75 tips for college students

The other night I got one of those emails from unknown students which just starts "Hey" and continues with some request (usually to be admitted to one of my oversubscribed classes). My immediate reaction is to ignore (that was my wife's advice) but this time I just decided to do something different. I wrote back explaining the over-subscription situation, and finished with this "By the way, you might want to address people you haven't met more formally in future: I don't find it irritating but many will" (which is a lie, I do find it irritating, but there's no need to tell her that). My original version had more verbiage in it, but my 14 year old (whose missives to teachers are like business letters) told me to take it out on the grounds that "she'll never do it again, but she'll be scared to meet you".

I was prompted to do this by Andrew Roberts' book The Thinking Student's Guide to College: 75 Tips for Getting a Better Education(see tip 53). The central idea of the book is that students need a map of how to get the most out of college, and that lots of them arrive not understanding key things. Why not just make it explicit for her?

In fact I don't currently have a copy of the book, because each copy I get goes to the next high school senior who walks through the door (which an alarming number of them seem to be doing these days). As suggested by this, 75 Tips would be a great Christmas present for the college-bound high school seniors and college freshmen of your acquaintance.

Roberts divides the book into 9 sections -- an explanation of how universities work; tips for choosing a college (upshot  - don't make such a meal of it, you'll like wherever you go pretty much); tips on choosing classes (including the sensible tip not to take more than a couple of classes with any professor -- because most of us have at most 2 classes worth of learning to impart) and on choosing a major; tips on being successful (including the excellent advice, too often neglected, to study with other people); on interacting with professors (don't address then in your first email with a "hey", go to their office hours (I always tell students this, and they say they have had experiences of being distinctly not wanted, and relax when I point out that if he really wants to get rid of you you can leave and he won't remember you), also, get to know at least one professor reasonably well, which, I should say, is brilliant advice but not entirely easy to follow at a place like mine); what to do with your extra-curricular time; whether and when to go to graduate school; and a final section explaining how professors behave and what incentives they are responding to (they want to research not teach, and teach graduate students not undergraduates -- a friend who recently graduated from an Ivy-ish institution told me that in his address to them on the first day of freshman year the Provost just told them that they should know that Professors would have no interest in them).

The tips are each easily digestible -- if you can't read the book you should maybe postpone going to college. My guess is that it will be read by parents more than students, but especially parents whose experience of college is 5 years or less (or none) would do well to read it to guide their offspring. But even those of us who know the college world well will only give at most half these tips to their kids, partly because some won't occur to us, and partly because others ("don't address a professor with "hey" in your first email to them) seem blindingly obvious. Apparently not.

I should probably disclose that the author sent me the manuscript completely out of the blue a couple of years ago (I've never met him) and I almost instantly gave him a good number of comments on it. There's one thing that I regret: the phrases "rape" or "sexual assault" don't appear in the index, and if I were giving comments now I would press him hard to discuss sexual violence on campus. But I was much less aware of the issue then than I thankfully am now.

By the way, the student in question did reply, almost immediately. She said "Dear Professor Brighouse, thanks for the tip, I will utilise it in future. Hopefully I'll be able to learn more from you in your class" which showed a willingness to learn and a slight cheekiness that I rather appreciated. Maybe I should give her the book. I have been very close to only a few undergraduates in my career, though I try harder these days (and my increasingly elderly demeanor seems to induce trust). I forwarded the exchange (stripped of the name etc) to a current undergraduate who is one of the handful whom I've known, and has known me, best (very well indeed), knowing she'd laugh, because after 4 years and numerous detailed email and personal conversations she simply can't bring herself to address, or even refer to, me as anything other than Professor Brighouse.

Crossposted at Crooked Timber

Not For Profit Episode 8: Don't Be Complacent.

Like the other participants in the symposium, I am very enthusiastic about Martha Nussbaum’s newest book, Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities.
To give the central argument in a nutshell – Nussbaum thinks that we are experiencing a crisis in the form of very great pressures to vocationalize education both at the compulsory and higher levels, and that these pressure are squeezing out the humanities. But education in the humanities, she thinks, plays a vital role in creating a citizenry that is capable of engaging in a fully responsible way in democratic institutions. It is through education in the humanities that we learn to understand and empathize with others – the humanities expand our imagination and help us to see the reasonableness of a great deal of disagreement on key questions. If the humanities are under threat, so is democracy itself – not necessarily the particular democratic forms, but the way that they are used by citizens.

I agree with a great deal of the argument, and think the book is terrific, and should be read widely. A lot of what I would have wanted to say has been covered already by the other participants, so I am going to restrict myself to two, rather disconnected, comments, neither of which is really new to the discussion.

Undergraduate students writing together.

I taught an unusual class in Fall 2009. I had taught a freshman seminar (FIG -- for more information see here) in Fall 2007, and a group of students from that class asked me to teach another class that would be just for them. So I did. It was unusual in several ways. I was seeing a substantial group of students (14 of the original 20) after 2 years of academic development. They were experiencing a class with a group of people all of whom they already knew. And I knew that everyone in the class was there only because they wanted to be.

This last fact was intimidating – I felt that I really had to make the class good. But it also gave me some freedom to experiment; the students, after all, had opted into it knowing what I was going to be like. One experiment I decided to do was to facilitate them writing papers together in pairs.

Why? Mainly I was inspired, as I have been in much of my recent pedagogical practice, by Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges. Bok describes the experience of Uri Treisman, a calculus instructor at Berkeley, who noticed that his black students were performing much less well than Asian students. After he established that the gap remained even controlling for how well prepared they were, he looked at their study habits. The difference between the black and Asian students was that whereas Asians students worked in groups, thus enabling them to learn from one another and help each other overcome road blocks, the black students all worked solo. When they encountered problems, they could not get help, did not turn in their homework, and fell further behind. So he started encouraging black students to work in designated groups outside of class. “The results were dramatic. The grades of black students improved, their drop-out rate fell substantially; and many more than usual went on to major in science and math”. 

How can we learn to teach better?

Thanks to Michael for the kind, and humbling, introduction. I hope it won't seem like a cheat, but I thought I'd devote my opening post to a reading recommendation. The reason is that Tony Wagner's The Global Achievement Gap: Why Even Our Best Schools Don't Teach the New Survival Skills Our Children Need--and What We Can Do About It is one of a handful of books that I'd like everyone in my profession to read, and frankly if I hadn't read it I probably wouldn't have accepted ISW's invitation to join up.

The reason I read Wagner's book has nothing to do with what I found so valuable about it. I was preparing a talk for teachers at a local high school on educational equity, and I knew that one of the teachers was obsessed with the "achievement gap" between American and foreign students, so wanted to learn more about it. And, indeed, Wagner is very clear about the kinds of things that our schools (and colleges) could be doing better for even our most advantaged students -- in particular failing to create opportunities for higher order cognition, and structuring their learning to produce the traits and skills that will serve them well in a global  economy (in this, and other respects, it is a nice complement to Martha Nussbaum's Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities which we'll be discussing later). He includes a nice, and in my experience quite accurate, critique of the AP History exams (I don't think my colleagues in English all agree with me, but AP English seems much better at eliciting the kind of curriculum in which students learn things that are valuable).

But what really grabbed my attention was his description of what he does at the Change Leadership Group at Harvard.

The Harvard program is focused on k-12 teaching. At its core is a workshop, in which groups of teachers (most of whom are unacquainted with one another previously) discuss videos of other teachers teaching in the classroom, led by Wagner or one of his colleagues. The aim is to develop a language for discussing instruction -- and to come to some sort of interpersonal agreement on standards of practice. Like most teachers, his participants have spent very little time observing other teachers do what they do, and are not practiced in rigorous detail-oriented discussion of what works and what doesn't. Initially the reactions to what they are observing are very diverse -- there is no agreement about whether what is being done is good or bad teaching. But over the course of the workshop the participants develop a common understanding, and a language for expressing it.

The idea is simple. If teachers were engaged in mutual observation and had resources to discuss what they were seeing and doing, they could begin to learn from one another, thus improving their practice. To use an analogy that Wagner doesn't use, it's like learning a musical instrument. You learn by watching and listening to others, noting what they do, mimicking it, practicing endlessly, subjecting your practice to your own critique and that of others, in the light of continued observations of others who are better than you are (or who are better in some particular way that you can improve). I suppose there are musical geniuses who learn some other way, and no doubt there's a handful of teachers who are so naturally gifted that mutual observation wouldn't improve things, but that's not most of us. Reading Wagner, for the first time, I started to see how it could be that we could improve our teaching collectively, by deploying the kind of inter-subjective scrutiny of our efforts that we already apply to our research (you never publish anything unless it has been scrutinized by at least one other person, and you aim to get it scrutinized by as many people as feasible before committing it to publication).

My wife consistently points out to me that the schools which actually adopt Wagner's process as part of their ongoing professional development are quite unusual -- they tend to be schools in which teachers have a fair amount of discretionary time, and which are pretty well run. Not like most. But research universities with undergraduate colleges within them, and small liberal arts colleges do seem to me to have the conditions in which a program like this could profitably be adopted.

The other natural worry about the Wagner method is whether the group is, in fact, learning the right things. Are they harnessing individual insights to develop group wisdom, or individual prejudice to develop an unquestioned orthodoxy? What they are not observing within the group is whether any students are actually learning anything which is, after all, what actually constitutes success in teaching.

Learning is hard to measure, and it's especially hard to measure the aspects of learning which really matter (the development of skills, enthusiasm for, and long-term retention of the material). In college, at least in the humanities, we make no effort at all to gauge learning --- we reward students for and celebrate their performance rather than their learning. We don't even have common interpersonal standards for what counts as quality performance -- we grade our own students' work, not one another's, and rarely sit down with a set of papers and discuss with one another what we value in the papers (and what we don't).

So there's a leap of faith in adopting a model like Wagner's, based on confidence in i) the capacity of the people involved for judgment and ii) the deliberative value of interpersonal discussion. I'd like to see something like Wagner's model adopted in a few places, ideally alongside some experiments in aligning standards and curriculum across classes within particular departments. Anyway, I'm recommending the book, and curious whether anyone knows similar models operating in higher education. I'm aiming to pilot a program not completely unlike Wagner's among a multidisciplinary group of faculty this coming Fall (see here) and will report on what we do.

(Cross-posted, as many of my posts will be, at CT)