TimesWatch, Day 1

I need to stop reading education stories in the New York Times.

Because life is short.

Since I'm probably not going to stop reading education stories in the New York Times, I've decided to document the badness.

Or at least list it:

• 12/19/2014 Raising Ambitions: The Challenge in Teaching at Community Colleges:"Data on what kind of teaching works most effectively at the community college level is scant. But what is known from learning theories generally is that constructivist methods, which prize active student participation over passive receipt of information, are intensely valuable." 
• 12/26/2014 Colleges Reinvent Classes to Keep More Students in Science: "Hundreds of students fill the seats, but the lecture hall stays quiet enough for everyone to hear each cough and crumpling piece of paper. The instructor speaks from a podium for nearly the entire 80 minutes. Most students take notes. Some scan the Internet. A few doze....Multiple studies have shown that students fare better with a more active approach to learning...
• 12/27/2014 Rage Against the Common Core: "Many teachers like the standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving."

If you haven't read the stories, don't waste your time.

Instead, spend it listening to Education Next's pod cat with Guido Schwerdt:

More Lecturing, More LearningIn this podcast, Guido Schwerdt talks with Ed Next’s Paul Peterson about his new study finding that students learn more math and science when their teachers devote more time to lecturing and less time to problem-solving activities.

Today, on average, teachers spend more time on problem-solving activities than they do making lecture-style presentations. If teachers were to spend 10 percent more time lecturing, this would be associated with a rise in test scores comparable to about 1 or two months of additional learning in a year.

Eureka, part 4: Why MOOCs don't work and professors are jaunty

Eureka
Eureka, part 2
Eureka, part 3
Eureka, part 4
Eureka, part 5

Back to my eureka moment:

Sitcoms explain why MOOCs fail, and why flipped classrooms will fail.

To reprise: sitcoms work because they are funny, and funny works because it is surprising.

Surprise affects us via reward prediction error. When something better-than-expected happens, dopamine spikes, and your brain marks that event as a good thing: a thing to return to, a thing to pay attention to when you see it again.

In short, reward prediction error (via humor, in this case) commands attention.

Which brings me to the difference between a live lecture & a MOOC.

Live lectures are, not infrequently, almost bizarrely jokey. I say "bizarrely" because the jokes don't really fit the content. They're add ons, humor for the sake of humor.

Take a look at Jo Ann Freeman's lectures on the American Revolution. These are fabulous lectures, so fabulous I've managed to watch almost 3 of them, a record for me to date.^* I've never made it through more than 1 lecture from The Great Courses.

At times, Freeman is so jokey I feel impatient: Stop joking around about the Founders, will you?

But if I were sitting in the lecture hall listening to Freeman in person, everything would be different. Inside the lecture hall I would feel happy, interested, and best of all awake.

17:03 - 18:11: Here she is on her first semester teaching at Yale. I've seen this section several times now, and I still find it funny (even on tape, which I realize undermines my thesis….)



Here's Lecture 2 Being a British Colonist:



13:42 "I've already given you one arrogant British quote…"
16:53 "As promised, here is yet another arrogant British quote in my series of arrogant British quotes..."
17:36 Freeman laughs out loud at the observation that British observers never view the colonies as "polite."
17:47 Freeman on the British sending inferior goods to the colonies because the colonists wouldn't know
18:51 "I just can't resist adding [this] in, it makes me happy and it's John Adams!!!!

Another example of weird humor in college teaching: Thomas C. Foster's books.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form

Notice the subtitles.

"Lively and entertaining"

"Jaunty"

Then take a look at the reactions to Foster on Goodreads. More than a few readers see Foster as condescending. The reason readers see Foster as condescending, I think, is precisely that he is jaunty. He is jaunty about Shakespeare, he is jaunty about the Bible, he is jaunty about Ulysses, he is jaunty about Northrup Frye, he is jaunty about intertextuality for God's sake. Name a work of literature covered by Foster, and you will find a jocular and jaunty tone; open the book to a random page, there jocular and jaunty will be. The entire work is unrelievedly jaunty; Foster never lets up. Reading Foster, you become desperate for whatever is the opposite of comic relief.

Why would anyone, let alone a professor of English literature, write a book that leaves the reader desperate for whatever is the opposite of comic relief?

What Foster has done, I am certain of it, is transpose his classroom voice directly to the page.

It doesn't work.

But inside the classroom, his jocular and jaunty tone does work.

As a first pass at understanding how sitcoms and reward prediction error explain the failure of MOOCs and the impending failure of flips, I would say that MOOCs and flips are catastrophically handicapped by the simple fact that goofy humor works inside the classroom and doesn't work on tape.

Probably for the same reason The Big Bang Theory isn't funny without the laugh track.

Eureka, Part 5 t/k



Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk

How to Read Literature Like an English Professor by Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Literature Like an English Professor by Thomas C. Foster - NOTES

^* It's a toss up which I'll finish first: The New Oxford Annotated Bible with Apocrypha: New Revised Standard Version or Jo Ann Freeman's 25 lectures on the American Revolution.

Flipping the Classroom: Hot, Hot, Hot
MOOCs grow the gap
The New York Times is surprised
In the world of MOOCs, 2+2 is never 4
World's funniest joke: humor depends on surprise
Dick Van Dyke on comedy
Philip Keller on the flipped classroom
If students could talk
Who wants flipped classrooms? (Salman Khan on liberating teachers)
True story
Are math & science lectures boring in a way humanities & social science lectures are not?

Is this true?

Each school day, millions of students move in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures. Despite there being anywhere from 20 to 300 humans in the room, there is little actual interaction. This model of education is so commonplace that we have accepted it as a given. For centuries, it has been the most economical way to “educate” a large number of students.
Why School Should Focus on Engagement Instead of Lectures by Salman Khan

I'm trying to think how long I talk at a stretch, with no word from my students.

Five minutes? (For passersby, I teach freshman composition in the context of an English class.)

I'll have to time myself.

It strikes me as unlikely in the extreme that "millions of students" are spending entire school days listening to 50- to 90-minute lectures 6 hours a day.

In fact, it strikes me as being at least somewhat unlikely you could force millions of students to listen to 50- to 90-minute lectures 6 hours a day even if you tried. But I could be wrong.

My impression (and again, I don't know) is that the only teachers using straight lecture as their predominant or exclusive method of conveying knowledge to students are college professors teaching lecture courses. And lecture courses in my experience typically have "recitation" or "discussion" sections where the content of the lecture is elaborated and questions answered.

Plus college students take four courses, or thereabouts, each of which meets typically 2 to 3 times a week, so college students aren't spending 6 hours a day listening to lecture even when they're taking 4 lecture courses.

Besides which, I object to the blanket assumption that lecture is somehow an intrinsically bad form. The lecture is a time-honored, efficient, and often inspiring means of organizing and communicating material from an expert to a novice -- or from an expert to a colleague.....

And with that, I see I've veered off-topic.

A school would play heck getting me to pay attention to 6 hours of lecture a day, that's for sure. I don't have the focus.

Good thing no school I attended ever tried it.

Back to K-12. My intended topic is not to ask: Do students listen to lecture? I'm sure they do.

My intended topic is to ask: Do students in K-12 spend 6 hours a day moving in unison from classroom to classroom where they listen to 50-to 90-minute lectures?

(And, if they do, my follow-up question is: how is that possible?)

People seem to think "explicit instruction" means lecture, which is not remotely the case.

See, e.g.:
Barak Rosenshine, Five Meanings of Direct Instruction and Principles of Instruction; and Doug Lemov, Teach Like a Champion.

Not only does "explicit instruction" not mean "lecture," it means almost the opposite. I recall watching a professional development video on direct instruction a few years back (no longer available online, it appears) in which the presenter gave teachers an explicit figure for the number of questions they were advised to ask per each 20 minute segment of class time.

It was a lot.

[pause]

OK, here we go. The Use of Questions in Teaching, 1970:

Certainly teachers ask many questions during an average school day. A half-century ago, Stevens (1912) estimated that four-fifths of school time was occupied with question-and-answer recitations. Stevens found that a sample of high-school teachers asked a mean number of 395 questions per day. High frequencies of question use by teachers were also found in recent investigations: 10 primary-grade teachers asked an average of 348 questions each during a school day (Floyd, 1960); 12 elementary-school teachers asked an average of 180 questions each in a science lesson (Moyer, 1965); and 14 fifth-grade teachers asked an average of 64 questions each in a 30-minute social studies lesson (Schreiber, 1967). Furthermore, students are exposed to many questions in their textbooks and on examinations. [emphasis added] 

This is what everyone on the planet (our current planet, I mean) seems to have forgotten: old-time teaching wasn't about teachers standing on a stage delivering a lecture for 50 or 90 minutes.

How could it have been?

How would that work in a one-room schoolhouse?

Old-time teaching, as far as I can tell, was highly interactive and fundamentally social. Probably most effective teaching is fundamentally social; at least, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it is.

And that's the problem with trying to learn math from a math video. It's lonely!

I'm pretty sure that reforms whose purpose is to topple straw men are the wrong reforms.

sage on the stage bests guide on the side

new study

from the press release:

[P]rominent organizations such as the National Research Council and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, for at least the last three decades, have “called for teachers to engage students in constructing their own new knowledge through more hands-on learning and group work.”

Harvard Study Shows that Lecture-Style Presentations Lead to Higher Student Achievement

Thirty years.

another nail in the coffin

Is Traditional Teaching Really All that Bad?

answer: no