Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Personal and Learning Cost of Paradigms

I keep pondering the issue of the Instruction Paradigm versus the Learning Paradigm in Higher Education. In this vein, I was reading an article by Jane Tompkins, an English professor. She writes about her own movement away from the traditional teaching model in the classroom to a student-engaged model, but she made this change after a moment of personal epiphany, not because she was exposed to discussions about the Learning Paradigm. Tompkins describes, and discredits, the instruction or "knowledge transmission" model that has been heavily criticized. She states that few professors endorse such a model of teaching today. Then she notes, "But what we do have is something no less coercive, no less destructive of creativity and self-motivated learning", and she calls this the "performance model" (p.24).

Tompkins admits that she has, essentially, been lying to herself for years, telling herself that she had been concerned with helping students understand Melville or deconstruction when, in fact, she has been concerned all along with demonstrating to students her intelligence, her knowledge as an expert, and how well she is prepared for class. In other words, she has been performing for students so that they will have a good opinion of her rather than actually being concerned with helping them learn. She theorizes that she, like many academics, developed this intuitive approach partly due to organizational structure but also due to her childhood. She notes that most professors were good "performers" at home and at school growing up, imitating adult behaviors in order to receive praise and feel good. She posits that this emotional trajectory, a fear of disapproval, continues into our careers and shapes our desires for both peer and student approbation and shapes teaching behaviors. She also acknowledges that a fear of pedagogy was a powerful socializing force in graduate school where she learned to look down on schools of education as the "lowest of the low", the place where only those who couldn't really cut it in Higher Education were able to find a position. This bias against pedagogy and teaching theory began to hamper her, and she slowly came to realize it. "In this respect, teaching was exactly like sex to me -- something you weren't supposed to talk about or focus on in any way but that you were supposed to be able to do properly when the time came" (p.25). She then describes how she began changing her courses to shift responsibility for presenting course content to students and how this dramatically changed the energy level in the classroom, invigorated her own teaching, and led to gains in student learning. She concludes by noting that "what we do in the classroom is our politics" and that if we are, in actuality, focused on performance, then we are leaving a similar legacy in the minds of our students.

I found this article thought provoking and useful. I know that in my own teaching, I had to overcome my own pleasure at telling stories that I believe communicated important truths, that I had to learn to give up the stage, the performance, in order to put students on the stage so they could learn their own truths. In working with other faculty, they have shared similar stories, so I believe that Tompkins is onto something important here. At the same time, and she acknowledges this, her own story also points out the very real nature of the Instruction Paradigm. Part of the desire for approval is driven, in academics, by fears regarding contract renewal and tenure; part of the approbation we seek from peers is practical and tied to these issues which are part and parcel of the Instruction Paradigm College. Assistant professors worry about student ratings and for good reason; tenure committees in the past have made decisions largely based on student input, partly because there is usually no clear definition of effective teaching or effective measurements of student learning outcomes because the institution is focused on delivering instruction. There is a very real, a very practical, cost that is personal to all of us as faculty, and to our students in terms of lost opportunities for learning. The solution is to shift our focus from ourselves, away from performance, and to focus on how to help students learn, and how to organize our institution to accomplish that mission.
-- Anton Tolman

Tompkins, J. (Aug, 1991). Teaching Like It Matters. Lingua Franca, pp.24 - 27.

Monday, February 16, 2009

Seeing the Invisible

It is an axiom of psychotherapy that the client cannot change something they are unaware of. If the client is not aware of their own motives, emotions, and thoughts, they have no clear "targets" that they can focus on to produce changes and improvements in their own lives. Put another way, the fish is unaware of the water because it surrounds them, has always been there, and is just a part of their environment, something they are unaware of.

Similarly, faculty are surrounded and immersed in what John Tagg (2003) calls an organizational paradigm -- the Instruction paradigm, to be precise. This paradigm has been around for a long time and has shaped the structure and function of our university and most universities and colleges across the country. We are so used to it that we think this is reality, instead of remembering that this structure, this way of thinking, was a deliberate artifact created by human beings. That means it can be changed. However, it is hard to change something when we are unaware of what it is or how it operates. Barr and Tagg (1995) and Tagg (2003) as well as others (e.g. Weimer, 2002) have described the impact of this Instruction Paradigm and how it pervades and shapes all aspects of how faculty work and how they interact with students. I will be writing more about this paradigm and the need to overthrow it in future blogs, but for now, let me give you a couple of examples taken from Tagg (2003).

1) The IP emerged when colleges were undergoing rapid growth and needed a national framework for transfer of credits and similar course design across the country. This led to the development of the standard credit = 1 hour of class time per week. Tagg then starts to describe the implications of this -- quoting Peter Ewell: "degree levels in this country have become almost exclusively defined in terms of the hours of classroom time required to complete them." Note that this definition has nothing to do with student learning; degrees are awarded mostly for sitting in a classroom and turning in assignments on time.
2) Although some faculty worry about UVU becoming a "corporate university", it has already happened and long ago. Tagg writes that colleges have come to be "factories for the production of full-time equivalent students, transcript-generating machines."
3) The core of the Instruction paradigm college is a view of teaching as the transmission of information from faculty to students. Biggs (1999) stated it this way: "Teaching rooms and media are specifically designed for one-way delivery. A teacher is the knowledgeable expert, the sage-on-the-stage, who expounds the information the students are to absorb and report back accurately, according to their ability, their motivation, even their ethnicity.....The curriculum is a list of content that, once expounded from the podium, have been 'covered'....The language is about what the teacher does, not what the student does...a quantitative way of thinking about learning and teaching."

If we are serious here at UVU about student engagement and student learning, then students, faculty, and administration all need to become more aware of the Instruction Paradigm so that we can see the invisible and work to counteract it.