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.

Book: The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World

I finally managed to finish Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen's  The Distracted Mind:  Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, MIT Press, 2016.  Not too surprisingly, reading this at work was not at all effective because of the constant disruptions that pulled me away from the focus of this book.

This book focuses on how our brains, still ancient in how they are able to set goals and how they are easily distracted to sense potential danger, are struggling with today's overload through social media, non-stop connection to information through smartphones, and the need to satisfy our "information foraging." Their hypothesis is: "We engage in interference-inducing behaviors because, from an evolutionary perspective, we are merely acting in an optimal manner to satisfy our innate drive to seek information.  Critically, the current conditions of our modern, high-tech world perpetuate this behavior by offering us greater accessibility to feed this instinctive drive and also via their influence on internal factors such as boredom and anxiety" (13).

When set goals to achieve anything, the danger to lose focus and, in the long run, either take much longer to achieve our goals or not achieve them at all, is brought on by the novelty of external influences that are coming in on social media and smartphones.  Humans have always had this challenge, but with the world at their fingertips, the challenge has increased, to the point where we have great difficulties not having our phones with us.  Some mind-boggling (and maybe self-reflective) data:
Smartphone users check their smartphones

• on an average of 27 times a day, ranging from 14-150 times per day depending on the study, the population, and the number of years someone has had a smartphone,
• when they have time to kill (42%),
• while driving (55%),
• in a movie theater (35%),
• on a dinner date (33%)
• during school performances (32% of parents),
• during church (19%),
• during a shower (12%)
• during sex (9%)

Smartphone users (75%) have their phones within 5 feet of them at all times, with 75% of the younger users sleeping with their phone next to their bed, on vibrate or ring, waking up at night to check.  80% reach for their phones within 15 minutes of waking up; 62% reach for their phones as the first thing after waking up.

This leads to lots of screen time right before bed, which disrupts sleep patterns and leads to increased anxiety (108-9).

Add to this the constant mental stress of multi-tasking and task-switching, and it is no wonder that people do not accomplish as much as we are hoping for as they have the constant challenge of work interruptions (you need to reply to that email right now) or social media interruptions (so much more fun and gratifying).  FOMO (Fear of Missing out) and simple boredom also increase our social media usage.

For education, research has shown that students with lower GPAs tend to spend more time on Facebook, tend to do a lot more task-switching, spend more time on media during the day, and lack study strategies.  I learned about the game cellphone stack, that apparently is played at dinners where the person who first needs to look at their phone will pick up the tab. Maybe this can be used for teaching as well.

The authors do not leave us completely hanging with these depressing numbers but provide a couple of chapters with suggestions on how to cope with this need to forage for information.  We can change our brains or change our behaviors.

What are methods to change our brains?  Consider meditation, cognitive exercises, video games, nature walks, certain drugs and physical exercise - all these, in some ways, allow us to focus on goals more effectively.  

What are methods to change our behavior? Focus on getting a good night's sleep by limiting screen exposure in the late evening.  Here is a list of questions to reflect on that may help with changing behavior:

• "How might I increase my metacognitive view of how my own mind performs in a given situation, and in what ways are my actions not in line with how I should behave based on my goals and an understanding of my limitations?
• How might I change my physical environment to reduce accessibility of potential distractors?
• How might I assess whether I am self-interrupting because of boredom, and how might I make the task more interesting to stave off that boredom?
• How might I recognize when my actions are driven by anxiety about missing out on something in my virtual world, and what steps can I take to reduce that anxiety?" (238

Thoughts and Impressions from POD 2018

POD is the conference for the pod network community of professionals working in areas that focus on academic or educational development in higher education.  This year's conference was in Portland, Oregon, which right there was a real treat.  Add to this the opportunity to spend almost a whole week with over 1,000 folks who are passionate, enthusiastic, and creative about working with faculty to improve student learning - what is not to like?  Here are some impressions from my first time attending this conference.

One of the great opportunities of this conference is to see and talk to all the folks who are well-known in this field, with the additional bonus that they are all very interested in sharing their ideas (including tangible takeaways like handouts, web sites, online tools) and hearing what your ideas are.  The conference started with workshops and moved into 4 days of sessions, with some carefully scheduled opportunities to step away from the more formal sessions and network with colleagues by exploring different aspects of the city - you could run in the morning, do some yoga, explore the food or museum scene, and even do some karaoke.

The sessions were focused on Leading in Times of Change, which is so broad that many ideas can fall under it. I focused primarily on sessions that addressed inclusion, diversity and equity topics and of course learning spaces. I found it interesting that not many sessions had any kind of technology angle, and that, instead, were sharing strategies and techniques. 

One of the highlights for me was José Bowen's keynote, and even though I had seen and heard some of his speech before, the content had been changed enough, with other kind of data, that it was again very engaging.  He certainly knows how to use the novelty and wow effect of data to engage with his audience.  Key takeaways from his talk that higher education needs to focus more on process than content and that the curriculum should be seen as a tool box giving our students an assortment of tools to solve problems, be creative, and think and evaluate critically the world around them and their lives. He reminded us that we need to start where the students are (not where we hope they are) and that testing needs to be carefully designed so that it is not anxiety-producing but getting to the results we want - students showing to us and themselves that they have mastered a skill or knowledge set successfully.

In a different session, I was introduced to a new idea for practicing critical thinking which is authentic, geared primarily towards graduate students.  The retraction watch,

https://retractionwatch.com, is a site that lists any research that is being retracted for small or more serious reasons.  Having students analyze such an item to see what the problem is with reflection on how they can improve their own research can be helpful.  Another resource are various preprint servers for different disciplines, where one can access manuscripts not officially published yet, to provide a kind critical review to the authors:

http://crosstalk.cell.com/blog/lets-talk-about-preprint-servers is one such preprint server.

Oh, and did I mention food trucks

and Powell's and Voodoo Doughnuts?

Ideas from Edspaces 2018

Here are my takeaways from the various sessions I attended at Edspaces.

This is a very different audience - not only are the professionals primarily architects, interior designers, and of course the sales people of the various furnishing companies, but almost all of the folks representing educational institutions are from the K-12 environment, and most of them are not necessarily faculty but people involved on the state or local level with designing schools.  As a result, the presentations appear to be focusing on ideas that folks in the instructional design and instructional technology communities have been talking about for a number of years - for example, having folks talking about what a flipped classroom is seems somewhat strange to me, having folks talk about how online learning is a new trend that should be seen as disruptive innovation is also interesting - just reminding me how slowly ideas work through different segments of the work force.

On the other hand, seeing some of the examples of what K-12 schools look like and, more importantly, what they are doing, is just amazing.  For example, one of the sessions on maker spaces gave the examples of multiple schools where the school culture has been profoundly impacted by introducing a maker space into an area that is publicly available.  (Reminder - a maker space is not just a space with tools, either physical or digital, but a space with these tools that gives students space to explore ideas with the specific purpose of solving a problem that they perceive by building/creating a solution and testing it).  One school where a maker space has allowed for a change in school culture, improving student attendance, retention, and graduation rates is Tilden High School in Chicago. Of course it is the people who make this happen, but the space makes it much easier.

Maker spaces are also described a space where you can learn to take risks - and risk taking was claimed as a core skill just like communication, leadership, and collaboration.

Showing another example of schools can be different, Chris Lehmann, founder of the Science Leadership Academy, a high school focused on letting students learn, challenged us to change our language so that we no longer say that we are teaching a subject but that we are teaching students a subject.  Adding the word students shifts the focus away from the content to the people - as it should be.  As the content can change rather quickly anyway, focusing on students is the only way to go (one person stated that every 73 days, medical education changes).
Part of this teaching the students is that we need to give students the space to learn - and that means the space to make mistakes and truly learn from them.  We take it for granted that athletes and musicians take years of practice before being good, if not even great at their skills.  For some reason, we set a different standard when it comes to other subject matters.

We also need to make sure that the environment allows for empathy and caring - change is scary, and it becomes even scarier when you do not have a safe space at home.  Caring is essential, but caring does not mean that I do things for and to you (that is control and management); caring means that I do things with you and by you.

And so our schools need to reflect the caring and the focus on student learning - and this means that we need to move away from learning spaces that are designed as prisons and as crowd control, and need to move across the board towards spaces that encourage curiosity, exploration, social justice, civic engagement, and innovation - for all, not for the school districts with a high socio-economic background

And finally a little fun - we did a rapid prototyping process in one of the sessions to come up with a learning spaces design, using, among other things, playdough.

Discoveries at Edspaces

This week, I am discovering new furnishings and other ideas at Edspaces in Tampa - while this conference very much focuses on K-12, there are some sessions covering higher education, and of course it is always great to see what K-12 is doing, to see what we in higher education need to expect from our students when they come to our campuses.  It is quite clear that the discrepancies continue to grow, and that the schools that are able to renovate/build new and change the way they are teaching are sending students to university who have a very different idea on how learning should happen.

While the sessions of the conference are interesting, I will focus more on ideas and products I am encountering.  Here are some ideas for starters.

 How about a storage cabinet where the sides can be used for writing?   Smith System, now part of the Steelcase empire, has some interesting solutions, and other companies, like Gratnells, are also quite fun.  I also found a couple of other erasable writing surfaces that may be worth exploring, for example Polyvision's ceramic steel, which can look and behave like a chalk board, comes in different colors and claims to be easier on the eyes than glass and more durable.

Or a rocking chair that is very low to the ground? Quite comfortable, though it took me a moment to get out of it. This one is built by Virco.

 And here is an example of games that can be played with your feet, by RichTech Display.

 Think about what kind of collaborative spaces you can build out of these shapes - and apparently they are virtually indestructible.  One version of this is the one shown by Fomcore.

this kind of chair can be taken anywhere and will potentially improve your posture.  HowdaDesignz won an award for this concept.  Yes, I tried this one as well.  

 And yes, this is a grassy knoll for creating green spaces inside, by NorvaNivel.

 This lab table has magnets so that the stools can be attached for storage.  Notice the additional storage behind the stools.

a maker space on wheels,

 height adjustable learning stations,  and what would be cool if this could be combined with something like the FootFidget for folks to stand during lecture and be able to move just a little

 wobbly stools to keep you moving,

and storage desks with velcro sides to add flexible sides - this is part of their STEM Starter cart - NorvaNivel also has velcro blocks to create privacy barriers for testing