Recently there has been a spate of articles in journals as diverse as Dow Jones, The New York Times, and Inside Higher Education which, when boiled down, ask about the fundamental value of a college education and raise the question of how, when we see that value, we will know what we are looking at. continue reading

Last sunday’s New York Times “News of the Week in Review” had an article by Jacques Steinberg entitled “Plan B:Skip College”. He is reporting on a fairly short list of people, including Charles Murray, who are serious about capping postsecondary education opportunity for currently marginalized people — read poor and/or of color. I am always impressed when people who have a privilege, like a college education and degree, argue that those without that privilege really don’t need it. continue reading

 

 

President Obama has sent a strong and badly needed  message of philosophical and financial support for community colleges. But they, and their students, are still in deep trouble in many states whose economic recovery is key to the national economic recovery, including California and Florida. continue reading

I saw an ugly sight last week: An emerging new exclusion from the opportunity called higher education. This exclusion is the net result of reduced state budgets for community colleges and state colleges and universities, an increasingly expensive and ineffective education model, and the expressed attitudes of some policy, government, and educational professionals. continue reading

While I was driving across New York State and southern Ontario, I listened to Daniel Pink’s new book Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. Drive while driving, I suppose.

Bottom line: I really liked this book! It purports to be a business book, but the insights seemed to easily be applied to education. Here are some of my “top-of-the-head” impressions of the book:

1. The social and behavioral sciences have interesting things to say about motivation.  Carrot-and-stick reward systems often backfire.  Pink cites work from research with monkeys, pre-schoolers, world-class artists, and of course, graduate students.

2. Pink’s main point is that the most effective motivation is intrinsic, not extrinsic.  Intrinsic motivation has three main components: autonomy, mastery and purpose.

3. Drive was more than a book-reading experience.  I felt like it was a holistic learning experience.  The lead to the story set the stage.  The concepts were compact and easy to understand, but with enough depth to make them believable. The last part of the book had practical things that you could do to further the ideas in your own life.  There were other goodies too: a glossary of terms, study group questions and a nice summary of the ideas in the book at the end.

This article was cross-posted at The Innovations Lab Blog.

Stanford psychologist, Carol Dweck’s work is research-based and nuanced, but can be boiled down to a simple (and profound) schema.

There are two mindsets: fixed and growth.

People who primarily have a fixed mindset believe that intelligence, talents and personality are fixed and innate. For people who have a growth mindset, intelligence, talents and personality can be worked on, improved and made better.

The implications of this schema are profound for education. For example, being mindful of these fixed/growth mindset tendencies in students should influence the way we give feedback. (Positive feedback about a student’s innate intelligence is less helpful then praise about the student’s effort and hard work.)

Click on the image below to see Dr. Dweck’s Keynote Address at the 2009 Scottish Learning Festival:

I have been reading Mindset.  It is quite good.

This article is cross-posted at Kaplan University’s Innovations Lab.

Stanley Kaplan, in his memoir Test Pilot, wrote something that has stuck with me over the years.  He wrote this about students:

I wanted them to love learning as much as I loved teaching. I used everything imaginable to stimulate the students — arguing, joking, teasing, cajoling, listening, deciphering, and probing. I dug deep into my bag of tricks and pulled out mnemonic devices… flash cards, scrawled blackboard diagrams, and flailing animated gestures.

What is interesting about this quote is the juxtaposition of “affect” and “technique.”  Towards the end of the quote, he opens up his “bag of tricks” and lists a number of techniques for getting students involved in their education. But notice how he started the quote: “I wanted [students] to love learning as much as I loved teaching.  He didn’t start with, “I wanted students to learn everything that I know.”  (Although, I am sure he did!)   He didn’t start with, “I wanted students to buckle down and become good students.”  (Although, I am sure he did!)  No, he leads with the affective dimension: love learning!

Was he just waxing poetic? I don’t think so.  Lots of contemporary writing about the scholarship of teaching and learning focuses on the affective dimension of the human being as a key to successful learning.  James Zull in The Art of Changing the Brain describes how fear and biological responses of deep structures of the brain can make the conditions for learning difficult.  Parker Palmer, in The Courage to Teach shows us with poignant examples, about how fear can shut down learning and teaching from both the student role and the teacher role.  Palmer shows how fear can, in fact, become more than biological responses as it is becomes embedded our culture, in behavior and in norms and values.

What Stanley Kaplan gives us, today, in that one thin sentence is a touchstone: The student-led revolution in higher education will start in the heart — in the hearts of teachers and in the hearts of students!

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Will deBock is the Associate Director and Founder of Kaplan University’s Innovations Lab. The Innovations Lab is a teaching-and-learning centered initiative focused on empowering teachers to bring sustainable innovations into their teaching and their classrooms. The Innovations Lab Blog is a publicly available resource for educators all over the globe!

I am very pleased that my most recent book, “Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning” (Jossey-Bass, Jan, 2010) was published in January. Writing the book has been a journey for me: changing me in the writing and changing the book as a result of the intellectual ferment created. I have come to understand this technological revolution as more  than a set of linked events with a cumulative widespread impact on almost every facet of our lives. Indeed, I now understand it as a new ecology, a new environment for information and intellectual activity which cannot be controlled by existing hierarchical structures, such as universities and governments. continue reading

I am excited and pleased today because I am holding my new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass, Jan. 2010), in my hands. It lives up to its title, I think, describing how our technology-rich environment, populated with platforms, networks, social sites, and downloads, makes possible a level of access and completion in higher education that has been unattainable up to this point. I illustrate this point with a number of examples. Primary among them is being able to self-assess your experiential learning and then, if you wish, get it reviewed formally for academic credit , all on-line. continue reading

On January 7-8, about 100 people, drawn from a wide variety of educational, technical, labor, non-profit, and business backgrounds, gathered at Cavallo Point, a conference center in Sausalito. Sponsored by the Lumina Foundation, the topic was “Envisioning the Future of Higher Education”. For this old warrior, it was a bright moment in time when principles and potential for the future of higher education were expressed clearly and honestly, without regard for whether they would go down easily with the traditional academy. continue reading