Learning Math via Sudoku, Music, and Web Design
In Who Needs Maths?, Andrew Hodges, maths lecturer at Wadham College, Oxford, states that mathematics would be better learned through logical puzzles like Sudoku and adds,

"We should be trying to find ways of equipping children with the basic maths they will need to function adequately in society. ... We should be looking at ways of teaching maths skills through other media, such as electronic music and web design, that are more relevant to most students."

Learning and Exercise
Use it or lose it! If you want to keep your mind in good shape, you need to use it, and there are recommendations from playing crossword puzzles to using your non-dominant hand for combing your hair. But did you know that you need to use your muscles to keep your brain functioning well? The article Lobes of Steel (New York Times) reports on research showing that regular aerobic exercise "boosts memory and cognitive processing speed" in both mice and people due to increased neurogenesis.

Students Remixing Teachers on YouTube
How would you like to be videotaped without your knowledge and then find yourself on YouTube? Students are now posting videos of their teachers on YouTube. Vaishali Honawar has a lengthy article, "Cellphone taping a classroom threat".

Faculty Grating Habits
From a study on Professors' Most Grating Habits, here are the top ten:

1. Poor course organization and planning.
2. Poor teaching mechanics (for example, poor use of the blackboard or speaking too fast, softly, or slowly).
3. Lecture style and technique, including being too wooden or long-winded.
4. Poor testing and exam procedures.
5. Negative mannerisms, including attire and verbal and nonverbal tics.
6. Monotone voice.
7. Poor use of class time (for example, coming in late and stopping early).
8. Intellectual arrogance--talking down to or showing a lack of respect for students.
9. Being unhelpful and not approachable.
10. Unfair or confusing grading process.

We're all familiar with the notion of first impressions and how the first day of class is crucial for setting the tone for the entire semester. But how does it work?

Primed by our senses
Part of the answer can be found in Benedict Carey's article "Who's Minding the Mind? (New York Times via Will Thalheimer), which reports on psychology experiments showing that people are primed by their senses:

The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

And the article gives quite a few more examples of how sounds, smells and sights can prime us, for instance:

In one 2004 experiment, psychologists led by Aaron Kay, then at Stanford University and now at the University of Waterloo, had students take part in a one-on-one investment game with another, unseen player.

Half the students played while sitting at a large table, at the other end of which was a briefcase and a black leather portfolio. These students were far stingier with their money than the others, who played in an identical room, but with a backpack on the table instead.

The mere presence of the briefcase, noticed but not consciously registered, generated business-related associations and expectations, the authors argue, leading the brain to run the most appropriate goal program: compete. The students had no sense of whether they had acted selfishly or generously.

More sensory hardwiring
We're hardwired by our senses in many ways, one of which is beauty. The "waist-hip ratio (WHR) is a significant factor in judging female attractiveness" (Wikipedia). Symmetry is apparently a factor in judging beauty, too, not only in humans but also in other species (Feng). "[A]ttractive scents - like the smell of freshly baked bread - are already known to keep customers in a store for longer (New Scientist). Music affects us, too. In one piece of research, it was shown that labeling wines with flags representing country of origin (France or Germany) and playing French accordion and German beer-hall music on alternating days affected sales:

"Despite an overall bias in favor of French over German wine sales," they soberly reported last week in the prestigious science journal Nature, "French wine outsold German wine when French music was being played, whereas German wine outsold French wine when German music was played." What may be even more significant is that only six of the 44 customers who consented to fill out a questionnaire admitted that they had been influenced by the music.

The Power of Precedent and Cultural Norms
Similarly, students subconsciously notice cues about the instructor, about their classmates, and about the general classroom environment that prime them to act in particular ways. Of course, later sense impressions can also have an effect, perhaps contrary to the earlier ones. However, once a group, such as students in a class, has established a precedent, or culture, for particular ways of acting or feeling about writing, that precedent has a strong effect on later actions.

In The Psychological Foundations of Culture, Holly Arrow and K.L. Burns look at how small groups establish behavioral norms. Using both complexity science and Alan Page Fiske's social relational models of culture (see Social Relations and Classroom Activity for a brief explanation) as a basis, they studied four groups of college students playing social poker. These groups, for different reasons, formed different norms in their groups. Once formed, however, those norms tend to stay in place, although they can be disrupted.

A combined authority ranking/communal sharing model was popular but persisted. The group stuck with this norm not because they were happy, but because dissatisfaction did not translate into coordinated action. The market pricing/communal sharing norm disappeared when a dissident dyad shook up the system.

In other words, it takes effort to oppose or change norms, once they've been established. Remember the Stanley Milgram and Stanford Prison experiments? Just as our senses prime our actions subconsciously, so do societal norms.

Practice
What does that mean in practice? At the minimum, we should work at becoming more aware of how all that we do--from our appearance to our habits and attitudes to our gender--affects our students and us. (See here and here and here and here.) Actually, we're quite aware when an occasion is important to us. Few of us wear less than business attire when in a job interview or in court (see, for example, Judging by Appearance).

Of course, as noted in Trout's satire, How to Improve your Teaching Evaluation without Improving your Teaching!", we could approach this in a manipulative manner. That's not the point. As Robert Rosenthal, Professor of Psychology, remarks in his biographical blurb:

For nearly half a century I have been fascinated by the psychology of interpersonal expectations; the idea that one person's expectation for the behavior of another can come to serve as self-fulfilling prophecy. Our experiments have been conducted in laboratories and in the field, and we have learned that when teachers have been led to expect better intellectual performance from their students they tend to get it. When coaches are led to expect better athletic performance from their athletes they tend to get it. When behavioral researchers are led to expect certain responses from their research participants they tend to get those responses. For almost as long as I've been interested in interpersonal expectations I've also been interested in various processes of nonverbal communication. In part, this interest developed when it became clear that the mediating mechanisms of interpersonal expectancy effects were to a large extent nonverbal. That is, when people expect more of those with whom they come in contact, they treat them differently nonverbally. Some of our most recent research on nonverbal behavior has examined "thin slices" of nonverbal behavior -- silent videos or tone-of-voice clips of about 30 seconds or less. Some of our more recent work with these thin slices shows that we can predict, using 30 seconds of instructors' nonverbal behavior, what end-of-term ratings college students will give their instructors. From thin slices of doctors' interactions with one set of patients, we can also predict which doctors are more likely to be sued by a different set of patients. Finally, jury verdicts can be predicted from the nonverbal behavior of the judges as they instruct the jury.

Similar to our senses instinctively priming our behavior, our nonverbal behavior reflects our (often unconscious) attitudes and expectations, which in turn, prime students' behavior and performance. We need to "mind our mind," to become more aware of our habits, attitudes, and expectations, from the first day of class on in order to help spark the intellectual performance that our students are capable of.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, the director of the Royal Institution and a professor of pharmacology at Oxford University, considers the notion of learning styles to be "a waste of valuable time and resources" (Julie Henry, Telegraph via Education News):

According to Susan Greenfield, however, the practice is "nonsense" from a neuroscientific point of view: "Humans have evolved to build a picture of the world through our senses working in unison, exploiting the immense interconnectivity that exists in the brain. It is when the senses are activated together - the sound of a voice is synchronisation with the movement of a person's lips - that brain cells fire more strongly than when stimuli are received apart.

"The rationale for employing Vak learning styles appears to be weak. After more than 30 years of educational research in to learning styles there is no independent evidence that Vak [visual, auditory, kinesthetic], or indeed any other learning style inventory, has any direct educational benefits."

Thirty years without independent evidence!

Commenting on student-centered learning about a year ago, I said that learning styles were not as important as the modality of the task:

When I began school more than a few years ago, I never "discovered [my] own learning styles." I still don't know what my learning style is. And it doesn't seem to have slowed me down as far as learning is concerned. When I think about the activities in which I engaged: studying various "book" subjects, taking Wood Shop, playing baritone horn in the band, and being on the wrestling team in high school, if there is such a thing as a learning style (at least in a way that it significantly affects learning), it seems obvious that the modality of the activity decides what "style" of learning should be employed.

As Greenfield states, "our senses [are] working in unison." A little bit of reflection confirms this: When playing baritone horn, I was using my ear for music, my eyes for reading music notation and watching the director, my fingers on the valves and lips on the mouthpiece for controlling the pitch, and my entire body for correct posture. And it didn't matter which of my "learning styles" I preferred. I had to use what was needed for the modality of playing music, in this case auditory, visual, and kinesthetic modalities working together.

Greenfield is not alone. Daniel Willingham, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Virginia (American Educator), says,

What cognitive science has taught us is that children do differ in their abilities with different modalities, but teaching the child in his best modality doesn’t affect his educational achievement. What does matter is whether the child is taught in the content’s best modality. All students learn more when content drives the choice of modality.

Willingham's article is worth reading in its entirety, but two of his points are:

1. Some memories are stored as visual and auditory representations—but most memories are stored in terms of meaning.
2. The different visual, auditory, and meaning-based representations in our minds cannot serve as substitutes for one another.

They seem clear enough. Despite the pervasive belief in the effectiveness of teaching according to students' learning styles, there's too little, if any, evidence supporting it--not to mention that the most important variable in learning is "time on task" (see The Expert Mind). From a pedagogical perspective, it seems Greenfield is right: Learning styles is nonsense.

Update of related articles (via ict-echo):
Learning styles and pedagogy in post-16 learning : A systematic and critical review
Stephen Draper's "Learning Styles (Notes)"

Keith Burnett responded to my response on his preference for being a Guide on the Side as opposed to Sage on the Stage:

I’m both in different parts of the lesson. I think that many people assume that PowerPoint use implies Sage role, and I was trying to provide counterexamples.

That Burnett did well, and it's also clear that he plays both roles, choosing the role appropriate to a student's stage in the learning process.

Unlike Burnett, however, not everyone seems to understand that both roles are appropriate. If you google the words "sage stage guide side", you'll find more than a few links to titles saying "Guide on the side, not Sage on the stage." Here's a typical example from the Internet Time Group:

an instructor’s energy should be channeled to become the medium whereby the discovery of learning is facilitated in a student-centered environment. No longer a "sage on the stage, " the online instructor becomes a "guide on the side," helping others to discover and synthesize the learning material.

Discovery learning is simply re-inventing the wheel. The time spent in "discovering" could be better spent using the wheels that have already been designed.

Here's another one, an excerpt from an article in College English by Alison King:

In most college classrooms, the professor lectures and the students listen and take notes. The professor is the central figure, the "sage on the stage," the one who has the knowledge and transmits that knowledge to the students, who simply memorize the information and later reproduce it on an exam-often without even thinking about it. This model of the teaching- learning process, called the transmittal model, assumes that the student's brain is like an empty container into which the professor pours knowledge. In this view of teaching and learning, students are passive learners rather than active ones. Such a view is outdated and will not be effective for the twenty-first century, when individuals will be expected to think for themselves, pose and solve complex problems, and generally produce knowledge rather than reproduce it.

There's some truth in this perspective. We've all had classes in which we took notes, crammed for an exam, and regurgitated information on the exam. The problem, however, is that this is a caricature of lecturing. Not all lecturers assume that students are empty containers, and not all use lecture as their only mode of teaching. Interestingly, the same people who promote this perspective are often the same ones who give presentations in lecture mode at a conference.

Again from the excerpt:

According to the current constructivist theory of learning, knowledge does not come package in books, or journal, or computer disks (or professors' and students' heads) to be transmitted intact from one to another. Those vessels contain information, not knowledge. Rather, knowledge is a state of understanding and can only exist in the mind of the individual knower; as such, knowledge must be constructed--or re-constructed--by each individual knower through the process of trying to make sense of new information in terms of what that individual already knows. In this constructivist view of learning, students use their own existing knowledge and prior experience to help them understand the new material; in particular, they generate relationships between and among the new ideas and between the new material and information already in memory (see also Brown, Bransford, Ferrara, and Campione 1983; Wittrock 1990).

And again, we can say, yes, students construct their understanding and in terms of previous experience. However, this does not mean that they cannot "generate relationships" from the information in lectures to their own experiences. If lectures are "bad," so are books and any other "containers" of information.

When students are engaged in actively processing information by reconstructing that information in such new and personally meaningful ways, they are far more likely to remember it and apply it in new situations. This approach to learning is consistent with information-processing theories (e.g., Mayer 1984), which argue that reformulating given information or generating new information based on what is provided helps one build extensive cognitive structures that connect the new ideas and link them to what is already known. According to this view, creating such elaborated memory structures aids understanding of the new material and makes it easier to remember.

It's not clear that one way of engaging with new information is more likely to be remembered than another. This is an interpretation. Anderson and Schunn in their article "The implications of the ACT-R learning theory: no magic bullets" (pdf) note that it is much more likely that any better remembering is due to more "time on task" rather than the notion of self-constructing as opposed to learning from provided examples, and they write:

There are no magical properties conveyed upon a knowledge structure just because it was self-generated. If all things were equal it would be preferable to have children learn by generating the knowledge (due to the redundant encoding). However, because of difficulties of generation and dangers of misgeneration, things are not always equal and it can be preferable to tell the knowledge.

None of this is to oppose the "guide on the side" perspective. Rather, there is a time and place for being a sage and for being a guide. Repeating mantras is no more than educational indoctrination.

Jason, reporting about Mike O'Connell's article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, has a post worth reading on this issue and ends nicely on this note:

In short, I think we need to get beyond the “sage” and “guide” dichotomy, and use both for truly effective teaching. One cannot just impose a set teaching style when it doesn’t work. It behooves teachers at all levels to consider what really works (or what might really work), drawing upon the makeup of individual classes and individual students to make the course truly memorable and meaningful. Otherwise, we’re just playing with techniques, and using unwitting students as guinea pigs.

Perhaps you've heard about the recent article in the New York Times, "Seeing no progress, some schools drop laptops". That is, students had not shown any improvement "on grades and test scores" as a result of laptop initiatives. Alex Reid at Digital Digs has an excellent response:

So basically the teachers couldn't figure out how to use the technology in the classroom. Not surprisingly, as a result, the technology did not have much of an impact on outcomes. It is not surprising that the teachers have no idea what they are doing. Why would we imagine that they would? ...

As I've said before and will say again (here and later, no doubt), it's not about delivering the same old curriculum with a new technology.

Why should I use books in my classroom? Lecturing works much better. Students hide magazines inside the covers of their books. They look at the wrong pages. They copy text out of the book and plagiarize. They can't do any of those things when I'm lecturing. The book is just a box that gets in the way of my one-to-one relationship with my students.

Sounds pretty funny when it's put that way, huh?

As Reid notes, it's not clear that laptops will aid learning effectively; however, "our children will live and work, and yes, learn, in these networked environments." So, it's not a question of whether to incorporate technology into our schools. But two questions we do need to answer are:

1. What are the best ways to introduce our children to the networked environments they will "live and work" in?
2. What are the best ways to introduce our teachers to using networked environments to facilitate learning in school?

Yesterday, our English Department held an institute on Cultural Literacies in the 21st Century. One of the speakers, Janice Fernheimer, an assistant professor in the Department of Language, Literature, and Communication at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, gave an excellent presentation, "Teaching the Raven Using Technology".

As she noted, it's easier to go from the known to the unknown. So, she introduces students to Poe's Raven via a YouTube clip on a Simpson's episode that is based on the Raven. In addition to the typical discussion questions, she provides links to other online sources discussing the Simpson's episode, the Raven, Poe's crafting of the Raven, readings that give different perspectives on different aspects of Poe's poem. One linked website even has various manuscripts of the Raven, underscoring the concept that texts are not fixed entities but evolving ones.

This presentation shows clearly some of the advantages of using the web for teaching and learning, such as:

• providing access to otherwise unavailable materials,
• facilitating a critical understanding by bringing together various viewpoints side by side,
• linking the known popular culture to the unknown academic culture, and
• integrating visual modalities like videos

If all I had to go on was the research on Error Correction in L2 Writing, I wouldn't do it. There's simply insufficient evidence to justify such an investment of time and effort.

However, research on learning, expertise, and motivation has garnered an impressive amount of empirical evidence for the positive effects of feedback that meets certain criteria. Before making suggestions on how to structure grammar feedback, let me summarize criteria on learning and motivation for guiding that feedback.

Learning

1. Learning occurs sequentially through three stages of declarative, procedural, and automatic knowledge.
2. Acquiring expertise in any field, including a second language, requires extensive practice.
3. Practice is made effective through
• accurate diagnosis of the task/rules,
• examples and understandable explanations for the task/rules, and
• feedback based on the examples and explanations.
4. Effective time on task is the most important factor in learning.
5. Learning occurs best when re-iterated at intervals.

Motivation

1. Motivation is important because it encourages persistance on task.
2. Motivation is promoted by
• clear goals,
• autonomy,
• tasks that challenge one's competence without unduly frustrating, and
• feedback that is immediate and informational.

Grammar Feedback Guidelines

Correctable Grammar

Grammar feedback in L2 writing should target only those items that are rule-governed and for which examples and clear explanations can be found. Subject-verb agreement is one such rule. Style is not.

Structure of Feedback

Dana Ferris (2003) breaks feedback into direct (the teacher giving the answer) and indirect (which ranges from merely noting the location of an error to using editing symbols to more explicit directions, such as use “future tense here.”). She says that direct feedback is preferred for beginning students, while indirect feedback seems to have better effects for intermediate and advanced students, likely because students must think about the errors and engage in self-editing (Ferris, 2003).

To some degree, if students think about an error, they're constructing declarative knowledge. But are they diagnosing the rule accurately and time-effectively? It would be better to first have the rules accompanied by examples and explanations that they continue to refer to. No doubt, Ferris and most instructors refer students to their grammar textbooks, but I'm thinking that students should construct their own textbooks to use grammar feedback more effectively.

Grammar notebooks: Students should maintain grammar notebooks with these examples and explanations, adding to the notebooks as new rules, examples, and explanations are covered. Extra space or pages should be available for students for revision. For instance, if an error was a case of misunderstanding, perhaps the explanation for the rule in their notebook should be revised. Or, if a rule doesn't seem to fit neatly into rules, examples, or understandings previously given, then students can revise the rule, create a new rule, make new examples, or write new understandings. In this way, students can acquire the requisite declarative knowledge, and the notebook becomes a textbook emerging out of, contributing to, and individualized to their own learning.

Goal logs: Students can keep a goal log, in which they set grammar goals and track their improvement over time. Seeing improvement is motivation, and seeing the same error repeatedly can help students target that error, review and revise their grammar notebooks accordingly, and determine strategies for reducing its occurrence.

Program-embedded feedback: Notebooks and goal logs should be used across courses in a program to provide the continuity and repetition needed of reading, writing, and revising understanding across different contexts to proceduralize grammar.

Frequency of Feedback

One problem with learning to write is that unlike sports, chess, and video games, feedback does not occur immediately or even often. Up until now, in my own classes, I generally only give grammar feedback on their major paper assignments, which means they get grammar feedback at the most every 2-3 weeks, and even that occurs several days after the paper is turned in.

If time allows, consider having students write for 5-10 minutes every class and then checking their work or perhaps checking their classmates' work. But instead of having them check for all errors, have them check for one specific error according to class needs. On days with less time, consider using a student example, perhaps from another class. Re-iteration of rules, or anything else, at spaced intervals is crucial for learning. This sort of task would work well for homework, too.

Note that while I grade the grammar component on a major paper assignment, I do not grade it on other assignments. Although the reality check of a grade is a given in most educational institutions, most feedback should be informational rather than evaluative. Otherwise, intrinsic motivation can be dampened.

Grammar Instruction

General lessons on grammar do not fit the criteria above. However, Ferris (2003; cf. Hinkel, 2004) suggests that mini-lessons may be useful if they have the following characteristics:

1. Mini-lessons should be brief and narrowly focused …
2. Instruction should focus on major areas of student need, rather than minor fine-tuning.
3. Lessons should include (minimally) text-analysis activities so that students can examine the target constructions in authentic contexts and application activities so that they can apply newly covered concepts to their own writing.
4. Instruction should also include strategy training to help students learn to avoid errors and to self-edit their work. (p. 157)

An example of a single task incorporating these guidelines and the criteria above would be one centering on the reporting of an interview (adapted from Hinkel, 2002). A mini-lesson could look at grammatical structures in interviews, such as tenses and reporting verbs. Examples would be given along with understanble explanations. Students would then analyze interviews in newspapers or magazines, focusing on tenses and reporting verbs and comparing to their examples. Next, they would interview someone and write a report of the interview. Finally, students would compare how they used tenses and reporting verbs to the grammatical findings of their earlier analyses and examples in their grammar notebooks.

The key diffferences in the original task and this one is (1) establishing declarative knowledge appropriately and (2) integrating feedback into the task via students' grammar notebooks. Many tasks in textbooks and elsewhere can be reframed to incorporate the learning and motivation criteria above.

Summary

Feedback is crucial for learning any activity, including languages. There are “no magic bullets” to accelerate learning. Rather, appropriate feedback helps students spend “effective time on task,” thus eliminating wasted time and effort.

Disclaimer: Because these suggestions are the recent result of my reviewing these theories and considering their application to error feedback, I haven't implemented them yet. This summer I intend to work on reframing the way I provide feedback and implement my new understanding in the fall semester. After doing so, I hope to provide some feedback here on how it went.

Call for feedback: If you have tried any of these approaches or others based on these theories, email me and let me know how it went, both successfully and unsuccessfully, and I'll post your experiences here.

All Error Feedback Posts in this series:
Error Feedback in L2 Writing
Error Feedback in L2 Writing: Scant Evidence
Error Feedback: Theory
Error Feedback: Skill Acquisition Theory
Error Feedback: Motivation
Error Feedback: Practice
Error Feedback: Bibliography

Jay Mathews, in "New teacher jolts KIPP", writes about Lisa Suben, a new teacher in the KIPP schools, who had her math students jump from the 16th to the 77th percentile in a single year. That's an unbelievably huge jump! How'd she do it? Theoretically, she says:

"My primary goal as a teacher is to help my students understand the reasoning behind math rules and procedures. I have several core beliefs about this: (1) Understanding is constructed by the learner, not passively received from the teacher. (2) Understanding is built by making connections between as many strands of knowledge as possible. (3) Understanding is galvanized through communication. (4) Understanding is only valuable when you reflect on it and question it."

Items (2) and (3) are related. That is, communication can (but need not) present more strands of knowledge to enter the picture that allows more connections to be made. It's not the connections per se that build understanding but rather the contradictions among them. Contradictions are the driving force of learning. On item (4), reflecting and questioning can improve one's understanding, of course, but most understanding is unconscious. That doesn't make it unvaluable.

Suben translated her theory into the following practice:

The core of her method is the workbook she produced last year on the fly. It "lets students build their own notes and create their own examples. It is incredibly active learning," she said. They were encouraged to write down the meaning of important terms and strategies they used that worked with certain kinds of problems.

Suben, I imagine, is differentiating between a traditional lecture form of teaching and Deweyan "learning by doing". It's not clear that one type of learning is more active than another. All learning is active. Of course, I can also imagine that students focus more on something they are "doing" as opposed to "receiving," and thus they spend more "effective time on task," the crucial element in learning. Thus, Suben's having her students create their own notes, examples, and meaning is an excellent way to (1) focus them more effectively on the tasks at hand and (2) bring them into contradictions between their declarative and procedural knowledge (see ACT-R Theory) and so improve their understanding.

Related posts on the five-paragraph essay:
Forget IQ. Just Work Hard!
The Expert Mind
Learning: A State of Disatisfaction
Learning with Examples

David Warlick at 2¢ Worth has got his Rubric Builder running again. He's still putting on the finishing touches, but what he writes sounds promising:

Rubric Builder is a tool kit that enables members to construct their own rubrics using an improved interface. Once the rubric is completed:

• Its author can generate a URL that will link to a web display of the rubric.
• The tool will also generate HTML code that can be pasted into a WebQuest or blog, to make the rubric a part of that web page.
• Rubric Builder also provides a rubric calculator, enabling the teacher (or student) to click the levels of performance for each objective and calculate a weighted score.

All rubrics are public and are available under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial, share-alike license. Members can search the database of nearly 50,000 current rubrics, select one that appears to be a good starting place for the rubric they need, and then clone that rubric and edit it for their immediate needs. It is a sharing community environment.

It’s not completely finished. I’m still tweaking the carburetor. Ok, I know, they don’t use carburetors any more. But the system is ready for folks to come in, join, or just search for existing rubrics by keyword, or, if you used the original Rubric Builder, you can enter your access code and call up many of those rubrics you built years ago. You are also welcome to join by signing up. This will enable you to build your own rubrics and clone the rubrics of others.

Rubrics are a good way to avoid halo effects in grading, to make grading transparent to students, and provide feedback students on areas in which they're doing well and areas that need work.

Sometimes, I wonder about the cute titles that accompany books, but in this case, it is appropriate. Zen and the Art of Public School Teaching is written by John Perricone, a longtime high school teacher and a holder of a 6th degree black belt. From an interview conducted with Michael Shaughnessy (columnist with EdNews.org), Perricone says his most important message is,

The concept of "philosophical identity." It is my thesis in both my book, and my address that we 'teach who were [sic] are', and that it is our 'philosophical identity' -- our sense of mission or purpose that we envelop ourselves in each day as we enter the classroom (or lack of same) which ultimately distinguishes those who find joy and passion in the teaching profession from those who find drudgery and simply pick up a paycheck every two weeks. So, both in my book and in my Keynote address, I take my audience on an introspective journey looking first at their identity as a human being, then as a teacher, and then we look to see if and where those lines intersect.

This notion of philosophical identity is closely tied to his perspective on values in teaching:

That every human life has intrinsic worth, value, and dignity and that it is our job as teachers to give our students those tools and insights that will enable them to live their lives at the fullest and deepest expression of their humanity. If that isn't the ultimate goal of education, I'm not sure what any of us are doing in this profession.

"We teach who we are." And who should we be? From Attending to the Inner Life of an Educator: The Human Dimension in Education (pdf), Avraham Cohen's dissertation, are several responses, one of which is a poem by Rumi:

The Guesthouse

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all;
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Related posts:
Sacrifice and teaching
Ants Have Teachers
Code of Ethics

Marvin Minsky, professor of media arts and sciences at MIT (from an interview in Technology Review via elearnspace), stated:

What surprises me is how few people have been working on higher-level theories of how thinking works. That's been a big disappointment. ... I think people look around to see what field is currently popular, and then waste their lives on that. If it's popular, then to my mind you don't want to work on it. ... The main idea ... [is] resourcefulness. Unless you understand something in several different ways, you are likely to get stuck. So the first thing ... is that you have got to have different ways of describing things. I made up a word for it: "panalogy." When you represent something, you should represent it in several different ways, so that you can switch from one to another without thinking.

Higher-level theories of cognition, especially in artificial intelligence, is not an area I'm familiar with. Even so, the notion of not jumping on the popular bandwagon seems to be a good one if we wish to advance in our understanding of pedagogy and learning. Right now, web 2.0 is popular, but for about six months, I haven't read much that is pedagogically new in this area. One exception is that of Dave (Academhack) and Jenn (Expos-i-story), who have introduced the browser Flock (with Wordpress) as the key element for bringing blogging into Jenn's composition course. Students will load Flock onto a flash drive and thus be able to blog from any computer using Flock and also through its RSS capabilities be connected to one another. The idea of a flash drive carrying one's blogging and RSS tools around is a good one and freeing oneself from one's one computer is a good one in some respects.

Most innovation, like that of Dave and Jenn's, is the remixing of already present ideas and practices, small ripples upon the surface of pedagogy and learning. Small as they may be, they're still an improvement upon our present practices. So, what ripples are you and I creating in our teaching that differ from what's popular with the web 2.0 crowd or elsewhere? And how can we represent it in more than one way?

I'm re-reading a fascinating book, Engaging Minds: Learning and Teaching in a Complex World. It's a book that intertwines learning theory and pedagogical practice. In it is the following claim:

Teachers must themselves know what it means to engage in a particular practice before they can teach it. Whether writing poetry, conducting a scientific inquiry, or whatever, being able to engage learners in disciplined study demands a well developed sense of what is involved in such engagements. One needs more than a textbook and a teacher's manual. To teach how to write, one must have written. To teach mathematics, one must have participated in mathematical inquiry.

The authors are not saying that teachers must be professionals in their discipline but that they must participate in the discipline to understand how to structure learning environments specific to the discipline.

As a composition instructor, I do my own sorts of writing. I submit manuscripts to be published, I post on email listservs, and I blog. In fact, the reason I began to blog was because I wanted my students to blog, I wanted to understand what blogging entailed. However, as a teacher of second language writing, I don't engage in writing in a second language. I've studied quite a few languages, but have had limited experience writing in them.

It might be interesting to have myself do what I have my students do: read blogs and keep a blog. (I might hold off on writing publicly for a while until I achieve an intermediate level of proficiency again, as it's been some time since studying my last language.) And I could perhaps join a listserv. The difficult part might be getting sufficient and targeted feedback. I wonder,

• How much time would I need to invest?
• How much time would be needed to obtain insights that would inform my teaching practice?
• How would the insights gained compare with the insights obtained from just reading the literature and listening to my students as they learn to write in another language?
• Does learning to write programming code count?

Often, I wonder, Why don't my students get it? Why don't they see what I see? Perhaps it's because they're not looking where I am.

Well, just the other day, I wasn't looking where I should have been. Trying to find my car, I zig-zagged through the parking lot, turning my head left and right. Where was my car? I couldn't find it. I finally stopped, looked left and right again, didn't see it, but just as I started to walk again--I looked down and there it was: one foot in front of me. If it'd been a snake, it would've bit me.

Similarly in language "seeing," I remember while in Istanbul I once asked a minibus driver in Turkish if he would go by Mecidiye. Each time he answered, "No speak English." On the third time, an elderly man behind him leaned forward, saying, "Türkçe konusuyor" (He's speaking Turkish). And then the driver could understand me. He had been listening for English, not Turkish. He hadn't been hearing where the other passenger was hearing.

And the converse is true, too. We don't understand why our students don't get it, because we aren't seeing where they're looking. To be able to see with them (and they with us), our most valuable skill may be that of listening to our students, listening to understand what they understand, in order to build a bridge between our understandings.

My last two posts have talked about listening to students. I just came across Susan Black's article "Listening to Students" in the American School Board Journal. She writes,

Giving students a voice in classroom decisions -- such as suggesting themes and topics to study -- and in school policies -- such as homework regulations -- makes schools less autocratic and more democratic. And democratic schools, researchers say, tend to have fewer discipline problems, more civic involvement, higher student engagement, and higher achievement. Plus, schools that genuinely seek and appreciate students’ ideas are more likely to see their school improvement plans succeed.

In contrast, schools that silence students can lead to their dropping out.

Students’ words matter, says Carole Gallagher of Indiana University, Columbus. In a 2002 study, she discovered that most school dropouts have been “systematically silenced,” not only in curriculum but also in how their schools are run.

Teachers in an Ohio middle school decided to listen:

By listening to their students, these teachers learned to look at them through a different lens that brought the kids into sharper focus. As a result, the teachers said they became less judgmental, more patient with their students, and more committed to helping them succeed.

The teachers also began to think more about their students as individuals, selecting strategies based on information they had gathered from the kids.

Part of motivation, according to self-determination theory, is autonomy and social relatedness. Teachers need to interact with students in ways that recognize the social, not simply the authoritarian. And students need some voice and control over their learning activity. How to achieve a good balance between competing needs to faciliate learning takes a lot of listening to all the voices concerned.

I came across this folk story at a testing blog, "Know Enough to be Dangerous":

The Three Tradesmen

A great city was besieged, and its inhabitants were called together to consider the best means of protecting it from the enemy.

• A Bricklayer earnestly recommended bricks as affording the best material for an effective resistance.
• A Carpenter, with equal enthusiasm, proposed timber as a preferable method of defense.
• Upon which a Currier stood up and said, "Sirs, I differ from you altogether: there is no material for resistance equal to a covering of hides; and nothing so good as leather."

Every man for himself.

Rather than "Every man for himself," I would say "Every man from himself." That is, it refers to individuals' (and theorists') chains of experience that constrain their ability to think and learn, much like my son's interpreting situations in terms of his own experience, and again showing the viability of radical constructivism as a theory.

von Glasersfeld, drawing upon Piaget, was the architect of radical constructivism. According to this theory,

• Knowledge is not passively received either through the senses or by way of communication;
• Knowledge is actively built up by the cognizing subject;
• The function of cognition is adaptive, in the biological sense of the term, tending towards fit or viability;
• Cognition serves the organization of the experiential world, not the discovery of ontological reality. (Radical Constructivism: A Way of Knowing and Learning, 1995, p. 51)

These four principles refute that notion that one can access--or make progress toward increasingly accurate representations of--objective reality or truth. Rather, we simply construct models and revise those models as we interact with our environment. So, radical constructivists use the term "viability" to represent how well one's models fit one's experiences with the environment. For this reason, "good" teaching results from the ability to listen to one's students and respond to them in ways that help them construct viable models for their school experiences.

Similarly, "good" theory building results from the ability to listen to other theorists and respond to them in ways that helps one create a new model that is perceived to fit our experiences better than our previous models.

Friday morning, I'll head out to a two-day (actually two half-days) conference at the University of Amherst Massachusetts: Conference on Teaching, Writing, & Technology, K-College

New technology is providing new venues for writers and for teachers of writing, offering us all exciting possibilities and different perspectives on what writing is, can, or should be. As tech-savvy students post blogs and teachers engage with new software to organize their courses and share student writing, technology challenges our definitions and practices of writing instruction. The Conference on Writing, Teaching, and Technology, K-College, will be an opportunity for teachers from all grade levels to share ideas, methods, and projects on integrating technology effectively into the writing classroom.

Kathleen Yancey and Charles Moran will be featured speakers. A couple of sessions will focus on first-year composition and one will look at the use of weblogs in the classroom. Looks like I'll have an opportuntiy to learn.

In a few weeks, our English Department will have a poster session on "Best Practices" in teaching. Mine will be on using blogs and wikis. Of course, I present the usual rationale for using blogs and wikis, but for me the highlight of presenting this poster was reviewing my students' blogs and seeing again how they were able to tie their writing into their own interests. One of my students, for example, has an active interest in things Japanese, applying the name "yukiseguchi" to her blog. She wrote about how to wear a kimono ("Flutter your sashes") and geishas and inserting great images, too.

Despite appreciating my students' posts, one thing still troubles me: Few of these students continue to blog after the course ends. Nancy McKeand (Random Thoughts) asks, Why aren't we all blogging?. There's no easy answer, but it's unlikely that we're all made from the same mold. Some like sports, others music, and others, still, video games. One of my students moved from blogger over to myspace, where she is still active.

Perhaps we shouldn't worry about whether students like blogging or continue to blog. When in high school, I enjoyed basketball, but I didn't like the speed drills. However, they were great for developing my stamina. And perhaps that's how we should consider blogging. That is, Is there some benefit from blogging? Besides, we could also ask how many of our students continue to write essays after graduating. Should we, then, stop requiring essay writing? Hmm. I'm assuming that writing essays has some benefit. Does it?

I've always wondered how well most writing instructors would do if we had to write what we have students write,say, for example, a coherent, developed essay in 30 minutes. Well, today, I'm wondering how most of us would do at writing about a presentation we attended, at least writing in such a way as to be interesting and useful.

Another thing I've wondered about is why do presenters at conferences read papers to the audience. I know it's standard practice in many disciplines, but if someone is going to just read, I'd just as soon have the paper and read it in my own time. Having academic papers read to one is simply boring! I'm at the TESOL conference in Tampa right now, and the difference in my interest level is inversely proportional to my being read to.

One interesting presentation was by Jennifer Granger, who is teaching as a Fellow at a university in China. To improve students' vocabulary, listening and research skills, and cultural knowledge, she uses episodes from "The West Wing." Besides TV being more interesting than textbooks, she writes, "This drama series promotes critical thinking, as well as shows different facets of American culture, history, and language usage." It's not just listening. They read about the series from several websites, including one with transcripts of the episodes. They look at current online magazine and newspaper articles related to the episode. And so on. I wish I had had her as a teacher when I studied my foreign languages.

Sometimes, simple methods work well for students. Students often have problems analyzing the information in their readings, especially if the amount of text is large. Gigi Taylor, a doctoral candidate at Purdue University, in her presentation "Teaching Academic Writing" suggests having students construct "Key Point Charts," a grid in which author's names are at the top of columns and "salient points" are on the left side. In this manner, students can visually compare the same point across authors to see the similarities and differences.

Thinking a little more about the notion of sacrifice and teaching from Ants Have Teachers, I was reminded of Albert Schweitzer, who said "all progress demands sacrifice, which has to be paid for by the lives of those chosen to be offered up." Bertrand Russell, speaking of progress, said, "There is only one road to progress, in education as in other human affairs, and that is: Science wielded by love. Without science, love is powerless; without love, science is destructive."

Granting that exceptions exist, I don't think we see much of this sort of teaching, that is, teaching guided by sacrificial love. That's why Fethullah Gülen asserts, "Education is different from teaching. Most people can teach, but only a very few can educate." That is, only a very few will love enough to sacrifice in order to teach.

Perhaps that's too strong a claim for some. Kevin Ryan, founder and director emeritus of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University, writes, "While I'm not suggesting that teachers be saints, they should take their moral lives seriously by modeling upright behavior." I wonder why the word "modeling" is used instead of "living." It suggests that teachers need to act contrary to their real character. After all, if one "lived" uprightly, one would not need to be reminded to model their behavior. As Huebner writes, "If we live our values and reflect responsibly on our life together, what need have we to teach values?"

Uprightness, for me, involves right behavior and relationships with others. Although not a one-to-one correspondence, the notion of right relationships is connected to social relatedness, which, in Deci & Ryan's self-determination theory, is an intrinsic need (along with autonomy and competence). From another perspective, right relationships involve trust. Deborah Meiers (In Schools We Trust) has some pertinent thoughts here:

"Standardization and bureaucratization fuel the very distrust they are aimed to cure" (p. 2).

Students need to be around teachers they can trust and teachers who ask questions as learners, too" (p. 14).

Instead of focusing on teaching teachers so much about teaching, education schools should work at developing character in future teachers. Huebner states that to improve teaching, "we must attend to the teacher." The problem, of course, is the "we," who must also have character. Perhaps this is why Kevin Ryan doesn't ask that teachers be saints.

The National Geographic News reports on research that claims that " Ants have teacher-pupil relations."

In a tandem run, the lead ant only continues forward when frequently tapped on its legs and abdomen by the following ant's antennae. When a gap appears between the two, each adjusts its speed to close it.

The researchers show that the lead ant in the tandem pair could reach the food stash four times faster when not slowed by a follower.

But the follower ant finds the food faster than when searching alone and is ultimately able to quickly run solo errands. The process likely increases the fitness of the entire ant colony, the researchers say, by making the ants more efficient.

From this, the researchers define teaching:

[Franks] and Richardson write that "an individual is a teacher if it modifies its behavior in the presence of a naïve observer, at some initial cost to itself, in order to set an example so that the other individual can learn more quickly."

In addition, the Bristol researchers say that teaching involves a two-way relationship between the teacher and pupil.

I'm wondering how often human teachers modify their behavior at any cost to themselves. And, How often is teaching "a two-way relationship" in formal institutions of learning?

Will Richardson comments on Steve Dembo's comments on absenteeism in classes that podcast their lectures online. Steve asks a good question,

When the lecture, presentation slides and notes can all be shared online, what SHOULD a higher education class look like?

Will ties this into the need to reinvent ourselves and teaching, ending with,

To be honest, I have a secret wish that when my kids get old enough for college (in about 10 years), that they'll have consumed all of the necessary consumables and just be showing up to classes that focus on actually taking an active role in the learning. What a concept...

That's part of the key, that students are prepared to take an active role in their learning. Many, perhaps most, students have been trained to be spoon-fed and find it frustrating to be asked to become active learners and even resent it. Actually, this is not just students. Time is so important to me that I often prefer the spoon-feeding for areas that I'm not familiar with. And that's part of the key, too: not overloading students with a massive memory overload so they opt for the easy way out.

Barbara Ganning jumps in on this topic, too, mentioning possibilities for classroom activities. She ends on,

Ah, the possibilities are limited only by our imaginations and by our grasp of the goals of formal education and our specific course objectives ( of course we are often hampered by state mandates and standards). As Maxine Greene has said repeatedly, "Scholarship is intensely creative." Shouldn't teaching be so, too?

Tim Frederick (via Bud and Nancy) are discussing the "lies" teachers tell their students, one of which seems to be saying "this is an important book." They make some good points, which I'll come back to, but first I want to look at some of the assumptions being made.

According to Tim, this is called a lie because: "How did we become so arrogant as to think we had the right to say which books were important to read and which aren't? "

I'm not sure we should consider arrogance as a form of lying, and I'm not sure that it's rights that are the issue. Shouldn't it be responsibility? That is, teachers have the responsibility (and are accountable to parents and society) for selecting those books that will best enable students to learn. Actually, depending on the grade level and subject, school administrators often do the choosing of books for the school's curricula, books that must meet a state's criteria, as determined by state departments of education.

Tim adds:

What disturbs me most is that when we say this, we take a little power away from students AND hurt their critical thinking. Shouldn't they decide what's important and why? That can be empowering, as well as exercise the critical thinking muscle of evaluating. They would have to be able to justify their reasons for thinking a book is important and we can share how other people define "important". Students can further evaluate others' criteria for "importance". How many perfectly good lessons surrounding this are thrown away when we decide what's important?

Part of this argument is a value judgment of "empowering" students, of appealing to egalitarian values. In the classroom, however, such an appeal should be secondary to principles of learning. No research on learning is cited in these claims, nor is any evidence given to support that "empowering" students will help them learn better. To be fair, Bud just wrote a few paragraphs, not an academic essay. However, with such strong claims, I'd like to see a little evidence.

Another assumption without evidence is that saying "This is an important book" somehow "hurt[s] their crtical thinking." Actually, this assumption is a shift from the perspective of teachers wanting students to read "good" books to a position on the value of "critical thinking," as if these positions were exclusive. Of course, I can imagine teachers who pontificate without inviting students into the discussion, but that's not at issue here.

There is no getting away from the teacher's responsibility. Consider Bud's last sentence, "How many perfectly good lessons surrounding this are thrown away when we decide what's important?" Who decides what are "perfectly good lessons"? If we carry this perspective to its conclusion, then we should have the children evaluating the criteria for "perfectly good lessons" and the criteria for good teaching. In fact, we should listen to the commplace saying that one learns best by teaching, and we should just have the children do the teaching, too. Then what would the teachers do?

Now looking at the positives of Bud's argument, It does make sense that students need to learn and evaluate "how other people define 'important'" and also develop critical thinking. The issue is how to do this. Perhaps we can draw from ACT-R learning theory. Anderson and Schunn (2000) write,

There are no magical properties conveyed upon a knowledge structure just because it was self-generated. If all things were equal it would be preferable to have children learn by generating the knowledge (due to the redundant encoding). However, because of difficulties of generation and dangers of misgeneration, things are not always equal and it can be preferable to tell the knowledge.

...

Thus, ACT-R's theory of procedural learning claims that procedural skills are acquired by making references to past problem solutions while actively trying to solve new problems. Thus, it is both a theory of learning by doing and a theory of learning by example.

Simply providing the learner with examples is not sufficient to guarantee learning in the ACT-R theory. The sufficiency of the production rules acquired depends on the understanding of the example.

Anderson and Schunn add, "For competences to be displayed over a lifetime, time on task is by far and away the most significant factor." That is, learners must practice a lot, whether critical thinking or other skills. The problem is one can practice the wrong skills, in which case "practice makes imperfect." In other words, learners need feedback and at times explicit guidance to make their practice effective. Of course, they can get that when they choose their own books. And now we're back where we started: How does the teacher choosing a book hurt students?

Reference:

Anderson, John R., & Schunn, Christian D. (2000). The implications of the ACT-R learning theory: no magic bullets. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional psychology (Vol. 5). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.