How To Teach History

Here is how a journalist described a class she watched a few months ago in a Northern California high school.

In the 1986 comedy Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Ben Stein famously plays a high school teacher who drones on about the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act while his students slump at their desks in a collective stupor. For many kids, that’s history: an endless catalog of disconnected dates and names, passed down like scripture from the state textbook, seldom questioned and quickly forgotten.

Now take a seat inside Will Colglazier’s classroom at Aragon High School in San Mateo. The student population here is fairly typical for the Bay Area: about 30 percent Latino, 30 percent Asian and 40 percent white. The subject matter is standard 11th grade stuff: What caused the Great American Dust Bowl?

Tapping on his laptop, Colglazier shows the class striking black-and-white images of the choking storms that consumed the Plains states in the 1930s. Then he does something unusual. Instead of following a lesson plan out of the textbook, he passes out copies of a 1935 letter, written by one Caroline Henderson to the then-U.S. secretary of agriculture, poignantly describing the plight of her neighbors in the Oklahoma panhandle. He follows that with another compelling document: a confidential high-level government report, addressed to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, decrying the region’s misguided homesteading policies.

Colglazier clearly is a gifted and well-trained educator, a history/economics major and 2006 graduate of the Stanford Teacher Education Program. But what sets this class apart from Ferris Bueller’s is more than the man; it’s his method—an approach developed at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education that’s rapidly gaining adherents across the country. At a time when national student surveys show abysmal rates of proficiency in history, trial studies of the Stanford program demonstrated that when high school students engage regularly with challenging primary source documents, they not only make significant gains learning and retaining historical material, they also markedly improve their reading comprehension and critical thinking…..

Colglazier builds his thought-provoking classes using an online tool called Reading Like a Historian. Designed by the Stanford History Education Group under Professor Sam Wineburg, the website offers 87 flexible lesson plans featuring documents from the Library of Congress. Teachers can download the lessons and adapt them for their own purposes, free of charge. Students learn how to examine documents critically, just as historians would, in order to answer intriguing questions: Did Pocahontas really rescue John Smith? Was Abraham Lincoln a racist? Who blinked first in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Russians or the Americans?

Most history teachers do not teach like Will Colglazier or the cartoon figure teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  Colglazier is an exception, albeit according to the journalist, one who joins many others in using  historical thinking to gain deep understanding of the past rather than a heritage approach, that is, using facts from the past to recreate a present that tells Americans who they are, who they were, and the nation they are part of.

As I and many others who have been in classrooms have pointed out, most history teachers tilt toward the heritage end of the spectrum of history teaching but many do incorporate historical approaches in their lessons (See here and here).

Why?

One answer looks at how external testing, state academic standards, federal accountability regulations, teacher certification, and the unofficial national curriculum of Advanced Placement influence what teachers present. These omnipresent structures in the policy terrain set the boundaries within which teachers teach. To answer the above question on why teachers tilt toward “traditional” teaching, then, I also want to identify other factors that often go unmentioned by those eager to improve the teaching of history in K-12 schools.

Consider that cultural beliefs about the function of public schools to socialize children and youth into the dominant civic and social values (e.g., honesty, respect for others’ values, cooperating) are anchored in age-graded school structures. They become a powerful organizational mechanism for carrying out societal expectations (i.e., kindergarten prepares children for the first grade, a high school diploma is essential to going to college or getting a decent job). Teachers operating separately in their classrooms move 25 to 30-plus students through a 700-page history text, and give frequent tests to see whether students have learned the required knowledge and skills.

Moreover, age-graded secondary schools have history teachers teaching five classes a day (with at least one planning or “free” period and lunch) usually involving up to three different preparations (e.g., world history, U.S. history, and economics) with a student load of anywhere between 125 to 165 a day. The sheer whirl of traversing these classes between 7:45 AM-3 PM is exhausting for 22-year-olds. Imagine what it is like for 62- year-olds. When grading homework, reading essays, and checking quizzes are factored into the workload of most history teachers—don’t forget most teachers see individual students before school, during planning periods and lunch, and then after school–the daily decisions and fast pace of the day, much less the unpredictable emotional ups-and-downs that accompany working with teenagers, exhilarate and exhaust teachers. These social beliefs and school structures added to the public expectation that every student passes a test to graduate and then goes to college merge to create intense workplace conditions that influence how teachers teach.

Yet history teachers are hardly passive agents that societal expectations and school structures pour into a mold. Teachers bring their life experiences, formal and informal knowledge, and personal beliefs about children, learning, and serving the community that also influence what and how they teach history. And this is where blends of heritage and historical thinking pedagogy enter the picture.

Both constrained and autonomous, teachers accommodate to external demands and organizational structures while carving out a niche for themselves in which they can make independent decisions about how they organize their classrooms, group students, and teach.  Most history teachers end up picking and choosing different practices to put a tattoo on their teaching yet fall somewhere in the middle part of a continuum of teaching practices.

While most teachers use a version of the heritage approach, a small minority like Will Colglazier work within the constraints of the age-graded school and make other teaching choices based on their beliefs about learning, children, and knowledge of history.

Consider New York teacher Linda Strait (a pseudonym). A researcher who observed her teach a hybrid of both traditions of teaching. She teaches U.S. history through lectures, guides discussions, and controls what content is taught and how.

Yet in her Civil Rights unit, she offered a series of lessons beginning with a videotape “The Shadow of Hate” after which students divided into small groups to discuss and list their reactions on wall charts; an ungraded quiz on a reading Strait had assigned; a roundtable discussion of four questions she posed to the class; a two-day simulation of a local skating rink that refused to admit minorities with the teacher role-playing the owner and students making pitches to her to keep or drop the policy. Then two days of reviewing notes, writing in-class practice essays for the 11^th grade Regents tests that would draw from the Civil Rights unit.

Strait tells the researcher, “I try to throw in as many activities and projects, but I still feel that I am too heavily the center of it.” She has invented a hybrid of the two teaching traditions out of the choices she made within the constraints of state and school district policies, the structures of the age-graded high schools, her knowledge of the subject, personal experiences, and beliefs about how her students learn U.S. history (pp. 16-28).

Will Colglazier is part of a minority of teachers using historical thinking pedagogy. Most teachers of history blend both pieces of it and the heritage approach; they hug the middle.

Parent/Teacher Conferences–More Cartoons*

If readers following this blog have not yet guessed it, I am a sucker for cartoons about school reform policies, classroom practice, and larger education issues. Cartoonists have the knack of getting to the basic point, albeit, with exaggeration, even caricature. Sometimes, they hit the bullseye and say what needs to be said even if it makes the reader wince. Getting the viewer to smile, maybe chuckle, and mutter: “how true” is the cartoonist’s reward.

Here is another set of cartoons about exchanges between teachers and parents that may elicit groans, laughter, or flinches. Enjoy.

__________

*For earlier monthly posts featuring cartoons, see: “Digital Kids in School,” “Testing,” “Blaming Is So American,”  “Accountability in Action,” “Charter Schools,” and “Age-graded Schools,” Students and Teachers, Parent-Teacher Conferences, Digital Teachers, Addiction to Electronic Devices,  Testing, Testing, and Testing, Business and Schools, Common Core Standards, Problems and Dilemmas, Digital Natives (2),  Online Courses,  , Students and Teachers Again, and “Doctors and Teachers.“

MOOCs and the Mechanization of Education: Widening the Gap Between the Haves and Have-Nots (Greg Graham)

Greg Graham teaches writing at a midwestern university. This appeared November 8, 2012 on his blog

 Sebastian Thrun left his tenured teaching job at Stanford University after 160,000 students signed up for his free online version of the course “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.” The experience completely changed his perspective on education, he said, so he ditched Stanford and launched the private Web site Udacity, which offers online courses. “Having done this, I can’t teach at Stanford again,” Thrun said. “You can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture to your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.” (Thrun is staying at Stanford as a research professor, but will not be teaching there).

What exactly was the “Wonderland” that Thrun saw that sent him into such euphoric zeal that he discarded his position at a premier institution of higher education like he was trading in an old clunker at the car dealer? He saw those phenomenal numbers signing up for his class, and it made him dizzy with delight. Anybody with a Twitter account or Facebook page can understand the feeling. Your number of followers or friends can be a source of affirmation, proof that what you have to say is important. I was on Twitter for several weeks following anybody I found remotely interesting, and then someone told me that it is better to have more followers than followees, so I promptly started culling my list. I didn’t want to be a Twitter loser. But surely those adolescent impulses don’t affect scholars like Thrun.

I teach writing at a mid-level university in the dead center of fly-over country; if 160,000 people signed up for an online course I was teaching, I’d probably take my shirt off, write 160K on my chest, and run around campus whoopin it up. But Thrun is above that, right? He’s driven by higher ideals, right? Well, I don’t know about you, but the longer I live, the more I realize people everywhere are just as likely to be driven by ego as by higher ideals.

We’ve Got Discounts!

Perhaps Thrun and others like him have made the classic mistake of valuing quantity over quality, believing that more is better. Those huge numbers on their screens have made them drunk, clouding their judgment about what is wrong with our education system and what it will take to fix it. Folks often say technology is value neutral, when in fact there are many values inherent with technology, and one of them is volume. Like Wal-Mart, online education promises greater numbers reached; to hell with customer service and quality, we’ve got discounts!

Thrun isn’t the only one plunging headfirst into the digital pool. From Education Secretary Arne Duncan on down to my son’s 8^th grade teacher, the push for technology is relentless. If you’re not on board, the sentiment goes, you’re falling behind. Recent conversations have emerged about machines grading essays. Machines grading essays. Some are seriously asking if machines can match teachers in effectively assessing student essays. Peering behind the curtain of this essay-grading wizardry, here’s what I see: less demand on teachers, fewer teachers needed, somebody making money with a product. Believe me, as a teacher of writing at the college level, there are times I would give anything for a shortcut to responding to a pile of freshmen essays. It can be grueling work. But I am like most writing teachers — an idealist, in it for the love of learning. Why else would we do it?  So my colleagues and I plow through those papers, knowing we are giving our students the best chance at growth and success.

We’ve got to question the motivations behind these moves. I’m sure online educators are motivated by the sight of an abundance of learners, but what are the chances that over time those numbers will lose their meaning? Kind of like a person disrobing for a web cam or publishing a lewd video. Surely he or she gets excited about gaining an audience of hundreds or even thousands, but that thrill lacks the true fulfillment of a genuine loving relationship. I imagine such a person initially enjoying all the attention, but eventually continuing the practice for one reason only: money. Is this too extreme an analogy to apply to “Wonderland” Thrun and his internet colleagues? Is it possible that Thrun’s ecstatic experience with online teaching will eventually subside, that the huge numbers won’t provide the buzz they once did, and that all he will be left with is the money that can be made from his venture?

What the future holds

I don’t know Thrun, nor am I a psychologist or a shaman, so I can’t pretend to know what motivates him.  I certainly support his right to quit teaching at Stanford and start his own business, um, altruistic educational venture. I wish him the best in Wonderland. But I’m from Smallville, where the majority of Americans get their education, and it’s a million miles from Wonderland. The great majority of our students will never take Thrun’s course because, frankly, it would be over their heads. My concern is for them and the trickle-down effect that the furor over MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) will have on their education. Though they are not the demographic Thrun is targeting, students like them, who are average or struggling, are the ones who will suffer if this trend continues to grow. Ironically, though the move toward the mechanization of education is being advanced by some of the nation’s most élite universities, in the end it will be the lower half of the student population that will be forced out of the traditional classroom, widening the gap between the haves and the have-nots.

You might think I’m overreacting. Alarmists rise up every time technology takes a leap forward. But I want you to cast your mind 20, 30, 40 ahead. It is not hard to imagine a day when only the élite will experience a face-to-face education. The great masses will be educated online. Colleges will be the first to switch, but the change will slowly overtake secondary and primary education as well. How can this happen, you ask? Because the move toward the mechanization of education is driven by a holy trinity of interests forming an unstoppable alliance. Consider:

1)      State & Local Governments – As budgets are squeezed, state governments are cutting back education funding, looking for ways to cut education costs. Several state governments have already mandated at least one online course for high school students, paving the way for the future.

2)     School Administrators – As school budgets feel the pinch, administrators find that online classes are most cost effective. Money talks.

3)     Technology Companies – Big money comes to state and local government, school administrators, and teachers, offering goodies galore in exchange for using their products in the classroom. What better way to expand their market than by luring younger customers through the classroom? The infiltration of business into education is a problem that is only going to grow.

It is unlikely that our higher ideals will be able to stop these forces.

Changing Higher Education Forever

“The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Education Forever,” read a recent Wired Magazine headline about Thrun’s online class. Indeed, many universities are jumping on the MOOC bandwagon. Earlier this year, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced they were also feeling the love, and joined forces to offer a variety of free courses online in a partnership they’re calling “edX.” These changes may be exciting for intellectually driven people in the U.S. and around the world who will finally have access to the lectures of elite thinkers, but the impact on the average American student is murkier. What these students need most isn’t to hear amazing ideas from brilliant teachers – these students need immediacy.

Immediacy

The average high school and college student in the U.S. has a modest level of literacy. In order to thrive in education, they need immediacy. Teachers who practice immediacy call students by name, get to know them personally, and give the occasional pat on the back. As a college writing teacher with class sizes limited to 25 students, I’ve always prided myself on learning my student’s names within two weeks of classes starting. I go over a list of their names and recall their faces. My previous college provided me a picture roster, which enabled me to get a head start on learning names. One of my role models at that school was a woman who has taught there for over twenty years. One semester, she taught in the same classroom immediately after me. As I was gathering up my stuff after the first day of class, I was blown away as she greeted every student who walked through the door by name, treating them as if they were old friends. That’s immediacy.

More than mere friendliness, immediacy means students receive customized instruction. Teachers learn what makes each student tick, pushing and prodding one, giving space to another, according to each one’s needs. Teaching is an art form. An imperfect art from, no doubt, but an art form nonetheless. It requires the teacher’s entire person, all the senses, including intuition. And it requires every tool in the teacher’s bag, including tactile and other forms of non-verbal communication.

At a recent rally in D.C. protesting the Obama administration’s education policies that are centered on standardized tests, actor Matt Damon (whose mom is a teacher) summed up the role of teachers very well:

My teachers were free to approach me and every other kid in that classroom like an individual puzzle. They took so much care in figuring out who we were and how to best make the lessons resonate with each of us. They were empowered to unlock our potential. They were allowed to be teachers.

That kind of awareness and responsiveness is achieved at the highest levels in a face-to-face context. That’s why many Silicon Valley parents, including executives from Google, Apple, and Ebay, send their children to the Waldorf School of the Peninsula, where no electronics are allowed in the classroom. They know what we know: the teacher motivating his or her students, and giving each of them the confidence needed to overcome every obstacle, is a very personal, creative, challenging task. Putting machines between the teacher and student (either online or in the classroom) alienates the ones about whom we claim to be most concerned: the struggling students.

There’s No Place Like Place

Students not only need immediacy, they also need a place for learning. One aspect of the radical disruption Thrun and others are advocating is taking education out of the classroom and putting it on the student’s personal screen so the student can learn on his or her own time in his or her own place. But has it ever occurred to them that the students with the greatest educational needs often don’t have a place conducive to learning at their disposal? For those students, a place of learning becomes a haven, an escape from the chaos that otherwise characterizes their lives. I know this because they’ve told me so. Place matters. It always has, and always will. Just ask the thousands of people who pay hundreds of dollars to attend TED conferences rather than watch the videos at home.

Online courses from teachers like Thrun can provide excellent learning opportunities for many people. And students certainly need to develop competency using digital tools, especially for research. But that’s not what average students need most. Their greatest need is for mentors and teachers who can skillfully guide them through the learning process.

Magical Thinking

Unfortunately, Thrun is only one of many superstar thinkers who are getting caught up in the pizzazz of a massive digital audience. Giddy with their own potency (real or imagined), these thought leaders will add fuel to the fire in the push toward the mechanization of education.

But the mechanization of education is an exercise in magical thinking. Exhausted and desperate for answers, we are tempted to think that machines can save us. But they can’t. Wonderland isn’t the answer. The greatest things happening in education are occurring in classrooms around the world, as teachers look into the eyes of their students and find ways to bring learning to life.

It’s a sacred trust that we must not abdicate.

Teaching Math: The Driftwood and the Vortex (Michele Kerr)

Michele Kerr is a second-career teacher, credentialed in math, history, and English, with a master’s in education from Stanford University, She teaches math from CAHSEE prep to pre-calc at Kennedy High School in Fremont, CA. She also wrote about teaching English in an previous guest post.

“Ms K, I need to do my work with Ms. V. My education plan is my civil right!” Deon’s entire body was contorted in a geometric impossibility, the better to shout at me from the back of the room.

“Hey, Ms. K! Come here! What if both numbers are negative?” Sticks was waving me over.

“If the rise and run are both negative, the slope’s positive. Just like multiplying!” Jack argued, as Cal watched dispassionately.

Welcome to the first month of my math support class, for juniors and seniors who haven’t yet passed California’s High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE). Snapshots from a typical day:

• Deon and Mack in exile, Deon facing east in back, desk jammed up against the full-wall closet, Mack facing due north, desk flush against the middle of the wall. The two would scream at me for a few minutes, demanding to be released to their guided studies teacher now that I had successfully removed anything remotely resembling fun from their grasp. Eventually, they growled various forbidden words and subsided into something approaching silence.
• Miguel and Eddie obliviously tagging my whiteboards with my precious student markers that I’d taken away twice already.
• Yesenia and Juan, a brother-sister pair who only spoke Spanish, chattering away about anything but math with Pauly Jay who, in a class that’s half Hispanic, is nonetheless my only bilingual student.
• JattJeet dozing off, Tavon fixing me with a hostile stare for disrespecting Deon and Mack.
• Johnny wandering aimlessly, resplendent in a teal plaid shirt and striped turquoise shorts, wearing a pink winter girl’s hat and a purple school blanket wrapped round his shoulders over his backpack, which he never took off.
• Atamai whirling around on a wheeled free-standing chair, stopping only to shout a math question at me or argue when I told him to put his posterior back in a desk.
• Brian tuning out the world with music, having surreptitiously put his earpieces back in when I wasn’t watching.
• Jack, Cal, Victor, and Sticks usually working on the assignment for the day.

And so it went.

Juniors and seniors who haven’t yet passed the seventh-grade standard-based CAHSEE are kids for whom math presents a serious challenge. A class of students with mostly low motivation and widely varying but generally weak math abilities is first and foremost a management problem, and a huge part of the management problem is the math. In order to maximize learning time, a teacher has to manage not only the students, but the math.

First task in managing the students: separate the vortex from the driftwood. The disruptive vortex sucks all the driftwood into his wake, where all spin about endlessly and, alas, happily, in circles all the way to the bottom. Pull out the driftwood and nothing changes. Move the vortex and the driftwood go back to floating about aimlessly, amenable to redirection. The quintessential disruptive vortex, Deon could single-handledly destroy half the class’s productivity if left undisturbed; his absence or isolation always left most of my “driftwood” students open to the idea of getting some work done.

The much rarer productive vortex students capture driftwood and spin it in the right direction. I was blessed with two. Seated with Jack and Cal, Sticks and Victor would compete madly to get the most work done; left to themselves, Sticks would toss wads of paper at JattJeet, with Victor shouting direction vectors. Understand that “good” kids and “bad” aren’t useful distinctions: Jack and Cal had the occasional zero-productivity hour, and all kids had days in which they settled down and learned. Deon was a math-solving machine who worked fiendishly once I isolated him from all other entertainment.

After carefully managing vortices, I sat the rest of the students so that no one, ideally, was next to a buddy. I ruthlessly rearranged students for the sole purpose of ruining their social hour, and pushed hard upon pain points (no music during practice, an F for the day) for any misbehavior. Then I had to figure out who to call and what to write when students left to go to the bathroom and never came back.

By the end of that first month, I occasionally ended class declaring that everyone had a daily F, and often endured various bleats of “Ms. K, why you so mean? Why you yelling? Chill out,”  from kids whose voice volume went up to 11. But most days we had fun. And no matter how crazy the class got, I taught math every single day.

Onto managing the math, so that the driftwood would move in the right direction, and preparing the students for the test.

The students have multiple opportunities to take the test. I aimed my preparation push for the November test, with the February test as a backup. Of the original eighteen students, I thought nine would pass by November, or get close to it. Their existing math knowledge wasn’t so much the problem as was their inexperience in high-stakes tests. The other half did not appear to have the language, motivation, and/or math skills to pass, but at least I could teach them some math they could use when they finally got around to wanting it badly enough.

But even that limited goal was a challenge. I learned how long I could run an upfront discussion before their attention waned, carefully timing the moment when I moved them onto practice problems—which had to be carefully managed, too. Struggling students need to build momentum on a string of problems before they get to their first hesitation point. Hit that hesitation point too early and they “shut down”. They look away and find a more rewarding activity: talk to their neighbor, take a nap, turn up the volume on their iPod, sketch, tiptoe out of the room when I’m not looking, send objects airborne in pursuit of a target. Finding worksheets that started with problems simple enough to get them working and then built to more challenging work that wasn’t too hard took up a big chunk of my day. I’d spend hours looking through practice sets to be sure they didn’t leap to tough problems too soon, and often just wrote a dozen or more identical problems on the board, simply varying the numbers. Even with all that effort, some concepts were still too hard for some students, and I couldn’t always reach each one before he got pulled into a disruptive vortex. And so, from managing the math back to managing the students.

I lived for the days when I scored a win. Much is made by both reformers and progressives about the soul-killing nature of drill, but I got hooked on the genuine triumph my students felt when they worked a whole set of problems correctly. They beamed and bragged. Stickers were not unappreciated, or maybe a big red star with a smiley face. They didn’t mind the drill. They minded that they couldn’t do the drill, and so pretended they didn’t want to.

Sometimes students could do the work but just decided not to that day. Long ago, all these students learned that the relationship between effort and result was non-linear with no guarantee of a payoff. That this payoff was passing the CAHSEE, something they needed in order to graduate, was sometimes forgotten in the moment. But it’s not as if I could offer a guarantee. Some students never do pass the CAHSEE.

“Improving teacher quality” is the buzzphrase for 2013. Yet none of the challenges I’ve recounted are addressed by higher teacher Graduate Record Exam (GRE)  scores, and an understanding of multivariable calculus offers no tools for managing a student howling nonsensical accusations about his rights under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. No conclusive research on superior discipline approaches can inform ed schools of the best way to prepare teachers to help students with complicated motivations and no real desire for academic excellence. Meanwhile, education reformers point accusingly to the very existence of high school students who haven’t yet mastered fractions and percentages as de facto evidence of incompetent teachers with inadequate knowledge, even though all of my students had been taught these concepts dozens of times over the years, from both traditional and “reform” approaches.

Another catchphrase these days is “grit”. While academically they might be driftwood, my students are a forceful, opinionated group who questioned my own views on politics and social policies (“Ms. K, what’s your position on alcohol?” “Upright. Bad idea to drink lying down–and never consume before 21, of course.”). Many hold jobs. At least one is a committed and dedicated athlete. While some have abysmal Grade Point Averages (GPAs), others are respectably above 2.5. Several seniors have done well enough on the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to qualify for military service.

Five of the nine students on my “should pass” list did, in fact pass, Jack and Deon in October, the other three in November. Two of the remaining four got “high fail” scores; the other two did about five points lower than I would have liked. All four on the “should pass” who didn’t probably did well in their February test. Of the remaining nine with more challenging skill deficits, at least half will find the motivation, the focus, or the language skills in the next year to succeed. The others have the option to waive the requirement.

Reformers will judge me for the low pass rate. As a long-time test prep instructor, I judge myself for the four who didn’t pass in November, and will continue to look for better tools. But as a teacher, I judge myself by the degree to which my students develop increased confidence and competence in their math skills, as well as the degree to which they take more responsibility for their academic choices.

And on those criteria, I am content. All the students improved their understanding of proportional thinking, linear equations, and binomial multiplication, skills which will help them move through the high school math track. Sticks is now doing well in my geometry class. Victor stopped by two days before the February CAHSEE asking for practice material to brush up, and Brian visited to give a full report of his performance after the same. Jack and Cal are studying for their college placement tests.

On the last day of class, I read this article’s opening paragraphs to my students. They listened in total silence and then burst into applause, with faces that I must describe as shining. Some of them picked their own pseudonyms. While none said so directly, they are clearly pleased and proud I’d chosen to write their story. As I looked out at the class I’d worked so hard to teach, I remembered my students make their own judgments. Clearly, I hadn’t done too badly in their estimation—and I wouldn’t be a teacher if that assessment didn’t matter most.

“Irrational Exuberance”: The Case of the MOOCs

Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan said in 1996 that the high-flying stock market was an instance of “irrational exuberance.”

Nearly two decades later, were he so inclined  to inspect the swift expansion of elite universities into sponsoring Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs), he might have said pretty much the same thing.

Certainly, there is “exuberance.”  The hype, the constant flow of words like “revolutionary,” “transformational,” speak to university officials becoming trumpeters for  expanding the reach of top-notch professors and brand-name institutions into every corner of the world where there is an Internet connection. The inspired hopes of university-based entrepreneurs to monetize these courses and bring in fresh dollars drives some professors to leave tenured positions and start new companies. The dream of pedagogically-driven faculty to use MOOCs to spread their expert knowledge to thousands of hungry students and, at the same time, enhance student-centered collaboration through networks where they come together to share ideas and help one another spurs professors to finally convert typical lecture courses into truly learner-centered experiences.  So there is exuberance.

And “irrational?” The Harvards, MITs, Dukes, Berkeleys, and Stanfords of higher education  offer these free courses now to anyone in the world. They give certificates of completion to the few who end up completing MOOCs. But not for credit toward a degree. That is a lose-lose proposition for elite institutions. Even irrationality has its limits.

Where the incoherence and mindlessness enter the picture is the current thinking among university officials and digital-minded faculty that delivering a degree or college-level courses to anyone with an Internet connection will revolutionize U.S. higher education institutions. While teaching is clearly an important activity of universities, doing research and publishing studies is the primary function. The structures (e.g., departmental organization, professional schools) and incentives (e.g., tenure, promotion) of top- and middle-tier institutions drive tenure, promotion, and time allocation for faculty. MOOCs will do nothing to alter those structures and incentives. If anything, MOOCs could accelerate and deepen the split between tenure-line faculty and adjuncts with the latter taking on these larger courses for a pittance. To think that such offerings by professors will transform higher education  gives new meaning to the word “flaky.”

The phrase, then, “irrational exuberance,” came back to me when I listened a few days ago to four enthusiastic Stanford University professors talk about their experiences teaching online courses including MOOCs. These professors in mechanical engineering, computer science, management science, and human biology told a filled auditorium of faculty and graduate students of their excitement, hard work, and surprises in re-engineering their courses to teach  MOOCs that included Stanford students in face-to-face classrooms.

The professors’ enthusiasm was infectious. They were animated in their remarks and energized by the experience. I was delighted to see professors so engaged in figuring out how best to teach a particular topic, how to get their students across the globe to work as teams on projects, and how they creatively went beyond pre-recorded lectures.

As I listened to them tell how satisfying these experiences were, how students across the globe gave feedback of how appreciative they were to learn from the professor and classmates–it occurred to me that I was hearing a great deal about student and professorial satisfaction but I was not hearing about what students learned.

Had there been more time for the Q & A after the presentations, perhaps the issue of student learning would have come up. Or the often-asked question in K-12 when an innovation is launched: does it work? Is it effective? Have students learned?

If degree of student and professor satisfaction is a measure in evaluating higher education courses, the anecdotal evidence on MOOCs thus far points to much student delight, the enjoyment of absorbing new knowledge, and professorial exhilaration. Both professors and students appear engaged in offering and taking these courses. Widespread student participation in course activities and collaboration in completing tasks seem to have increased, according to professors’ reports. But satisfaction, engagement, and networking, while important in of themselves,  cannot be assumed to have led to student learning. Such outcomes fall short of answering the basic question: Have students who have completed MOOCs–recall that these courses have more than three-quarters of students dropping out– learned and applied the knowledge and skills? That is the question asked repeatedly in K-12 schools. Why not for MOOCs?

To duck this basic question becomes another instance of “irrational exuberance.”

The Past Lives on in the Present: Customized Learning then and Now

Pupils are working on their own. The second and third grade reading class of 63 pupils … is using a learning center and two adjoining rooms. Two teachers and  the school librarian act as coordinators and tutors as the pupils proceed with the various materials prepared by the school’s teachers and … developer, The Learning and Research Development Center at the U. of Pittsburgh. Each pupil sets his own pace. He is listening to records and completing workbooks. When he has completed a unit of work, he is tested, the test is corrected immediately, and if he gets a grade of 85% or better he moves on. if not, the teacher offers a series of alternative activities to correct the weakness, including individual tutoring, There are no textbooks. There is virtually no lecturing by the teacher to the class as a whole. Instead, she is busy observing the child’s progress, evaluating his tests, writing prescriptions, and instructing individually or in small groups of pupils who need help.*

The school is Oakleaf elementary near Pittsburgh (PA) and the time is 1965. Implemented across all grades, the innovative program was called Individually Prescribed Instruction or IPI (el_197203_tillman-2, p. 495).

Nearly a half-century ago, before there were desktop computers, university developers and school-site practitioners championed IPI as a program where students move through materials at differentiated paces until each achieved mastery of the content and skills to then continue on to the next unit of study.  Observers found students engaged in the process, pleased with the prompt feedback, and delighted that each could move at his or her pace rather than wait for the entire class to move to the next lesson.

Sound familiar?

It should. IPI was a more sophisticated version of psychologist B.F. Skinner’s “teaching machine” in the 1950s that evolved from “programmed learning” engineered by psychologist Sidney Pressey in the 1920s.

IPI was a prototype for subsequent online learning once electronic devices became widespread in K-12 and higher education. The DNA of present-day blended learning (e.g., Rocketship schools’ Learning Labs, Carpe Diem schools) and MOOCs in  higher education reaches back nearly a century into  “programmed learning,” “teaching machines,” and  IPI.

Alright, Larry, you made the self-evident point that earlier renditions of self-paced, individualized learning appeared nearly a century ago. So what?

At that time and now, those various incarnations of individualized, self-paced learning sprang from competing ideologies of what children and youth should learn and how they should learn it. Student-centered vs. teacher-centered ways of teaching and learning (and mixes of both) have competed for time and space in K-12 schools for the past two centuries in schools. Teacher-centered instruction (e.g., lecture, discussion, textbook, worksheets, quizzes and tests) has won time and again and dominates classroom lessons. Yet student-centered instruction challenged conventional practice repeatedly.

Connecting students to the real world, students working in small groups and individually, teachers acting as guides and mentors, and a host of other student-centered activities that blend different subjects and skills (e.g., math, science, art, and poetry) moved to center stage of public attention on different occasions (e.g., progressive curriculum and instruction in the 1920s; open classrooms in late-1960s). But after a brief fling in the spotlight receded to the wings in past decades.  Of course, there have been hybrids of both where many teachers hug the middle of the spectrum of instruction, but advocates for each pedagogical ideology continue to contest one another even today when K-12 battles erupt over different kinds of math content, reading textbooks, and early childhood programs.

In higher education, rival ideas about teaching and learning, albeit under wraps, drive  different versions of MOOCs.  The answer, then, to my “so what” question is that  pedagogical ideologies that drove earlier versions of individualized, self-paced instruction are active in current versions of MOOCs.

The prevailing version of MOOCs offers traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction, that is, lecturing to large groups of people, asking occasional questions, online discussion sections, and multiple-choice questions on exams. Such MOOCs possess advantages of efficiency in delivering information especially in particular subjects (e.g. procedural knowledge in computer science, mathematics). Computer science departments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard launched the initial MOOC offerings, not the Humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences, according to Keith Devlin, a Stanford University mathematician currently teaching a MOOC course on mathematical thinking.

There are other ways of teaching these courses, however. Some enthusiasts for MOOCs see opportunities for non-traditional forms of teaching where students learn from one another, form online communities, crowd-source answers to problems, create networks that distribute learning in ways that seldom occur in bricks-and-mortar colleges and universities. To Devlin, “the key to real learning has always been bi-directional human-human interaction (even better in some cases, multi-directional, multi-person interaction), not unidirectional instruction.” In other words, student-centered or learner-centered pedagogy.

So these rival ideologies contend with one another in MOOCs as they did when “teaching machines” and IPI were garnering public attention. Chances are efficiencies in cost and delivery will drive MOOCs toward teacher-centered instruction, as has occurred in the past. I would hope, however, that there would be attention to (and discussions of) MOOCs where benefits derived from student-centered ways of learning occur.

 

___________

*Thanks to Justin Reich and Dan Meyer for pointing me to IPI as a past reform that lives in the present.

Being a Physics Teacher and Father: The Story of Jeffrey Wright

The following article and YouTube selection comes from a story written by Tara Pope published in the New York Times, December 24, 2012. It is an uncommon story of a gifted teacher whose life story becomes part of the physics lessons that he teaches. I saw this story on Joanne Jacob’s blog, “Linking and Thinking on Education” (http://www.joannejacobs.com/)

Jeffrey Wright is well known around his high school in Louisville, Ky., for his antics as a physics teacher, which include exploding pumpkins, hovercraft and a scary experiment that involves a bed of nails, a cinder block and a sledgehammer.

But it is a simple lecture — one without props or fireballs — that leaves the greatest impression on his students each year. The talk is about Mr. Wright’s son and the meaning of life, love and family.

It has become an annual event at Louisville Male Traditional High School (now coed, despite its name), and it has been captured in a short documentary, “Wright’s Law,” which recently won a gold medal in multimedia in the national College Photographer of the Year competition, run by the University of Missouri.

The filmmaker, Zack Conkle, 22, a photojournalism graduate of Western Kentucky University and a former student of Mr. Wright’s, said he made the film because he would get frustrated trying to describe Mr. Wright’s teaching style. “I wanted to show people this guy is crazy and really amazing,” Mr. Conkle said in an interview.

The beginning of the film shows Mr. Wright, now 45, at his wackiest. A veteran of 23 years teaching, he does odd experiments involving air pressure and fiery chemicals — and one in which he lies on a bed of nails with a cinder block on his chest. A student takes a sledgehammer and swings, shattering the block and teaching a physics lesson about force and energy.

But each year, Mr. Wright gives a lecture on his experiences as a parent of a child with special needs. His son, Adam, now 12, has a rare disorder called Joubert syndrome, in which the part of the brain related to balance and movement fails to develop properly. Visually impaired and unable to control his movements, Adam breathes rapidly and doesn’t speak.

Mr. Wright said he decided to share his son’s story when his physics lessons led students to start asking him “the big questions.”

“When you start talking about physics, you start to wonder, ‘What is the purpose of it all?’ ” he said in an interview. “Kids started coming to me and asking me those ultimate questions. I wanted them to look at their life in a little different way — as opposed to just through the laws of physics — and give themselves more purpose in life.”

Mr. Wright starts his lecture by talking about the hopes and dreams he had for Adam and his daughter, Abbie, now 15. He recalls the day Adam was born, and the sadness he felt when he learned of his condition.

“All those dreams about ever watching my son knock a home run over the fence went away,” he tells the class. “The whole thing about where the universe came from? I didn’t care. … I started asking myself, what was the point of it?”

All that changed one day when Mr. Wright saw Abbie, about 4 at the time, playing with dolls on the floor next to Adam. At that moment he realized that his son could see and play — that the little boy had an inner life. He and his wife, Nancy, began teaching Adam simple sign language. One day, his son signed “I love you.”

In the lecture, Mr. Wright signs it for the class: “Daddy, I love you.” “There is nothing more incredible than the day you see this,” he says, and continues: “There is something a lot greater than energy. There’s something a lot greater than entropy. What’s the greatest thing?”

“Love,” his students whisper.

“That’s what makes the ‘why’ we exist,” Mr. Wright tells the spellbound students. “In this great big universe, we have all those stars. Who cares? Well, somebody cares. Somebody cares about you a lot. As long as we care about each other, that’s where we go from here.”

As the students file out of class, some wipe away tears and hug their teacher.

Mr. Wright says it can be emotionally draining to share his story with his class. But that is part of his role as a physics teacher.

“When you look at physics, it’s all about laws and how the world works,” he told me. “But if you don’t tie those laws into a much bigger purpose, the purpose in your heart, then they are going to sit there and ask the question ‘Who cares?’

“Kids are very spiritual — they want a bigger purpose. I think that’s where this story gives them something to think about.”

Mr. Wright says the lecture has one other purpose: to inspire students to pursue careers in science and genetic research.

“That’s where I find hope in my students,” he said. “Maybe if I can instill a little inspiration to my students to go into these fields, who knows? We might be able to come up with something we can use to help Adam out one day.”

If you wish to see the YouTube 12 minute excerpt from the documentary on Jeffrey Wright, it is at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CbMH3XtAMqg&feature=player_embedded

Eighty-Six Things I Learned at P.S. 86 (Hallie Fox)

This guest post is written by Hallie Fox, who taught in a Bronx (New York City) elementary school–P.S. 86. She was a student in my Fall quarter seminar on “Good School and Districts.” For a final reflective paper, she attached a list of what she learned while teaching at P.S. 86.  I was struck by three things in reading the list. First, how complex and totally absorbing is the daily life of an elementary school teacher. Ssecond, how important local knowledge is for a teacher to survive and thrive, and finally, a sense of humor is vital to teaching and learning.

I am Hallie Fox – Ms. Fox to most at PS 86. I taught 6th grade inclusion my first year and had a class of 26. My co-teacher and I survived the year together and then went our separate ways. For the next two years I taught 5th grade self contained (12 students in a class) and worked with a wonderful woman (my paraprofessional) Ms. Cintron. PS 86 serves about 1,800 students from preK-6th grade and is about 95% free and reduced lunch. While there, I also coached the running team and planned international and outdoor trips for 5th and 6th graders. I have a MA from Hunter College in Elementary Special Education and a BA from Middlebury College in Political Science.Although I loved teaching and learned more from my students than they’ll ever know, I am pursuing a degree in Policy, Organization, and Leadership studies at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.

86 Things I Learned at PS 86.

1. Be the first class down at fire drills
2. Take the stairs not the elevator; it does get stuck and your kids will have no teacher
3. Know Maria (payroll)
4. Avoid Dunkin Donuts
5. Speak powerfully – yell only when it really counts
6. Don’t make promises you can’t keep
7. Keep your lap-top over the summer (getting it back the first few weeks is a loose term)
8. Have Jerry’s Number programmed (IT)
9. Make Normal Fuentes (or another 30 year veteran) your best friend
10. Ask for help from people you trust; don’t always take their advice
11. Know the janitors
12. Talk to your AP (Assistant Principal) first before the Principal
13. Work after-school and on Saturday tutoring sessions
14. Participate wisely in grade meetings; try to not look bored
15. Take any chance you get for PLCs (professional learning communities) and group planning
16. Accept that bus duty is not fun
17. Have calming routines in place in the morning and after lunch because your kids will be wild
18. 2 lines, quiet in the halls
19. Be out of the room during prep (if you actually want to use prep)
20. Be at work the day before every break
21. Independent reading should not be 45 minutes – that is not teaching
22. Homework systems count – they are always accountable
23. Ask the [math/language arts] coaches for advice – that is their job
24. Assess often and COMMUNICATE to students
25. Long-term plans. Enough said.
26. Be flexible
27. Give students choice within reason
28. When meeting with School Based Support Team – be on time and be loved
29. Bathroom breaks and snacks mid morning are key
30. Eat breakfast no matter what
31. Attend all social events
32. Request preps after 8am
33. Adjust, readjust, and then adjust again the math calendar
34. Do read-alouds that you enjoy (Roald Dahl!)
35. Make science and social studies fun!
36. Have class celebrations with parents (!!)
37. Speak Spanish
38. Befriend the librarian
39. Create centers and use them!
40. Small groups as often as possible – they work!
41. Don’t talk AT them, talk WITH them
42. Keep intro to new material (INMs) short
43. If it doesn’t work, try again in a new way – improv. is key
44. Use every minute – even if that minute is one dedicated to laughter
45. Don’t assume your SMART board [interactive white board] works
46. Don’t assume copiers work (or printers…)
47. Send attendance on time
48. Plan field trips (and invite other classes!)
49. Call home often (with good and bad news)
50. Stay late… when it counts
51. Always have an extra desk in your room – you will get another kid
52. Try not to wing it… but if you do, fake it well
53. You can’t teach with a hangover
54. You can’t teach with a fever
55. Share yourself with your students
56. Encourage them to share themselves with you
57. Keep students for lunch and prep for FUN too!
58. Buy munchkins for Saturday school (this contradicts point #4 but buy munchkins anyways)
59. Read with students – “independent” reading is hard
60. Reader’s theater is fun and kids love it! Have them even write their own!
61. Phonics intervention actually works and can be fun
62. Don’t let bad habits go unattended (like not doing homework or asking to use the bathroom every time you start a math lesson)
63. Be tough
64. Expect the most
65. POSITIVE praise – we like it as adults and kids need it.
66. If one doesn’t get it, don’t give up
67. Know all the counselors, social workers, psychologists’ numbers – cell and office
68. Keep tantrums to one student, not 12
69. Notice patterns
70. Pencils – have LOTS
71. Pencil sharpeners – have a system
72. Team Marble Jars are a great management trick (but follow point #6)
73. Try a “Scholar Dollar” system (points for behavior, hard work, and right answers – kids get “checks” they cash at the end of the month at the scholar dollar store which sells lunch time with teachers, pencils, granola bars, etc)
74. Monitor computer time (CoolMathGames is not actually math)
75. Update student work regularly
76. Don’t have a teachers desk – if you do, don’t sit at it – be with your students
77. File regularly to avoid professional development day pile ups the day before report cards are due
78. Always have cash
79. Make sure your students feel important – love them
80. Field day? Participate with spirit!
81. State tests are terrible. Make test prep a game, keep it short, think strategies not reading lessons.
82. Careful with manipulatives…
83. Take a breath before you explode
84. Find laughter, every day
85. Allow time for kids to be kids
86. Blank slate every morning!

Students Evaluating Teachers

Should K-12 student surveys of their teachers be used to determine whether they get a boost in salary or be judged effective or ineffective?

The emerging answer, according to Amanda Ripley’s recent article, is yes. Based on surveys given to students about their teachers over the past decade, student judgments about their teachers are highly correlated with test scores. In particular, researchers have found these questions on a 36-item survey to bear the highest association with test scores. (see preliminary-findings-research-paper-1, pp. 11-16)

1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.

2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.

3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.

4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.

5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes.

These questions measure classroom control and the degree to which teachers challenge students to work harder with academic content and skills.

According to Ripley:

Memphis became the first school system in the country to tie survey results to teachers’ annual reviews; surveys counted for 5 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. And that proportion may go up in the future. (Another 35 percent of the evaluation was tied to how much students’ test scores rose or fell, and 40 percent to classroom observations.) At the end of the year, some Memphis teachers were dismissed for low evaluation scores—but less than 2 percent of the faculty.

The New Teacher Project, a national nonprofit based in Brooklyn that recruits and trains new teachers, last school year used student surveys to evaluate 460 of its 1,006 teachers. “The advent of student feedback in teacher evaluations is among the most significant developments for education reform in the last decade,” says Timothy Daly, the organization’s president and a former teacher.

In Pittsburgh, all students took the survey last school year. The teachers union objects to any attempt to use the results in performance reviews, but education officials may do so anyway in the not-too-distant future. In Georgia, principals will consider student survey responses when they evaluate teachers this school year. In Chicago, starting in the fall of 2013, student survey results will count for 10 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.

Of course, the cat is way out of the bag now. Once high stakes (e.g., salary, getting fired) are attached to a metric–student perceptions of teacher performance–then count on that measure being resented by teachers and then gamed. If the hope was that a useful tool such as student evaluations of teaching could be used to improve classroom practice, forget it. As one journalist put it:

I don’t doubt that student surveys could, in theory, be very useful in the large task facing administrators and teachers — how to make schools better and improve the quality of the education they provide. They would show where schools were weak and where they were strong; which teachers have managed to crack certain nuts where the rest of the faculty is having difficulty; that kind of thing. In short, they could be tools for diagnosing and improving the quality of a school’s education as a whole.

But the reformers rush straight past all that, and decide that the first best use of such data is to use it in performance reviews, and use it to give raises to good teachers and pink slips to bad ones. And, of course, the minute you start doing that, it becomes impossible to use the data for anything else, since the scores then become an end in themselves, rather than a means to an end.

In higher education, students have evaluated their professors’ teaching and course content for decades. Depending upon the institution (community colleges, small private colleges, large land-grant institutions, Ivy League schools), student ratings are used to varying degrees in salary and tenure decisions but they remain controversial. (see Student ratings of professors, American Psychologist).

Controversial or not in higher education, reform-driven policymakers and foundation officials, eager to find another metric beyond unstable end-of-year test scores that simply and inexpensively judges K-12 teacher performance, look to researchers to quantify student perceptions of how and what their teachers teach. Students do know a great deal about their teachers and professors; they sit in classrooms hundreds and thousands of hours each school year. Such information can be useful to help teachers and schools improve.

Not, however, if student perceptions of teaching are sliced and diced to fit into little boxes that can be checked off by principals and superintendents to determine teacher effectiveness and pay. Were that to occur, its usefulness will approach the likelihood of most people drinking rat poison.

MOOCs and Pedagogy: Teacher-Centered, Student-Centered, and Hybrids (Part 1)

In writing about all of the hype surrounding MOOCs, I saw this photo entitled “University Classroom of the Future.”

From instructional television in the 1950s through updated versions of  “distance education, “a professor professing in front of a camera is familiar and surely will dominate many of the newly established platforms (e.g., Coursera, Udacity, edX). Whether it will be the “University Classroom of the Future,” I cannot say for sure. But the photo makes the professor front and center in teaching content and skills.

The prevailing version of MOOCs offers traditional, technology-enriched teacher-centered instruction, that is, lecturing to large groups of people, asking occasional questions, online discussion sections, and multiple-choice questions on exams. Such MOOCs possess advantages of efficiency in delivering information especially in particular subjects (e.g. procedural knowledge in computer science). Computer science departments at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard launched the initial MOOC offerings, not the Humanities, social sciences, or natural sciences, according to Keith Devlin, a Stanford University mathematician currently teaching a MOOC course on mathematical thinking (and the “Math Guy” on NPR).

These courses, in the words of George Siemens, a Canadian professor at Athabasca University–Canada’s Open University–who started an early version of MOOC in 2008, duplicate knowledge for learners who then replicate that knowledge.

“In a traditional course, the instructor creates knowledge coherence by bounding the domain of knowledge that the learners will explore: i.e. this is the course text, here are the readings, quizzes will validate that you’ve learned what I think is important, etc.”

There are other ways of teaching these courses, however. Some enthusiasts for MOOCs see opportunities for non-traditional forms of teaching where students learn from one another, form online communities, crowd-source answers to problems, create networks that distribute learning in ways that seldom occur in bricks-and-mortar colleges and universities. In other words, student-centered or learner-centered pedagogy.

Again, George Siemens:

“In all of the MOOCs I’ve run, readings and resources have been used that reflect the current understanding of experts in the field. We ask learners, however, to go beyond the declarations of knowledge …. Learners need to create and share stuff – blogs, articles, images, videos, artifacts, etc…. Our first MOOC … started by being primarily centered in a Moodle discussion forum. As the course progressed, interactions were scattered over many tools and technologies. We ended up with many spaces of interactions: Second Life, PageFlakes, Google Groups, Twitter, Facebook, Plurk, blogs, wikis, YouTube, among dozens of others.”

To Keith Devlin, “the key to real learning has always been bi-directional human-human interaction (even better in some cases, multi-directional, multi-person interaction), not unidirectional instruction.” He believes that:

“while the popular image of a MOOC centers on lecture-videos and multiple-choice quizzes, what Humanities, Arts, and Science MOOCs (including mine) are about is community building and social interaction. For the instructor … the goal in such a course is to create a learning community.  To create an online experience in which thousands of self-motivated individuals from around the world can come together for a predetermined period of intense, human–human interaction, focused on a clearly stated common goal.”

And hybrid versions of teacher- and student-centered instruction is about “flipping” classes ala Salman Khan, that is, undergraduate students view the professor’s lecture in dorm rooms or at home and then meet with teachers and fellow students face-to-face for closer examination of the concepts in the lecture, and deeper inquiry into the content. What others call blended learning. (For a taxonomy of blended learning types in K-12, see Classifying blended-learning2 .

In MOOCs, of course, “flipping” cannot be done easily even with teaching assistants, email exchanges, and the like although Devlin, Siemens, and others see social media–the Facebook model–as the instrument for creating peer learning and communities of learners in “flipped” models of blended learning.

Here, then, at the early stage of the hype cycle–somewhere between the “Technology Trigger” and the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” are three kinds of pedagogy vying for attention among MOOCs. Which will prevail?

Based upon my experience in higher education and the research I and others have done, technology-enriched traditional teacher-centered instruction will continue to dominate MOOCs for the following reasons:

1. Professor-centered instruction in courses where procedural knowledge and skills are expected to be learned (e.g., math, computer science, entry-level social sciences, engineering) is easier to deliver to students and, after initial start-up costs are factored in, cheaper than in face-to-face classrooms. At least to one researcher, it will be shown that students learn as much from such technology-delivered instruction as if they were listening to a professor in undergraduate lecture halls. See Bowen lectures SU 102-1 .

2. In those institutions where faculty are expected to do research and publish, the incentives of tenure and promotion drive faculty behavior. Professors are rewarded for spending far more time on  research than spending time on developing and teaching student-centric courses and learning communities. Thus, in research-driven institutions, most professors will not invest in designing and teaching student-centric courses.

For these reasons, chances are that the photo at the top of this post captures a typical higher education classroom in the years to come.