2006 ISSOTL Conference Plenary Reports

written by James Rhem

John Bransford        |        Lee Knefelkamp        |             Diana Laurillard

“Emerging Views of Expertise, Transfer and Assessment: Implications for Guiding Our Collective Scholarship on Teaching and Learning”

Dr. John Bransford, Professor of Education and Psychology, University of Washington

In the opening plenary of the third annual meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, John Bransford squarely tackled the question on everyone’s mind. “What’s needed for effective teaching and learning in our fast-changing world and how can we make it happen?” Bransford’s high-spirited presentation explored the question by modeling a broad commitment to learning in and from all kinds of contexts. As principle investigator and director of the LIFE Center (Learning in Informal and Formal Environments) at the University of Washington, watching how learning happens wherever it happens is his specialty. At the ISSOTL conference, he moved deftly from charts outlining innovation patterns at Boeing, for example, to screening a clip from Peter Sellars as Inspector Clouseau miscalculating on the parallel bars and dismounting through the floor into the room below. “All routines have conditions of applicability, and if you violate them the whole thing falls down,” Bransford commented wryly amid the group’s .loud laughter.

Bransford travels widely and currently, he says, no country in the world feels satisfied with its educational system. The dissatisfaction stems directly from the pace of change and innovation in today’s world and frustration in keeping up with it. As an example, Bransford cited one excellent nurses training program, a program dedicated to “absolute level of skill mastery.” “At that school they found that by the time their students graduated, the technology had changed and they didn’t have the mastery anymore,” he said.

Rapid change and the challenge of staying ahead of it or even keeping up with it have plagued education for some time, Bransford acknowledged, and a number of approaches have been tried in an effort to adjust. “We used to teach general thinking skills and general creativity skills, but that’s not enough any more. It’s too general,” he said. A still broader rethinking seems needed, he believes. 

“The question is, is there a mid level of knowledge organization that will prepare people for flexible future learning, but also for moving beyond the silo-like experiences of university?” “In other words,” said Bransford, “an organization aimed at learning how to learn other disciplines?”

For Bransford the two most vital components in working toward such reorganization in a formal setting are

• teachers who are adaptive experts
• teaching within adaptive organizations. 

And for Bransford “adaptive” carries a very humanistic rather than mechanistic tone: “we need competent, compassionate, ethical, flexible people and competent, compassionate, ethical, flexible organizations,” he says. In short, Bransford presented an approach to knowledge reorganization that centered less on knowledge as it’s usually imagined –static if continually expanding -- and more on ways knowledge and learning might be conceived as completely dynamic processes informed continually from multiple points of view.

Imagination plays a big part in the ideas Bransford outlined. “We need to look at people’s lives ten to fifteen years down the road and think backwards from that to what we need now,” he said. Unless educators look far ahead in this way, said Bransford, they’ll find themselves by-passed by those who do, just as corporations that focus on improving a working idea rather than innovating a better one often do. The key to following imagination into the well-innovated future lies in what Bransford calls “managed risk, not big risks.” Turning again to Boeing as an example, Bransford explained that the heart of “managed risk” is “a fast feedback loop about what’s working,” what one might call continual assessment and reassessment.

If “managed risk” describes a social or organizational norm needed to keep pace with rapid change, building that norm depends on first building some shared understandings at the “people level,” Bransford said. First among them comes an understanding of the “innovation cycle” as it applies to teaching. “You have to start with the people part first,” said Bransford. We value expertise because it allows the efficient application of knowledge to new situations. Because experts (good teachers) have wide knowledge, problems that seem non-routine to others fit into schemas and routines of thought for them and solutions appear readily. However, it’s already clear that just as knowledge is expanding so rapidly that college cannot hope to equip graduates with all the schemas they’ll need to continue to be experts in their field after graduation unless they also learn how to adapt and innovate, the growth in knowledge and rapid pace of change also demand that teachers continually innovate more effective and efficient ways to teach. Meeting that challenge, says Bransford, means overcoming a very human problem, the reluctance to be less efficient (and perhaps receive lower evaluations) in the short run in order to be more efficient later.

It’s called an “implementation deficit.” “To innovate sometimes means you have to give up your efficiencies, and, then, ultimately you’ll be more efficient, but in the short run you won’t be,” said Bransford. “Unless people have the concept that there are such things as implementation deficits and that you have to ride them out, you get a lot of resistance to change.”

“Change can be highly emotional,” said Bransford. “We need to change the idea of ‘expert’ to ‘being an expert means I’m a learner’ rather than ‘I know it all.’ ”

While individuals need new, adaptive attitudes toward expertise, organizations need some new attitudes as well, said Bransford as part of what he calls the “social ecology” of innovation. “At the LIFE Center, we collide our ideas with one another. We celebrate when someone else has a better idea, and we model that celebration to our grad students.”

While acknowledging the daunting problem of keeping pace, Bransford remained unfailingly optimistic, concluding his plenary by offering three practical but open-ended ideas for reforming the work of the expert faculty members in the classroom.

The first evolved as the result of thinking about the different kinds of expertise he’d need to teach a particular teacher preparation class: “I thought, let’s see, I’d need an historian, an ethicist, a multicultural expert, a brain scientist . . . “ Realizing he couldn’t bring this platoon of experts to class for the entire course, Bransford innovated the “virtual clone.”

Virtual Clone – The Virtual Clone brings an expert to class (sometimes via teleconference) to respond to “a challenge.” A “challenge” here means a familiar assertion or accepted idea, say about history. A standard documentary clip with narration describing the “westward expansion” of the “pioneers” might set off a “challenge cycle” in which an historian might point out that “westward expansion” didn’t apply to the Lakota Sioux and that “marauders” might substitute for “pioneers” in their history.

Switching Roles – Overturning the top-down model of instruction also offers a freer means of keeping pace, said Bransford: “change the dynamic so that sometimes students are students and sometimes they are teachers.”

“If I can channel what they do, I can learn a lot from them,” Bransford declared. “I’ve taken that as a major metric for success in a course: Did I learn something I didn’t expect? It maybe about my teaching, how I ask questions, what questions to ask or it might be about content. This has become my take on John Dewey’s comment that education is not preparation for life, but life itself.”

Publication -- And finally, Bransford suggested the traditional proof of learning in some form of publication might not only benefit from an enlarged definition, but also could be interwoven with the kind of innovative teaching needed to stay on top of rapid change. Instead of waiting until the learning was all done (supposedly), Bransford suggested, publication might be looked at in more basic ways as the on-going sharing of ideas, insights and information in a variety of new forms. “Simulations as a form of publication? Open source materials? A new kind of journal? They’re all with us already all we have to do is embrace and use them,” he said.

“Student Intercultural and Intellectual Development and the Growth of a Moral Imagination”

Lee Knefelkamp, Professor of Higher & Postsecondary Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University

Early in her address to the 800 attendees at the Third Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Lee Knefelkamp told the group: “This evening I hope to make the case that intellectual and moral development are deeply intertwined.” By the end of the hour it would have been difficult to find anyone present who was not convinced. Indeed, as her address closed one felt convinced that “knowledge” without “responsibility” was inert and that without learning to connect with other cultures “not just in areas of commerce,” as she put it, “but especially in areas of social justice” any education was sadly incomplete.

“Individual and social responsibility are the heart of the struggle for excellence,” Knefelkamp declared. How then, she asked do campuses currently make it possible for students to contribute to a large community – local, regional, global? And how do they lead their students to “take seriously the perspectives of others, especially the perspectives of they disagree with?”

Five years of recent research, she reported, show high correlations between “cognitive complexity, intercultural sensitivity, and personal identity and moral development.” In short, the truly brightest students are not only sharp, they care about others.

Sadly, however, those findings stand in the shadow of recent national survey data on what students say they value most and least as outcomes of their college educations. Among the most valued outcomes were a sense of maturity, better time management skills, better work habits, self discipline and an understanding of team work. Among the very least valued were developing values, principles, and ethics, tolerance and respect for others from diverse groups, expanded global awareness and sensitivity, and awareness of one’s responsibilities as a citizen.

“Are these ‘bad students?” Knefelkamp asked. “They’re our students.”

“The issue,” she continued, “is not suggesting to them that what they see as important isn’t import (It is: those things are important) but leading them to see that they things they don’t now value “are important as well.”

Knefelkamp, a renowned scholar in psychology and higher education known especially for her study of moral and intellectual development, spoke from two platforms of authority. On the one hand she spoke with the authority of a distinguished professor at Columbia University’s Teacher’s College, and on the other with the brooding wisdom of a grandmother. Not long into her address she invoked her grandson’s favorite children’s story, “The Three Questions,” a retelling by Jon Muth of a story by Tolstoy as a model of the challenge and opportunity teaching today confronts.

In the story a young boy named Nikolai feels frustrated at his uncertainty about how to know the right way to act in order to be a good person. Three questions define his uncertainty and he puts them to his three friends – Sonya, a heron, Gogol, a monkey and Pushkin, a dog. Of each he asks:

• When is the best time to do things?
• Who is the most important one?
• And What is the right thing to do?

Each friend offers an amusing but self-serving and unhelpful answer. Finally Nikolai consults Leo, an old turtle digging in his garden. While Leo contemplates answers, Nikolai helps with the digging. Just then a storm springs up and a cry for help issues from the forest. Nikolai runs to help and finds an injured panda whom takes back to Leo’s cottage and tends. When the panda awakes, she cries out for her baby still shivering in the storm in the forest. Nikolai runs to restore the child to its mother. The next morning Nikolai still feels disappointed at not having heard Leo’s answers to his questions.

Over a bowl of broth, Leo reviews yesterday’s events and points out to Nikolai that they show he has the answers already. “If you had not stayed to help me dig my garden, you wouldn’t have heard the panda’s cries,” says Leo. And, of course the most important one then were the ones who needed help and the most important thing to do was to help them.

“There is only one important time,” says Leo, “and that time is now. The most important one is always the one you are with. And the most important thing is to do good for the one who is standing at your side.”

For Knefelkamp the story extends hope and poses an obvious question for teachers. Hope lies in the idea that in some sense students already have the answers; they only need to see the connections. “The question for all of us then,” she said, is how can we help young Nikolai make those connections.?”

John Dewey, she recalled, once wrote that the central purpose of education was “to create in students and ourselves the capacities for associative thinking.” And harking to the wisdom of her mentor legendary educator Maxine Greene, she continued “What are those capacities that we want in our students – intellectual, moral, social – that will allow them to see and live ‘a world in common’ as Maxine Greene once put it?” Continually getting better at those things that create a more just society – not just learning new things – is Knefelkamp said (again citing Dewey) what life-long learning is all about.

Five changes of mindset seem needed, said Knefelkamp, to move toward a more just, global society. 

1. Challenge the centrality of the notion of the nation state. “We live within the boundaries of the world.”
2. Reframe “globalization” as more than economic or environmental, but as an idea about “how we relate to one another as humans as well.”
3. See individuals in the Diaspora. “All individual are in some kind of movement, some journey in relation to the histories of our kind, our people, our families.”
4. Accept “intercultural hybridity” both domestic and national. “We are all mixing all the time in multiple ways.”
5. Strive for “global learning in the presence of others, not merely learning ‘about’ others.”

“All diversity is global, national, regional, local, and” said Knefelkamp harking back to her notion of all individuals experiencing their own Diaspora, “in my own research I feel all diversity is also internal. We negotiate our social identities in the historical context in which we inherit those identities.”

Meeting the intercultural and moral future of teaching and learning will require three fundamental commitments, said Knefelkamp – an ethical commitment, an intellectual commitment, and a commitment to see ourselves as “global citizens.” Each of these, she insisted has a moral dimension. “Dewey suggested that morality begins in conversation, dialogue, respectful attention to the other,” she recalled. “The greatest moral failure,” she continued, “is a lack of empathy , especially toward a point of view different from our own. We can’t separate our sense that our students need to become intellectually more complex from their need to become interculturally more complex.” But, Knefelkamp was quick to point out, serious empathy for multiple, even opposing points of view does is not advocacy for an “anything-goes relativism.” “That,” she said, “is intellectually and morally bankrupt. But only through listening with empathy and understanding to multiple viewpoints, can we truly chose and then stand for what we believe.”

The most important students learning to live in this global world, said Knefelkamp, recalling the turtle’s answer to Nikolai, are “the ones now in our classrooms and advising offices.” “They are young Nikolai,” she proclaimed, “and the most important thing that we can do is to find ways to connect their most burning questions with their most possible actions” working for good in a complex and unscripted future.

As Knefelkamp concluded by reading Marge Piercy’s poem “To be of use,” it was clear she felt not only optimistic about higher education’s ability to meet the intercultural and moral challenges, but eager to join colleagues in taking them on. “The people I love the best/ jump into work head first,” the poem begins and ends “The pitcher cries for water to carry/ and a person for work that is real” to which Knefelkamp added “and teachers for students who are hungry for knowledge.”

“The Teacher as Action Researcher: Using Digital Tools to Capture Pedagogic Form”

Diana Laurillard, Chair of Learning With Digital Technologies, University of London

Dr. Diana Laurillard’s plenary address to the third annual meeting of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning offered the provocative idea that the flood of often bewildering and, at times, vexing digital technology into higher education may end up allowing teaching to realize its most ambitious goals for a global society. Ironically, perhaps, it wasn’t what is new about these innovations that made this seem possible from her remarks, but what was old that might be newly captured, understood and shared: namely, effective teaching practices or good pedagogy.

“What does it take to make technology work in higher education?” Laurillard asked. “Afterall, it’s there to do something.”

What it can do, her presentation made clear, is not only make active, cooperative inquiry a common mode of teaching, but also capture and refine the best ways to go about this kind of teaching at the same time. No one remains passive in the world Laurillard foresees; everyone remains curious, involved and critical. In short, everyone learns.

Reports from the European Union predict that internationally there will be 125 million enrollments in higher education by 2020 and the stated goal for 2015 from the EU is “education for all.” “Meeting these goals obviously calls for teacher education on a grand scale,” said Laurillard. And technology will clearly play an important role, especially since the vision for that education also includes more personalization and choice, more flexibility and independence, more available services and collaborative partnerships.

It’s to “e-learning,” said Laurillard, that we will look for much of this personalization and flexibility as well as the means to reach hard to reach populations. At the same time, she said, we’ll also look to e-learning to improve the productivity and effectiveness of teaching.

To a large extent, technology comes from the outside, from Microsoft or WebCT or some other source, but effective use of it depends on how teachers can, do and are allowed to use it. Compared with the multiple “drivers” affecting the pace and character of innovation in higher education – running from strategic plans to funding issues to curriculum requirements – technology is “a tiny thing” in comparison, Laurillard cautioned.

Still, if the context for innovation remains complex the power of technology relative to its size seems great, especially when its users keep straight who owns what. “Who owns the pedagogy of e-learning?” Laurillard asked? Presently some conflict exists over ownership in the sense that vendors like Microsoft and WebCT have great influence on pedagogy through the design of their products. Hence the importance of action research on the part of faculty into the best teaching and learning uses of technology. “Teachers should be in control of pedagogy,” Laurillard declared.

The aim of action research in the use of technology, as Laurillard outlined it, would be to create “tools with the pedagogy intact that the teacher could tweak.” These would be generic tools with cross-disciplinary utility. “Textbooks are one example of such a tool,” she pointed out. “Lectures and essays are also examples.”

Where would action research into e-learning begin? Probably, Laurillard suggested, in reflecting upon the dynamics of interaction between students and their teachers, or the “conversational framework” as she describes it in her highly influential book, Rethinking University Teaching (2nd Edition, RoutledgeFalmer, 2002).

Through a succession of variations on a complex diagrammatic representation of that framework, Laurillard demonstrated how some accepted generic tools of teaching, like books, only go so far in implementing the full dynamic possibilities of the framework. Simulations go a bit further, but the aim, said Laurillard, must be the realization of the possibility technology seems to extend and yet frequently does not achieve – true interactivity. “It must be more than an illustration,” she declared.

Laurillard’s diagram of the conversational framework presents a social projection of something like the familiar Kolb Model of learning, as she acknowledged. So it was not surprising to find her successive variations leading toward a mode of inquiry-based learning.

Modern teaching already widely utilizes the power of small groups so that diagrams of student learning can no longer have merely two poles – teacher and student – but must factor students’ interactions with other students into the equation as well. Still, if the classic conversational framework begins with a teacher’s outline of theory followed by students’ questions and the teacher’s clarifications with reflection and refinement of goals and actions at every stage, the advent of technology can offer a means of opening up this flow of interaction.

“Ideally,” said Laurillard, “questions would start the conversation and theory would come in at the end, not the beginning.”

With this interactive model in mind, Laurillard went on to explore two examples of generic pedagogical tools that might be developed for use in e-learning by capturing good pedagogy and distilling it. The first centered on recording the narrative of a Google search. An assignment might offer the following directions:

• Read the text attached illustrating different approaches to using a search engine

• The goal is to achieve the output of ‘material documenting whether waste products affect the City area‘

• Select two words to input to the search engine and record your results (the first five urls)

• Compare your results – whose are better?

• With your partner, select different words and input these to the search engine – does this produce better results?

• Post your best results

• Vote on which results, you think are best – 3 votes

• Submit your account of why these are the best results

While the initial capture of the exercise might begin in environmental studies, it could easily become a generic pattern useful in teaching in a wide range of disciplines, said Laurillard. The integration of such old and proven necessities of good teaching – prompts to critical thinking, the importance of collaborative interaction, etc – with new digital tools is as obvious as it is exciting.

Laurillard’s second example projected the integration of a variety of tools like this, along with standard components such as group work, written assignments, live discussions or chats, into course design modules or software packages teachers could adjust and sequence for their own courses.

But the test for any new tool, Laurillard maintained lies in its passing the muster of nine key questions:

Does it motivate learners to

• Access the teacher/expert’s concepts?
• Ask questions of the teacher or their peers?
• Offer their own idea to the teacher or peers?
• Act to achieve a clear task or goal?
• Use feedback to improve practice/actions ?
• Compare outputs with their peers?
• Reflect on that experience?
• Discuss/debate ideas with their peers?
• Articulate their ideas? Produce an output?

Developing tools that pass this test matters tremendously, Laurillard declared, if the goal of “education for all by 2015” is to be realized. And the best way to realize the goal is to through the scholarship of teaching, action research. As she put it, “making lecturers more like researchers - to accelerate the use of technology in the service of our most ambitious educational aims.”