Category Archives: faculty development

empowerment, engaging students, evaluation, explain everything, faculty development, GCC, GCC Students, GCCAZ, higher education, learning design, Student Engagement, Teaching Ideas, Write6x6

A Balancing Act

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A Little of This – a Little of That

One of my goals as an instructor here at GCC is to improve students’ listening skills. Most of the time I do this without them consciously knowing it. That sounds rather odd. It’s not that they aren’t conscious, but they may be distracted — paying attention to other things — while improving their listening at the same time.

I ask questions that I hope will make them think about what they listen to in their every day life. I ask them to describe what they are hearing and what their first reactions are. I’ve found if I can include visuals they will listen a lot longer and understand more clearly what the music is trying to convey. I have discovered that students start paying more attention to everything that is part of their listening day, and that is my intention.

One of the questions I often ask is “Do you listen to orchestral music?” Most students answer, “No, never.” I then talk a little about film. Do they watch films? Again, most of them say, “Oh, yes, I watch movies all of the time.”

With that they usually realize that they have listened to lots of orchestral music. Here’s an example: Composer John Towner Williams (we have learned through trial and error that there are a lot of ‘John Williams’ out there so I have become accustomed to using his middle name just to make sure we are all talking about and listening to the same guy), who has had the temerity to scare us out of the water, share the feeling of flying under all sorts of conditions, whether on a broom, a bicycle, or as a bird, and show us the martial qualities of The Dark Force. I chose this clip because of the content, the audience reaction, and, in this case, not for the visual images, which are slightly blurry. The answer to your question about the first instrument you see is – a contrabassoon. This is as iconic as Bernard Herrmann’s strings in Pyscho, but I digress. One of these days someone will re-master it and it will be clear — but in the mean time, I dare you to stick your toe in the water….

Williams’ Jaws

Known for many different kinds of music, Elmer Bernstein’s music has been patriotic and poetic. Here is a well-known theme. I usually choose something from the film “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but you should all be familiar with this.

Elmer Bernstein’s National Geographic Theme

There are a number of others I could have included if we were learning some specifics, but I thought it might be interesting to simply poke a little fun with Vangelis:

Mr. Bean with one of my favorite conductors – Sir Simon Rattle

I hope you enjoyed the listening.

Apologies for any advertising that may have appeared. In Canvas this does not show up.

 
empowerment, engaging students, evaluation, explain everything, faculty development, GCC, Glendale Community College, higher education, Living, Student Engagement, teachers, Teaching Ideas, We Matter, Write6x6

Can We Live Without Risks?

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A statement someone made recently jumped out at me. They said they rarely take risks. I was amazed. I consider myself a very careful person, but I often feel like my risks are the challenges I take on. Of course, I’m not talking about doing anything like this!

Perhaps it’s the definition of the word risk [enter student’s clichéd discovery of dictionary definition to make written assignment longer]. Wink

I see risk as a transition and an opportunity. Now, if the risk doesn’t have that element, I won’t do it. In some ways, we all take risks every day. There are certain risks I simply won’t consider, the consequences are just too costly.

Professionally, I was always taught to say ‘yes,’ if you want to work. People want to know that you will say ‘yes,’ when they ask. It saves time for those hiring. That’s a musician’s point of view. It’s the way you keep getting more opportunities – or, for those who prefer less formal constructs – How you get more gigs. Regrets, yes, certainly. I said ‘no’ to a really good opportunity, which was a risk, because I was just getting married (hence, already in the midst of a transition) and didn’t want to spend my honeymoon thinking about the project and risking the beginnings of our marriage… I’ll always think about where that job might have led. But see, once again, I keep going back to the positive-negative balance of risks.

And I’ll admit to some positive/negative possibilities. I’ve walked into a classroom and spoken completely ‘off the cuff,’ which is definitely a risk. It’s not that I hadn’t thought about it. I had. I know my subject deeply. Some of those have been my most inspired lectures, but occasionally, they have not. It’s a risk.

How about classroom management? I had a student who sat in the front row of class and never took a note. (This is a room that is set up as a lecture/recital hall, so down in front is noticeable.) In fact, he came in without anything – no books, no notebook, no pen/pencil or computer. Nothing. An instructor would assume he didn’t come prepared for class. And we’ve all had those students who obviously weren’t. Did I mention this was a long lecture format? The class was two hours and twenty minutes long. Should I say anything to him? He wasn’t disruptive, and he did well in the subject. One day he came in with a Rubik’s cube. I saw it, but chose not to say anything. As the lecture was finishing I just happened to look over at him. He subtly showed me his work by merely opening his hand. It was finished, and it was perfect. He hadn’t been disruptive to anyone, he didn’t show anyone else, I hadn’t been interrupted by what he was doing, but it allowed him to concentrate on what we were talking about. A risk, and a reward.

Deeper Risks

I could stop there, because it would be a great place to end – but I’m going to “risk” it and go heavy. As I mentioned earlier, we take risks every day. Driving, flying, walking down a set of stairs, saying something that you wish you hadn’t. I never discuss politics. I’ve gotten to where I rarely offer comments – especially to the entire world on any of those fronts.

But I’m going to include the world community and the risks people are facing today because we need to be talking about this in our classrooms. These are the ultimate risks because they are about basic human needs. This is not something that is happening somewhere else. It will ultimately affect us here. I was just reading an article about the fact that many Russians are also leaving their homeland, just as many Ukrainians are – except those who choose to fight. There is a general surge of people trying to survive with some semblance of their lives intact. In the article, the author referred to a family’s current residence, a shared room with three mattresses on the floor. The people had a roof, they had mattresses, a floor, running water, and they still had some money. They had been well-to-do so such living conditions would not have been acceptable in their previous life, but under the circumstances they knew they were lucky. They calculated the risk and felt they’d come out ahead considering the cost.

I first saw evidence of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s in Sweden. I ended up working with two Russian musicians as part of a Swedish quartet. There were interesting cultural flare-ups that surprised me. But like other recent mass emigrations, everyone was, and had been, fleeing for their lives. It’s amazing what we are willing to risk when we feel that we have little left to lose or too much to lose – our lives or our children’s lives.

A fountain with a person etched into it
Found at an Estonian Fountain commemorating lost lives

In Estonia, ten years after the last Russian troops slowly left, I moved there, and in my research I learned more of Stalin’s ’round up’ of people. Sometimes there were lists, sometimes just numbers. ‘Take this number of people. I don’t care who.’ They disappeared or went to gulags. Often, no one ever knew whether they were killed outright or just never seen again. How can you live with that threat? I was part of an interview team to determine whether a young Estonian man would study in the U.S. when he talked about the importance of the NATO alliance to his country. I knew about NATO. It also meant, in couched terms, the U.S., from where funding came for this prestigious scholarship. I occasionally thought about NATO – but not to the extent that this young man understood it because the Estonians had few defenses against the Russians on their shared border. We, as Americans, have the luxury of a different point of view.

Before I sign off, I want to mention that moving people, their craft, their professions, their influences, and their cultures affects everything. It affects the arts, music, the humanities, science, technology, engineering, people, and even education. Would you stay or would you go? Ultimately, when we talk about risks, these are the most critical risks to discuss. I truly believe as educators everything we do counts, but we are also lucky that we can talk about risks that are so relatively ordinary when others face risks that are so tremendously devastating.

 
6x6, faculty development, learning design, Miscellanea, Write6x6

6×6-2 The Compulsory Arts

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[Apologies in advance for this ramble. Out of desperation I resorted to headphones, a timer, and an unedited—other than fixing basic spelling/grammar errors and formatting footnotes8—writing sprint.]

It’s been a few years since I’ve explored the research into the challenging relationship between instructors and instructional designers, but a quick trawl today at least makes clear that no magic communication cure-all has appeared1.

I say “challenging,” but anyone who works in learning design knows the common framing question is, “how do we overcome faculty resistance?” Or, as the more jaded might ask amongst themselves, “why do we have to spend so much time convincing faculty to just pick up some of those $%&# gold nuggets?“

Some of the highest hurdles to teaching excellence are systemic: even assuming that an instructor can overcome the natural trap of “good enough,” and wants to improve continuously for their own reasons, most are trapped inside a double-layer of smothering bureaucracy. Teaching is usually not accorded the importance it deserves—if it is seen2 as important at all—and plays a correspondingly small, effectively unimportant role in promotion and tenure, compensation, workloads, etc. And this broken system is stuffed, turducken style, into institutions that not only aren’t philanthropic in nature, though they often like to pretend they are, but are actually big businesses in which credit hours and high-minded rhetoric are scanty fig leaves for real currency.

So I understand the reluctance. Academic work can be difficult, time is in short supply, and they aren’t paid by the hour.

But teaching is both craft and art. It’s more than a calculation of time and effort, more than the imagined billable hours on the mental meter salaried instructors frequently have running in their head. Good craftsmanship and creative teaching are hard. Caring about learners and working to improve are often Herculean labors7 that, unlike those faced by the mythical hero, don’t stop at a mere dozen. In fact, they don’t end at all, placing real demands on instructors and designers alike to manage their time. I frequently say that both could spend the rest of their careers improving and transforming a single course, but that isn’t our blessing/curse.

However, the answer isn’t spending as little time as possible on preparation and teaching, either, turning what should be creating a world of connection and learning into a producing a minimum viable product. I understand when good enough to go teach a course has to be good enough to stop improving a course. I don’t understand why so few teachers put in the effort to go further. Where are the artists challenging themselves of their own accord? The craftspeople who want to go beyond assembling items from the publisher’s versions of IKEA?

I’ve been in this field for a long time and, in the end, I don’t believe this kind of creative striving is something that can be instilled, only discovered and cultivated. I can work to establish relationships with instructors and gain their trust, facilitate learning communities, and put on events. I can provide cookies and coffee. If I’m fortunate, I can provide stipends and release time. These things will help some teachers do more for a while but, as the cliché goes, the motivation and passion have to come from the inside. Extrinsic motivations, even if maintained materially, are not enough to foster permanent change. Teachers who want to pick up and spend those bags of gold have to do it for themselves, the same way writers have to choose to put pen to paper and fingers to keyboard3 without being told to and, for the vast majority, with insufficient compensation and little to no fanfare.

All of this is why the common framing in the instructional design world of overcoming resistance and convincing faculty feels off. Before instructional design work of consequence can happen, the instructor needs to have an authentic, intrinsic desire to create work of consequence. Before faculty development events can succeed, those motivated faculty need to be found—or aided in discovering their own creative ambitions.

As a poet4, I’ve taken my fair share of poetry classes and workshops and had the fortune of leading them myself. In many ways, the pursuits of writing poetry and teaching demand, if one is to “succeed” at them, the same things: desire, intrinsic motivation, and the willingness to find the time to put in the hard intellectual labor at a pursuit that will never be finished.

But poetry writing classes are attended by people who want to write poetry. No one is being forced to be a poet, and teachers don’t spend time trying to convince their students that creative writing is a vast, life-long discipline, and poetry a demanding art form.

Faculty, on the other hand5, are often practically forced to teach. For the most part they don’t recognize, or they discount, education as a real discipline, and they don’t understand that teaching is an art. And I’m not even going to get started on lack of knowledge of, and disrespect for, the discipline and art of learning design6, even as those designers have to simultaneously do their actual work and fill in for what would be, in the poetry analogy, introductory literature classes that provide exposure to different authors and work ahead of some of them self-selecting into that world.

As I said earlier, some of this is systemic. A real solution would involve recognition and review of teaching, unbundling research and teaching, proper compensation for dedicated teachers, and much more. Meanwhile, while teaching remains for most a necessary sidelight to achieve things they feel are more important, and part-time lecturers are given little or no time for development of themselves or their courses, learning design is left to attempt the impossible: creating compulsory, collaborative art.

1. The pharmaceutical industry is woefully behind in created such a wonder drug.
2. A sad reality is that even the pretense of prioritizing teaching is often dropped, leaving teachers who want to excel “seen” in the same way one might note that a driver saw a pedestrian…and ran them over anyway.
3. And often head to table, hard.
4. Or more accurately, former poet and MFA program deserter.
5. Particularly full-time, tenure-track and tenured faculty.
6. Maybe another time. But it’s bad. At least once a week an instructor will ask, essentially, how they can quickly “pick up instructional design” when they have a bit of free time.
7. If you’re getting bored already, may I direct you to reading Stephen Fry’s depiction of Heracles in his excellent book Heroes.
8. Yes, I do think with footnotes!

[CC-BY image by lylejk]