5 December: Curriculum (in draft)

Here is the annotated presentation--the other half (!) will be along shortly...

Incidentally, on smashing pots: Edmund de Waal here. (before I forget)

Prep. for 5 December

As I mentioned when I met you briefly yesterday, there are some things you might find it useful to look at for next week:

• What has this got to do with curriculum?

• I know we are not about schools, but try to read chapter 1 of Illich's polemic if you can; it's an interesting argument...

• From a similar stable, Friere is almost unreadable, but this page is a good introduction, from a brilliant site (and see below*)

• These people are talking about transformative rather than simply informative learning. 

• You may conceivably be interested (although it is unlikely!) in this paper, which touches on the argument from another side--some consequences of the banking model and the constraints we talked about on 21 November.

• ...which touches in turn on to Anna Sfard's two metaphors for learning.

• and from a different angle, related to the Becker article I mentioned last week, look at this page on situated learning, just as a reminder, because we did mention it very briefly in Unit 2. Do follow the link to the Infed page on this, too, for more detail.

Which sort of comes full circle to the first bullet point.

That's probably more than enough to be going on with, but please come with your questions and ideas arising from your reading for the next session, and we'll see where the discussion takes us... (Saying which is begging** some questions about the nature of the curriculum, of course.)

(PS --and also relevant is this excellent tirade by Frank Furedi in today's Times Higher Education, which I think I shall link to from my more moderate pages here and here.)

(PPS --possibly of some interest in relation to the diversity and distinctive needs component of this unit, an interesting NYT piece on employing people on the autistic spectrum. It only touches in passing on the issue of how they may best be helped to learn, but that is the kind of question you may want to address in the groupwork.)

---

Friere and the "Banking Model" of education; the page I linked to does not spell out the characteristics of the banking model in detail, but Friere himself sets them out thus:

•  the teacher teaches and the students are taught; 
• the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing; 
• the teacher thinks and the students are thought about; 
• the teacher talks and the students listen - meekly; 
• the teacher disciplines and the students are disciplined; 
• the teacher chooses and enforces his choice, and the students comply; 
• the teacher acts and the students have the illusion of acting through the action of the teacher; 
• the teacher chooses the programme content, and the students (who were not consulted) adapt to it; 
• the teacher confuses the authority of knowledge with his own professional authority, which he sets in opposition to the freedom of the students; 
•  the teacher is the Subject of the learning process, while the pupils are mere objects. 

(Paulo Freire, 1970, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, p. 59.) 

** Yes, it is "begging" the question, not merely "raising" or "posing" it--it's a nice point of usage.

Resuming for Unit 5: 21 November

(Sorry about the date error in the heading, earlier)

Welcome back to the blog, which I have re-activated for Unit 5.

It was a useful conversation last Wednesday, which threw up various ideas, and arising out of which I have come up with a provisional schedule (which I have amended to get the dates right [I think], following this afternoon's discussions);

We'll assume that outcome 5.1--Understand the range of contexts in which education and training are offered in the lifelong learning sector has already been addressed.

21 November

2—4     What is “curriculum”?

• 5.2—Understand theories, principles and models of curriculum design and implementation and their impact on teaching and learning
• 5.6—Critically evaluate the rhetoric of curriculum discussion.

4.30—6.30    Models of curriculum: Academic/vocational, Mastery/developmental,

(28 November) Wind up Unit 6

5 December

2—4     Situated learning, Critical pedagogy, top-down/bottom-up etc. Devising curricula; values, stakeholders, influences, stages

4.30—6.30    Devising curricula exercise;  Evaluating curricula—Brookfield’s lenses; Gibbs

• 5.4—Understand and demonstrate how to apply theories, principles and models to curriculum development and practice.

16 January

2—4     Current issues and debates about curriculum

4.30—6.30    Set up Group working

• 5.3--Understand the significance of equality and diversity for curriculum design, and take opportunities to promote equality within practice.
• 5.5—Understand  how to evaluate and improve own practice in inclusive curriculum design and development
• 5.8—Further develop skills in collaborative working…
• 5.9—… and contributing to the learning of colleagues

23 January

2—4     The social experience of the learning group; helping and hindering; group processes and development; roles and labelling

4.30—6.30    Group working

30 January

2—4     Loose ends/assessment guidance

4.30—6.30    Group working

6 February

2—4     Presentations 1

4.30—6.30    Presentations 2

Note  5.7—Further develop skills in addressing outcomes at the appropriate academic level  will follow from the preparation of the submission.

Some of you couldn't make the session today so I'll try to fill in some of the points from the discussion.

We started with the critical question: What is the "curriculum"? Some of you raised the question of whether it makes sense to talk about "curriculum" in general terms. Indeed, the term is used in so many ways that it is confusing to list the possible definitions. (See Neary, 2002 if you want to know more.)

We tried to get at some of the issues by looking at the concrete elements which may or many not be components of the curriculum; items were scored as 1: definitely not, to 5 definitely is part of the curriculum; the results have been re-ordered to reflect the scores from the group:

		Score	Order
1.	Syllabus	26	1
14.	Assessment strategy	23	2
3.	Marking scheme	21	3
5.	Educational technology	19	=4
11.	Scheduling of sessions	19	=4
10.	Lesson plans	17	6
7.	Late submission policy	16	=7
12.	Behaviour policy	16	=7
2.	Calendar	15	9
6.	Comfort breaks	12	=10
9.	Uniform	12	=10
13.	Library facilities	11	12
8.	Sports team mascot	10	13
4.	Seating plan	8	14
15.	Car parking	7	15

As we discussed the specifics it became apparent that the boundary of the "curriculum" is fuzzy and contestable. (Of course it also contestable how useful the term itself is, if it can mean so many things...)

Elements such as the syllabus (content), the assessment regime, and possibly practice (either on placement or in ordinary work) are clearly central. Many other elements are often left to administrative convenience, such as scheduling/timetabling, room layout and available technology, but they do impact on the learning experience, and so they may be brought into the designed curriculum.

• Some practical sessions need to be scheduled for solid blocks, so that skills can be developed,

• whereas other more academic sessions work best on a "drip, drip" basis, allowing for reading or research between classes

• The seating plan says a lot about the expectations of how students will participate and interact,

• and the available technology changes the manner of teaching.

The curriculum then becomes anything which affects the students' learning. Sometimes it is hidden, and sometimes unintentional, even to the extent of being counter-productive.

So the in vocational education curriculum sits between the real-world requirements of a job, and the detailed implementation of training, we'll probably look at how all this gets negotiated, later;

(Note that when we next meet we'll explore some of the complications and limitations of this model.)

There is an overview of some of the things we talked about in the second half on my site:

• There are a couple of clips from the "Simple Minds" video here (we'll look at threshold concepts again later)

• The distinctions of approaches to curriculum can be found here.

Pupils tailoring their responses to what they think the teacher wants to hear are discussed in Holt J (1969) How Chidren Fail London; Penguin.

I gave out copies of the Saber-tooth Curriculum, which we may look at next time (or not).

And you might find it helpful to read "School is a lousy place to learn anything in" for our next meeting.

The Ken Robinson talk on changing educational paradigms is here:

Here is the source of my objective, that you would be "confused at a higher level than before".

Incidentally, given that we may well be looking at some forms of neurodiversity later on, you might be interested in this and this on what it is like to have Asperger's.

See you on 5 December.

28 March: final formal session...

...although there may be more after Easter on request, as well as the individual tutorials.

Critical Incidents


Lest there be any extra confusion beyond what I may well have already engendered--

• You do not have to construct your submission around one or more "critical incidents." That was merely a suggestion and an informal exercise for our class discussions. The actual requirements are all in the Handbook--if all else fails, fall back on them.
  
• Critical incidents can be "good" or "bad"; as we discussed when we talked about the Interest Groups at the Study Day, sometimes the puzzle is "where did it all go right?" and that can be more revealing than picking over problems.
  
• They can be exceptional or routine; the exceptional highlights features through their variation from the normal, and the routine because their taken-for-granted quality points to the key features which make your sessions what they normally are.

We briefly re-visited Laura's incident from our previous session, and discussed what it said about the selection of elements, packets, or sequences of skills to be practised and rehearsed together. I suggested that the definitive reference is: Charness N, Feltovich P, Hoffman R and Ericsson K (2006) The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance Cambridge; C.U.P. (But warned you that it's 900 pages!) Much of the interesting stuff is covered more accessibly and indeed entertainingly in Syed M (2010) Bounce; the myth of talent and the power of practice London; Fourth Estate.

And that linked to the issue of repetitive exercises, and when one can move on. That raises the issue of the  learning curve, and the point at which one has to take the risk/plunge of going on to the next stage. (And as we discussed in another context, that underpins the approach to the assessment, too...)

Rebecca C posed the problem of transferability--material learned in one session is apparently forgotten in another. This illustrates a couple of issues:

• Coding: Material needs to be learned at the appropriate level to be portable/transferable. The Dale/Bruner model is discussed here. (Note that I got the labels wrong-I thought I might. Sorry! The arguments stands.)
  
• ...and that led to a brief note on how other cognitivists like Ausubel (advance organizers) rely on rich experience-based material as a hook on which to hang other more abstract learning
  
• Cuing: This interesting study on Why Walking through a Doorway Makes You Forget suggests that how and where a memory is formed is an important cue for its recall, and may complicate the transfer of learning from one setting to another.

...and, in the light of Sue Cowley, Emma raised the matter of ground rules for behaviour. What happens when there is a difference of opinion within the class about the operation of the ground rules--over a trivial infraction, in the last class of the course? An insightful discussion had you digging behind the scenes, as it were, to discuss how a member might feel excluded by fellow-learners conversing in their first language (thus excluding a native English speaker) even about an on-task topic;  whether all members can appreciate priorities and exceptions in the application of the rules...

Stuff we have not covered...

We've mentioned a great deal of material in passing but not gone into it in detail--this blog serves as a means of reminding us about it. One issue we have not discussed at all, however, is technology and learning.

You all work in largely low-tech environments, so I consider myself excused from having to introduce the much-vaunted wonders of e-learning, and contented myself with a simple take-away message--the technology is not neutral. From the hand-written book to Twitter on your mobile, it changes not only how you teach but what you can and can't teach....

The assessment (no, it's NOT an assignment!)

Rebecca raised an interesting point about the "angle" of this unit in relation to that of those of Year 2. Year 2 zooms out a bit as it were, and mostly looks at issues in broader contexts (with the conspicuous exception of the action research project), so keep this unit's submission close to your actual practice, as we have discussed--and as the presentation from a fortnight ago recommends.

(Incidentally this set up some discussion/speculation about the latest report and consultation from BIS.)

We consulted about tutorials on the submission proposal, and provisionally fixed dates and times--please let me know if you need to change anything, and feel free to send me a draft of the proposal. There is no deadline for the proposal--its principal function is to provide you with peace of mind about the acceptability of your plan, and your submission will be accepted even without it (apart from the ethics undertaking), but it does make sense to run it past me, and the deadline is 11 May, although of course submissions are welcome earlier.

Have a good break!

PS; All relevant presentations on SlideShare have been set to be downloadable until the deadline.

14 March: Assessment preparation

Yesterday's session was largely about checking your understanding of the outcomes, and where the material you have looked at fits in with them, and discussing a possible strategy for producing the assessment.

This PowerPoint covers the assessment a little more systematically than our discussion, but along the same lines (at the time of writing SlideShare is a little erratic, I'm afraid):

Submission plan 10

There's also some advice on baking an essay here.

Please remember that you are welcome to send me your submission proposal any time from now on. We'll have a wind-up session on the afternoon of the 28 March, but if you would like a tutorial from the tea-break onwards, please let me know. I'll fit you in on a first-booked, first-served basis--but if you would prefer the tutorial in the Summer Term, I can fit in with that, too.

7 March: Humanistic and situated perspectives

We were down on numbers, and those of you who were here had not been able to read last week's blog. So most of the links stand for this week, too.

We did also spend some time this week on:

• The Subject-Teacher-Learner model. (Sorry! The interactive page has stopped working.) One point I didn't make was that making inclusivity a major principle in policy and practice has the effect of elevating the position of the Learner in the sculpt. In particular, if the Learner comes out higher than the Subject, there is the danger of dumbing down the Subject, and that is what some commentators periodically say about the UK education system.

Please be ready to share your critical incidents next week. And just a reminder that I shall be away on 21 March, so you have Carol all day then, and me all day for the final session on 28 March.

If any of you would like to email me your draft submission proposals, feel free!

I'll let you catch up!

Remember Little Albert?

Here is some new background on the case.

29 February: Gestalt and the Deep & Surface construct

Commentary

It was an interesting session yesterday, in which you illustrated some of the issues we have been trying to talk about. There was a palpable frustration that the whole thing is not coming together for several of you; the co-existence of different perspectives on learning is difficult to sort out--can they all be right at the same time?

Sort of. I'm not sure that "correctness" or "accuracy" is the best criterion to use. It is usefulness which matters. Learning and teaching is an activity too complex to be captured in just one model. Whether you adopt a behavioural perspective, or a neurological, cognitive, information-processing, humanistic or situated one, each will draw your attention to different aspects of the process and the task of teaching--and some will be more relevant to your own practice and context than others. (And you'll see from the list above that there are many more angles than we touch on...)

But your experience is normal--the picture is confusing, but you will bring it together. People do emerge at the other end (and for what it's worth, from a surface learning perspective, they do pass the assessment!) In the meantime cultivate what Keats called "negative capability":

Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

[Letter to George and Thomas Keats (21 Dec 1817).
in H. E. Rollins (ed.), (1958) Letters of John Keats, Vol. 1, p.193]

And of course your experience is just that kind of "liminality" which we discussed in relation to attempts to iron out the peaks and troughs of the learning curve, lest students be put off by their negative experiences and drop out of the course.


I brought that up in the discussion in relation to the idea of threshold concepts. The link is to a page introducing the idea, with lots more links at the end of it.

And here is a paper by Peter Hadfield and myself (2008) exploring how compliance and accountability, as the mantra of much PCE teaching, may be conspiring against genuine learning.

And for the last word see here.

---

Meanwhile, back at the ranch...

Here are the slides from the presentation (annotated):

Some notes on Gestalt learning theory

(I've enabled down-loading of the slides: to get at them click on "View in SlideShare" (bottom-left corner) and then "Download" across the top of the display.)

My major Gestalt link is here.There's a more academic and informative one here, with more pointers to Wertheimer, Kohler and Koffka.

Specific points;

A number of the slides were concerned with visual illusions; R L Gregory is the chief authority on them, and some can be seen in video format at the following link (including the mask illusion--which is also here );

• http://www.richardgregory.org/experiments/index.htm and
• http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_p1.htm
• See Gregory R L (1997) Eye and Brain; the psychology of seeing (5th edn.) Oxford; Oxford U.P.
• and lots more examples here although these are illusions for the sake of illusions and take us off track a little.

A fuller list of the movies on Betty the Crow's use of tools can be found here, and a write-up at here. More generally here's a TED talk on corvid intelligence:

 ...and here is a crow doing the same sequential tool process as the chimp in the presentation (mutatis mutandi):

One example of crows using stones to raise water level (which one of you referred to having seen elsewhere) is here.

The tendency of people to see patterns which are not there when they don't feel in control is discussed here 

Deep and surface learning.

This is almost the only work on "learning styles" which escaped unscathed from Coffield et al's review in 2004, introduced on the linked page.

The basic idea is introduced here, including Saljo's (1979) five conceptions of learning, which we looked at briefly.

And here is the SOLO taxonomy from John Biggs.

This is worth reading up about properly, especially if you work in more academic areas: see here for a potted account. And:

• Biggs J and Tang C (2007) Teaching for Quality Learning at University (3rd edn) Buckingham: SRHE and Open University Press

• Prosser M and Trigwell K (1999) Understanding Learning and Teaching; the experience in higher education Buckingham; Open University Press: SRHE (They have a useful self-assessment tools which you can use to work out whether your teaching style promotes deep or surface learning--if you would like to try it let me know.)

Next week

I hope you will have given some thought to your "critical incident". Remember:

• For discussion purposes all you need is a few notes; there's no need to write it up, although if you do, you might find it works as a starting point for the submission.

• "Critical" just means that the fact that it happened was significant rather than routine. It does not imply something which went wrong, or that you have to be self-critical.

• Indeed, examining how something went right, or better than expected, is often more of a challenge!

We shall be moving on to:

• Experiential learning--dear old Kolb re-visited. The page is here 

• And you might find this adaptation of his model of interest. Or not.

• The Humanistic tradition. This page is merely a taster. Follow some links.

• In particular, Malcolm Knowles on andragogy. And given that you are an all-female class, do see the bottom part of the page.

• Beyond that, there are the theorists of transformative learning and critical reflection, with whom you may find it useful to have a nodding acquaintance, but they go rather beyond the scope of this course.

• And then the proponents of situated learning, for whom the whole idea of pretending that you learn anything useful in an educational institution is rubbish, as cogently argued in this classic article by Howard Becker.

That makes quite a load; so please do as much advance reading as you can, and make a note of your questions, which I'll try to answer!

---

Also:

Pancakes: a bit late for this year. These are not traditional Shrove Tuesday tossed thin crepes but more robust, thicker (up to 6mm) but more compact (about 100mm) American-style pancakes… for about a dozen:

• A heaped tablespoon of self-raising flour. (Plain flour for Yorkshire puds, s-r for pancakes)
• A heaped dessert spoon of sugar
• A rounded tea spoon of baking powder
• Half a flat teaspoon of salt (or less, but some at least)
• One egg (this poses the tricky scaling issue; you can multiply all the other ingredients quite happily, but at what point do you need another egg? I think it is when you reach three times the above amounts, but in practice there appears to be no harm in using more eggs, so err on the side of generosity).
• Milk (or milk and water) to mix the batter to the consistency of double cream.

Put it in the fridge and it will thicken, so you may need to add more liquid (carefully–a little liquid makes a big difference) before cooking. You can use the batter at once, but letting it rest seems to produce better results.
Lightly oil a frying pan and pre-heat until a drop of water turns into a dancing ball when dropped in the pan. Pour in the batter, sufficient to spread to about four inches. When bubbles have formed and burst on the top surface, flip over and cook for about fifteen seconds or so until lightly browned. “Children are like pancakes–always throw the first one away” (Peter  Benchley) Once you have the hang of the process, do them in batches of three or four at a time.

Serve with butter and maple syrup.

We'll re-visit the pancake case new week, and see how it works with the Kolb cycle.
.

8 February: "Intelligence"

 (28 February: please read the new material at the end of the post. Thanks)Notes on "Intelligence"

This post has rather less in it than I expected, because most of what we talked about is at least touched on at: http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/intelligence.htm where you will also find a range of onward links, specifically including the Flynn effect, and a brief mention of Gardner on multiple intelligences.

• The "Flynn effect" is discussed at http://www.indiana.edu/%7Eintell/flynneffect.shtml and also here. Note that the latter article tackles Spearman's g head on.

• The two different forms of thinking identified by Hudson--"convergent" and "divergent"--are discussed here (just in case you missed it first time).

• The distinction between Gf (fluid intelligence) and Gc (crystallized intelligence) originates from Cattell in 1967. As the initials suggest they are both seen as aspects of Spearman's g factor. There is a brief summary here. At the time of writing (last updated 8 Feb.) the Wikipedia article was pretty sound, but of course you can't rely on it.

• The inherent problems of any kind of assessment are discussed here.

• The Dweck mindset idea has its own website here, and there's a good summary--with practical implications--from Geoff Petty here. It's perhaps too simplistic and pitched in the discourse of the "personal growth" and "positive psychology" movement, but it does tie up with some of the recent research on what works best in teaching, which we shall return to later.

• See Gould S J The Mismeasure of Man for the best critical account of the concept and history of intelligence.

• Raven's matrices are introduced here, and there is an online test here.

Asides

• Wordle is actually at www.wordle.net (I'd said wordle.com)

• On eugenics, you may be interested in this review, from as late as 1952, and these videos (sample those related examples in the right-hand column, and the comments--which is why I have linked to the source rather than embedding it--which need to be read for what they say about the authors and their times rather than their explicit content).

• The contentious book on IQ (in part) I mentioned was The Bell-Curve (1994) by Herrnstein and Murray: it so happens that Charles Murray is making ripples again with another new book published this week in the States, although not much concerned with IQ this time. It's reviewed here.

• The link with  Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (raised by Jackie) is noted here. The scene of classical conditioning of babies against flowers is in this chapter.

• The other dystopian view I referred to was Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870-2033 reviewed here, and (via his obituary) here.

• De-sensitization therapy is outlined here. 

In three weeks' time:

We shall be looking at two more aspects of cognitive theory.

• Gestalt, and

• Deep and surface learning

These pages are of course just starters. In all probability I shall be adding further recommendations during the break, so please keep watching this space.

Have a good break!

---

Additional points (28 February)

I've just been reviewing the pacing of this unit, and bearing in mind that you want time on application and indeed preparation for the assessment, I think we need to quicken the pace a little. So I'd like to look at learning from experience tomorrow, too. We've already touched on it several times, but not looked at it systematically. I know the web-page looks dense, but remember, we are interested in the underlying ideas, not in memorising the detail.

That should mean that we can go on to humanistic and situated ideas about learning the following week (again, they just need to be put in context, because we've already mentioned them), and we shall by then have an overview of the field, ready to start exploring its relevance with reference to your own practice.

Ready for that: please give some thought to one or two critical incidents from your own teaching, which you are prepared to share and "mine" to see what the ideas have to say about them.

By "critical incidents" I don't necessarily mean "problems". They may be occasions on which "the penny dropped" for someone. Why?  Or when you tried teaching something differently, and the results were unexpected. Why, and how?

We'll talk about this in more detail tomorrow. See you then!

Supplemental: more on memory

You may be interested in this recent article: "Enjoyable essay review of new book that charts a century of memory research. From Frederic Bartlett, who concluded in 1913 that we remake our memories each time we remember them, right up to contemporary research on memory erasure."

1 February: Behaviourism

Sorry a few of you missed some of the material; I've made rather greater than usual use of video this week to help you to catch up, but do bring your questions to next week's session.

Here is an annotated version of the full presentation, of which we saw only a few slides;

Notes on Behaviourism

My summary page on behaviourism is at www.learningandteaching.info/learning/behaviour.htm, with links in the side-bar to other pages on the site and external links in the main body of the page.

If you are searching for yourself, remember that "behavior" will get many more hits than "behaviour". If you come across anything particularly good, let me know, please.

For a fun simulation of Pavlov's original experiment, try:http://www.simplypsychology.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/pavlov.swf

Books! Look at;
SLATER L (2004) Opening Skinner's Box; great psychological experiments of the twentieth century London; Bloomsbury --on Skinner and the myths surrounding him, and lots of other good stuff in a popular-science style.

Here's a reasonable short overview:



Here’s a rather sanitised reconstruction of Pavlov’s set-up!



This half-hour silent film, however, is authentic.

(Pavlov, Watson and Thorndike were interested only in stimulus and response (S-R) behaviour; Skinner paid more attention to the organism as part of the chain (S-O-R), which is why he is sometimes referred to as a "neo-behaviourist".)

Here’s a bit more detail on Skinner and his pigeons and free will…



Some videos I referred to can be viewed here:

• YouTube playlist "Skinner and Behaviourism"http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=6439B7CD9DD445F9&page=1

• Basic chicken training (QuickTime movie: download free version here) 

• Shaping chicken behaviour (also QuickTime)

(Note: be careful when downloading movie players: they use sneaky tricks to get you to sign up for more than you bargained for!)

There's a very straightforward overview of clicker training for dogs here:



Note that there are two stages, which I think I should have spelt out more clearly:

• The first is classical conditioning, establishing the association between the sound of the clicker (conditioned stimulus) and the treat (unconditioned stimulus) 

• The second is using that conditioned response to reinforce and then shape behaviour in a desired pattern.

...and here is a training session in real-time showing how long it takes (once the conditioned response to the click has been established):



at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC367wKGi4M there are as many related videos as you could wish for.

Here is original footage of the case of Little Albert (1920). Forgive the intrusive music, and trust what you see, and not what the commentary tells you to make of it!



Here is a postscript on the case, which is even more disturbing, but does make sense of the film you just watched.

It is very easy, as we discussed, to get hung up on the details of behaviourism, partly because it is so experimentally focused, and there seems to be a lot to remember. Don't worry about that--concentrate on what you can do with it.

Points 

• Here's the latest take on Robert the Bruce and the spider. 

• There is an outline of the principles and practice of token economies here. 

• A propos of nothing (except that it is a very interesting novel), Never Let Me Go is by Kazuo Ishigoru.

Next week 

We shall move on to some selected aspects of cognitive theories of learning.


In particular we'll be looking at the fraught topic of intelligence, so start here and follow the links. You may also get into the idea of multiple intelligences, convergent and divergent thinking, and--heaven help you--learning styles.

If you have time to take in a book on it, from a critical stance, see:

• Gould S J (1997) The Mismeasure of Man (rev. ed.) London; Penguin

Gould also describes the eugenics experiments which we discussed briefly this week.

25 January: Motivation

Matters Arising from previous session and reading...

We started with a question about assimilating what one has read; looking around for a useful source, this material from the OU is good and contains the ideas we discussed and more.

And that led on to re-visit what we had previously discussed about memorisation techniques, and Joshua Foer's book about becoming a memory champion, Moonwalking with Einstein reviewed here.

(And then digressed onto the unit assessment...)

When we got onto the Zull material, much of the discussion was taken up with the distinction between System One thinking (immediate global grasp of a situation and response, initiated in the amygdala) and System Two (more painstaking disciplined linear analysis of an issue, through the neocortex). The distinction--and the limitations of both forms--are spelt out in Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow (2011). If you want an introduction to his ideas, then check out this site--scroll down to get to video and transcript, or this TED talk (although he's slightly off topic, here).

As I mentioned, there is some discussion of similar material in Claxton G (1997) Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind London; Fourth Estate and Gladwell M (2005) Blink; the power of thinking without thinking London; Penguin.

This raised the question of the point at which a skill becomes "second nature", and the role of deliberate practice in facilitating that, which...

...moved us on to motivation... Remember that there were several links recommended in last week's post.

We started by thinking about Intrinsic and Extrinsic motivation, and the (longer than I had intended) clip from Dan Pink at the RSA, arguing that rewards etc. could actually inhibit performance. That led on to a discussion of the Educational Maintenance Allowance--now defunct, of course--and its upsides and downsides in these terms.

We did look fairly briefly at the Maslow model and its implications for the classroom (particularly in prison), and then at Herzberg, and the importance of addressing the "hygiene factors" (a.k.a. de-motivators). (Links for these were listed last week.)

We could have proceeded from there to a consideration of optimum arousal or stress levels and their motivating role, but as it was we just nodded at them in passing, so here's the link again. We can't cover everything, but do ask about things--which, of course, you do.

And that broadened the topic a little to overall attitudes to learning. One of the most interesting models in this area, although very easy to grasp, is Carol Dweck's "self-theories" (see here and here [by Petty] for web introductions. And here for her home page at Stanford where there are pdfs of several papers on open access.) We discussed a couple of emergent points;

• These are the kinds of beliefs which may be difficult to change, but have profound implications if they do.
• They only really become influential under conditions of adversity, difficulty, and failure.
• The labels Dweck uses are variable, which can be confusing.
• The model has implications for the way in which we give feedback to learners: as some of last year's group put it, "Tell students that they have worked hard when giving feedback, rather than 'you are really good at that!'" "Praise for putting effort in, not for being naturally good at something."

Going on from that, we looked at Seligman's work on learned helplessness, where people and animals lose the connection between anything they do and consequences in the real world. I mentioned in passing that he has now cheered up a little and turned his attention to "positive psychology", which sounds good but could be pernicious; see Ehrenreich B (2010) Smile or Die; how positive thinking fooled America and the world London; Granta. or watch this RSA presentation on YouTube (10:23)

We'd by now got into some personality features, and so to sum up I directed you to Gregory Bateson's ideas about levels of learning.

Next week...

Please look at some material about behaviourism. (And note that of course some of what that approach says is undermined by the evidence about rewards we looked at in the video...)

• My own attempts, with some further links, are here. I say "attempts" because behaviourists often get very impatient when their work is described in anything less than very flattering terms, and they regularly write me rather patronising emails about how I've got it all wrong...

• This is an annotated links page on behaviour analysis. Just browse and make a note of your questions; this topic is not really difficult, but it is easier than most to get hold of the wrong end of the stick, so don't try to force yourself to get your head around it. You can always post your questions in advance as comments to this post--just click on where it says (at the moment) "0 comments" at the bottom of the post to open the comments box.

Asides

Sorry--the snowboarding crow has disappeared from YouTube for copyright reasons.

18 January: Learning, and Memory

It was a long session yesterday, which threw up all lots of stuff; if I have forgotten to mention any, let me know. What follows is not necessarily in the order we discussed it, because we jumped about a bit!

A propos of our brief discussion of "teaching to the test", incidentally, you may be interested in this article about GCSE exam practices from today's Telegraph.


What is learned? 

So many ideas and points were raised that I can’t cover all of them: I’ve tried to summarise them in a separate handout, which is here, but includes some observations from earlier runs of the exercise, too:

• What_learned_commented_2012

(Incidentally, the rationale of the exercise, which uses concrete instances to get an underlying themes, is described at http://www.learningandteaching.info/teaching/exercises_definitions.htm )
The major themes which came up concerned

• the relationship between what is “hard-wired” into us genetically and what we learn. As we saw, it is not a simple either/or; our inheritance may equip us or pre-dispose us to something but it is our environment and experience which determined the form it will take. So we are equipped to learn a language from soon after birth, but which language is an environmental matter. The  most accessible and fascinating discussion of this is to be found in Ridley M (2003) Nature via Nurture; genes, experience and what makes us human London; Fourth Estate. (The fact that he was Chairman of Northern Rock when it collapsed is neither here nor there!)

• the other major theme was that not all change is learning; take the example of language acquisition above. The baby has to grow a bit before she acquires the motor control of voice to babble and then speak, and the integration of brain function to master language. You can’t learn what are you are not yet ready for. That does not concern us a great deal on a PCE course, but it’s very important for teachers of children. The great figure in exploring the developmental changes in understanding and learning capacity throughout childhood was Jean Piaget. (Lesley--if there are any links on developmental psychology you think others might find interesting/useful, feel free to add them as comments, or to send them to me and I'll post them.)

• http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/a_a_learning.htm on anticipatory-avoidance learning and OCD

We came back to finish off the presentation from last week on defining learning. As part of that we looked at Bloom's taxonomy in a little more detail than hitherto.

• With particular reference to skill acquisition and the psychomotor domain, there was also the matter of getting to the stage–through practice, of course–where performance is “second nature”, where it takes more effort to get something wrong rather than to get it right. That is briefly touched on here. 

• We concluded by looking at the "range of convenience" of different theories of learning, briefly covered here--including a note on the brain-based material. And on that point--I was rather dismissive of some of the claims for "accelerated learning" and the like. A more nuanced account of the area can be found at http://www.neuroeducational.net/ Some more specific links have now been added in the "Points" section below.

Memory

Here is the presentation from the session last year, annotated and slightly edited:

Introduction to Memory

The principal links to expand a little on the basic material are:

• http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/memory.htm and links onwards from that page

• And going back a bit to the sensory buffer and selective attention, here comes the gorilla!

• The book I showed you is; Chabris C and Simons D (2011) The Invisible Gorilla and other ways our intuition deceives us London; Harper

• See also this page for Piaget's ideas about Assimilation and Accommodation.

• So to a consideration of the difficulties of changing your mind; we talked about cognitive dissonance (and here's a link to the book about Mrs Keech and the UFOs).

• And that in turn led on to "supplantive learning": the short account of that is here, and a fuller one here. That discussion provided an initial skirmish with the topics of emotion and learning, and resistance to learning, which you mentioned as matters of interest last week, but we hadn't scheduled. We'll no doubt consider that in more detail when we look at motivation next week.

• For a more detailed account, the most accessible but authoritative book is probably still Rose S (2003) The Making of Memory; from molecules to mind (revised edition) London; Vintage. (Amazon link)

Points from the Board:

• The visual cliff experiment: video and notes.

• The education/training distinction: see graphics on slides 12 and 13 of this presentation (sorry it's jumping ahead a bit). The Dewey graphic is based on his ideas in Experience and Education (1938).

• The case study of Paul West's loss of language and recovery of it is told here.

• The Ramachandran mirror-box for the treatment of phantom-limb pain is described in this video. 

• The experiment on prejudice between blue-eyed  and brown-eyed children was devised by Jane Elliott.

• I've spent a while trying to find suitable links concerning Neuro-Linguistic Programming. As I rather expected, it is a bitterly contentious field. So I'm just posting a link to wikipedia, because this is where its strengths show. Because a wiki can be edited by anyone, extremely partial accounts of a topic don't survive long. You can also check how much activity there has been on editing the page: this one has been edited over 10,000 times in the almost ten years it has existed.

• Most of the stuff on Accelerated Learning is simply advocacy, rather than dispassionate evaluation, but this article is a little more even-handed, even if the author is a little credulous about "learning styles" in general.

Next Week: Motivation

• The basic page is http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/motivation.htm  with links to other pages on the topic, including http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/motivanx.htm Please read those at least, and come prepared with any questions they pose for you, and ideas about how they relate to your practice of teaching.

• Extrinsic motivation in the form of rewards do not always work: a couple of the studies which explore the limitations of extrinsic motivation on children's learning are abstracted here. (I mention this because it's likely to come up in the discussions, and you can be prepared for it. 

• "Learned helplessness" provides a perspective on motivation which may apply to some prisoners in particular, so you might like to look at http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learned_helplessness.htm with some further links. 

• ...and of course we'll relate these to Zull. You'll know by now that he is accessible (if a little folksy and cheesy at times), but he does over-simplify occasionally and is now rather dated. If you want something a little more up-to-date and authoritative try Fine C (2007)  A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives London; Icon Books (Amazon link).

• If you fancy a little heavier lifting, this recent article puts Abraham Maslow in context.

There are many theories of motivation: we shan't even try to cover them all, but just select a few with implications for teaching and learning.

Supplemental

Complementary to Zull, I've just come across Brainrules.net: the site is designed to accompany a book, which I haven't read, but it's engagingly laid out to explore this fascinating but slightly peripheral area without getting into too much detail.

11 January: Welcome back!

This week is the introduction to Unit 2: Bases for Learning and Teaching.

After the submission debacle (for which I apologise on behalf of the university--the problems have apparently now been resolved) we started by going through the unit outcomes. Some points emerging:

• 2.1  "Inclusive practice" is (I think we agreed) a Good Thing, but it is not a panacea. Discussion identified issues around assessment standards, but we also touched on other areas which need to be addressed.
• 2.2 and 2.3  "inclusive" is a gratuitous qualifier; the outcomes make more sense without it*.
• 2.4 is principally assessed in the unit 4 submission.
• 2.5: we discussed how the evidence will emerge from describing your practice and then digging down into the factors which shape it.
• The remaining outcomes are standard.

So we moved on to a consideration of the content of the Unit.

This was the "menu": items in bold are the chosen ones.

	What is learning?	Forms of learning
Learning and the brain	Motivation	Memory
Conditioning (behavioural approaches)	Cognitive approaches—developmental etc.	Gestalt
“Intelligence”	Mindset	Social and humanistic approaches
Experiential learning	Resistance to learning	Emotion and learning
Imitation	Work-based learning	Situated learning
Educational technology	Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge	Inclusivity and its dilemmas
Learning difficulties	Communication theory	What works best
Learning “styles”	Fads and myths	Tutorials
Tacit learning/knowledge

to which we added:

"Inclusivity" and Threshold concepts and troublesome knowledge


Schedule

	Date	Topic
1	11 Jan	Introduction: What is learning? (i)
2	18 Jan (1)	What is learning? (concluded) Forms and factors of learning.
3	18 Jan (2)	Motivation
4	25 Jan	Memory: the physical basis of learning (inc. intro to learning difficulties and "neurodiversity")
5	1 Feb	Behavioural approaches to learning (and teaching)
6	8 Feb	Cognitive/constructive approaches 1: (inc. Gestalt)
	15 Feb	(1/2 term)
	22 Feb	(Unit 3)
7	29 Feb	Cognitive/constructive approaches 2: “Intelligence” and individual differences
8	7 March	Social and humanistic approaches, including andragogy and situated learning
9	14 March	Inclusivity and its dilemmas in practice, including cultural issues
10	21 March	(Unit 3)
11	28 March (1)	Loose ends (although of course we can always carry on after Easter...)
12	28 March (2)	Group tutorial on tackling the assessment

This programe leaves us without specific slots for communication theory or for the emotional aspects or resistance to learning, but I think I know where those will feed in anyway. And we probably won't stick to the scheme anyway, which leads me to an important caveat about this Unit...

Teaching strategy

I am decidedly not recommending that you teach your classes with the approach I am taking with you! That approach is informed by what I know of you from teaching you last term, by your experience and background, by your level of motivation, and by the size of the group, and of course the kind of learning we all want you to engage in--not just teaching to the test.

• Of course we digressed and I talked a bit about the approach adopted on some FE courses, where simply accumulating little disconnected gobbets of allegedly relevant knowledge substitutes for any more demanding --or indeed interesting--engagement with the subject. I blogged about that here and here 
• And that linked in to the notion of threshold concepts, which we'll get into later.
• Another way of putting it is to say that we want to promote deep rather than surface learning. Again more later.
• This led on to a discussion of what you had to know about "theory", initiated by Lucy. I commented that it does not matter much to me whether you can name theorists and attribute ideas to them--but what does matter is whether you can use them to illuminate and help you to further develop your practice.

So in the light of that, we agreed that I would recommend some reading each week which you could do in advance, and that the session would kick off from your questions about it. It's a good idea if you've have all read some of the same stuff, but it is also great--for students of your degree of maturity--if you've also read different matterial as well, so that you can share the ideas between you, and get the benefit of what your colleagues have been reading (and thinking about and experimenting with...) as well as your own.

So for next week-- please read ch 4 of Zull (2002) --available here:


(The full reference is in the handbook.)

Here is the presentation which followed after the break (with a few bits we didn't get round to):

Introduction to Learning

Points

• We briefly discussed "tacit knowledge". This portrait of Robert Hooke, Newton's great rival, is constructed from contemporary descriptions, like a police photofit. Not sure I'd recognise him in the street (wig and garb aside, of course).
• And that raised the issue of expertise-- the TED talk I referred to on the expert in medical diagnosis (not Gregory House) is here: the anecdote starts at 4:30 in.

* ...the issue is similar to that discussed here.

(I'll probably recall more to add, but I thought I ought not to delay posting too long.)