Tell Them: Restoring Faith in Education through Narration (DRAFT)

The Bargain

This turn towards emphasizing content over skill is a type of Faustian bargain, and one which many of us entered into willingly:

With the pressure for ever-higher grades, students seem happy to strike this bargain because memorizing material, while boring and life-sucking, is a reliable tool for predicting grades, and, thus, securing access to the world of resources available to the student with a high grade point average. They could be assured of admission to college, a reasonable array of grants and scholarships, access to valuable internship experiences, entrance into graduate training, and, ultimately, access to flexible, well-paid employment opportunities. Sure, the educational experience was suboptimal, but at least it had clear rules that students knew how to operate within.

With the pressure for ever-improved student performance by parents, administrators, and tenants of the state, teachers were asked to swallow the bitter pill of satisfying nearly everybody's demands but their own. Increasingly standardized course materials, closely followed by increasing emphasis on student performance on standardized tests, intensified the need to teach specific content, because standardized tests are chiefly composed of content questions. In the end, teaching to the test seemed like an appreciable solution to the group-level problems facing teachers across the nation.

With pressure for enhanced research agendas and expanded course enrollments, college faculty also gave into the content trap. After all, teaching an introductory level college course chocked full of content and then testing the students on how well they memorized that content is easy for assistants to grade and, for the faculty, far less time consuming as compared to engaging the students as individuals and then tailoring course material to their immediate learning and developmental needs. Streamlining courses dovetailed nicely with larger course enrollments and saved the faculty member much-needed time for conducting research, or, at minimum, staying up-to-date with current research in the field.

The only promise that held together this uneasy bargain was the deep-seeded belief that, along the way, amid all the content, students would learn the implicit lessons and develop the skills necessary to become a competent, engaged, and critical citizen, if only through osmosis. We remain faithful that the American education system is capable of producing thoughtful, responsible citizens, even if we have failed to teach the average American what a "thoughtful, responsible citizen" look likes.

Public consciousness of the failure of modern education has been around for a while (Mr. Novello, afterall, proves it was already comedic by the 1970's), but it is now reaching a fevered pitch, in the form of a backlash against pervasive and draconian use of standardized tests. Should we tear down the educational system and start anew? We think not. Instead, we must do what we are charged with doing --educate students about their learning experience. We must provide a proper education, and part of that charge requires that we teach students the value of being educated. To that end, we aim to be a little more blunt with our students.

To set out the problem more bluntly:

Higher education has failed this country in one important respect: over the past hundred years, it has failed to convince the public that the traditional model of a liberal arts education has value (beyond its immediate transferability in the job market). College and universities have even failed to convince their own students to value the process they are actively engaged in. We hear about students who are ill-prepared to understand the systems they are in, and who resent the requirements that their faculty think are most valuable. To solve this problem, we have begun a novel intervention: Telling them; narrate why it is valuable. 1 While this might seem an obvious thing to do, there are important historic reasons why it fails to happen more often.

In what follows, we explain what students need to know, why they do not already know it, and provide some simple advice for how to help students understand their situation better.

The failure of memorization and the failure of exploratory learning

We all know education based solely around memorization is a failure. This strategy produces students who can parrot things back over a short period of time, but who fail to remember them over the long run, which is simply not a very useful skill. Some thought that if students could just get the facts and figures into their heads, the rest would come naturally. That might have been a reasonable hypothesis at one point in time, but it is clearly wrong now. As, Tony Wagner, a Harvard Innovation Education Fellow, puts it:

Today knowledge is ubiquitous, constantly changing, growing exponentially… Today knowledge is free. It's like air, it's like water. It's become a commodity… There's no competitive advantage today in knowing more than the person next to you. The world doesn't care what you know. What the world cares about is what you can do with what you know. (as quoted in Swallow, 2012).

Education emphasizing memorization fails to produce nimble students capable of using the limited number of things they know.

The commonly touted alternative to a memorization-centered, content-heavy curriculum is an exploratory learning curriculum, which is often characterized as "student-centered." Most readers of this volume are at least somewhat vested in the student-centeredness approach. This approach is certainly an improvement. However, as currently practiced, it also does our students a disservice.

In our experience, most children and young adults trained in exploratory learning environments, and virtually all who have been placed in strongly "student-centered" environments, do not come to a higher-level understanding of the processes they are embedded within. The students have learned, but they have not learned about learning, and so do not understand the crucial importance of the flexibility they were given, of the time it took them to master skills they could have been "taught" more easily by an "expert," of the value in the myriad failures and struggles they had along the way, and, most importantly, they do not understand the need to vigilantly protect that system in the future. They do not understand, generally speaking, because such processes are intentionally made invisible.

In the best student-centered learning environments, the instructor has arranged things carefully so that the student is unaware of how carefully things have been arranged. The student exactly does not know how carefully the instructor is making sure that the lessons are at the limits of their ability; not too easy, not too hard. The student does not see the hours of careful planning that go into lessons, nor the pride the teacher takes in getting the student to "get there on their own," nor are they told that they are developing exactly the skills of succeeding in such environments --the student still thinks they are simply "learning the material."

To take a dramatic example, let us examine a typical elementary school field trip. In southern California, a typical trip might be to the La Breia Tar Pits. Students get in a bus, arrive at the museum, are given a tour, and return home. At the museum they will learn about prehistoric animals and about the process by which bones are dug out of the pits of tar, which preserves them remarkably well. What they will not learn about is why they are going to the Tar Pits, as opposed to the other places they might have gone. They will not learn about how their tour is specifically designed for their abilities, and about how the tour for highschool students would involve much greater detail. They will not learn about how the activities they take part in were carefully designed and refined over decades to serve particular educational goals. They will not learn about how a change in the state-mandated third grade curriculum could make it impossible to justify taking future generations to the site, no matter how educational the experience is.

What would an elementary school student do with such information? We don't know. But the immediate point is that they are not told that information then, or later, and they eventually become adults who do not appreciate the amount of careful work that went into their education. Like certain businessmen who have recently been drawn into the political spotlight, many of these students become adults who believe they have "done it on their own."

Thus, while experiential learning and student-centeredness are good things, they are not sufficient on their own to create the faith needed to sustain our educational systems into the future. We must produce students who understand the value of how they have been taught, and who can safeguard the profession of teaching into future generations.

What to do instead

The process of teaching cannot remain opaque. We cannot afford to leave students with no idea of what their instructors do, why we do it, and how hard we work for them to master the skills they need. When we provide students with the "scaffolding" they need to succeed, we rarely show them where such scaffolding comes from. We erase any evidence of our hard work. In this context, it is no wonder that teaching is taken-for-granted and not given the support it deserves --both in terms of straightforward financial support and in terms of giving teachers the autonomy and flexibility they need to put our students at the center of their own learning. Teaching is not something that can be done according to a formula, it cannot be mastered easily, and rather than just telling ourselves such mantras, we must make these basic principles obvious to our students.

Tell them 2 Good teachers are always, at least modestly, tweaking their lessons. Does the average student know this? In our classes they do, because we tell them. To illustrate, we provide two examples.

First, in introductory psychology, traditionally, a chapter on different psychological disorders is followed by a chapter on different approaches to treating such disorders. This does not work well. After getting halfway through the chapter on disorders, I (Dr. Charles) switch chapters, go all the way through the chapter on treatments, then finish the chapter on disorders. That way, when we are talking about treatments, the students have a few disorders fresh in their minds, and when we are talking about the last few disorders, they can try to understand them in the context of the different treatments. I do not want to convince you whether this is right or wrong. I do wish to point-out that I tell all of this to my students before we start the chapters. I tell them that our textbook is laid out in the way all other textbooks are laid out. I tell them that I do not think it works, and that I have been experimenting with this other method. I explain to them why I think it works better, and tell them that in past semesters my students have thought it worked well afterward. I make it clear to them that they are, during these lessons, becoming part of the process by which teaching improves over time. This additional narration helps. It makes what is happening seem less arbitrary, and they better understand my role as a professor.

Second, in introductory sociology, students take a quiz about the class. The questions ask about which portions of the class they learned the most from and which parts of the class are in-need of transformation or improvement. I (Dr. Rowland) find the process is best when it is meta-narrated to my students. "Your comments will reshape this class for the future you's in those seats, and the current structure of this class is the direct outcome of the quizzes from previous generations of students taking this class --this class is a living, breathing laboratory, and you can put your stamp on it." Whenever we come upon a lesson that has been meaningfully transformed over time, as a preamble to the lesson, I just tell them. For example, I have a lesson about the "McDonaldization" of society, which is about the role of social structure in everyday life (on McDonaldization, see Ritzer 2013). I begin this lesson by telling the students, "This entire lesson was once only a blurb about 10 minutes long; however, after getting student feedback, I expanded it, little-by-little, over the course of four semesters. The brief video clip that will kickoff our discussion, I did not find it, one of your peers from a previous semester did. She shared it with me, and now I share it with you." The too-often implicit lesson about how education works is made explicit in this class, and students benefit. In my experience, the more I characterize the course as an unstable and ever-transforming laboratory for learning, the more my students, ironically, rate the course as exceptionally well-organized on teaching evaluations.

What we can learn from these examples is that narrating educational experiences is not a complex task. You know, better than anybody else, why you've made the changes you have. If you encounter a part of the curriculum that does not make immediate or obvious sense, tell the students what you think. If you cannot skip a lesson because it is mandated, tell them. If you must cover it because instructors in the next class will expect students to be familiar with the idea therein, tell them. Some teachers and faculty might very well feel degraded by this, as if they are being asked to justifying every pedagogical decision they make. That has not been our experience. Telling the students about these things adds mere seconds to a lesson, but hearing about these otherwise invisible facets the educational process is invaluable in helping them understand the broader educational process they are embedded within.

Telling them about group work in Environmental Studies

The above examples were from primarily lecture-based courses, but it is not hard to incorporate such narration into other courses. For example, for the last five years, I (Dr. Rowland) teamtaught an Environmental Studies course on research methods. After a couple years, I noticed a disconnect. I knew the value of students working groups, and so we had students work in groups; and yet, the quality of group work was consistently inconsistent. What was missing? Two things: students did not know why they were in groups and they did not know how to work in groups. In my experience, when students object to group work, they are usually given the clearly-true-butuninsightful explanation that, "you will need to know how to work in groups in industry," the implicit message being "so suck it up." However, beyond putting students into groups and then demanding work be produced by the group, we rarely talk to them how group dynamics work, so that they can effectively work in groups. After speaking openly and honestly with a few students about group work, it was clear enough to me that we needed to tell them more.

On our first day of class this Spring, I tried it out. "Goal-oriented groups can be arranged for maximum productivity and creativity through the use of science," I told them. Their faces sent back this message: "Seriously? Stop wasting our time." "Indubitably," I responded, "One of the primary barriers to successful group work is not understanding how your fellow group members prefer to engage others and the world around them. This means that doing excellent group work requires you that understand your personality type and the personality types of members of your group, and that you teach yourself how to act on that knowledge." Students were then asked to take Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), personality type inventory. Students took natural interest in their personality type and how their type might interact with the personality types of their group members. We harnessed student self-interestedness for the purposes of improving group work, and narrated the whole thing to the class. "As a member of a group, you are a puzzle piece, and you must make yourselves fit together," I told them, and then walked the students through every step --from how psychologists validate tests like these to how they would need to adjust their interaction strategies in groups in order to facilitate the best possible outcome. Highly extroverted students, for example, will need to vigilantly ensure the more introverted group members have a chance to contribute. Of course, as in years past, groups could have simply been assigned at random; however, this year, students were fully involved in the process --you might even say that they were the process --and, along with way, everything that was being done was made transparent to them.

Needless to say, the group work has never been better. More importantly, however, the students are more aware of the effort that went into their classroom experience, and why that effort was valuable.

The Best of all Worlds -An Undergraduate Research Lab

In the above examples, we illustrated how students could be made aware of a particular aspect of two fairly conventional classes, the first a lecture class, the second mixing lecture with group work. We hoped to provide examples of how instructors could make students aware of the educational process, to help them appreciate the types of decisions that went into the creation of their lessons. However, we want to suggest this is probably not enough for students to truly appreciate the overarching structure of their educational process. That is, if each instructor did this in their own class, students might develop better faith in their courses, but would likely still retain their suspicion about the liberal arts education in the broader sense. While we do not have a general solution to this problem, we have overcome it successfully in the process of teaching students in an unconventional setting, an undergraduate research lab, in the context of social science majors.

Students tend to be brought into the lab after doing well in a particular course (such as those discussed above), or when they express interest in research (to ourselves or other faculty). The lab is always conducting 3-5 projects, with some initiated by senior students. The lab meets once per week, with weekly readings assigned. For their first semester students have the option of doing the readings, summarizing them, and attending the meetings with no further obligations. If they continue, they will do that, and assist with one of the research projects for 4-6 hours per week. Senior students will do that, and oversee one of the projects. Another way to explain this is that over the course of being in lab for a few semesters, students are transformed from reading second-hand accounts of research, to initiating and seeing-through their own research. Perhaps there was a time when wide-eyed students would simply embrace such opportunities because they recognized them as opportunities, and because they had been enculturated to view such work as the logical culmination of their education. If so, that was a long time ago, and those students were not first-generation college students from rural Pennsylvania.

Instead we tell them why they should be in the lab. We must tell them that it can help them, even if they don't want a career in research. We tell them why it is better than their regular classes. We tell them how we design the schedule. We tell them why the projects we have picked are good projects. We tell them what skills they are picking up as they work on those projects. We tell them how to talk about those skills, and why future instructors and employers will care that they have those skills. We must tell them that the skills they are developing -determining a problem, testing solutions, reporting results in person and via report, etc., are skills that employers care about. We must tell them that being able to read and discuss papers, even papers they don't fully understand is important. What else must we tell them is important? The ability to interact with others as a team member and as a team leader, the ability to apply materials between classes, the ability to interact with professors consistently, in a sufficiently professional manner to get letters of recommendations, the ability to pick goals and progress towards them over a series of years. We also need to tell them that the work done in lab is going to be published if it works out, and so it is much more important than they are -because it will be recorded for posterity. If they are an author, then its importance will reflect positively upon them, not the other way around. We tell them all that, and more. And at the end of the year, just to be sure, we tell them all again.

Out of a two hour weekly lab meeting, probably half an hour is spent on such topics each week. This is not as much as it might seem, but over the course of semesters and years, it adds up to a group of students that truly understands the college system they are apart of: Its strength and virtues, its weaknesses and vices. They are positioned to navigate the larger system and to use it for their current and future advantage.

This effect is dramatic. Most students not only do well in the lab, but they begin to do better in all of their educational endeavours. We treat them as if they are responsible young adults, and in return, they start to act like they are. They start planning for future semesters, graduation, and beyond. They start doing better in the classes they like and the classes they don't like. It is not that no one had told them such things were important before. They have been told their entire lives that it is important to do well in school. But no one had really taken the time to explain to them what doing well looks like at a college level, and no one had really taken the time to explain to them why it was the important. For example, it is one thing to see be told you should start thinking about graduate school in your Junior year. It is another thing to be made part of a group that includes people who do so, and to see both the successes that result from careful planning and the struggles that result from not heeding the advice. The students see what a student can do if they plan in advance -increasing their GRE scores, planning internships or research projects that complement their career interests, contacting potential faculty mentors in advance, revising their applications additional times, etc.

Most importantly, in this context, when these students leave college they do so with faith that the system they have been part of is designed in an intelligent manner, a manner which is under attack, and which should be sustained. They can look back and see how their elementary and highschool teachers were handicapped by state mandates, and how good teaching is more than just following a lesson plan.

Letting students behind the scenes helps restore faith in the educational process We are proud of the examples discussed above, but don't want to pretend that we have a magic recipe that will fully restore the average student's faith in our educational system. Much more modestly than that, we feel strongly that we have begun to understand an important problem, and we have provided one pathway toward overcoming it. We cannot simply rely on students to figure out what we are doing for them, nor can we demand that they take it on faith that we are doing our jobs well. If we want them to understand, we must explicitly educate them about the educational process they are part of. One way to do that, the easiest first step, is just to tell them, out loud, what we are doing as we are doing it. Some students will find this a bit crude and gruff; some faculty members will no doubt feel awkward or, potentially, fear that it could weaken their authority. We worried about these concerns ourselves, and started these efforts with much trepidation. However, in our combined experience, which now involves several thousand students across a number of institutions: Most students respond very positively to these efforts, and even express appreciation for our honesty and candor.

These efforts can work at the college level. We have seen it. We also believe that they could work for teachers at the primary and secondary levels; however, we know it could not be done in exactly the same way. We hope that primary and secondary school teachers are willing to try it, starting as we did in small doses, and that they can determine how much of it student would benefit from at those different ages. When students are having fun doing teacher designed lessons, make sure they know that those are the teacher designed lessons. When students are bored to death doing the standardized testing, make sure that they know that this part is beyond your control and has been mandated by legislators and government agencies. When those children grow-up and think back to their educational experiences, they will think back fondly on the parts that were flexible, and they will have disdain for the parts that were mandated. When someone in the legislature starts talking about making stronger mandates, those informed citizens will understand the consequences that such legislation will have on the classroom. In short, you will begin to teach the students to have faith in their teachers, and faith in an educational system that is flexible and transparent. Restoring that faith, we contend, cannot wait. ~Fin~