Educause 2019: Session Lessons

First of all, Educause was in Chicago, which was pretty great- except that, with some more forethought, I could have seen more than this:

Instead, I learned a lot, networked even more, and encountered some new ideas:

1. In the pre-conference workshop focusing on active learning spaces, one of my key takeaways was the analysis what kind of teaching is happening when and for how long - and how attendance is only an issue in some of these types of teaching.  This discussion, coming out of Australia, discussed the mapping of pedagogical constructs (prepare, connect, discover, activate, demonstrate, consolidate, extend) on to learning modalities (didactic, participative, facilitative, self-directed, supportive) over the course of the term. 

The mapping broke down as follows, with the percentage being the amount of time throughout a term this may last:

Didactic - prepare through activate - 15%

Participative - connect through demonstrate - 20%

Facilitative connect through consolidate - 25%

Self directed - discover through extend - 30%

Supportive - demonstrate - through extend - 10%

The percentages created the aha moment and showed that the first two created the attendance issues - if students missed these, faculty were concerned, so focusing on these two parts as the times and spaces active learning strategies needed to be implemented to engage students, making it more likely for them to come to class made it easier for faculty to consider active learning (vs. the idea that the entire course needs to be redone).

Another key take-away were the square footage numbers that McGill is aiming for and what it has as a standard in its various classroom types:

ALC 22sf

Flat floor 19.66sf

Flat floor large 16.20sf

Lecture hall 15.86sf

Auditorium 12.72sf

Standard  25 sf 

2. Steven Johnson's keynote focused on reframing the narrative of innovation away from a lonely genius inventor to the sense that innovation comes out of collaboration, in particular diverse collaboration. The terms he used were slow hunch - something that grows slowly over a long period of time, together with liquid networks - the people and networks that, in their diversity, change over time and bring different perspectives to the slow hunch.
The 18th century coffee house was his prime example of how this kind of liquid network has worked in the past.  For more on his ideas, check out this TedTalk: https://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from?language=en

3. The Better Allies session was also quite meaningful, especially seeing quite a few of my Auburn colleagues in the room, which was heartening.  Catlin focused on office housework, use of language, and how we need to protect our colleagues so that they are able to focus on productive work, not busy work.  Definitely a book to read!

4. Tom Tobin's session on Universal Design for Learning brought home two points for me:  We need to make sure that universal design for learning is not something that is seen by faculty as one more thing to do - rather, we need to encourage and teach everyone on campus what this is, why it is important, and how they can use it.  And we need to make sure not to overwhelm everyone.  Instead of insisting that multiple formats need to be used for folks to access content in multiple ways, let's focus on one more way.  If I send something out as a text document, to make sure that it can be listened to. If I send out a video, to make sure that it has captions.  Tobin also managed to capture the pre-conference attention by giving us a busy, nonsensical slide - quite a lot of fun!

Other fun things during the conference:  Betsy Gilbertson, Shawndra Bowers and I presented our Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Information Technology poster, and we had lots of great discussions:

And we could write notes to young female coders to encourage their continued work:

Educause 2019 - Technology Finds

This year's Educause seemed to move even faster than previous ones - the venue was huge, many of the sessions very engaging, and with over 8,000 attendees, this was the largest gathering to date.

With this post, I want to highlight some of the technologies in the exhibit hall that caught my eye, even if only for a brief moment.  I am not endorsing them; I am simply pointing out that they had some features that struck me as useful.

1 Beyond:  https://1beyond.com/automate is a set of cameras that allow for a wide scope shot with one camera while tracking the speaker with a second camera.  Facial recognition software allows for intelligent tracking.

GlyphEd for data visualization: https://www.glyphed.com/ This looked rather strange, and maybe that was the appealing part of it, but its visualization made it easy for someone like me to spot the anomaly,  Of course, it may have also just been a very clear example for the sales pitch.

Steelcase may have done it again, creating a new collection, Flex collection - the wheel barrow approach strikes me as quite useful for maker spaces that need to be more flexible, and I was quite taken by their mobile whiteboard solution.


Techready.io: https://techready.io/ - a potential solution for ensuring that devices used by online students are ready for online courses, online exams, and online participation.  This may be too intrusive, but could help with better information when students need technical help and don't know enough about the devices they are using. 

Pronto - different messaging platform in Canvas: https://trypronto.com/ - not sure that it is a real improvement, but it was touted as working better on mobile devices.

Acadly - for attendance and student response systems - https://www.acadly.com/ - this system could make it easier and more reliable to take attendance in any size class.  The system also makes it easier to track attendance of individual students, identifying students at risk, and it incorporates some polling, quizzes, Q&A and other features for student engagement.

Nearpod - student response system on steroids - nearpod.com - I watched a bit more of a demo for this one, and it has some intriguing features:  a large library of 360 degree, high resolution photos of, for example, a hospital room, that students can explore on their own devices, 3D models that an be rotated and zoomed into; universal design for learning features making it easy to have text or audio available to students, and some other interesting student engagement features.  As the instructor, you can also choose if you want to run the presentation synchronously or have it set for student-paced, which makes this easier to use for a complete online course.

International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms

At this year's International Forum on Active Learning Classrooms in sunny Minneapolis/St. Paul, the focus of sessions was well balanced between how to accomplish certain administrative processes, implementations, technical issues and why we focus on active learning, evidenced through valuable research that shows the impact active learning has for student success.  The following captures some of my key takeaways from three full days of presentations, workshops, posters, and networking.

Christina Petersen from the University of Minnesota discussed different practices to discern if students in small groups are indeed learning, adding accountability and moments of reflection for individual students and groups. Here are some key strategies she used

• Noise level in class
• Instructor captures student contributions
• Provide specific and clear opportunities for individual students to check in with you
• Provide groups with a plan and elements that need to be covered to be successful in learning in group
• Ask for volunteers
• Call randomly on individuals (with random generator)
• Call on someone but give opportunity to check with table for 30 seconds before the cold call
• Cold call
• all groups participate by making choices (e.g., student response systems or simply paper)

Some of the issues with these are that random and cold calling can be problematic for introverts; however, research shows that cold calling does increase student voluntary participation - and student anxiety. Giving students extra time and allowing to check in with group members may help.

Wait until more hands are raised.

Tracey Birdwell from Indiana University showcased how they provide faculty with opportunities and ideas to come up with dream learning spaces

Derek Bruff from Vanderbilt, drawing on his new book Intentional Tech:  Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, led us into raising awareness what technology is the most important one - it was a draw between erasable surface and wheels, not too surprising in our group.  He asked us to think about story telling and thin slices of learning (Randy Bass) as ways for students to get more engaged with the materials, create knowledge and artifacts.  He reminded us that our task is to move novices towards expertise, which means we need to be agile teachers to make learning visible.  He also reminded us that volunteer responses from students always come from the same type of students, always about 5-8 students, no matter the class size.

Elizabeth Lugosi, Math faculty at University of Arizona, showed research indicating how active learning in her Math courses had increased the A and B grades and decreased failure rate by 13.4%.

I learned here about pressbooks for the first time, and I saw them again at Educause - more to be explored.  I had some great discussions around my own poster:

Colleagues from Florida International, Uma Swamy and Sonia Underwood, discussed how model building and simulations can make Chemistry more relevant and relatable for students.  Their tools include balloons and gum drops for physical manipulation of molecular structures, but also online simulations.  These models and simulations make it easier for more students to shift from a 2D model of thinking to a 3D model of thinking, vital to understanding chemical structures.

Julian Allen, Georgia State, discussed his research on exploring and overcoming instructor barriers to adopting active learning techniques.  He learned that while faculty think that their students are resistant, it is really more the faculty themselves and their leadership that brings resistance to the table, partially explained by the perception that a space needs to be designed for active learning.

My colleagues Taffye Benson-Clayton and David Crisostomo made our session on inclusion, diversity, equity, and academic development towards active learning a big success. Together, we asked session members to explore IDE through the lenses of the teacher, the administrator, and student success.  We saw quite a few aha moments, and we learned about using a word cloud app to make invisible diversity obvious to everyone in class.

Sarah Grace, University of Arizona, reported on her research that included classroom observations in active learning classrooms.  Her observation tool is somewhat different from others we have seen, and relies on five-minute- chunks. She learned that while more women do active learning, they shift back to lecture after about 20 minutes.  Having learning assistants is very important to keep going with active learning.  Active learning also happens more during 1st year classes (towards the end of the class) than 4th year classes.

Michelle Rossi and Kem Saichaie, UC Davis, shared four practical strategies from the science of learning for some workshop ideas.  Their handouts connect the theory from the science with the practical application (jigsaw) to give faculty the time to think about the science and how this may affect their classes. The four strategies are Retrieval Practice, Interleaving, Spaced Learning, and Explanatory Questioning or Elaborating Interrogation.  Most interesting to me was that Michelle had used this activity as an icebreaker in her lab with undergraduate students, and they used this language throughout the term, even into the student evaluations.

Finally, Sue Wick from U of Minnesota gave us some moments of reflection about the conference, what we learned, its history, and future challenges of student mental health.

Book: The Spark of Learning: Energizing the College Classroom with the Science of Emotion

Sarah Rose Cavanagh works through different dimensions of emotion and how they impact learning and therefore teaching and the classroom.  Her big takeaway is to involve our students emotionally in order for them to learn better and persist, stay motivated, and not give (too much) into negative emotions. She reminds us that emotion and cognition are intertwined and connected in our brains (not in separate regions as some folks believe), and that emotions are needed to make quick decisions (think back to Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow), so we as teachers need to be able to recognize student emotions, make sure we have tools to generate positive emotions and handle negative emotions.

If learning is paired with positive emotions, students will believe they are more successful - which may not lead to more learning but will lead to greater willingness to stay engaged with content and that should lead to more learning.  However, positive emotion does not equal entertainment.

The following are some quick notes about each of the chapters, with a couple of resources:  

1. The science and neuroscience of your emotions
   emotions guide our thinking and cannot be separated out from what we consider rational
2. The Wellspring:  emotions enhance learning
   emotions connected to how well we focus (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo)
   emotions maximize working memory potential and memory consolidation:  the more memorable the circumstance, the more likely you remember the content- surprise
   emotional contagion:  emotions can be contagious, affective crossover
   Why we hold hands tedtalk:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UMHUPPQ96c
3. Be the Spark. Craft your first and lasting impression:. Active and enthusiastic. Take care of yourself; be mindful and aware of yourself, emotionally authentic; humor relevant to course, confidence and optimism, inclusive pronouns - we learn together
   Flook article Mind brain and education 7(3) 182-95
4. Burning to Master:  make your content relevant, engaging, creating curiosity and confusion, pushing students carefully out of their content comfort zones
5. Fueling the Fire. Prolonging Student Persistence - give students some choices for their assignments as that kind of empowerment will give greater buy-in into their learning; goal setting are also important to foster growth mindset
6. Best-Laid plans. When emotions challenge or backfire. Negative emotions taking over because of anxiety, esp on tests and other high stakes assignment - clarity, transparency
   power struggle - students want to not do the work, so will challenge esp when authority is perceived as not that strong - be transparent, respectful, engaged.  Social loafing

Her conclusion highlights the key ideas (starting on page 212):

1. "Choosing activities, readings, and assignments that are interesting, self-relevant, emotionally evocative, and/or deeply relevant to the future careers of students may be the most powerful organizing principle you have as a teacher" (212). 
Where do you see this in the classes you teach?  Take a moment and identify three moments in your class where you are carefully building into the class these kinds of activities, readings, or assignments.  What do you find?

2. "Practicing full transparency will yield benefits in motivation, heighten student perception of your supportiveness and honesty, decrease student anxiety, and alleviate psychological reactance" (213).
Think back to a moment where your transparency helped your students relax into the content, learn better, and engage more fully with potentially adverse or difficult ideas and concepts.

3. "Teaching is a performance profession, so hone your performance:  transmit confidence, curiosity, optimism, and immediacy in your verbal and nonverbal performance" (213).
How do you practice performance?  Do you stand in front of the mirror for practice?  Do you mark in your lesson plan moments of performance?  Do you reflect on your course and identify moments of performance?

Book: How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching

Joshua Eyler's book starts with the idea that learning and teaching is what makes us human.  This book, organized by learning traits, is his reading and synthesis of current neuroscience and other research that has connections to teaching and learning - with some ideas about how this impacts how we teach and learn.  The terms he focuses on are curiosity, sociality, emotion, authenticity, and failure.

In Curiosity, he reminds us that from day 1 of our lives, we are curious about things - if something is different than we expect, we will spend more time on it; if we get something in detail explained to us, we spend less time exploring it (and thus learning less).  Novelty sparks curiosity but can also create stress and anxiety, counteracting any kind of learning. This means that for instruction, we need to find essential or mega questions to guide our students' learning - and we need to give them space and practice to develop their own questions.

One way to start sparking curiosity in class is to ask what do you notice, what do you wonder about.

Curiosity tends to be something an individual develops, but Sociality is the dimension that connects us with others.  Humans are one of a few species where large groups take care of the immature - being social is essential to us, in isolation we become sick.  Humans learn through imitation (here is where mirror neurons in our brain come into play), and communication is the next step in imitation.

One interesting point here is that the mother-infant language has been undervalued in its role of language development as women have not been seen as "evolutionary movers." But this understanding appears to be shifting.  Other social activities that humans learn through are play, story telling, and modeling.  Bandura's modeling theory and Vygotsky's zone of proximal development show why these ways of interacting create learning opportunities. 

For instructors this means that we need to create a positive learning environment, a sense of belonging and community in our classes for all of our students.  Modeling not only assignment but behavior is also important to move students from novice to expert in our fields - whether this is modeling how to conduct an experiment, modeling how to cite a paper, or modeling how to make a mistake and learn from it, all of these are essential to giving our students the chance to learn and grow in the higher education learning environment.

Eyler's next major concept is Emotion.  Emotion ties directly into us being part of a group (Sociality) and being curious (Curiosity), as positive emotion allows us to participate more fully and allow us to think more effectively.  While a negative emotion can be helpful to learning up to a certain point (consider the stress of a deadline that may help us focus, or, even more importantly, pushing ourselves out of our comfort zones to learn something new), too much negative emotion triggers fight or flight behavior and our survival instinct kicks in, essentially cutting off the blood flow to our brain.  Emotions are also connected to memories, and as we build on our existing learning based in memories, the more we can emotion connect to learning, the more memories are formed, the more connections are created and learning occurs.
None of this means that we as instructors need to be come entertainers to create a happy environment.  Instead, as Eyler suggests, it means that we show the relevance of the material to the students so that they see why they are learning content and skills - this in itself creates satisfaction and happiness, though joy may be a better word.  Showing our enthusiasm and passion for the subject area will also trigger joy in the students as we create a social system of learners, and finally, caring for our students to help them be successful will also create positive emotions.  Eyler quotes Nel Noddings, reminding us that "the student is infinitely more important than the subject matter."

Authenticity connects back into showing our enthusiasm and passion and making the material relevant to students.  Research shows that a lack of authenticity leads to short attention spans.  Long lectures do not tend to be authentic for the students, so the lose focus and do not learn.  Providing authentic learning experiences, instead, will give students the chance to practice, and learn from mistakes.  This leads to the final concept:

Failure - mistakes are essential for learning, but in a high stakes environment like the university, convincing students of this is difficult.  Giving them low-stakes opportunities for making mistakes and learning from them is key; faculty need to remember to be transparent about this process as students have a hard time differentiating between high and low stakes assignments.  This transparency can also include more of a discussion on how we learn - that we tend to jump to conclusions without reflection because of habits, that we need to remind ourselves to slow down and think, and that we learn best when our expectations are violated.

But this kind of productive failure also needs to be set in a positive learning environment.  If the basic needs of food, rest, hydration, and safety are not met, learning will not happen.  Giving students safe spaces to learn is essential -- for all students.  Giving students the support network to learn to just keep going and try one more time is also important - for all students.  Not giving students grades may be one way to create such an environment.  Giving students space to learn skills and content that we think they should already know but, for some circumstance, have not learned yet or did learn but are not recognizing as applying in our learning context is another strategy.

Conference: The Future of Public Higher Ed

Inside Higher Ed is known for its useful daily newsletter and its small events highlighting trends in higher education.  This year, they are moving into the longer conference arena, with their first conference focusing on The Future of Public Higher Ed.

Here are some of my takeaways from this very interesting conference.
Disclaimer - it is possible that all of this information is already well-known to everyone who is fully immersed into higher education politics - I am not always, so this collection of diverse sessions, focusing on affordability, funding, the diverse missions of public institutions of higher education, and their diverse range brought different ideas and discussion partners together in interesting ways (for me).

Nathan Grawe, and Economics professor from Carleton College, started us off by providing us with information about Demographic Destinies; How Population Shifts will Play out in Higher Ed.
His main points were that we are seeing a national migration from the Northeast and West to the SouthEast and South, an increase in immigration, a general decline in fertility, with the exception of the Hispanic demographics.  In particular, the economic recession of 2007 led to a sharp decline in the national birthrate, which translates to a dramatic drop in traditional (18-year-old) college enrollment in 2025.  As he put it, we are missing 5.7 mio babies.

In addition, just because some groups still have a solid birth rate, these are groups that are so far not targeted by many of our higher education institutions, with the major exception of the community colleges.  Another group that is growing are Asian Americans - this tends to be traditionally a group very interested in higher education, but this means that institutions need to think about how to shift their focus from what they may see as their traditional group of students.

And while his discussion very much focused on the traditional 18-22-year-old students, it begs the question how we can reach anyone else who needs to get a better education, especially in a world where an increasing number of jobs require at least a bachelor's degree or specialized skill sets that employers are now interested in providing.  Before too long, we will see the large tech companies moving into the education field, cutting out higher education potentially altogether, and they may have better success targeting those folks who were not able to stay in our more traditional settings.

Other discussions focused around the myth of tuition - that it is too high and people cannot afford it.  The discussion shifted from everyone can afford college if they can afford a new car to, yes, tuition is not too bad, but the additional costs of housing, food, fees, and other items make this again very difficult.  Berkley disclosed that 10% of its students are at some point homeless while enrolled, while up to one third suffer from food insecurity.  Everywhere, Black students' attendance rates are still dropping, in spite of all the efforts towards better retention, while St. Cloud State research shows that student belonging and boosting it through simple gestures of inclusion can make all the difference for a student at risk to stay.  The bottom line is that tuition is still problematic - it gets raised when the states cut their contributions, and states cut their contributions, when the federal government spends more money on, say, Pell grants - so an increase in Pell grants and support for students almost inevitably leads to higher tuition that outpaces any kind of well-meant support.  And at the same time, what the states are spending on higher ed now is more than what they spent in 1993 - because there are more students.  At the same time, the average income of a family has been shrinking.  Find yourself on this map and see what the average salary is in your area:  http://www.energyjustice.net/justice/index.php?gsLayer=income.  For Lee County, AL, just around Auburn, different regions range from $25,000 to $72,000 - just a couple of miles apart.

Does it then make sense to talk about tuition-free education or debt-forgiveness?  A couple of discussions focused on these options as touted by current presidential candidates, with the answer that this is not a simple discussion.  The philosophical point, made by Christopher Newfield,  is based on the idea that a university education is for the public good.  If I receive a degree, it is not solely for my private business gain, but it is for the larger community - whether this is based in the economics of taxes or in the politics of social justice, either way a degree is more than to benefit the individual.  Only when the country understands this, will free education make more sense.  While some European countries have been able to do this, they pay for this through higher taxes, they use higher education not as a general way of shifting adults to a new chapter in their lives, and they most certainly do not assume that everyone needs to have a college degree to be successful.  In the United States, this appears less and less of an option, and one should counter the argument that not everyone needs a college degree with the question of - so your children are not getting one?  Tennessee is of course one of the examples where the offer of free education (Tennessee promise, for the first two years of community college) appears to work - but only because Governor Bill Haslam also spent a lot of time and effort getting businesses to come to Tennessee.

And if institutions cannot keep going by finding new markets (international students, dual enrollment, returning students) and cannot stay competitive with offering shorter degree options that focus on certificates for a limited but valuable set of skills/knowledge, then closing down institutions or consolidating them appears the next logical step.  Here, voices were loud and clear that closing of higher education institutions in poor areas (rural, some urban) can mean the death of the community.  But this may also be a sentimental cry for the good old times.  If your students at the community college do not have jobs to move into with their new degrees, it begs the question what the function of the community college in that community truly is.

Online learning can be seen as an easy solution for some of these issues, but they also compound other problems - online learning can push smaller programs more easily out of business; online learning, though touted as a way to save money, does not equate with lower tuition; online learning, unfortunately, while academically is equal to face-to-face learning, for many folks the personal connection, the social learning is necessary to succeed - and this is very difficult to achieve well, consistently, in the online space.

A couple of speakers reminded us of the role of faculty and that it also needs to be shaken up and reconsidered. I really liked the idea of the University of Georgia's bus tour of the state for new faculty members, exposing them to the diverse regions, people, concepts and issues that define the state, and giving them an opportunity to connect with the people of the state and recognizing for whom they are working.  Listening to Freeman Hrabowski and his call for giving all students a better education was inspiring.  If you have not encountered him in person, take a moment to listen to him here:

He reminded us that the more prestigious the institution, the more AP classes, the higher the SAT score, the more likely it is the students drop out, no matter the demographics.  That is painful!  And he reminded us of the importance of asking good questions.

Finally, we were reminded that higher ed needs to do a better job evaluating what it does.  The new government scorecard should help with this (with a new FAFSA), and a better focus on outcomes - though it is unclear what the word meant in this discussion.

For a different perspective of the conference, please see https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/%E2%80%9Cfuture-higher-ed%E2%80%9D-day-one-bluntness-unto-truth

and https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/ideas-search-theory-day-two-future-higher-ed-conference

and https://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/confessions-community-college-dean/%E2%80%9Cfuture-higher-ed%E2%80%9D-day-three-vouchers-vouchers-vouchers with a much better discussion of the financial challenges than I can put into words.

Let me finish with a final Baltimore impression:  Edgar Allan Poe's touristy grave stone, not to be confused with the original, less glamorous one:

Book: Small Teaching

The biggest take-away from James Lang's Small Teaching is that we can all start today making small changes to our teaching.  Potentially even more importantly, we all become more aware of why some of the things we have been doing in our teaching for a long time are work - so that we can be more intentional about our teaching strategies, making our student learning more effective.

The book is an easy read - a good mix of research, examples, and tips, with a language that is aware of an audience not steeped in social science terminology.  I encourage you to read through it, dip into this book and find a couple of ideas that you want to try.

Here some of the key points (according to me):
1. Students need to learn content so that, down the line, they can become experts who can think critically and creatively.  Learning content is hard, especially when the standard learning methods are based on ways that we know do not work - studying by rereading notes, underlining the textbook, and cramming before a test.  We need to guide our students to learn differently by giving the opportunities to practice retrieval of data.  This can be done in small ways at the beginning of class through questions to remind them what happened before, by connecting learned knowledge to a question geared towards the new content, and by asking them to reflect at the end of class.
Interleaving learning by not only block learning new content but interleaving old learning as review will build stronger neural connections and make it easier for students to build the new knowledge into their existing system.
Predicting how something new will work out and fit into existing knowledge not only adds to this building of pathways but it also triggers emotional responses (competition) that will make for deeper learning.
2. Students need to understand and apply content, so that they can transfer their learned knowledge to new situations.  This means we need to give them opportunities to practice, and while we tend to do this through assignments, we need to remember that we ask them not only to show off their learned knowledge but also other skill sets.  So, if we ask them to write a lab report, we need to break down the assignment not only into its content components for practice but also into its skill components - how do I observer, how do I write a lab report and give those moments of practice.
3. Students need to be inspired to learn - again, emotion is important, and if we can show them through our passion why what they are learning is important, they will find the content easier to digest.  Add to this compassion when needed . Passion and compassion do not translate into entertainment,  However, good stories are memorable, which will, again, make learning easier.
4.  Students are stuck in study habits that are unproductive - we need to force them to change, we need to be transparent what we do in class and show them how they are learning better when they follow our guidance.

I encourage you to read this book - and then see what you are already doing and be more intentional about your teaching!

Book: Make Just One Change: Teach Students to Ask their Own Questions, Rothstein

I gave a brief review of this book on Goodreads but am finding the need to dig a little deeper into it.

The method Rothstein explains is straightforward and strikes me as very valuable - a process to teach students to develop better questions, reflect on them and thus lead to more connection with the material, higher level of engagement, and deeper learning.
While all of the examples come out of the K-12 environment, especially High and Junior High, I think that the process can also be helpful in college level classes as it goes beyond the concept of brainstorm to moments of reflection not only about the content of the questions but also about the type and nature of the questions.  The process is called Question Formulation Technique, or QFT, and is trademarked.  For online resources, please check out the Right Question Institute.

You may ask why it is important for students to be able to ask not only questions but good questions - it empowers, it educates through curiosity, and gives you a pathway to expertise.  Think of your own empowerment (or lack thereof) when you are in a space where you are not the expert.  This may be a medical office, a legal office, working with an electrician or car mechanic.  If you have not learned to ask questions, you will not ask any and thus have to rely on these experts to do their jobs.  When you are able to ask questions, you still rely on them to do their job, but through your questions you may give them insight and information that will allow them to do an even better job.  The authors call this "microdemocracy."

In the classroom, we know that right now it is the instructor who is asking all the questions.  Students are often not encouraged to ask questions.  When students ask questions about a subject, they become emotionally connected to the subject and will learn it better.  They will also practice their curiosity.

We practice through this three fundamentally important thinking abilities: divergent thinking, convergent thinking, and metacognition.  Think of these as 1. divergent thinking: The ability to generate a wide range of ideas and think broadly and creatively; 2. convergent thinking: The ability to analyze and synthesize information and ideas while moving toward an answer or conclusion; and 3.  Metacognition: The ability to think about one’s own thinking and learning


So, how does QFT work?
In a nutshell, here is what this process looks like:
The instructor provides a Question Focus - this is a statement that is short, often challenging
For a set amount of time, in small groups, with one person as the scribe, students come up with their questions, following these rules:

1. Ask as many questions as you can. 
2. Do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions.
3. Write down every question exactly as it was stated.
4. Change any statements into questions.

This allows for the following - students practice asking questions, all questions are accepted, so marginalized voices are accepted at the same level as dominant voices (because questions are not edited or judged).

Once the time is up, students work through the process of categorizing their questions in to open-ended and closed-ended questions and potentially change some of their questions into a different category.

Finally, students prioritize their questions based on what the focus of their project is - what are the most important questions for my project, most interesting for my paper, most difficult, easiest, etc.

What happens here is the necessary reflection to let students think about the kinds of questions they have gathered, and while they do this they are also reflecting on their own thinking and learning.

The book outlines techniques on how to guide students the first few times through this process of learning how to follow the rules, how to categorize and manipulate questions, and how to prioritize - but I am not going to go into these details as you then no longer need to read the book.

I urge you to think about how you can use this process in your own teaching and am looking forward to more discussions.

Book: The New Education - How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux

I expect that many of you have already read Cathy Davidson's The New Education:  How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux.  If not, please consider reading it if you are at all interested in what the future for higher education may look like.  

The following are some of her ideas, so this is not a summary but highlights for me.  If you prefer, instead, to listen to some of her thoughts, please listen to this FutureofEducation talk, moderated by Bryan Alexander.

I very much appreciated her historical approach, starting her new education by reviewing Charles Eliot's New Education from 1869, where he envisions a new system of higher education that is not grounded in medieval elitism but in the recognition that more people need to have access to more education in order to find jobs in a world influenced by the industrial revolution.  And even though he was president of Harvard at this time, his realization came out of a very personal situation when he realized that he was not making enough money to survive while his independent wealth had disappeared in a recent economic crash.

Eliot's vision of engineers and managers makes sense during his time, and developing standardized testing also makes sense - what did not make sense was the standardized classroom design of bolted seats, and the industrialization of education.  And today it makes even less sense to think about education, including higher education, as a pipeline into factories and to conveyor belts, and as a way to keep still many people away from access to this knowledge and these skills, while focusing on time management and people control rather than creativity.

Davidson provides provocative questions about higher education issues and interesting examples of institutions that grapple with these issues and are developing innovative solutions.  Whether these are discussions about technology (is it a bane or the ultimate solution?), about funding (who should pay for what and why?), about what kinds of skills, literacies and sets of knowledge should be taught (STEM, STEAM, SHTEAM?), about the labor state of academics (tenure vs. adjunct), all of them have supportive data that is often shocking, sometimes disturbing, but, when it comes to the examples, inspiring.

Many of her examples focus on initiatives that grow students through student-centered learning in cross-disciplinary, project-based learning that reaches into communities and connects to real-life problems and issues.  As she says, "The new twenty-first century education makes the academic periphery the core, emphasizing not requirements to be checked off on the way to a major and a degree (the Eliot legacy) but an intellectual toolkit of ideas and tactics that are as interactive and dexterous as ur post-Internet world demands."

One of her points is that community colleges are much better at connecting students to relevant content and more authentic learning experiences because that is their mission - research-focused universities, on the other hand, are not and cannot be interested in this kind of learning-centered mission because their funding is tied to research grants to a larger degree, and faculty time and energy is focused on these precious dollars.  This becomes especially important in Southern states where state government has pulled funding for higher education at a considerably higher rate than in other parts of the US.

Some of the names associated with her examples are John Mogulescu in the CUNY system, Derek Bruff, Andrea Lunsford and her research on writing, Seymour Papert, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Tetsuya Ishida, Sha Xin Wei, Randall Bass, Patrick Awuah

One remaining thought from one of the folks discussed in the book - this country does not have a higher education or an education crisis, it has a national crisis - because if your education system is in shambles, you do not have the people power to innovate, create, and grow themselves and their society.  

The exclusive focus on STEM that does not include creativity does ignore the scientific method which "is grounded in curiosity, testing, iterating, synthesizing, analyzing, problem solving, inventing. And stem needs humanities and social sciences".  This, not surprisingly, leads to a high percentage of students dropping out of STEM fields while in college, and after graduation, 74% of people with STEM degrees do not stay in these fields.

The book has some great ideas that are worth exploring - maybe you find something that gives you the creative push to try something different in your classroom or in your own learning.

Accessible Icon Project

Book: Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Joseph E. Aoun, President of Northeastern University, is calling on higher education to adapt to the times and change its teaching and learning models rapidly to ensure that students learn not only the traditional content but learn how to learn and how to be creative to allow for their success in a world that is more and more shaped by robots, computers, and ever-improving artificial intelligence (AI).

He is delineating 3 literacies and 4 cognitive capacities that, combined, allow for students to become creative life-long learners in a world with the potential to give humans the possibility to create solutions for new problems, invent new products, and improve life for everyone.  This subject to teach he calls humanics.

The literacies and cognitive capacities are
1. technological literacy:  knowledge of mathematics, coding and basic engineering principles,
2. data literacy:  data analysis with an emphasis on the context,
3. human literacy:  knowledge and skills of interacting successfully with other, diverse people
and
1. critical thinking:  "analyzing ideas skillfully and then applying them fruitfully" (62),
2. systems thinking:  connecting different sets of thoughts, systems in (unexpected and creative) ways,
3. entrepreneurship:  the "means for people to distinguish themselves in the digital workplace" (66),
4. cultural agility:  "the mega-competency that enables professionals to perform successfully in cross-cultural situations" (70).

Higher education needs to give students the opportunity to learn and practice these 7 facets, including the practice of learning through mistakes and failure in a relatively safe environment.  Active learning in its various appearances will help provide students with some of these experiences, including study abroad and internships/co-op positions.

Higher education needs to provide students with new ways of learning, moving away from the one path to one degree and create opportunities for quick immersions (bootcamps), personalized learning (online), and a more customized slate of learning experiences leading to a degree and various credentials.

Higher education needs to realize more effectively that it does, as a whole, spend its resources and people power on teaching, not on research. Some of his numbers show that of the ca 1.5 million college and university employees in the US who work in instruction, research, or public service - so not administration and support - 1.2 million are primarily instructors. 270,000 balance research with teaching, and 65,000 do research only. The numbers of pure instructional staff are growing (131). 

Some of the challenges to overcome are
1. robotics and AI are replacing humans in repetitious and time-consuming positions. This means that the concept of working your way from the bottom up in, say, a law firm, may no longer be the case as these boring entry-level positions are no longer needed.  How, then, will we gather the necessary experience?  Co-Op opportunities seem one opportunity, but can we really make this possible for all students in meaningful ways?
2. How can we guarantee such a meaningful education for the 21st century for every single person on earth?  And if that is not the goal, how are we going to provide for the potentially millions, if not billions of people who cannot participate in this system?

I think the book raises interesting questions that need to be brought into the discussion of where higher education is going - I am wondering if it needs to be applied to all of education to ensure that all human beings can benefit from these ideas.