Higher Education Observer

As mentioned here or elsewhere, I am working through Parker Palmer's The Courage to Teach.  It is a must read, but I don't think it would speak to young teachers, someone in their twenties.  It is for people who have taught at least a decade and have enough life experience for what he writes to resonate with them.  It is both a wise and spiritual book.  I hope to write half so good something about teaching  in the future, and I plan to use the book as a basis for a learning community in the fall, related to my dissertation. The chapter on fear and the Student from Hell so resonated with me that I am still in awe.  My students are fearful, and sometimes they hide it with bravado, rudeness, seclusion, avoidance.  I am fearful, too, stupidly of student evaluations.  So much is put on those that we good teachers are afraid to challenge.  I don't mean like the colleague who told his students to get their heads out of the a---. I mean to avoid p...

Parker Palmer writes:  We collaborate with the structures of separation because they promise to protect us against one of the deepest fears at the heart of being human--the fear of having a living encounter with alien "otherness," whether the other is a student, a colleague, a subject, or a self-dissenting voice within.  We fear encounters in which the others is free to be itself, to speak its own truth, to tell us what we may not wish to hear.  We want those encounters on or own terms, so that we can control their outcomes, so that they will not threaten our view of world and self."  (p. 37) This is a big answer to the previous post.

I have been enrolled in a doctoral program in adult education for almost two years now.  My gpa is 3.96 or so and I am ahead of all my cohort on the dissertation, which we are supposed to write during the classwork, a difficult process.  I am taking a day off today having spent the last two days at class and struggling with something. I did not expect this doctoral experience to change me as much as it has.  I have been in the classroom 35 years and have been taught to examine a lot of my assumptions.  I was always rather self-critical, so examining and questioning my professional practice is a good and welcome and rather natural thing.  However, there is only so much self-criticism one can endure until one feels like her self or his self is being sucked away.  So I end up backing off, being angry that I am expected to change, especially when the person asking me to change is hardly in a position to do so. One issue that has hit me this semester is the ...

I have taught college classes for thirty-five years.  Yikes.  I like to think I have learned a few things in that time.  One of these days I'll write it all down (and like a good academic, provide theoretical and evidence based support for it).  But today I'll focus on anecdotal data. When I came to my current position, I was told that I had to earn 4.6 or higher on my student evaluations to advance professionally.  I had always gotten 4.4 to 4.5 or so, and thought that was pretty good.  Certainly I wasn't expected to be perfect!  Yet some of our professors did get 5s, rather frequently. I balked at this like everyone else, but took on the challenge eventually--not willingly, but having to.  I did a lot of reading about the subject, although I doubt anyone could really read the volumes on it.  Five years ago I read a meta-analysis published in the late '90s on the subject, and at that time there were 3,000 academic articles on the subject....

That is the title of a book I am going to write when I finish my doctoral program.  It will be based on my research.  I am interviewing college professors about their self-directed learning and how they learn to be better teachers.  So far I have only interviewed ones at my college, but I will spread out eventually, at least in the state.  It's fascinating research, but the transcription is miserable. If any college professors would like to be interviewed for this book or research, please contact me through this blog and we can set up a Skype or Google hangout.  

I have finished four semesters of my Ed.D. program in Adult Education.  Some observations. It is an eclectic field. I wish there was more about the brain and brain science in this field.  We use the brain to learn. Some of it is far too New Agey for me and I just "bracket" that (code word for "ignore"). I am annoyed by the assumption that liberal politics is the only politics.  These are people who depend on the government for sustenance, so how dare the politicians demand cuts! I find most of it fascinating.  

I am a novelist.  Novelists create intricate, detailed worlds of characters, spaces, actions; fantasy novelists create a cosmos with its rules about magic; science fiction novelists create the "what if" based on physics no one can understand.  I am currently reading Ender's Game and encountering such world creation. I bring that intricate world creation to my classroom and I have recently decided that is not such a good thing.  It means more work for me and confusion for the students. Consequently, my goal for the new academic year is to simplify my teaching.  For example, I am teaching English 1101.  The departmental syllabus requires six essays and gives the teacher discretion about how much of the class can be homework and daily participation.  I have decided that only 5% will be and I will not grade a lot of quizzes and homework.  I have also decided that I will progressively grade essays--look for Type I errors on the first, Type Is and some ...