How Should I Adjust My Teaching for Different Types of Learners? “The cognitive principle guiding this chapter is: Children are more alike than different in terms of how they think and learn.” Styles and Abilities “The definition of cognitive ability is straightforward: it means capacity for or success in certain types of thought.” “In contrast to abilities, cognitive styles are biases or tendencies to think in a particular way; for example to think sequentially (of one thing at a time) or holistically (of all of the parts simultaneously).” “Abilities and styles differ in a few important ways. Abilities are how we deal with content (for example, math or language arts) and they reflect the level (that is, the quantity) of what we know and can do. Styles are how we prefer to think and learn. We consider having more ability as being better than having less ability, but we do not consider one style as better than any other style. ” Cognitive Styles “Remember, styles are supposed to represent biases in how we prefer to think; they are not supposed to be measures of how well we think.”
http://image.slidesharecdn.com/factorsaffectinglanguagelearning-141109091510-conversion-gate01/95/factors-affecting-language-learning-16-638.jpg?cb=1421136874 “I've mentioned that a cognitive styles theory must have the following three features: it should consistently attribute to a person the same style, it should show that people with different styles think and learn differently, and it should show that people with different styles do not, on average, differ in ability.” Visual, Auditory, and Kinesthetic Learners “The visual-auditory-kinesthesia theory holds that everyone can take in new information through any of the three senses, but most of us have a preferred sense. When learning something new, visual types like to see diagrams, or even just to see in print the words that the teacher is saying. Auditory types prefer descriptions, usually verbal, to which they can listen. Kinesthetic learners like to manipulate objects physically; they move their bodies in order to learn." “The key prediction is that students will learn better when instruction matches their cognitive style.” “Matching the “preferred” modality of a student doesn’t give that student any edge in learning.” “Most of the time students need to remember what things mean, not what they sound like or look like.” “But the vast majority of schooling is concerned with what things mean, not with what they look like or sound like.” “A final reason that the visual-auditory-kinesthetic theory seems right is a psychological phenomenon called the confirmation bias. Once we believe something, we unconsciously interpret ambiguous situations as being consistent with what we already believe.” “The best you can say about any of them is that the evidence is mixed.” Soooo should I stop having students do the learning styles inventory because it may give them a bias towards the assignments I post??? Could this be why my students don't read the readings I post??? This one is more of a stretch because I think they are just in the habit for not fully reading documents, they scan like they do on their phones... I can take this one step further... I had a student today tell me she wasn't tech savvy but her boyfriend was and together they still couldn't figure out how to set up a Remote Desktop Connection on her Mac laptop. The is a 17 page document with screen prints on how to set it up. I also made an almost 5 minute video on setting it up. Theoretically, I gave her two different ways to get the information and I'm thinking because of her bias she couldn't do it. Just my rambling thoughts... Abilities and Multiple Intelligences
http://www.connectionsacademy.com/Libraries/blog/multiple-intelligences-learning-styles.jpg “Educators were (and are) interested not so much in the particulars of the theory but in three claims associated with the theory:” Claim 1: The list above is one of intelligences, not abilities or talents. Claim 2: All eight intelligences should be taught in school. Claim 3: Many or even all of the intelligences should be used as conduits when presenting new material. That way each student will experience the material via his or her best intelligence, and thus each student’s understanding will be maximized. “He argues that some abilities—namely, logical-mathematical and linguistic—have been accorded greater status than they deserve. Why should those abilities get the special designation “intelligence” whereas the others get the apparently less glamorous title “talent”?” I'm going to get severely politically incorrect here... Do you consider Mozart musically talented/gifted or musically intelligent? What about idiot savants? They are talented/gifted/intelligent in one specific area and severely deficient in most if not all other areas. They still have intelligence in one area and therefore shouldn't be considered deficient, imho. I had a heated argument with a religion/philosophy professor WAY back in the day regarding this issue. I was a sever/profound special ed teacher for 5 years in the late 1980's. His contention was that in the Hindu tradition, if a person was reincarnated having "mental retardation" this was a bad thing and a step down in the reincarnation process. My contention is was a step up the process because these people are the most loving and caring individuals on the planet, i.e. interpersonal - people smart. He came back the next week and admitted I had a point he had not considered before, mainly because he had little experience with "those type of people". Have we, in the Western culture, over emphasized logical-mathematical and linguistic abilities/talents/intelligences over the others Gardner proclaims are intelligences? Discuss... “These abilities are not completely insulated from one another, but they are separate enough that you can’t take one skill you’re good at and leverage it to bolster a weakness.” Implications for the Classroom “When differentiating among students, craft knowledge trumps science.” Think in Terms of Content, Not in Terms of Students Change Promotes Attention There Is Value in Every Child, Even If He or She Is Not “Smart in Some Way Don’t Worry—and Save Your Money “Cognitive processes (such as analyzing, synthesizing, and critiquing) cannot operate alone. They need background knowledge to make them work.”
What’s the Secret to Getting Students to Think Like Real Scientists, Mathematicians, and Historians? “The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: Cognition early in training is fundamentally different from cognition late in training.” “In truth, no one thinks like a scientist or a historian without a great deal of training. ”
“If we’re not giving students practice in doing the things that historians and scientists actually do, in what sense are we teaching them history and science?” This gives credence to what we are trying to do with the VIP (http://vip.colostate.edu/) program, get undergrads involved in the research process so they learn the research process. What Do Scientists, Mathematicians, and Other Experts Do? “Expertise extends even to the types of mistakes that are made. When experts fail, they do so gracefully. ” “Experts show better transfer to similar domains than novices do.” “Compared to novices, experts are better able to single out important details, produce sensible solutions, and transfer their knowledge to similar domains.” When it comes to technology skill, today's students can barely figure out the important details and produce sensible solutions. They expect everything to work right the first time and don't try different methods to complete a task. Then they email wanting the answer given to them... What Is in an Expert’s Mental Toolbox? “Experts don’t have trouble understanding abstract ideas, because they see the deep structure of problems.” “They have representations of problems and situations in their long-term memories, and those representations are abstract. That’s why experts are able to ignore unimportant details and home in on useful information; thinking functionally makes it obvious what’s important. That’s also why they show good transfer to new problems. New problems differ in surface structure, but experts recognize the deep, abstract structure. ” “The second way to get around the limited size of working memory is to practice procedures so many times that they become automatic.” “So, experts save room in working memory through acquiring extensive, functional background knowledge, and by making mental procedures automatic.” How Can We Get Students to Think Like Experts? “What was singular was their capacity for sustained work. Great scientists are almost always workaholics.” OK well that explain a few things... here I thought i worked too much because I was behind all the time. Turns out I'm a workaholic (hehehe). “Great scientists have incredible persistence, and their threshold for mental exhaustion is very high.” “A number of researchers have endorsed what has become known as the “ten-year rule”: one can’t become an expert in any field in less than ten years, be it physics, chess, golf, or mathematics.”
https://expertadvantage.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/ericsson-accumulated-deliberate-practice.jpg Malcom Glawell's book Outliers is a really great book in this area of more practice leads to greater achievement. I'm seriously thinking about adding this book to my class to get students to understand it takes a LOT of hard work to achieve great things. “There’s nothing magical about a decade; it just seems to take that long to learn the background knowledge and to develop the automaticity that I’ve been talking about in this chapter. ” If this is generally accepted knowledge, then why do "people" (i.e. the higher up in the faculty/administration) think it's OK not to teach technology skills in college when a) technology is consistently changing and b) students don't have 10 years experience using technology as a tool not just for entertainment. Implications for the Classroom Students Are Ready to Comprehend but Not to Create Knowledge “Drawing a distinction between knowledge understanding and knowledge creation may help.“ "Experts not only understand their field, they also add new knowledge to it.” "Again, the goal is to provide students with some understanding of how others create knowledge rather than to ask students to engage in activities of knowledge creation.” Activities That Are Appropriate for Experts May at Times Be Appropriate for Students, but Not Because They Will Do Much for Students Cognitively “Assignments that demand creativity may also be motivating.” Don’t Expect Novices to Learn by Doing What Experts Do “Whenever you see an expert doing something differently from the way a nonexpert does it, it may well be that the expert used to do it the way the novice does it, and that doing so was a necessary step on the way to expertise.”
No snarky comments toady. Just trying to get caught up :) Is Drilling Worth It? Excerpt From: Daniel T. Willingham. “Why Don't Students Like School?.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/SexLw.l “Does the cognitive benefit make it worth the potential cost to motivation?” Answer: The bottleneck in our cognitive system is the extent to which we can juggle several ideas in our mind simultaneously." “The cognitive principle that guides this chapter is: It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.” “Odd as it may seem, that sort of practice is essential to schooling. It yields three important benefits: it reinforces the basic skills that are required for the learning of more advanced skills, it protects against forgetting, and it improves transfer.” Practice Enables Further Learning “This lack of space in working memory is a fundamental bottleneck of human cognition.” “Thus, the first way to cheat the limited size of your working memory is through factual knowledge. There is a second way: you can make the processes that manipulate information in working memory more efficient.”
“Mental processes can become automatized. Automatic processes require little or no working-memory capacity. They also tend to be quite rapid in that you seem to know just what to do without even making a conscious decision to do it.” “Most of the time automatic processes help rather than hinder. They help because they make room in working memory. Processes that formerly occupied working memory now take up very little space, so there is space for other processes.” “ Finding a fact in long-term memory and putting it into working memory places almost no demands on working memory. It is no wonder that students who have memorized math facts do better in all sorts of math tasks than students whose knowledge of math facts is absent or uncertain. And it’s been shown that practicing math facts helps low-achieving students do better on more advanced mathematics.” Practice Makes Memory Long Lasting “One thing these studies don’t make clear is whether you get longer-lasting memory because you practice more or because your practice is stretched out over time." “If you pack lots of studying into a short period, you’ll do okay on an immediate test, but you will forget the material quickly. If, on the other hand, you study in several sessions with delays between them, you may not do quite as well on the immediate test but, unlike the crammer, you’ll remember the material longer after the test ” “We’ve been talking about the importance of practice, and we’ve just said that practice works better if it’s spaced out.” Practice Improves Transfer “As I’ve said, transfer is more likely when the surface structure of the new problem is similar to the surface structure of problems seen before. ” “Working lots of problems of a particular type makes it more likely that you will recognize the underlying structure of the problem, even if you haven’t seen this particular version of the problem before.” “Contextual information can be used not only for understanding individual words with several possible meanings, but also for understanding the relationships of different things in what you read.” “In sum, practice helps transfer because practice makes deep structure more obvious.”
Implications for the Classroom “Such practice yields three benefits: (1) it can help the mental process become automatic and thereby enable further learning; (2) it makes memory long lasting; and (3) it increases the likelihood that learning will transfer to new situations.” What Should Be Practiced? “In general, the processes that need to become automatic are probably the building blocks of skills that will provide the most benefit if they are automatized. Building blocks are the things one does again and again in a subject area, and they are the prerequisites for more advanced work.”
Space Out the Practice “But if material from a week or a month or three months ago is sometimes included, students must think more carefully about how to tackle the problem, and about what knowledge and skills they have that might apply.”
Fold Practice into More Advanced Skills “You may target a basic skill as one that needs to be practiced to the point of mastery, but that doesn’t mean that students can’t also practice it in the context of more advanced skills.”
Three ways to improve learning by giving students a measure of control
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By James M. Lang APRIL 03, 2016
Over spring break, I helped lead a student trip to Ireland in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising. We toured the country with a guide and learned about the pivotal role of the Rising in Ireland’s political and cultural history. I brought my 11-year-old twins on the trip, hoping the experience would continue to cultivate in them a love of travel and learning.
Observing how the twins responded to the different educational events we had planned offered me another perspective on a learning principle that has become increasingly important in my own teaching.
One afternoon we visited a small historical site and listened to a long-ish lecture from the curator. I kept my eye on the twins, knowing how this might test their patience, but they both seemed attentive throughout. Later, on the bus back to the hotel, I asked them to tell me what they had learned. Neither could recall a single thing. They had been paying what Jay Howard has called "civil attention," instead of actually listening. They had learned nothing.
Small Changes in Teaching
In this continuing series, James M. Lang explores ideas on everyday classroom learning.
Near the end of the week, with plenty of lectures and walking tours under our belt, I left the students in the hands of my co-leader and took the twins to a small museum on medieval and Viking Dublin. I promised them we could stay as long or as briefly as they liked; I would follow their lead. This time, they wandered through the museum at their own pace, skipping some sections completely while stopping at others to read the placards, do the activities, and study the exhibits. They followed their own interests entirely, and afterward, spoke enthusiastically about what they had learned.
No doubt one reason they responded differently to the two experiences was because the lecture was passive and the museum was interactive. But clearly that wasn’t the only issue, since the twins also zoned out on some of the very active walking tours. Instead, I would attribute most of the difference to one factor: In the museum, they had choices — complete freedom to choose what they wanted to learn, and how. They were in control.
Education theorists sometimes distinguish between two orientations that students take toward learning: mastery or performance. Performance-oriented learners want to do well on tests, essays, or other assessments. Mastery-oriented learners want to grasp the material for its own sake, because they find it interesting, relevant, or beautiful. Plenty of research suggests that a mastery orientation creates deeper and longer learning.
That same research suggests that we can help orient students toward mastery by giving them choices. As biologist James Zull has written in The Art of Changing the Brain, "one important rule for helping people learn is to help the learner feel she is in control." Likewise, the authors of How Learning Works: 7 Research-Based Principles for Smart Teaching, argue that mastery arises when we "allow students to choose among options and make choices that are consistent with their goals and the activities that they value."
That said, you may well feel — as I do — that you know more than students about your subject matter, and, hence, you know best what they should learn. You can’t just take them to the museum of your discipline and let them wander around freely. They might well, as my twins did, skip entire sections of your discipline that are essential to a full understanding of the subject. Some faculty and educational structures do offer students complete control over their learning in this way, but most of us aren’t — or don’t want to be — in that position.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t offer our students some control over their learning. The quest to produce mastery learners is another challenge ripe for a small teaching approach. In the four previous columns in this six-part series, I have argued that we can make substantive improvements to our teaching and to student learning by paying closer attention to how we organize the minutes before class starts, the first five minutes of class, the last five minutes of class, and the opportunities we give students to form connections.
In this column, I propose three small ways in which we can take existing courses and offer students the chance to assert some measure of control over their own learning.
Student-generated exam questions. Traditional exams represent one of those moments in a course in which students seem to lose all control. They come into the room at a specific date and time, sit down, and complete tasks that we have set for them. One obvious way to offer students some choices within an exam is to create more questions than you want them to answer — if you want students to write four short essays for an in-class exam, for example, you could allow them to choose from six or eight questions.
But a more meaningful way to give them some control is to allow them to write their own exam questions. And then promise you will use some proportion or version of those questions on the actual exam. Taking 30 to 45 minutes of class time and asking students to work in groups to generate exam questions not only will give them some sense of control over the test, but also will serve as an excellent review activity.
I give essay exams in my "British Literature Survey" course, and a couple of the questions always require students to analyze passages from the works we have studied. The class prior to the exam, I ask students to work in small groups to identify the passages they would most like to see on the exam questions. With seven or eight groups, I end up with a long list of possibilities, and I always choose from it. I suppose the class could collude to limit the choices to two or three works, but that has never happened, and so we have reached a happy medium in which they get to help determine the works appearing on the exam and I still have plenty of choices.
Open assessments. I have been intrigued in recent years with assessment systems in which students are offered a wide range of possible assignments and get to choose which ones to complete to earn the grade they desire. I profiled the work of one teacher who uses such a system, John Boyer, in my book Cheating Lessons: Learning From Academic Dishonesty. Bonni Stachowiak, host of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast,spoke about her own use of open assessments in a recent episode.
Adopting this approach in my own classroom would represent a large conceptual step forward for me. I just haven’t been able to see my way there yet — or even decide if it makes sense for me.
Instead, in true small-teaching fashion, I’ve taken one mini-step in this direction. On my syllabus this semester, I left open 10 percent of the grade for an undetermined assignment, and told students on the first day of class that we would decide together what that assignment would be. The default would be a paper, I said. But if we could come up with an alternative they liked better, I would find a way to make it work.
That idea actually came from a conference paper by Chris Walsh, associate director of a writing program at Boston University, who spoke about using a "blank syllabus" in his literature-survey courses. He doesn’t actually hand out a blank document. Instead, he has some blank spaces on his syllabus that the students help him to fill throughout the semester with readings they would like to see included from their anthology. I loved the idea of having at least one small blank space on my syllabus, in terms of the work they would do, and will perhaps even expand its size a little further next semester.
Class constitutions. Some readers may have another objection to offering students more choice and control: Perhaps you are preparing students for an external exam or are teaching in a predetermined curriculum. Fair enough. But that doesn’t mean you can’t still give students a sense of ownership in the course.
Cathy Davidson has written about her experience in creating a class constitution. It sets the ground rules for a course and helps establish the idea that your classroom is a community of learners working together toward a shared purpose. You can take this notion as far as Davidson does, allowing the class constitution to determine most of the operating rules, or you can take a slight step toward it in small teaching fashion.
Many of us, for example, continue to wrestle with policies on the use of cellphones, iPads, and laptops in the classroom. Others struggle with whether (and how) to award participation points. Or we wonder about what our policies on late work or absences should look like. There are no "right" answers in any of those areas, which leaves them open for teachers of good will to make different decisions. A class constitution approach would invite students into that decision-making process.
Practically speaking, you might hand out a draft syllabus on the first day of class, and then present the areas in which you want students to help you establish certain class rules. (You can obviously set limits and define certain rules that are nonnegotiable for you.) You could invite students to comment on the course website and/or have them discuss these issues in groups. Once the class has made a collective decision, you can remind students that it is your responsibility to ensure that the class abides by these new rules.
Ceding control over any aspect of teaching can be scary, which may be why my own progress in this area has been so gradual. But if you find the prospect intriguing — if these ideas resonate with your own experience as a teacher or learner — see if you can offer students one new choice next semester, either in how they demonstrate their learning to you or in how your class forms its community rules.
In doing so, you just might nudge them one step closer to the goal we have for every student: taking ownership of their own education.
James M. Lang is a professor of English and director of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. His new book, Small Teaching: Everyday Lessons From the Science of Learning, was just published in March. Follow him on Twitter at @LangOnCourse.
This is the first episode of our new podcast series on the future of higher education. You can subscribe in iTunes to get future episodes.
Salman Khan is not afraid to make mistakes in his popular teaching videos. In fact, he considers them a feature.
"I’ll giggle every now and then because I make a mistake, which I think students say, "OK, it’s OK to make mistakes and it’s OK to giggle while doing mathematics," he says. "And it seems like a small thing. But when was the last time you giggled, you know, while doing a math problem?"
He’s the founder of Khan Academy, which has grown from something like a hobby, when he recorded videos in his walk-in closet, to a thriving nonprofit organization with more than twenty million registered students. Those videos are now one small part of a mission to remake education.
The New Education Landscape
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning project provides stories and analysis about this change moment for learning.
Here is an edited transcript of Mr. Khan’s conversation with The Chronicle.
Jeff Young: Hello and welcome to The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning podcast. I’m Jeff Young, an editor here.
Many people think of Sal Khan as that educational video guy — and he has produced thousands of videos — but Khan Academy has grown now into a force. It has software that can quiz folks who’ve taken these videos. It has issued badges to folks to prove that they’ve done it. And, more important, Khan Academy represents a philosophy. Sal Khan is pushing this idea of mastery learning where students shouldn’t move on to the next thing unless they really grasp the concepts that have come before, especially in areas like math, the idea that he’s trying to patch over an educational system he sees as flawed and moving people through too quickly.
I sat down with Sal Khan just after his recent talk at SXSWedu in Austin to talk about his vision and about what he thinks the university of the future should look like.
Sal Khan came to education as an outsider. He spent most of his career, in fact, as a financial analyst at a hedge fund. He made his first teaching videos to help his cousins with their math homework, so he sort of stumbled into all of this; and those are just essentially him narrating as viewers see him working out problems on a whiteboard or drawing sketches. As he added more videos, he eventually decided to turn it into a nonprofit, and it came to the attention of Bill Gates, who became a backer. Anyway, the materials, the vibe feels very different than anything students typically see in a classroom. They’re more informal and often irreverent. Some of the trackers online have even complained that these videos aren’t formal enough or careful enough in their presentation. And yet at Sal Khan’s talk at SXSWedu, he said he’s inspired to make Khan Academy a world-class institution. How does he square those two things?
Sal Khan: Maybe when a lot of people think world-class, they think of, you know, bronze-plated pillars and, you know, kind of a very stoic type of style and all that. But when we say world-class, we just mean it should be the best in the world. It should be the best that students get access to. The style that I started off with — and this won’t, you know, as we bring other people on at Khan Academy they all kind of have their own style — but it is one of enjoying the material. You know, when I make a video, I genuinely am enjoying that. I’m genuinely — my sense of wonder is engaged. I’ll giggle every now and then because I make a mistake, which I think students say, "OK, it’s OK to make mistakes, and it’s OK to giggle while doing mathematics, and it seems like a small thing. But when was the last time you giggled, you know, while doing a math problem?"
Jeff Young: Sure, sure.
Sal Khan: I think that one thing that I hold very dear is, you know, even when I was starting with my cousins 10 years ago, over 10 years ago now.
Jeff Young: Wow.
Sal Khan: A lot of them were A students, but they had these fundamental gaps in their knowledge.
Jeff Young: Right.
Sal Khan: For them, math and science and actually most things were these disjointed formulas that they never saw the connection between. What led me to do well in math through high school and college and beyond was that — and even to be able to still remember all my math when I’m in my 30s and now soon to be 40s — is that it was very intuitive. It all kind of connected. And so what I initially wanted to give my cousins is that connection. Look, you don’t have to memorize that other formula. That’s just a rearrangement of that thing that you learned before, and even that you don’t have to memorize. That comes out of common sense.
There’s that thread throughout Khan Academy, and I think that’s what a lot of students enjoy. That, OK, this isn’t magic formulas coming out of anywhere. This is about really understanding what we’re doing, really understanding what this math or this science has to say about the universe. I mean, sometimes I have moments in videos where I’m just in awe. I’m just in awe of what we’ve just observed or learned about, and I think it’s that, you know, just being in the same room or the same video with someone who’s literally in awe, and you can’t fake that, I think hopefully inspires students, too.
Jeff Young: One of the most intriguing things Sal Khan has done recently is set up a brick-and-mortar school. That’s a far cry from making videos. It’s call the Khan Lab School. So far it serves only kindergarten through eighth grade. Sal Khan actually sends one of his own kids there. But it made me wonder: If he started a college, what would that look like?
Sal Khan: I’d start a college and I would have to say, in full disclosure, I’ve had some of these conversations. There are some people who are interested, so —
Jeff Young: I’m not surprised.
Sal Khan: I’d make a college that focuses on some really high-need areas in the world today. You know, you could talk about tech, you could talk about finance, you could talk about design. When I say that, people might immediately start to say, "OK, this is going to be some type of a vocational school, very narrow, not make it kind of the worldly type of students that we want," but you imagine bringing — say you start a school like this in Silicon Valley. The students have all of the good things that we all remember about college. They have the quad, the dorms, the student centers, the clubs. They have seminars about everything that is intellectually interesting, philosophy, great literature. It’s all fair game. But a lot of their time, their days are not spent in these 300-person lecture halls taking notes, trying to take exams on things that will have very little relevance to what they will eventually do or, even if it does, they’ll forget.
Instead they should be out in the field doing things — and that doing things, it could be interning at a Google or a Khan Academy. It could be doing research at a local, it could be at another university or at a pharma company. It could be working with a tech incubator or a business incubator and trying to start or innovate something new. It could be getting mentored by a great writer, kind of in an apprentice system and you’re trying to learn how to write similar types of novels.
Jeff Young: Sure.
Sal Khan: Or an apprentice painter, artist, whatever it is, and so you do that, not necessarily for four years. I always joke this four-year time bound is a pretty arbitrary thing. It’s like someone decided, "OK, we’re going to keep them here for four years. Let’s see how we can fill it up regardless of whether you’re a computer-science major or you are an art-history major. I think what these students graduate with, what they do in this environment is, yes, they could take some exams that show their competency in certain core skills. That would be done at the student’s own time and pace. They say, "Hey, you know what? I know signal processing good enough to take that exam. They’re going to administer that exam in a month. I’m going to take it then," but the core of what they do is they create their portfolios.
Jeff Young: Yep.
Sal Khan: They create their portfolios, not just in their specialty — which if it’s in software, might be creative-writing software programs or robotics — but it’s well beyond their specialty, their portfolio of writing, their portfolio of creative art projects, their portfolio of speeches they’ve given. When they graduate, instead of saying, "Hey, I have a magna cum laude GPA, blah, blah, blah, blah in this major," you’ll say, "Here’s my portfolio," and your portfolio is going to be one-third just of really well created things that you’re most proud of. There will be some assessment of what are the academic concepts that you’ve truly mastered.
Jeff Young: Sure.
Sal Khan: Then there will be some narratives, some pure feedback from the people that you have worked with, from your professors, from the other students. Some of it might be commentary on a narrative on your portfolios, but a lot of it could be commentary on, "Well, what was it like to work with this person?"
Jeff Young: On a scale of 1 to 10, how serious do you think it’s possible that you might do something like that someday?
Sal Khan: I don’t know if I’m going to do it, but I think one of these universities are going to exist in the next 10 years.
Jeff Young: Did you hear there’s this MIT dean, Christine Ortiz?
Sal Khan: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I know her, yeah. She’s starting a new university, and, you know, I personally think that this university, in order for it not just be a one-off kind of quirky college, I think it has to be so compelling-
Jeff Young: Yep.
Sal Khan: That it’s taking students from Harvard, it is taking students from MIT, that the value proposition has to be — and when I say that, it isn’t just so that this thing only serves a small number of elite students — because if it can take, if the model can pull students from schools that have these incredible brands, and reputations, and multiyear, 100-year histories and kind of networks and all of that, if you can, then it sends a shock wave through the entire system that this is the model that we should try to emulate.
Jeff Young: Why do you think it’s going to take a shock wave for that to happen? If you think some of these changes are, you know, when you listen to your presentations, often you have this sort of common-sense kind of tone here. Why do you think traditional colleges aren’t going ahead and doing this?
Sal Khan: Well, you know, there’s just a, there’s tradition. There’s the way things have always been done, and I think universities are infamous. You know the joke, they have 2,000 CEOs. Some of the beauty of a university is that every professor is given a lot of autonomy over what he or she does. That’s also what makes it very hard for even a very forward-thinking president to change courses. I think the place, the best way for change to happen is for strong catalysts from the outside, and if some of these universities start saying, "We just, we’re losing some great students to that thing over there." By the way, that thing over there — since those students are interning, and they’re out in the real world, and they’re actually not ending up with debt, they’re ending up with savings.
Jeff Young: You know, there’s this book that came out about the history of the cubicle, which seems quite random, right? But the history was this utopian vision of, like, every person would get their own personalized — they would be able to make it their own, and it was this beautiful, artistic idea. But the way it was implemented by companies was to make it standardized and make every cubicle identical. Do you ever worry that by this beautiful resource you’ve created, well-intentioned, could lead to a world in which, world-class as it may be, that might be the only thing a lot of people end up getting? Or that kind of style of education of very — may be very good, but interactive software and videos versus an elite who get the in-person, and that it almost might exacerbate a trend that’s not your fault but that is in the world beyond your control?
Sal Khan: You know that, in theory, is possible, but everything we talk about is the exact opposite. Whenever we talk — I mean, in my book, One World School House, we’re not talking about what a school of the future is or a university of the future. I talk about large, open spaces, potentially even outside, where the students are working with each other. Even if they’re working on Khan Academy, Khan Academy is facilitating them to help each other. When they’re not doing their core skills on something like Khan Academy, they’re doing big, open-ended projects. They’re outside for significant parts of the day, and that’s actually one of our core design principles. They’re building these social, emotional skills.
The lab school that we’ve created, you know a lot of people think, "Oh, Khan Academy, Khan Lab School, it’s going to be these kids on a computer." Yeah, they use computers, but these kids are — I would put this school against almost any other school in terms of how much interactivity they’re getting with other human beings in terms of how much time they get outside, in terms of how much time they get to be creative and take ownership over what they want to learn. And so, yeah, I mean, I definitely appreciate how good intentions can go wrong. But our view on what schools should look like are virtual. That’s a tool, and it can do great things to personalize whatever else, but the real beauty is how do we leverage those tools to get humans to interact with each other more and give them flexibility to do more interesting things? Get off — you know, the school should just be their base. Get out of there. Go on field trips. Visit the beach. Have class on beach. Do Khan Academy on the beach. You know, visit the museum, go do some research, whatever else it might be.
Jeff Young: Do you ever just think like, "What have I done?" like this is a big responsibility you’ve created?
Sal Khan: Yeah, yeah. It hits you every now and then. Well, you just can’t screw up. That’s our, you know, all of this stuff, it’s good. I mean, you know we’re doing it, but they’re so — like, the last five years have been important. You know, I tell people that Khan Academy 1.0 was me in the closet for five years. Khan Academy 2.0 was the last five years. We’re a real organization. We’re doing real things now, some of it already very substantive, but then the next five years is our chance to like, you know, I would hope in 2025 people will be like, "Yeah, Khan Academy, that’s a major institution," like what would the world be like without it? Like, that’s, you know, that’s kind of the aspiration. But we’ll see.
Jeff Young: If he’s right that it will take new outside players coming in and showing new ways of doing things in education, then Sal Khan and his Khan Academy have become one of those outside forces. And as we’ll learn in future episodes of these podcasts, he has inspired others — both to use Khan Academy videos in their classrooms and to launch their own upstart efforts.
This has been the Re:Learning podcast. This is our very first episode, and it’s an experiment, so we’re really looking for your feedback. If you like this and want it to continue, please review us on iTunes and subscribe either there or on your podcaster of choice. You can follow us on Twitter, @relearningedu or like us on Facebook. Today’s show was produced by me, Jeff Young. Our theme music is by Jason Caddell. We’ll be back next week with more stories and analysis about the new learning landscape.
Jeffrey R. Young writes about technology in education and leads the Re:Learning project. Follow him on Twitter @jryoung; check out his home page, jeffyoung.net; or try him by email at jeff.young@chronicle.com.
J.Patrick McGrail says two things have become anathema in his classroom: risk and ambiguity.
More and more he realizes his students are interested in acquiring technical skills rather than theoretical ones. But "what about the creative side?" he asks.
Mr. McGrail, an associate professor of communication at Jacksonville State University, in Alabama, says he gets peppered with more questions from students about the organization of his examinations than about the content of his lectures, and that’s a problem. Over the last several years, Mr. McGrail has struggled to resist simplifying his courses into rubrics to meet increased student demands for clarity in learning objectives.
The New Education Landscape
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Re:Learning project provides stories and analysis about this change moment for learning.
"I have noticed students want there always to be a right answer," he says. "They get upset when the answer is slippery — and in media, it frequently is."
The problem, he says, is that too many students expect there to be a right answer and a wrong answer. And the theory of editing audio and video, something he often teaches, is ambiguous and requires trial and error before a project is ready for publication. But how do you persuade students to embrace risk when their grade is on the line?
For a while now, Mr. McGrail has wondered how he can adapt his teaching to meet students somewhere in the middle, by making clearer objectives while continuing to push students to flex their creative muscles.
He asks: How can professors embrace the students’ desire for a graspable skill and marry it with creative inquiry?
He brought us that question after we asked readers what puzzles them about how college teaching is changing, and his question got the most votes from other readers. After reaching out to professors across the country, it's clear that Mr. McGrail is not the only one wrestling with the question.
Below are three creative solutions we found from talking to professors.
1. Integrating Career Development
A couple of years ago, Ann M. Tschetter noticed that she and her students weren’t on the same page. "There is this huge disconnect in what we think as faculty and what the students think," says Ms. Tschetter, a professor of practice and undergraduate history adviser at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. To Ms. Tschetter, who has taught for 18 years, it’s clear that the skills her courses cover, such as reading, writing, and arguing, are invaluable. But for students, it’s not obvious how those skills are marketable in the real world.
It’s no secret that enrollment in history departments and other humanities programs has fallen steadily across the country. Part of the reason, Ms. Tschetter says, is that students and parents can’t connect the faded dots between a history degree and a full-time job.
Last year she set out to draw that line more clearly by incorporating tasks into the syllabus for History 250, "Introduction to Historical Methods." The first task was small: Explain why you are a history major. But her students didn’t find it all too simple. "Students would say, ‘I don’t know, I just like history,’" she says. But when pushed to give elevator pitches about how their interest in the discipline connected to their career goals — and when part of their grade included interviewing professors in the department — the answer became clearer to students like Jessica H. Carter, a junior who took Ms. Tschetter’s course last semester.
Another task: Go to the career fair. Ms. Carter had never been, and she was nervous. But once she got there, she was handed a list of employers who sought out history majors. "It allowed me to realize the scope history majors can go into," she says. "A lot of times people think history majors are for going to law school." Although that is what Ms. Carter plans to do after graduation, she also realized that banks, businesses, and governments systems also seek history majors.
By the end of the semester the positive feedback from students made it clear to Ms. Tschetter that career development was something the entire department should consider weaving into courses. It hasn’t been so easy to persuade her colleagues. "They know their careers," she says. But helping students envision how their coursework might apply to a different job is another matter.
2. Experiential Learning
Ambiguity is a part of life, and students need to learn that, says J. Wesley Leckrone, an associate professor of political science at Widener University. But as a professor, it's his job to teach them how to wade through the complexity of political theory as it conflicts with the reality of the political climate today. He wanted students to learn to think on their feet. So he created a mock super political-action committee, or PAC, to give them hands-on experience working in politics.
"You have to learn to think creatively," he tells students. "You have to realize people you deal with in life need different messages, and they believe different things."
Specifically, the student-run super PAC helps them apply the theory they learn in lecture to the problem of rising costs in higher education. One day a week, he lectures about relevant theory and readings, as well as how to solve problems and argue. The rest of the time, though, the students take the reins, discussing how to raise awareness in the local community and lobby for more state funding. There is no clear syllabus. Nor is there a clear outcome. The point is that students learn to figure things out as they go, he says.
From the very first day, Mr. Leckrone says he tells students there is little chance that what they do will get passed by legislators. But that’s "part of the way our political system works," he says, adding that failure is a part of it. That’s not the easiest thing for students to accept, but Mr. Leckrone strongly believes that professors cannot continue to teach only in a traditional lecture format, and experiential learning is key.
Every year Mr. Leckrone leads a trip to the Pennsylvania State Capitol, in Harrisburg, where students meet with legislators and put what they’ve learned to the test.
Nicole E. Crossey, now a senior at Widener, has participated in the mock PAC in a number of courses since its creation four years ago. At the beginning, she says, it was a "trial by fire." Neither she nor her classmates had experience lobbying or promoting a campaign. But she says she’s learned that, "in politics and working with people, you can’t have black and white."
Ms. Crossey, who plans to work in politics after graduation, says the hands-on experience with the super PAC has allowed her to see what actually motivates the political process. "It helped open my eyes to see some people can impact the political system and can lead change," she says.
3. Digital Open Badges
Bernard D. Bull is another professor who has thought a lot about how to balance teaching hard and soft skills. Several years ago, he wondered, "What if we could find some ways to recognize the more discrete knowledge, skills, and abilities people are developing as they go through a program?"
Mr. Bull is an associate professor of education and assistant vice president for academics at Concordia University Wisconsin, where he teaches courses in a badge-based master’s program in educational design and technology. In each course students can earn up to seven or eight badges for different skills. An overall course may be about learning design, but individual badges can be awarded for projects that demonstrate the student understands game-based learning or service-based learning, for example. "Eventually our entire program is a master's portfolio," Mr. Bull says.
His students also write reflections after each badge is earned, which means they can’t simply gloss over challenge areas and move on.
The digital-open-badge model at Concordia stretches across the entire degree, but Mr. Bull says professors could use badges to structure learning in any classroom. For example, students could get badges for public speaking or collaborating with classmates. The badges themselves may not have much currency outside of that classroom, but it’s still one way of rewarding the nuances of learning, he says.
Badges can also level the playing field for students who arrive with fewer skills. "Sometimes you have to swim in the ambiguity until you understand it," he says. "But other times you can break it down until you understand it." Badges allow students to see the individual building blocks of what they are learning and set their sights on short-term goals while working to stack those blocks into a holistic project.
Badges might not work for every classroom environment, Mr. Bull concedes, but it’s one way students could prove to employers a particular competency with more depth than a traditional transcript.
Students today are under a lot of pressure to succeed, do well, and have the right answers, says Nancy H. Hensel, head of the New American Colleges and Universities, a consortium of independent institutions. But as someone who has worked in higher education for decades, Ms. Hensel says the big questions in life don’t have right answers — they have many answers.
"We need to recognize that not being successful in some efforts is legitimate, and we need to help them understand that failure isn’t real failure, but it's that you haven’t been successful yet," she says of students. "That’s part of the process of scholarship."
The professors we talked to acknowledge that their interactive courses are a lot more work for them — it takes more daily planning and a little scrambling to make sure things run smoothly. But they all agree that college teaching needs to meld a traditional liberal-arts education with skills students can apply to their working life after graduation.
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