One of the great benefits
of teaching is that the summer is available.
We can do research and writing.
Or, we can work to improve our teaching. “How can my next class be better than my
last class?” is a great question to ponder during the summer break. You have had a couple of months of break – how
often have you addressed that question?
I am a strong proponent
that everyone needs to learn to think differently about the challenges they
face. If you think like everyone else,
you will wind up being average by definition.
In my book Don’t Just Dream about
Success: Stack the Odds in Your Favor,
I devote an entire chapter to the challenge of learning to “Think Differently.” Here is just one of the suggestions that I put
forward in that book:
“’How could this have been improved?’ is a great
question to consider throughout your daily wanderings. It stimulates critical thinking. Let your mind expand to consider the widest
possible range of answers. Except for
the Ten Commandments, nothing in life is really carved in stone. Almost any service, product, or arrangement
can be helped by a bit of innovative questioning. I have no proof, but I suspect that the
employees at Apple, Google, and Amazon spend more time seeking out better
questions and fewer hours defending the status quo.”
“Defending the status
quo” – in most operations, there is too little time spent thinking differently
and way too much time spent defending the status quo. I think that is true for teaching just as it
is for many other things in life.
So, recently, I was
thrilled to read the book Think like a
Freak by Levitt and Dubner who had previously written Freakonomics and
SuperFreakonomics. I won’t try to
boil down Think like a Freak into a
few sentences but the authors argue (as I do in my book) that we are too quick
to accept the status quo without question.
They stress asking better and better questions and then analyzing all available
data to figure out the actual results and what caused them. They write about taking traditional thinking
apart—piece by piece—so that innovative alternatives can be tested. All of that seems to be inherently obvious
but it is very easy to accept “traditional wisdom” and be accepting of the
status quo even when the end results are not as hoped. Is your teaching being saddled by the
traditional wisdom and the status quo? In
their book, these authors had two words that I liked especially: “experiment endlessly.”
When is the last time,
you seriously experimented with your class organization and structure?
I liked Think Like a Freak so much that I wanted
to share its wisdom with my students. I
believed they could learn something of value that might carry over into the
fall semester and make them better students.
Here was the question I needed to address: How could
I encourage my students to read this book during summer break? The writing style is lively and fun and the
topics (how can a person break the world record for eating hot dogs?) are
amusing and insightful. But students are
not inclined to read a serious book during their vacation time.
I wrote my junior
students for the fall and told them about the book and why I had liked it. I figured that would get their
attention. Then, I told them that I
would give each person who read the book over the summer 2 ½ extra points on
our first test in the fall (out of three tests and a final exam) if they had
read the book by that time. Therefore,
they weren’t reading the book for fun.
They were reading the book to earn extra credit on the first test in a
difficult course. That provides motivation. That is enough points
to be helpful to their grade but not enough points to guarantee too much of an
improvement.
Since that time, I have
heard from approximately 1/4 of the students who talked about reading the book
and how much they were enjoying thinking about thinking. Here’s a note I got yesterday:
I have been reading the Think Like a Freak book that you had recommended, and this has
surely helped me view general problems (even personal ones) differently. I
really believe that by the end of the book, I will be able to think through
problems more efficiently, and hopefully use it toward the accounting problems
this fall.
Is that kind of insight
worth 2 ½ points on one test? I
certainly think so. Reading is always
good for people. I think this
particular reading can be especially helpful to the students which might make
them more successful (and my life somewhat easier) in the fall. I am more than happy to give up those 2 ½ points
for that potential benefit.
What are the lessons that
I think can be learned from this particular experiment?
--Never stop trying to
get your students to do things that improve their chances of reaching your
goals for them. Do not feel confined to
the few months that make up a semester.
Many of these students are working hard for me, well before the semester even begins.
--College students need
a little push. They are human
beings. They have a lot of things that
need to get done in their lives. If you ask them to do
something without a reward, it probably will never get done. We all know that. They are too busy or get distracted and,
pretty soon, the time has passed and the opportunity is lost. Give them a push.
--Even a small amount of
motivation can get good results. For 2
½ points on one test, a number of them will read a book that might change their
entire way of thinking. You do not have
to give away the bank to get students to do work. But, it is extremely helpful to have a
specific reward system in order to provide a justification for doing the work
requested. It does not have to be much
but it does need to be some.
Okay, that is one way I
thought differently about the upcoming semester. What about you? What kind of innovations have you
considered? What kind of experiments
might help your students to work harder and learn more? That is one of the benefits of summer—you have
time to come up with a great answer.
