cognitive vs emotional tension in the classroom: encourage the former, diffuse the latter

I was re-reading some notes I made during the 2016 Festival of Teaching at the University of Alberta and noted that I heard a number of excellent faculty discuss what drives their teaching and how they developed themselves as teachers. One interesting issue that came up is whether or not it is good to either foster tension in the classroom or dissolve/dismiss tension in the classroom. After thinking about it, I think there are actually two issues going on here. One faculty member who incorporates the development of tension and seeks it out in order to cultivate it in his classroom I believe was referring to cognitive tension; that is, enabling students to first see and then evaluate the tension within a dichotomy or paradox. This particular faculty member, Jérôme Melançon works hard to enable students to think and analyze cognitive tension.

The other was looking to diffuse affective tension in the classroom. - this is emotional tension. This is the tension that exists for students when they are unsure whether they are up to the task of the expectations of the course and instructor. Or the tension that materializes when students are intimidated by the instructor or feel unsure about where they stand in relation to the rest of the students in the class. This is the kind of tension that as instructors we try to diffuse when we attempt to create a safe classroom environment.

On the other hand, having students constructively evaluate and consider the tension that is present between their existing mental models and the new knowledge that confronts them in the current course is to be cultivated. This is what the keynote speaker, Ken Bain was explaining that the best college teachers enable students to integrate new learning into their existing knowledge structure (deep learning) rather than simply wrapping the new knowledge around students existing mental models. Sometimes this requires students to break down and remake, from the bottom-up, their worldview in order to integrate new knowledge. When this happens, education becomes a transformative experience because students have been enabled by their learning environment to re-consider how they understood the world to be and as a result see the world with new eyes as a result of a new integrated and thus more robust knowledge structure.

teaching naked: the flat classroom and global competition

In preparation for Dr Bowen's keynote at our Festival of Teaching and Learning this year, I have been reading his book Teaching Naked. I'll be posting my reading notes to my blog a couple of times a week for the month of April. By the time of his keynote, I should have read and blogged on all eleven chapters.

This is an interesting book. The first chapter explains how online learning threatens to make traditional liberal arts colleges obsolete because information and lectures are freely available online. Of course, this assumes that education is simply information transfer. Dr Bowen argues, however, that education must include interpersonal skills and critical thinking: skills that are not so easily learned online. So he makes the case to use educational technologies to leverage content coverage out of the classroom and online in order to release time inside the classroom to engage with the course material by learning how to apply and communicate it.

Bowen makes the analogy that online learning is revolutionizing education similar to how Japanese car manufacturers revolutionized the car market by producing better quality for a cheaper price. GM lost massive market share because they were unable or unwilling to change their product and how it was produced. Is the same thing going to happen to bricks and mortar colleges? Bowen thinks it will unless we focus on the advantages inherent in face to face learning when content is moved online outside of class time.

My issue with this is that students still want to have content in class rather than online. Many of my courses are taught using Team-Based Learning as the instructional strategy. I regularly receive student comments on my student evaluations of teaching complaining that they had to learn the material themselves and that if they were going to have to learn that way then they might as well take a cheaper online course. So is the problem mine in that I have not taught students what true mastery of a discipline is? Or is it that their learning curve is too great for the first contact I give them in the textbook? More likely many students do not understand that learning ultimately requires that students learn it themselves. Teaching is guiding students to do the learning.

My first-year course went ok last year when I switched to giving students an overview lecture the class before their reading quiz. My second-year course was less successful I think because I did that with less consistency. Also, I wonder if the 2nd-year textbook I choose was at too high a level for students? Effectively flipping the classroom, which is basically what Bowen is arguing for, requires careful consideration of what to expect students will be able to master on their own before discussing and working with the material in class. Expecting too much of student first contact will cause needless frustration. Expecting too little results in students not appropriately appreciating what they need to learn in class. A successful flip really does require the Goldilocks touch.

So, I think Bowen is correct in his assessment of the place of face-to-face teaching and the role that online technologies can play in freeing up time to engage students in deeper learning. I look forward to reading subsequent chapters which may address how to successfully do this given that this is a  counter-cultural approach to learning for most students.

Resources

Bowen, J. A. (2012). The flat classroom and global competition. In Teaching naked: How moving technology out of your classroom will improve student learning, Chapter 1. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, an imprint of Wiley. p 3-25.

Smith, C. V, & Cardaciotto, L. (2011). Is active learning like broccoli? Student perceptions of active learning in large lecture classes. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching & Learning, 11(1), 53–61.

Spence, L. (2004). “The professor made us do it ourselves.” The Teaching Professor, 18(4), 6.

Van Sickle, J. R. (2016). Discrepancies between student perception and achievement of learning outcomes in a flipped classroom. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(2), 29–38.

Weimer, M. (2014, September 10). “She didn’t teach. We had to learn it ourselves.” Faculty Focus - The Teaching Professor Blog.