How much do students learn?

"How much do students learn? How do you know?" are the final two sentences of today's NY Times column by David Brooks. Brooks gashes many academic sacred cows in this column: the idea that college makes you a better person and never mind the content, that college advances you from the hormonal confusion of high school to the ethereal thoughts of ivy towers, that students actually learn something in exchange for a decade of student loan payments.

The challenge, he writes, "is not getting educators to embrace the idea of assessment. It's mobilizing them to actually enact it in a way that's real and transparent to outsiders."

I suppose that as an instructor at a technical college I sit smug in my office knowing that in our case, students do learn because our learning product is easy to see and measure: you either learn how to run a CNC machine or you do not; you either learn how to find a vein and drawn blood or you do not; you either learn how to clean the back molars or you do not, you either learn how to produce a profit and loss statement or you do not. Our assessments are rather cut and dry. And, in my case as a basic ed instructor, my students either pass the GED tests or they do not. My instructional colleagues and I are able to point the projects, portfolios, and presentations of our students and say, "Yes, they have learned the material." Our job, we think, is much easier than, say, a French medieval scholar, a business leadership theorist, or even a tenured education professor.

Yet, Brooks challenges this complacency by asking if in addition to teaching students how to create and use widgets, do our students graduate into the workforce with the communicating and thinking skills necessary for employment as well as being contributing members of society. Gulp. He points out that studies show that nearly half the students (albeit he is talking four-year+ degrees here) "show no significant gain in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing skills during their first two years of college."

Assessment of things and activities are relatively easy. Assessment of critical thinking and communicating skills are much more difficult. The challenge, I think, is first to incorporate these critical skills in all curriculum (which we do on paper) and then work out ways to assess the learning of these skills. That is a continuing challenge for all educators. I don't consider the Brooks column as an indictment of education as much as a challenge, a challenge education needs to accept.

Losing language, losing a people

News item from Indian Country Media Network, "Alaska Native Language Loses Last Native Speaker." "The world and the Holikachuk Athabascan language suffered a great loss with the passing of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon on March 10, 2012. He was 86."

The loss of language coincides with the loss of the soul of a people, in my opinion. We are what we think and what we think is coded through our native (and sometimes acquired) languages. When the fluency of a language is lost, the language becomes a museum piece, a dusty exhibit visited only by equally dusty scholars but is, essentially, dead -- a shell of a way of life that can no longer be described. That loss is sad. Native people have long recognized the importance of native languages and have fought to retain their language as a mark of their identity. Here in Northeast Wisconsin, the Menominee and Oneida tribes work to carry on their language through the next seven generations, as they say, though that is hard to do in an overwhelming, encroaching white culture.

Julie Raymond-Yakoubian, of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, described Mr. Deacon: "He strongly identified his life with the traditional, now-abandoned village of Holikachuk on the Innoko River in interior Alaska, where he was born. Tiny spent many years hunting and trapping in the forests of the Innoko River region and possessed an almost unimaginable wealth of traditional knowledge about the land the its inhabitants."

As a comparison of the importance of language, I think of the changes to the Catholic Church in the 1960s brought about not only by the Second Vatican Council, but also by the change from Latin to the vernacular at Sunday Mass. Once the mystery and music of the Latin prayer were replaced by the clanging sounds of English among other languages, the Church was bound to change, because the way we described and thought about the central weekly sacrament had changed. Change the language and you change the core of people. Lose the language, and the people and all they stand for fade away into history.

I mourn the loss of Wilson "Tiny" Deacon, but also of the Holikachuk way of life that has been lost.

Moving beyond the classroom

The two line summary beneath the blog title has bothered me since I started writing this in January. Do I limit myself to education and teaching, and if I do, will I be violating the privacy my students for the sake of a blog?

As you can tell, I have been a bit self-conscious about speaking on behalf of the school I work for. I think I have gotten over that. What I see in the classroom is important, and my opinion about the importance of continuing adult education stands fast and will likely continue to inspire reflections. That is, however, only part of who I am, and if this blog is to have a life beyond the rhythms of the college semester, my subject matter needs to expand into all areas that I am interested in.

I spent the last three years developing creative writing chops in a graduate program. It seems a shame to submerge them back under an undergraduate journalistic voice, the unbiased reporter of rhe mundane. So, rather than limit myself to teaching and education, I choose to expand into other subjects. A single line about exploring "the nature of things" will be more complete than what the blog had been titled. The writing may still be boring, but it will no longer be limited.

World don't want you to do that

Procrastination is a problem with workers, with students, and, yes, with instructors. We know what we need to do, we just don't get up and do it. I just read a memorial by Dinty W. Moore to memoirist Harry Crew (1935-2012) in the online blog for the online magazine, Brevity, that puts it much, much better. Crew wrote:

"You have to go to considerable trouble to live differently from the way the world wants you to live... The world doesn't want you to do a damn thing. If you wait until you got time to write a novel or time to write a story, or time to read the hundred thousands of books you should have already read -- if you wait for the time, you'll never do it. Cause there ain't no time; world don't want you to do that. World wants you to go to the zoo and eat cotton candy, preferably seven days a week."

Go out and live. Amen.

When the Best Class is the College Community

The question of the Wall Street Journal feature on Monday, March 19, was, "Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught?"  The debate featured a professor from the Harvard Business School (he thought it could be taught) and a Silicon Valley venture capitalist who thought it could not be taught. Since I have been an successful entrepreneur and taught the subject as an adjunct some years ago, I thought both writers scored points. The truth lies somewhere between: you need knowledge to be successful, but you also need an undefined passion and drive that can't be taught.

A comment made by the venture capitalist, Victor W. Hwang, under the heading, "The Best Class is Real Life," made me think of the students I work with at the school. Hwang spoke of working with entrepreneurs, "We should come up with ways to help entrepreneurs help themselves to learn more effectively. This means finding ways to provide them with a network of mentors and advisers and nurturing a business culture around them that says: dream big, open doors and listen to new people, trust and be trusted, experiment, make mistakes, treat others fairly and pay it forward."

Wouldn't it be great if education could consistently do the same with students: surround them with mentors, encourage them to dream big, and preach the virtue of paying it forward? Sure, some of our students are fortunate to fall into a situation where this kind of support is in place, but for most the support needs to come from within, just as it does with entrepreneurs. Both groups benefit from social groups that support and sustain their dreams. Hwang advocates supportive communities for entrepreneurs; in college, instructors, organizations, and fellow students take those roles. In fact, the design of a college community surrounds its students with levels of support that can be ideas exchanged over coffee in the Daily Buzz, or an instructor-initiated evaluation of a semester-long project.

Initiative and drive can't be taught in the classroom, but it can be supported and nurtured.

Fifty percent increase in student success

The top-tier students have their advocates, as do the bottom-tier students (although the advocacy there may be of an entirely different nature). But what about the students in the middle? Those who are not trouble, but those who do not post perfect scores on their SATs either. Those students make up the bulk of the high school and college classrooms. Students who barely survive post-secondary classes and only have a two in three chance of collecting a diploma. Where are their advocates?

USA Today published an article on March 17 about a New York program called SEO (Sponsors for Educational Opportunity) that provides mentoring and all-day Saturday school for the great middle of our classrooms. These students sit quietly, rarely volunteer, and are passed just above the minimum GPA in the traditional classroom. What, the program asks, would happen if these middle-tier students had just a little extra help?

SEO works on classroom basics: math, reading, writing, vocabulary, and grammar. Results are impressive, according to the article written by Greg Toppo: "SEO students post academic skills indistinguishable from those of their suburban peers. Last year, the program sent 100% of its graduates (about 120 at a time) to four-year colleges. Nearly all earn diplomas: 91% last year vs. 63% for most college students." 

The difference between a student taking advantage of supplemental education program, like SEO, and those who have to make it on their own, can be life-changing. The figures quoted by Toppo speak volumes: almost a 50% increase in the final collegiate goal, receiving a diploma. So, if there is a proven program that increases success by 50% why isn't it being used in every school system?

True it is expensive because it is teacher-intensive. The SEO program costs about $5000 per student per year. And, working on the basics of grammar and vocabulary is not as sexy as wiring the classroom with the latest technology. We seem to want to invest our education money in toys that go whiz-bang rather than the proven building blocks that help students get to where they want to go. We can do better by our middle-tier of students. We know how. We just need to give them a little more help.

State Conferences: Place a Face to the Space

I spent two days at a Wisconsin Technical College System curriculum conference last week. To be honest, I would rather be in my assigned classroom working with students, but on occasion it is important to mingle with fellow BE, ELL, and Literacy instructors. Since this was my introduction to state level meetings as a faculty member, I stayed a little in the background, trying to match faces with colleges, and sort out jargon that comes with the position.

The NRS (National Reporting System) seemed a little clearer to me after hearing from the Washington, D.C. speaker who manages the system from the Department of Education. In the past, the NRS had just been a list of requirements from the "feds".  You report student outcomes, and employment, and progression not only because it's a good idea to quantify what you are doing, but because it was required by the "feds".  After the Wednesday session, and over a beer at a reception Wednesday night, I had a chance to meet one of the feds and place a face to the system. A few moments of face-to-face discussion is more productive than a stream of impersonal emails.

Since you are the new person, you are often the one going up to people saying, "Hi, I'm Doug from Green Bay." I met colleagues from the northern-most regions of the state in Superior, to Racine and Kenosha instructors. Madison Area Technical College faculty peppered the sessions, since the four-story downtown campus is across the street from the Concourse Hotel where the spring meeting was held. And, I met faculty who are from neighboring districts from Moraine Park Technical College in Fond du Lac, Fox Valley Tech in Appleton, and Northcentral Tech in Wausau.

I still need to type out notes for my team members in Green Bay who were not able to attend, and I was recruited to take minutes at a final afternoon session about BE Writing classes. Followup to a conference like this is important -- otherwise why attend at all? So, you might see a little more about the conference in future posts.