Teachers: Can't predict 'em, can't live without 'em

Malcolm Gladwell (Mr. Tipping Point) in the December 15, 2008 New Yorker, says, "Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession has to be more rigorous in how it evaluates young teachers…"

Gladwell draws comparisons to the recruitment and training of pro quarterbacks and financial advisers, and points to this kind of research about teachers: "A group of researchers—Thomas J. Kane, an economist at Harvard’s school of education; Douglas Staiger, an economist at Dartmouth; and Robert Gordon, a policy analyst at the Center for American Progress—have investigated whether it helps to have a teacher who has earned a teaching certification or a master’s degree. Both are expensive, time-consuming credentials that almost every district expects teachers to acquire; neither makes a difference in the classroom."

Compelling challenge. Of course, it's an idea that would only apply to K-12 teachers. Right?

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AAC&U Meeting in Minneapolis October, 2009

How's this for exciting? The Association of American Colleges and Universities is holding a national meeting on ethics and civic engagement here in town next fall. Call for proposals open through January 30, 2009. Let's make sure our public colleges and universities are well represented!

Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments

Network for Academic Renewal Conference

October 1-3, 2009

Minneapolis, Minnesota

About the Conference

Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments will bring together faculty, student affairs personnel, academic administrators, students, and others to explore how to move education for personal and social responsibility to the center
of institutional culture and academic practice. The program will feature promising practices that develop students’ civic engagement and social responsibility in both a local and global context; personal and academic integrity; ability to examine and understand differing (and often competing) perspectives; and ethical and moral reasoning.

The central premise of the conference is that personal integrity and ethics cannot be developed in isolation from a commitment to and engagement with others, and that students’ ethical, civic, and moral development must be addressed as part of their basic responsibilities as learners.

Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility | Conference Overview

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Face to Face with History

On a day that brings news from our neighboring state of new public swastikas at the University of North Dakota, here's also news of real possibility, of teaching for peace, not hate.

Bernard Reuter, director of St. Cloud State University's Center for Holocaust and Genocide Education, is leading a tour of 200+ students from the St. Cloud area to Germany and France, where they will study directly the effects of the Nazi holocaust on the area of Alsace-Lorraine. They will also take part in performing a choral work (by Stephen Paulus and commissioned by Fr. Michael O'Connell when he was pastor at Minneapolis's Basilica of St. Mary), "To Be Certain of the Dawn."

One of the things that makes this trip so resonant, and so hopeful, is that St. Cloud State University is the institution most known in the news of the last few years for swastika graffiti and other evidence of anti-Semitic hate. I look forward to learning about the impact of this visit on these students and the faculty who accompany them. And I wish them all a wonderful trip, full of learning and deeply human interaction.

January Thaw

We're warming up here at CTL. Hope you are, too.

Science Teaching Matters

An article in today's New York Times compares the sense of science education crisis in the post-Sputnik era and now.

It's a good general-interest update piece that pulls together a lot of the key current issues:

• We need more and better science teachers in high-school classrooms (coincidentally, that's a current MnSCU initiative: More and Better STEM Teachers).
• Teaching methods in science need broadscale improvement: too many memorization-based approaches, not enough conceptual and hands-on work.
• The sequence of science education: it presents the arguments of the "physics first" scientists, who say that what made sense in the 19th century (biology, chemistry, then physics) is upside down, and based on the idea that biology is a "descriptive" science. (The American Association of Physics Teachers articulates this approach at http://www.aapt.org/Policy/physicsfirst.cfm).
  
• A lot of disagreement about what the problems are.

The piece got me sifting through the dregs of my own files on STEM. Almost a decade ago, in 1999, Gibbs and Fox wrote an article in Scientific American, "The False Crisis in Science Education," that summed up the then-current sense of angst, and argued that there were really two problems underlying the "crisis:"
1. General science education in elementary and postsecondary schools isn't focused on science that is useful to most people in their adult lives, and
2. There are plenty of college students prepared and willing to take on advanced science education, but they get weeded out in gatekeeper introductory courses. The shortage is thus "controlled by universities, not by secondary schools."

As the NYT article notes, the "current" crisis has been roiling since at least 1983 and "A Nation at Risk." It will probably continue on bubbling until we can agree on what the problems really are.

Moodlin'

One of our summertime CTL colleagues, Yolanda Williams, shared with us today this List of Top 100 Tools for Learning from the UK Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies. It's a pretty good checklist of current instructional technologies. (Yolanda's note, though, pointed up an item in the Chronicle that took issue with the relative absence of library databases.)

In checking out the list, a couple things jumped out for me:

1. Our own (Lake Superior College's) Barry Dahl is one of the contributors to the Top 10/Top 100 list.
2. There's only one course management system on the list, and that's the open source Moodle. When I attended the TAOSE group's discussion on open-source IMS a couple weeks ago, a majority of the colleges and universities represented (outside of our system) were either adopting or experimenting with Moodle. Take a look at it; it's grown into a really flexible IMS.

As an adherent of social- or sociocognitive learning theory and fan of non-commercial, user-modifiable open source software, I'm fascinated by moodle, which was developed to serve both ends. It was initially developed by Martin Dougiamas, who articulates on the Moodle home page his own and Moodle's (imagine!) pedagogical philosophy.

The Minority Experience

This month's issue of About Campus explores a number of issues related to students' racial, social class, and cultural diversity.

It closes with an article by Craig Bennett of the University of Cincinnati. He teaches a course called "Strength Through Cultural Diversity," in which he gives students the assignment to "actively participate in a cultural event in which they can experience minority status." While the assignment requires involvement in just a single event, Bennett recounts the anxiety, panic, and resistance of his students. They are mostly white, and have grown up in white neighborhoods and schools.

They are often creative about finding new experiences: attending a gay nightclub, using a wheelchair at a shopping mall, or attending unfamiliar religious rituals. "However," says Bennett, "the experience that typically generates the most awareness and challenge is white students attending an African American church."

Besides resulting in good discussion and new awareness, the experiences end up with students reporting new more welcoming behavior, improved understandings--and giving highly positive end-of-course evaluations.

So now the question is: in what courses and disciplines--beyond the "diversity course" might this be a useful assignment? And, like Bennett, I'll ask you the starter question: "Who can share an experience in which you were the only person representing your race in a room?"