Miners Need Cool Shoes | A Name For Professors ‘Cognitive Coaches’: One issue with college teaching is that professors regard themselves as professing—proclaiming what they know and believe. According to Jose Bowen, president of Goucher College, this is not how good teaching works.
He contends that the best teachers have more in common with fitness instructors. They inspire and guide their students to achieve their objectives.
Miners Need Cool Shoes | A Name For Professors ‘Cognitive Coaches’
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Bowen coined the term “teaching naked” years ago to describe teaching without the use of technology such as PowerPoint. His most recent book, “Teaching Naked Techniques.
A Practical Guide for Designing Better Classes,” expands on his arguments and provides practical advice for instructors who want to reconsider how they design their classes.
Bowen recently spoke with EdSurge in his office at the liberal arts college just outside of Baltimore, where he argue that improving college teaching is critical to improving the country’s political climate. For clarity, the conversation has been edited and condensed.
What Bowen Wants To Say
I, too, am a member of the oddball club as a faculty member. I enjoyed school so much that I’m still here. That’s not common. The majority of students want to graduate, leave, and never return. This isn’t their favourite spot.
Because we’ve discovered that teaching is primarily about motivation, this is significant because, for most faculty, motivation was not the primary issue.
We motivate, we does the extra reading, we understood, and we were enthusiastic about Foucault, saying, “Oh my god, I always want to read this.
” This is incredible.” We came to class prepared, and we enjoyed participating. We were excellent students. The majority of us.
But now we are in this whole paradigm shift from teaching to learning, which was the start of a revolution that has everything to do with the brain—with cognition and behavioural science. From now know a lot more about how the brain works and how learning occurs.
According To Him What Teaching Is
The ability for breaking things down into steps is essential for great teaching. You’re an expert, you’ve put everything together, but most people need practise with step one, then step two, and then a little bit of step three.
The irony is that the only people who are really good at this are video game designers. They excel at breaking things down into problems. That place they refer to as “pleasantly frustrating.” If something is too difficult, you give up.
When something is too simple, you give up. The main point is to find the right balance, and the problem is that the key is different for everyone.
The best you can do in a classroom is teach to the middle. A video game can be both enjoyable and frustrating for everyone at the same time.
That is extremely difficult for us to do in a classroom of even five students because they are all very different people.
The new book is about approaching teaching as a design problem. People who are not like us are the ones for whom we are designing.
But What’s The Harm In Incorporating Technology Into The Classroom?
For starters, people do not multitask. We now put for resting the myth that people can shop on Facebook while also listening to your lecture and taking good notes. The maximum distractions there are in class, the more difficult it is for students to concentrate and learn.
However, the other argument is that classroom instruction will always be more expensive. It will simply cost more to bring people together and drive to campus, park, and do all of that.
So, if all I am going to do is replicate something I could do just as well online, no one will pay the premium we charge for online classes.
As with any operation or organisation, I want to maximise the value of the most expensive item. Face-to-face classroom time is the most expensive. It is without a doubt the expensive thing we do.
During that time, I should prioritise the activities that are most valuable, as well as those that cannot replicate elsewhere.
It’s the same thing when you goes for a meeting and someone reads his PowerPoint presentation.
Especially if you’ve travel across the country to a convention where they’ve gathered all these people you’d like to speak with—and they line you up in a room and read their PowerPoint.
Is It Correct To Say That Our ‘Smart Classroom’ Is Also Not Smart?
It’s also not wise. The ability for changing your mind is a sign of intelligence. The ability to change one’s mind is, in my opinion, the most valuable aspect of education.
Yes, there is content, but in keeping with the principle that “the one who does the work does the learning,” I can’t force it on you.
You’ll have to figure out how to learn content on your own, which you can do at home. What you can learn in my class is how to change your mind.
Without getting too political, the internet has made available a plethora of alternative facts. There are plethora of other ways to look at the world—and, to be honest, a plethora of garbage.
The need to be discerning, analytical, and self-aware enough to say, “That’s not really causal; that’s a correlation.” That is not a true statement.
” That has increased in value. At the same time that the value of professing has decreased. I will argue that, like the fitness coach, we should stop referring to our teachers as professors and instead refer to them as cognitive coaches.
As an undergraduate college, our goal should be to transform students into voracious, self-regulated learners capable of learning content on their own.
We have failed if you graduate from college and are unable to learn new material on your own. It’s a bad sign if you need me.
However, Lecture Capture is a big business. It’s pretty common these days.
Yes, but it also gives the impression of doing something new, innovative, and high-tech without actually doing it. The truth is that video capture improves learning in a lecture class in a small way.
If I have a lecture class and videotape all of the lectures, students can now skip class and watch the video and listen to the same parts over and over.
In a live class, the one thing I can’t do is press the rewind button and say, “Say that again.” So there is some incremental benefit to learning from making a video of your lectures.
To me, video capture is a half-measure that truly represents the worst of both worlds, but I will admit that it does provide some small incremental improvement over simply lecturing and looking at your shoes.
Is Failure Of College Teaching Contributes For Current Political Climate?
I believe that empathy for those who disagree with you is critical. It’s also about persuading someone else to change their mind.
If I want to persuade someone to change their mind, I don’t start by telling them, “You’re wrong.” I begin by saying, “Explain to me why you believe what you believe.
” It’s almost like teaching if I really listen and understand your motivation. If the goal of education is to change people’s minds, then all of these methods will help to heal our country. It’s all the same.
What matters to your students is the starting point for good teaching. It concludes with what is important to me.
In fact, I would argue that the graduation system is perverse. We measure butt time, how long you sat on your tookus, and if you complete it in 120 hours, you get a degree. We maintain a constant time and a variable learning.
What If We Reversed So That Learning Is Constant While Time Is Variable?
You may take longer than I do, but you can graduate when you can change your mind—when you can hold two ideas in your mind at the same time without having to choose one.
Those are the mental abilities required to become a citizen, and you can stay here for as long as you want until you have them. We’re not going to let you go until you can do that.
That could be a very different society and country than the one we live in now.
How Did You Become The President Of A College?
I’m not sure. I play the piano as a musician, so I spent a large part of my career listen for other people and making them sound better.
The trick to being the band’s pianist is that there is nothing you can do to make the drummer go faster. The drummer will do whatever he wants.
The drummer is too loud if he is too loud. You can hire a new drummer, but I don’t have the authority to tell you, “You must play softer, you must play faster,” so you can up the tempo a little. You can do things from your seat in the band to try to make it sound a little better.
My role here is to use the power of persuasion. You know how they say being a college president is like being in charge of a cemetery?
“You’ve gotten over a lot of people, but no one is listening.” You don’t have as much power as people believe. My job is to listen to everyone else and assist them in sounding better.
I accomplish this by slapping a chord here and there and seeing what happens. In some ways, I perform a similar creative function.
That aspect of the job is appealing to me. The three-hour meetings on deferred maintenance are less enjoyable, but it’s the same thing when you’re in charge of a band.
You have to go make sure the checks are paid, the taxes are paid, and all that sort of thing. It’s a little unusual, but I approach the job in the same way every time.
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