Risky Teaching
2019 Symposium
Learning Transformation

Jay Roberts

Pairs

Who are you sitting next to?

How would you define risk?

Query:

What is the difference between "educative" risk and "miseducative" risk?

Risk

Expereri: to try, test, experiment

Physical, emotional, intellectual, relational, spiritual

Subjective/Objective or Internal/External

Uncertainty

Failure

Query: What if, rather than shying away from uncertainty and failure in teaching and learning, we actually DESIGNED FOR IT?

The Journey

Part One: The World (and the Earthquake)

Part Two: Our Students (and the Playground)

Part Three: Ourselves (and the Engineering Professor)

Part Four: The Real Work (and the Magic Bus)

Part One:
The World

A World of Wicked Problems

Story #1: The Earthquake

Three New Curricular Fault Lines

Fault Line #1:
Learning Happens Everywhere

Disrupting Ourselves

"By using the phrase “disrupting ourselves” ... I am asserting that one key source of disruption in higher education is coming not from the outside but from our own practices, from the growing body of experiential modes of learning, moving from margin to center, and proving to be critical and powerful in the overall quality and meaning of the undergraduate experience. As a result, at colleges and universities we are running headlong into our own structures, into the way we do business." (Bass, 2012)

The Risk: What if the formal curriculum isn't the point after all?

Fault Line #2:
How Do You Assess That?!

"Out of class" learning

Institutional/Departmental Learning Goals

Competencies

ROI and Career?

The turned soul

The Risk: What if we stopped grading?

Fault Line #3:
Grand Challenges

Wicked Problems

Contested and Complex

Dispersed responsibility and power

High potential for unforeseen consequences

Uncertain, unclear data

Time stress

Climate Change

Gender Inequality

Global Health Pandemics

Violent Extremism

Hunger and Food Insecurity

Water Rights

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. AAC&U LEAP Initiative

Do our current educational structures prepare students to work and thrive in these kinds of contexts?

The Risk: What if we changed from "majors" to "missions"?

The Bottom Line:

Transformation

"We all know or sense that the academy today is in the throes of transformation. The knowledge, skills, and values in which students should be educated; the intellectual landscape of the disciplines and degrees; the ways in which educational institutions are organized; the funding of teaching, learning, and research-- all of this promises to be profoundly different in 20 years. The forces of change have resulted partly from our own inertia, partly from consequences of our success, and partly from broad political, market, and technological developments not of our making. The question is not whether the academy will be changed, but how." (Scobey, Civic Provocations, 2012)

Part Four:
The Real Work

Is it worth the risk?

Story #4: Team Magic Bus

Discussion

Contact Information:
Jay Roberts
roberja@earlham.edu
Twitter: JayWRoberts
Website:JayWRoberts.com

Part Three:
Ourselves

4 New KSA's for teachers

Story #3: The Engineering Professor

1: Teachers as Curators of Experience

WHAT?

Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom

It is not (just) about the content

Education as the "continuing reconstruction of experience"
J. Dewey

WHY?

American Academy for the Advancement of Science:

“As biology faculty, we need to put the “depth versus breadth” debate behind us. It is true today, and will be even more so in the future, that faculty cannot pack everything known in the life sciences into one or two survey courses. The advances and breakthroughs in the understanding of living systems cannot be covered in a classroom or a textbook. They cannot even be covered in the curriculum of life sciences majors.

The time has come for all biology faculty, but particularly those of us who teach undergraduates, to change the way we think about teaching..." (Vision and Change Report, 2009)

HOW?

Put the Experience before the Label

Experiential Methodologies

Project-Based Learning

Community-Based Learning

Work-Integrated Learning

Resource:

(Shameless Plug)

2: Teachers As Mentors

WHAT?

SOTS->GOTS->MITM

Grit, Resilience, and growth mindset

Advising is teaching

WHY?

Research is absolutely clear on the importance of relationship in learning

"A Review of Educational Research analysis of 46 studies found that strong teacher-student relationships were associated in both the short- and long-term with improvements on practically every measure schools care about: higher student academic engagement, attendance, grades, fewer disruptive behaviors and suspensions, and lower school dropout rates. Those effects were strong even after controlling for differences in students' individual, family, and school backgrounds.

Teachers benefit, too. A study in the European Journal of Psychology of Education found that a teacher's relationship with students was the best predictor of how much the teacher experienced joy versus anxiety in class."

https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2019/03/13/why-teacher-student-relationships-matter.html

HOW?

Focus on empathy

Concentrate on building an intentional classroom culture

Develop cross-cultural competencies

Resource:

Universal Design

http://www.cast.org/

Resource:

Sandra Huber: My Shadow Syllabus

3: Teachers As Learning Scientists

WHAT?

The neuroscience of learning

Stress/Threat

Neuroplasticity

Pattern-seeking

Multi-modal

WHY?

Instruction vs Learning

Barr and Tagg

Is It Ever OK to Lecture?

"On the one hand, research on the matter is quite convincing: A 2014 meta-analysis of 228 studies of lectures and active-learning strategies showed that the results were decidedly one-sided in favor of active learning. So much so that the authors found it questionable ethically to make students attend lecture-based courses, given all that we know about how ineffective they are."

HOW?

Active Learning