All Posts Tagged With: "teaching"

How government cuts threaten Oxford and Cambridge’s unique teaching style

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh famously depicted Oxford in his classic novel Brideshead Revisited as a place where young people spend their days “twittering and fluttering over the cobbles and up the steps, sightseeing and pleasure-seeking, drinking claret cup, eating cucumber sandwiches.” Six-and-a-half decades later, things in the whimsical college town are far less civilized. Oxford University students spent much of the fall term staging angry protests, gathering in town by the hundreds to demonstrate against the government. Meanwhile, at its historic rival Cambridge, a 21/2-hour train ride away, students are equally fired up. After a number of boisterous marches in November, about 1,000 students staged an 11-day occupation of a university building. At issue is Britain’s massive new austerity package, which includes an 80 per cent cut to higher education teaching grants by 2012, and a potential tripling of tuition fees. The protests were “a wake-up call,” says Tom, a Cambridge Ph.D. student and one of the occupation organizers, who spoke with Maclean’s on the condition of anonymity. “The things the government are calling for seem extreme,” he says. “And extremely dangerous to education.”

Protests have taken place across Britain. But students at Oxford and Cambridge are motivated by a more pressing fear: that the new cuts will end the centuries-old reign of the institutions collectively called Oxbridge. Some are afraid the famed Oxbridge “tutorial system” is in jeopardy. Since their conception, Oxford and Cambridge have dismissed the traditional lecture system. Instead, undergrads are taught largely through one-on-one “tutorials” with professors. In between the weekly or fortnightly meetings, students work through massive reading lists, and write papers to later discuss with their tutors. “It makes the best use of bright students,” says David Palfreyman, an Oxford tutor and editor of The Oxford Tutorial. Students at the two schools work harder—10 to 15 hours a week more than average students, he says—“because [they] can’t escape in the tutorial system.” And it teaches them to think more creatively; many papers aren’t formally assessed, so students “can be a bit adventurous.”

It certainly attracts some keeners. David Barclay, an Oxford undergrad and president of the student union, says the tutorial system was one of the things that drew him to Oxford from Scotland, where he grew up. “It’s the best way of teaching,” he says. “One-on-one interaction with the best minds in the world.” At a coffee shop near the history department, Barclay recounts some particularly memorable classes, including one on 20th-century political history taught by a sitting member of Parliament. “Tutorials can be pretty scary,” he grinned. “But I love them.”

But will tutorials—and with them, Oxbridge’s international standing—ride the wave of public cuts? “The tutorial system is absolutely wonderful,” says Phil Baty, deputy editor of the London Times Higher Education World University Rankings. “But it is extremely expensive. And the universities have really struggled to maintain it.”

Currently, university tuition in Britain is capped at $5,150. Since it costs far more to teach students one-on-one, Oxford and Cambridge have relied on teaching funds from the government. As well, says Baty, the schools subsidize the system, likely to the tune of $8,000 to $9,000 a year per student.

But come 2012, almost all of the public money for university teaching will be gone. To address the shortfall, the government will allow universities to raise fees—up to $14,000 in as-of-yet-unspecific “exceptional” circumstances. This amounts to a near tripling of tuition. But administrators say the tuition hikes may not be enough. According to Andrew Hamilton, Oxford’s vice-chancellor, it costs $25,000 a year to teach an undergrad at Oxford. “If we believe strongly that the tutorial system is the best way to nurture maturing minds,” says Hamilton, “we are going to have to find ways of making it more financially sustainable.”

Also hurting Oxbridge is the scrapping in 2009 of the Historic Buildings Fund, which was set up to dole out money to preserve the nation’s prized architecture, but has gone disproportionately to keeping Oxford and Cambridge’s buildings well kept. “With [the cut],” says Barclay, “died any acknowledgment, subtle or unsubtle, about the special nature of Oxford and Cambridge in public life in Britain.”

The irony of the precarious position that Oxbridge now finds itself in thanks to government cuts is not lost on critics. Many point out that 70 per cent of the British cabinet was educated at Oxbridge. Twenty per cent of the cabinet and 35 members of the House of Commons took Oxford’s famed philosophy, politics and economics degree, dubbed “the surest ticket to the top” by the BBC. (Graduates include British Prime Minister David Cameron, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, and former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto.)

Of course, the tutorial system isn’t all that keeps Oxbridge afloat. But it helps. Its standing in the Times ranking, Baty says, is boosted by its unmatched student-faculty ratio and intense learning environment. It’s also one of the biggest draws for international students, at a time when Britain’s share is declining. Tim Hands, an Oxford headmaster, recently bemoaned: “There is no doubt that parents are increasingly interested in the prestige of an American university as an alternative to a British one. Now the chief barrier, that of cost, looks as though it may disappear.”

Still, some insist the cuts will actually be a step in the right direction: toward privatization. For years, administrators at the two schools have issued barely masked threats to break free from state control, particularly over the issue of tuition caps. “It is surely a mad world,” Oxford chancellor Lord Chris Patten has remarked, “in which parents and grandparents are prepared to shell out tens of thousands of pounds to put their children through private schools to get them into universities, and then object to paying a tuition fee of more than [$4,500] when they are here.” Even some students are sympathetic. One Oxford graduate student who preferred not to be named was adamant: “If students don’t believe their education is worth more than a few thousand pounds, they should think about what they’re doing at university.”

The crux of the problem, says Bahram Bekhradnia, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, is that Britain has struck an unhappy marriage between state control and market control of higher education. Until 1998, education in Britain was free. Since then, the state has held tuition artificially low. And yet, Britain’s public spending on higher education ranks near the bottom of OECD countries: 0.7 per cent of GDP in 2007, compared to 3.1 per cent in the U.S. and 2.6 per cent in Canada. The result is that top schools must rely heavily on philanthropic donations to maintain their education standards: a system that may not be sustainable.

The government also limits the number of students that universities can accept—largely because every undergraduate, regardless of family income, is entitled to state-subsidized loans. Those loans, says Claire Callender, professor of higher education at University College London, cost the government around £30 for every £100 borrowed. So, in effect, the government must be prepared for all students—even, Callender says, “the kids of millionaires”—to draw on government aid.

The new system may help correct these long-standing ills. Top schools like Oxbridge, which will likely command the maximum $14,000, might see some financial gain. And though tuition will increase for most, children from the lowest-earning families may actually see theirs go down, as subsidies for the poorest students are expanded.

But for Cambridge’s Tom, this higher education experiment is not worth the risk. “I’m afraid,” he says, “that my discipline, in 10 years’ time, will be little more than a finishing school for the rich.” But how best to decide what’s fair? That debate, wrote the Telegraph’s Neil O’Brien last month, sounds like the kind worthy of a “chin-stroking philosophy tutorial at Oxbridge.”

When all teachers are paid the same, hard work isn’t worth it

There is virtually no other profession in Canada whereby termination due to incompetence is so rarely handed down.

In recent years, the annual average of termination due to poor performance for teachers was just 0.002 per cent Ontario, and zero in many major city boards across the country. Unsurprisingly, teachers’ unions are some of the strongest unions in Canada and besides job security, most express unequivocal support for the pay-for-seniority type wage model. So when British Columbia Liberal leadership candidate Kevin Falcon proposed the idea of merit pay for educators, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation—predictably—was not in favour.

But there is support for the proposition, and it’s easy to see why. The remarkable security enjoyed by teachers across the board and rewards based on amount of time served (not quality of time served) in no way motivates improved performance. Of course, there are teachers who take it upon themselves to seek new challenges and improve their methods of teaching, but those who don’t are rewarded just the same. The logic is backwards for a society that is supposedly meritocratic. When those who strive for excellence and those who just coast along are rewarded just the same, it sends the message that hard work really isn’t worth the effort. That is, unless we find some new form of trade involving intrinsic worth.

The obvious problem with merit pay lies in its application. Is there really a valid way to measure merit? It’s easier in some professions—real estate, for example. But it’s more difficult to measure the efficacy of teaching without employing some sort of standardized testing. These tests are limited still in that students’ scores are often based on a variety of factors (parental involvement, community values, socio-economic status, etc.) and do not necessarily reflect the instructor’s ability to teach the material. The idea is further complicated when you consider that teachers—some of them, at least—are exceptional not for their ability to break down the complexities of learning logarithms, but for their roles as classroom mentors. One of my best teachers once told me that the lessons I’ll learn from taking a look around once in a while will surely outweigh anything I’ll pick up from a book. Of course, that sort of attitude won’t ensure the best standardized test results, but its impact is still valuable. Those sort of intangibles are practically immeasurable.

If Falcon was serious about his proposal (which, based on the amount of political pandering that’s gone on during this campaign, I’d say is doubtful), it would be worth running a pilot campaign in a few schools before overhauling the B.C. education system altogether. Testing should measure improvement in a single class over a single school year—say September to June to see how students have progressed—rather than comparing scores from across the province. And teachers should be assessed for their non-academic contributions to the classroom as well. Just like in other professions, exceptional teachers should be entitled to higher pay, but only if we can properly identify who the exceptional ones are.

Hollywood may be reading the Canadian icon but university students are not

Even nine years after his death, Mordecai Richler can’t seem to get a break.

Just one day after the local government in Richler’s old neighbourhood announced that they would not be naming anything after him, the Globe and Mail is reporting that his works aren’t being taught at Canadian universities.

Well, it’s not quite as black and white as the Globe makes it out to be, but it’s still concerning.

At Montreal’s Concordia University, a school which claims to take particular pride in the city that surrounds it, only one course has any Richler as required reading and that’s a religion course on Jewish literature, not an English class.

According to the Globe, students at Montreal’s other English-language university, McGill, are only reading one Richler book, The Street, in a course on urban writing.

Ironically, despite the almost complete lack of Richler works being taught at McGill, the university’s writer-in-residence program is named for Richler.

Several other universities and colleges are teaching his work, but they’re few and far between and when his work is taught it’s generally in classes where his exclusion would be almost impossible, like “The Worlding of Canadian Fiction Since 1967,” a class at the University of New Brunswick.

It’s hard to say what’s causing this lack of Richler in the classroom, although it does seem like his works were taught more often in the past, it may just be that he’s back in the public eye with a film based on his novel Barney’s Version arriving in theaters soon and the TV documentary on his life that premiered last week.

But while Richler is being taught in some Canadian and Jewish literature classes, Canadian universities don’t seem to be teaching his works anywhere else.

It’s not just Richler though. It’s been a while since I took a literature class (and I’ve never taken a Canadian literature class) but since high school — and quite probably earlier than that — the only Canadian writer I’ve read in an academic setting has been Margaret Atwood. This shouldn’t be a surprise, since the Globe reports that studies of Atwood’s work have received more research grants than those of any other Canadian author. There’s nothing wrong with this, Atwood is a great writer, but there should be room on the shelf for a little bit of Richler beside her.

Canada has had a vibrant literary community for decades, too bad you couldn’t tell from looking at academia.

It’s the way students use the tool, not the tool itself, that delivers results

It turns out, for some students, the addition of technology to the classroom has helped with their grades. Or at least that’s what a recent study from an unnamed Midwest American university would have you believe.

Paige Chapman summarizes the study’s findings on the Chronicle of Higher Education’s website:

“At the end of the semester, the tweeters had grade-point averages half a point higher, on average, than did their non-tweeting counterparts. And students who tweeted were more engaged. Twitter users scored higher than those who didn’t use the tool on a 19-question student-engagement survey over the course of the semester — using parameters like how frequently students contributed to classroom discussion, and how often they interacted with their instructor about course material.”

But the study’s conclusion misses the mark entirely.

The entire title of the study, “The Effect of Twitter on College Student Engagement and Grades,” is counter-intuitive. Regardless of the effect a tool may have on learning, it is the way that students choose to use the tool that is most important. Chalkboards, after all, are useful learning tools, but nobody would suggest that the use of chalkboards is somehow causal in the event of chalk-using students getting better grades than their chalk-free peers.

The willingness of some students to use a tool like Twitter, or a chalkboard for that matter, is demonstrative of a student’s wider ability to interact with unfamiliar tools, to expand their horizons, to ask more difficult questions and to engage with classroom material in new ways. This quality can also manifest itself in the classroom through increased participation and deeper interaction with the subject matter.

But one thing should be made clear: These are qualities possessed by students, not by the tools they choose to use.

Whether a student uses a tool like Twitter or not can be indicative of a number of things. But it is not, by itself, indicative of a student’s intelligence, nor is it by itself capable of boosting any single student’s GPA. The possession of a hammer does not make a person a better carpenter, but simply offers them more opportunities.

I would hate to see the effects of a study like this on an impressionable young student, struggling with their course load, thinking that the answer to all of their academic problems lies in a Twitter account. Sure, in some cases, Twitter can bring a new, dynamic and sometimes valuable contribution to class life, but it’s completely naïve to think that the simple addition of this social networking tool to a classroom will turn Cs to As.

Look east to see that all universities are not the same.

I am getting really tired of people protesting too much the state of Canada’s universities in general but describing big, central and western Canadian research universities in particular.

Oil executive Gwyn Morgan gives us the latest salvo, blasting today’s universities. At our modern universities, he contends:

1. Little attention is given to the teaching abilities of faculty when it comes to hiring and promotion.

2. Faculty hate undergraduate teaching and get their grad students to do it if they can.

3. Students, at least in first year, sit silently, listening to dry recitations of  material that could easily be found in the textbook or online.

4. Students only attend classes because they are coerced by pop quizzes and other underhanded methods.

I’m not entirely certain this is broadly true at any university in Canada, and I can say with confidence that it is generally not the case at other small eastern Canadian universities. Indeed, I can say with certainty that none of the above matches very well with the reality at my own august institution. To wit:

1. At my university, teaching is taken just as seriously as research when it comes to hiring, tenure, and promotion decisions.

2. Small universities like mine don’t have grad students for the most part so teaching is not foisted upon them. In any case, I can’t think of a single colleague of mine who hates teaching. Perhaps there are one or two who would do only research if they were allowed to, but those are, by far, in the minority. Based on my interactions with faculty at places like Acadia and UPEI, the same seems to hold true at other small maritime institutions. If  you are a faculty member at a small east coast Canadian school and you despise teaching, let me know.

3. Unlike classes at the big research schools that Morgan seems to have in mind, classes at my university are small, even at the first year level. In my department, first year classes are capped at 30-45 students and upper-year classes rarely have more than 20 students in them. But even in my first year class (enrollment of about 40), the emphasis is on learning to read literature as a set of skills and as a habit of mind. Most students are reluctant to talk in first year, but even so, the class is not simply a monody of cold facts; I help my students understand what it is to read creatively and to think critically. It’s a year-long dialogue.

4. Some professors may reward attendance with grades, but I certainly don’t. To my mind, the benefit of attending classes should be obvious to students: you learn interesting things and take part in interesting discussions.

Indeed, it’s amazing to me that Morgan concludes his essay by wishing for something that already exists:

What if formal lectures were eliminated altogether, in favour of informal, smaller group discussions with those talented scholars? Think of how much richer the teaching and learning experience could be.

Could be? Nay, Morgan, it is. You just have to know where to look for it.

Get your hands on The Hour Hand

Why summer courses make me happy, even when skies are gray.

I have taught a course in the summer almost every year I’ve been a professor, and I’ve always enjoyed it. Well, almost always. And it’s not just because of the extra money.

For one thing, the classes tend to be at just the right size, around a dozen or so. Smaller than that and there are not enough ideas to sustain the discussion; too many more and people feel intimidated and reticent.

The students, too, are often better in the summer. It’s a matter of motivation:  if they are driven enough to pick up extra credits in the summer, they’re likely to have the wherewithal to do the readings and, you know, actually think about them. Such students often do very well in these courses, too, because when it comes to exam time, the material is fresh in their minds. We just covered half this stuff last week!

It’s not all joy and fun, of course. I have not, for example, been able to keep up with mowing my lawn lately, and it’s sometimes frustrating when students are taking your course because they need three credits of something, anything, to graduate. But on the whole, I would hate to miss that brainy season in the sun.

Give us a few years. We can reset it for you.

Beloit College has released its annual “Mindset List” which purports to serve as a reminder “of the rapidly changing frame of reference for this new generation.” The list tells us that for today’s young students, Magic Johnson has always been HIV positive. Hopefully students know that he wasn’t born HIV positive, but maybe they don’t.

I find this list frustrating. I mean, what am I supposed to do with this information? Am I expected to relate better to my students once I understand that, as far as they are concerned, salsa has always outsold ketchup? They have never known a world without a Cartoon Network. Does that mean I jettison Hamlet in favour of The Simpsons’ parody of Hamlet?

I also find it insulting. To the students I mean. The implication is that students cannot grasp a world that existed before they were born. They have never known a world without flat-screen TVs! So what? We never had a phonograph in my house, but I knew from childhood what a phonograph was. Surely these young people can figure out what Morse Code was for.

Finally, I find the list disturbing. Disturbing because it seems to imply that it is the job of universities to adapt their curricula to fit the “mindset” of this new generation. The Beloit list tacitly hints that we have to learn to think like them because their minds are already, well, set. I sometimes hear the same ideas from other well-meaning colleagues who think that students should no longer be expected to read books or write long essays because today’s students are used to online resources and instant messages.. To teach them, we have to learn to think like them.

I say exactly the reverse is true. They need to learn to think like us. That’s what they come here for. Not because we are super-human geniuses or gurus, but because in our years of study and research, we have gained some measure of expertise in at least one particular way of thinking. Together, the professoriate encompasses a vast range of knowledge and expertise, and we are doing a disservice to our students unless we challenge them to learn to think broadly, critically, imaginatively, just as our professors challenged us. Students learn to evaluate arguments in philosophy class, to be systematic in math class, to understand culture more profoundly in sociology. If they could do these things well already, the wouldn’t need to come to university.

If they think that women have always outnumbered men in universities (Beloit implies they do), we are here to tell them that it wasn’t always so, and ask that they think about why it wasn’t always so and why it changed. If they don’t know what the KGB is or what Europe was like before the EU, we will tell them and insist they think about what that means for the world and its future. They need to know more than they already know. And they need to be able to think better than they already think.

A new study correlates lower marks, less studying with Facebook use

The time students spend “poking” friends, posting photos and updating their status on Facebook may bear some relationship to how they’re faring academically, a new study suggests.

Researchers found that students who use the popular networking site spend less time studying and have lower grade point averages compared to those not on Facebook.

Study co-author Aryn Karpinski, a doctoral student and graduate teaching associate at Ohio State University, said the researchers wanted to look at demographic differences of student Facebook users and non-users and to investigate their typical profiles.

Karpinski and Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University are presenting their research Thursday in San Diego at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Foundation.

The researchers surveyed 219 students at Ohio State – 102 undergraduates and 117 graduates – in the summer and fall quarters of 2008. Of that total, 148 said they had Facebook accounts.

Facebook users were typically younger, full-time students majoring in statistics, technology, math, engineering and medicine, Karpinski said.

When it came to academic achievement, Facebook users surveyed had GPAs between 3.0 and 3.5, a B, compared to non-users with GPAs between 3.5 and 4.0 – an A, said Karpinski.

What’s more, researchers found those on Facebook spent one-to-five hours a week studying compared to their non-Facebook-using counterparts who devoted between 11 and 15 hours weekly to hitting the books.

When asked whether Facebook had an impact on their academic performance, 79 per cent of Facebook users said it didn’t. Students also said it was not having an impact on their grades because they weren’t using it frequently enough – even though nearly 65 per cent said they use their account daily or multiple times daily, Karpinski said.

While not drawing a direct causal link between Facebook and academic achievement, researchers found the disconnect between qualitative and quantitative findings are “cause for concern.”

“I totally agree you cannot say Facebook causes lower GPA or less time spent studying, but there is some kind of relationship there,” Karpinski said. “I hope that the more people that research this area will tease apart the intricacies of this relationship.”

Students can wander in space with new video game-based learning

Why look at a PowerPoint presentation about Mars in a science class when you can wander its red ridges and canyons?

Or stare at a famous painting’s two-dimensional image instead of stepping inside and chatting with the characters? A new virtual learning centre at Athabasca University in Alberta could take lessons a long way from the conventional classroom.

The distance-education school is hoping that cutting-edge video game technology can be used to sink students deep into what they’re learning.

Young people have long been able to hone physical skills through realistic video games, and the university wants to approach academics the same way, says Rory McGreal, the university’s associate vice-president of research.

Hours spent hunched over a computer perfecting how to shoot a gun or explore a virtual environment could also be spent learning how the body works or understanding the universe.

“We’re trying to harness the power of games and how we can use them to promote learning,” McGreal said Wednesday.

“What they do is they grab the students, they hold their attention, and the students learn.”

The school is launching a specialized centre in immersive technologies and plans to create its own programs.

McGreal stresses they will go far beyond a virtual classroom or computer tours of existing attractions.

Quite a few schools, including Athabasca, have already done that in the online Second Life community, but it’s really a waste of the technology, he said. Even taking art history students to a virtual trip of the Louvre would be a “primitive” use of the vast possibilities online, he suggested.

“We want to move forward ahead of that, and to get away from the classroom altogether. How about going into the photo and actually interacting with the characters in the piece of art?”

One school programmer sees students creating a virtual representation of themselves, known as an avatar, and having the ability to go anywhere or do anything their teacher can think up.

We all end up feeling like we don’t have a lot of time to spare

I’m not sure if anyone may have noticed, but I haven’t been posting much lately. This term I’ve accepted a position teaching a course at U of T Scarborough. It’s a fantastic opportunity and I’m very glad to get the university experience from the other side of the lecture podium. But of course I’m still in full-time law school myself, and doing a combined MA in English, and a few other things beside. Still, after a bit of thought on the subject, I had to say yes. I’m a few weeks into the term thus far, and so far so good.

This experience has led to a few results. First, I haven’t had much time to post lately, along with several commitments I’ve had to scale back on. Second, I’ve been thinking about what it means when great opportunities come along at inconvenient times. And third, well, I’ve been thinking about a few posts on the subject of what it means to be a university lecturer for the first time. But that will have to wait for now, and maybe I’ll get around to it nearer the end of this term.

So on the second topic, I think it’s often the case that great opportunities come along at times when it isn’t easy to make the most of them. We all get busy, after all. There are just so many hours in a day and it’s natural to find ways of filling them. Whether that means taking on a variety of specific commitments, or a number of organized hobbies, or simply getting into habits involving favorite television shows and video games – one way or another we all end up feeling that we don’t have a lot of time to spare. So springing any of it to make time for something new isn’t easy. Yet sometimes that’s exactly what you want to do.

What I’d suggest is that every once in a while a good think through your priorities is in order. Some things, you just don’t want to sacrifice. Personal relationships, friends and family – you get into the habit of cutting the corners on these things and it can become a very bad habit. But other activities are simply fun or dispensable. Some may feel very important and you get into them pretty deeply, but with a little thought you can realize they aren’t part of your long-term future. And then, it hurts to say it, but sometimes you can skimp on things in the short term in order to take on more than anyone really should. That’s probably the stage I’m at now.

We all have goals and ambitions. There are things we want to achieve in the future, but then the present gets pretty busy. A classic example is when you don’t like your job but it takes up so much time and energy that you’re never really motivated to look for a new one. But it’s very important to make that effort all the same.

I think this is very relevant to students in post-secondary education because there are so many conflicting demands on students’ time. And students, many for the first time, have a lot of independence to arrange their affairs as they see fit. I won’t dictate that grades are necessarily the most important thing in every student’s life. One guy I know, for example, certainly wanted a university education but his long-term ambition lay with teaching martial arts. So it’s important to know where your most important commitments are, and they don’t absolutely have to be in the classroom. But they should be somewhere.

Anyway, I enjoy blogging here, and I’ll be around once in a while. But for this term I’ll be devoting more of my time to the class I’m teaching, and to various other commitments relating to my long-term career. I hope you all understand. I also hope that anyone who hasn’t done so already might take a bit of time to be sure you can identify your own deepest commitments and goals. If you aren’t sure for your own sake, it often happens that someone else will step in and do your thinking for you. And rarely works out well.

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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even those I don’t address here will still receive replies.