Planning the Class Event

Is the professor responsible for everything that occurs in the microcosm of the class event? Yes, says the reflective planner. The competency of the practitioner to recognize problems within the course of the practice is a given. Things are going to go wrong, and the practitioner should be able to recognize non-optimal performance. Failure would result in incompetent practice.

A practitioner should also know when bureaucracy is getting in the way, and the actions that will be required to fix problematic operating variables. This is a basic telling of the work of Chris Argyris and Donald Schön. To save time and warp your brain, here is 1,000's of pages of material condensed into a quick example.

Example: You drive your car to school and the tires go flat; this happens every time you drive to school.

Incompetency: You do not recognize this problem and continue driving.

Single Loop learning: You realize that car tires going flat is a problem and you fix the tires.

Double Loop learning: You realize that car tires going flat is a problem and you also realize that fixing the tires repeatedly isn't solving the problem.

If you want more info but hate the tl;dr aspect of grad school here are some sites for more info:
http://www.infed.org/thinkers/argyris.htm
http://www.aral.com.au/resources/argyris.html

This idea goes even further nowadays though, incorporating an even higher level of learning, that actively changes the practitioner into a post modern mess. I'm not sold, but here is some info:

http://www.coachforauthenticleaders.com/how-we-work/triple-loop-learning/
http://www.thorsten.org/wiki/index.php?title=Triple_Loop_Learning

So what does this have to do with pedagogy class?  Professors are going to get things wrong. Things are going to happen in the classroom that require different teaching applications. Thinking about why things are going wrong and making necessary modifications to your teaching practice is going to help you in your daily work life, or at least help you better understand your daily work life.

Dr. Karpanty's Pyramid Scheme

Last Wednesday, Dr. Karpanty provided direct insight into the practice of case based learning, based on her direct observation in the performance of her teaching pedagogy. While some may have gained understanding of the practice, I was left more confused than before the class began. One item of contention is the need for Teaching Assistants in the operation of the course. The claim was made that teaching cases is the wave of the future, where more professors will have to provide these learning opportunities to students. Do you see the problem?

Where are we going to get teaching assistants? The cost of education continues to increase while funding decreases. Is it safe to assume that Grad students will continue to multiply? 

My take is that this pedagogy is stacked pyramid scheme thinking. Sure, we can set up this type of learning environment, but it demands that we have access to skilled low cost labor, TA's. Then when these TA's become professors they too will have to have an increased crop of low skilled labor to enable competent practice. This is a system of exploitation, whereby the original professor is going to be a position to create more gain than the outer leveled professors or TA's. 

Lets go further. What happens when all of the good research gigs dry up and professors have to take on higher teaching loads, without TA support. If i'm teaching a 6x6, in what world will I be able to place 8 to 10 hours into every course hour? That means I may be spending 144 to 160 hours a week setting up my cases for class. In this scenario, I may get 24 hours to exist in all other areas of my life, that includes sleeping, eating, doing research, going to departmental meetings, and teaching classes. The time requirement does not make sense.

I'm sure students love this approach, but it is not feasible. This is a trap at best.

The Coming Poverty

I had an interesting discovery that has been making me think about the role of teaching in a University setting, I'll share. On Monday, I learned that I was accepted in the PGG PhD program (yes!), with no funding (wtf?). Since that time I have been working solely on finding funding and/or an acceptable homeless living arrangement with the town (whole nother thread!), all other projects have been put onto the back burner. I know I am not giving proper weight to any of my assignments or responsibilities. Why should I? Any investment I make with my current education will be squandered without future funding. I don't have that much leverage and life must prevail over these Earthly wants of an education.

This made me think about PBL and now CBL and the responsibility of the instructor/professor in providing a learning environment that works for the student. Reviewing Dr. Karpanty's syllabus brought the issue home. Non-stand and deliver teaching techniques are complex learning environments that are demanding to the instructor, in a normal funded setting. What happens when guaranteed funding goes out the door? Where is the economic incentive to produce these types of learning environments? My understanding is that the incentive to the professor is to produce a sustainable practice, i.e. continually get paid, and the students are a tool for doing just that. But if that motivation stops, won't the learning environment have to change to adapt to the decreased economic incentive for the professor?

I'm thinking the following clip is a more practical learning environment for the volunteer instructor model of education we are moving towards. Why bother with students, if we are on a race to the bottom.

TERC Math

I'm thinking Problem Based  Learning, this week's GEDI topic, is a double edged sword. The idea is to have students work on complex problems based in part, or in full, on real life topics. One of this weeks reading's noted the importance of Problem Based Learning in medical schools, which makes sense. Yeah I want a doctor to have memorized everything about medicine, it just makes sense, but if that doctor can't apply that knowledge, their customer faces higher chance of mortality. 

Ok, yeah, let's get students to start thinking differently about problems that way we have competence in our working class. STOP. 

While I agree the concept is great, the actual practice gets a little more complex, and it reminds me of a TERC math scenario in the making. What's TERC? It is Investigations in Numbers, Data, and Space. What does it do? The idea is basically to teach people to teach themselves. Sounds great right? It is... kinda....not really.

As you can imagine, parents love it.

As you can imagine, the people and corporations that fund higher education, want their investment to pay off, and that means successful classroom instruction. Problem based learning could be great, but it implies that the approach being examined by the student is correct. Sometimes the way we do things will be wrong. We shouldn't teach people to do things incorrectly, but that is where Problem Based Learning opens the door.