East versus West -- No Pain, No Gain

A few days ago, this blog moved over 65,500 page views since its inception.   It is amazing how often I receive emails from teachers (around the world) who start out by saying “A friend of mine who teaches at my school told me about your blog.”  

Consequently, I like to stop now and then and say Thanks!!! to everyone who passes along a good word about this blog.   If not for you, I would be writing all this stuff to myself.   Whether you agree or disagree, I really appreciate your passing along the blog entries.

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One of the things that I try to do in my classes is talk with my students about my teaching philosophy.  I want them to understand that I do not do things randomly.   I try to have a reason for what I do and I want that reason to be logical.   I think students appreciate being brought into the conversation about their own education.   I think they are more likely to do what the teacher asks if they understand that there is a reason.  

To use an overused cliché, I want my teaching to be transparent.

Here’s an email that I sent out to my students today.   It is probably pretty obvious that I do become frustrated at times by students who simply will not try.   For some reason, they have come to the conclusion that trying is not a necessary part of learning.  Or, that trying is some type of bad omen.  

I want them to look at trying in a different light.   Here's what I wrote them.

 

To: Accounting Students

From: JH

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2012/11/12/164793058/struggle-for-smarts-how-eastern-and-western-cultures-tackle-learning

A friend of mine sent me the link above from an NPR show that was aired this morning about education. As people who have been students virtually your entire lives, I thought you might find this essay interesting. It could make you question whether you have been educated by the best possible philosophy. And, it might also help you understand my style of teaching a bit better.

Basically, this article stresses a philosophy that learning is greatly improved by struggle (a word that we rarely associate with education in the US).

In fact, here is the quote that I found most interesting.

“In Eastern cultures, Stigler says, it's just assumed that struggle is a predictable part of the learning process. Everyone is expected to struggle in the process of learning, and so struggling becomes a chance to show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle”

“To show that you, the student, have what it takes emotionally to resolve the problem by persisting through that struggle” – interesting concept for education. The author is apparently talking about something more than taking notes and memorizing formulas.

I think we all realize that in sports there are many sayings that stress the importance of struggle: “No pain, no gain” being probably the best known. I don’t think I’ve ever met a single athlete who didn’t subscribe to that philosophy whole heartedly. Whenever you see a championship athlete (in the Olympics, for example, or on the football field), it is simply assumed that the person has spent countless hours in rigorous training in order to become that good.  

However, we don’t exhibit the same attitude toward our best students. We rarely talk about the countless hours it takes to become a championship student. Instead, we tend to dismiss the difficult work that is necessary because “oh, he/she is just smart.”

For some reason, our education system doesn’t put much emphasis on the struggle that is necessary for deep learning. In fact, any visible sign of a struggle to learn material is often viewed as a weakness (“he/she is really not cut out for this stuff”). Is learning that takes place quickly any more beneficial than learning that occurs after considerable effort?

I believe the reason we don’t stress the need to struggle to learn is that we don’t challenge our students enough (and then we are often unhappy that they don’t turn out better prepared). From kindergarten forward, the “struggle” to learn is not often much of a struggle. After enough years, you come to believe that struggle is not really a necessary component of learning.

Oh, do I disagree with that. I want you to struggle. To repeat, I want you to struggle. Every single day. I want you to have to put up a fight. I want to make this stuff hard enough that you have to struggle to do well. I think it is good for you and it makes the learning so much more a part of your being.

If I could make learning easy for you, I would not do it.

In truth, I think about 70 percent of you are putting up the fight that I want. I am very pleased (most days) with about 70 percent of you. The other 30 percent have a tendency to give “lazy answers” that often seem to say “I didn’t feel like struggling with this material so here’s a throw away answer so that you’ll let me slide.”

My goal in this email is not to convert you to my thinking. I’m more interested in making you aware that lazy answers don’t do you any good.

My real goal here is to make one point: Champion athletes struggle mightily to get better. Champion students must do the same thing. There is no shame in having to put up a fight to learn this stuff. In fact, that’s how it ought to be.

ONE WEEK DOWN

We completed our first week of school yesterday.

I always believe that this is an important juncture. Is the class going to fall into a lethargic mediocrity or begin to take off? We only have about 14 weeks. If we are going to have something great, we need to start building on that almost immediately. If you begin to lose student enthusiasm, you may never get it back.

So, this morning, I wrote my students a note to make sure they each understand what it takes to be good in my class. The goal is not to cram the night before the test. The goal is to understand the material today so that you can answer more questions tomorrow. I’m hoping they’ll buy into that as a goal worth taking seriously.

Here’s the note that I wrote to my students in Intermediate Accounting II.

“I thought we had an excellent first week. That’s what I want and that’s what I want every day and every week. Success is never earned by an occasional good day of work. I want you to be consistently excellent.

“I have three pieces of advice now that you have gotten a feel for this course.

“First, I hope you see that what we are doing every day is helping you to see how to think about and answer new situations, problems, and questions. In that way, when you get to each test, you will have already been trained in analyzing and answering questions. You should be ready for whatever I throw at you. To do this, it is essential that you spend an adequate amount of time preparing for class. If you are not spending 60-90 minutes preparing for every class, you are probably shooting for a C. That’s just a fact. Put a clock on it and see how much time you are devoting.

“Second, when I ask a question on Friday, I expect you to know what we did in class on the previous Wednesday. We are constantly adding to what we have learned so I have to make the assumption that you know what has been covered. When, I ask in class on Friday ‘how did we answer this type of question on Wednesday?’ and I get blank stares, that is not a good sign. That’s not what I want or expect. Therefore, after every class, spend 20-40 minutes going back over and organizing the material from the previous class. We’ll never get anywhere if we are constantly having to relearn the material.

“Third, you should always be looking for connections. Everything is tied together. I realize that this is different from what you are used to in school but you are bright folks and you are capable of making those connections. You are just a few months away from working in the real world. Consequently, you don’t need a ‘copy and memorize’ course. You need a ‘think about this and figure it out’ course. When we determine, ‘a loan is shown as a noncurrent liability if it has been refinanced (zero chance of paying a current asset) or if the company has obtained a noncancellable agreement to refinance (zero chance of paying a current asset)’ and then I ask ‘What is the precedent we can take from this rule so that we can use it when we are deciding whether any other liability should be reported as current or noncurrent?’ I believe you can make that connection and figure out the answer. The connection is there -- pointing the way for you.

“Okay, it’s easy to bail out and say ‘you haven’t told me so I don’t know.’ Baloney, you can figure it out.

“This is not an intro course. It is a very very very difficult course. However, I believe that every one of you folks has the ability to make an A. Why then do I usually have only 18-20 percent of the students earn A’s. That’s easy to answer: Most students do not spend 60-90 minutes preparing for EVERY class and 20-40 minutes reviewing after EVERY class. Therefore, they never really learn to analyze and make connections and answer questions. But that’s a talent truly worth having.

“I am not naïve. I do realize that this course can be hard. Your attitude toward that degree of challenge is important. It is easy to give up. But, to quote Tom Hanks: ‘It's supposed to be hard. If it wasn't hard, everyone would do it. The hard is what makes it great.’

“It’s the hard that makes it great. I couldn’t have said that better myself.

“In fact, go watch Tom say those exact words:”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndL7y0MIRE4

My Favorite Quotes About Teaching – Number Six

Let’s assume that you are a true baseball or soccer or basketball fan and you’ve just been appointed manager/coach of your favorite team. You are absolutely thrilled. Your goal is to win the world championship with your team. How exciting is that? How would you go about achieving this goal? My guess is that you would willingly spend hours analyzing every aspect of your team. You would try to think of how you could help each player reach their potential within the team to bring on the victories. You’d study everything about the game to help everyone do better. Heck, this might be so thrilling that you’d do all the work for free just for the opportunity.

Is winning a few sporting events in basketball or baseball more important than helping your students to learn? Of course not – we may occasionally forget how important our jobs are but we should never lose sight of what we are accomplishing. I would argue that you already have a much more important job than any big league manager/coach. They play games; you change lives. They entertain; you make a difference. They occasionally play big games; you have the chance to improve lives every day.

Do you treat your teaching with enough importance? Do you approach your teaching with the same seriousness that you might have for the preparation of a sports team?

Over the past few months, I have been writing periodically about my favorite quotes concerning teaching. I find that certain things people have said can make a difference in how I think about teaching in general and my teaching in specific. Few quotes (maybe none) have influenced me more than the quote for today.

About four years ago, my teaching tips book got some publicity and I began to hear from a few people who talked about their teaching and their thoughts on teaching. One day, I got an email from England. It was from a person that I did not know. The note said something like “we have never met but I have read your writings on teaching and I feel like I know you personally. Here is a quote that has meant a lot to me over the years. And, knowing how you think about teaching, I believe it will mean something to you also.” How true that was.

I don’t remember who sent me that email.
I don’t even remember who said the original quote.
However, I think about this quote virtually every day. I believe that it really does hold the key secret to being a better teacher.

"Teaching does not come from years of doing it. It actually comes from thinking about it."

When I give teaching presentations, people will often ask me how they can become better teachers. They want concrete suggestions – talk more, talk less, use more PowerPoint, use less PowerPoint, work more problems, work less problems, yell a lot, don’t yell at all, test a lot, never test. The problem is that all of those do work for some people at some times but none of them work for everyone all the time.

The one thing that does work consistently (I believe) is thinking carefully about your students and your classes and your teaching and how things are going and what changes you need to make. In other words, improvement comes from seriously analyzing the infinite number of variables that make up a class over the course of an entire semester.

It is easy, especially after teaching for a few years, to go on autopilot. I have known teachers (heck, I have been a teacher) who could teach pretty well and never really think about that they were doing. At times, a teacher can come to function more like an actor repeating the same lines over and over on the stage with predictable results.

In my own teaching, I want to try to analyze every single aspect of the learning process on an ongoing basis so I can do better. I want to stay off autopilot. For example:
--What is my overall goal for my students by the end of the semester?
--What did I ask my students to do today? Did those assigned tasks further my overall goal or were they just busy work? What did they require of the students? How did they change the students’ perceptions and understanding?
--How well did my students perform today? Did they live up to my expectations? If not, what went wrong and how could I have gotten a result I liked better? Were the assignments too easy? Were the assignments too hard? Did I challenge each student enough or too much?
--Is every student improving at the pace that I want? If not, can I make adjustments to get better results from specific people?
--Are my students focusing on memorization or are they improving their critical thinking skills? How am I changing them? Is that what I want? How can I get them away from memorization and more into thinking? Too much education focuses on memorization - how do I get my students away from that?

I could go on and on but you get the point.

If I were a coach and wanted to win a championship, these are the kinds of questions that I would address every day. Why then don’t I think more about my teaching on a regular basis? If I believe that teaching is so important how do I stay off autopilot? How do I keep my teaching fresh?

There is not a good answer to these questions. Or, perhaps, each person has to find their own answer to each one. I want to help my students grow and mature. A good class can help them in so many ways. How do I do that? Hopefully, I think about my teaching in a serious and in-depth fashion much the same way as I would if I were appointed the manager/coach of a great sports team.

The next time I give a teaching presentation (Louisville and Savannah – both in May) and someone asks me how to become a better teacher, my truthful response is going to be: "Teaching does not come from years of doing it. It actually comes from thinking about it."

Go out there and do some thinking.

The Very First Question

My first class of the 2011-2012 academic year will be next Monday at 9 a.m. If you have followed this blog for long, you know that I only teach by using a Socratic Method approach. I distribute questions in advance and then discuss those or related questions for the entire class time. I want a thoughtful conversation. This allows me to stick with my 50-50 goal (I do 50 percent of the talking and they do 50 percent of the talking).

I am a big believer that it is important to get each new class off to the proper start. You set a tone at the beginning that carries through for the entire semester. If you are funny, they’ll expect you to be funny from now on. If you do 100 percent of the talking, they’ll assume that this is the way you teach every single day.

Consequently, I spend a lot of time thinking about the tone I am creating during that first class. By now, I have already sent my students 4-5 emails so I fully expect them to be prepared on Monday morning and ready to go. I like creating a bit of urgency right from the beginning – this is important stuff and we cannot afford to waste our time. I believe that myself so why not convey this message.

This semester I have focused a lot of my attention on the very first question that I am going to ask. What do I want my students to think about immediately starting right at 9:00 a.m.?

I may change my mind by Monday but the question I plan to ask (as I type this) is: “if our class works perfectly this semester, if you and I both do all that we can possibly do and things go great, how will you be different at the end of the semester?”

Only a very few words but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this question. Why do I like it?

--First and foremost, it focuses on the change that can occur in them. Students typically think about class in terms of learning. I’m not nearly as interested in learning (which can sound like the memorization of the Gettysburg Address). I want them to think about class in terms of how it will change them. In December, as a result of this class, I want them to walk out as different people. How is my class going to make that happen? I think “learning” simply understates the potential impact of a college class. I want them to be different; I want them to be better people in some definable way. And, I think they are more likely to get there if they consider what that change may be.

--Second, I want them to connect what they do with that change. Benefits don't happen by accident I want the students to realize that their “work” and their “change” are closely related. It is not just the passage of time that counts. That only makes you older. It is the work carried out during the semester that creates change in the student. I want them to realize that the more they work, the more they will change (and grow).

--Third, I definitely want my students to understand that the learning process is a team effort. It is not my job alone. Likewise, it is not just them operating by themselves. “If you AND I both do all that we can possibly do . . .” I often tell my students that class is like performing a dance such as the waltz. One party leads but both parties have to do an equal share of the work. A dance where only one person does any real work is an awkward mess. However, a dance where both people work together can lead to wonderful results. I inform students that I will do my half of the work but I will absolutely not do more than my half. It is their education and they have to be willing to do their share of the work.

--Fourth, I want the students to know that there is risk involved. I never never never take it for granted that a class will be a success. For me, “if” is always a scary word. “If this class works perfectly this semester,” sends the message that things might not work well. Benefit is not guaranteed. Students often seem to feel that if they merely persevere until the last day, they will accrue whatever benefit that is available. School = Perseverance = Success. No, some students gain immensely in my class whereas others obtain literally no benefit. I want to show students the opportunity that is available to them. But it may not happen There is a great benefit to be gained but only if we both do the work necessary.

Now, I have a question for you. And, I’d love to hear your response: When you walk into class on the first day of the semester and you are ready to get started (you’ve gone over the course outline or whatever housekeeping you have to do), what is the very first question that you ask your students. I’m definitely curious. Let me know – I might change. Send me your “first question” at Jhoyle@richmond.edu.

Common Sense

A student that I had in one of my classes last spring wrote me recently for a book suggestion. He said that he wanted to learn more about the nature of business success and wondered what books I might suggest for him to read over the summer. I gave him a few titles that I like and then finished off with one of my very favorite books from many decades ago: Up the Organization.

I made the point to the student that I liked this last book especially because it made so much of business just seem like common sense. The book didn’t try to overwhelm me with weird ideas and theories or complex calculations and assumptions. It just said, in very simple terms, “if you treat people this way, you should get good results.”

After I wrote the student, I started to wonder if I could use the same logic in my teaching. Is there a common sense approach to teaching? The education system in the U.S. gets criticized quite frequently and experts put forth a lot of new suggestions all the time. However, improvement seems elusive. So, for the past 2-3 weeks, I have been pondering what a “common sense approach” to teaching might look like.

Here are some of the ideas that I came up with. (If you have some additional common sense teaching ideas, let me know.)

--The teacher should know what he or she wants to accomplish. How do you decide what you need to do each day if you don’t know where you and your class are going? How do you evaluate whether you are making the progress you want if you are not sure what you want to see happen? Seems like common sense to me. So, as an exercise, write down in (let’s say) 20 words or less what you want to see your students gain from your classes in the fall. I think this is a great way to start every semester.

--Be careful that you are not simply teaching your students to memorize. There’s a big difference between understanding and memorization. As you look at your goal above, does it require anything more than memorization? In the past, occasionally, people would appear on television who were memory geniuses. They would have the entire New York City phone book memorized or the name of everyone in the audience. When I write a test, I always picture that person. If the memory genius can make too high of a grade on my test, I’m not happy with how I’ve written it. I’m not trying to teach memorization so why reward it. I need to be testing more understanding, asking questions that would leave the memory genius completely stumped.

--I never expect students to read my mind. Never. That’s a bad teaching strategy. I tell them exactly what I want from them every single day. There should be no guesswork. I give them very specific assignments and I make sure that they are each of a proper length. Not too long to discourage them but not so short that it doesn’t seem to have any substance.

--I never expect students to do work unless they will eventually (sooner rather than later) see the reason for that assignment. If I ask my students to read a 5 page article for Monday, then on Monday I will question them about that assignment. “In the article you read for today, what did WorldCom do wrong, why do you think they did it that way, and how should they have operated differently?” If an assignment is given but not mentioned later by the teacher, students have every reason to believe they wasted their time.

--If a student is given an assignment and it is not done properly, there should consequences. Students are gamblers. They are constantly weighing out what might happen if they don’t do a certain amount of work. If you ask students to read Chapter One and they don’t and you do nothing about it, then you can certainly expect them NOT to read Chapter Two. That will follow as night follows day. They have now been conditioned (by you) to ignore what you ask them to do.

--When you call on students in class, call on the poor ones the same number of times that you call on the good ones. If you consistently call on John twice in every class but call on Susan only once, everyone in class gets the signal (especially John and Susan). What that exact signal is will depend on you (and why you call on John more), but all of the students will quickly get the message. One of the greatest rewards of teaching is turning a poor student into a good one. That is so much harder to do if you are sending signals that you recognize that some students are better than others. For example, I have a tendency to ask harder questions to the better students and easier questions to the poorer students. That is one habit that I want to break. I’m subtly telling the poorer students that I don’t believe in them and their ability to become better students.

--Care enough about your students as human beings to actually listen to their answers. It is very easy to make a quick evaluation (“this person is totally lost”) and start thinking about the next question you are going to ask. The student talking is a human being and deserves your full attention as they try to piece together an answer to your question. If you listen carefully, you can actually hear the pattern of their thought process as they work through the answer. They are talking to you; you should care enough to listen.

Okay, I could probably list 25 more like these. They are all just plain common sense. There is nothing here that every teacher in America could not do starting this fall. However, I’ll bet if you follow these religiously, you would improve as a teacher. Maybe not much, but some. And I have always held that the secret to becoming a great teacher is a little improvement each and every semester. And, to make that improvement, you don’t need to follow some complicated new educational fad. I’m betting common sense will be enough.