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.)