17th International Workshop-Conference on Teaching Philosophy

Sponsored by the American Association of Philosophy Teachers, the 17th IWCTP will be hosted by the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada this coming August 6-10, 2008. Proposals for interactive workshops and panels related to teaching and learning philosophy at any educational level are welcome. We especially encourage workshops and panels that deal with innovative and successful teaching strategies; the application of philosophy to any area or issue; the connection of philosophy with other disciplines; the use of new technologies; new uses of "old" technologies; and the challenge of teaching in new, as well as in traditional, settings. Applicants are welcome to submit more than one proposal. Please visit http://www.philosophyteachers.org for proposal guidelines. The deadline for receipt of proposals is January 16, 2008.

Evaluating teaching credentials (revisited)

We've talked in the past about how departments do (and should) evaluate the teaching credentials of prospective job candidates. I'm serving on a search committee right now and we just completed about a dozen phone interviews with candidates, in which questions about teaching constituted about half the questions. I thought I'd share some observations about that experience in the hope that it may be of use both to candidates and to those seeking to hire.

First off, here are the teaching-related questions we asked in our interviews:

1. Describe for us the worst course you ever taught and why, and the best course you ever taught and why.
2. How would you approach general education courses for non-majors?
3. How do you approach teaching students with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds?
4. Describe how you would teach courses in area A and/or area B (our requested AOS's).
5. What are some specific methods or approaches that you use in your classes to enhance student learning?
6. What are some of your long-term teaching goals (for example, topics you would like to teach, techniques you would like to try, areas where you'd like to improve, etc.)?

I won't comment on candidates' responses to each and every question but rather point to some themes that linked the responses that impressed us the most.

First, some candidates answered virtually every question in terms of (a) course content (which topics, textbooks, etc they have taught or would teach), and or (b): evaluation (how many papers and exams they do). Obviously some discussion of content and evaluation is appropriate, but candidates whose answers fixated on content or evaluation did not impress, for the following reasons:

• It can get awfully tedious to hear people talk this way. It's like they're reading a syllabus (a syllabus which we may already have in their application materials anyway!).
• We sometimes were not in a position to know if the candidates' content was well-chosen. With respect to one of our requested AOS's, no one on the search committee had much background in the area, so we weren't really in a position to know if opting for this textbook over that one, for instance, is a good choice pedagogically or not.
• Most importantly, those who fixated on content and evaluation seemed less reflective than those who could more thoughtfully talk about teaching goals, challenges, methods, etc. I.e., it just doesn't seem like rocket science to be able to select some topics and a general evaluative scheme for an Introduction to Philosophy course. I don't mean to trivialize the challenges presented by the choices we have to make about content or evaluation, but I suspect most any philosopher can make those choices competently. What separates competent instructors from the excellent ones are that the latter have a better understanding of how to enable students to learn said content and demonstrate their mastery of that content via different evaluation instruments.

Second, in addition to being able to talk about how to help students learn, the candidates that performed best had a sense of their self-development as teachers. Several of our questions (1 and 6 in particular) require candidates to refer, at least implicitly, to their development as teachers, and I have to say, a number of candidates were flummoxed by them. It was as if they possessed a very limited pedagogical vision of themselves — teachers with no past and no future.

Third, candor goes a long way. We fully expect candidates without a specialization in X to, say, "of course I'd be interested in teaching a course on X." But it made a favorable impression when a candidate said things like, "no, I've never taught X and know very little about X, but if the department needed someone to teach X, I'd be willing, even though I'd need some time to investigate X a bit."

Finally, be detailed. With respect to questions 1, 2, 3, and 5, some candidates struggled to get past generalities and pieties. The best candidates left us with something concrete that illuminated the core of their pedagogical philosophy.

Is there a ppoint?

Since there's been some mention of PowerPoint over in Nathan's post about lecturing, I thought I'd draw everyone's attention to this pro-con discussion of PowerPoint over at the the NEA Higher Education Advocate. The discussion is too brief to settle much, but let's talk about this technology

Confession: I'm not a PowerPointer. For me, it's not a pro-tech/anti-tech issue. (Heck, this is a teaching blog; how much more high-tech can you get?) And as the pro- piece argues, PowerPoint can (like every technique or technology) be used well or badly. But here are my main reasons for my PowerPoint abstinence:

• Dim lights = dim brains? If your students have any inclination whatsoever to ignore you (or sleep!) turning the lights off won't help.
• Note taking: Writing on the board takes time. With PowerPoint, the text is already there, so to speak, and as a result, instructors sometimes go far too quickly for students to keep up and take notes. I also believe (though I concede my evidence is minimal) that students perceive PowerPoint to be somehow more authoritative than written text, with the result that they write down only what the slides say. It's only a hunch, but I suspect PowerPoint might discourage a more active or detailed approach to note taking.
• Engagement and dialogue: Again, this is very unscientific, but when I walk the halls of my university I see the blue glow of PowerPoint in classrooms and rarely are those classrooms filled with much interaction. It just seems like so long as the slides are up there, they're what matters (not the reactions, questions, concerns, etc. that the slides' content might prompt in the audience). It's as if PowerPoint artificially confines interaction and discussion to those moments when it's not in use
  

Of course, I'd be delighted if people find PowerPoint useful, but I remain something of a skeptic for now.

Happy instructional new year

Seeing as we're approaching the New Year, I thought we could share classroom-related New Year's resolutions for 2008: something we'd like to be more conscientious about, improve upon, etc. I''ll go first:


Return student work in a more timely fashion. I'm usually good about this, getting student papers back to them within a week of the due date. But occasionally it takes longer than it should, and the longer it takes, the less students attend to (or can do much with) the feedback I provide. Sometimes this is just a matter of sheer workload, but (I admit) it's traceable to my dislike of grading. I actually enjoy reading people's work and providing comments, but the need to assign grades tends to kill my motivation for some reason. So let's see if I can be more on the ball in this regard next year.

What's your resolution?

"Lecturing is not good for children and other living things"

I am opposed to doing much traditional "lecturing" in most classroom contexts that I find myself in, which are typically classes with less than 35 students. For one, I think lecturing encourages passivity: students just sit back and typically just let ideas wash over them, at best. Second, I think it discourages doing the reading, if a lecture substitutes for that, as it often does: if the lecture will sum up the basic ideas and arguments, why bother reading about them in the readings? (And somewhere I have gotten the idea that there is research to show that most people learn best from reading, although I now retain that belief probably on the basis of wishful thinking!). I prefer spending our time doing learning activities that students could not do on their own.

Fortunately, I am not alone in having these kinds of thoughts about lectures. Here are some recent articles on lecturing:

Lecturing vs. Teaching Problem-Solving Skills

Breathing Life Into the Lecture Hall

To Lecture or Not to Lecture, an Age-Old Question

A guru here seems to Eric Mazur from Harvard's physics department.

I wonder if people have any thoughts on this issue, know of other relevant discussion, etc.

Arguments for classroom discussion

In his very influential introductory text on ethics, The Elements of Moral Philosophy, James Rachels discusses the tragic case of an anencephallic baby named Theresa (BT) whose parents wanted to donate her organs so that otherwise healthy children who need them could survive. One of the issues involving this case is that in order to utilize the organs the doctors would have to kill BT. The ethical question arises, is it morally permissible to kill BT in order to retrieve her organs so that others might live? The argument that he presents in favor of killing BT in order to retrieve her organs is what he labels the ‘benefits argument:’ (It should be noted that Rachels does not address whether or not he agrees with this argument, only that this argument can be made.)
1. If we can benefit someone without harming another then it is permissible to do so.
2. Retrieving the organs from BT will benefit others without harming BT
3. Therefore we should retrieve the organs from BT.
When I discuss this problem in my intro to ethics course most students find this to be a plausible argument. They believe that the premises are true and have a tendency to agree that the doctors should be allowed to kill BT.

Assuming that the benefits argument is a sound argument, I then present an argument that seems to follow from, and be consistent with, the benefits argument, but which most students reject as being implausible and would not sanction doing what this argument requires. The argument is:
1. If we can benefit someone without harming another then it is permissible to do so.
2. There is a shortage of organs needed to save lives.
3. We can reduce this shortage by developing a fetal farm of anencephallic babies from which we can harvest needed organs.
4. We will benefit others and will not harm anyone by developing these fetal farms and harvesting the needed organs.
5. Therefore we should develop fetal farms of anencephallic babies and harvest their organs as needed.

The reason I give these contrasting arguments is to get students to realize that even though we sometimes accept premises as being true we do not always accept the conclusions that seem to follow from them. Anyway, you might find it interesting to discuss this issue with your students. In my experience it has generated a great deal of discussion that has lead to some interesting distinctions; e.g., something simply happening and causing something to happen, and possible theoretical positions regarding the roles of reason and emotions in our ethical lives.

I hope all of you have a happy holiday season and a new year full of adventure and growth.

In praise of task praise

We've talked a good bit about learning and motivation at In Socrates' Wake, and of the educational psychologists working on such questions, Carol Dweck has the most interesting things to say. This article from Scientific American summarizes her fascinating work on how praise impacts learners' conception of knowledge, and in turn, the motivations that govern their learning efforts. I'd encourage everyone to read it themselves, but here are a few key ideas.

Central to Dweck's work is a distinction between two ways that learners come to understand intelligence:

... I developed a broader theory of what separates the two general classes of learners—helpless versus mastery-oriented. I realized that these different types of students not only explain their failures differently, but they also hold different “theories” of intelligence. The helpless ones believe that intelligence is a fixed trait: you have only a certain amount, and that’s that. I call this a “fixed mind-set.” Mistakes crack their self-confidence because they attribute errors to a lack of ability, which they feel powerless to change. They avoid challenges because challenges make mistakes more likely and looking smart less so.

The mastery-oriented children, on the other hand, think intelligence is malleable and can be developed through education and hard work. They want to learn above all else. After all, if you believe that you can expand your intellectual skills, you want to do just that. Because slipups stem from a lack of effort, not ability, they can be remedied by more effort. Challenges are energizing rather than intimidating; they offer opportunities to learn. Students with such a growth mind-set, we predicted, were destined for greater academic success and were quite likely to outperform their counterparts.

It's easy to imagine how students with a helplessness mindset would struggle academically: The slightest adversity will be taken as evidence of an innate deficiency, and so the helpless learner will figure out to avoid the tasks that manifest this deficiency. As we've discussed a lot here at ISW, studying philosophy can be awfully intimidating and can bring to the surface various insecurities about one's academic abilities. It would not shock me if intro to philosophy classes are places where this difference in how students see learning and intelligence play a huge role in their motivation and subsequent performance.

The practical upshot of Dweck's work is that praise — and in particular, how we praise — shapes whether learners acquire the helpless or mastery learning outlook:

How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about math geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided.

In studies involving several hundred fifth graders published in 1998, for example, Columbia psychologist Claudia M. Mueller and I gave children questions from a nonverbal IQ test. After the first 10 problems, on which most children did fairly well, we praised them. We praised some of them for their intelligence: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must be smart at this.” We commended others for their effort: “Wow … that’s a really good score. You must have worked really hard.”

We found that intelligence praise encouraged a fixed mind-set more often than did pats on the back for effort. Those congratulated for their intelligence, for example, shied away from a challenging assignment—they wanted an easy one instead—far more often than the kids applauded for their effort. (Most of those lauded for their hard work wanted the difficult problem set from which they would learn.) When we gave everyone hard problems anyway, those praised for being smart became discouraged, doubting their ability. And their scores, even on an easier problem set we gave them afterward, declined as compared with their previous results on equivalent problems. In contrast, students praised for their effort did not lose confidence when faced with the harder questions, and their performance improved markedly on the easier problems that followed.

So a question for us philosophy instructors: Is it too late in the academic careers of the students we teach (i.e., college leval) to think that the forms of praise (or criticism) would have any impact on their conception of learning? Suppose that it's not too late. Do we praise (or criticize) students in ways that encourage the fixed intelligence view or in ways that encourage the mastery/effort view? It seems like the message from Dweck is that our praise and criticism needs to be very task-specific, referring not to alleged facts about students but facts about their work and the efforts that produce it. I'd be interested to hear about the styles of feedback or feedback mechanisms that people use and whether these provide feedback along the lines recommended by Dweck.

(On a side note: I don't think most of us are given a lot of directions early in our teaching careers about how to provide feedback to students. One bit of advice I've heard is that we should always something positive on a student paper, no matter how awful it is. Is that good advice?)