The other end of the log

Mark Putnam, the President of Central College, writes in Inside Higher Ed about the difference between the transactional and relational views of education:

James A. Garfield was president of the United States for a brief time in 1881. Though his life was cut short by an assassin’s bullet, historians note his many contributions to our nation. During his years as an undergraduate at Williams College, Garfield was the beneficiary of both the teaching and leadership of Mark Hopkins, who served as president of the college for 36 years during an even longer career as a member of the faculty. Garfield’s admiration for Hopkins is remembered through his still famous quote: 

The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other. 

For educators, the image is poetic. It stands in stark contrast to the rhetoric we hear today. Many voices are calling for an educational approach designed for efficiency – less time to degree completion, fully online programs of study and customer convenience. It’s a very transactional model resting on the individual accumulation of credits, courses and credentials. By checking boxes to fulfill requirements we assume we can efficiently declare an individual educated. It’s all nice and neat. 

An education at “the other end of the log,” however, is not transactional – it’s relational. The opportunity for faculty to spend time with students is not at all efficient, but our experience tells us it’s incredibly effective.

What we remember most about our school and college experiences are not the facts we memorized, but the inspiring people we met, and the transformative and confidence-building experiences we had. 

Project-based learning

Just a short post, to note this nice article on project based learning for K-12.

Suzie Boss writes:

For a closer look at what this looks like, consider just a few examples of the learning experiences that happen more frequently in PBL classrooms:

• Students compare information from different sources before completing an assignment
• Students draw their own conclusions based on analysis of numbers, facts, or relevant information
• Students try to solve complex problems or answer questions that have no single correct solution
• Students give feedback to peers or assess other students' work
• Students convey their ideas using media other than a written paper (such as posters, blogs, or videos)
• Students answer questions in front of an audience
• Students generate their own ideas about how to confront a problem

These indicators paint a picture of students who are able to think on their feet, contribute to a team effort, and work creatively when they confront new challenges.

Having just concluded my own project-based course this semester (albeit for masters students in engineering), I can strongly attest to the powerful learning that can take place in such an environment.

Ideal Company

An illustration from the Handbook

Recently, someone leaked Valve's handbook for new employees. It's a remarkable introduction to what is clearly an exceptional place to work.

Valve, in case you haven't heard of it, is a game software company known for highly popular products such as Portal, Steam.

Here are some excerpts from this thought-provoking document.

On why Valve is a flat company:

... when you’re an entertainment company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value. 

We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish. That’s why Valve is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any management, and nobody “reports to” anybody else.

On how self-directed individuals organize to work together (see illustration above):

We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self-directed projects. At Valve, that percentage is 100. 

Since Valve is flat, people don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions (more on that later). Employees vote on projects with their feet (or desk wheels). Strong projects are ones in which people can see demonstrated value; they staff up easily. This means there are any number of internal recruiting efforts constantly under way.

(Yes, apparently they really do have desks with wheels that allow them to move around to physically different locations depending on the project and the group they are working with.)

Questions employees are asked to consider when deciding on what to work on:

• Of all the projects currently under way, what’s the most valuable thing I can be working on?
• Which project will have the highest direct impact on our customers? How much will the work I ship benefit them?
• Is Valve not doing something that it should be doing?
• What’s interesting? What’s rewarding? What leverages my individual strengths the most?

On work-life balance:

While people occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at Valve, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected. If you’re looking around wondering why people aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is hiring good people, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.

And there's a lot more! The handbook discusses everything from the importance of hiring and what they look for when hiring new recruits to how they evaluate each other's work and value to the company. Read it for yourself.  For additional reading, there is Michael Abrash's blog post on "Valve: how I got here, what it's like, and what I'm doing".

While I've heard of other small creative companies that provide a great deal of freedom and hierarchy-free operation (for example, IDEO), Valve is clearly an extreme example of this kind of company, and an extremely successful one at that.

It occurred to me when reading this handbook that this kind of creativity-enabling autonomy is precisely why many academics love their job.  There is a remarkable degree of similarity between the way Valve operates and the way a top academic department operates. There is a lot of effort put in to hire the very best possible individuals as tenure-track faculty. But once they are hired, faculty have complete autonomy on what to work on, how to work on it, how much funding to get, and where to get it from, who to collaborate with, how to balance their work and life (though arguably, during the years on the tenure track this can be a bit skewed). There is also an internal peer review process which provides faculty with an incentive to stay productive and contribute in their own way to the mission of the department. (It's a pity we don't have massage rooms!).

How can we all take inspiration from Valve to change our work environments to be even more flat and autonomy-encouraging? What would it take to change the prevailing paradigm so more companies are operated this way?

I would of course wish for all my students that they could find for themselves a job that offers this degree of autonomy and opportunity for self-realization through passionate engagement. But I also wonder: are they all ready for such a place? Would they all have the self-confidence, the proactive, entrepreneurial attitude, the service orientation, the passion, the self-drive, and the grit to get and succeed in such a job?

Indeed, a central question of this blog, one I have been probing in many of my posts, is this: what do we need to change about our current system of education at all levels so that it aids in the development of more individuals capable of creating and excelling in self-directed environments?

**
For more on Valve, check out this informative video:
http://www.onlinemba.com/blog/what-every-company-can-learn-from-valves-employee-handbook/

Free Education, For Profit

Following closely on the heels of Udacity, the company founded by Sebastian Thrun, Coursera, another new startup by two other Stanford Professors is offering free college courses online. The aforelinked article notes:


 "Mountain View, Calif.-based Coursera is backed with $16 million in funding led by John Doerr at Kleiner Perkins and Scott Sandell at NEA. It has no immediate plans to charge for courses or to make money in other ways." 


Making college classes accessible to a large audience is great, and I do support this in principle to a large extent, but I have to say it bothers me that Coursera, like Udacity, is a for-profit private company. 


I fear that sooner or later the investors will demand their pound of flesh. 


Think about Facebook and Google. They are both free, but ultimately they both make their revenue from advertising. Increasingly they've been driven towards trying to extract more information about their users and exploiting this information for targeted advertising. Similarly, Coursera, for instance, will be able to accumulate quite a lot of information about participants in its courses - their interests, their skills, their strengths and weaknesses in the context of learning and problem solving. Will these be for sale too?

Can innovation be taught?

This article by Tony Wagner in the Wall Street Journal, titled "Educating the Next Steve Jobs" echoes exactly  my key concerns about traditional education, in particular that it puts too high a price on failure, is too subject-focused (rather than experience-focused), and treats grades as the main end. A few excellent quotes from the article:

In most high-school and college classes, failure is penalized. But without trial and error, there is no innovation...Students gain lasting self-confidence not by being protected from failure but by learning that they can survive it. 

Learning in most conventional education settings is a passive experience: The students listen. But at the most innovative schools, classes are "hands-on," and students are creators, not mere consumers. They acquire skills and knowledge while solving a problem, creating a product or generating a new understanding.

In conventional schools, students learn so that they can get good grades. My most important research finding is that young innovators are intrinsically motivated. The culture of learning in programs that excel at educating for innovation emphasize what I call the three P's—play, passion and purpose. The play is discovery-based learning that leads young people to find and pursue a passion, which evolves, over time, into a deeper sense of purpose. 

Creating new lab schools around the country and training more teachers to innovate will take time. Meanwhile, what the parents of future innovators do matters enormously. My interviews with parents of today's innovators revealed some fascinating patterns. They valued having their children pursue a genuine passion above their getting straight As, and they talked about the importance of "giving back." As their children matured, they also encouraged them to take risks and learn from mistakes. There is much that all of us stand to learn from them. 

A double loss

                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                       

Wu Ying and Qu Ming were two MS students in my electrical engineering department at USC. I mourn for their tragic loss in a shooting that took place outside the campus yesterday. Today would have been Ming's 24th birthday.

I did not know them personally. They did not take any classes with me. But by all the accounts given by my colleagues today in a brief department memorial, these were two wonderful, smart, quietly hard-working students. They had taken a series of challenging classes, and were just about to graduate at the end of this semester, a few weeks away. No doubt they had great hopes and dreams for their future.

As a father, I cannot bring myself to even imagine the magnitude of this loss to their parents in China. It must be very painful, indeed. My deepest sympathies go out to them and all who knew, loved, and cared for Ying and Ming.

                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                       

A Homeschooling Infographic

I was recently pointed to this interesting chart about homeschooling. I do think a lot of these numbers reflect the socio-economic, the educational status, and the general outlook on education of the parents who choose, or can choose, to homeschool  their kids (though the chart itself shows numbers suggesting that household income is not a key determinant of homeschooling student success). And there is a huge variation in how the homeschooling is done, from recreating the traditional classroom at home to unschooling. But it nonetheless gives some good insights into the prospects for kids and parents pursuing alternatives to traditional schooling.


Created by: College At Home

How many Books

My 8 year old asked out of the blue, the way kids do, "Dad, how many books are there?" 


After some discussion, it emerged that he was looking for a count of all the books ever published. 


Using rough back of the envelope techniques I teach engineering freshmen, I conservatively estimated an upper-bound of about 500 million. 


Then I looked it up online. Turns out Google did a count just a couple of years ago, and found that there were about 174 million known unique works.

Failing by Solving

The upcoming February 2012 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society contains an interesting essay titled "A Modest Proposal" by Alan H. Schoenfeld, a Professor of Education and Mathematics at UC Berkeley. He writes of some "horror stories" of how kids being taught mathematics respond to questions that don't match the usual pattern:

Reusser [2] asked ninety-seven first- and second-grade students the following question:  

There are 26 sheep and 10 goats on a ship. How old is the captain?  

More than 3/4 of the students “solved” the problem, obtaining their answers by combining the integers 26 and 10.

( Note: The cited paper is K. Reusser, Problem solving beyond the logic of things, Instructional Science 17 (1988), 309–338. )

Schonfeld concludes that kids are not being taught how to think correctly in classrooms and advocates teaching in such a way that they come to view mathematics as providing  "a set of sensible answers to a set of reasonable questions".

This is certainly commendable, and I like the example he gives of how to make the arc length formula simple and intuitive. But, as I've argued repeatedly on this blog, the problem runs deeper.

Over-schooling, by its very nature, so constrains young children's thinking that they are unable to see outside the patterns that they have been drilled on and made to repeat. They need to learn in a more carefree environment, ideally one where they have plenty of time to think of many "reasonable" questions and possible solutions on their own through their natural habits of play and curiosity-driven exploration, free of the overwhelming pressures of adult expectations.

Here is a relevant piece from John Holt's foreword to his classic "How Children Fail"; the italicized words in brackets are mine, connecting the quote to the above setting:

...there is a more important sense in which almost all children fail: Except for a handful, who may or may not be good students, they fail to develop more than a tiny part of the tremendous capacity for learning, understanding, and creating with which they were born and of which they made full use during the first two or three years of their lives.  

Why do they fail?  

They fail because they are afraid, bored, and confused.  

They are afraid, above all else, of failing, of disappointing or displeasing the many anxious adults around them, whose limitless hopes and expectations for them hang over their heads like a cloud. [Every question posed to them at school has a clear and definite answer; and failure to answer disappoints the teacher. So they know once they are asked a question, they *must* set out to solve it.] 

They are bored because the things they are given and told to do in school are so trivial, so dull, and make such limited and narrow demands on the wide spectrum of their intelligence, capabilities, and talents. [Face it. At the end of the day, solving word problems about addition are simply not as interesting as any of the dozen other things related to playing and exploring and being with friends that little kids would rather be doing.]

They are confused because most of the torrent of words that pours over them in school makes little or no sense. It often flatly contradicts other things they have been told, and hardly ever has any relation to what they really know — to the rough model of reality that they carry around in their minds. [If much of what is presented to them in their workbooks or by the teacher doesn't make sense anyway, most of the time,  why should this puzzle be any different? What all this confusion sadly does is to breed a special form of intellectual laziness --- it's easier just to play along and mindlessly apply some known formula, rather than say over and over again, "I don't understand".]

I asked my eight-year old the same question. The amazing school he goes to leaves him to his resources almost entirely. I do teach him a bit myself from time to time, mostly because of my own interest in mathematics, but I try hard not to over-do it. And when we do talk about math, our discussions are very much in the spirit of Schonfeld's "reasonable questions" approach. So I was quite sure how he would respond.

Nevertheless, it was with some relief that I heard him say, "Wait, that doesn't make sense! What does that have to do with anything?"

***

This post seems as good place a place as any to put in a pointer to one of my favorite songs:

The pseudo-science of testing

A brilliant article in yesterday's NYTimes by Michael Winerip, titled "10 years of assessing students with scientific exactitude" describes the ups and downs experienced by the New York school system over a decade of No Child Left Behind-inspired Testing.

It starts with:

In the last decade, we have emerged from the Education Stone Age. No longer must we rely on primitive tools like teachers and principals to assess children’s academic progress. Thanks to the best education minds in Washington, Albany and Lower Manhattan, we now have finely calibrated state tests aligned with the highest academic standards. What follows is a look back at New York’s long march to a new age of accountability.

After reading the full chronological listing, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.

***

Perhaps the single hardest (worst) part of my job is making and grading tests. I never know in advance how a particular class of students is going to do on a particular test I make up. Well, the students that do extremely well might do well in any variant of it. The students who do extremely poorly may not do that much better in some other variant of it. But for the vast majority of students, I find there is great sensitivity to every aspect of the exam, from the choice of topics, to the subtle deviations of these questions from what has been covered exactly in the notes, the book, or the homework assignments, to the length of the exam, and even the ordering of the questions.

Even in a seemingly objective field of study like Engineering, there is a lot of subjectivity in how one grades (going beyond the obvious subjectivity inherent in the choice of questions to put on an exam). We try our best to be consistent and fair across all the students for the same class; but for the same question and answer, unless one uses shallow multiple-choice questions (the approach adopted by many standardized tests), it is certain that no two instructors would grade the same way. While there may be one way (or relatively few ways)  to get the answer right, there are exponentially many combinations of errors that trip up students. Particularly if one wishes to go down the road of offering partial credit, the art of grading requires one to differentiate between these and place a value judgement on them: do you give a student that got the right numerical answer through incorrect reasoning some credit? Do you give a student that took completely the wrong approach to the problem but applied that approach correctly albeit to give the wrong answer more credit than one that tried out something new and original but failed with it and gave (if it is possible) an answer even further from the correct one? What if you discover upon grading that a question that seems perfectly straightforward to you has been misinterpreted by number of the students to be quite different from what you had intended? How large a number does this have to be for you to factor the possible ambiguity in the wording into account when grading? Does it matter if the misinterpreted question is easier or harder than the originally intended question?

Unfortunately, the politics of public K-12 education and the economics of higher education dictate that we must always have assessment and grading. Testing is a necessary evil that we cannot wish completely away. Let's continue to strive to be as fair as possible in making and grading tests, but let us not pretend that test scores and GPA's are objective, noiseless, measures of a student's intellectual capability (or, in the case of public schooling, of the effectiveness of a system of education).