Thinking about thinking about thinking.

That's right, I'm thinking about metacognition this week.  After an interesting discussion at the AAC&U annual meeting on the more general use of student reflection on their own learning (such as in general education programs), I've been inspired to experiment with metacognition in the classroom.

This week, I'll try different ways of getting students to think about their logical learning and thinking.  Today, I asked them to answer two questions during a short in-class writing period:  what they've learned so far in class that has been useful outside of class (in other classes or, gasp, even in "real" life), and what has been difficult for them to learn or understand so far.  On Wednesday, I'll offer students the option to revise some answers on their first exam.  The scores were fine, as a whole, but the process of revision should solidify their understand of concepts they may have misunderstood.  I'm requiring that they not only fix answers, but that they explain why they thought they missed them and what they know now that they didn't on exam day.  They'll be thinking about their thinking, that way, which should further solidify their knowledge of Logic.

GMC's teaching center just happened to have a newsletter on metacognition last semester.

American Association of Colleges and Universities annual meeting

Naked Teaching is on the road (fully clothed--you know that's just a metaphor, right?)!  I (Heather) am at the AAC&U annual meeting on general education assessment.  Did you just go to sleep?  I didn't, because if you take out the assessment bit, which CAN be a little boring, this organization is ALL about liberal arts and general education.  People here are talking about making Shakespeare relevant to today's students!  They like values education!  They see general education as a public good!  Leslie Wong, president of San Francisco State, just said that the most important thing we can teach our students is to "own their own minds."  Yes.

Wong also talked about the changing "face" (i.e., demographics) of students in the next 30 years or so, and the importance of making general education culturally relevant.  This should make us think.  At GMC, we're pretty good at making gen ed (our beloved Environmental Liberal Arts) fairly relevant to the problems of our time, such as climate change, but culturally relevant?  We can work on this.  I heard this morning that there are only 12 or so people left who can speak the Omaha (Native American) language fluently, for example, and I was reminded of Paul Hawking's idea in Blessed Unrest that preserving indigenous cultures, especially their languages, was essential to "the movement" that is needed to mitigate climate change and other ecological disasters.  It's all connected.

Lots of people are live-tweeting the conference, including my alter Twitter ego, @JaybirdVT.  Just search #AACUGenEd15.

Getting Naked

When I began teaching at the tender age of 23, just five years older than my freshman writing students, my teaching was indeed naked--the first day that I walked into a classroom, attempting to project confidence in spite of my shaking hands and quaking voice, I felt stripped to the bone. I had to hold onto the podium for dear life with my shaky, sweaty palms threatening to jettison me out of orbit at any moment. Sure, I had my ice breakers ready to go, the sonorous reading of the syllabus planned, and the prompt for the writing sample ("What are five things you want me to know about you as a student? Discuss") in hand. Yet I was absolutely terrified that I wouldn't know enough to convince my students that I was indeed justified in representing myself as a a teacher, since I was still a student myself.  Now, twenty years later, perhaps 200 classes later, I still feel like a student. And while that sometimes still frightens me, I have learned how to sit a little more with the fear.  I will not know everything about a text I teach for the first time, nor be an expert on a course that I prepare for the first time.  For that matter, I will not know everything about texts I have taught a hundred times--quite often, in fact, I reread the texts I teach, and glean novel insights upon those re-readings. In teaching my students, I try to be as "naked" as possible in the sense that I am upfront about ideas that perplex me and what I may still wonder about the text.  In sitting with the fear that my students might find out that I don't know everything, I embrace that wonder, and the more I practice the better I get.

In my history of the English language course, my students and I use the OED and study word etymologies.  This is a source of constant surprise, and indeed wonder, as we connect root words to the branches of various languages that multiply and magnify meaning in a marvelous way.  Indeed, the word "wonder" in its verb form, was an Old English word: "wundrian."  Endemic to our language, it becomes a metaphor for what the experience of teaching offers: to admire, to magnify, to be struck with astonishment, to marvel.  When it is working, many teachers would say that these are some of the best moments: when we are struck, astonished, provoked to admiration, or overcome by a sense of the marvelous. More of that, please!

Confessions of a lecturer

I was thwarted by classroom design today.  When I arrived, rather than the little group pods I had made out of tables, my classroom was arranged in straight rows facing the projector screen.  As students started arriving, they asked whether I wanted them to move tables.  In the spirit of democratic pedagogy, I said "I don't know, what do YOU want to do today?"  Someone expressed an interest in trying out rows, and others quickly agreed.  So, we left the classroom in lecture mode.

It's like something clicked in my brain.  I was in front of rows of students.  I had no choice but to talk at them.  They played their parts well, too, by waiting to be called on and looking confused when I finally, late in the class period, asked them to arrange themselves in little groups within their rows.

Lecturing isn't all bad.  Though I felt some guilt about so easily giving up on my flipped classroom experiment, I was also sure that they were exposed to the important material of the day, and I invited a lot of response during the lecture part of class.  Since class was particularly small today (13 out of 22 students!  I imagine the flu and a beautiful day at the Mountain were responsible for that.), it was easy for me to interact with students and to be sure that they were at least somewhat active in class.

I did leave some time for reflection with a very short assignment I've never tried in Logic.  Rather than have students reflect on mistakes in other people's reasoning (it's so easy!), I had them write a few sentences about their own reasoning and fallacies they know they should watch in their speaking and writing.  I'm going to follow up on this, since it's perhaps the most important thing students can learn in Logic--the power of clear, correct, and responsible communication.

Next time, it's back to the pods.

Flip it. Flip it good.

As I mentioned, my focus this week is on creating some outside of class resources for students so that we can spend time workshopping exercises and discussing Logic in class, while still covering a lot of necessary ground.  I'm using some ideas from the "flipped" classroom approach--asking students to do some of the work outside of class (in addition to reading their text), leaving room for more active work inside of class.  That means very little lecture on my part.

Here's what class looked like today:  students spent about 10-15 minutes workshopping their weekly written exercises (due today) in small groups.  Owen, my brilliant teaching assistant, and I walked around the groups, answering questions.  I allow students to change answers based on workshops in the interest of giving them immediate feedback.  Students then, still in their groups, were responsible for writing an example of part of today's topic on the board, and teaching that concept to the rest of the group.  Our material this week is informal fallacies--fairly easy and interesting, but a lot of vocabulary.

In past semesters, I would teach informal fallacies primarily by lecturing on the types and then looking at examples together as a whole class.  I like that approach for obvious reasons:  I had control of the class material, I could rest easy knowing that students were at least *exposed* to the ideas (because I said them!), and I knew that we'd get all of the ground covered.  What I didn't know was whether students were tuned in and learning.  Using my approach today left me sure that most students were tuned in (if they weren't, it was obvious), though I had a lot less control over the content.

To allow myself to rest more easily at night, I've created some online resources to accommodate all the lecturing I used to do.  I've made three quizzes, so far, for students to enjoy outside of class.  I'm making these optional (ungraded, though I can see who does them).  Students who do them will get immediate feedback on how well they're grasping the material, which is what I hoped to accomplish by looking at examples during a lecture in class.

The proof will, of course, be in the pudding.  That pudding will be dished out next week in our first exam.  And yes, that's almost as enjoyable to me as having DEVO songs going through my head.

Slow down, you move too fast...

This week, I paid attention to the speed of material and content of my class meetings, with the idea that I'd try to slow things down a bit to get students to think more actively and deeply.  Though we covered less of the material in the textbook than I might have liked, slowing down allowed us to transition between types of material (from parts of the argument to good vs. bad arguments to vagueness, ambiguity, and fallacies), and to allow students to spend more time in discussion and problem workshops.  I think it was useful.

An added benefit of slowing down was that I was able to introduce topics into our discussion that I hadn't anticipated.  An extra day, for example, on cognitive vs. emotive meaning, allowed me time to explore ideas in the news that I felt really should be discussed in classes.  I devoted part of Wednesday's class to a discussion of ISIS's use of video (of beheadings and burnings) to create emotive meaning.  It was a difficult discussion, but one that I hope caused students to think about both world events and Logic in new ways.

Covering less material in my 50 minute class periods this week also allowed for a little forecasting of coming topics, which I always think is a good idea and never seem to leave time for at the end of the class.  I might regret these decisions at the end of the semester when we've barely scratched the surface of propositional logic, but my hope is that giving students more time to discuss and apply what they're learning will lead to better use of their skills later on.  Though reading and exercises are essential to learning Logic, so are applying and discussing concepts.  Our teaching center just happens to have a newsletter coming out on Monday with an article on "Increasing class participation through inquiry" which has lots of tips on how to use questions to start, maintain, and ensure the quality of class discussion.

Tune in next week for a new theme:  speeding up while still using most of class for application and discussion!  To prepare for this, I've started putting more resources online (flipping the classroom, as they say) for use outside of class (such as practice quizzes that give immediate feedback--things I might usually do in class).

Slow teaching?

My focus this week is on balancing the structure of the Logic course (i.e., getting somewhere) with attempting to slow things down a little in order to experiment with facilitating deep learning in students.  The class is fifty minutes, which blows by like a bullet train.  Sometimes, students look like they may have been left on the platform, wondering where everyone is going, as the train whooshes by.  Having missed my share of trains, both literal and figurative, I know the feeling.

Slowing down in class has the benefit of allowing more time for reflection, questions, and applying what we're learning.  We workshop more exercises, look at more examples, and explore a tangent or two in discussion.  Ideally, students will gain deeper knowledge--ideas they are more likely to use because they stay with them over time.  As much as I enjoy Logic for its own sake, I really hope students learn to use it throughout their whole lives, which requires a deep connection with the material.  And maybe slow pedagogy, like food, is more likely to be organic, local, healthy, and delicious.

Here's a book (which I haven't found time to read) on all things slow, including education:  In Praise of Slowness.  You should read it and tell me about it.  Along the same lines, this piece just appeared in the New York Times on whether students can have too much tech (does that qualify as fast?).

Today, we spent most of our time looking at video examples of cognitive vs. emotive meaning (well, we spent all of our time looking at the ills of emotive meaning, which is more fun).  It was a good discussion, and maybe students will be more watchful in their consumption of advertising, politics, news, and social media.  We also had more time to process examples by moving a little more slowly.  I don't mean that we did less or lowered expectations.  Rather, I was asking for greater focus, depth, and appreciation.  Maybe by stopping a little longer to see the local sights (sites?), everyone had time to get on board and enjoy the trip.