Education

Wrestling with difference

Freakonomics’ Stephen J. Dubner recently did a two-part podcast on the true value of a college education. While part 1 gives convincing evidence for a strong correlation between one’s health, wealth, and level of education, part 2 takes a much harder look at the economic costs of a university education and, intriguingly, tries to get a handle on exactly what students learn when they go off to college. As someone who has been thinking about this question for the good part of a decade, I get tired of hearing the old chestnut that college “teaches people how to think.” It’s lazy and vague, and frankly, I can’t see how that would persuade people to fork out increasingly higher tuitions for their children’s education if they themselves haven’t had a transformative college experience. For this reason, I really appreciated how Dubner pushed his guests to spell out what they themselves got out of their college experiences, and what they hoped would stay with their students long after they’ve earned their degrees.

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By Ysette, ago

Modest proposals

I’ve found that the surest way to paralysis at the beginning of a project is to get caught up with concerns of assessment and scalability. This isn’t to say that we can conduct programs willy-nilly. Rather, I think a case can be made for tabling those issues in favor of designing innovative programs that seek to address the immediate concerns of a specific population. Let me explain.  (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Sometimes it’s surprising what will get them talking

My aim as an educator is to bring about “catch fire” experiences in the classroom, so to that end I try to make my material engaging primarily to myself and then to the students. Yes, you read that right: teacher engagement is the sine qua non of successful learning. (One of the worst courses I ever took was taught by a professor who regularly used to pull lecture notes from a filing cabinet that was decades old and read those notes as a lecture during what was supposed to be a discussion-based seminar.) (Of course—and pardon me as my parenthetical asides multiply—we’ve all suffered at the other extreme where the teacher is so obviously fired up about a subject that leaves the entirety of the class cold. Teacher engagement is a necessary but insufficient condition for successful learning.)

I’m disentangling myself from parentheses to bring us back to the point I really want to make, which is that sometimes I take risks with material that I consider vital to the discussion even if I fear that students will have to slog through it with a little less enthusiasm. What I thought would be the necessary evil in my Transitions to Adulthood program was the opening unit on legal definitions of adulthood. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Figuring out what “good” teaching means

Yesterday I read a post on the American Scholar where the author declares both herself and her sister as being “against educational reform.” It’s a short piece that’s worth reading for yourself, but in sum, Paula Marantz Cohen recounts a discussion with her sister, also a college professor, about their views on educational reform. Although their teaching styles differ, they both possess enough knowledge of U.S. educational history, as well as experience in the classroom, to recognize that most reforms in education come and go, only to return once more as the next big thing. Against her sister, who subscribes to Dewey’s model of experiential learning, Cohen considers herself more of a traditionalist—one who is more oriented, as she puts it, “toward product rather than process.” Importantly, it’s not that Cohen objects to the more open-ended inquiry that her sister orchestrates in her classroom; rather, she admits that in the progressive model “too much would be going on; I would get confused and, being confused, would likely confuse my students.” She thus concludes that “teaching—and learning—can proceed through any number of methods, provided that the teacher is engaged, knows something about the subject, and cares about the students.” The best method, in short, is that which plays to an individual teacher’s strengths.

Cohen’s piece is a refreshing read precisely for it’s teacher-centered concern. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Time management vs. time perspective

Goal-setting and time management are some of the more essential life skills that experts try to teach youth in foster care, but one of the first lessons I learned when I entered the field of youth development is that young people—and especially teenagers in care—are extremely present-oriented. Prof. John Immerwahr has written succinctly on the challenges of educating undergraduates. The problem, he says, is not a matter of students being unable to manage their time well. It’s more fundamental than that: There is a conflict between the future-orientation of professors and the present-orientation of most students. When the desires of the present (“I’m hungry,” “I want to hang out with friends”) compete with the demands of the future (“I want to do well in the next exam,” “I want to graduate on time”), the present almost always wins. This present-orientation is exacerbated in foster care, where problems demanding immediate attention (“Where will I sleep tonight?”) crop up frequently. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Identity-Based Motivation (IBM)

Someone recommended I read a paper by Profs. Daphna Oyserman and Mesmin Destin on a social psychological framework called Identity-Based Motivation (IBM). The model offers not only an explanation for poor educational outcomes among certain populations (especially for low-income black and Hispanic boys), but it also offers a modest but proven method for closing the gap between students’ desire to do well and actual academic attainment. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Post mortem

Here’s the thing about last Thursday: If I had harbored any doubts about the impact of the first workshop and whether or not I was too ambitious about what could be accomplished in the span of one mentoring session (I certainly was), everything came together beautifully during the follow-up session. After everyone arrived and had a bit of dinner, we went over all the concepts I planned on reviewing in the allotted time of fifteen minutes. I didn’t get to the bonus questions, but then again, I didn’t show the final two videos attached to those questions during group. I think in a different context (with a group of older teenagers or in a situation where we didn’t have to put aside time for dinner or evaluations) we could hew closer to my original lesson plan for the first session. The second session, however, ran longer. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

Indexes of engagement

I don’t yet have the evaluations in hand from the last workshop, but based on the energy in the room and the output of the young people, I could safely say that the Tribal Rites of Passage activity was a success. Even though some people could not make it back for the second session due to personal and work issues, several things indicated that the participants were in fact engaged by the last session. (more…)

By Ysette, ago

The importance of signposting

Talking about reviews in the previous post brought to mind how important it is to give constant signposts to your students. From personal experience, I know what it’s like to get so preoccupied keeping up with weekly lessons at the expense of losing sight of the larger arc of a course. A well-written syllabus will guide students through a course and show how each week contributes toward a larger lesson. But another way of reminding students where we’re at and where we’re headed is by writing down a daily class agenda and doing regular reviews at the beginning of class. (more…)

By Ysette, ago