Flipping the Paradigm

Our QEP staff meeting today focused on three primary issues:  Connectivism, JiTTs, and Flipping the tradition classroom model.  All three of these elements mingled together for some fascinating insights into the potential of a fully realized learning experience for both students and teachers.

We chatted a little bit about what QEP is trying to accomplish and immediately dove into applying some of these questions to an actual class syllabus.  We brainstormed together and came up with a lot of ideas to integrate JiTTs into the coursework and "flip" the class from a professor-led lecture model to a professor-facilitated learning model. This is the truly exciting part of re-imagining the nature of the classroom experience.  Flipping puts the onus on the students and holds them even more accountable for their own learning while actually encouraging a much broader and more practical understanding of the content.

One of the major points of contention from the resistance to this strategy is the question of student motivation.  How do we get them to do the work?  I know all too well the proportion of college students who rarely open the book or attempt the homework.  They figure if they show up to class (sometimes), listen to the lecture (maybe take notes), and regurgitate what they memorized, they are learning.  They cram for the test and write the major papers the night before they are due.  And that is what comprises the bulk of their grade. Is that real learning?  Or is it simply adding and shuffling note cards in a vast catalog of information?

It got me thinking about our particular students and why they have chosen college. Is it to fulfill a dream and become x, y, or z?  Is it because their parents said it was that or the military? Is it because they simply can't get enough knowledge?  If I posed the question to them, I imagine a fair number of them would shrug their shoulders and say, "'Cause..."  Period. Well, perhaps I'm not really that jaded.

I guess one JiTT idea I might attempt the first week of class would be to ask the students to write (in a blog or discussion thread) about why they came to college.  Why are they here?  What do they expect to get here?  Where will they go when they are finished?  If they are honest and offer more than a knee-jerk, superficial response, we can find out quite a lot about our students, and this is where we connect.  Why is education relevant to ME?

You don't have to be a science major for biology to be relevant to you in some way.  You don't have to be a writer for literature to resonate with you.  But we are all learners with a variety of personal experience and knowledge that we bring to every subject. And what really makes content relevant?  How we put it to use.  When we wallow around in it, splash about, trip over it and fall face first in a big fat mistake.  And there is the professor, at the ready with a life-preserver in hand.  If we are really only "experiencing" content outside of the classroom, who is there to guide us?

If we flip that model, the student is gathering content information and reflecting on it outside of class.   It's when he comes to class where he has a chance to manipulate it and apply it with the guidance of his professor that he really comes to understand its meaning and relevance. Now the professor can guide the student's active experience with the content, connect with him in the process and even expand his own understanding.

Back to motivation:  If we make the students more responsible for their learning, shouldn't we put more grade-weight on it too?  Of course JiTTs cannot be graded as "one-right-answer" assignments, but they can be evaluated for their level of participation and depth of exploration.  It's an interesting premise, and one that will most likely take some getting used to.  But it does seem that in the current situation, we are asking for a different kind of mastery when we give a student a grade based solely on 3 essays and 2 exams.  What is he mastering—the card catalog or the content?  I don't think essays and exams are wrong, but perhaps the structure and timing of their administration as well as their prescriptive value is not as effective as we have come to accept.  Obviously we need some way to assess knowledge and expertise.  As a society, we need to know if a doctor is competent or an engineer is qualified, and that is another discussion.  But it may be time to re-think what we mean when we say "learning."

Problem Finding

As a teacher of gifted students, I prepared my class every day by offering them opportunities to find problems.  I did not give them a question to answer or a list of problems to solve.  I gave them a spark, an uncomfortable idea to ignite that relentless itch that wriggles under their skin and begs for attention.  It was up to them to find the problem, articulate it, attack it, and explore the wreckage of their onslaught.  That may sound a bit dramatic, but gifted learners are particularly adept at and drawn to finding problems as much as solving them.  What many educators may miss, however, is that almost all learners, gifted or not, retain far more content when they have to find a problem and truly experience it first.

Many of us grew up in the tradition of lecture, notes, test, essay, and reams of questions laid out for us to answer.  All hail the Scantron sheet!  If we were lucky, we resisted the temptation to doodle or write notes to our friends while the teacher spewed his vast catalog of facts and homework questions and we wrote down what we thought was important in order to memorize it later and vomit it all back up on our beloved scantron sheets to earn a passing grade.

Ideally, however, grades are not the motivating factor, particularly in higher education.  We would all hope that learning is the goal, though the reality of our students' mindsets and social/academic pressures may suggest otherwise.  For now, we'll leave the issue of motivation for another post.

So how do we break away from the old receptacle notion of students as empty vessels into which we pour knowledge?  This is the point in such conversations when I often launch into pointing out the Latin roots of the word "educate" and remind everyone that we are drawing our students "out" rather than filling them up.  But let's start with shifting our perspective a little.

• Invite them to find problems

Okay, who read that as invite problems?  Raise your hand... Now take my hand and don't be afraid.  Problem finding does tend to be what pedagogical theorists like to call a "higher order learning skill" but why not at least try it with all of your students. When I taught Ayn Rand's THE FOUNTAINHEAD to gifted high school juniors, I often started class by posting a quotation from one of her many controversial texts and asking them to free write for 15 minutes or so.  These brilliant nuggets of philosophy often addressed difficult ideas like morality or love or selfishness.  The students had to respond to it from wherever they were in their intellectual evolution.  Then we discussed what they came up with, which mostly involved their own questions as well as the answers they came to.  Now we were ready to tackle the text.  The true learning had already begun.

• Promote Experiencial Learning

You may be familiar with the educational models of David A. Kolb, Maria Montesorri, Jean Piaget, and Rudolf Steiner.  They all looked at learning as an experience rather than an event.  It is a process that takes its roots deep inside the student and continues to grow as long as it is fed and nurtured. Both writing and experimentation are activities that engage a student with the topic.  By writing, I don't mean jotting down notes from a lecture.  I mean truly thinking on paper, manipulating ideas, possibilities, questions, problems in new ways that make the topic more meaningful to the learner.  Those who teach hard sciences rely on lab experiments to solidify information or problems presented in lecture.  But consider using writing to launch their inquiry instead of reserving that solely for grade assessment.  Even mathematics is primed for experience and questions.  Reflecting on their initial ideas and early attempts at finding and solving problems nurtures those concepts and keeps the learning growing.    

• Model it and never underestimate the power of a question

No matter how basic a student's initial perception of the subject is or how simple his questions may seem, that is his starting point.  You have to allow him to find himself in the problem. So you may present them with a situation or a statement to consider, but you can also ask a question to get them thinking.  But it is a particular kind of question: ONE THAT HAS NO RIGHT ANSWER.  This is how learning happens.  It's not a plug-in to keep the operating system moving; it's writing the software and hard-wiring the real knowledge, the experience. 

As a QEP Writing Specialist, of course I encourage educators to use writing to facilitate learning.  Asking students to find problems and write through their experience not only teaches them about the course content, but it also teaches them how learning works.  It invests them in the process and makes it more meaningful to them by allowing them to work from the inside out. 

If we use writing only as a means of evaluation, then we are wasting its tremendous potential as a learning tool and it becomes nothing more than the hammer that pounds another nail in either the coffin or the scaffold.  Research has shown that writing is an integral part of the process of learning, yet many educators continue to use it only as a measure.  Consider it as the essential tool that helps students find problems and truly experience their learning, which sows those seeds of knowledge we really hope will grow.  And that, after all, is the whole point of education.

Huck's Audience

With all the flurry over the recent attempt to sanitize Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN for young audiences, one important element of the question seems to have gotten lost. Who was the intended audience? For that matter, consider the newly released film version of Jonathan Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS. It is being marketed as a fun "family" film, but Swift's work was carefully crafted political satire aimed at adults.

Now look closely at Twain's book. Consider when he wrote it, not only in terms of the historical time period but also in terms of the stage of Twain's own life.  Though he may have envisioned a boy's adventure book when he began writing it, his novel became something very different by the end.  The end of Reconstruction, the introduction of Jim Crow, and a flood of lynchings as well as personal tragedy led Twain to put the half-finished manuscript on the shelf for seven years before he finally picked it back up. And when he did, he came at the novel from a very different place. There is far more darkness in his tale than today's young people would understand. Does that mean they shouldn't read it? No.

However, it does mean that we should treat it as what it is.  This book has been a point of contention on school reading lists for decades primarily because of the language, yet teachers want to share this eloquent indictment of Southern Honor and Post-Reconstruction realities with students of all ages. Why? What abiding truth resonates with the young reader? I think the problem is that many teachers don't really answer that question, if they ask it all all, before they plunge in with a group of unsuspecting 8th-graders.  Does a popsicle-stick raft really demonstrate an important theme in the book?

I'm not saying we shouldn't include this in our school reading list or ban people from teaching it.  I'm just saying don't be careless with it because you think it was meant for kids to read and learn a lesson about racism and don't let a sanitized version of the text lure you into a complacence that fails to address the true issues in the book.  An adolescent main character does not always mean a book was written for kids.  Is THE LOVELY BONES a book for young readers?

You can look around and find a host of classics that have been turned into graphic novels or abbreviated versions for young readers and that is not a bad thing.  We teach books written for adults all the time.  But if you wish to teach a book like HUCK FINN, don't assume that because one offensive word has been extracted or painted a different color that it is somehow more relevant or more acceptable to a young audience.

Kids can learn a lot from HUCK FINN.  Don't boil it down to a single word and don't assume that it was written for kids.  Think about those abiding truths you want your students to glean and start there. After all, if we want them to learn how to think about the hard questions, we have to be good models and ask them ourselves.

"Light Out, Huck, They Still Want to Sivilize You"

Yes, it's time for another round of literary sanitation in the name of political correctness.  If you haven't heard, an English professor at Auburn University is protecting us from ourselves in order to preserve a classic for generations to come.  How does he plan to do that?  He has replaced the word nigger with the word slave in Mark Twain's ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN.  All 243 times it appears.  His hope is to make the book more palatable and less taboo to parents, teachers, and young readers alike in order to preserve a classic.

While I understand his aim, I have mixed emotions about the ramifications of such a cleansing.  My guts tightened and my brain shuddered when I heard the news.  Who would dare?  But I'm sure many teachers have grown weary of explaining and testing the cultural climate before attempting to teach the text and have abandoned it altogether in the name of job security.  It's a delicate business and believe me, I understand. But there is something more to this issue beside censorship and the political conscience of a modern audience.  For me, it's as simple as integrity.

I taught HUCKELBERRY FINN in the 90's and my students truly "got" it.  Now, keep in mind, I didn't just fling the book at them and dive into it without any context.  That would be ludicrous.  But then teaching any classic without context is not only asinine, but borderline criminal.  In his New York Times article, Michiko Kakutani sums up a crucial point here:

Never mind that today nigger is used by many rappers, who have reclaimed the word from its ugly past. Never mind that attaching the epithet slave to the character Jim — who has run away in a bid for freedom — effectively labels him as property, as the very thing he is trying to escape.

I was teaching high school juniors at the time, and when I announced our next project, several sighed and said, "We already read that in 8th grade."  These were gifted students, mind you, and they had little tolerance for repetition let alone something that has been dubbed a "kid's adventure story."  Yes, that is how it was presented to them the first time around.[shudder] Of course I set them straight and then presented the historical and cultural context, complete with disclaimers about language.  Also consider that the demographics of this school were 49% caucasian, 48% African American, and 3% other (Indian, Iranian, etc.) Moreover, the socio-economic scale reached from the poorest to the wealthiest (children of pro football players and heart surgeons, etc.) who made their own cliques to often surprising ends.  When we had finished, several students remarked that they had read a completely different book. They had no idea that that is what the book was about.  They loved it and each one of them took in the truth that they found there.  


Prof. Gribben hopes to introduce more young people to Huck by sterilizing part of the very social comment that Twain was addressing.  Of course we have seen the term pass through different usages and through its evolution, we have cringed and cursed at the sound of it.  But what is really at the heart of good literature?  Truth.  No matter how ugly, uncomfortable, or embarrassing, if we seek it earnestly, we shall find it.  As teachers, isn't that a large part of our job, to help our students discover their understanding of the world and its naked truth?  


The primary problem is not the text.  The problem is that so many teachers get it wrong.  If you think that boiling down a social commentary like HUCKLEBERRY FINN to nothing more than a jaunt on the Mississippi, than you should not be teaching it to anyone.  The rich, beautiful, harsh story says so much about Twain's understanding of a country that had just come through a firestorm, not unscathed, not instantly wiser, and certainly not romantically mussed up, but truly, brutally scarred.  This isn't a book about friendship and acceptance.  This is a book about honor and truth and clarity.  Where is the honor and truth and clarity in eviscerating the text and subjugating the context? 


In the end, Huck doesn't necessarily see all slaves as equals, but he does see Jim as a man—an honorable, brave man—and a friend.  Mark Twain simply asked that we look at him, that we look at ourselves, that we see this country as it was, warts and all and consider the truth.  Don't look away now because it makes you uncomfortable.  You'll miss the most important parts.