Cathy Davidson, Senior Advisor on Transformation to the Chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY), recently released an updated version of her book The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World In Flux. In the book Davidson introduces us to wild innovators in higher education and provides examples of engaging ideas.
Although is an tremendous amount of takeaways and things to ponder in the book, these three quotes set the stage for a grand reimagining of what we do as educators:
We live in a time when the world’s problems are of such magnitude that no one knows the answers. Yet in universities, we are still teaching as if we know. That’s a deception. It’s dangerous, really. If you expect palpable impact, you are challenging students to admit what they don’t understand, what they don’t know, what no one knows, and to begin to test ideas that could become solutions.”
We talked a bit about wicked and messy problems in the past, but Davdison’s assertion that educators become part of the solution is important – we need to model a positive response to the intensity of wicked problems.
- Try using “we” language helps learners engage in the problem with you, not at your behest.
- Instead of “students”, use the term “learners”. The term students has baggage – it typically is associated with a hierarchical power schema. By using “learner” you can signal a more democratic environment. Buttress the sentiment with expressions like “I’m eager to be learning with you this semester” in lieu of “I’m eager to be teaching you this semester.” There is also the benefit of leveraging the verb effect over the identity noun. If that sounds like a mouthful, it’s sufficient to say that Christopher Bryan from Stanford studied the effect of verbs as descriptors and found that subtle linguistic cues can motivate people. For instance, calling someone a “voter” invokes identity whereas asking someone if they vote does not. Voters are more likely to register and vote than “people who vote”. He goes on to say that this linguistic cue expands beyond voting – “I run” versus “I’m a runner” and “Don’t cheat” versus “Don’t be a cheater” can influence behavior.
- Encourage failure! Failure needs to be normalized – there is a lot of telemetry that can be learned from failing. And that telemetry informs improvement. Go down the rabbit hole of the Toasted podcast (co-hosted by Nick Fargnoli) to examine how to translate failure into learning.
In design school, this is called “iterative thinking”; as Crow puts it, “You design, you redesign, you adjust, you redesign again, you adjust—the process doesn’t stop. Like learning. There’s no end point, it’s all a process. That’s what a university is.”
Help your learners understand that there is no end-state. There are milestones (graduation), and there are different types of learning, but learning is a life-long process. As Michelle Weise states in Long Life Learning, students are going to need to train for jobs that don’t exist yet. Not only because of break-neck advances in technology, but because our life spans are increasing and our currency as productive employees will be acutely linked to how well we learn as we constantly enter new domains.
- Ask your learners what they’ve learned. Not about a chapter or a unit or a topic. Ask them at the end of the semester what they learned about learning. What did they learn about themselves?
- Attenuate failure often. Make mistakes in your class. Give recognition or bonus points if students catch a mistake. This engaging activity lionizes failure and encourages frank and honest conversation. I know this might sound edgy, but if we are to combat the stigma failure brings, we need to put our money where our mouth is.
- Give students threads to pull. Maybe you don’t have time to show a video or assign a reading to students. Why not provide a list of resources students can look at if they are interested? Adding a list of resources at the end of every chapter or unit signals your desire to help students follow interesting things.
Students need new ways of integrating knowledge, including through reflection on why and what they are learning. They don’t need more “teaching to the test.” They need to be offered challenges that promote their success after graduation, when all the educational testing has stopped. This is an engaged form of student-centered pedagogy known as “active learning.” Students are encouraged to create new knowledge from the information around them and to use it to make a public, professional, or experiential contribution that has impact beyond the classroom. Students don’t just master what an expert sets out for them but, rather, learn how to become experts themselves. It’s a survival skill for the journey that is their lives.
Try widening the influence of student work. David Wiley (Lumen Learning and consummate champion of OER) talks about “disposable assignments”; that is, work that will only be seen by the instructor and rarely revisited by the learner. Might you be able to reimagine assignments to have a legacy?
- Have a regular requirement to post on LinkedIn. Encourage students to summarize an article related to the current content. In addition to the benefit of starting a LinkedIn presence early on, students are able to show their learning and growth – and contribute to a relevant body of knowledge.
- Adopt an open pedagogy mentality. Can your class collectively write a textbook that can be shared for future students?
- Perhaps your learners can socially annotate with Hypothes.is (see the session recorded at FLCC). Making their learning visible and sharing it with other students gives everyone a voice in the learning and adds a layer of purpose to work.
Of course there are myriad ways to prepare students for situations they are likely to encounter – and you are probably practicing a number of them. Keep up the great work helping our learners learn. And be brave as you tread into the New Education.
