We The Professors

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT...WEEK THREE

During the summer I will post each Monday. Each post will offer six elements intended to enable each of you to look, think, explore and imagine. 

 

1. TED talk of the week: Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of “Eat, Pray, Love” discusses her ideas about artists and geniuses. Watch it here. 

2. Article of the week: A short piece concerning whether how we teach might be improved by considering how we ourselves learn. As higher education faculty, it’s important to remember what it was like to learn an idea or concept for the first time. Read it here. 

3. Wild-ass thought of the week: Every course develops its own rhythm and personality. Sometimes a course can be a precocious three-year-old who constantly tests the limits. Sometimes a 13-year-old who dares you to teach or engage him. And, occasionally a course can be a wonderful mix of young adult learners and outgoing critical thinkers. A prof must have a significant part in developing the rhythm and shaping the personality to one that allows discussion and learning, even if it means being parental, corrective and reassuring. Be sure early in every course to have a brief discussion with the class about personality.

4. Self-evaluation topic for teachers: Think about retail stores you have been to that have extremely poor customer service. Think also about those that have great customer service. Jot down some characteristics of great and poor customer service and then apply it to your teaching, your course materials, and your interactions with students.

5. Self-evaluation topic for administrators: if necessary or if required, can you speak eloquently, insightfully and inspirationally about your department and your college or university? While this may be called an elevator pitch, in fact it should be a short (10-15 minutes), practiced and polished presentation that can be given to an individual or a group at a moment’s notice.

Shower thinking: First impressions are often the most significant impressions. Mentally choreograph the first moments of your courses. What do you do to make students know the course will be a different experience than anything they’ve had before? Think hard and make it happen.   

 

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT...WEEK TWO

For the next 10 weeks I will post each Monday. Each post will offer six elements intended to enable each of you to look, think, explore and imagine. 

 

1. TED talk of the week: Well known speaker Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for today’s students to flourish. Listen to it here.

2. Article of the week: A discussion about the differences between teaching philosophies and learning philosophies and how to craft a good set of learning statements. Read it here.

3. Wild-ass thought of the week: Teaching is storytelling. Framing content in the form of stories makes that content more memorable, easier to learn, easier to apply and easier to share. During every semester, tell every course you teach a story that will make the class laugh out loud, and want to share that story. Also tell them one story that will make them sad enough to cry. Make it a story they will also want to share. Remember, teaching is also an emotional pursuit.

4. Self-evaluation topic for teachers: What is the one thing that, as a teacher, you are the absolute best at doing? Make it specific and something that truly stands out. Then figure out how to do it a little or a lot better. Don’t let it become part of your comfort zone. Think hard about genuinely improving the thing you do best.

5. Self-evaluation topic for administrators: Determine your greatest leadership weakness. Maybe it’s fear of saying negative things to people or fear of conflict. Then spend a part of the summer reading, writing, thinking and formulating specific ways to overcome and correct this fear.

6. Shower thinking: What do you really hate about students today? Say it. Think it. Figure it out. Brainstorm how to fix these things. Come up with society-changing thoughts. 

 

BOOT CAMP. NOT FOR EVERYONE, ONLY THOSE WHO WANT TO BE THE BEST.

If you want to be a U.S. Marine, you first go to boot camp. It’s a 13-week course intended to physically and mentally change a person into a soldier. Upon successful completion the recruit is ready to fully engage in the tasks--pleasant, unpleasant, and horrifically unpleasant--of a soldier. And he/she has also been skilled in the art of working as part of a team and helping to strengthen and to support the team in every possible situation.

Training a soldier is really a personal building process intended to strengthen a team.

So why not boot camps in higher education; boot camps for departments or other academic units to grow and to perform and to innovate as individuals, and as a team? Obviously these would not be 13-week physical boot camps, but rather a shorter boot camp that builds collaboration and synchronization.

When? Have a boot camp right before school starts—for a week. Or have one during fall break, or Spring break, or even just after graduation.

Boot camps are great for rebuilding, reinventing, and creating new courses,  programs, processes and procedures. Boot camps can help strengthen teaching. Boot camps can help with burnout and a plague of pessimism. Boot camps can be great for new faculty.

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Requirements:
• Have the experience be for a week.
• Have it off campus.
• Announce it a year ahead of time and make it either required for everyone or designed for a small skunkworks of faculty/administration.
• Make it demanding.
• Make it different from anything done before.
• Address problems. Create solutions
• Use it to make your program the best. Use it to make yours the program that you can say to students at orientation: “We do not want some of you to major in our area. We want all of you to major in our area.”

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An example. Begin the boot camp with two hours of individual thinking. Send each attendee off by themselves (no contact with anyone else in the group) to identify one thing that needs improved, one idea that will totally and positively change the program, or one out of the box idea that changes the whole game.

Things that have sprung from boot camps can be very unusual. Ideas such as every course in the program will be team-taught. Or that courses will be for drastically different time durations. Or the fact that some courses will be sequential so that the same group of students meet during the semester in the same three courses for two full days of the week. The ideas are limitless and a boot camp actually gives time to figure out implementation.

Make the boot camp distinctive. Take people out of their mental comfort zones so the results aren’t just the same old things dressed in slightly different clothes. Make the point of the boot camp be teamwork, ideas, solutions, specific action plans, the future, innovation and abandoning the status quo.

Make your motto: "Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Very few programs will actually ever have a boot camp like this. That’s disconcerting.

But very few programs really have the will and the desire and the approach to be truly and absolutely the best.

 

CURIOSITY CANNOT BE TAUGHT, BUT IT CAN BE ILLUMINATED AND NURTURED

Curiosity is frequently the engine that drives learning and achievement. If a student is curious she will be a better student.

Yet curiosity is not something that can be taught. It’s not something that can be demanded on the syllabus. It can’t be easily tested. But it is a spark that can be lit. It is something that can be nurtured. Yet assuming, for the moment, that curiosity has not been well developed in students during high school, how can a college professor ignite that spark in college?

How indeed?

Each student must be motivated to see that the course subject and material represents a gap in his knowledge that needs to be filled. Psychologist George Loewenstein, in a 1994 article, talks about curiosity as not only a mental state, but also as an emotion, “a powerful feeling that impels us forward until we find the information that will fill in the gap in our knowledge.” Teaching, even in higher education, is a creative activity. It’s dealing with a student’s emotions so that a desire to learn becomes a mutual goal of both teacher and student.

Curiosity is that self-motivated desire that impels a student to search on their own for desired information, not because they have to, and not only because they want to, but because they feel like they need to know that information to become educated and informed.

In a course, talk about curiosity early on. Often a student simply looks at curiosity as a platitude thrown out as part of the academic jargon. Be motivated. Pay attention. Turn things in on time. Don’t plagiarize. Be curious. Blah, blah, blah.

So discuss curiosity…as an emotion, as a goal, as a flame that needs to be kindled and nourished. Give examples. Ask for examples. Examine it all for more than a few minutes.

Curiosity also can be nurtured by asking questions. Interesting questions. Fascinating questions. Questions posed by the professor that are so good that they lead to other questions. Point out that expert learners keep searching until they find answers to the cascading series of questions that emanates from something they want to become knowledgeable about. You want to pose questions to students that will lead them to additional questions of their own that will increase their desire to accumulate knowledge and information about a subject. Again, tell them that.

Curiosity can also be modeled and, in a sense, needs to be modeled if the professor is to be seen as the leader of a group of mutual learners. As the prof, point out how you became fascinated with the course subject, how you went about becoming curious, the initial questions you asked, and the complex questions and answers you developed in order to accumulate the knowledge necessary to teach the course.

In Lewis Carroll’s, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is the following:  “Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).”

Alice is talking about curiosity as a sense of wonder. She knows not where she is. She does not know the people and things she encounters. But she is in awe. She wants to learn more. She enjoys the sense of adventure involved in her journey.

And any professor wants those same things for his/her students. But they will not get there on their own. The “curiouser and curiouser” has to be explained, nurtured, nourished and modeled.

  

LET TED'S IDEAS WORTH SPREADING HELP YOU BUILD A COURSE

All of us in higher education, I hope, have availed ourselves of TED talks. They are incisive, informative, creative, contagious and extremely interesting.

So why not make a series of these talks the basis and primary resources for a course?

Certainly such topics as technology, education, the arts, energy, and the environment, are perfect for course creation. Imagine, for instance, a course built around the TED talks and books by Ken Robinson. A course like this would be popular, I’m certain, with any education major.

My suggestion would be to show a couple of talks (they’re each no more than 18 or 20 minutes) during one class and then discuss those talks during the following class. Students obviously would have access to these and other related talks at any time to watch or review. 

To me there is absolutely no downside to this idea. The talks are interesting. The discussion and related materials can be educational. Learning can occur. Creativity is abundant.

But can you do this? What about the actual rules about using these talks? The policy at TED says: “You are encouraged to view as many TED Talks as you wish for free, and to share what you learn with others both online and offline.” You also must read and abide by the usage policy and the TED Creative Commons license, allowing you to use TED talks “to stimulate discussions with students or to complement course materials.” You might also explore making a class or two an actual TEDx event.

Try it out. Could be great for a short-term course, a summer course, even an online course.

The incredible resource is there. Why not take advantage of its value.

 

A CLASSROOM SUCCESS STORY

I taught a course in media history for a handful of semesters. And, to me, few things have changed more dynamically than the teaching of history.

My approach to the course evolved every semester by the increasing realization of the amount of historical information that is so complete, so accurate, so interesting and so easily accessible via the World Wide Web.  And much of that information obviously does not really need to be taught in class in the same way it did before the proliferation of technological tools. My students in media history could look up the invention of anything or the history of anything or any inventor they found interesting. My job, in part, was to lead them to the understanding of why that information should be interesting and should be acknowledged. I used the Web heavily in terms of telling them what to look at, who to look at and where to look.

This then allowed me to use the majority of class time very differently. I experimented very successfully with spending just a little time in each class telling them and showing them some of the fascinating stories of media history, but I used more and more class time to get each and every student to understand why history is a vital part of their lives and why it is necessary for every educated person to be part historian.

One discussion simply centered around my simply writing on the whiteboard: “The meaning of life and its relationship to history." The class and I talked for 90 minutes. It was a great dialogue. And in that course, three students actually ended up wanting to become media historians.

The obvious moral. Never ever fail to change.

 

WHEN ABANDONMENT MAY BE THE BEST PLAN

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” is a common saying in any business, and is often said by employees to resist change.

But what if it is broke? Maybe “don’t fix it” is applicable to that as well.

• Instead of fixing it, perhaps it should just be abandoned.
• Perhaps whatever needs fixed is out-of-date.
• Perhaps whatever needs fixed is just the way we’ve always done it and it has outlived its usefulness.
• Perhaps whatever needs fixed has been eclipsed by new technology.
• And perhaps whatever needs fixed needs re-invented, not fixed.

Two examples.

First, pamphlets and other printed publications to introduce programs, departments, services or other university entities are simply wasted paper today. Students do not read these printed pieces. They just do not. Perhaps their parents do, but today’s students live in an electronic age where information is best disseminated through a website, a blog or even an App.

Second, tables set up in gymnasiums or other common areas to pass out those pamphlets and other material are equally useless. These tables, staffed by faculty and students are friendly, personable and often make the programs seem fun and interesting. But that is not why students should be enticed into something. Send electronic messages (ideally text messages) inviting new students to an informational meeting after they arrive on campus. Or invite them to take an introductory course. Online marketing works far better with today’s students than tables staffed by people who pass out printed material that is rarely read and point out lots of information that is rarely remembered.

Fixing things that have always been done but are no longer useful or productive is simply not the way of the world today. And especially not when 17 and 18-year-olds are involved.

Re-invent. Don’t just repeat in a slightly different way. 

 

SUCCINCT AND CONCISE SHOULD BE REQUIRED

Clear thinking and clear writing and well-crafted explanations are what academicians require of students. So why not for all academic writing?

Emails should be short and to the point. A memo should be one page. A resume should be an abridged accounting. Strategic plans should be interesting, and even pleasurable to read. Everything should be edited for clarity and brevity.

Educators are not often known for their semantic simplicity. Like legalese, there is also academic jargon, and wordiness and needless complexity are two characteristics.

Fortunately, things do seem to be getting a bit better. But there’s a ways to go.

1. Email: In academia there are lots (and lots and lots) of emails. And virtually no one reads paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. Two paragraphs, maybe three, should be the maximum. Any more should be an attachment or a phone call. Long emails rarely get the attention they deserve.
   
   
2. Memos: One page. Period. Short and to the point. Larger type than 10 point. It’s a memo. Definition: a short note designating something to be remembered, especially something to be done or acted upon in the future. No one remembers or cares about more than one page.
   
   
3. Resumes: Students are often told that their resume should be one page. Some faculty resumes are more than 20 pages and include every committee, subcommittee, focus group and meeting they were ever part of. What’s recommended? If a student’s resume extends to a second or third page, so be it. No potential employer ever required a one-page resume or penalized a candidate for two pages.
   
   Faculty resumes, on the other hand, are better if they are brief(er). Hit the high points. Cite the significant events. Everyone reading it realizes you were on committees, taught classes, and handled your share of academic duties. Why not a resume that highlights the contributions you made rather than a listing of everything you did.
   
   
4. Strategic plans: Should be short. Should be interesting, even creative. Should also be straightforward about what needs to be done, when it should be done, and an interesting explanation of how to do it.

There are no accolades in academia for making what is written long and complicated.

So don’t.

 

TEACHING HISTORY IN EVERY COURSE

Let me begin by saying that this is NOT a post about only history professors. It’s a post about the idea that all professors have a responsibility to mention and even to teach a bit of history, as far as that history relates to the subject matter of their course.

And all profs need to do it in a way that makes that history interesting, fascinating, curiosity-inducing, and even astonishing. Otherwise too many of our students are doomed to a life of disinterest and ignorance when it comes to the events of the past.

There are members of my own family who could care less about history because they never were delighted by the presentation of history as it related to their lives, their families, their thinking, and their culture. They find history insignificant and associate it with names, dates and events they feel they should not know about or care about.

And that is not only unfortunate. It is wrong. We owe it to all of our students to show them the what and the why of the past in ways that make those students both appreciative and curious.

Recently in the news in the United States there was a story about Jews in the Ukraine being forced to register with the government. Now to anyone familiar with World War II and with Adolph Hitler, this brings back thoughts of horrific acts of death and attempted extermination. And many college classes, when something like this is in the news, should bring up history and discuss it. The Holocaust is relevant to classes in history, mass media, psychology, sociology, English, political science, and film studies.

And the holocaust can be made devastatingly real by showing the 1951 French documentary "Night and Fog," created by Alan Resnais. There are very few 35-minute films as real as this one at depicting an event in history that should never be forgotten. And any student who sees it will remember it for years to come.

And it’s the same with many other subjects and events. Why not discuss baseball in early April by showing students a segment from Ken Burns’s multi-part documentary on its history, or the segment from Ken Burns’s documentary on the U.S. Civil War that discusses the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Show it on the date of the actual assassination. Or why not a telling of the story (in an interesting way related to your course subject matter) of the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Yugoslav nationalist Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo, which set off a diplomatic crisis resulting in World War I.

Obviously this list could go on and on. But the point here is not only the discussing of these things, but the discussing of them in ways that make history interesting.

Why?

Because maybe, as the saying goes, without a significant understanding of history, we are doomed to repeat its tragedies.

It takes a short time in any course to introduce and to fascinate a student about a historical event. It also shows students that there is a certain attraction in historical events, and that there is knowledge and wisdom to be gained from an understanding of those events. 

 

AN APPALLING COMMENT…BUT ABUNDANT SOLUTIONS

A few weeks ago (on a now-defunct blog called College Misery) I noted a comment by a seasoned professor who was talking about new professors on his faculty.

“Fresh-faced kids have no idea how to teach so I cut them some slack.  They talk about caring and helping students fulfill their potential and sh*t like that.  It's the equivalent of a new husband telling his lovely wife, ‘Sure dear, I'll split the house work with you.’  You only say stuff like that because you don't know any better.”

I think this comment is appalling.

Not only is it demeaning to new faculty, it is discouraging and it is insulting. Obviously new young faculty need to steer clear of these burned out veterans, but that’s not always as easy as it sounds.

It is this seasoned professor who obviously has gotten discouraged, disgruntled and dispirited. He looks at students as young people who have no desire to learn, no interest in school, no desire to fulfill their potential, and do not care. And he encourages new faculty to look at students the same way.

But new faculty need to do the opposite.

New profs need encouragement. They need nurturing. They need mentoring. They need professional development opportunities that are centered around pedagogy, presentation, interaction with students, and every other aspect of classroom management and control. Those things are undeniably necessary.

Too often colleges and universities do fail to provide enough guidance about teaching to new professors. Although with the proliferation of teaching centers that guidance is getting much better.

But there still are many teachers out there who are struggling and challenged in their classrooms. They have never learned to teach. When they were hired they gave a “sample” teaching presentation, which was practiced, polished and the best of their best. Then they were put into a classroom and told, “TEACH!”

But without substantial guidance by, among others, seasoned professors the classroom situations of these new teachers never get better. And then these new teachers simply get frustrated and fall into that bottomless abyss called average.

And then eventually, those new “fresh-faced” profs soon (too soon) become the ones who utter the comment at the beginning of this post.

And higher education institutions suffer.

And education itself suffers.

And learning suffers.

And, in the end, society suffers. 

 

THE PURPOSE OF A BLOG

Definitely I read my share of blogs, and I also write this one. And often I find myself thinking, as I both read and write:

“This is kind of preachy.”
“Why is this trying to tell me how to do what I do?”
“Do I really need to know this or present this?”
“Do I really need to waste my time on someone else’s advice?”
“Why am I reading (or writing) this stuff?”

So, as the school year winds down…faster in some places than others…here’s a thought about why I think many bloggers and writers do what they do and say what they say.

Bloggers blog:

• to make their readers think about various topics and themes,
• to get readers to consider adopting or rejecting the ideas,
• to present a point of view that readers can begin an internal or external dialogue about,
• to try to get readers to think about change and perhaps foment change because groups are more powerful than individuals,
• to present to readers information that can lead those readers to expand and to develop.

It’s not because bloggers have the best ideas. It’s because bloggers want to be the catalyst for presenting the topics that can lead to the thought processes that can lead to the conversations that can lead to change or to the rejection of change.

Bloggers aren’t expounding on what they know to get you to know what they know. Bloggers are presenting ideas and topics and opinions on topics that should engender ideas and more topics and opinions in you, their readers.

That, to me, is the total purpose of a blog.

Think about these things today, this week, this month and over the summer. Start a blog of your own. Get your ideas out there. Let yourself be heard. Maybe you can help change the world.

 

SUMMER’S COMING, TIME TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE

As courses begin to wind down, especially in the Spring term, there is often a collective sigh of relief, both by faculty and students.

Things are over. Let’s finish it up. Summer is here. Rest, recharge, recover.

Faculty often however do not get to do that. There is research to be done, workshops to often organize or participate in, new courses to plan, books to be read, and assorted other things that have been put off to be accomplished. Not that faculty do not get to relax, vacation, hang out with their families, and simply do nothing, but mostly they are required and encouraged to do more than students are encouraged to do.

But why?

Should students, indeed, get a bye from learning and education during the three-month summer break? Are they weaker than faculty? Are they more tired? Are they busier? Probably not. Unless they have internships or summer classes, students are quite likely very free from educational pursuits during the summer.

So why can’t these very students use the summer to make a difference?

Yes, make a difference. Help their communities. Use what they learned to improve something. Create a positive ruckus. Let their voices be heard for the benefit of something. Make the things they have learned in the past year or two years or 10 years mean something.

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“The purpose of life is to contribute in some way to making things better."
--Robert F. Kennedy 
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And, as professors, it’s time here at the end of a semester to exhort students to pursue that action rather than to exhort them to rest. Education doesn’t stop in May and resume in August. It continues and it should persist the whole year.

Doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be time for recharging. But summer should also be a time for charging ahead, for changing yourself, for changing your world, for showing others that what you learned can make a difference.

And it should be done by both students and by professors.

 

WHOSE FAULT IS IT ANYWAY

Is it okay if only three students in a class of 20 are listening, are engaged, and seem to be learning? Is that a good life for the prof or the students?

No.

Is it the profs fault that this situation occurs? Will those students not listening or learning penalize the prof on the course evaluations?

Not usually. Probably.

What can professors do about this? Nothing? Be frustrated? Endlessly complain?

Pretty much.

Are these situations fixable?

Yes. With the right amount of articulation, energy and passion in the very first class session, and with the right students, and with the power of the gods on your side, it could be fixable.

But as anyone who has taught for any length of time knows, a bad group of students can sometimes be the scourge of teaching. A course like this can drag down a prof and ruin an entire semester.

But, an occasional bad group of students is just that. And it too will pass.

But if every course seems like a bad group of students, then maybe it’s time for an examination of the professor rather than the students.

Great professors are great almost all of the time and have successful courses every semester. The weakest professors are always complaining about bad courses, and should look to themselves for the cause.

 

THE SKILLS OF YESTERDAY, TODAY AND TOMORROW

Colleges and universities are constantly being urged to teach the skills of tomorrow. Teachers are told to teach tomorrow’s skills today. Students are told they need to be proficient in the skills they will need in the future.

But what exactly are the skills of tomorrow? And have profs been “secretly” teaching them all along? Are tomorrow’s skills, in fact, the skills of yesterday, or some mysterious set of skills universities either don’t know or haven’t figured out yet?

Just exactly what precisely, specifically are these skills of tomorrow?

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According to the American Management Association (AMA), “executives believe that to grow their businesses they need a workforce fully equipped with skills beyond the basics of reading, writing and math. Skills such as critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation will become even more important to organizations in the future.”

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The Association of American Colleges and Universities says “Beginning in school, and continuing at successively higher levels across their college studies, students should prepare for twenty-first-century challenges by gaining:

1. Knowledge of Human Cultures and the Physical and Natural World
   Gained through study in the sciences and mathematics, social sciences, humanities, histories, languages, and the arts.
2. Intellectual and Practical Skills, Including:
   • Inquiry and analysis
   • Critical and creative thinking
   • Written and oral communication
   • Quantitative literacy
   • Information literacy
   • Teamwork and problem solving
3. Personal and Social Responsibility, Including:
   • Civic knowledge and engagement—local and global
   • Intercultural knowledge and competence
   • Ethical reasoning and action
   • Foundations and skills for lifelong learning
4. Integrative and Applied Learning
   •Gained through synthesis and advanced accomplishment across general         and specialized studies.

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Zayed University in the United Arab Emirates, has had the following learning outcomes since 2000. These outcomes, the university says “frame the unit's mission to prepare students for the 21st century.” 

• Critical Thinking and Quantitative Reasoning
• Global Awareness
• Information Literacy
• Language
• Leadership
• Technological Literacy

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As is easy to see, there are very few of what are cited as 21^st century skills that were not also yesterday’s skills.

All three passages above could easily be picked apart by any teacher or administrator in higher education. Things that seem obvious:

• Skills such as critical thinking and problem solving, communication, collaboration, creativity and innovation are skills that were taught during most of the 20th century. They are not new.

• If employees need to think critically, solve problems, innovate, collaborate, and communicate more effectively, then higher education has always been the place to go to develop those competencies.

• Calling skills 21st century challenges doesn’t mean they were not also 19^th and 20th century challenges.

• Couching skills as learning outcomes does not necessarily make those skills new.

Now it is feasible that perhaps teaching the skills of tomorrow means teaching the technology of tomorrow. But, the jury is still out on exactly how much technology actually helps learning. Technology does assist teaching and has a lot of bells and whistles and seems to make things easier much of the time, and it is very cool, but how much it actually assists the learning process is largely often dependent on the skills of the particular professor. And, many times, students are more adept than faculty with new technology.

The point here is that skills haven’t really changed. The technology has changed. The faculty has changed. The techniques have changed. But tomorrow’s skills are yesterday’s skills and as long as we’re teaching them, have taught them, and will teach them, that’s okay?

After all, since we’ve always been doing it, we’re pretty good at it.

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO….

Does your department celebrate the birthdays of faculty and staff members? Perhaps there is a cake at lunch, or at least an e-card, or some other acknowledgment of the day.

And if your department doesn’t do that, why not? I’ve seen it done in programs with up to 25 faculty members. And it was almost always a cake. It makes a difference and in its own small way improves morale.

But that’s not the point of this post. The point is why not also acknowledge student birthdays?

You have three types of students in your courses. Majors, minors and those who aren’t majors or minors. Why not, in each course (assuming there are not more than 30 to 40 students), ask each student to indicate the date of his or her birth. And then, on that day, send them an e-card. A nice e-card. Simply to acknowledge the day.

And perhaps, at the beginning of each week, note in class those whose birthdays are that week. It takes less than a minute. And what about those whose birthdays are not during the semester? Well, yes, they are just out of luck. This is, after all, not an activity to get obsessed about.

But there is one step further to go.

Get the department administrative assistant to keep a list of the birthdays of majors and minors and have the department chair or the Dean send those students a short e-mail wishing them a happy birthday.

Ridiculous and foolish, you say. No, not at all.

Departments and professors should want the program and the people (especially the administrators) to appear human and real to students.

There’s enough depersonalization in higher education. Why not bring a bit of humanness into the equation?

 

SHOW ME, DON'T TELL ME

Show Don’t Tell is a song by Rush with a chorus that goes:

(Show me, don't tell me)
You've figured out the score
(Show me, don't tell me)
I've heard it all before
(Show me, don't tell me)
I don't care what you say
(Show me, don't tell me)

It’s an anthem that profs should have printed on their t-shirts, tattooed on their arms, put on plaques and hung in their offices, and memorized and sung daily in the ivory towers of academe.

Because too often professors do only tell. Then they tell some more. Then they break students into groups and then tell them what they did after they did it. They give tests based on what they told students. They have students read textbooks and other readings that tell them things. They show PowerPoint presentations that use words and charts and graphs that tell things.

It becomes all about telling…and not about showing.

Some disciplines are obviously much better at showing than others. Math profs do show how to do problems. Science profs do demonstrate how to do experiments.

But too many professors don’t show the procedures and thought processes and actual personal examples of how to accomplish tasks they ask their students to do.

In a public speaking class the prof should, in fact, demonstrate how she would go about planning, outlining and delivering the kind of speech she expects her students to deliver.

In an English class, the prof should actually read a short story to the class, showing how she would interpret as she goes, how her thought processes work, how she would analyze the story, summarize the story, and then she should hand out an example of what she would write about the story.

In a history class, the instructor must demonstrate the ways he learned to understand and to interpret and to connect and to love historic events and people.

In any class that involves writing, the prof must show detailed processes and examples of how a writer achieves the final product.

The examples could go on and on. But the point is that a faculty member needs to show his students in front of his students how to do what he expects of his students.  

And sometimes it means showing the fear he once had at doing what he is asking his students to do. Sometimes it means showing vulnerability. And sometimes it means letting students see the prof try to get it and see how the prof struggled sometimes to do that.

Telling is unconvincing. Showing is everything.  

 

TECHNOLOGY, TECHNOLOGY EVERYWHERE, BUT NARY A PIECE THAT WORKS

•How does this Smart Board work?
    •Why won’t the computer projector come on?
        •Half the clickers just do not function.  Why?
            •The PowerPoint presentation simply will not load on this computer.
                •Why does this classroom not have Wi-Fi?

Why…why…why?

My most recent job was at an international university. During my years there the university built an entirely new campus outside the city to replace an older, smaller campus in the center of the city.

The new campus is pictured to the left.

Yes, it’s monstrous, ultra-modern, with a mall, a huge library, a conference center and many classrooms, auditoriums, conference rooms and offices with all the technology a teacher could need or want.

Yes, all the technology a teacher could need or want. Which brings me to the purpose of this post.

No matter how much technology exists, and how new it is, if it doesn’t work, or if the teacher doesn’t know how to use it, then a teacher can look like a fool in front of the class. Of course the prof can smile politely as he/she waits for a tech person to come and help. Or the prof can laugh nervously as a student or two or three try to help make it all work.

Meanwhile the class clock is ticking, no learning is occurring, nothing is happening and, honestly, a little of the je ne sais quoi of being the teacher is lost.

And the more classroom technology there is, the more problems there are to occur, and the more alternative plans must be made for when the technology doesn’t work.

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At the campus pictured here the problem at the beginning was that the technology often did not work. Then it did work, but faculty had never been taught properly how to use it. Whole class periods were lost way too many times and frustration was initially rampant.

As profs, it IS important to go over the technology before class begins and to do it IN THE CLASSROOM in which the technology will be used. It IS important to know you know how to use it. And, like any other form of teaching, it IS vital to make it all seamlessly integrate with your content and your style.

It’s also important to have some kind of alternative plan if things simply don’t work. I know that’s not always possible, but some strategy is necessary other than standing there endlessly waiting for someone or trying to figure out why something is not working.

These are problems that did not occur 30 years ago because overhead projectors, slide projectors and blackboards rarely failed to function, and if they did, more chalk and spare bulbs were usually readily available.

Poor use of technology can ruin teaching, can ruin the rhythm of a class presentation, and can be a genuine impediment to classroom culture.

Poor performing technology is a fact of life today and that poor performance must be anticipated, work-arounds must be charted, and quick thinking and quick action must be mapped.

It’s not your grandmother’s classroom anymore.

And the more advanced understanding and foresight that exist about that, the more successful teaching in the 21^st century will be.

 

BUT IT’S NOT MY JOB. I’M AN ADMINISTRATOR.

Disconnected. Out of touch. Distant. Not interested.

Does that describe a college administrator? Not if you’re a faculty member, I hope.

But if you’re a student…maybe…in fact, much more likely.

So what? They’re administrators. It’s not their job to interact with students unless, usually, there are disciplinary situations or award presentations.

No. No. No. Not true.

A big problem with too many administrators is that they almost never interact with students on a regular basis.

But, you say, administrators are too busy...meetings, governance, meetings, more meetings. Just too busy.

Again, not true.

• Not too busy to stop by the cafeteria and have lunch once a week with a miscellaneous group of students.

• Not too busy to attend a student organization meeting now and then.

• Not too busy to walk around the campus or the library or the student union or the rec center a couple times a week.

• Not too busy to simply be visible to, friendly with, interested in and attentive to students for some more-than-minimal amount of time every week.

From president to department chairs, it’s worth the time to be involved with the paying “customers.”

 

REACHING BY LOVE. TEACHING BY LOVE. REACHING BY FEAR. TEACHING BY FEAR.

If teachers do not have students in the palms of their hands, if they are not mentally in tune with them, not their friends, if they are not aligned with the same cosmos, then nothing positive will ever happen in a classroom and learning will never occur.

Or…

If teachers scare the he## out of their students, make them know that they will fail if they do not work harder than they’ve ever worked before, make them adhere to every minute detail of the syllabus, and rarely utter a positive word to them, then pure panic will force learning to happen.

I remember one prof I taught with. She maintained that students learned best by being “loved” into learning. Positive feedback, absolute friendliness, mutual course decisions, pizza now and then, and virtually no negativity ever were her “professorial” styles.

And I remember another colleague who taught by fear and fright. His exams were the hardest. He never forgave and rarely bent the rules or compromised on a position. Students truly feared him, and the course he taught was required, which made it all the worse.

But both these profs were admired. Because they both connected with their students. They each found a way to reach their students. They used what they did in the way they did it to make that key connection, to get their students attention in a way that made sense to them and made students truly feel that what was being done and accomplished was 100 percent worth it.

Being nice is not always easy. But it does make a course enjoyable and a prof likable. Everyone likes nice, even if that nice is not equated with easy. Nice just has to feel to the learner like the learning is worth it.

Being the hardest teacher in the world is a bit more difficult to succeed at. But as long as you are only generating demand and intensity and not hatred, you can easily succeed by making it all seem relevant and life changing and inspired and, of course, worth it.

Often, the poorest teachers are those that teach by the seat of their pants. Some weeks they are the caring, loving prof and the next week they are the devil. One week they will compromise on many things. Next week there are no compromises on anything.

Anyone who teaches for any length of time knows that it’s unevenness that results in the greatest course confusion and the greatest degree of student unhappiness and discontent.

If you want learning to be consistent, then you, the professor, have to be consistent in how you teach.

 

FIRE, THE UNIVERSE, AND YOUR STUDENTS

Today is the day to ask your students:

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Are you writing the future

in letters of fire?

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And then you actually talk about it.

Then you tell them:

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We are here to make

a dent in the universe!
(Steve Jobs)

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And then you explain how and why you want to do that

And why they should want to do that.

And yes, then the class period is over…

And not a minute has been wasted…not a single minute.