Pedagogy central

After the spring semester, I usually spend about a month on a combination of pedagogical activities, organizing, and thinking strategically about courses. (I should spend the time writing articles for publication, but that's a different story.)

The week after finals, I attended four workshops on pedagogy in various forms, plus a planning meeting for an institute I'm teaching in August. These events tend to be heavy on broad concepts and light on applications, but if you can spend some time after the fact thinking about how to apply them, it's not totally wasted time.

First up was a workshop on assessments using a modified Kitchener-King cognitive development model. Allegedly our students are best at memorizing random chunks of information. They don't think critically about this - meaning that they can't sift through evidence to find out what's valuable and what's garbage, much less synthesize all that into a cogent argument.

I don't totally agree. Some students come in with this capacity but what they lack is enough knowledge of "how the world is" or general life experience to be able to contextualize what they know properly. (I am forever making assumptions about what they know - often wrong. For example, although all of them have had at least one year of world history, I can't assume they remember that WW2 was in the mid-20th century or know what (generally speaking) the sides were, Allied versus Axis.)

Two days later, another workshop dealt precisely with this point - how to understand your students and what they know and care about. Not a lot of answers (the mood at our table was fairly cynical) but at least we are asking the questions and trying to put ourselves in their shoes. But I hope that I bonded with my co-facilitator for my first-year class, and we met the following week to hash out some of the scheduling stuff.

The worst was the strategic planning retreat. Working with my colleagues to try to dream up new initatives within the framework of our institutional core values was pure torture.

I teach at a teaching college. It's interesting to see the rigor (and cookie-cutter-like methods) taught TO students in the name of early ed pedagogy. But are our young students better educated because of it? Many of my students rail against standardized testing. I don't; to me it's a first step. You need knowledge and perspective to be able to think critically about ANYTHING.