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kaberettAn impassioned and unfit-for-purpose first draft of the teaching statement I will eventually produce, in lieu of the December meme for today - the story about dragons I was intending to tell you is a little too sore, after everything else that's happened, but I will share it tomorrow. Instead, this: which I think still understates exactly how deep is my conviction that teaching constitutes a mental health intervention with the potential to be life-saving. I have no idea how to communicate the strength of this belief while being appropriately professional; and I'll leave it for another day.
This is the most important work I will ever do.
I am trans; I am queer; I am autistic; I am disabled; I am mentally ill. I am an abuse survivor; I have PTSD; and teaching is the most important work I will ever do.
The personal is political: through existing, I show my students that they, too, can exist; that they, too, can excel. Survival is, for many of us, exhausting.
It is vital to teach compassionately.
I have been in counselling since 2006, one way or another; I have spent a lot of time learning how peer support and active listening can be employed to help vulnerable people learn about themselves. I have volunteered in health education since 2010; and in open-source development, including mentoring people who had never previously coded, since 2011. Between these roles, I've carried out peer education in subjects ranging from coding via chemistry to sociology and diversity.
Over and over, I have learned how important it is to enable empowerment: to give people the information they need to make their own choices; to support exploration and curiosity; to encourage taking risks. Science is a fundamentally creative endeavour: students who have been told that there are true, unchangeable answers are ill-equipped to trust that their questions aren't ridiculous or trivial; and this is intensified in those who have been subject to trauma, taught that their best chances of – yes – survival lie in not taking up space, not drawing attention, not being visible.
At its core, my teaching rests on the assumption that students – particularly at this level – want to learn; and that the best way to help them is to approach them compassionately, building confidence. In terms of small-group teaching, this is encapsulated in the concept of active listening: reflecting the student's words to determine whether their question, issue or problem has been correctly understood; leading to an answer, rather than handing it over; and establishing what kind of feedback the student desires, where possible. In particular, when demonstrating Introduction to Programming, I have found that students are extremely receptive to being asked what level of feedback they would like: when offered the choice of being congratulated on having written code that works, and of discussing how it might be improved, students who have had their confidence bolstered via (well-deserved!) praise are more likely to feel able to engage with constructive criticism, even at five o'clock on a Thursday afternoon.
Importantly, my focus is not on correct answers but on the acquisition of skills: through listening carefully, including to concerns that remain implicit, I work to help students towards confidence in their ability to learn, to problem-solve, and to acquire and apply new knowledge and tools. I emphasise that making mistakes is part of learning – that real programmers mess up, read error messages, and step through a sequence of actions designed to help them diagnose and fix the fault. Thus any student who writes buggy code, and fixes it, rather than demonstrating that they are incompetent, has demonstrated that they are a real programmer. This reframing – through acknowledgment that experts are not infallible, and thus demystification – is absolutely necessary to developing the belief that, though themselves infallible, my students can also attain expertise and competence.
The quality of confidence is, of course, difficult to measure: self-reports are readily skewed, via internal mechanisms (e.g. the Dunning-Kruger effect) and external pressures (e.g. stereotype threat). Nonetheless it is predicted that increased confidence fostered by compassionate teaching will result in increased (testable) competence: and thus a research project is born.
This is the most important work I will ever do.
I am trans; I am queer; I am autistic; I am disabled; I am mentally ill. I am an abuse survivor; I have PTSD; and teaching is the most important work I will ever do.
The personal is political: through existing, I show my students that they, too, can exist; that they, too, can excel. Survival is, for many of us, exhausting.
It is vital to teach compassionately.
I have been in counselling since 2006, one way or another; I have spent a lot of time learning how peer support and active listening can be employed to help vulnerable people learn about themselves. I have volunteered in health education since 2010; and in open-source development, including mentoring people who had never previously coded, since 2011. Between these roles, I've carried out peer education in subjects ranging from coding via chemistry to sociology and diversity.
Over and over, I have learned how important it is to enable empowerment: to give people the information they need to make their own choices; to support exploration and curiosity; to encourage taking risks. Science is a fundamentally creative endeavour: students who have been told that there are true, unchangeable answers are ill-equipped to trust that their questions aren't ridiculous or trivial; and this is intensified in those who have been subject to trauma, taught that their best chances of – yes – survival lie in not taking up space, not drawing attention, not being visible.
At its core, my teaching rests on the assumption that students – particularly at this level – want to learn; and that the best way to help them is to approach them compassionately, building confidence. In terms of small-group teaching, this is encapsulated in the concept of active listening: reflecting the student's words to determine whether their question, issue or problem has been correctly understood; leading to an answer, rather than handing it over; and establishing what kind of feedback the student desires, where possible. In particular, when demonstrating Introduction to Programming, I have found that students are extremely receptive to being asked what level of feedback they would like: when offered the choice of being congratulated on having written code that works, and of discussing how it might be improved, students who have had their confidence bolstered via (well-deserved!) praise are more likely to feel able to engage with constructive criticism, even at five o'clock on a Thursday afternoon.
Importantly, my focus is not on correct answers but on the acquisition of skills: through listening carefully, including to concerns that remain implicit, I work to help students towards confidence in their ability to learn, to problem-solve, and to acquire and apply new knowledge and tools. I emphasise that making mistakes is part of learning – that real programmers mess up, read error messages, and step through a sequence of actions designed to help them diagnose and fix the fault. Thus any student who writes buggy code, and fixes it, rather than demonstrating that they are incompetent, has demonstrated that they are a real programmer. This reframing – through acknowledgment that experts are not infallible, and thus demystification – is absolutely necessary to developing the belief that, though themselves infallible, my students can also attain expertise and competence.
The quality of confidence is, of course, difficult to measure: self-reports are readily skewed, via internal mechanisms (e.g. the Dunning-Kruger effect) and external pressures (e.g. stereotype threat). Nonetheless it is predicted that increased confidence fostered by compassionate teaching will result in increased (testable) competence: and thus a research project is born.
(no subject)
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Date: 2013-12-12 11:32 am (UTC)Basically if you praise learners before criticizing them, they tend to report higher satisfaction, with the course, with the specific feedback they received, with the person offering them the feedback. But they don't actually implement the received feedback any better than a control group who are offered criticism only, or who receive criticism first and praise afterwards.
Multiple caveats, of course; some of the problem is how you define "praise". Obviously if you say to someone, "well done, you did a great job! But this line here contains a bug and you implemented this part of the task really inefficiently and your variable naming conventions are inconsistent and your code will fail in this edge case", that's fairly unsurprisingly useless, that's not "praise", that's a meaningless platitude. So part of what the research shows is that praise needs to be actually specific, people are starting to talk about "constructive praise" along similar lines to constructive criticism. Also it depends how you define successfully implementing the feedback. Like, ok, if people get no feedback, or feedback they find completely unacceptable, and then repeat the task, they probably won't improve very much, but it's a bit of a reach to say that the more learners improve at measurable tasks the better the feedback must have been. It may be that their confidence is increased and they're generally happier as a person, but not seeing huge improvements in their exam scores as a direct result of that, and you've still done a good thing by praising them!
But some of it is, you can basically train people to expect a "shit sandwich" (this is the colloquial name for Pendleton's rule that educationalists like, ie you should give praise then criticism then end with praise), and then they essentially ignore the praise because they assume you're just giving it because you're following the rule and don't really mean it. That could be a problem even if the rule comes from your internal conviction that it's important to praise people and build confidence, not just a mechanically applied feedback formula, people can spot patterns. One possible way round this is to apply a variant of the formula which is more student-centred. Namely, ask what the learner wants feedback on, ask them what they think they did well, tell them what you perceived they did well, ask them what they needs improving or what they had trouble with, tell them what you perceived was the problem and what they should do to fix that in future. I think this would fit quite well into what you describe as your preferred approach. It's not a perfect answer to the shit sandwich problem, and it will still only work if the praise part is actually specific rather than just generic meaningless congratulations.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-12 12:23 pm (UTC)Another concept which might be useful for framing feedback is the terminology of directive vs nondirective, confirmation vs exploration styles of supervison. (The former is an axis used widely in professional mentoring; the addition of the latter axis is particular to one educational researcher working on student-supervisor relationships - I haven't recieved the bibliography for that workshop yet, but can cite later.) One thing I'm getting out of your post,
Apologies if that is in fact citations did not need.
(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-12 12:26 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2013-12-12 12:45 pm (UTC)Hmm. So, question: how will you respond when your superior says to you 'but if you don't give students critical feedback, how will they improve? We want them to get past code that just about goes!'
The notion of *not* giving detailed feedback goes so very against the grain for many academics (myself included. I've been told off for giving too MUCH feedback, reined myself in, and am now in trouble for giving too little...).
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