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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.
-Mark Twain
When I started teaching, neither I nor any of my professors or colleagues knew anything about learning—indeed, we didn't even know how much we didn't know about it. If we thought about it at all, we presumed that it was what should be happening automatically on the other end of the log on which we perched, professing.
And when the loop was completed via essays or problem sets or other assignments, we were shocked and amazed at how wrong students got what we had said perfectly clearly. Was there some mysterious static in the air that prevented the air waves emanating from our mouths from reaching them? Or were the students just dumb, lazy, poorly prepared, inattentive, or all of the above?
We have substantially more understanding of learning now, a lot of which has been written about in Change, and we're starting to take more responsibility for it. We know how important it is to be aware of the knowledge and beliefs students sit down on that log with. We know that we have to find some way to make students care about what we're teaching if they're going to retain knowledge about it, that the cognitive load needs to be kept manageable, and that the assessment loop (teaching/demonstration of learning/assessment/correction—over and over) needs to be frequent and continuous.
But what we know most of all is that students need to do something with what they learn if it is to be made theirs: manipulate it, put it to work, test it, demonstrate it—knead it like dough, in short. That's clearly true of skills: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice practice practice!” If we want students to write better when they leave us, freshman English won't do the trick—they must write, and get meaningful feedback on that writing, in every class. If they are to become critical thinkers, the logic class isn't going to be enough—they must practice critical reflection in every course they take.
But it's also true of content knowledge. Now that I teach in a professional program, the value of students' practicing what we preach to them through, for instance, internships is starkly clear to me. I know this in my bones because my knowledge of the higher education field was originally that of a practitioner, not a scholar. If I know more theory now, it's because I wanted to better understand what I experienced. That may be the ideal order in which to learn it.
But even as an English student, and later professor, I had inklings of the importance of doing something with what I learned. I remember the exam questions I answered as an undergraduate where we had to apply our newly acquired reading skills to a poem we had never seen before. And when I listened to lectures, my notes were full of bracketed thoughts about what had just been said, my arguments with it. As a professor, I had students bring in song lyrics that they liked and talk about them as poems.
I could have done more, of course. If I were teaching poetry now, I think that helping students develop electronic portfolios, as described by Terry Rhodes in this issue, would be thrilling—especially given the possibilities of working in multiple modes online, a particularly effective way to cement learning. I might ask them to channel William Blake and create visual images for poems they found especially significant. (Remember Matt Procino's “Listening to Students” piece in which he described asking students to write haiku on the principles of child development he was teaching them?) I might ask them to reflect on their learning with a real audience in mind, not just me, or to start a slam poetry contest.
But systematically applying my understanding about learning-as-doing in my own life has been hard. First, it's difficult to keep practitioner knowledge current. I haven't worked in a policy agency for a long time, and my memory of the day-to-day struggles of that work is dimming. When I think about the rust that's built up over the years, I'm uneasily aware of the old saw: “Those who can, do; those who can't, teach.”
That's why I so admire Patricia Piver's determination to go back into the middle-grades classroom to re-experience dealing with hormonally challenged schoolchildren so that her theoretical knowledge of them is deepened and refreshed. All of us teaching in professional programs should find ways to get back in the field from time to time.
I also have trouble systematically working my understanding of the importance of doing into my classroom teaching. I find it remarkably hard to figure out just what I want my students to be able to do when they leave my class. And I have to keep reminding myself that I need to look far enough ahead for them, just as a locomotive engineer needs to look miles, not yards, down the track. I remember a department meeting in which we were discussing the need to teach writing to our students, and someone commented that it was so that they could write their dissertations. No. It's so they can go out into the world and write clearly, succinctly, and persuasively enough that they can get others to do what they want them to.
The other kind of doing that I struggle with is making changes to the way I've always done things based on the results I'm getting. The assessment loop is not just for students. As Trudy Banta and Charles Blaich describe it in this issue, it includes correction not only of student learning but of teaching, and the subsequent assessment is not just of students' learning but of the effectiveness of the changes we've made to that teaching. Continuously checking those results and making adjustments is not built into teaching as we have known it, and it takes a lot of work.
But in accepting the responsibility to do so, we move a long way from the dumb/lazy/poorly prepared/inattentive student hypothesis. I'm made hopeful by what I see as the increasing tendency of faculty to accept at least some responsibility for classroom learning and for finding ways to get students to do something with what they're teaching, if only to press a clicker. I see it in the teacher education programs described in the previous issue of Change, where professors work hard at getting student teachers to work hard at getting their students to work hard at practicing their craft and getting demonstrable results. I see it in the faculty who help students develop their electronic portfolios. And, most hopeful for the future, I see it in the way the Cross Future Leaders speak about their teaching—as helping their students reach into the world and do something to make it better.
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