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Using
Technology to Create a Safe, Humanistic Classroom
by Tom Marino, Ph.D., Professor of Anatomy and Cell
Biology, Temple University
Part II
Furthermore, we need to consider the work of Perkins and his Thinking Frames. He talks about four types of learning. 1. Information content – what every practitioner needs to know. 2. Problem solving – familiarity with classic questions and answers in the field. 3. Epistemic – mastery of styles of analysis prevalent in the field. 4. Inquiry – the ability to undertake research in the field. For my student, I think he only is comfortable with the information content and can not go far beyond that with the lecture/study/testing mode learning style that he is so comfortable with. And yet it is just this need that exists. We need to have our students be able to go beyond educational bulimia.
Casey Green, at a recent talk at The Blackboard Summit, pointed out that in the middle nineties the Internet was used mostly as a place for students to find information and a passive resource where information was archived. In the late nineties, the web began to be used for specialized functions. Green points out that in the year 2000 the Web is now used for e-everything, e-commerce is the word. And yet for many in education, technology is still only being used in the old CAI mode. Computer Aided Instruction continues to foster educational binging and purging. We need to use technology to create new models.
And even as I look at my own teaching, I realize that my use of technology has gone from using it for animations that aided my students’ understanding of embryology, to an interactive CD that helped involve them in group-learning, to online lectures and exams that helped them take charge of their own assessment tools. One of my most rewarding uses of technology was in developing a discussion group online to extend class discussion from the classroom into the evenings and weekends of my students’ days. In this discussion setting, the quiet students who never said much in class became vocal and alive. Their opinions were often heard more loudly that those who would dominate the class. Now everyone had a voice.
The Goals
Having said
all this I still have not articulated my goals. I knew how I did not want
to teach, but now I needed to tell others how I did want to teach. But how
was I going to be able to figure that out? That’s when Steve Gilbert,
Susan Saltrick, Parker Palmer, Jane Tompkins, and Mary Rose O’Reilly
came into my life. Gilbert, who is the President of the TLT
Group, loves to talk about Gandhi an. He would tell us about the Seven
Blunders Gandhi would teach his grandson. They were: Wealth without work;
Pleasure without conscience; Knowledge without character; Commerce without
morality; Science without humanity; Worship without sacrifice; Politics
without principle. And Gilbert would add his own: Teaching without joy.
Saltrick would talk to us about being in a dark wood and remind us of Dante, as we dealt with our struggles with teaching inadequacy and wonder where we were and who was going to be our shade. She said to us in her beautiful piece "Through a Dark Wood": "If Goethe is right, if we learn from those we love, and if love is the opposite of fear, then one might be tempted to say that real education can occur only when there is no fear"
Jane Tompkins told of her struggles in the classroom and wrote in her book A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned: "...School should be a safe place, the way home is supposed to be. A place where you belong, where you can grow and express yourself freely, where you know and care for the other people and are known and cared for by them, a place where other people come before information and ideas" (Tompkins, 1996, p. 127).
So there it was: the germ of an idea. But the real questions for me were: how do I make this a goal and was it an appropriate goal? Then I read Parker Palmer’s article in Change where he says: "Recovering the heart to teach requires us to reclaim our relationship with the teacher within. This teacher is one whom we knew when we were children but lost touch with as we grew into adulthood, a teacher who continually invites me to honor my true self – not my ego or expectations of image or role but the self I am when all the externals are stripped away."
I knew why I liked the safe humanistic classroom now. It was the classroom I have always wanted but was afraid to try. Yes, I too was afraid, and fear was not only part of my students’ classroom it was part of my classroom too. So what could I do and how was I going to do it?
I was going to make my classroom a safe place. A place where students did not just learn about the facts but also learned about each other and the implications of the facts they were learning. It was important no for me to begin to create a place where my students felt free to explore and grow along with experiencing the subject they were studying. In my safe, humanistic classroom, my students will be learning as much about themselves and their relationship to the subject and their colleagues as they are about science facts. We will all be working together to learn.
Parker
Palmer in To Know as We are Known summed up the main focus of my
new classroom. "We do not learn best by memorizing facts about the
subject. Because reality is communal we learn best by interacting with it.
In a wide variety of ways good teachers bring students into living
communion with the subjects they teach."
So I have set out to change my classroom. I want a classroom without walls. First, all of the didactic material was moved out of the lecture hall. The information content, as Perkins called it, was moved online. I could give my students online presentations on the facts they needed to learn. I could give them handouts online and I could give them PowerPoint presentations online. I could also now point them to other classrooms online. They could look at what others have presented and made available. They could see Kathy Sulik’s beautiful scanning electron microscope images of developing mouse embryos. They could turn to William Larsen’s animations done at the University of Cincinnati.
I could then ask them to tell me what they did not understand and I could ask them questions online to see what they did understand. And this means that more time can be spent in the classroom on higher order learning such as problem solving, understanding and mutual inquiry. More time can be spent in mutual discovery. Our face-to face classroom time can be spent discussing the information and using it.
I have learned much from my forays into online learning and one thing I have learned is that I need to provide more structure for my students as they approach each new topic. Many are not used to learning with freedom. They tend not to be independent learners. So I have learned to build in structure. The sequence of my course begins with a set of readings on the topic. The readings are from a textbook that is recommended and also from handouts I have prepared for online distribution. Then I will ask them to listen to a series of online presentations. After they listen to these, I will ask a few questions to see if they understand the basics. I will also ask them to tell me what they did not understand. Once they have listened to the online presentations and answered questions we will go to class and have a case study, problem-based discussion. I teach embryology so it is easy to find many cases of abnormal development and ask the students what went wrong with the normal development.
A common question, at this point, is whether this takes more of the students’ time than just attending lectures. What I did was take 3 hours of lecture and presented it online. It turned out to be about an hour of online material. Then I divided my class of 200 into 4 and met with the 4 groups separately for these face-to-face problem-solving sessions. The individual sessions were only 1 hour. So in fact for the students it was the same amount of time, and for me it was an hour more of my time in face-to-face contact.
Then, I prepared online student assessments. These were exams that could be taken at anytime during a designated period and the students could take these exams twice. Since I was using a pool of questions and the exams were randomly generated, if a student did not like the first grade they got they could take the exam again. I used the highest grade to determine their grade for that section. No longer did I hear students saying that I did not ask questions about what was stressed in class. If they did not know the first time, by the second time, they knew what was expected. I really wanted to move students from being afraid of an exam to being able to use an exam to assess competence without the fear of failure. I wanted them to ask how did they know they knew. That is the really hard part of learning.