While I appreciate the efficiency of uniform standards, I am concerned because it becomes even more efficient to teach to the test, which means more students will arrive in my college classes expecting to be told exactly what to do. I want them to take risks which means I have to convince them that I will reward them, not take off points, for making and fixing mistakes — which can feel very inefficient. Sometimes that’s a very hard sell.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation didn’t just bankroll the development of what became known as the Common Core State Standards. With more than $200 million, the foundation also built political support across the country, persuading state governments to make systemic and costly changes.
Bill Gates was de facto organizer, providing the money and structure for states to work together on common standards in a way that avoided the usual collision between states’ rights and national interests that had undercut every previous effort, dating from the Eisenhower administration. —How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution – The Washington Post.
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That’s one reason I loved learning technical writing from Dennis, but I also loved teaching technical writing later on because those courses allowed me to implement project structured assignments rather than traditional papers (which most students never cared for anyway). All of them understood at the end how projects and cooperating with fellow students (colleagues or co-workers) applied to their life during their second semester.
My brother is a huge gamer. I mean this literally when I say he, up until a few months ago, spent all of his free time gaming. He just graduated high school today and we were discussing how college will be very different, especially in his most hated field of study, English. The problem I see isn’t teaching them HOW to write, close read and analyze text, or form a sound argument. They’ve been taught in a how-to, mimic-me fashion throughout high school. The problem is getting them to care. The kids in his class don’t find any value in those skills, and they don’t see how learning them pertains to them, so they don’t put in much, if any, effort in acquiring those skills.
I always encouraged de-mystifying college writing to the point that recursive process was represented as concrete and manageable tasks in exchange for feedback. The results were phenomenal!
True, but undergrad students’ problem is focusing too much on grades rather than abstract concepts and developing knowledge through contribution.
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I agree many students are psychologically invested in gaming, or fandom, or other aspects of culture that provide feedback and a sense of progress, and that the onus is on educators to adapt to the strengths that students bring into the classroom, rather than bemoan “kids today.”
In May or December, a student can’t really “reset” a term paper and start the semester over. There may be financial consequences for doing a course over again.
Our stakes, as Gee points out, is adopt and adapt gaming practices or else education at all levels will cease to exist, which means everybody is out of work and needs another use of their PhD.
I disagree because students are more invested in gaming and other activities like it than they ever will be in anything school (a James Gee argument I support).
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The stakes in gaming are lower, though.
Hacking our own pedagogy may bring us and our students closer than ever when it comes to process. However, making mistakes and learning from them is something we need to catch up to our students because they already know about that from things like gaming.
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Of course… students are changing as rapidly as the technology. The #cwcon is full of talented teacher-researchers who regularly hack their own pedagogy. I hope I’m as open to making mistakes — and learning from my mistakes — as I’ve ever been.
Have you ever thought about that student expectation as an opportunity to analyze our own teaching methods and develop stronger meta-teaching?