Un-learning pt 2 - #FutureEd #digilit

We are coming to the end of the main phase of my Leading Teams module. The group projects have been completed, the peer feedback uploaded, the self and tutor assement is done and I am just about to release the groups' grades.

The group projects are presented using an online tool - such as Blogger, Wordpress, Wix - and the groups have  a free choice of leader to focus on. Usually a film is selected and its main characters analysed against the main leadership theories and models. This year we had 3 Coach Carters (I banned Toy Story on the grounds that it had been done to death in previous years, I may have to subject Samuel Jackson to the same cruel fate). The Iron Lady and Twelve Angry Men cropped up again but new choices included Mean Girls, Robin Hood, Remember the Titans and The Shawshank Redemption. One group chose to focus on Lord Alan Sugar.

Each presentation is completely different from every other - colourful, interactive, full of images and even humour. Working in groups seems to make the students a little more adventurous and I get very few questions about format, style or even technical issues as they tend to find the support they need from one another.

Stage 2 is a personal reflective assignment, completed individually. At this point I get an endless stream of queries via email. This tends to make me doubt my ability to give clear guidance, so I try giving more in the form of FAQs, but that's not enough either. The levels of anxiety seem to be particularly high amongst the more able students. They find the idea of writing from a personal perspective very challenging and they want instruction about what theories to use, what structure to use, which headings to use.....

Left to their own devices some of these students seem to get lost - or as one put it in an email to me yesterday (and she wasn't intending this as a Good Thing): "this way of writing is so different, it's really making me think". .

Well, that was the idea! In fact I'd hope that by the end of three years at University, thinking would be something students would be really good at. But maybe all we have done is made them really good at passing assignments.

In the History and Future of (mostly) Higher Education MOOC, led by Cathy Davison of Duke University, we have been looking this week at the way education got made over using "scientific" methods to ensure it was able to turn farm hands into factory workers. I don't have a problem with employability as a goal for university education, just with the idea that students who don't know how to be creative, thinking indivduals are actually employable, especially as they are no longer very likely to find themselves working on the factory floor (or at least not in the UK).

This MOOC and Prof Davidson's book Now You See It, is really making me think (and I do mean that in a good way!) about how I teach and why I teach the way I do, what I believe about education and what makes me sad about it, and helping me to understand how we got to where we are in the current education system, and about maybe being part of changing it.

At the same time as I am pondering ways of getting my students to think for themselves, my daughter is training to be a primary school teacher where the aim seems to be to prevent that at all costs. Six year olds are being trained for their SATS tests by learning how to write "Experts say..." and "It is a well known fact that...." when beginning a factual sentence. Next week they will be experiencing aboriginal art by colouring in a pre-printed outline, in the colours specified by the teacher. They are not allowed to go to the toilet except in break times. A "My Favourite Story" theme week has been cancelled so the children can begin work on the text they have to memorise for their SATS test.

I could go on but I think you get the picture. There is much for students entering University to unlearn if they are to become successful, independent, life-long learners. There is also much for me to unlearn about teaching.

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As a footnote, I should add that I feel really guilty about having jumped off the Rhizo14 MOOC to join FutureEd. I feel a little capricious - or maybe I'm just being rhizomatic afterall! What I do I know is that I felt totally out of my depth in the Rhizo14 Facebook group and that this Coursera MOOC has come along at exactly the right moment for me, with exactly the stuff I need to learn about.

#rhizo14 Week 2 Enforced Independence

Well there's an oxymoron if ever I heard one....

.... and yet this is exactly what I am wrestling with in my first year undergraduate module. The students enter University expecting - and sometimes even demanding - very detailed guidance, worksheets, notes and handouts. They think lectures are the way University education should be done - I even had some first year students tell me today that they preferred exams as course work required them to do too much reading and they couldn't handle the distant deadlines: pressure, recall of facts, 2 hours of hand cramps - this is what learning is all about!

So these same students then turn up to my module and they are in a large open space with 100 other students, seated at round tables with Apple Macs available. Or they can bring their own device. Whatever. They get a few minutes of introduction from me for this week's theme and then they get to it - searching the internet, answering questions, posting responses on Twitter, Facebook, Padlet. Whatever. We think about digital identity, digital citizenship, research skills, ethics, intellectual property.  I provide a detailed written structure for the module through the VLE where I post links to videos and articles for them to read in their own time. They get feedback through a short formative piece evaluating the role of social media in research; they choose their own work groups for a final summative project using Storify or Pinterest (or... whatever) to curate their online research.

Yup. They hate it.

There's not enough teaching. They don't understand the point of what they are doing. They don't get the relevance of social media to social science research. There are no handouts! (Well, very few). The group is too big and too noisy (these are justifiable complaints in my view!). They can't find anything on the VLE (also possibly justified - its UI is Byzantine). They hate the Macs.

and yet ...... Week 13 of the module: they settle down to the task, they use the Macs with ease, they ask fewer questions. They seem engaged - with the task, with the conversations in their groups. They may just be getting it.

I cut my teeth, teaching wise, in a Person Centred Counselling course.  The curriculum was designed by the students (within some constraints). Students peer assessed all the time - in formative practical work and in the final summative dissertation and case study. The group process was in the hands of the group - I was a facilitator. Things got messy - a lot of the time. They hated it. One particularly angry student stated (to the whole group) that the course was rubbish because everything the students learnt they did entirely by themselves. On the final day, after a year of being angry with me about this, she repeated her claim - only now she got it. Yes - they had done it all by themselves. They were/had become independent learners.

The difference with my current students is that they don't really have the same Freedom to Learn. Other parts of their course are taught traditionally. There are exams and course work and grades and structures that will judge the worthiness of the student to progress to another level. There are rules about plagiarism and using Google and Facebook and Twitter and Wikipedia will be frowned upon (maybe even punished). And the biggest oxymoron of all - I am forcing them to be independent. I am not permitting them to learn in the way that is cosy for them, I am imposing (through my power as teacher) a set of conditions and expectations about what is good for them. Just as I do as a parent to my children.

Knowing when to nurture and when to push the chicks out of the nest is key - as is knowing the difference between encouraging independence and abandonment. I don't know how, when or if I ever get this "right" - but then, I am still learning....