Tuesday 1 May 2018

teaching naked: the naked curriculum

I think this 10th chapter is my favourite of the book. It is written with an immediacy that demands our attention: we know how to teach better than we are - so what is stopping us from designing our learning experiences so that they best promote student learning?

It is a frightening prospect for me because I learned and was successful using the old passive lecture model that Bowen decries. Of course, he understands that sometimes lecturing is required to clarify a misunderstanding, but he is ardent in his assertion that all surveys of post-secondary teaching indicate we are lecturing too much relative to what the pedagogical research indicates. So why do we do that? Why do most of us continue to lecture despite the evidence to the contrary of what constitutes the best learning environment for our students?

There are myriad reasons.

One is that to redevelop our teaching approach is too costly. Most faculty evaluation committees (FEC) award merit, tenure, and promotion on the basis of research not teaching. Which is unfortunate because teaching is a scholarly activity. It is certainly not a scholarly activity when all we do is teach how we were taught without keeping abreast of the research evidence for how to improve learning outcomes. Why are we adamant in basing our research programs on published evidence but not require the same of our teaching? Why do many of us assume that we already know how to teach best when we were never actually trained how to teach? Possibly because we were successful being taught under those conditions. However, what many are demanding now is that we design the learning environment so that more students can be successful.

However, our FECs do not award sabbaticals for redesigning courses or programs even though such a redesign would require research. Teaching is often not viewed as a scholarly activity and hence is not rewarded as such.

So that is Bowen's take on transforming our in-class learning experiences by using active learning rather than passive lecturing. This chapter also discusses how to redesign curricula - something in which my campus is currently engaged. Bowen makes some bold suggestions about not confusing the package with the product. Learning is the product, not the course or the degree. Our credit system assumes that time spent equals learning. We all know that is not true. Many students earn course credit without the learning sticking. Bowen suggests that using a cookie-cutter approach to all disciplines and programs may not make sense. Maybe what constitutes a program in the humanities is different from what it is in the sciences or creative arts. Perhaps units of learning are different. Maybe professional programs are best mastered in smaller concentrated units where students take one or two courses over six weeks, whereas others require integration of multiples ideas over time and thus requires 3 or four courses completed simultaneously over 15 weeks. We don't need to assume that the same programs require the same curricular structure.

A point Bowen makes that has particular resonance for me is to scaffold learning over the time that students are learning. Educational programs need to be designed so that students' learning and skill mastery are developed to increasing levels of proficiency as they progress through their education years. This requires a different level of expectation of students' writing and thinking in their first and second years relative to their third and fourth (or fifth) years. How do we scaffold that into our courses? It means that there does need to be some linearity in course sequencing: students cannot take any course at any time in any sequence. Skills are developed sequentially over time. There is a foundational knowledge that students must first master so that they have something to draw upon when they are critically thinking, researching, or communicating.

So Bowen throws out some suggestions to see what might stick as colleges and universities try to determine how to recreate how learning occurs on our campuses in the midst of the myriad of online learning resources. As he has argued before in the book, faculty need to view themselves as curators of content and coaches of skill development. We do not need to tell students what to learn. We simply need to point them where the resources are located and then hold them accountable in our classrooms where we can then coach our students as they actively learn how to apply their learning. Of course, this will require the occasional mini-lecture in order to clarify student misconceptions. But most of our time should be spent in class engaging the students in the application of their learning in order to provide them with the opportunity to develop their thinking, researching, and communicating skills. And of course, the balance between telling students what to learn vs students applying what they are learning will depend on the level of student learning ability, on the level of the particular course, or the demands of a particular discipline.

I very much appreciate Bowen's suggestion that FECs and dept chairs provide space for failure as faculty try to implement new teaching strategies and curricular structures. We always tell our students that the best teacher is failure. Why do we not do the same for instructors as they develop their ability to teach? Why do we not do the same for programs as they field test different program structures? Bowen suggests that perhaps we need to approach changing our learning environments in terms of smaller incremental changes rather than large punctuations. That way if something does not work it is easier to backpedal and try something different. This is certainly what I have read in the SoTL literature - don't change everything in our teaching and learning all at the same time. Make the change in a manageable way that permits reassessment. The suggestions in Teaching Naked amount to a culture change in teaching and learning. And changing any culture takes time - if it happens too quickly there will be resistance and burnout.

Resources

Bligh, D. A. (1998). Evidence of what lectures achieve. In What’s the use of lectures? (5th ed., pp. 10–23). Exeter: Intellect.

Bowen, J. A. (2012). The naked curriculum. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 10. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 243-266.

Ellis, C. (2010, November 16). Tweckling, iconoclasm and lecturing as a normative discourse: Reflections on two ALT-C keynotes. cathellis13.

Freeman, S., Eddy, S. L., McDonough, M., Smith, M. K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M. P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(23), 8410–5.

Haave, N. (2017). Assessing teaching to empower learning. Collected Essays on Learning and Teaching, 10, iii–ix.

Moran, L. (2015, January 11). Why can’t we teach properly?

Stains, M., Harshman, J., Barker, M. K., Chasteen, S. V., Cole, R., DeChenne-Peters, S. E., … Young, A. M. (2018). Anatomy of STEM teaching in North American universities. Science, 359(6383), 1468–1470.

Weimer, M. (2013). Taking a developmental approach. In Learner-centered teaching: Five key changes to practice (2nd ed., pp. 218–238). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint.