Practical Pedagogy

For 285 years, five different artistic disciplines have all used a single instructional method. Few, if any, seem to have noticed this fact. All five methods are instances of the same type, rather than applications of any particular theory.

These methods have notable commonalities.

All were developed by experienced pedagogues through observation, trial & error and induction. They did not start primarily with broad, abstract theories, though theories did emerge from and alongside the teaching methods.

These innovators did not work alone. They worked within communities of experienced pedagogues sharing similar approaches. And these innovators all worked during periods of ferment, excitement, experimentation, and systematization.

For a clear example of the CAIM, we can start with the earliest one I have been able to identify: Johann Fuchs’ method of teaching counterpoint.

In Fuchs method, students write actual melodies: they’re not simply doing ‘exercise.’ Everything they write can be sung and played and appreciated as a melody. These melodies begin with a very small scope. Students write melodies of eight to a dozen or 15 notes obeying specific rules: only certain intervals are allowed; some intervals are forbidden; the melody must end with step-wise motion to a certain note, etc.

After experience composing melodies, studying, examining and discussing what makes a good melody, the students then compose secondary melodies that can be played at the same time. These also follow definite rules about intervals and motion--what is and is not allowed. The ideal is that all the melodies are really melodies, not just convenient bunches of notes.

These secondary melodies grow in number and complexity: first the ratio of notes is one-to-one, then one-to-two, etc. Earlier melodies are synchronized while later melodies are syncopated. The work starts simple and gets harder. Issues of harmony emerge from issues of melody. The two can be handled somewhat separately, but they also merge so that the game of composing becomes a sort of strategic juggling act, a back-and-forth balancing of options and combinations.

From the very beginning there is an emphasis on beauty and control. What is the rise and fall of a pleasing melody? What is a pleasing build-up and release of tension? Students learn from each others' work--and from actual historical examples. The gap between just-for-practice and actual musical works narrows.

This site represents a work-in-progress.

The topic is teaching, and the aim is to talk about teaching not in terms of abstract ideas about the brain or "instructional design" but rather as concrete actions teachers need to do to have a practical result.

The points are few.

What Teaching Is Not

Teaching is not the application of a theory: it is a practical activity with its own inner logic.

Teaching is not simply the communication of abstract ideas. Teaching must be oriented around actions: what the students must learn to do and what they must do to learn, and what the teacher must do to support that learning.

Anything not about these actions must be translated to be usable.

What Teaching Is Like

Teaching can be 'merely' effective, or it can be done expertly.

Practical arts like cooking and sewing provide fine analogies.

Games and sports also provide good analogies for teaching--because learning emerges from play, and games and sports are highly organized forms of play.

Practical thinking works exactly by such analogies--with the added caveat that practice tests analogies. If the practical activity fails, the analogy is faulty. That is how practice goes: learning by experience.

What Teaching Is

Teaching is a practical activity with real results.

Teaching is a form of helping: helping another to learn.

Learning is a form of behavior change, and so those who study behavior change have a lot to tell us.

So teaching is: a practical activity of helping others to change.

The rest goes on to define

what it means to be competent at teaching,

what the skills of teaching are, and to show

what mastery looks like.

The writing that supports these ideas comes from blog posts that have been re-purposed on this site to create a browsable version of the draft of what I hope becomes a book.

If a book has a table of contents and can be opened and read for what's interesting in it, this site aims to provide a similar experience on a different platform.

In the field of instrumental performance, the Suzuki Method provides another instance of the CAIM. The Suzuki method emerged for a number of reasons. Shin'ichi Suzuki objected to harsh methods of teaching children. He wanted a method that emphasized joy, as well as the building of character. He had learned German as an adult, and he tried to develop a method in which listening and repeating played a large role--as it does in language-learning.

The best way to teach about teaching is likely: by example. There are so many principles and theories that could be "applied." But is that really the best way to approach teaching? Not likely.

Teaching is a practical art. You must do it--not just think about it. And when it comes to practice, a good strong example is often quite effective.

Happily, we do not have to scrounge around to find some obscure example of great teaching. There are terrific examples in plain sight, although most people don't sort them into the category of "teaching."

I am talking about what I will call vernacular pedagogy. This is any presentation in any medium which explains rich and complex material very successfully. Two hallmarks of such success are: many people are drawn to the material, and the teaching has a large impact. Information really is passed on, people really do learn, and so vernacular pedagogy has real impact.

Public television is a treasure trove of vernacular pedagogy: Julia Child, Carl Sagan, and Ken Burns quickly leap to mind. Since two are on-screen performers and the third a documentarian, we can see that the vernacular pedagogue is not the same thing as, say, a writer or a director or a TV personality: it's not a job it's more of an avocation.

Classical music has its own explainer-demonstraters:

pianist Andras Schiff does lecture-demonstrations at the keyboard, and

Deryck Cooke recorded a terrific analysis of 'leitmotives' in Wagner's Ring Cycle, complete with musical examples played by none other than the Vienna Philharmonic.

But a single example of vernacular pedagogy suffices to present the hidden complexities of the form. I've picked Julia Child, because she's wildly pleasurable to watch and to talk about. Just as you could learn from her all day, you can talk about her all day.

Another hallmark of vernacular pedagogy is the combination of otherwise incompatible features. Think of a Julia Child show. It is:

practically purposeful,

richly layered,

easy to absorb yet

repays revisiting, it

often leads to a deeper engagement, and it is

deeply personal.

Practically purposeful. You feel you can do something afterwards you could not before. You are excited to try. You feel empowered, confident. (In learning theory terms, you feel efficacy--that Can-Do Feeling.)

Richly layered. There are many things going on, many topics, many kinds of information. Each is touched on lightly, deftly. It's not an obscure clue that leaves you lost: it's an essential string of related elements which is woven around another such string, so you're getting many things at once without ever being stumped.

Easy to absorb. You're conscious of learning, conscious of being immersed, conscious of absorbing something new, but you're never lost, puzzled, or frustrated. You know where you are, and you know where you are going.

Repays revisiting. It's not that we need to watch it more than once: it's that we want to. You make take a long break, you may think you know everything, but when you do return, you're surprised just how much is there.

Often leads to a deeper engagement. People often fondly remember Julia Child as their first encounter with more sophisticated cooking techniques. It's that moment when you go beyond throwing a piece of food in boiling water or a hot frying pan, when you go beyond fearing it will be burned or raw. You may go quite far beyond some of the recipes and techniques Julia introduced to you. But Julia will always have been a key turning point, the opening of a door.

Deeply personal. Not all teaching is. But great vernacular pedagogy is. Why should sharing knowledge, even very publicly, be so intimate?

I have noticed something with creative writing. (*Among my sidelines is teaching screenwriting.) If you approach creative writing in a certain way, if you start from the right place and work in the right way, some very personal stuff comes out in even the simplest writing tasks.

If you imagine a city, a vast network of places and the experiences you've had there, and you imagine running a simple errand, so much of your past and of the city may be attached to that simple route and task.

Knowledge is also a network, like a city and like memory too, and some expert guides know how to traverse their network of knowledge and know-how in such a way that a lot happens beyond the seemingly simple tasks set out.

In this way, a terrific vernacular pedagogue shares something very personal: personal it how it was acquired, personal in how it is organized, personal in how it is shared.

Why does vernacular pedagogy matter?

Today the liberal arts education is under fire. Many call for something that prepares young people for jobs and careers, rather than merely making them "well-rounded individuals" (which itself sounds pretty mechanical).

Reflecting on it in this way, vernacular pedagogy actually seems like a good model for some excellent things you'd expect from a liberal arts education. Vernacular pedagogy offers a stimulus to do something, begins a lifelong journey of revisiting some exciting and important issues, makes learning deeply personal, and begins a long task of becoming the kind of education that never ends.

More recently, the visual arts offers another example of the CAIM. Betty Edwards was an experienced artist and art teacher in Venice, California. She was committed to helping every single student draw realistically. She struggled long and hard over why she could draw realistically but it was so hard to explain to her students. She noticed that some students suddenly ‘got it,’ and she pondered why this was so. She came to the conclusion that the answer had something to do with the way the brain processes visual experience. She sought out and joined a group of scholars who believed that the right/left brain distinction was crucial to understanding perception. This work is now seen as rudimentary, if not misguided, but Edwards’ teaching methods work, even if the purported “explanation” of why the method works is no longer believed to hold water as a theory.

Edwards analyzed realistic drawing into component perceptual and mechanical skills. She constructed assignments that separated out and focused on these skills while still allowing students to produce real drawings. All Edwards’ assignments are drawings--not just assortments of lines or shadings or studies. All her assignments can be completed in a single sitting. Edwards’ workshops lead students through a whole series of assignments in a week or even a single (busy) day.

So what do these teaching methods have in common? What justifies labeling them all as a Common Arts Instructional Method?

First, the smallest unit is the whole task. There are no 'exercises,’ or if there are ‘exercises,’ they are brief and lead quickly to doing ‘real’ things. These methods ask the students to do real tasks with real results. You can show these results to others who are not trained in the discipline, and they can appreciate them as student work that is complete by itself. The satisfaction for the student is not negligible.

These tasks are the same task done by the rawest neophyte and the most mature practitioner. Beginning music students write melodies--and so do accomplished composers. Great painters and sculptors still make drawings. Great dancers still do pliés. Students sit at the feet of masters, but they all face the same challenges. This is both exalting and humbling.

The task can be done in a single sitting. In many cases, the task can be done many times in a single sitting. A ‘sitting’ is an indeterminate but important unit of time lasting from 20 or 30 minutes to 90 minutes or two hours. One might imagine that the duration of a lesson is determined by external forces--such as the scheduling of classrooms. But there seems to be some unit of time--which I’m calling a ‘sitting’ (although one might be dancing) during which attention can be focused and work accomplished, lessons internalized, in a satisfying way.

The tasks given in these methods are complex but integral. That is: there may be many dimensions or aspects--so the tasks are complex--but they are all firmly woven together. The dimensions can be pulled apart or discussed artificially, but some of the satisfaction seems to come from weaving them together in real time or slower: patiently bringing the dimensions together, moving backwards and forwards, developing a sense of control, an observation of repeated patterns. One melody is joined by another in a controlled way such that melody and harmonic interval play with and against one another.

A dancer carries herself from one movement to another in a sequence, controlling of energy and balance, handling rhythm and phrasing. An artist moves lines here and there, sketches, erases and re-sketches, creates positive and negative shapes, covers lines with shading, arranges elements within the bounding shape of the frame.

The tasks have clear minimal standards. It is not hard to spell out what is and is not an appropriate melody in counterpoint, or what a plié is, even if it is devlishly hard to make a lovely or graceful one.

In this kind of curriculum the tasks grow in scale and complexity: though there is always a smallest whole task, the tasks also grow to form larger and larger wholes. Problems of strategic control repeat themselves across different dimensions or scales. And different whole tasks cross-train the student for complementary skills.

So how does derive a new instance of the CAIM type? The use of the type-instance analogy has not been strongly developed yet, but a few questions need to be answered, and observation and trial-and-error cannot help but correct whatever initial mistakes the careful pedagogue makes.

What is the smallest whole task learners can complete in a single sitting? It must be an authentic task that experts and non-experts can recognize and evaulate.

What are its minimal criteria for correctness in performing this smallest whole task?

How can you guide learners the most quickly to the correct form? What types of scaffolding or support can be used?

What are the highest standards of excellence? How can we get learners to sense these early on? How do we focus learners’ attention on complex processes within small examples?

The word "hand" plays a role in many very common figures of speech.

Such expressions are useful or "handy."

They come easily to us: they're "ready-to-hand."

And yet their exact meanings and origins are obscure––probably exactly because they are so common.

The familiar distinction between "firsthand" and "secondhand" is important to law and to journalism.

Eyewitness testimony is "firsthand," and it's the gold standard for journalists.

"Secondhand" report is, in some legal situations, inadmissable, and much journalism is just that: a secondhand recounting of a firsthand observation.

A "thirdhand" account would be someone relaying a secondhand account––and so on.

To use an example, take: riding a roller coaster.

A firsthand experience is: riding the roller coaster.

A secondhand experience is: watching someone else ride the roller coaster.

A thirdhand experience is: hearing an account by the person who watched the person riding.

To be more abstract:

Firsthandedness means: experience.

Secondhandness means: observation.

Thirdhandness means: symbolic mediation, reducing experience and observation to a transmissible form.

So what has all this to do with learning––my recurring theme in these blog posts?

Much of higher learning is thirdhand. We read books that summarize knowledge. Often these books don't even include direct observation, and they may even summarize other books (which may summarize other books, and so on). You could say: we observe knowledge and talk about its features and how it's produced. We encounter knowledge as it's encoded in symbols.

While some see video lectures as 'revolutionary,' we are still talking about thirdhand experience: someone summarizing something someone else saw or did. Does it matter so much that it's watched on a smartphone on a bus?

Some college courses have more firsthand experience than others.

Science classes still have labs where the students do science themselves.

The study of literature always involves a firsthand experience of a poem or novel or play.

Some social science courses include direct observation and learning to be a semi-professional observer: a child development course may involve going to watch pre-school students.

And fine arts, when studied as a practice, must involve doing: you can't just read and write about painting; you must paint with your very own hands.

But many college courses simply involve encountering symbolic representations of facts and abstractions. It is this sense in which college students end up with "no real-world experience." Sometimes that's meant to be a damning claim, when it in fact misses the point. But from the point-of-view of building knowledge in all the possible ways we will need to build it, this kind of thirdhand learning is seriously deficient.

To read about poverty, see films about it, acquire facts and theories about it is completely unlike observing poverty with one's own eyes and ears, let alone being poor oneself. It's with this fact in mind that instructors have students do things like: volunteer at the local food pantry or soup kitchen, try to eat for a week on the same allowance as received under 'food stamps,' and the like.

You can download all the lectures you like, do online quizzes until your fingers bleed: you will never have the same involvement in the subject matter as experiencing it or seeing it for yourself.

(I don't think a film about the topic entirely counts, because it's still someone's constructed symbolic account. In a film, the form constructs meanings for you. By contrast, if you experience and observe for yourself it's incumbent on you to construct the meaning, and from a humanistic perspective, that's where the heart of the matter resides: in taking responsibility for ascribing meaning and discovering one's own agency in that act and process.)

You may object: but very important knowledge comes in books and other symbolic media. Fine and good. But who knows something significant about roller coasters?

The person who has read all the relevant information?

The person who watched one being ridden?

Or the person who has ridden the roller coaster herself?

It seems to me that: a complete, well-rounded education on roller coasters would involve some of each.

More broadly: not all learning in life comes from books and symbols; we also need to learn by doing and by observing. And we significantly short-change our students when we deprive them of practice in firsthand and secondhand learning.

A quick formula would then be a more complete education requires at least some of all three 'hands.'

Students should do things themselves: experience the subject matter firsthand.

Students should observe the phenomena under study as directly as possible: learn by secondhand observation, interviewing, etc.

Students should consume (but also produce) thirdhand accounts of the facts and knowledge they are venturing to acquire: learn by reading and writing thirdhand representations of the phenomena under consideration.

If we did this, students would become more deeply involved in the topic, while also learning techniques of observation that are often highly transferrable to new situations.

And we would then produce students more prepared to convert the raw material of experience and observation into reliable knowledge.

We know a lot about learning. Quite ironically, we know little about teaching.

Perhaps its wrong to think of teaching as some separate process––as something other than: facilitating learning.

The trouble is: what we know about learning is all theory. And as everyone knows: theory is not practice.

Theory is a set of abstractions. Physics has "gravity," and sociology has "social solidarity," and literature has "textuality." You can't point to gravity itself anywhere: you can only see it in action––and then only when you know what to look for.

And learning has "motivation" and "working memory" and "cognition" and "executive functions" and "agency" and "self-efficacy." If you know what all these aspects of learning, you 'just teach based on them.'

This is a lot like saying: learn all about color and pigments and perspective and then 'just paint a painting.' Or: 'just learn the laws of physics and then go split an atom.'

In this sense, teaching would just be: turning all the underlying elements of learning into something you can see––because you know what you are looking for (and at).

And yet: no one knows clearly and simply what that is. What is the "application" of all the ideas of learning?

Indeed, we the best procedure is probably to reverse the whole thing and to say that the whole issue of teaching can be reduced to the very gap between abstract theories and concrete actions: making ideas and abstractions concrete and perceptible and actionable through definite steps.

Yet what are these "definite steps"? We should have something on the side of teaching that corresponds to the Big Ideas of learning (motivation, working memory, executive functions, etc.)––and yet which is not abstract but rather a concrete procedure.

One such notion would be modes of instruction.

That is: there must be certain ways of teaching which are so basic and so elementary that they can be separated out like elements in chemistry. These would be the smallest possible ways of teaching, and I think it's possible to identify eight. (I'll leave out the word 'instruction' to characterize each, to avoid repetition.)

Direct or nominal: This is the most common, and it can be represented by the verb "to tell." The instructor thinks "I'll just tell them." The knowledge being aimed it is simply named. "The square of the hypoteneuse is equal to the sum of the other two sides of a right triangle."

Demonstrative: This is also very basic, although often ignored in favor of direct instruction. It's simply showing. With the triangle example, the instructor walks through the equation––even measures an actual physical triangle.

Indirect or analogical: This is the use of metaphor or allusion to get the point across. An allegorical tale could be invented personifying the sides of the triangles and giving their feelings, for instance.

Exploratory or experiential This is giving the learner something to do, without necessarily explaining either the result or the goal. Here the students would be given triangles and asked to measure and explore their properties. This kind of purely exploratory method had a fashion for a while but now is looked down upon.

Procedural or algorithmic: Here the learner gets a specific sequence of steps to follow. No mention need be made of the goal, and indeed, lots of bad instruction falls under this heading.

Goal-oriented: Here the learner is asked to achieve something specific. "Determine the relation between the two sides of a triangle joined in a right angle and the third side." No more guidance might be provided: just a goal.

Social or observational: Here the learner is asked to observer others doing something relevant. You could say: this is implied in all demonstrative instruction, in which case neither of the two is really elementary. But observing other learners or other aspects of the physical and social world seems so central to naturalistic learning, that it would be absurd to exclude it as a method.

Reflective: Here we ask the learners to recall and reflect on experiences. You could object that this requires an experiential or exploratory moment, but the experiences reflected on need not be a part of the instruction, so the process of reflecting does have some independent value.

These eight basic modes of instruction could be reduced to verbs or even sentences, depending on how the instruction was implemented––which is to say: who did what in relation to the verb. E.g.,:

tell,

show

imply,

explore,

walk through,

achieve,

watch,

reflect.

Or, for the teacher as the grammatical subject and the learners as the object:

I tell them.

I show them.

I imply.

They explore.

They go through the steps.

I set a goal which they achieve.

They watch others.

They reflect.

The methods change dramatically if the instructor is no longer the center. Indeed, inverting every method produces something dramatically different: the students tell or show the instructor; the instructor explores or watches or reflects. These would seem to be good instructions for how to make the teacher a learner, which is what a good teacher ought to be. And so the fact that changing the agent changes the impact does not say much about the validity of separating out the modes.

One very clear implication seems to be: each mode of instruction has a fatal weakness.

If you don't understand the terms of a direct explanation, you're out of luck.

Similarly, if the analogy makes no sense to you, the effectiveness is near zero.

You can show me something, and I can attend to the way you stand, rather than what you're doing.

Etc.

What this says to me is: effective teaching likely combines several of the basic modes of instruction. Indeed, telling usually gets followed by showing, then students going through steps, etc. But many practical teaching procedures skip entire modes of instruction (such as reflection), and yet we do not actually know which modes should be accompanied by which, nor in what order.

We could find out, though. A very nice research project would be a meta-analysis of studies of instructional methods. Researchers would code the methods studied to determine which modes of instruction were being used. And then the effectiveness of each method could be analyzed statistically in terms of the various modes being combined, as well as the combinations.

The fact is: we simply do not know (a) whether these modes of instruction really are primary, nor (b) which work best in which combination (let alone with which subject matter, which one might want to hold constant).

If these methods sound terribly concrete, that's exactly the point. Does one engage motivation better? Or another addresses issues in working memory? Are agency and self-efficacy supported better by this or that method? That is not the point.

Or rather: we could find all that out.

The point is: to make instruction something do-able and systematic and to know which techniques to use when and in what combination.

And then we would know more about teaching––which is something, as the poet said, "devoutly to be wished."

Many years ago, a very thoughtful man wrote about "two cultures." The man was C. P. Snow, a Cambridge intellectual, and the two cultures were: scientific and humanistic.

It was a very good idea, a very nice distinction, and it was very influential, and people still talk about it.

But Snow was talking about a divide within intellectual culture, and the most important divide we must come to grips with today is: between intellectuals and practical people. Students and 'experts' often demand that higher education be "practical," and intellectuals take offense, because it rubs them the wrong way to hear that what they have devoted their lives to is not valuable. (Wouldn't you feel the same way?)

So intellectuals focus on what they feel is lofty and valuable and important, and practical people worry about jobs and skills, making and selling things and delivering services––all things intellectuals also need to live. But a good rift makes people forget what they have in common, and that's what this rift between intellectuals and practical people does.

Intellectuals are concerned with ideas, and practical people do things. Yes, being concerned with ideas means doing things: writing and researching and lecturing––and teaching. It's not that "those who can't do teach," but rather: that those who teach do not perceive their professional doing's as teaching; they rather see it as a heap of ideas, facts, principles, theories, and other similar abstractions.

And therein lies the rub.

Ideas are abstract. Actions are concrete. "Doing things" aren't even the same as "actions," because words that name actions are mere descriptions. The words "baking a cake" name an action: they don't get any cake baked.

Those concerned most with ideas often favor them over practical concerns. There really is some substance to the image of the 'absent-minded professor': to intellectuals, many practical details are just not as interesting or meaningful as ideas. But many of the professionals who work with professors find ourselves more on the practical side of the divide. Professors appreciate our help getting things done, but when what we do extends into their idea-domain, things get tricky. And we instructional technologists and designers and ed tech folk experience this daily.

And so practical matters are hard to grasp intellectually exactly because they aren't ideas, and they aren't susceptible to many intellectual (which is to say: abstract) approaches.

Take the law of universal gravitation. It's not in this room, nor on the planet Mars. It's a law, not a thing. The law may govern things (matter, to be exact), but the law isn't itself matter––and it would be madness to think so.

And the same for "social solidarity": sociologists talk about it and measure it, but you can't hold it in your hand. Likewise "meaning" and "reason" and "textuality," and all kinds of other abstractions whose importance we can admit without wishing they were food or water or sunshine.

Actions, like other things, exist in time and space: this thing is to the right or left of that, and I put one foot down first and the other foot down next. Immanuel Kant constructed an astonishing theory about time and space––but reading it won't help you find your keys or walk without falling down, for both of those are doings and not ideas. The idea of walking is subtle and complex––have you ever read anything about kinesiology?––but actually walking is nothing when done right, everything when done wrong.

Yes, matter may be arranged to express and to show and to prove an idea: in letters and numbers and demonstrations and experiments. But those are things and actions subordinated to an idea and arranged beautifully to express that idea. And it is a very special skill to express the abstract in the concrete. Great artists do it. It would be ungrateful to ask ordinary people, even the most thoughtful intellectuals, to approach that level of skill. We have some such expectations, and we're often disappointed, but we also tend not to recognize how high our expectations have been.

Exactly part of becoming an intellectual is: learning to subordinate practical matters entirely to ideas. If you ever went to graduate school, even for a professional pursuit, you likely remember the wrenching process of learning the procedures and norms of your discipline. You only get the ideas by doing things in a very specific way: using words this way and not that, footnoting like this, researching like that.

It's like those scenes in the musical My Fair Lady (or the play Pygmalion from which the musical is derived) in which Eliza must learn to speak properly. Even those who went to college, however briefly, may remember the odd feeling of the persnickety finickiness of college professors, they way they seemed to rephrase our thoughts in slightly different words––oh but those little differences seemed to matter so much! It was like treading on eggshells.

So intellectuals teach. And they believe and feel that they're teaching abstract ideas. And so all the practical matters of teaching often seem just beneath them––and they are: in the sense that practical matters are of a completely different order from ideas.

And yet teaching and learning are completely practical. Teaching and learning take place in time and space. The first day of classes is September 14th. English 216 meets on LC 114 Mondays from 11 to noon. Your paper is due next Thursday in my mailbox by 5 pm.

And teaching at its basis is instructions: do this, then that, in this order. If you can't give clear instructions, you may teach well or poorly, but no one may show up to class. It's not that everything can be reduced to a set of procedures, but if I don't know how to write a paper, I can't show you what I've learned about Descartes.

Instructions and procedures, like so many things in education, are, in a very rich and profound sense, a platform for knowledge, not the knowledge itself––just as words are a platform for poetry, and poetry a platform for feelings and thoughts and experiences and reflections and things.

That's aesthetic: how things are arranged to point at once both towards and beyond themselves, to become gestures whose import we don't just think but also feel and sense in very powerful ways. At that far end of things, teaching is indeed an art: an art of doing and instructing and arranging actions and experiences.

But here and now, at the near end of things, teaching and learning are like, say, project management. And "like" is the key relation here, because practical matters are connected by relations of similitude, by analogy. Baking a chocolate cake is like baking a lemon cake. And baking a cake is like baking biscuits––but different in crucial ways. And baking biscuits is like baking cookies, but again different, etc.

Practical matters are concrete doing's, but they are ordered in relations of likeness, with typical and prototypical instances, and types emerging from the instances: a butter cake, an angel cake, a biscuit, a scone, a muffin.

In the domain of ideas, analogies are risky and suspect: they can work or fail, and much of the domain of logic arose very long ago to prevent analogies from going to far.

And that, in a sense, is how science and the humanities, logic and poetry, parted ways––so that a couple thousand years later C. P. Snow could write about the two cultures.

Today our leap across the divide is a trickier move: connecting abstract ideas and concrete actions. For we who work in education must take all our abstractions and carry them to those who need them: putting one foot in front of the other and hoping we can be graceful enough in ordinary things to get as close as we can to making helping others learn into something very near to art.

How To Cook An Egg.

Vernacular pedagogy is enjoyable popular teaching that takes place outside the classroom. It's part of everyday life, notably in the media, commonly in books, on TV, even on records.

This is not the kind of "training" we do at work or even in college to prepare formally for work.

Vernacular pedagogy is largely for pleasure, although we also know when we're doing it that we're growing, too. But the Big Trick of vernacular pedagogy is: it doesn't seem like work; it's not drudgery; it's actually fun.

Writing about this topic before, I mentioned (among others):

Julia Child

Ken Burns

Carl Sagan

These folks made learning exciting. They drove eyeballs to TV shows and to books. And they brought people to other places--restaurants, faraway countries, planetaria, museums, historic battlegrounds.

Wouldn't You Like To Know How Vernacular Pedagogy Works?

How do the pieces fit together in a terrific bit of teaching that large numbers of people enjoy without any special incentive or incitement--apart from the pleasure in learning and the promise of many kinds of benefit?

For one thing, vernacular pedagogy is often very practical and social. There's something you can do afterwards, and the learning connects you to others who care about the same stuff.

Learning to cook or sew may have a practical benefit. But when we learn to cook or sew, we usually get additional benefits and pleasures.

We take pride in our achievement.

We share our work with friends, neighbors, guests, colleagues, even strangers.

We take pleasure in reaching new heights, however humble.

And the same can be said when we visit a planetarium or a museum or historical battleground. We feel connected to others, to history, and we're out physically doing something we care about.

Teaching and training which promise only utility or earning a grade and not inherent pleasure will never beat the activity and community vernacular pedagogy bring to the table. More reasons for learning, more kinds of pleasure, more benefits, as well as social connections and reasons to leave the house: these will always be better than "so you can pass the course, so you can operate a drill-press, so you're qualified for job x."

Luckily, we can 'reverse-engineer' what popular teachers like Julia Child do. That's what I'll do here.

And I'll tell you right up front that two secrets of vernacular pedagogy are: let folks know what they will learn and smoothly combine different sorts of learning.

The first is technically called a learning objective. The second is a bit more involved.

Learnables.

In the theories of learning and designing learning, professionals separate out three kinds of things you can learn. Technically, they're often called "learning domains." But practically they're just different kinds of stuff you can learn. I like to call them "learnables"--kind of like "Lunchables."

In 1956, Benjamin Bloom suggested three such domains: cognitive, affective and psychomotor. We can be less fancy and call them:

knowing, valuing and doing; or

thinking, feeling and doing; or

what's, why's, and how's.

Combining, you could say there's:

what you might know,

why you might care, and

how you might do something.

In short, if you're gonna learn something, you can learn to:

talk about it, define it, recognize it, and the like;

care about it, value it, feel motivated by it; or

do it, practice it, apply it.

If you want to be philosophical, you could call these buckets:

cognitive,

practical and

moral.

The first bucket--cognitive stuff, stuff you can know or think about--has in it things like:

facts,

definitions,

principles, concepts and rules,

ways of solving problems,

strategies for figuring things out, etc.

The Big Thing you notice pretty quickly about vernacular pedagogy is: great popular 'teachers' mix the three kinds of learning very thoroughly and consistently.

It's not all the facts, definitions and rules--and no "how-to."

It's not strictly "do this first and this second and that third"--without understanding the underlying logic.

And it's not a sales pitch: it's not "this is great!" with no facts or how-to.

Already, you can see where higher education often fails its learners.

College courses usually focus mostly the first and the third: it's often All The Stuff You Need To Memorize, or All the Reasons You Should Care. The procedural aspect of "What do I do first, second and third?" is kind of left off. It's not "intellectual" enough.

Of course, colleges have lots of information to impart. But if you make knowledge purely abstract, it's harder to internalize: there's nothing I can do that cements what I think or how I care.

Watch Any of Julia Child's Old TV Shows.

Take the one on omelettes.

1. The very first shot of the show is Julia pouring the eggs into the pan. And after about 15 seconds of dexterous hand movements, she plops an omelette onto a plate. It's practically like a magic trick.

What a great, economical visual way to speak to the audience: 'this is what you'll be able to do after watching this show.'

It's a learning objective! But it's concrete, vivid and mouth-watering. (Did you ever have a college course where an image brought home to you so clearly what you would learn?)

2. Julia goes on to talk all about omelettes "the French way." She talks about how delicious they are, about how easy they are, about all the things you can do with them--build a light lunch around them, etc.

This is the "why" part: it's about valuing, caring, attitude. She is motivating you. Do you want to be able to make an omelette? Does it matter to you? Do you recognize the benefits?

Just about every show Julia seems to say "your friends will be so impressed," "it's very lovely," "people will ooh and ah," "it tastes delicious" and other similar things. She really wants you to care.

3. The rest of the show is the "how": here's how to do it. This goes step-by-step. It's a demonstration.

But if you watch closely, Julia does something cool.

She compresses a long process into a 30-minute show. She's pre-made the end result, or various steps along the way. She may have pre-cut or pre-measured some of the ingredients.

All of these tricks are familiar now: Julia pioneered these techniques which allow a live, continuous 'performance' to be more like a movie: a long period of time is compressed into a shorter 'running time.'

What's surprising is that many teachers don't do this. They start every demonstration from the very beginning and go through to the very end. They don't focus on the hard part first, nor start with the simplest example.

Going by Julia's example, you might show people how to do one part of a long procedure--but only the most interesting part, the part that bears demonstrating. Language instructors do this cleverly: when they offer a sentence with a blank, and the learner needs only to add that one word--conjugate the verb or whatever.

How-to is very easy to watch. It's actions.

She does this, she does that. It's sequential. It's a little story. And you can see the progress: it's very visual. She also assumes you're taking notes, but she also seems to assume that visual repetition will help you impress the actions on your memory.

There's likely a part of our brains that's activitated by hearing about or watching physical actions--probably because some part of our brain needs to 'give directions' to our bodies as we do things. You can feel this process very dramatically when learning a new physical skill--such as a new posture in yoga class. It can take time to figure out "wait, my hand goes where?" You have to watch the instructor, put a hand here, look at how others are doing it, look in the mirror, etc. It's challenging but involving.

4. Inside the step-by-step instructions, Julia adds in facts, principles and definitions--the cognitive "what's" (and also "why's").

She shows you which eggs to pick.

She might show how to check for freshness.

She shows you different pans you can use.

She explains why these pans will work and others won't.

She shows you how to season the pan with oil and salt, and she warns you not to wash or soak it.

All these involve principles.

Why is a fresher egg better?

What does "freshness" mean vis-a-vis eggs?

What's the chemical structure of an egg that makes a fresh one different from a stale one?

Etc.

5. And so problem-solving is woven in between the lines.

The famous part of this episode is where the omelette doesn't flip back into the pan and instead lands--plop!--on the stovetop. Julia bravely puts it more or less together, and then she shows you how to top it with tomato sauce and sour cream and cheese and put it under the broiler.

What's implicit is: different things can happen here; there are eventualities, and you need to be prepared for them.

She does something similar when she's teaching how to make mayonnaise or hollandaise sauce. Those sauces can curdle or fall apart, and there are tricks for getting them back together into a smooth sauce. So she tells how--and also explains the underlying principles (of emulsifiers, for instance).

Vernacular Pedagogy Is Not a Lecture.

Here's what Julia Child does not do.

She doesn't start with the history and defintions.

She doesn't explain all the theories and principles.

She doesn't short-change the benefits of what she's doing.

In short, Julia avoids entirely what a very good college lecturer would do routinely.

She does not make all the content cognitive--facts, principles, definitions, etc.

She does not explain her subject historically.

She does not start from theories and first principles.

While it is popular now to imagine that a video lecture on the internet would make learning better or easier, it really depends what's in that lecture. If it's just the history of the topic from Day One and every fact and principle and no reason for caring and no steps you can take, no social or physical activity or reward, then there is little reason to imagine learning will follow.

What Julia does do is a model for popular pedagogy. She blends why you should care, how to do something and what is really happening beneath the surface.

So if you really want people to get involved and excited by learning, steal a page from Julia Child's playbook. Give a clear target, and mix the three kinds of 'learnables.'

One key part of learning is: internalizing norms, criteria or standards.

If you cannot do something to a certain standard, there is little sense in which you can do that thing at all.

Some used to compare free verse to "playing tennis without a net."

We may not hold this low opinion of free verse: after all, if it scans, alliterates, etc., it may be 90% poetry, and that may be poetic enough.

Learning as part of education, is a part of the larger process of socialization. We have no problem thinking of socializing as internalizing norms and rules. But we sometimes lose our agility when thinking about how internalizing criteria happens in learning, let alone what kinds of criteria there are and what roles they play. As so often, the single word "criteria" blinds us to the variety that word hides.

In the interest of practical utility, I'd like to identify three kinds of criteria which I don't think are sufficiently differentiated. Each comes at a different moment in the learning process, is expressed in a different kind of language, has a different degree to which it is shared with others, and each plays a different role in the learning process.

Examples from prose-writing, bread-baking and cake-making may provide some assistance in clarifying these admittedly broad notions.

Minimal criteria are concrete. "You must be this tall to get on this ride." They can be expressed in declarative language. A full description may be rather detailed; but it is possible to give one. Minimal criteria are widely shared and shareable. And they are prerequisites to correct performances.

The ability to write a grammatically-correct sentence is a pre-requisite for many other activities. It is a minimal standard, a set of entry conditions. It may be complex, but it can be described exhaustively.

The longer the sentence, the longer the list of ways it can be grammatically defective. But beginning with a capital letter, having a subject and verb, the subject and verb agreeing, the words being spelled correctly––the compass is not vast.

For baking bread, kneading is a basic skill. If you can't knead the bread correctly, all the rising and baking is mostly for naught.

Similarly, to bake a cake, you must be able to keep butter chilled, cream sugar into it, probably whip egg whites until they form stiff peaks, etc.

Ideals are another kind of criteria. These are maximal criteria: they represent the highest performance a discipline, art or craft can reach. Their language seems declarative but is actually connotative: clarity, beauty, delicacy, grace are ideals for writing prose, creating art, baking a cake, and dancing, respectively.

The role of such ideals is both guiding and summative. They lead the learner forward, but they also summarize an understanding which must be achieved.

Saying a sentence is "clear" sounds simple enough: clear like glass. But what makes a sentence clear, and whether this sentence is more or less clear than that is a complex judgement. Once you've mastered it, it seems self-evident––which is why teachers have such a hard time teaching these high-level values: the language describing these values seems literal once the complex meanings are internalized; but it is anything but simple to those early in the learning process.

Ideals are public and shared, but not all publics overlap. Hence ideals are often contested. Some bakers believe bread is best when it's chewy and airy; others when soft and finely-textured. Likewise, when it comes to cakes, if you want to start an argument, talk about "crumb" and "lightness."

One of the things disciplines argue about is what their ideals are or mean. Different theories are not simply different in what they hold to be true: they are different in what they consider a theory should be and do. "Theory" is an ideal, and its definition is therefore often contested.

Terms referring to ideals need to be used throughout instruction, even though they're only understood gradually.

Finally, the fuzziest set of criteria are those we give ourselves. These are self-created rules-of-thumb. They encapsulate the learner's emerging understanding, and therefore I call these criteria "emergent." They are complex and simple at the same time. Their language is idiomatic: you may understand them, and I may not, but likely I get a strong feeling from them. It may be useful to share them, but they are not a common parlance. They are a by-product of the process of learning, rather than a pre-requisite or an end-point (as minimal criteria and maximal ideals are).

Bakers know when the batter "looks like thick latex paint" that they're in good territory––or in deep trouble.

Experienced breadmakers may recognize a certain smell as "yeasty" or "fruity" or "alcohol-y," and based on that they know just what to do.

Likewise, prose writers can tell you that they are done drafting when they find themselves polishing sentences excessively.

In many activiites, knowing when you're done, and how to push yourself towards being done, is not so much a matter of deadlines as it is of rules-of-thumb.

Learners can be encouraged to formulate their own emergent rules-of-thumb, and this seems to facilitate the learning process. For in fact, learning is not pure socialization: it's not simply internalizing others' rules. Learning always has a personal dimension. Even if learning is forced on you strictly in the most aggressive and regimented way, you will develop your own internal resistance to it, a sort of ridicule or gallows humor that you use to survive indoctrination––and to resist it.

These three kinds of learning criteria may be summarized in a table:

scope complexity language how widely shared role in learning minimal concrete declarative shared prerequisite maximal abstract connotative contested ideal, guiding emergent mixed idiomatic individual by-product

But then we've made just another set of vocabulary terms––which become disciplinary ideals, hence something to argue about.

Whereas what I really wanted to do was to say:

Put the minimal criteria first to help the learners succeed.

Bring out the disciplinary ideals at regular intervals, but don't expect them to be understood right off the bat.

Encourage the learners to create rules-of-thumb as they go.

Or: know how to knead, whether you like your bread chewy, and what to do when your dough smells like beer.

Recently I saw a blog post about how to "gamify" your classroom.

The suggestions ran from giving rewards for good answers to asking students to play learning games.

At first I thought: games aren't really gamification. The idea of gamification is to turn an entire activity into a game-like experience.

And for a moment I stopped there, where I often stop: this isn't really gamification; people don't understand the concept well.

But then I went a step further.

Actually, to gamify your classroom implies that the teacher should stop being a teacher and become instead a game desiger.

First of all, this suggests that becoming a game designer is the easiest thing in the world. Yet there are graduate programs in the subject, and many people fail to become game designers, and many games fail to find a wide audience, and all of these things suggest that designing games isn't even easy for game designers. So why, oh why, should teachers top being teachers and become half-baked game designers?

And yet this kind of appeal--stop teaching and start gamifying--is symptomatic of so much that is said about teaching. For some reason, we want teaching to be anything but teaching.

And no one says why.

What's wrong with teaching? Shouldn't teachers teach? Have we given up on teaching? On teachers teaching well? Do we no longer remember what teaching is or respect it? Have we lost the cultural memory of teaching?

Everywhere you turn in educational circles, teachers get this message: Forget about teaching––learn to do something else.

Become a test coach. There's no point in teaching, only helping your students pass a standardized test. You don't need to help students learn, only to pass the test. So forget about teaching: just become a test coach.

Become an expert in software. You need technology in the classroom. So go to this web site, and learn how to operate software. Learn how to build web sites. Learn how to teach your students to operate software and build web sites. Instead of teaching and learning, everybody should just use software and build web sites.

Become an iPad trainer. We'll buy all the students iPads. And then your job isn't to teach––it's just to help students use their iPads. The iPads apparently will do the teaching. The teacher's job is then just to wrangle the hardware and help the students use the apps.

Become an expert on learning theory, cognitive psychology, the science of the brain, theories of instruction. Then "just apply it." Because distilling large bodies of research and "applying" complex theories is just so easy. And there's apparently an infinite amount of time for teachers to spend with their noses in theories and research––since I suppose the software is grading the students' work on their iPads.

And now we have--

Become a game designer. Forget about teaching. Learn to design games disguised as courses and lessons.

Well, here's a wild suggestion.

Let's talk about teaching. Let's talk about what makes teaching good, what makes it effective and what makes it enjoyable, interesting, challenging and meaningful.

Let's have these conversations not only with teachers and experts but with our students as well. And with parents. And with those who work with us. And the whole community.

Let's identify elements of good teaching, elements of terrific teaching, elements of competent teaching. Let's talk about what doesn't work.

Let's help teachers improve on the good their doing and fix their real problems. Let's not replace the real challenges of teaching with an arbitrary but fashionable set of problems created by trying to ignore teaching.

Let's help teachers learn from other teachers––and from anyone who's a good role model.

Could it really be that easy? All these things sound so simple. But of course they're challenging. And they're already happening. Colleges have brown bag lunch sessions and all manner of events where teaching and learning are discussed.

But there are just as many presentations and in-service's at which obscure new methods are trotted out, and teachers are made to feel that they must master some incomprehensible new system or science in order just to do their jobs well.

I'm not saying there's no room for innovation or new ideas. I'm not saying theories and research have no part to play. I'm not saying technology plays no role. Or that it's not worth the time and effort to use the best and even the easiest tools that everyone enjoys using and incorporating those in a meaningful way in teaching and learning.

I'm just saying this.

We have some great teachers. They do their job very well. And even our just good-enough teachers know what they heck they're doing.

So please, can we try to avoid suggesting that teachers stop doing their jobs, what they know and what they're good at, and master something else.

Please let's have a little respect for teaching.

In my day job, teachers come to me. I help them use technology in their teaching. And in the process, I see many different, um, teaching styles. (We no longer believe in "learning styles," but maybe we can recycle the concept for teaching.)

I have learned to spot the committed and experienced pedagogue: what I call, "The Truly Terrific Teacher." How can you recognize the Truly Terrific Teacher? You may even be one yourself. (I apologize in advance to Jeff Foxworthy.)

You may be a Truly Terrific Teacher If...

1. ...you care, really care, about the learner.

There was on old saying: the most important thing is authenticity––and if you can fake that, you've got it made.

Truly Terrific Teachers care. It vibrates from every fiber of their being. They're all about the learner. They're curious about the learner. They want to know what the learner thinks and feels. They want to know how the learner is progressing. They want the learner to have a good experience.

When the Truly Terrific Teacher sees a learner fail, a part of her dies inside. It's not just the learner's failure, nor simply the teacher's; the failure is structural: something wasn't there, wasn't done well.

2. ...you have high standards––and you match them with high support.

"High standards plus high support." It's a well-known formula, but the reasoning bears repeating.

If you set high standards but you do not support the learner, she gets frustrated, feels betrayed and ultimately gives up.

If you do not challenge the learner, she's bored. Without a challenge, why bother? This is the problem with breaking everything down to such small-and-easy steps that no thinking is involved. Students know "busywork" when they see it. They can smell it. Tiny tasks without some larger issue or question are "busywork." No one likes that: not learners, and not teachers either.

3. ...you understand when not to help.

Me helping you is different from me doing the work for you.

This well known by folks in the helping professions. Psychotherapist and counsellors don't magically heal through the magic of cognitive re-framing and uncovering repressed memories; they help the client change by giving moral support, space for reflection, acknowledgment of feelings, and all those other "common factors" underlying of all forms of therapy. (This has been known for (some time)[http://www.modernpsychological.com/commonfactors.pdf].)

Many teachers fear helping the student. They believe: it's the student's job to learn, and it surely is. But if the learner does not know help is available, it's discouraging.

The best teachers I know are very clear: the student must try first.

The student must do work so the teacher can diagnose the issues.

The student may even be given the means to diagnose her own problems––to take on a task, correct the results herself, and identify the trouble spots.

Truly Terrific Teachers sometimes send students away when the student arrives having done nothing. "You have to start so I can help you." The Truly Terrific Teacher may help the student start smaller, may tailor a new, easier task to the learner's needs. But this kind of expert teacher knows that teaching is not injecting knowledge like filling in a Twinkie.

4. ...you plan, plan more and always plan strategically.

Truly Terrific Teachers are always looking at what they're doing and asking themselves questions.

Okay, I got them this far, but can I get them further?

Where do the learners have problems? Where do they get hung up? How can I help them over these stumbling blocks?

What can I do differently?

What might the students do differently?

Are the teaching materials the best they can be? I may like them, but do the students like them? Do the materials help more than they hinder?

Should I provide some more assistance? Or should the students find what they need and then share that information with me and their peers?

Planning for the TTT seems non-stop. She may be revising next year's syllabus even as this year is still going on. Or she may collect notes somewhere to later sit down and revise the course––the syllabus being that planning document which keeps the plan together in one place.

Over- and Under-Teaching.

What's the opposite of the Truly Terrific Teacher?

It's not a question of being bad. It's not a moral issue or a judgment. It's a question of not making the effort, or the right effort, effort directed towards something effective. You can change the air freshener in your car and shine the tires: it won't make you a better driver.

The opposite of the Truly Terrific Teacher is the Over-/Under- Teacher: doing too much, too little––or a bit of both.

The comparisons with the Truly Terrific Teacher are point-for-point contrasts.

You're an Under-Teacher if:

you never find out what the students already know;

you never find out who the students are;

you never ask the students what they need.

One-size fits all teaching is incurious and likely ineffective.

You're an Over-Teacher if:

you spend endless amounts of time with the students;

you answer all their questions, rewrite all their papers, and help them do all the homework.

you could be mistaken for a student's relative.

You may be an Over-/Under-Teacher if...

1. ...you believe that your obligation starts and ends with you giving the students information.

You show up.

You lecture.

You answer one or two questions.

And you leave.

It's the student's obligation to learn. (It surely is.)

You show up and deliver the goods. So what's the problem?

The problem is: just delivering information may or may not support learning. It depends on how the information is structured and what the learner needs.

2. ...you have high standards and no support. Or no clear standards, because what you teach is too complex to be oversimplified.

High standards are great. But students may not understand those standards. So just the standards alone are not enough.

And if your subject area is very complex and subtle, it's hard to construct standards. But basic standards can be useful even just as the starting point for a conversation.

3. ...you help so much that you do the students' work for them.

Are students in your office all the time?

Do you take the paper and pen or computer from their hand and show them?

It can be a very effective exercise to ask yourself: "How could I get them to do something to learn this without actually telling them the answer?" Hinting, it used to be called. It's really not a bad idea. If you gave the student a clear goal and lots of hints, that would be better than doing the work for her.

4. ...no one can tell what year it is based on your syllabus.

Have you been copying the same syllabus for the last ten years?

Is your syllabus a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy?

Do you still use White-Out to change a few dates–&ndashand nothing else?

You don't really change the way you teach, because the same number of students get A's, B's and C's each year––so why bother?

Because you could help your students learn better. That's why.

Some Simple Steps Towards Terrific Teaching.

Sometimes people don't teach so terrifically because they don't know what steps to take.

That is: if you don't teach others well, you may not be good at teaching yourself many things––including how to teach well.

It sounds a bit circular, but whatever shape it is, there are some simple concrete steps to take to improve one's results as a teacher.

Find out more about your students. Give a first assignment asking them their interest in the topic, any relevant prior experience. Find out what they liked and didn't about prior courses in your department––not to dig up dirt about colleagues, but to identify possible gaps in your students' knowledge or key misunderstandings about the discipline and departmental expectations.

Ask your students how things are going? Consider starting each class meeting by asking if the students had questions or problems. Could they find the reading? Was it hard to understand? Was it boring or interesting? Show some interest in what students do and don't enjoy. They may become honest with you and see you as an ally in having a good learning experience––which is not the same thing as

Whan a student performs poorly, consider asking yourself what additional support could have been provided. Consider even asking the student how she could have done better. Imagine that the number of students who earn A's, B's and C's are functions of something about the course: deadlines, reminders, previous assignments, triage that helps you find out what the learners' strengths and weaknesses are.

Try to make your standards as explicit as possible without being voluminous. Look at existing stronger and weaker papers and try to develop a holistic description of what those look like. Share those descriptions with the students. Try to build into the syllabus steps and actions students can take to target elements of those holistic descriptions. E.g., if a very good paper is unified, you might ask students to draft outlines, share them with peers and for each outline pick the one element which is the most weakly connected.

For areas where students have problems, invent some support mechanisms. If students don't format their bibliographies well, ask for one to be submitted early so you can give feedback. Or give examples of better and worse bibliographies, with praiseworthy points and faults clearly marked––as you would in handing back work. You may end up saving your own time (and red ink) by helping students avoid problems in advance. And this gives you more time to discuss the subject matter, rather than matters of form.

Emphasize the real-world importance of the tasks. Give a comparison to real work and point to the consequences of not understanding the subject matter. This helps avoid students seeing what they're doing as 'busywork.'

When students ask for help, consider asking them to bring something, however small. This can help the student know: you need something from them in order to help them. It must be a small task, or the student may become overwhelmed and fail to show up.

Help your students understand what effective studying is. After the midterm, ask your students to fill out a survey giving their midterm grade and how they studied. Let them know you'll be sharing their answers but not their names, so ask them not to put in any identifying information. Then sort the results by grade so students can see what A, B and C students do to prepare for an exam. For the final exam, compare the grades by student, and you should see an improvement for the students who earned lower scores on the midterm.

Revise your syllabus. Take notes each year on what doesn't go so well. Then before you teach the course again, drag those notes out and figure out things you might change on your syllabus: extra reading, more time for papers, time to make revisions, etc.

And remember what good learners know: Try something, try anything––but only one thing at a time.

Trends will be trends. They’re trends because everyone does them. Mindless imitation? Or a really good idea?

Of course, who wants to do something everyone else is doing? It’s like that Yogi Berra saying: “No one goes there any more––it’s too crowded.”

Gamification in education threatens to be another "trend" in the bad sense of that word.

When I was a kid––don’t ask when that was––there was a song called “Little Boxes.” It was a kind of humorous folk-protest song, and the target was the suburbs: those rows on rows of identical quickly-built houses.

Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky tacky, Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same. There’s a green one and a blue one And a pink one and a yellow one. And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky,And they all look just the same.

I often think of this song when I see one of those reality shows in which dull people rehab a perfectly nice old house to be a McMansion.

Every “social” web site now seems a bit like this.

Every user has a profile page.

You can post photos.

Users can send each other messages––because of course the one thing everyone wants in life is more email.

Blah blah blah.

At this point, you can download software that has all these same tools. But it’s just like the song. Little social sites made of ticky-tacky. And they all look just the same.

Gamification is the new suburban ticky-tacky house/social web site––but for learning.

Most people’s idea of “gamification” is shallow and trivial:

Every user has a profile page.

You earn points.

There’s a leader board.

Blah blah blah.

Like the song says: And they all look just the same.

But there are reasons to look to games as we plan learning and help others learn and plan learning. Games are important.

Playing is likely primordially human. Games, sports, contests and play are ancient. There is one whole conception of man not as a maker or thinker but as a creature who plays: homo ludens.

Games are motivating. People actually enjoy playing games. Different people enjoy different games. But almost everyone enjoys some game or other.

Games are learnable. This is often overlooked. If you couldn’t learn a game, you couldn’t play it. So a game itself is a learnable thing. And most games have some kind of pleasure in getting better at them.

So making an activity game-like can mean: making it engaging, motivating and learnable. And that seems good. But we need some notion of what’s involved in that.

If points and leader boards are not the key elements of games we should bring to learning, what are they?

There are five elements of games which seem fundamental and which bring clarity and order to game activities––and which we should consider using when we organize learning activities. They are largely spatial, though some are temporal.

Borders. Boundaries. Edges. A field of play. The space where the action is.

Games and sports involve some bounded space. Only what happens there truly matters.

You can’t play baseball from the locker room. You have to be on the field. You can’t play chess on your lap. You can play tennis on a table, but that’s a different sport, and it’s not just any table (though one could surely improvise).

Goals.

I mean: a physical place you have to get to to earn something or win. The end zone. Home base. In chess it’s where the king is.

The organizing role seems clear––as does the motivating power.

Field Markings.

In football, you know if you’ve moved the ball ten yards or not. And you know how far from the end zone you are.

This is likely more important than points. Points tell you where you stand, who’s ahead. But so do markers which let everyone measure progress.

Physical positions in a game do more than show a general progression: they have deep implications for what is happening and what is possible.

In baseball, being on first base is quite a bit different than being on third base. Different stakes. Different consequences. Different strategies.

Flows and Cycles. What gives what to whom when? How is the entire time of the play broken into segments and units?

Many games and sports have turns: your turn, my turn.

Innings. Sets. Games. Matches. Rounds. Time figures heavily in sport and play.

In baseball, the ball travels from pitcher to catcher, maybe to the bat, then to whomever, then to the player, who’s running to evade the trajectory of the ball towards him.

A relay race is all about flow: the baton’s hand-off.

Positions. Aka roles. Specialized jobs or functions.

The pitcher does something different than the catcher.

The king, queen and rook all move differently. They have different potentialities, different strengths and weaknesses.

(I’ve left out rules and strategy, because they’re abstract and conceptual, whereas the five elements I’ve listed are spatio-temporal. We already do too much to make learning abstract and conceptual; so the idea that teaching and learning happen concretely in space and time seems worth emphasizing as a counterweight.)

Learning isn’t just cramming stuff into your head. Nor is it simply being trained like a lab rat. Significant learning involves consciously changing your behavior: being able to observe, plan, control and select your actions with strategic purpose in order to achieve this result rather than that. If the learner doesn’t have these five elements, she likely can’t orient herself towards what she needs to do, nor act purposefully to achieve a specific result.

Borders. What separates chemistry from baking? Or alchemy? How are we having a discussion about literature––and not just chatting about life-in-general? What is the specificity of the activity which makes it a discipline?

Goals. It’s not just “What do I have to do to get an ‘A’?” We all make fun of that question, but that question points to a real concern.

What counts as success in this discipline? What kinds of performance do I have to give? What’s a better and worse one?

These are questions about the contents of the discipline––not just an external concern with grades.

Field Markings. Where am I? How am I doing?

Am I closer to the end of the course than the beginning?

Am I performing well or poorly?

Am I inches from achieving a good result? Or did I lose 20 yards and now need to move the ball 30?

Flows & Cycles. Where is the locus of control? Who initiates the learning?

When is the first paper due? Where do I turn things in? When do I get them back?

What are the units and modules? How often should I open the textbook?

Positions. Who does what? What am I responsible for?

Is the teacher a coach, mentor, and expert? Does she give feedback? Lecture and not grade? Grade and not lecture?

What are my responsibilities as a student?

If I’m part of a group, am I the editor? The project manager? The facilitator?

Of course, most of these game-like elements can be described using the jargon of learning theory.

The field of play is Bloom’s competence: you are basically doing it right, or you’re not. You can add or you can’t. You know your letters and numbers. It’s similar to prerequisite knowledge.

Goals are learning objectives. It’s what needs to be accomplished, under what conditions and to what standards.

Field markings are formative assessments: testing people and letting them know how they’re progressing.

Sociolinguists have concerned themselves with turn-taking in the classroom––who speaks when. Otherwise, questions about how long a class period should be and how often the course topics should change are sometimes seen as ‘merely’ practical concerns.

Positions don’t have an exact equivalence. But in psychotherapy there’s something called role preparation––which means ‘Are you ready to be a good patient?’ And in education, we get concerned about cognitive strategies, which means ‘Do you know how to study?’

But truly: is it better to explain something to people in terms that are clear, concrete and familiar? Or in terms of some obscure theories that most people don’t know too well?

The difference between trivial gamification and really learning from how games work is: the player of a game or sport can direct her efforts purposefully towards a successful performance. Learning involves steering and self-orientation, the continuous adjustment of a performance with respect to a standard which is being acquired.

By contrast, trivial gamification just adds bells and whistles. And that kind of ‘keeping up with trends’ could end up leaving us off the field of play entirely.

Try this thought experiment.

Picture yourself somewhere in your home or apartment: lying in bed at night, or sitting on the couch watching TV, or sitting at the table eating.

It's night.

Now suddenly, the lights go out. It's pitch black.

Right now, thinking of that situation, if you close your eyes, you can probably describe exactly what you would need to do.

Throw your legs to the left, find the floor, feel with your feet for your slippers, fumble on your left for your phone.

Fumble for the remote. Put it on the coffee table in front of you. Stand and walk slowly to the right, feeling your way between the coffee table and the couch.

Etc.

It might take a bit of concentration, but you can think of all that now. But how do you feel imagining yourself on the couch and the lights going out? How have you felt in actual circumstances when the lights went out?

Likely you feel and felt: stressed, panicked, even frightened.

Now I want to make a comparison.

You at home is your students before your class starts. They know where they are, what the world around them is like. They're at ease. But whether it's math, philosophy, sociology, chemistry, or whatever, you in the dark is your students upon encountering the complexities of your discipline for the first time.

That is: we tend to forget that every discipline is a tightly organized body of knowledge, and it's not obvious to outsiders. You are an insider.

You know what the commutative principle is, what a proposition is, what social solidarity is, what the periodic table of elements is, etc.

You know your way around. You know what's there. It's all inside you––like the layout of your home you would know in the dark and could narrate if you needed.

But all these concepts, ideas and principles are highly structured based on assumptions and methods that make up your discipline. To the outsider, they mean nothing. Worse than nothing: they're scary.

The step-by-step instructions we give students are like the inner voice that guides us in the dark and says "stand up and move to the right, but don't bump into the coffee table." Our students may be blindly following our instructions, because they don't really know the space in which they're navigating. They may just trust that if they follow the instructions, the countours of the room will eventually become clear.

Indeed, one successful intellectual remembers asking his undergraduate math professor to explain the idea behind a certain mathematical process. The professor said "don't worry about it––just follow the instructions." That student transferred to a different college.

The fear of the unknown is real. New information and ideas are unknown. And you must deal with this fear as a teacher––if you wish to succeed, that is.

So how do teachers do this? How do we bring the student from where she is to some new place?

Happily, there are some good examples of how people can be brought from what they already know to what they don't yet know. Some are some small and verbal, some are quite a bit larger and not merely verbal. But we can start with the smaller verbal analogies.

How do writers of sentences and paragraphs manage to bring the reader from what's familiar to something new, possibly strange, which the writer wants to introduce?

The same basic phenomenon has been viewed from two, nicely complementary angles.

Consider this simple element of the classic style in prose writing (spotlighted by Francis-Noel Thomas & Mark Turner): the twist. The writer repeats a common phrase, but turns it unexpectedly. Oscar Wilde was quite good at these.

"Her husband died, and her hair turned quite gold from grief."

The traditional image is someone's hair turning white from grief. One's hair only turns 'gold' (aka blond) upon being bleached or dyed. So the inference is: this widow wasn't grieving at all: she was quite a merry widow.

Another fine one is:

"I can resist anything––except temptation."

What, I ask you, is one supposed to resist if not temptation? Not to be able to resist temptation is not to be able to resist much at all.

Here the writer builds his meaning by changing something familiar. If you simply repeat what's already known, that's what Thomas and Turner call the plain style:

"When I was a child I spake as a child, but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

The plain style pretends to do nothing other than: to say what everyone knows, the assumption being that what is known by all is true.

The classic style, by contrast, allows the writer to express a meaning which is not familiar and traditional. And so the classic style emerges with the Enlightenment, in which individuals can create new knowledge by building on, criticizing or departing from what's already known.

What's good advice for addressing an audience of strangers is also good advice for teaching--as I've argued before.

Sadly, most professors almost never write for an audience of strangers: they write for professional colleagues. They write in what Thomas and Turner call the practical style: a discussion among professionals of how to solve a professional problem. This is almost meaningless to an outsider. Which is why most scholarship cannot be understood by the average intelligent lay reader, and why many terrific scholars cannot lecture terribly well: they're insiders who spend most of their professional lives debating with other insiders.

What in the classic style we might call "what's twisted" and "the twist" can also be identified as:

the familiar and the unfamiliar,

the old and the new,

or, in a more linguistic frame: topic and comment.

Another excellent writing guide suggests ordering your writing so that you start from the former and move to the latter: in sentences, paragraphs, sections, and whole essays. Compare the immediacy and impact of:

"Your car is on fire."

with:

"There's a fire burning right now––in your car."

It's easier to process the first sentence, because you know the topic first; whereas the second sentence has a weird effect of suprise and delay: you can't quite process that the important bit––that it's your car that's burning––comes at the end.

The rule-of-thumb is:

Start with the topic, then add the comment.

Start from what's known, and add the as-yet-unknown.

Start from the old and move to what's new.

These two pieces of writing advice, taken together, suggest that the introduction of new or unfamiliar information requires careful management. These experts on writing suggest strategies for managing the transition at the level of prose––right down to the level of the sentence.

So sentences can manage the movement from the familiar to the strange. And something very similar is needed for learning.

Learning means changing: a more or less conscious change in dispositions, habits, or abilities, as one common formulation runs. In teaching, you are asking your students to change.

You may be asking them to master entirely new skills or to change very old habits.

You may be asking them to criticize or give up on cherished beliefs and assumptions.

You may be asking them to shift from concrete to abstract thinking.

You are effectively (we are told) asking them to rewire their brains.

Like it or not, as teachers, we facilitate change. Change has a psychological and emotional dimension, and these things are intimate, and in public settings we tend to shy away from intimate matters. But we do this at our peril.

At some point those of us involved in teaching and learning must recognize the elements of the psychological processes of growth and change, and we must come to terms with the ways we have of managing and helping learners manage those processes.

Naturally, there are disciplines and frameworks for thinking about the personal, psychological, social and emotional dimensions of change.

Psychologists, social workers, counselors and other helping professionals have models and frameworks for how change happens and how to facilitate it.

Social scientists in a variety of fields concerned with changing behaviors––quitting drinking or drugging, eating differently to lower your cholesterol, and the like--have a transtheoretical model for the stages of change, and they even know that you talk to someone differently if he is ready to change or not ready to change.

And anthropologists consider rituals as mechanisms which help to manage how individuals change their role or status.

I've already written a little about some similarities between teaching and psychotherapy. But here I'd like to consider the last topic––rituals as symbolic structures which facilitate change. In many societys rituals help manage changes such as:

a young person becomes an adult;

a man and woman become husband and wife;

someone gets a new job--notably a leadership role.

This is the rite of passage. It's well-studied, and I won't rehearse many details here. You can look it up and make your own connections to learning. Suffice it to say that most cultures use symbols to manage changes in status, and these symbolic things called rituals also help organize the psychological experience of changing.

Some see folk tales as mirroring these rituals. Joseph Campbell's famous analysis of the "hero's journey" does just that. Campbell sees certain mythic narratives, folk tales and popular culture as symbolizing a specific ritual movement and its attendant psychological changes:

a violation of expected norms;

a disturbing movement from the familiar to the strange;

a reassuring guide who gives new skills, new tools;

a challenge, trial or test;

followed by a return in a new form, ready to take on new challenges, sometimes with a new status.

If learning really is a stressful experience which needs to be managed and faciliated, then each lecture, each class meeting, each course might take the shape of this kind of ritual or journey:

We take learners from where they are.

We rupture their world view with a paradox or an anomoly.

We give them the tools to make sense of something strange.

And

And they return to life different, their spirits enlarged, better prepared to meet a wider array of challenges.

In short, when we teach, we are helping people to grow. If we are not mindful of the contours of this journey, we will be poor guides. And if we are not aware of the journey's stresses, we will fail to take many all the way to the journey's end––which is where most really want and need to be.

At a certain level, we must begin to think of teaching as a cultural ritual or work done with symbols which helps learners to manage the psychological stress and disorientation of learning––which is a form of change.

It was once an insult to refer to mental health professionals as "witch doctors." But Jerome Frank suggested that belief played a key role in psychotherapy, and "expectancy effects" have now been accepted as part of psychotherapy's efficacy. And perhaps now we are ready to accept that how we approach teaching may have a beneficial effect on learning which goes beyond "cognition."

In higher education, professional teachers often see themselves as professional something-else's first. Professionalization is the social and psychological process by which people who earn money in the same way come to identify with their mode of making a living and to act in certain ways in order to protect and promote that group identity. It's not a bad thing. But as professors are professional x's, y's or z's––mathematicians or philosophers or sociologists––they get wrapped up in professional communication, and their ability to communicate to those non-experts called students suffers.

If we are to be a society that cares about learninge, professionals who teach must also see themselves as professional teachers––and therefore also to care deeply about the way we help learners manage the stress of becoming someone new.

Verbal models can point the way. So can rituals and stories. But eventually, we must understand better the broader symbolic mechanisms which help us to facilitate the enormously important personal growth called "learning."