By's Musings

Higher Education

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Teamwork is Critical: Learning with and from Others

One of the blessings of my current physical situation  has been the opportunity to nventory anbooks on the d catalogue more than forty years of  collected files and academy. While working full-time I never had  the time to review all the files and books that I was collecting. These files  and books were just piling up in my university offices and in my home offices  and the storage areas of our homes. I had some idea of fwhat I possessed, but I  didn’t know for sure. This led to duplication of files and  books. As I have discovered  these duplicates, I have given them to individuals who can ake good use of  them.

However, the process of inventorying and cataloguing  has also created a problem. In Chinese philosophy, this dichotomy, where  opposite but complementary items form a complete whole, is known as yin and yang. The same situation is  viewed by some people as a problem and by others as an opportunity. A modern western  idiom attempting to express this is the question, “Do you see the glass as  half-full, or half-empty?” I must admit that as I have inventoried and  catalogued my collection of files and books, I have experienced both feelings.  At times I am elated at the long hidden jewels of ideas and thoughts that I am  finding in my files and books. As I consider these ideas I am easily distracted  and start trying to track down more about the given topic. I find myself  creating more files to add to my already abundant collection. When I try to  return to where I was when I was distracted, I can’t find my place or I can’t get back into the flow of things. I am pleased that I have been reintroduced to  many ideas that I had abandoned. However, I am frustrated that I can’t excavate  around these ideas more fully. I am almost convinced that a life-time of  thinking will take a second lifetime to explicate it.

One of the dangers when an academic picks up a book or  an article is the temptation to scan it. Whenever I start to scan a book or an  article, I find it almost impossible to put it down. It happened again and  again as I went through my books and files. At one point, I came across a  somewhat dated book with the intriguing title of Rural Development and Higher  Education: the Linking of Community and Method, published by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. While  I have been laid up, I have been reading and thinking about the development of American Higher Education. Recently, I was reading about the effect that the Morrill Acts and the establishment of Land Grant Colleges had on the overall development of rural America. My curiosity got the better of me, and I started  scanning the Kellogg book. I was trapped. Soon I found myself reading the last  chapter which was a summary of the nine Kellogg funded projects that were outlined in the book. The first section of this chapter was entitled, “Learning from others.” It began with a great story about “a city fellow who bought a thriving farm that had a new brood of baby chicks. A week later all the chicks were dead.” At this point the city fellow went to the neighboring farmer to find out what had happened and if there was anything he could do to prevent  this from happening again when he bought some new chicks. The neighbor in all  innocence asked the city fellow, “What did you feed them?” The city fellow was shocked and he stammered, “Feed them. I thought the old hen nursed them.”

The conclusion of this story is obvious. If you don’t  know what you’re doing, it can be very dangerous to make faulty assumptions. In  the setting of this book, the authors continued by suggesting that university faculty can’t hope to deal successfully with rural development if they presuppose full knowledge of the local needs, wants, and conditions of any given  location and any given group of people. This led to the standard operating procedure within all Kellogg funded  projects of forming a citizens’ advisory committee at the very beginning of the  project. Everyone was constantly reminded that “Teamwork is critical.”

In higher education this is not only true when we are  working on projects outside the institution, such as rural, urban, or  industrial development. It is also true when we are working on a project inside  the institution with our own students. How easy is it to assume we know what people  need and what they already know? We can save a lot of time by just plowing in  and developing assistance programs for them. Why should we ask students what they need? How absurd, they are only students! How many colleges and universities have set up student assistance  programs to help students and find these programs don’t address the needs of  their students?

Today almost everyone gives lip service to the adage  that cooperation is the best policy. People know that generally you’ll get  better results if you involve other people, seek their advice and help, early  in a process. People are more willing to help and accept change if they have  ownership in the process.

If teamwork was the most important lesson that the  Kellogg Foundation learned from these projects, there was one more lesson that  was a close second. This second lesson was that every project needs a project  director who possesses the appearance of neutrality, “the statesmanship of a  Disraeli, the leadership abilities of a wagon master, the selflessness of a  missionary, and the energies of a long-distance runner.” These are great  lessons for any organization to learn and master.

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Students Are Paid To Not Attend College

The Chronicle of Higher Education posted an e-version of an article written by Ben WIeder, entitled Thiel Fellowship Pays 24 Talented Students $100,000 Not to Attend College. The Thiel in the title is Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal. The $100,000 Fellowships are meant to encourage 24 very talented students to spend two years developing their business ideas instead.  The whole idea has created a stir in higher education circles.

The whole article may be found at http://chronicle.com/article/Thiel-Fellowship-Pays-24/127622/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

One of the fellowship winners highlighted in the article is Jim Danielson, who was an electrical-engineering student at Purdue. Mr Danielson is quoted as saying he “learned more about his field on his own than in the classroom.”

This comment from Mr. Daniels  reminded me of a portion of Mike Rose’s story, that he tells in his autobiographic book “Lives on the Boundary.” Mr. Rose’s related an incident from his graduate education in creative writing when he became overwhelmed with hour after hours, day after days of studying in the UCLA library, reading essay after essay about the poems they were reading in class. He finally gathered up all his courage and went to see the chairman of the creative writing program. Mr. Rose told the chair that we was learning more about the poems they were reading and studying in class by writing his own poetry. The chair shook his head,smiled and said in effect, “That’s not the way we study poetry here.”  Some institutions will permit and encourage students to learn by doing, others do everything they can to discourage that type of learning activity.

I find this ironic since Aristotle said all free men should be educated in the three forms of knowledge, theorica, poeises and praxis. Theorica was the reflective contemplation of knowledge received through all of our senses (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching); poeises was the production of objects of value (such as writing poems or painting a picture–poeises is the word from which we get our word poetry); praxis was learning by doing (praxis is the word from which we get our word practice – More than once people have said the only way to learn to teach is to teach, and that you really never learn medicine until you practice medicine.) It seems that poeises and praxis are both learning by doing. What’s the difference? I believe the primary difference is that the goal of poeises is to produce a product of value. It is to create an inanimate object of value; while the goal of praxis to enable the individual to affect changes in people whether oneself or others.

In many of our institutions, particularly liberal arts institutions, the primary, if not the only emphasis, seems to be on theorica. We also tend to restrict our sensory intake to seeing and hearing.  In Ancient Greece, the full orbed theorica was held up as the pinnacle of knowledge. However, beyond a rudimentary introduction to it, further study in  it  was reserved only for superior students, the best of the best. Does this have any implications for our higher education system of today?

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Relief Through Reading – Part II

For my first excursion after many years into what I thought would be recreational reading, I chose a book I saw on the New York Times Best Sellers List that sounded interesting. It was a novel by Emma Donoghue, entitled “Room.”

If recreational reading is reading for fun and enjoyment, it is hard for me to call “Room” recreational reading. However, I have to label it recreational reading in my taxonomy, because it definitely isn’t informational or work-related, at least at first glance. I will explain this a little later in this posting.

After getting started on the book, I found myself having a hard time putting it down. I found myself mimicking my wife, reading for hour after hour, trying to either get through the book or at least to a good stopping point. When I finished the book, I returned the favor to my wife by telling her, “You’ve really got to read this book. It will disturb you, but you will like it.”

Since we had gotten the book from our local library and there was a long list of people who had reserved it. My wife picked it up immediately and finished it before we had to return the book to the library. My wife admitted that it did disturb her, but that she liked it so much she recommended the book to her book club as a future choice for a book of the month.

The story line of the book revolves around a five-year-old boy named Jack who has lived his entire life in an 11×11 room with his mother. They are captives of a deranged individual who abducted Jack’s mother when she was a teenager and imprisoned her in this specially constructed room that had one door and only one window, a skylight. For more than eight years ‘Ol Nick’ would come in the room at least once a week to bring food and molest the frightened young woman who had no way of escape. Because of these sexual advances, two babies are born in the room. Only Jack survives and we pick up the story when he is five-years old with all the normal curiosity of a young boy, but no knowledge of the “outside world” other than what he can see through a skylight, a black and white TV with limited reception, and a few National Geographic books. ‘Ol Nick’ knows of his existence but Jack’s Ma shields Jack from ‘Ol Nick’ by making Jack hide in a wardrobe every time ‘Old Nick’ comes into the room. When Jack starts asking Ma about the outside world, Ma begins concocting a plan of escape.

As I continued to reflect on the book and its story, I began to discover applications of the story to higher education and to my life. I kept finding rooms that had been constructed to imprison people and keep them from fully developing and enjoying the outside world. Most of those rooms were not physical rooms, but they were prisons all the same. In the posting by Finding Strength to Stand Again, entitled, “Hitting my head on Glass Ceilings” : http://findingstrengthtostandagain.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/hitting-my-head-on-glass-ceilings/,

we see rooms that have been constructed to keep those people with challenges “where they belong.”  In her Glass Ceilings posting, the author talks about how she has been shut out of employment because she is different. She has a disability.

These rooms are difficult to see, hence the name “Glass Ceilings” They are metaphysical rooms, but they are just as real as the room ‘Ol Nick’ used to imprison Jack and his Ma. I know because I have experienced several of these rooms recently. The law says people who are aged challenged and physically challenged are members of protected classes in terms of employment. However, if I were to submit my resume for a job opening that I was perfectly qualified to fill five years ago, I wouldn’t even get an interview today. I know because three years ago I was looking for a new job as a chief academic officer at a college or university. Even though I had an outstanding resume from my 40 years of work in higher education, and was well-known in the Christian college and higher education assessment circles. I had a difficult time convincing some institutions to even give me an interview. I know that my age was a problem. When I finally did get two interviews, one of the first questions that I was asked at both institutions was, “How long are you planning to work?” I told people who I could not promise anything, but that I planned to work for another seven to ten years. At that time, I felt that was quite doable. I felt good and I had maintained a rigorous physical exercise routine for more than 50 years. One of the great advantages of working in higher education is the availability of a gym. Until my knees finally gave out and I couldn’t find a surgeon who would operate on them for a fourth time, I played an hour of competitive basketball five days each week. In life after basketball, to keep up my workouts, I switched to a recumbent stationary bike. In my first year on the bike at age 62, I racked up more than 10,000 miles pedaling more than 30 miles per day.

Paraphrasing the 1970’s hit of the Five Man Electric Band, “Rooms, rooms. Everywhere rooms; keeping me in my place; playing with my mind,” I can hear a new acquaintance that I have come into contact with through the web, say right now, “Be careful. You’re heading into dangerous territory. You are trying to stretch an analogy or metaphor too far.” ‘Ol Nick’ was imprisoning Ma for his own evil intents. People in higher education are not imprisoning people for evil intents. I concur with that. However, to the victims, the results are similar.

I believe that by playing off the metaphor of “room as a prison,” I am using what we know from learning theory. People learn more when faced with a compelling problem and can connect the new problem to something with which they are already familiar. I understand the concept of a room. The compelling problem is looking for a means of escape. It makes sense to me.

In Part III of Reading for Relief, I will explore the ideas of rooms and means of escape in relationship to higher education.

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Michigan Community Colleges Make Push for State Lawmakers to Allow Them to Offer Some Four-Year Programs

A recent article in the Jackson Citizen Patriot was picked up by and featured in the February 23, 2011 e-edition of University Business: http://www.universitybusiness.com/newsletter/daily/dailynewssummary.aspx?newscontenttype=1&newsid=42 .

This article sets the stage for an upcoming fight in the Michigan legislature.

What’s at stake in this battle?  The answer depends upon who is answering. Four-year institutions will argue that academic quality and integrity are at stake. They will argue that two-year institutions are not equipped or staffed to offer “legitimate” four-year programs. The four-year institutions will argue that four-year programs are our forte. That’s what we do. Shouldn’t students get the best education available?

That last question is an interesting question, because students will agree and then say the education that four-year institutions are offering are not available to them. The JCP interviews one such student. Her statements are telling.

Registered nurse, Stephanie Palmer wants to earn a bachelor’s degree in nursing at Jackson Community College. What are the three reasons she gives? 1) Convenience: It’s close to her home.  2) Cost: It’s…”less expensive than a four-year college.” 3) Flexible schedule: JCC offers greater scheduling flexibility for working parents like her.

At this point, the four-year institutions jump up and ask the public:”When you’re sick, do you want a nurse treating you who hasn’t received the best education possible?” I’m sorry but this is in no way meant to disparage Stephanie or any other registered nurse. But all registered nurses have already taken the required clinical courses and passed all the licensure tests to permit them to practice nursing. I would dare say that if you have visited a clinic within the past five years, you have been treated by at least one registered nurse, and that you probably didn’t notice any difference in your treatment.

So why would Stephanie or any other registered nurse want to get a four-year BSN degree? The BSN opens new opportunities to nurses, including specialty training, higher pay and more responsibilities. Many hospitals hire registered nurses but restrict their duties. A recent study by done by the American Association of Colleges of Nursing reported that surgical patients treated by more nurses with bachelor’s degrees had a greater chance of survival than those treated by fewer bachelor trained nurses. Results like this have led some hospitals to require the BSN as a prerequisite for service on post-operative patients.

I have spent more than forty-years at four different institutions overseeing and studying non-traditional adult education programs along with the traditional educational programs at those institutions. During those years, the three reasons given by Stephanie were always the primary reasons adults gave for selecting non-traditional educational programs over traditional academic programs. Interestingly, at one of those institutions, the three primary reasons given by commuters for selecting the on-line alternative over a residential program were: 1) Convenience; 2) Cost; 3) Flexibility of scheduling. For both categories of student, non-traditional learners and commuters, these three characteristics outweighed any perceived difference in program quality when it came to program choice.

The next three most frequent reasons given by adults in program selection were 4) Program meets students’ needs. The curriculum and examples are related to what the students do or want to do. The students see the immediate usefulness of this learning. The students can apply the learning immediately. 5) Program uses pedagogical methods that the students understand and help the students learn. 6) Prospective students believed that the alternative programs provided excellent learning. The students and others who have gone through the program have received work place or other external recognition for things learned through the program.

Four-year programs respond with comments stressing the real worth of a program is not immediate gratification, but long-term usefulness and that students are not the best judges of long-term usefulness. That may well be the case but the four-year institutions have not done enough to convince students of these arguments.

The one argument that is almost never heard in public venues is that if enough students switch to the two-year institutions or alternative learning style programs, the traditional four-year programs will be hurt financially. For public institutions, the second biggest source of income is from the state, county or city, and that is currently based on enrollment. The more students that go elsewhere, the less money these institutions receive. Generally tuition is the main source of income in all institutions, and the fewer the number of students, the less income is available for anything the institutions want or need to do, such as hire or pay faculty. The fewer faculty members hired and the less they are paid, the more unhappy they will be.

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Distance Eduction Begins at Twelve Feet

Most people think of distance education requires instructor and students to be physically separated by time, distance or both. I would like to offer a new definition that permits instructors and students to be in the same room at the same time. Under my definition, in addition to being separated in time and space, the separation may also include psychological separation, also known as cognitive distance. I have indicated this by suggesting that this psychological separation can typically begin at twelve feet. Why twelve feet? Twelve feet is the usual distance between the teacher’s station and the second row of seats in a typical lecture style classroom with tablet-arm chairs. Many instructors find it difficult to generate and keep cognitive connection with students outside the front row of a class. Most instructors have found that if a class has “open seating, without assigned seats,” the students who sit in the front row are usually very interested in the class. Students who are less interested will tend to sit further back in the classroom. This means instructors will have to work harder to keep those students connected, interested and learning in the class.

Most surveys of faculty and students indicate that the lecture modality is the most used course delivery system today. There are other modalities, such as discussion, seminar classes and blended modalities that are gaining in popularity, but lectures are still number 1. In the 1970’s, surveys of students and faculty suggested that in as many as 90% of all courses, the predominant teaching mode was the lecture. Even with the emphases of the 1990’s on active learning and using teaching styles geared to student learning styles, as late as 2000, surveys of students and faculty were showing that still in approximately 75% of all courses, the dominant teaching mode was the lecture.

A straight lecture modality can be characterized as a “jug and mugs” approach. In such an approach, the instructor brings a jug that is full of ideas or content to the classroom and has the students hold out their individual mugs, and the instructor fills them up from the big jug. It has derisively been described as the transfers of knowledge from the instructor’s notes to the students’ notes without touching the minds of either. If we really consider the operational aspects of this approach, there is no necessity for the instructor to be physically present. Why have faculty remained loyal to the lecture? I believe the lecture is the most popular modality because instructors are most comfortable with this style. It was the way they were taught and the way they learned. They are just modeling what their instructors and mentors did. Plus, there are few rewards to experiment with different modalities. Instructors have little or no access to developmental resources to do something different. Short of no preparation, where the instructor goes into class and “wings it,” the lecture is the easiest modality for which to prepare and to use. It is hard work trying to come up with learning artifacts or objects to engage students in compelling problems that direct their learning in other ways toward the desired goal of learning specific things or ideas.

The “jug and mugs” pedagogy grows out of a “tabula rasa” or “blank slate” approach to teaching, where the teacher has all of the knowledge and the students possess blank slates that the teacher then writes on. This model of education is not congruent with the best of today’s or even yesterday’s theories of learning. From brain and learning theory research, we know that students are more apt to remember and understand things in which they have a real interest and things of which they have had some experience. We have to link new knowledge to current knowledge and we need a reason to do so. Brain research also suggests that we are more able to make connections if we perform activities related to the item or idea. Confucius knew this 2500 years ago when he said, “If I read or hear something, I forget it, if I see it, I remember it. If I do it, I understand it.” Current research with well-functioning adults has found that after three months, these adults retain only 10% of what they read, 20% of what they hear, 30% of what they see, 50 % of what they see and hear, and 70% of what they say or write. These are great rules of thumb to use in the preparation of lesson plans and presentations. If you can involve the audience in the topic, they will have a much greater chance of remembering what you were trying to say. However, the research goes on to show that these adults will retain more than 90% of what they say while doing something that illustrates it. This should become our guiding force in the preparation of learning assignments.

Dr. William Pfohl, former president of the National Association of School Psychologists in discussing how adults and children learn has said, “The best process to ensure learning take places is to guarantee the individual sees it, hears it, and then gets some experience using it. And that way it’s most likely to stick.”

If distance learning begins at twelve feet because it is difficult to connect with students in the second row when they are in the same room, then wouldn’t that suggest that distance learning via other means is impossible?  I don’t think so. There is a whole body of literature that speaks to engaging students via distance learning technologies. Conversely, if we can engage students that are hundreds of miles away, why can’t we engage students, that are physically in our presence in the same classroom? We can and must do a better job in both venues.

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Moody’s Investors Service’s Take on Higher Education

The headline for the January 16, 2011 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education , ” Financial Outlook is Brighter for Some Colleges,but Still Negative for Most” doesn’t tell the whole story. This story may be found at http://chronicle.com/article/Financial-Outlook-Is-Brighter/125973/?sid=at  (Note: YOu may need a subscription to The Chronicle of Higher Education to view the article.) If the bright side is that a “relatively small number of colleges may be stable (no worse than what they have been), what the down side? The down side is that the financial outlook for most college will be worse. The Moody’s report will be available to Moody subcribers later this week.

What does Moody’s think is the secret to do as well as you did before? You must be well-managed and be diversified, i.e., not too dependent upon one source of income, such as tuition, advancement dollars, auxiliary enterprises or state support.

If the outlook for the have’s is stability, what’s the outlook for the have-nots’? Moody’s suggests that it will be a very bumpy road. They are projecting a number of institutions will have to retrench, merge or fold completely.

According to Moody’s the primary three factors driving the 2011 outlook for colleges are:

1. “Weakened prospects for net tuition growth because of a market preference for low-cost or higher-reputation competitors.

2. “differing degrees of pressure on non-tuition revenues” such as philanthropy or research money.

3. A “need for stronger management of operating costs, balance-sheet risks and capital plans.”

For all who don’t think that higher education is or should be a business, all these negative signs are closely tied to operations of a business. Moody is suggesting that if we don’t operate our colleges as well-run business, we may not be operating at all.