Books that Every Educator Should Read

I took this photograph recently in Rochefeller Center in New York City. Great architecture has always inspired me. On one level, the technical genious required to make these monumental structures is amazing. It requires a great deal of expertise to determine what is the best design and materials to withstand the slowly (and sometimes acutely) destructive elements of nature over years, decades, and even centuries. On another level, the artistic and creative genious that is required to make a functional structure into something that is aesthetically pleasing and evokes an emotional response is a gift. I think great teachers are like great architects. Creating great structures requires not only technical expertise but also a cultural sensitivity, an awareness of the surroundings, and an ability to visualize a potential that does not yet exist.

Every educator (who takes their vocation seriously) probably has two or three books that have shaped and inspired them as teachers. Here is a list of books that have influenced me the most over the past year:

What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain (Harvard University Press 2004). This short, inexpensive (less than $15 thru Amazon.com) and inspiring little book was a delight to read. While the book cover is a bit goofy, Bain takes a scholarly (but accessible) approach to the subject matter. The bottom line - the best colleges teachers know and love the subject matter they teach ... engage their students to think about the most relevant questions that matter ... and have confidence that their students can (and will) meet high standards.

The Courage to Teach. Exploring the Inner Landscape of A Teacher's Life by Parker J. Palmer (Jossey-Bass 1998) is a book about the vulnerability of being a teacher and the importance of integrity and being whole. Great teaching is not achieved by employing superior pedagogical techniques but rather in developing self-awareness and connectedness to one's subject and students. My favorite chapter is entitled "Knowing in Community." Truth - according to Palmer - is a reality created by a dynamic web of communal relationships between "knowers." In the community of truth, there is no ultimate authority - but rather knowing, learning, and teaching is a dialogue among a community of people (knowers) who approach a common subject in a shared way (e.g. they communicate in a shared language, share rules of observation, and interpret information in a similar manner). It is only after we (teachers) abandon our need to be the ultimate authority that we can truly engage students to become members of the community of truth.

The Wisdom of Practice: Essays on Teaching, Learning, and Learning to Teach by Lee S. Shulman (Jossey-Bass 2004) is collection of essays (as the title would imply) on a wide range of topics related to pedagogy. Dr. Shulman is currently the President of the Carnegie Foundation - a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement of teaching - and previously a professor in psychology at Stanford University (1982-1996) and a professor in educational psychology and medical education at Michigan State University. These essays span his career. Again, the focus is not on technique but the art and craft of teaching.

Educational Resources On-Line

This photo is from the Pompidou Centre in Paris - one of the world's greatest museums. The Pompidou is dedicated to modern art in its many forms - including photographs, films, scuptures, furniture, and architecture. Sure - no visit to Paris would be complete without seeing the Louvre or d'Orsey - but be sure to visit the Pompidou.

The Web is rich with resources and forums dedicated to education, teaching, and learning. Finding credible sources of informaton, however, can be a challenge. Here is a short list of on-line resources I have found very helpful:

Search Engines

ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) is the world's largest educational database - similar to MEDLINE - with more than 1.1 million citations dating back to 1966. If you want to do a general literature search on an education topic or find the primary educational research literature, this is the first place to go!

Journals / Newsletters / Weblogs

BMC Medical Education provides access to full-text and abstracts to original research articles regarding professional, post-graduate, and continuing medical education.

The American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education (AJPE) is the official journal of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. All manuscripts published since 2003 are available on-line in full-text.

The Carnegie Foundation was founded in 1905 and is dedicated to the advancement of teaching. They publish a monthy on-line newsletter called Carnegie Perspectives.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is a weekly newspaper covering a wide range of issues of interest to educators and adminstrators at institutions of higher learning.

The Learning and Forgetting Curves

This is a photo I recently took in Paris - a truly unforgetable city! I've traveled to Paris several times and I have fond memories from each trip.

Nearly everything we know today about learning and forgetting was "discovered" by Herman Ebbinghaus in the late 1800's.

Ebbinghaus, a psychologist, had a keen interest in memory and higher cognitive processes. He was the first to describe the "learning curve" and characterize retention. His experiments were quite clever. He was able to systematically measure how long it takes for people to "memorize" new information and how much was retain over time by developing a series of nonsense syllables and words. During his experiments, subjects repeated a series of nonsense syllables and/or words as many times as was necessary to reach an a priori level of accuracy (for example, three perfect reproductions without being prompted verbally or looking at it in writing). What he discover was that the time required to memorize nonsense syllables increased sharply as the number of syllables increased. I think we can all appreciate that it requires much more time and effort to memorize a 13-digit overseas telephone number than it does a 5-digit zip code. Ebbinghaus also discovered that people are able to memorize more in distributed learning sessions rather than by trying to assimilate everything in a single session.

Ebbinghaus then set out to determine the duration and strength of retention. Using a concept he invented, called the "savings method," he determined the number of repetitions required to relearn material (to the same criterion) and compared it to the number of trials initially required to learn the material. The more repititions you required to relearn the material, the more you had forgotten - he surmised.

What he discovered through these experiments are things we inutitively know. First, items that are associated with one another are more easily remembered together. These associations could be due to congruity (e.g. they appeared next to each other on the list) or due to remote association (e.g. the learner made some connections between the two items in their own mind). Second, we remember best what we FIRST and LAST encounter (the so-called primacy and recency effects) and tend to forget middle items. Third, even small amounts of practice, far less than what is required for mastery to the criterion level of performance, lead to "savings" (e.g. improved retention over time). Finally, most humans tend to forget 50% of newly learned knowledge in a matter of days or weeks. But the speed of forgetting is related to a number of factors. Most importantly, our ability to learn nonsense material (e.g. things we don't understand) is quite poor - requiring a great deal of effort - and the forgetting curve is quite steep. On the other hand, meaningful material (e.g. things that make sense because they relate to things we already know) takes only about one tenth the effort to learn and the forgetting is relatively gradual. Not surprisingly, the forgetting curve is nearly flat for vivid or traumatic experiences - perhaps because the learner "reviews" the memory repetitively in his/her mind.

What are the implications of Ebbinghaus' work? Many of our "best practices" in education are based on these findings and most of us probably take them for granted. For example, stating the important learning points at the being and end of a lecture relates to the primacy and lacency effect of memory. Breaking up material into small chucks of information - rather than massive amounts of information at a single sitting - relates to the inherently limited capacity that most of us have to absorb new information. Opportunities for practice during a lecture or workshop - even when its not mastered - improves retention. And encountering the material repetitively over time - rather than concentrating on it intensely for a short period of time - is a more effective learning strategy.

Cognitive learning theory (aka contructivism) postulates that we construct our own learning by making connections between what we sense (see, hear, feel, taste, touch) and what we already know. Ebbinghaus' experiments certainly provides evidence to support that contention - learning new materials is far more efficient when it is "meaningful" to the learner (not the teacher!!). But how can we, as teachers, make the material "meaningful?" .... That's a topic for another time.

Learning Communities

There has been a lot of talk about "learning communities" over the past few year. Many corporations are trying to build them. And learning communities have spontaneously formed in cyber-space. But what are learning communities?

A learning community is a group of individuals (usually 20 or more, too large to be a "team") who've gathered together to learn about a specific subject or professional discipline. Learning communities, like learning teams, generally have individuals at all levels of development. Some members of the community are novices and other are experts. Learning communities may have specific tasks or objectives they are trying to accomplish - but many do not. Members may simply gather together because they have a strong personal interest in the subject matter or commitment to the discipline. Examples that we're all familiar with are Schools or Colleges within a University. And many professional associations are learning communities because they foster the development of people within a particular discipline by offering a variety of instructional activities and enabling like-minded people to communicate with one another. Prior to the advent of the Internet, learning communities were a PHYSICAL place where people met face-to-face. But now "virtual" learning communities exist where people communicate only online. Of course, most schools and associations have quickly adopted the Internet to augment the face-to-face interactions that occur in their communities.

Building effective learning communities requires more than just subject matter to hold them together. No doubt, some schools are probably held together merely because the law or the market place requires individuals to have a certain academic degree or credential in order to work in the field. But in most learning communities are constructed by people who've voluntarily come together. Strong learning communities, like any organization or neighborhood, generally have the same key ingredients that sustain them and help them flourish:

1) All members have a sense of belonging; new members feel welcomed
2) A mission or purpose which is important and transcends individuals
3) Members share responsibility for sustaining the community

The distinction between a learning team and a learning community is a sutle one. Learning communities are generally larger in size (often several hundred people) and have a much broader purpose. Learning communities are frequently sustained over long periods of time. Learning teams are generally much smaller groups - generally less than 20 people. The purpose of a learning team is generally a short term goal - their actions are often focused on a specific task or objective. Learning teams may be disbanded when the objectives have been met or when its members move on to do different things. Learning teams are often found within learning communities.

An analogy, one that I think is helpful, is to compare learning communities and teams to neighborhoods and households. A strong neighborhood is a large group of people with common interests (not merely the land that they occupy together). Strong neighborhoods are made of not only households but also businesses and other organizations (e.g. churches, senior center) that support and sustain the members of the neighborhood. Most strong neighborhoods have strong households - smaller units of people who spend significant amounts of time together and who enable one another to succeed. Older, more experienced members of the household (usually called parents, but this is not always the case) have a particular responsibility to attend to the needs of the younger members of the household. But members of a household often grow and leave. New household are sometime built and others fall apart or move away. Strong neighborhoods can help households that are faltering. But strong neighborhood are rarely destroyed by an isolated or even a few households that aren't doing well.

Like strong neighborhoods, strong learning communities have similar requirements - they don't thrive merely by having a bunch of members or a collection of learning teams affiliated with them. Food for thought in this new year.

If you're really interested in this stuff, check out www.creatinglearningcommunities.org or this site at Miami University of Ohio regarding Faculty and Professional Learning Communities.

Learning Teams

There is a growing body of literature regarding the effectiveness of "learning teams" - small groups of learners of different levels of knowledge, skill, and experience. Learning teams have existed in various forms for millenia - modern examples that most of us are familar with are the American 1-room school house and medical clinical education. McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario is a pioneer in medical education and has used the learning team concept extensively in their new Compass Curriculum.

The principle of a learning team is to create an environment where EVERYONE learns from one another and where (full-time, paid) instructors serve as role models and their content expertise (perhaps) is not particularly important. In learning teams, every individual on the team is responsible for the learning process - not just the "teacher" - and everyone is expected to contribute. Obviously, more novice learners, those who've joined the team most recently, are generally able to contribute less in terms of knowledge, skills, and experience ... but they can (and should) contribute by asking the fundamentally important questions and challenging the status quo ... thereby forcing more knowledgeable, skilled and experienced members of the team to either defend (support) the "dogma" or reconsider it. Since we spend most of our working lives working (and learning) in teams, shouldn't our formal education teach us how to be effective and contributing members of working (and learning) teams?

Learning teams are often constructed around important and genuine (not artificial) work - for example, taking care of patients on a particular hospital ward or conducting research to develop a new drug for Parkinson's disease. But the true goal of the learning team (and the instructor who leads them) is to go beyond learning the day-to-day technical functions (of patient care or discorvering new drugs) but to develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to contribute to other learning teams.

Peter Senge, well known for his books and articles on management and leadership, talks about the "learning organization" in his book "The Fifth Discipline." The principles in Senge's books - "personal mastery," "mental models," "shared vision," and "team learning" - were initially developed to conceptualize how highly effective corporations "work" ... but they are equally important concepts in higher education and the "work" of learning teams. It's not surprising that Senge's more recent work has focused on how these principles can be applied to education in the Fifth Discipline Fieldbook entitled "Schools that Learn."The bottom line - learning isn't about what the "teacher" knows and can impart to "students" but rather a shared process where people come together to grow and develop. The best teachers - while they may be known for their content expertise - are really achitects of the "learning process."