My response to Dr. Yee could fill a whole book. It would all be positive, though there's a heavy-handedness to some of what he suggests which I would love to be able to use, but lack the seniority to put into practice. Or maybe I don't, maybe UCF is different than anywhere I've been before. All I can say about Dr. Yee is, I never thought I could listen to an 8-hour lecture and be riveted for the entire thing, but that's basically what he put us through, and that's genuinely my reaction to it. It wasn't Stockholm syndrome either, we totally got a substantial water and meal break. It was all genuinely interesting and if his full-length course hadn't been full I would have signed up for it.
This article was so good, it hurt to read it -- I kept wanting to put it down and think about it, or even pull up admins I used to know and point at it and go, "See? SEEEEE???" -- but this is Earth, and we can't do that, so here are the points I will think about more.
-- the best students will anticipate that we're teaching the thing AND how to think about the thing
-- "Students fail assignments. And sometimes, assignments fail students." ... I agree with this, I'm just noticing that its structure (unnecessary but poetic break into two sentences) betrays the fact that it functions by appeaking to our emotions (poetic) not our reasoning, and that makes it more than usually necessary to read the piece with heightened skepticism.
-- "What changes do you hope a semester's work will provoke in your students? How does your plan for the term make those changes possible— or, better, probable?" ... that's another one of those aphoristic and glittering rhetorical passages that make you think, but about the wrong thing. Again, I don't dislike this article, I love it, but I want to anticipate any objections to it. Whether my plan makes those changes possible or not is seldom in question. Whether those changes are probably or not is out of my control. It depends on whether I have the support of my department, which includes regular and meaningful contact with the instructors who teach the course before mine and after mine (and alongside mine) in a student's trajectory. While this is not the fault of any other instructor, things aren't really set up so that I can check in with anybody else in their department, so the goals I might have for a semester are _undermined_ in probability by God knows what, and short of offering the students cash (which I've considered, after googling for nearby plasma banks for me to give to in order to raise those bribery funds) I don't know how I could make these ideal outcomes probable. Still, I live (and read) in hope, but if the premise of the article is that it's all within my power, or even my influence, I think we're going to have a bumpy morning.
-- "They'll even develop a useful doubt about how well a concept accurately or completely maps the reality of any given phenomenon" - Okay, this is true, and this is on me. I absolutely know this to be true, and I would LOVE it (have loved it) when students have said "I get the concept, but is this really the best way to achieve it?" (p. 103) -- the reason my fears get the better of me is that by the time we get to that point, haven't they already lost their trust in this whole process? And in this, I realize I am wrong. In my own career as a student, I don't argue with instructors I don't respect. I don't interact with them at all. I just sort of give a quiet thumbs up and comply with instructions half-heartedly. It's just this side of malicious compliance. But if I'm pushing back out loud, it means I really want to know what the instructor says. So I need to be less afraid of being questioned.
-- "A caveat here is that students need to learn how to articulate, in their own words, the ideas and arguments others have advanced, without flattening the complexity of those ideas." (p. 105) ... Great. And I'm going to get administrative back up when a student resents this and demands to be excused from having to do it, right guys? (Silence) ...guys?
-- "But when you begin asking how Assignment 1 relates to Assignment 2 and to Assignment 3, you may find new functions for old forms, or you might discover that you want new types of assignments to accomplish your goals, which ultimately need to be, or become, the students' goals." (p. 112) ... This is what I live for, and it's the reason I'm willing to risk most kinds of formal reprimand in order to test experimental pedagogy. It's just too easy to assess based on comprehension of the last unit or readiness for the next. Students will push back against this, NOT because they lack confidence, but because they know that they can through an informal, and then a formal, complaint process. That's part of our new reality that many of us grumble about, but which we're going to have to integrate into our way of working, just like we can grumble about AI all we want, but we're stuck with it. I don't resent students who go nucleur to get out of doing homework. They're just trying to get through their day. I'm working on techniques so that, even if homework looks time-consuming, it's not seen as the enemy, and that's something this article did help with.
Since this article is fairly short. Not much to disagree with either, although I do question whether it's right to assume the relevance of Mager (1997) that, as with the natural sciences, repeatability of a pedagogical experiment with the same results is the proper metric for whether another instructor's methods and discoveries should be added to the store of checklists and diagrams we have. I'm not sure that's how pedagogical knowledge progresses. But I can't really think of what my arguments against that would be, and the article is way too useful to nitpick about that.
I'm going to deliberately take notes on it vis a vis the assignment I really feel like I have to create for the game design portfolio class I'm teaching (the students have expressed that they'd like to work together more. I was not expecting that, but I think I can accommodate them). Here's how the article's concepts might serve my purposes or might relate to game design and gamification as a whole:
-- Learning Objectives (LOs) scaffold knowledge like game levels, gradually increasing in complexity and skill requirements. This parallels game design where each level builds on the last.
-- Similar to game mechanics aligning with narrative and objectives, LOs should align with assessments and instruction for coherent course design, ensuring gameplay (learning experience) is consistent and goal-oriented.
-- The concept of making LOs transparent to improve student engagement mirrors game design where clear objectives enhance player motivation and understanding of game goals.
-- This relates to metacognition from the very start of this class ... encouraging students to use LOs for self-assessment and self-regulation reflects game-based learning strategies, where players assess their OWN strategies and skills - they can then adjust their approache.
-- The idea of improving LOs through collaborative professional development could be used in a unit on multiplayer (or, and I'm less optimistic about this, "community-based game development," where feedback and collaboration are essential and where the designer will frequenrtly disagree with the client, and just as frequently will need to do more than the obvious abmount of research just to understand the client, whether that's the gamer/player or whoever commissioned their design.)
-- Similar to trial runs or tutorials in games that prepare players for upcoming challenges, the use of LOs in pretests can prepare students for assessments, making learning expectations clear and actionable.
If I did reach out to the center for teaching and learning, wouldn't they just point out some technical reason why I'm not actually allowed to innovate, regardless of whether my intention, or capability, supported the learning outcomes?
Let's not speculate on that, I've always been able to talk to certain people I know there and help has been available, so this isn't anything I should whine about (though I do know of others who won't reach out to them BECAUSE they've simultaneously been told not to change anything, and also provided with either no shell at all or one so old and out of date that it came across like something out of a skit).
Since I mention whining, though, I note that the step which has always proved difficult for me, in the three-step process of backward design, is the second one -- how do I identify what acceptable evidence would be? The Vanderbilt link provides a list, one so obvious I don't have to repeat it here. While I think the step itself (and the three step process overall) is useful and true, that list of assessment types is ... I picture medieval monks nodding their heads and approving of it, as they labor in scriptoriums to copy it out into an illuminated manuscript, that's how OUTDATED it looks to me... we need new assessment models. I can't wait to see what we, as a group of soon-to-graduate students of curriculum design, can add to it. I'm well aware that in the process of discovering new assessment types, we're going to make some hideous mistakes, and that's scary, but I would refer anyone to the Germano and Nicholas article to feel ready for taking that on.
OMG I'm so excited for this! This is scary.
My goal here will not be to get approval, necessarily, but rather to hear (from those with more experience) exactly which parts of what I propose are a SERIOUSLY bad idea, vs. which parts are just kind of new and untested. And of course, which parts are solid and least likely to meet with concern. That said, I'm aware that the actual goal here is employment or employability. I feel some despair about employability in this particular year, but I'm optimistic for the future, if only because everything always changes I have a friend who says, "If you don't like the weather, give it time, because the weather's going to change. If there's something else you don't like, give that time, because that is going to change."