Thoughts on Teaching, Learning and the Classroom
Thoughts on Teaching, Learning and the Classroom
January 2008
(based on Ken Buckman: What Counts as Assessment in the 21st Century? In Thought and Action: The NEA Higher Education Journal, Vol 23 Fall 2007)
Tests and quizzes are not a useful measurement for learning. About the only test that seems necessary and useful is a driver’s license test.
Modern society views higher education – all education for that matter - as product based and that all outcomes of a class are quantitative. Colleges and universities should show profit. More, “successful”students = $$$
Hmmmm
Education should = a process toward intellectual independence. We should learn to think for ourselves. How can this be assessed?
The only true education is self education and as Socrates said thousands of years ago – Know thyself.
How can this be assessed?
Like Professor Buckman I teach disciplines that are a hard sell in the university: Music, Humanities. Other than being part of gen-ed requirements “What the hell can you do with music and humanities? (in a job=centered understanding of education)
Buckman calls this a Wal-Mart outcome: “One brings one’s shopping cart to the check-out line, slaps down money for the cashier, and takes the ‘bag full o’ stuff”to the car and drives away.”
Professor Buckman talks about his discipline – philosophy – in a way I find quite inciteful and relevant to the disciplines I teach and how I view education in general.
What does music do to you?
What is the nature of truth?
What is the relation between appearance and reality?
What are the conditions that make life meaningful?
What constitutes our identity?
What is the relation between humans and a deity?
These 6 questions defy quantitative measures? Like philosophy, music does not give you answers, it gives you the opportunity for more questions.
Aristotle: all thinking begins with a sense of WONDER. Knowledge of facts is the lowest rung of an educational process.
Education = critical thinking – problem solving
Outcome based teaching or teaching to the test makes for a passive experience. Does not help to create and absorbing experience. Does not encourage students to be self learners, life-long learners and responsible for their own education. Again, all education is self-education.
Teaching to the test = students who can give the right answers as opposed to students who can think for themselves.
Rather than teaching to a test, teach to my strengths, my training, my experiences as a professional musician/educator
Test question: Beethoven was
A) a cook
b) a plumber
c) a brilliant composer who transformed western Europena art music
Which answer would be chosen and why? Hmmmmmm
Or
Test question: Who wrote Hamlet?
A)Picasso
B)Leonard Bernstein
C)Michaelangelo
D)Shakespeare
An understanding of this play is evidenced by the “correct” answer. ?????
Buckman makes an interesting analogy> “People who pander to the buzzwords of accountability and standardization peer into their toolbox, and the only tool they see is a hammer. Every problem is a nail.”
Other types of assessment tools: observation, student responses in class, portolfios, group projects, field trips, papers, journals, conferences – to name a few.
Education is engagement between professor and student in the transformative e process of learning and learning how to learn, a process of continuous self-realization and self-remaking.
Education is an ART that is cultivated in an atmosphere of free inquiry where the Outcome is often not predictable and often unanticipated.
Self education helps to conceive of novel solutions to problems throughout ones life
“Free inquiry, which is the vigor of the university community, becomes arrested in the demands for a particular kind of curricula. The university community is no longer driven by the paths evoked by questioning, but rather the measurable demands of bureaucrats.”
An educated person is a thinker not a tool/wage earner.
Educations should encourage a certain “playfulness.” Drilling for answers is not at all playful.
“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”