The Master and the Student.

 

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I've been involved with (or I've been sitting in on) a lot of meetings at the moment about the future of assessment in a post AI world.

How can you ensure the students are actually learning when they can use AI to complete any part of any assessment for which they have advanced warning? If your goal is to test their own, actual knowledge, the options available are limited. They grow even more limited if you don't want every assessment item to be some kind of invigilated exam.

So what can we do to make sure the graduates of our universities actually meet the graduate attributes? In a world where it's almost impossible to survive without hustling, how can we ensure the student who has graduated from your university actually learned anything, apart from how to hustle their degree?

To be honest, I'm not sure you can. The more I hear and read about this conundrum, the more I think about the implications of this Brave New World in which we find ourselves, the more I think our current education system can't continue to work like this.

What's the solution? 

Well, some clever bunny somewhere is going to come up with a better option for assessing large numbers of students with small numbers of teachers and markers, but I think the only "true" solution that will let us ensure the graduates actually know their stuff is to go back to the old "Masters' Apprentices" way of doing things. Small numbers of students attached to teacher who is able to regularly talk to them and watch them work, and glean from those conversations and observations if they know what they are doing.

This is going to fly in the face of budget conscious higher education institutions who want to have hundreds of "bums on seats" while only having scant handfuls of academic faculty members on the payroll.

But I honestly think this is the way we need to go to ensure we aren't completely deskilling ourselves and undermining our future. The Capitalist way of delivering education has just "Capitalist-ed" itself into a corner, and it was barely fit for purpose before it became possible to outsource your every thought and sentence to a machine.

How can you ensure your students actually know their stuff before they go out into the real world? By talking to them. Really, deeply, meaningfully talking to them. Have a real conversation with them about what they know and how they would apply that knowledge. Give them puzzles to solve and be with them, as they solve them – watching how they go about it, asking them about their processes.

This is, I feel, the best way to know if you are happy to release that student out in the world to be a professional in your field.

Didactic teaching

 We've been updating our training statistics form at work, and I've been finding myself in the middle of some very interesting conversations about words I thought were better known than they are.

First, I used the word "narrowcast" to refer to the lessons we teach via the LMS or Zoom, and then I had to explain to people what "narrowcast" meant. Apparently that's not a common word. In case you were wondering, narrowcasting is like broadcasting, only you have a precisely delineated audience (for example, only people who can log into your electronic classroom).

To wit: if anyone can get it as long as they know when and where to look, it's broadcasting. If you can only get it if you are in the group that has access to it, it's narrowcasting. Public radio = broadcasting, police band radio = narrowcasting. You get the picture.

The second word that brought the discussion up a bit short was "didactic". Rather than talking about "lectures" and "workshops", I was going to suggest "didactic" vs "activity-based" classes. Most of the people in the room had only heard the word "didactic" used in the same context as "preachy" - if they'd heard it at all. Apparently, that wasn't a common word either. Turns out most people don't just randomly talk about pedagogical methodologies unless they've done an Education degree at some point.

When writing up my notes, I wanted to link to something that said what didactic teaching was in a nutshell, but couldn't find something I liked - so I'll just write my own:

Didactic Teaching in a Nutshell

Didactic teaching is the presentation of information to an audience.

It's commonly (and often derogatorily) referred to as "Chalk and talk" - the idea being that the teacher stands in front of a board and simply talks to (or "at") the class, who sit passively and listen, theoretically taking notes.

Didactic teaching isn't necessarily passive, though. Or, rather, it isn't necessarily unengaging just because it is passive. Like anything, it depends on the execution (and the audience). You can regularly ask the students questions to check their understanding, and you can field questions from the class members who wish to clarify matters or offer comments. Active listening is a thing, and you can encourage your audience to listen actively. Technically, using questions is bringing in a spot of dialectal teaching (see below) but it's still a didactic class.

You can also be interesting and humorous in your delivery of the content, so that your audience finds your presentation engaging, even if they aren't engaged in any interactivity at the time. A stand-up comedy routine is technically a didactic presentation.

However, didactic teaching can be very boring, so if you are a naturally boring presenter (or you have a class that refuses to engage in active listening), it is a dangerous method of teaching to use - even if it is one of the most common.

And now for a digression:

Lectures are considered to be didactic, as the lecturer presents/delivers information to people who aren't engaging in any kind of "activity" per se. The word "lecture" actually means "read" - in the olden days, the lecturer would literally stand at the front of the room and read their notes aloud. If you tried doing that these days, someone would complain (unless you got someone like Stephen Fry to read them for you, I suppose). Interestingly, "lecture" is often used with negative connotations - like "didactic" and "preachy". It seems people don't like being expected to listen while someone talks at them.

Not didactic teaching

Traditionally, the opposite of didactic teaching is dialectal teaching. In this method, the teacher and the students participate in a conversation in which they both talk about the subject matter (even though the student might not have had any information "presented" to them yet) and let knowledge and understanding unfold from the conversation.

The famous Socratic Method (okay, possibly not famous if you haven't studied Education or read much about Greek philosophy) is a form of dialectal teaching that actually consists of the lecturer asking the student questions in order to walk them through thinking out the logical conclusions. It's probably much more suited to philosophy than the inner workings of volcanoes, but I expect the right teacher could make it work for anything.

Most non-didactic classes these days are based around activity-based learning or problem-based learning. In these classes, students are presented with something to do or a problem to solve. The teacher should make sure it's possible for them to find all the information they need to complete the challenge before them (although not all teachers do this). In the process of doing the thing, they actively engage with and apply the information, theoretically making it more memorable.

Work-integrated learning is a cousin of activity-based/problem-based learning, in that students attempt to do the job they would be doing in the real world, had they already learnt what they are learning right now. It's sort of what an apprentice does, learning on the job.

You may notice a slight shift in  language for these methodologies. Rather than didactic/dialectal teaching, we've moved to activity-based/problem-based/work-integrated learning.

This is because the focus of the class has shifted - it has moved from teacher-centred to student-centred.

Now, if you're anything like... well pretty much everyone who talks about this in any kind of professional capacity, you're probably thinking "well that all sounds fabbo - so much better than that awful teacher-centred didactic teaching crap we've been forcing on students for generations!" I'd just like to point out that, once again, it's all down to the execution.

Activity-based learning needs to be really well designed to work well. I've been in activity-based classes that were about as engaging as having someone read their lecture notes to me, and I felt like gauging my eyes out with a spoon rather than doing their stupid activity. I've also heard many a student make similar comments.

The fact of the matter is, a good didactic class can be more interesting and engaging than a bad activity-based class. It all comes down to how engaged the teacher is. If you are connecting with the content and the students, the students will connect with the content as well.

In Action

When I was a child, I was absolutely held in thrall by an educational programme that would occasionally screen in the mornings on ABC.

The ABC had a programming schedule that would alternate between educational programmes and children's entertainment, depending on the day of the week.  I can't remember exactly which day was which, but if you were watching morning television on, say, a Monday you would see cartoons and such, but if you watched on a Tuesday you'd see programmes about maths and chemistry.  I loved those.

They were part of an educational support programme that ABC was running for schools in the 80s and 90s.  The broadcaster would have a schedule of programmes, which it would send to teachers, and those teachers could then arrange to have their class watch TV at that particular time.  My grade 5 class watched the entire series of something to do with Australian settlers (I can't remember what it was called, but it was something generic like The Colonials).  However, I think most classes at the time couldn't quite structure themselves around live TV, so most teachers asked their schools to buy the videos, if such things were available.

Sadly, my mother insisted on sending me to school, so I didn't get to see many of the educational programmes on ABC but, thanks to the fact that Aunty* ran its scheduling based on the school calendar for the southern states, I could watch a couple of weeks a year when the Queensland holidays ran a week earlier or later.  I was always secretly pleased when any sick days coincided with an episode of Square One (a maths programme), or something equally dorky.

But the show I loved most - and one that would occasionally be screened early on Saturday mornings - was French in Action.

It was actually my mother who got me onto that show.  She had an idea, at the time, that we would watch the programme together and learn French - one she vehemently denies, now.  I don't know how she heard of it, but I do remember her saying that she heard it was a particularly good language programme.

It was.  In fact, I've never seen anything that can compare to it - not just in languages, but in televised classes in general.  FIA was simply one of the best examples of education design I've ever seen.  Even today, whenever I watch an educational show or listen to a podcast, I find myself thinking "that's kind of like what they did in FIA, only FIA did it better..."

If I explain the format, you'll recognise most of it.  Other programmes have used similar techniques before and since.  There was a plot running through the entire series - each episode would show a few short chapters of this ongoing story.  Snippets would be repeated, with particular words highlighted.  Those words would be shown in other context, spoken by a variety of other people in a variety of other settings.  The spelling of the word would be shown, and a mime would act it out - just to drive it home.

Everything (apart from an introduction right at the beginning of each episode explaining what we were about to see) would be entirely in French.  Even the "class discussion" (there was a "class" who would often discuss what was happening in the story) was done entirely in French.  The learner was expected to "pick up" the meaning of the words based on the context(s).

Did it work?

Well, on the one hand I don't speak French. On the other hand, I did spend a lot of my childhood randomly spouting French things like "Je déteste ce!" and "J'suis malade" - these are things I picked up from the programme, and still remember to this day.  I didn't pick up useful things like counting and the days of the week.  They might have been in the episodes I didn't see, or they might have been left out entirely.

When I took myself to French evening classes for one semester in high school, I found myself in the peculiar position of being the only person in the class who couldn't count to ten, but could say entire sentences (albeit rather short ones).

And I have to admit that I'm finding what little French I do know a bit sticky.  I'll occasionally come up with the French word when I'm trying to think of the German or Estonian (both languages I am actually trying to learn at present, as opposed to French, which I'm not).  One day I'll probably start learning French again, and I expect I'll find a few more traces of FIA floating in the back of my brain.

I think I can safely say that FIA gave me a foundation in French that would have proved rather useful if I had built on it by continuing with the language.  What it definitely did, though, was give me a benchmark for educational design.  So often I find myself wondering how we can bring the FIA way of doing things into our own educational what-nots.

And so, just to indulge myself more than anything else, I'd like to finish by outlining six educational design principles that I first discovered in FIA, which I believe are worth pinning to a notice board if you are going to work on a series of vodcasts or podcasts:

1. Never underestimate the value of light entertainment (people engage with stories and anecdotes - they always have and they always will)
2. Give people a heads-up - let them know what they should be seeing and learning as a result of watching (or listening to) this thing.
3. Repeat your keywords.  Feel free to repeat them a little too often.  They become stickier by being slightly annoying.
4. Embrace the pastiche.  By mixing and matching different techniques to emphasis the important parts of your message, you are making sure your audience doesn't start tuning your "voice" out as background noise.
5. Write short and write long.  Each part should be able to stand on its own, but become richer when experienced as part of a bigger picture.  One episode on its own should be perfectly fine.  Three episodes in sequence should be even better.
6. Offer context.  Offer lots of context.  Let them see what you are talking about, and see it from a variety of different angles.

*"Aunty" is a common nickname in Australia for the ABC (from back when it was the Australian Broadcasting Commission).  It indicates something that is a part of the family, but a little bit dowdy.