Teaching for Uncertainty in Uncertain Times
Jay Roberts
Friends Council Spring 2017 Gathering

Welcome and Introductions

Overview of the morning

Opening activities (9:30-10:00)

Changing Landscape of Education (9:45-10:15)

Discussion

Break (10:45)

A Pedagogy for Uncertainty (11:00-11:30)

Final reflections

Introductions

Mihi Mihi

More about me

More about us

Pair shared progression

1. Something I am uncertain about...

2. Typically, how I respond to uncertainty is...

3. A question or query I have about this topic is...

Instruction vs Learning

Wicked Problems

Contested and Complex

Dispersed responsibility and power

High potential for unforeseen consequences

Uncertain, unclear data

Time stress

Solvable by any one discipline?

"Easily" solvable?

The world is full of complex, unscripted problems where the answers are not immediately known and the consequences matter.

Neuroplasticity

Growth mindset

Metacognition and learning how to learn

Resilience and a tolerance for ambiguity

Pattern Seeking

Relevance and WIIFM

JFK LBJ ON TV LBJ

Reflection

IBFVTNOJBLKFJ

Holistic

Brain-Body connection

Emotion

Multi-modal

STANFORD STUDY

"The study involved 28 undergraduate and graduate students as participants, none of whom had studied neuroscience. After being given an initial test, half of the group read about the neuroscience of vision, while the others worked with BrainExplorer. When tested after those respective lessons, the performance of participants who used BrainExplorer increased significantly more – 30 percent – than those who had read the text.

Next the researchers had each of the two groups do the other learning activity: Those who had used BrainExplorer read the text, while those who had read the text used BrainExplorer. All the participants then took another test, and the findings revealed a 25-percent increase in performance when open-ended exploration came before text study rather than after it. (A follow-up study showed identical results for video classes instead of text.)

“We are showing that exploration, inquiry and problem solving are not just ‘nice to have’ things in classrooms,” said Blikstein. “They are powerful learning mechanisms that increase performance by every measure we have.” Pea explained that these results indicate the value for learning of first engaging one’s prior knowledge and intuitions in investigating problems in a learning domain – before being presented with abstracted knowledge. Having first explored how one believes a system works creates a knowledge-building relevance to the text or video that is then presented, he said."

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/before-reading-or-watching-videos-students-should-first-experiment/

Learning communities

Collaborative assignments and projects

Service learning, community based learning

Undergraduate research

Internships and project-based learning

Diversity/global learning

Immersion experiences

"These pressures are disruptive because to this point we have funded and structured our institutions as if the formal curriculum were the center of learning, whereas we have supported the experiential co-curriculum (and a handful of anomalous courses, such as first-year seminars) largely on the margins, even as they often serve as the poster children for the institutions’ sense of mission, values, and brand. All of us in higher education need to ask ourselves: Can we continue to operate on the assumption that the formal curriculum is the center of the undergraduate experience?" (Bass, 2012)

Diana Laufenberg

What does this uncertain landscape call us to do as educators?

How do we work with uncertainty?

What new knowledge, skills, and abilities will our teachers and our students need?

The Real Work

"It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings."

Definitions

A state of being uncertain

synonyms: unpredictability, unreliability, riskiness, chanciness, precariousness, changeability, variability, inconstancy, fickleness,

synonyms: doubt, qualm, misgiving, apprehension, quandary, reservation, scruple, second thought, query, question, suspicion

Experiential education

Experiment->Expereri->To Test->Risk

Dewey's "Indeterminate Situation"

Unscripted, messy, complex situations

G. Fox's "To know experimentally"

Living the questions- Rilke

Queries

Leadings and misleadings

As Way Opens...Clearness and discernment

To hold lightly

To allow for the possibility you may be mistaken...

Palmer and Live Encounter

"We want encounters on our own terms, so that we can control their outcomes, so that they will not threaten our view of the world and self" (p. 37).

"To avoid live encounters with teachers, students can hide behind their notebooks and their silence. To avoid a live encounter with students, teachers can hind behind their podiums, their credentials, their power" (p. 37).

Teaching Naked- Jose Bowen

"Comfortable being uncomfortable"

Heifetz "Holding Environment"

"The mandate for a leader who is helping a community through adaptive change, then, is to hang in there with them while they work their way in adaptive change. But what we have learned feels a bit vague. We know what won’t work (deciding for someone else or simply telling them what to do—I’m picturing how absurd it would be to command someone to grieve, “Grieve, now, do it. Come on, grieve faster.”) and we know that we have to hang in there with people. But what exactly are we supposed to do? We should construct a holding environment.

Whenever you find yourself leading adaptive change, you must construct a holding environment. A holding environment is a psychological space that is both safe and uncomfortable. Picture the stereotypic dad running alongside the kid learning to ride a bike. The kid is safe in that the dad is there to catch her if she falls. But the kid is uncomfortable because she is the one doing the work—the balancing, the pedaling, the steering. She is the one learning the new behavior. So long as Dad is holding onto the bike, it is not a holding environment because he’s doing the work. But if he is only there with his outstretched arms not quite touching her, then it’s a holding environment.

Let’s define the concept some more. Specifically, a holding environment is uncomfortable enough that a person cannot avoid the problem, but safe enough that the person can experiment with a new way of being."

From: http://leadership.fuller.edu/Leadership/Resources/Part_4-Leading_for_Transformative_Change/III__Constructing_a_Holding_Environment.aspx

Flight to authority and work avoidance

Gradient: Turning up the heat, turning down the heat

Inquiry-based, constructivist, progressivist, experiential

Curators of experience

Can happen at any scale: micro, meso, macro

Bill Gates story

Study Away

Capstones, presentations of learning

Eustress vs Distress

Expanding Comfort Zones

Growth Mindset- failing forward

Grit and tolerance for adversity

"The Land"

Facilitator vs teacher

Multi-perspective taking

Social dimensions of learning

Civic Engagement

Mattering to someone other than the teacher/student

RFS Guest DJ's

Natural History of San Diego Bay

Data->Information->Knowledge->Wisdom

David Orr

Instant gratification

Cooperative Jigsaw!

Home groups

How is your school responding to the changing and disruptive landscape in education? How does your school deal with uncertainty both in terms of faculty and students?

Expert Groups

1. Active Learning

2. Problem-Based Learning

3. Community-Based Learning

4. Integrative Learning

Home Groups

What are you doing well in your school in terms of these approaches? What would you like to do more of/improve?