I had a revelation this fall. A Joycean epiphany, suitable for novelization.
My wife, after 10 years of not being a school teacher, got a job teaching art at a local school. About two weeks before the start of the school year she went in to get the whole administrative run-down, and found that the previous teacher hadn’t really left any materials, curriculum, etc. And since art isn’t like writing or history, with a set textbook or district provided curriculum, she had no institutional materials either.
Which left her in a bind. While she was only teaching two days a week, she was teaching 9 classes in those two days, and on her own time, two weeks before the start of the semester, she had to plot out her quarter, matching it to basic standards and learning outcomes.
Let me let this sink in, for those used to the college environment. That’s nine classes times nine weeks — or 81 sessions of classroom instruction across nine grade levels. Just to get through the first two months of the year (the whole year, of course, involves over 320 hours of instruction: about equal to designing a 3/3 4-credit college course load in a year).
Once again, this is not terribly unusual for an art teacher starting out. If anything, the abnormal bit may have been the fact this is only a two day job.
How did Nicole deal with it? Well, she bought a bunch of packaged curriculum books, but soon grew frustrated with them. They didn’t match the length of her classes, or the meeting frequency, or the standards that mattered. So she went online. And once there she started to tap into the huge selection of free lesson plans available.
Here’s the mind-blowing bit for those of us in Higher Ed who are wondering how in the world to get even a small amount of reuse on the OER we are producing:
Fifty percent of her instruction has been based on internet sources: open lesson plans, handouts, discussion questions, even folding orgami diagrams. And she tells me while this may be somewhat high, she doesn’t think it is abnormal.
Think of that level of adoption. Is there anyone on your campus that uses OER for fifty percent of their instruction?
What can we, in higher ed, learn from this?
Teacher-facing, not student-facing
On the whole, most OER I’ve seen for higher education has been student facing. Even when we look at, say, MIT OCW, what we are seeing is student-facing materials. Course structure is there, but encoded in the form of a syllabus. Content is lecture notes, or the materials students see. Sample tests, etc.
This seems a subtle point, but I think it’s important. When I get professional assistance from the web — on say how to run a presentation, or how to use a new API, it is directed to me explicitly as a fellow professional. It gives me a set of steps to accomplish a task, warns me about the gotchas, holds my hand through the scary bits.
Yes, API instruction will have the bits of code as well, the output and artifacts of production. But professional resources, well done, talk TO me, not past me. They say, hey, I tried this set of steps this way on the version 2.6 installation, and if I had to do it over again, I think I would have copied kses.php first.
OER for P-12 educators does that. It’s professionals talking to professionals. OER in higher ed doesn’t, for the most part, do that. That’s due to a bunch cultural reasons, but if I had to pick just one reason why OER does not have broader adoption in higher ed, I would say it’s because in general OER does not treat the instructor as a fellow professional. It talks past the instructor to the student. If we had no extant educational system, maybe that would work. But we do have an extant educational system, and we’re supposed to be concerned about adoption of OER. And the sale for the use of OER is not the students, but the instructors.
That’s just fact.
So why are we talking past them instead of to them?
The Right Size Means Everything
Nicole needed to build up nine full courses in a small amount of time. But most people don’t need to do that. The glory of the lesson plan exchanges out there in P-12 is you don’t have to blow up your existing course to use them. You want to try something new? Find the parts of last year’s course that didn’t go so hot, get on the internet, and find new stuff to swap into those slots and try.
OCW is extremely useful for a lot of things. But when you look at the politics of pushing OCW reuse on a campus like Keene State’s the first thing you notice is it doesn’t solve a problem faculty think they have — it creates one. Most faculty will tell you much of their class works, some of it doesn’t. They are interested in solving the parts that don’t work without blowing up their whole class.
And if you want to promote OER use in this sort of context, you have to solve faculty problems, not create them.
Battle-tested, and Practical
You want to know one of my favorite things about the lesson plans my wife uses (and hacks!)?
The Prep list. Here’s an example from a claymation lesson plan:
PREP:
Photocopy lesson outline and assignments for student use
Rent VHS movie-Chicken Run
VHS hooked up to classroom TV
Groups assigned
Cameras charged
Disks assigned to groups
Software orientation for production
Production Area Assigned and Set Up
Light supports for production area
My second favorite? Materials:
INSTRUCTIONAL RESOURCES:
Chicken Run, Hatching of a Movie, by Brian Sibley
Microsoft Movie Maker Help Topics
Claymation Handouts Work Sheet Check List Storyboard Worksheet (use as many copies as necessary) Self Evaluation Worksheet
Websites below
So simple, but so important for anyone who has started a presentation to find they didn’t have the right materials, or the right software wasn’t installed in the lab. Seriously, consider this for a second — how many class sessions have gone wrong because your content was wrong? Now, how many have gone wrong because you weren’t prepared?
That’s what I mean. Practical, Battle-tested.
Good Practice Baked In
As an instructional designer I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convince people via theory and research to adopt certain classroom practices. And I’ve come to this conclusion: people don’t really care about theory and research. They say they do, but they don’t.
The reason people won’t adopt your suggested practice is not because they have a theoretical disagreement. It’s because changing what they do is harder and more risky than not changing what they do. Address issues of risk and time, and most faculty will try anything once. The theoretical discussion is only their way of saying there isn’t enough proof for me to blow up my instruction on something that may or may not be true.
In any case, here’s the neat thing about Open Teaching Resources: you can bake best practice in. If you put together a two-week team-based unit on quantitative literacy, you don’t have to spend an hour educating faculty that 5-7 people is optimal working group size, or that readiness assessment testing is crucial to solving the free rider problem. You just put the practice in the plan.
This allows instructors to learn like most professionals do — begin with good practice, and come to the theory later, as reflection on their existing practice.
I Apologize to Everyone All At Once in Advance
- I apologize to all the P-12 people reading this who are thinking, “Well, duh.”
- I apologize to Connexions and WikiEducator and Siyavula and all the other people that have been doing stuff related to teacher facing resources
- I apologize to the OpenCourseWare Consortium, my much beloved former employer, which is doing amazing and necessary work, and has spent a lot of time looking at reuse issues on the course and module level (and has got a lot of student facing reuse, via third parties, etc)
- I apologize to the people I have not named here, both for not naming you, and for whatever I’ve done
My point in writing this is not to say that this isn’t being done, in various ways, in OER endeavors. Making OER more teacher-friendly is not exactly a revolutionary concern, and I think everyone in OER is working on this issue in one way or another.
But to return to my introduction, the thing that is revolutionary to me is this:
My wife’s P-8 curriculum is fifty percent OER and she does not consider that groundbreaking in the least.
This post isn’t meant to attack any of the current OER players, but merely to ask: How is that possible? And how might I learn from that success to help transform my own institution?
I hope this bit of reflection on my own practice is helpful to people. I’d appreciate any comments.
I’ve written about 7 long comments here and I’ve finally distilled(?) my thoughts to this slightly manic hippy rant.
Using OER material isn’t my focus. The thing I like about your wife’s actions is that she was dissatisfied and took matters into her own hands. She reflected on what the desired outcomes were and saw that the given materials didn’t meet them.
I do believe that educators on all levels should be actively publishing everything from lesson plans and multimedia to reflections on teaching philosophy. I think they should do it openly in ways that allow people to adapt and build on those thoughts and material. I’d also throw in the hope of building conversations and communities around this content. I like Dan Meyer’s WCYDWT concept for just this reason. The lessons are good. The media is good. The conversation is good and when combined the sum of the parts is incredibly powerful.
What drove me to start using and creating open materials was an understanding of the needs of my students. The idea of entirely built courses out there ready for you to drop into place worries me. Courses ought to change fluidly based on the students in them. I have similar worries about the overly pedantic lesson plan. it’s a fine line between guidance and prescription.
On the other hand, some consistency and structure is useful in sharing. We’re struggling with what those components are in our district right now. The thin lines between too much structure and too little, too much information and not enough are tough ones to walk. How do you include enough detail that the lesson is useful without it becoming bloated and unlikely to be read at all? The points you bring up in the post are solid ones. People need “battle tested” lessons and it makes sense to embed solid instructional design elements.
Instructors need a self-identified rationale to change and I think that’s the hardest part. How do you get people reflecting so they recognize what is failing their students and they can act to deal with the issue? I think if you do that the OER activity starts to take care of itself.
Thanks so much Tom — it’s interesting b/c from the HE perspective we have almost nothing of what you have in P-12, so it’s easy to lust after it without having to confront the problems of overly zealous implementation.
I focussed on lesson plans here, b/c that was what Nicole, as essentially a new teacher starting out, found really useful. But I don’t think it stops there — the reason I was so fascinated with the videos you posted yesterday was it represents another sort of open teaching resource — one that models interaction across a discipline or program (or maybe all instruction). And I can see how at the college level these materials could be helpful to different people at different times — A teacher coming in might try a couple lesson plans, but after running through a semester might look at something like that video on math questioning to develop more fluidity.
I’ll also add that of course Nicole hacks her plans extensively. So part of this is not so much about the materials, but the culture. We want a culture of hackers that both exchange detailed plans, but also hack the hell out of them.
I think my major point with HE OCW materials is they have to be a conversation between teaching professionals, not a set of course artifacts. What I want to see is a world of teaching practice that is as connected and collegial as the world of, say, web developers.
And I want to see smaller modules, things smaller than courses. I can sell an instructor on trying something for a class, but a semester is a bit beyond my persuasive powers. Yet when we talk about developing materials in HE we always seem to gravitate towards new courses instead of smaller pieces to be loosely coupled by the teacher.
On your final point — I agree, but think the less risky and less time-intensive you make things, the less rationale you need. At a certain point, the rationale for a small enough piece can be — hey, what have you got to lose? And the rationale for the piece after that can be — hey, that last piece worked well, so why not?
@Tom — I should also say that Nicole’s turned out to be an incredible teacher in her own lessons. She’s come up with amazing things — sessions on stop motion whiteboard drawing (completely with an intro that showed behind the scenes of Finding Nemo and kids broken into project teams), a community project where students designed art to cover plywood on some abandoned buildings, a set of paper-maiche armadillos for a local restaurant (named Armadillos). She’s also designed impressive cross-grade projects where the second graders produce input into soemthing the fifth graders are doing too.
In other words, all that stuff I struggle with here very often (project based learning, community engagement, cross-course collaboration) she just gets, natively. It’s really neat.
If I can do it and preserve marital happiness, I am going to try to get her to share some of her stuff with people — and if you know of any online art ed communities with good energy let me know….
It’s surprising how a simple word substitution can change the whole direction of a long-running dialogue. And while there’s a lot to talk about, I zeroed in on your thinking about reasons why this doesn’t exist as much in higher ed, and what I think is an accurate targeting of the culture of HE. I admit it’s tempting to criticize HE’s sometimes discouraging lack of attention to or interest in the act of teaching, but that’s probably not necessary to move forward. What may be useful is another post–or even a collaboration–listing our potentially useful open teaching resource production practices that instructors will actually want to use. I found myself in a similar situation this semester when a failing instructor was pulled from a PHP course and I was asked to step in–at week 7. I wasn’t too worried because my former colleague had published his PHP online course under a CC license, and there was plenty of material online. And though I felt I would be good at teaching this language, I found that I was a bit unprepared for the act of teaching it, as a server-side language is much different from the client-side languages I’m used to teaching, and I hadn’t anticipated common student difficulties, nor had I really enough time to fully explore the materials that I was going to use.
In retrospect some very simple things would have helped; for instance, a lesson plan would be great, but even a “manifest” file in each lesson that explained to me the purpose of the lesson, things the students will likely stumble on, and how to make the material engaging would have been brilliant.
@Jared — I’m working on (or perhaps, struggling through) an open teaching resources project right now, and I’d love to talk through what sort of production practices we’re thinking about implementing.
There’s two directions I can see here — the first is how we can make (or are making) extant OER more of a teaching resource and less of a student-facing materials repository. I think the other question would be what do OER repositories built from the ground up as teaching resource communities look like. As I mentioned, some of the OER players, especially those with p-12 participants, DO treat OER as professional support for teachers, at least in part, and people like Tom have been sharing resources in that space in some interesting and successful ways.
Given I’ve sold my bosses on letting me put together a set of teaching resources for Keene State, trust me, there will be many many more posts on this — till you are all bored to death. But I need all the help I can get, so if you can share any of your thoughts on what would help, please do…
Mike here are a few more random thoughts. I leave them as someone else who’s struggling with how all this might work.-
We’re finding the video of actual classrooms to be valuable places to start discussions and really powerful tools to use in setting best practice. For K12 it’s like observing another teacher (which is supposed to happen but often doesn’t). It does have all sorts of added benefits in terms of scale, time, organization and the benefits of instant replay and pause. I don’t really see any downside to video vs live observation, especially if the person filming and editing understands the pedagogical focus. I think video can actually be better.
We even use this style to train our principals on how to conduct post observation interviews.
Another thing we found to be a factor in this was teachers didn’t extrapolate techniques out very well when going cross subject. They wanted to see it focused on their subject and with a similar population. That is a lot harder in HE. It seems like you’d have to work on examples in one area and maybe provide rough sketches of how it’d look in other disciplines. Maybe it’d be possible to set up brain storming areas for conversations based around the individual disciplines.
It sounds like your wife is doing awesome work. I often dream of becoming an art teacher. I love the possibilities there and I’m a wannabe artist anyway. I figured she hacked away at the lessons she found. My response is no doubt influenced by a thousand other things I see going on in k12 and you got stuck with some of that. My apologies.
I too want to see more human discussion and narrative around these elements. There were little sidebar characters who’d call out certain problems or tips in a Windows book I read way back when that would be interesting to use in something like this.
Here’s kind of another format that I’m working on as a bridge between pedagogical techniques, lesson plan chunks and tools. We/I am trying to tie some of our big picture online resources on things like research/info fluency into our classroom video and then tie all that to tools that will give an advantage and the tutorials for how to use the tools. Done right it’d lead to lots of small pieces flowing laterally in interesting ways. Teachers will end up being exposed to multiple concepts/tools/examples.
I’ll stop here and try to write this up more cohesively on my blog rather than continuing to over stuff this comment box. I’m now realizing how little of this I’ve written about openly. I’ll be very interested in seeing how you chose to progress. It’s hard work but valuable. I appreciate you inviting me into the conversation.
[...] Mike Caufield’s post made me realize I’ve done a pretty poor job of publicizing what we’re trying to do lately in good old HCPS1. So here’s my attempt to put this out there for people to spot holes, misdirection, etc. [...]
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