(Or, Why do I suddenly have a sharp, shooting pain in my neck?)
I might be too knee-jerk in the way I make a cross with my index fingers whenever the shadow of Active Learning looms close. I am more open to it now, since Eric Main has always been helpful to me, but I still dunno... maybe some good old fashioned reading and learning will help me come around.
Eric Main acknowledges that all learning is active bc we're always thinking. Agree. He goes on to say we've realized that lecturing to students is a culturally acquired habit. After all, the university doesn't have to exist if it's just about sitting back and soaking up a lecture (because YouTube and Podcasts could provide the same thing). "Active Learning is seen as everything except lecturing", he says, and I doubt that. Every teacher I've talked to, whether they like Active Learning or not, associates it with a very specific movement and rationale. It's not seen as just "the opposite of lecture", but his phrasing is typical of those who think the only reason their views aren't widely adopted is because of a blinking innocence, in those who resist them, of what those views really involve.
I get it. We need an already well-explained topic explained to us again.
When he talks about research, he mentiones Freeman 2014 comparing active learning environments w lecture environments, and when data from STEM classes is surveyed, it appears active learning is more beneficial for underrepresented students. He also says that, as far as he's concerned, there's nothing wrong with lecture. This is, in itself, an attack on it, disguised as a shrugging acknowledgement that, up until our enlightened time, lecture was all we had.
The idea that "there's nothing wrong with lecture" is less of an acknowledgement than an attempt to damn with faint praise a method of teaching that has been around for more than 1,000 years for a reason. A lecture is a prepared distillation of (often unpublished, therefore not on YouTube) perspectives, and in its stronger forms, it's a hell of a lot more than "listening to someone drone on" which is the description consultants use to sell educators (or administrators) on a set of vexing "let's get up out of our seats" exercises. It is advertised as a refreshing change, but of course, if they weren't a departure from the norm, there'd be nothing to sell. Some people find Active Learning exercises mortifying. (Maybe the same people who were looking forward to college, where they could finally learn in peace.)
I like Eric and all, but I'm offended by his naive name-dropping of Montessori. The environmental learning stations in a Montessori school do not annoy children as much as "Okay now let's break up into groups" annoys college students. The push for active learning from cynical meta-analyses like Hattie's goes directly against (as the theorists acknowledge, and which EM mentioned) the learning preferences of students. That's not my issue with them. While I did find only a few scholars supporting my passionate dislike (not for the practice of, but the rhote enthusiasm around) Active learning, scholars don't write papers calling for the restoration of methods that aren't extinct. Why would they prove that an existent thing deserves to exist? Any gap in scholarship supporting traditional learning derives largely from that. And nothing supports criticisms of active learning better than Lenin. Who's deriving the benefit from Active Learning, really? If it's the students, great, I'll embrace it if it works.
EM says students dont like active learning because they have to be more accountable. He mentiones ARCS because the Competence feature in motivational design (Keller, 1983) is emphasized in Active Learning, which is ironic, because the other elements of motivational design (Autonomy, Relevance and Satiscation) are often either de-emphasized or contradicted by these group projects. Praise is divided among all group members, reducing Satisfaction, while penalties for any shortcomings are borne by all even though the critiques of those shortcomings are only Relevant to the least involved members of a student group -- and those members aren't listening. Autonomy is impossible in those cases, almost by definition.
Emily Johnson mentioned a case involving aircraft manuals and their inefficacy when outside factors like weather are a factor. I think that's more in line with the potential in Active Learning... I may have found the case she meant, and if so it is here.
The aircraft study points toward simulations, and if that's what was implied by Active Learning, then it would be great. It COULD be. It would be a way I could learn to stomach active learning, if I see it as a means of bringing it more genuinely (instead of superficially) in line with Montessori methods.
EM makes a good point toward the end, in that you can measure whether students are truly engaged in active learning if you can observe lots of behaviors. There are many types of behavior, what matters is that behaviors are happening. There's wisdom in that.
I read that blog post and thought, "Oh, well, pardon me all to hell, jeez, I'm not the one that asked for the stupid 'teaching philosophy' anyway, why am I being yelled at?"
I'm sure the article just struck a chord. It said "feelings about teaching are intense and difficult to articulate" which means that we do put a lot of difficult emotional energy into trying to get things down on paper and the article is telling us "yeah nobody wants that" -- well, nobody wants to write it, either, so why don't we just forget the whole thing?
I say that with full and bitter awareness that writing one is an essential skill for anyone who wants to teach, so I'll... throw myself into it... because I'd have to do it eventually anyway... here I go... throwing myself... into my own teaching philosophy...
My attention is drawn to the pyramid shape, which either I'm only just now appreciating or... which is under-appreciatred. It tells us so much. I say this because at GDC last year, there was a round-table about teaching games. The teachers themselves had great insights, but it was undermined by the round-table's organizers who had some really weird theory they were invested in, which they diagrammed with some triangular emblem that they called a pyramid, and which they did seem to think was their own Bloom's Taxonomy. My attention is drawn to that this week because... thinking of it in terms of "blah blahs" -- knowledge being the base should have the most "blah blahs" -- Evaluation is at the top, and it's easy to remember that we do it last and it's "special" but the shape also tesaches us that Evaluation should take no more that one "blah blah" -- it does not get equal "blah blah"s with the rest of them
The Answer is in the Questions -- this is something that came up at a conference recently, how much better some student questions are (only sometimes) than the "study questions" I'm prone to ask as conversation starters. I heard one teacher say she was surprised and "lucky" that her students had some great ways of asking about the symbolism in a certain game... "Why does the start menu screen show a treehouse? Why is there a chair outside in that picture?" -- they may have been entirely plot-based questions, but maybe bc it was a title screen, they automatically addressed theme.
Maybe questions like that only get asked by students by accident, trying to get at something other than "a good question about symbolism" or whatever the teacher's (my) goal is. And maybe they're more powerful if they're not answered conclusively, but they just sit there... bc there's two answers. One diegetic and one more... real? Diegetic answer is: "Somebody was planning on climbing out their second story window" and the real answer is something more vague and more variable and vague, like "because it's about freedom" or "the lengths we'll go to for freedom" or even "because a small detail in an otherwise ordinary picture of a house is more provocative than a close-up of someone escaping their house would be" -- I need to start taxonomizing types of questions, starting from game-design (where different questions have different aesthetic/mechanical effects) and heading toward education from there, instead of vice-versa... putting the beginnings of that notebook here
"When students came in on Monday they had already thought about the content and had thought about it, not just as a string of data points, but in a larger context" (p. 76)
They did, huh?
Well, if you're happy in that world, god bless you, I can't get students to think of anything in any terms other than what I see in this discord channel they've just invited me to, where I can read their conversations about my assignment for an analysis of the game inside The Lottery (Shirley Jackson) -- it's all "I think we're supposed to say it's about herd mentality" and "Yeah, that's what I did" and "are we supposed to make a game out of it?" and "I don't think he wants us to make a game, just write about it" and words to that effect -- it's a me-problem, but I feel inadequate, I guess, like no matter what I say their goal will be to try and second-guess what I want them to say... when the fact is, if I knew what The Lottery was about, I wouldn't have asked the students, because I think they're way too smart to just repeat "it's about how mean people can be" or whatever.
I think Shirley Jackson WISHED her town would have a yearly lottery, thin out the asshole population. The fact that, if it existed, she herself might get killed was either a matter of indifference to her (like "six of one, half-a-dozen of the other," or "at least I won't have to deal with them anymore"), or a reflection of the fact that she wasn't sure whether she was the asshole or not.
But I digress -- I returned to the Singapore sub-chapter after beginning a "questions notebook" for the breakdown of the 4 Ss -- significant, same, specific, simultaneous -- since I have this Lottery situation and a Discord, I can actually make some lab notes (I hope) and see if re-focusing the question bearing those four Ss in mind brings about the kind of responses I'm hoping for -- not mini-term papers, but a game-design-student's perspective on a short story that has some obvious, but perhaps distracting and irrelevant, themes, and a more interesting game driving all of it, which hardly anybody really pays attention to.
This is something I have trouble with:
"Demystify your mastery. Thinking back and articulating your own challenges to students encourages a growth mindset by testifying to the ability to master content and achieve an expert status. Walking students through your ideas step-by-step allows students to see all the thinking behind the academic work."
I love admitting to students that I discovered something just through the process of working, making mistakes, etc.. so much of what I've done is embargoed or secret for some reason, so that I can't even give examples of what those projects were in these notes. That doesn't mean I was ever powerful, or controversial, it's just that technically I can either say I worked there, or say what the knowledge is, but not both. So if I tell them what I learned, it's risky to say where. I don't find any of that mysterious or intriguing, it's banal, but it's annoying. Doesn't stop me from saying what things are like to students, though... and if it's in office hours, it doesn't matter...