Donn King's Corner

Budding politician?

You don’t have to know a lot about history to know that people used to think illness could be caused by too much blood, and so the way to cure illness was to bleed the patient. I heard that George Washington died as a result of being bled to treat pneumonia (turns out it was actually “acute epiglottitis“). We just shake our heads and sigh at the ignorance.

You may not realize that the idea of “having too much blood” made perfect sense, supported by evidence and observation. Read more »

The following is adapted from a piece I originally wrote a decade ago, but it certainly still applies today.

Not long ago I heard a student give a speech that I know would have killed her had she been forced to sit in a classroom and listen to a professor lecture that way. She stood still as a statue, holding her notes in front of her, and read most if not all of the speech in a flat, sing-songy tone, the kind that movies use to stereotype boring speakers and teachers.

If you read a written “speech” out loud to the audience, why are you bothering to speak to them?

Wouldn’t it be simpler, easier, less nerve-wracking, and more time-efficient to just photocopy your manuscript? Read more »

Photo by Flickr user gerriet

I’ve noticed the last few years that students seem to bring a slightly higher degree of beginning presentation skills into the classroom. I suspect this comes from growing up surrounded by hundreds of cable channels and YouTube.

It has even reached the point where the old saw about public speaking being the number one fear is no longer true. I thought perhaps it was, indeed, a steady trend of increasing confidence. If so, this semester doesn’t fit the trend. In fact, students have generally had more trouble with the second speech round than the first speech round. Read more »

Esher Sketch photo credit: Wild Guru Larry

In Flipped classrooms hold implications for communication (part 1), we talked about an experiment I’m conducting this term, and explored the background a bit. In this part, let’s explore some of the advantages of the flip, especially for students.

Inside out

There are certain advantages for students getting “lecture” material outside of class via reading or podcasts (audio or video). I have tried to follow my own guidelines and speak rather than lecture, and I think it works in the way intended. I contend that “out loud” excels at giving the “big picture,” the context into which the details fit, making them more understandable because the audience sees the pattern, whereas print excels at explaining and mastering detail.

A skilled writer can show the big picture, and a skilled speaker can get detail across memorably, but neither are easy. Most of the time, why not simply focus on strengths? Give an audience a handout, a white paper, a book, etc., to master the detail, and use speaking to give the big picture.

Think about when you’ve been on the receiving end. Have you ever had a history teacher flood you with dates and names and wars and wound up simply empty? Have you ever gotten so lost in the details of a book chapter, you couldn’t find your way through? Most academic conferences, and most business reports, would improve fivefold from this simple realization.

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photo credit: MichaelLaMartin

I’m trying an experiment this semester in the college classes I teach. In various circles it’s called a “flipped” or an “inverted” classroom, a term I’m not completely comfortable with, but it’s a handy term at the moment.

While relatively new, it is rooted in ideas and practices that are not, and it seems to me to be good communication practice, recognizing the strengths of various forms and building on them.

The flipping background

A flipped (or inverted) class swaps out what goes on in the classroom and what goes on outside the classroom.

Traditionally, since the Middle Ages students listen to a professor lecture in class, and do application work (otherwise called “homework”) outside class. Reading could fall into either category.

Almost everyone has heard that the lecture is passé, exemplified in the now-cliché, “Be the guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage.” I’ve taken a related approach, demonstrated in workshops I’ve done for teachers around the theme, “Stop Lecturing and Start Speaking.” When you want to master detail, you do better to work with the information in written form. When you want the big picture, “out loud” excels. That partly has to do with the way we process information, and also with the interactive nature of “out loud.”

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Peter Gray at Psychology Today has posted a thoughtful blog article entitled Why Children Protest Going to School: More Evolutionary Mismatch. I find it an insightful argument in favor of homeschooling and several other education methods that do not lead to a factory model of schooling.

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Effort is. MindShift asks the question, Can Everyone Be Smart at Everything? and seems to conclude that we don’t need to be. My only quibble with the article is that the headline doesn’t seem to me to fit the article very well. But I like the article itself. We’ve known for awhile that telling a kid, “You’re so smart!” isn’t very effective. “Great effort!” works better. Even “Good job!” doesn’t work–kids tend to interpret as “you’re smart” or “you’re talented.” They don’t see that as something they have any control over, whereas they  do have control over their effort.

“[T]elling kids they’re smart when they get good grades encourages them to continue focusing on the grade rather than the learning process,” they say.

More importantly in light of recent practices, though, is this: the emphasis on learning styles can be just as counterproductive. When you tell a kid that he is a visual learner, it can leave the message that no one expects him to learn, say, via auditory means–again, he has no control over it. “Taking that idea one step further, kids might think that if they have to work hard at something, that must mean they’re not smart.”

Furthermore,

“Clearly, people have distinctive abilities and aptitudes. Some people have higher visual ability, and some have higher auditory ability,” said UCSD professor Hal Pashler, lead author on the report. “But the question is whether that predicts anything about the most effective way to teach them. … There is a complete lack of evidence of the sort.”

There’s a lot more food for thought there. Go take a look at the article to see the implications that seem, to me, to point beyond educating kids (as important as that is) to educating college students.

The following infographic comes from Rasmussen College. What do you think about its insights?

Source: http://www.rasmussen.edu/student-life/blogs/main/is-a-bachelors-degree-really-worth-the-cost/

As I write this, I’m at the Innovative Professor Conference at Austin Peay State University, getting ready to do a presentation about a method of publishing student work for Flipboard, one of the most popular apps available on the iPad.

I have this theory that “out loud” is best for big picture information–establishing context, talking about meaning, etc.–while detail is best communicated via writing. In keeping with this, in the session I’m mostly trying to show what’s possible and point to resources, while developing the details on the “how to” via a public Google doc. I’m also pointing to this post for people to be able to find these resources:

• My Twitter feed: @donnellking
• The Google doc how-to
• The Prezi from the session

As I was reading an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education about plagiarism from an administrative perspective. It includes suggestions about heading off plagiarism, and pointed out the need to define plagiarism and teach proper citation practices.

The author said faculty protest that they shouldn’t have to teach those basic things, because students should have learned that already. The response not only explained why students may not have learned those basic things but also shed some light on at least one of the reasons students come to college unprepared to do college work.

First, many students do get out of high school never having written an essay that involves research or working with sources. This is happening more and more because of the state-mandated tests students have to take to earn a high school diploma. These tests usually do not require that students cite anything, so teachers who have their salaries or continued employment tied to the test scores of their students do often focus on teaching for the test.

Among other things, high school should prepare a student to reason and to work independently. College work requires that–it’s not just about shoveling more information into their heads, but giving them the tools to think critically.

Unfortunately, misguided efforts at accountability scuttle that very important function of high school, and similar efforts currently aimed at higher education will likely make the situation worse. At a time we bemoan the fact that students aren’t learning much in college (Student Tracking Finds Limited Learning in College), we certainly don’t need to discourage the development of independent, critical thinking skills at any level of education. But this is what happens when we treat schools like factories, and when we force all schools to hue to the same standardized tests, they become factories.

The teachers are as frustrated with this as anyone, based on conversations I’ve had. So let’s not blame them, or even the administrators who simply struggle to comply with mandates forced on them by politicians. Even the politicians are (ineffectively) trying to address public concerns.

We, as a society, need to take a step back–for the time being, don’t just do something, sit there–and examine what we really want an education to do. It’s not just about jobs. Education, properly done, will lead to jobs, but it will do that because education will lead to a higher level of functioning as a human being in a complex society. That is difficult to standardize on a test, but it’s the only thing worth pursuing.