaching and about what your associated goals would be in doing so. Try them, and document the process, including: *why* you chose to try these particular things, what your goals were, to what degree did you achieve your goals, what issues or problems came up, etc.

Guest in Class on Monday

We invited a colleague from the math department to join us on Monday evening, to talk about how she engages students in constructivist activities in her math classes at QCC. here is some more information about her:

Dr. Maria Mercedes Franco

Assistant Professor, Mathematics and Computer Science

Dr. Franco received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from CornellUniversity in August 2005. She also holds a M.S. in Applied Mathematics from Cornell University, May 2000, and a B.S. in Mathematics from Universidad del Valle (Cali, Colombia), March 2000. Her research focuses on problems of nonlinear elasticity, calculus of variations and numerical analysis. Dr. Franco is a very committed educator, who has taught college and high school students at institutions in Colombia, Puerto Rico, and the United States. From giving lectures to organizing workshops to collaborating in REU programs, Dr. Franco is actively involved in activities that seek to (a) increase the number of women and minorities in the mathematical sciences; (b) increase public understanding of and appreciation for mathematics; (c) address issues relevant to educational equity, in particular issues relevant to under-served populations and incarcerated youth/youth placed at risk.

On Learning Styles

Here’s the learning styles stuff I promised.

Before you dive in, you might want to take this Index of Learning Styles survey, just for fun. If you do, post your results here (in the comment area) and your thoughts on the survey and what it claims to measure.

http://www.engr.ncsu.edu/learningstyles/ilsweb.html

Here’s also a link to the decoder ring that tells you how the survey’s designers would interpret the results.

http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/ILSdir/styles.htm

There are countless instruments out there like this one and I am only linking to this one because it happens to be freely available on the web and not prohibitively time consuming in length.  It is posted on the NC State School of Engineering website, and may be valued by them particularly because one of its designers is a chemical engineer.

Here’s how they describe it elsewhere on their site:
“Index of Learning Styles was created in 1991 by Richard M. Felder, a chemical engineering professor at North Carolina State University, and Barbara A. Soloman, then the coordinator of advising for the N.C. State First-Year College. The four learning style dimensions of the instrument were adapted from a model developed in 1987 by Dr. Felder and Linda K. Silverman, an educational psychologist then at the University of Denver. The first version of the instrument (which had 28 items) was administered to several hundred students and the data were subjected to a factor analysis. Items that did not load heavily on one and only one item were replaced with new items to obtain the current 44-item version of the instrument. The ILS was installed on the World Wide Web in 1996. It gets over 500,000 hits per year and has been translated into Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, German, and several other languages.”

The conversation among educational researchers about learning styles is more than 4 decades old—and has its roots in theories that date back to the early 20th century. It’s a complicated field to discuss and impossible to give a truly in depth overview in the context of this blog. One recent article in a journal of educational psychology that provides an overview of learning styles theories, methods and measures, discusses more than 25 different approaches.

As I said before, the field of education is full of proponents and skeptics about both the validity of the measures used to establish learners’ profiles and also about the usefulness of the profiles for learners and for teachers. I find myself among the skeptics, generally, but I don’t feel that the discussion of earning styles is devoid of value. For one thing, it places the focus on learning and learners—and it suggests, at the very least that there is this other less visible dimension of diversity in our classrooms that we should take into consideration. If an interest in learning styles encourages us to presenting material in a range of formats and to provide students with a variety of different kinds of classroom experiences and assignments, then the effect is positive.

Some critics of the learning styles approach focus on the questionable validity of many of the instruments that are used to create learning styles profiles of individuals. The concomitant concern has to do with how we use this information, once we have it.  There were debates in England recently when the government decided to make “personal learning planning” (PLP) a key element in educational policy and asked schools to adopt a learning styles approach, en mass. Some schools went so far as to put labels on students’ desks, indicating what kind of learners they were. The Department of Education and Skills in England published a learning styles guidance pamphlet for teachers which one critic, Professor Frank Coffield of the London Institute of Learning called, ‘woefully under-researched, simplistic and downright dangerous.” Coffield worked with a group of other researchers on a study for the Learning and Skills Development Council of England. They found (among other things) that only three of the 13 most valued models for predicting and analyzing learning styles came near to meeting baseline criteria for internal consistency and predictive validity

Here’s a link to their report, the result of 18 months of study, which is published on the website of the Learning & Skills Research Centre

http://www.lsneducation.org.uk/user/order.aspx?code=041540&src=xoweb&cookie_test=true

Other critiques of learning styles models and applications can be found in:

Curry, L. (1990). One critique of the research on learning styles. Educational Leadership, 48, 50-56.

Miller, A. (1991) ‘Personality Types Learning Styles and Educational Goals.’ Educational Psychology 11 (3 &4): 217-37.

Moran, A. (1991) ‘What can Learning Styles Research Learn from Cognitive Psychology?’ Educational Psychology 11 (3 &4): 239-45.

Reynolds, M. (1997) “Learning Styles: A Critique’ Management Learning 28(2): 115-34.

Some basis assumptions underlying the learning styles perspective:

• There are individual differences in learning.
• An individual's style of learning is fairly stable across time.
• An individual's style of learning is fairly stable across tasks/problems/situations.
• We can effectively measure an individual's learning style.

Most educators and researchers share the first assumption. It is the about the other three that opinions diverge (Denzine, "Learning Stles: Myth or Reality." http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~dlk/Learn.styles.html)

Here’s some other basic terminology:

• Cognitive style: an individual’s typical or habitual mode of problem solving, thinking, perceiving and remembering--how individuals characteristically approach different cognitive tasks

• Learning style: the application of a cognitive style in a learning situation--how individuals characteristically approach different learning tasks

• Learning strategies/approaches--strategies selected by students to deal with different learning tasks.

• This distinction between learning styles and strategies is reflected in the “state or trait” debate around learning styles which are considered by some to be stable over time (structural/traits) or changing with varying experiences & situations (processual/states.)

• Learning preferences: learners’ preferences for one method of teaching over another (such as a preference for group work over independent study.)

• Many learning styles models integrate or address explicitly some major forms of learning preferences.

One popular method of classifying learning styles models is the ‘Onion’ Model developed by educational researcher, Lynne Curry (Curry 1983.) It divides learning styles models into four layers (hence onion), listed below starting with the inner most, or least observable and progressing to the outer later, most observable:

Personality Models focus on the influence of personality on the ability to acquire and integrate information. Models stressing personality include Witkin's (1954) construct of field dependence/field independence and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (Myers, 1978) with dichotomous scales measuring extroversion versus introversion, sensing versus intuition, thinking versus feeling, and judging versus perception.


The Information Processing Models focuses on the processes by which information is obtained, sorted, stored and utilized. This model includes Schmeck's (1983) construct of cognitive complexity and Kolb's (1984) model of information processing.


Social Interaction Models - focusing on how learners interact with their peers in the learning. Reichman and Greisha’s Student Learning Style Scale and attempts to categorize learners as independent/dependent, collaborative/competitive and participant/avoidant.


The Instructional Preference Models focus on the most observable traits of a learner, examples of which are environmental, emotional and sociological preferences. This model describes, among other instruments, the Learning Preference Inventory (LPI), which tries to measure preferences for the following kinds of learning: Abstract, Concrete, Individual, Interpersonal, Student-structured, and Teacher-structured.

The text in the four paragraphs above describing the onion model is an amalgam of descriptions taken (mostly verbatim) from these two articles:

1. Gordon, D. (2004). The Nexus Explored: A Generalised Model of Learning Styles. In C. Crawford et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Society for Information Technology and Teacher Education International Conference 2004 (pp. 917-925). Chesapeake, VA: AACE.

2. Giles, E., Pitre, S., Womack, S. (2003). Multiple intelligences and learning styles. In M. Orey (Ed.), Emerging perspectives on learning, teaching, and technology. Available Website: http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?printable=1&resID=7543

Here are a few links to other sites with information about learning styles.

Introduction to learning Styles
http://ferl.becta.org.uk/display.cfm?resID=7543&printable=1

Teaching English, a website sponsored by the BBC world service and the British Council.
http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/methodology/learning_style.shtml#four

“Matters of Style,” article by Felder (one of the designers of the Index of Learning styles, linked above) Felder gives fairly straightforward descriptions of four learning styles models, including his own:
http://www.ncsu.edu/felder-public/Papers/LS-Prism.htm

"Class Discussion"

Reading over your posts prior to the semester, particular Susan’s and Neil’s, I’m struck by the reliance on “discussion” as taking up most of the class time.  I want to spend some time thinking about what we mean by this, to think about how we might pay attention to what actually happens, and even to experiment with different ways of holding discussions during class time.

What, for example, might a “constructivist discussion” look  like? When you all write we have “discussions”, what exactly does this mean? Can you describe it, what it looks like, sounds like, what happens in the room, what doesn’t happen in the room, what a successful discussion is?

                How do you design a discussion? Give the class one question? Or several? Do you have them write prior to opening up the floor for oral conversation (something I highly recommend and can talk more about)? How do you organize the interaction? Are you always the one who chooses who speaks next? Have you experimented with, for example, organizing a discussion so that after someone speaks they are to choose who goes next, either through the raised hand model or just picking someone at random?

I ask all these questions out of my curiosity around statements like Neil's "I'm used to discussions on readings taking up most of the time.  Although useful, it's not totally 'constructivist'" and Susan's "We then had a discussion, sort of 'in character,' about the reasons for these motivations and the messy realities of governing."

                Peter

Several Things

It was great to see you all again on Monday night.  Such a great, helpful conversation for both Belle and myself. We hope it was as rich for you all, as well. 

A couple of quick reminders:

1.  We want you to blog at least twice each week. Ideally the two blogs will  range from thinking through the practical things going on, or planning for actual practice, and theorizing/wondering/ connecting what is going on to the issues/theories/ideas we have been discussing in the seminar.

2. We want each of you to visit each others' classrooms at least once early in the semester. It probably won't be possible for everyone to visit eveyrone's class, so try for at least two others. Please find a time over the next three weeks to do this so we can have you blog prior to our Feb 26 meeting.

3. Our next meetings will be on Monday, Feb 5 at QCC and Feb 26 at the GC.

Here are the teaching schedules:

Susan MWF 7:45a  Science 418

David MW 12-1:15p  C 102

Stephanie M 2-4:50p S 424

Saehan M 8-9:40a MC31; W 8-940 MC31; Th 8-8:50a ?

Neil MW 12-1:40p H334

I'll post more in a bit about what we mean by "visit" - and maybe we can generate a list of questions we want to have as we go on our visits to help guide our seeing? As well, whenever I have to do class observations (and our visits are different than observations!) I always ask the professor what they would like me to watch for that they can't always pay attention to, whether they would like me to participate as well, and whether there are particular issues they are thinking about that my visit can attend to....)

The Changing Shape of Public Education

NYTimes article about how public universities are managing (or not) the tensions between the quest for national reputation and higher rankings and the mission to provide high quality affordable education for all.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/education/20colleges.html?ex=157680000&en=9cebc9afcb12ec02&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Toward "constructivism"

            I want to offer a tentative step in the direction of trying to nail down more specifically what we might  mean by “constructivism” or a “constructivist pedagogy” based on what we have been reading and talking about thus far over the semester. I guess am concerned that we don't fall into conceiving of it as equating to something like drawing on student personal experience in the classroom. To do so seems limited and problematic (when do we not draw on their experience – from how we design a syllabus to how we plan a specific class meeting? We don’t/can’t ignore their past experiences as students as we confirm and confound their expectations about what it means to be a "student"…)

            Looking at the Ford and Leclerc article (“Economic Education”) that Belle gave us to look at several things stand out for me:

-         early in the introduction, they criticize the lecture hall experience and point to how students in such situations have “little or no opportunity to ponder the meaning of, react to, or evaluate the relative value of the various points being made.”

-         In the next paragraph they suggest that “constructivism,” drawing upon Vygotsky, Freire and Dewey (talk about distinct!), challenges students to learn by placing them  “in a position in which he/she must construct his/her own meaning and not simply be required to reproduce someone else’s” (483).

These above points point me in a direction I’m more comfortable with: asking of ourselves how or when and why do we create opportunities for students to do the hard work of pondering, of reacting to, of slowing down and looking closely, and of evaluating carefully the value of the subject at hand?  It’s the student “experience” that I get the willies about because I just can’t get my head around that term to make it useful yet; or rather, that term "experience" has a long and troubled history in my own field and I don't want to go there. It’s a term that has been used in similar ways as “voice” (‘I want my students to develop their own, unique voice in their writing.”).

Ford and Leclerc do move the conversation toward experience, however, in the next paragraph on 483 when they base their idea of “constructivism” on using “the students’ own experiences to provide ‘scaffolding’ for the student to construct and increased understanding….” What I think they mean here is their “experience of economics,” not where they grew up, their lives as raced/gendered/sexed students, etc. But it is this distinction that tends to collapse, I think too often.

Questions for Syllabus "Construction" & Reflection

Ask your department chair what the goals of the course are? (And, or get these from the departmental syllabus.)

How will you attempt to achieve these goals in your course?

What are your goals for the course?

How will you attempt to achieve these goals?

In what ways do the principles of constructivist pedagogy inform your course goals (departmental and otherwise)?

If they do not—how would the course goals look different if they did?

What do I know about the related knowledge, skills and educational experiences my students bring to my class?

What would I like to know?

What methods have I built into my course to discover and utilize my students’ knowledge and skills in service of the course goals?

Who is responsible for “knowledge” in my classroom?

In what new or different ways can I share this responsibility with my students?

How will I try to ensure that they take on this responsibility?

What will I have to give up in order to make these changes?

How often during my course do I gather evidence of student learning or student engagement?

What do I learn from this eveidence and what do I do with it?

Access to what?

Our recent discussions colored my experience of a rereading of chapters 1, 3 and 4 this week from the Carnegie Foundation book, the Advancement of Learning. I was (this time) more aware of and sensitive to the underlying assumptions, the agenda and politics, evident in the rhetoric of this work. Since it is an agenda that I, to some large extent, share, it didn't irk me much—but, my experience in the seminar has taught me, or reminded me, that this work would be stronger and more useful if it didn't necessarily start with the assumption that all its readers are, “on the same page,” so to speak. If I were editing this book, I would ask the authors to site more research on learning (from the fields of education and cognitive science, for example) that support the notion that the narrative of transformation they describe is a positive one, given what we know about how people learn and how they retain new knowledge and ideas. What is here, in chapter one under the heading “The College Classroom on Shifting Ground” (that others noted as missing from some previous readings) is some articulation of how students in higher education have changed. Another thing that the authors could have done here to strengthen their position is to draw some connections between the pedagogies they are advocating and the needs of the changing student body.

For me the most compelling thing in all of these three chapters is the discussion about access which leads to the question: “access to what?” For the authors, that seems to be primarily a  question about curriculum and pedagogy, but it made me think at an even more fundamental level about the ethics of open access education. What does open access mean, finally—hopefully not just that we will take your money and watch you fail? To me it points to our responsibility as community college educators  to try to better understand  the needs of our students and to meet them where they are, with specific strategies to bring them to where we want them to be.

--Belle

Response to "Big Picture" Questions

I found this cluster of readings useful in the ways that they provide a range of approaches to, and angles on “big picture”questions about the relationships between the goals, purposes, meanings and values of higher education and those of society at large. No matter how comfortable it might be to resort to the notion of an ivory tower (designed, as Fish says, to interpret the world, not to change it,) we are a cluster of folks studying in and teaching in a public university. The fact that public education exists and the fact that we participate in it, seem in themselves affirmations of  a belief (our belief?) in education as a societal good. Is there such a thing as values-free knowledge? I find it hard to conceive of. All of the choices we make about what to teach and how to teach it are value laden, as are the choices we make in structuring curricula, majors, admissions policies, funding, support services and other aspects of public education.

At the same time, I have some trouble with the schematic of “civic education” outlined in the Carnegie statement. I do believe there is a strong connection between having an educated citizenry and the success and effectiveness of participatory democracy. I also believe that there is evidence that the “democratic process” may not be serving the best interests of the citizenry now, because many of us lack knowledge (of historical, social and economic processes, among other things) knowledge/information seeking skills, critical thinking ans reasoning abilities, as well as habits of engagement with the world, that would allow us to make political decisions that best serve our interests. I am FAR less interested in the “civic engagement” criteria laid out by Carnegie: i.e. whether my students (or students in general) will vote, volunteer or wear clothing that displays political slogans (which seem to me, really, the measure of nothing in particular) than I am in their ability to, and motivation to) find, read, think about, understand and apply useful pertinent information about the world in which they live. Fish might argue that this is interpreting the world, not changing it, but I see the two as inextricably linked.

In this way I find useful Schulman's article, in which he highlights the moral and “judgment making” aspects inherent in (if not always made visible) professional education, and asks us to think about these in relation to the goals of liberal education. Even from a purely functionalist perspective, no one can argue against educating professionals who are well-prepared to apply knowledge to challenges in the work place and to reason through the gaps between the theories they have studied and the situations they encounter. To take it one step further is to note that professional decision-making has an underlying ethical dimension in that it requires some notion of what constitutes “good law,” “good medicine,” “good government,” or “good education.” Is it such a leap to inquire whether, underlying the decisions we make, when we construct a syllabus, a class or a curricula, there are not judgments about what constitutes “good history”, “good mathematics” or “good reading and writing?”

       --Belle