Dave’s Educational Blog

It’s been both a humbling and exciting prospect to return to the face to face classroom. I’m teaching two versions of the same course ‘Digital Technology and Social Media’ for the faculty of education at the University of Windsor. It was a last minute offer, and I saw it as a great way to get my mind around the new LMS that we have at the university. That was my overt reason. Also… I just really wanted to be back in the classroom.

My students are first year education students from two different programs. The age range is reasonably broad, but I would suggest that the majority of them are early career. I have a few students who are more ‘mid-career’ with some teaching experience, but the course is not designed with any previous teaching experience expected.

The activity from this week was originally stolen from Dr. Bonnie Stewart. The article I used was sent to me by Lawrie Phipps. I can’t imagine that there are many ideas that I use in the classroom that I actually made up, but in this case I remember where both the content and the approach came from, giving me the opportunity to give credit where its due.

I’ve used the approach before in a number of contexts. It’s not a terribly complex process. Take an article, break it into pieces, give each piece to a group of students and get them to report back on what they’re reading.

Why this approach

I’ve been in a number of contexts with students and faculty where it has become abundantly clear that students have not had many opportunities to do deep, opinion based responses to readings. Looked at through a faculty lens, ‘students just don’t read what they are assigned’. They are often given LOTS of readings or asked to do ‘summaries’ of readings… but rarely, it seems, given the opportunity to think about one small piece with time to give a response. It’s also a response to which I apply my own context as the facilitator. So each group has a section of the work and is given, say, half an hour to read that section and come up with a perspective on the piece.

Students in both classes responded very positively to the approach. I overheard a number of ‘why have I never done this before?’ and ‘this is the first time I’ve ever actually read one of these things’. We’re those things said so I would overhear? Maybe. Fact remains that they did the reading, and the groups reported back on it. They also seemed to grasp a number of the concepts in ways that I hoped they might. They also took a few of them out of context, which is maybe just as useful in the way it spurred discussion.

What I actually did

1. I Created a slide deck in google slides that had the article title and link and then a slide each for each of the 7 sections.
2. I duplicated the slides so that I had the option of smalls groups or large groups. (i went with groups of 2 or 3 and did the whole article twice)
3. In the class I introduced, broadly speaking, some of the concepts that in the article. I did a bit of early deconstruction of commonly held beliefs that I thought would be useful to setup the content of the article, but didn’t talk about the article directly.  
4. I explained a ‘group read’ to the class
5. I walked around the class and assigned students to a particular slide. “Jim and Jane, you guys are slide 3. (slide 3 explains what part of the article they need to read)
6. I had to confirm (several times) that their responses were not being graded and that they were not, in actually, meant to ‘just do a summary’ but rather have a response.
7. They took about 25 minutes to get through their article section and to write up a response in their own slide
8. We took another 25 or so minutes to go around the room and listen to people talk about their response to their section of the article. I tried to engage with each group and occasionally included other groups in that discussion.

So. Takes about an hour. Students do an ungraded, deep dive into an important article in the field and, hopefully, come out the other side with some new ideas or, at least, a better understanding of their existing perspectives.

What did I choose the Barbara Fister article?

This article introduces many of the concepts that I’m hoping to cover in the first term of the course. It takes on the way we ask questions, integrates it with the way we do assignments in universities, runs through the impact of algorithms and talks about some of the things that the students can do about it. Its central focus on uncertainty matches my own research, at the moment, and allows me to have something external to confirm that I’m not just making things up.

The article is also approachable AND written in an academic style I’d love for the students to emulate. It’s the kind of writing I’d love for them to aspire to.

Outcomes?

I got a lot of what I was hoping for from this activity. We had some talk about how google’s algorithms control how we search for things and how we make truth, which is going to be important for future assignments. We started to talk about how task based much of their education has been and how the digital can, if you’re not careful, lead you further down that ‘task based learning’ approach. We also teased out some of the balance between ‘believing experts’ and ‘having your own opinion’ which I feel is going to be a theme that goes on for the term.

Notes for improvement

I definitely should have taken more time to talk about what a good response looks like. It would have been perfect if i’d said “and this kind of response is what I want you to do in your discussion forums” which is the activity they had to do for homework. Thought of that right after class. smh.

I started to lose focus on the last couple of slides. I struggle to stay in those things for a long time. Just need to do a better job preparing myself so that i can be as interested in the last comment as the first.

For you long suffering readers of this blog (this is year 17) you know that my blog is often just where I keep my notes. This one is going to be my ‘working with dave’ notes for new student employees.

I have been fortunate to work with a fair number of excellent students on a number of different projects over the years. At UPEI I worked with the student union for a number of years to introduce some basic project planning and management. I led New Student Orientation for a couple of years, and had some students working for me full in a number of previous roles. In the last two years (’cause Covid) that number has shot through the roof as I’ve had about 80 CoOp students working with me in the Office of Open Learning.

It’s an interesting group to work with. I’ve only got them for four months and, for many of them, this is the first job where they are expected to do things beyond simply repeating a pattern they’ve been given. This term I have three students, two of them are returning from previous CoOp terms. It means that instead of allowing the ‘this is how we do stuff’ to come naturally through conversations, I’m going to do some one on one training with the new students to avoid forcing the returning students to hear all my introductory advice again. In preparation for that, I thought I’d jot down some notes.

Would love some feedback on this so I can turn it into a long term document.

Choosing to be interested

One of the challenges for CoOp students who are working with us in the department, is that they would not have (with a few exceptions) ever have imagined working in education. They are predominantly engineering students who have been unable to find in-field CoOp placements because of the pandemic. Many students (and not just engineers) have been sold the fantasy that they can go to school to get a job that is going to be easy to love.

I mean, that can happen, I guess. But it probably wont. Liking the work you do is mostly about mindset. It’s something I was fortunate to learn in my house when I grew up. My mother can have fun peeling apples. Or raking the lawn. She turns things into a game for herself (and others), tries to get better at it. Tries to do it more efficiently. That mindset is a critical one to develop for people to live happy lives. Most of us have to work. Most of us will never have jobs that are ‘fun all the time’. Learning to find things to like in your job is critical. Even if that thing you like is playing cards at lunch with coworkers (I learned to play 5-way cribbage working at a lead-silver refinery)

I approach this in a number of ways. I try to bring a positivity and enthusiasm to our staff meetings. Try to model it. More importantly, I talk to students about finding a project during the term that they can invest in. Something that they can find interesting that they are responsible for. That they can take pride in doing well.

You need to choose to be interested.

(but not all tasks are going to be interesting)

Being prepared

Such an easy thing to do. Such an obvious oversight if you don’t do it. If someone says “read this over” then read it. Yes. But read it to the point that you have an opinion about it. Come to our meetings with thoughts about the work that you’ve been given.

You could even read around it. A 2 minute google search where you’ve looked at what other people have done or checked the meaning of an industry term can make all the difference to you enjoying the next meeting.

Be prepared

(it doesn’t have to be a big thing. Just think about the work BEFORE the meeting)

Handling multiple tasks

I have consistently seen students struggle managing multiple tasks. If I forget (early on in the term) to say “hey, when i give you a new thing to do it doesn’t mean you stop doing the other one” I will have at least one project totally fall off the radar. Students have had their lives jammed into 60 minute sections (classes) for basically all of their lives. They are accustomed to being TOLD when to work on things, and when to change tasks.

This is super easy to fix. You just have to say “look, segment out your day so you can keep working on different projects.”

Be conscious in managing your work day.

(this might take a while to get used to)

Learning to prioritize

“Wasn’t it obvious that this was more important? The VP asked for this!”

This is something I once found coming out of my mouth before I stopped and realized that, obviously, if my employee didn’t understand the priorities, it’s because I never explained them. A big part of working with student employees is to pass along these cultural norms, but you need to say them out loud. These are very different based on cultural backgrounds.

I like to think of it in terms of ‘right now’, ‘next 24 hours’ or ‘next two weeks’. YMMV. But a big part of the job is to get students thinking about how they are prioritizing their multiple projects. Talking it through… “hey, i know you’re working on three things right now, how have you got them mapped out?” really helps.

Some things are going to be more important than others

(You don’t have to do everything at once, you just have to keep track)

Managing up

This might be the most important piece. We often hire students to do projects that we don’t want to do. We also hire them to do things we don’t necessarily know HOW to do. So many students end up working for people with very little management experience or, worse, for people who think management is some kind of guessing game where they say ‘go do stuff’ with some expectation that students know what’s hidden in your brain.

I talk to my students about how to manage me. I can get a little scattered, so I tell them it’s perfectly ok to remind me that I said I would send them something or to answer their questions. You can ask me questions about what I’m asking you to do, but I’d like it if you read everything first and get a sense of what’s happening before you ask.

That’s the way I like to work. But one of the biggest jobs of any employee is to figure out how your boss ticks. I mean, some of them are just jerks, BUT we all have to work. Learning to manage your boss in a way that allows you to find out what success looks like is going to make you happier and make your boss happier.

You need to manage your boss, as much as they need to manage you

(figure out what success looks like, it’s almost never obvious)

The project charter

I love me a project charter. It’s just a document that lays out what a project is and keeps track of high level issues. The beauty of your average project charter is it gives you a place to put decisions, to clarify outcomes and timelines and to keep track of risks and scope creep.

It becomes the official record of the project and gives you something to go back to. To make sure everyone’s on the same page. I use various versions of this one, which you are free to steal.

Filling out a project charter is also a great way to frame your questions for your boss (see managing up). “hey i was just going through my notes and realized I don’t think you ever told me when you needed this finished”

Keep track of what you’ve been told to do

(and everything else that’s been said about your project)

Dealing with uncertainty

This is the hardest. When I ask a student to do something or I ask them for their opinion, they almost always assume that I already know the answer. 15 years of school has told them that it’s what adults do. They ask questions to test you.

It takes a lot of convincing from me to get students to realize that when I ask them a questions it’s because I DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER. It’s one of the things that slows down the work the most. Students think they are trying to figure out what I’m withholding and I’m waiting for the work to get done. It’s bad for everybody.

There is not a ‘right way’ to do most things. There are local customs at different places of employment that you need to follow, but a lot of the time you just have to make choices AND learn to be ok with being wrong sometimes. It can take a while before a student gets their mind around that. It requires patience.

Face uncertainty, make decisions

(just not decisions that can get you into too much trouble 🙂 )

Learning to be wrong and to fix it

Today I showed the edit that my own supervisor did on a grant application I wrote. It was GLOWING it had so many edits. Students have been trained to believe that they get one chance to submit something and that if there’s anything ‘wrong’ with it, that they have failed somehow.

Real life is mostly not like that. You need to get used to the fact that your supervisor is going to ask you to change things… sometimes in ways that you wont like. You can certainly talk about why you made those decisions, but being open to critique is a necessity.

Be open to critique

(just bring it back better next time)

Talk about what you don’t know

This is a touchy one. I want students to tell me when they don’t know how to do something, but I also want them to try and figure it out. It’s a delicate balance. If you ask me a simple question you could have easily found the answer to, I’m just going to send you a lmgtfy. So, as a student, you need to try something first. Asking questions without trying just leads to bad questions.

But. If you don’t know how to do something, or you don’t understand the scope of something… your work is going to suck. And people are mostly bad at telling students what to do. That means that students need to advocate for themselves. They also need to make an effort to learn the stuff they don’t know on their own.

Working is all about learning.

(sometimes that learning is your job, sometime’s it’s your boss’ job to help you)

Overall…

Working is hard. You’re going to find, a lot of the time, that you aren’t sure what you’re supposed to be doing or how to do it well. Figuring out the job is a big part of getting good at it.

I’ve been asked by the folks at OECD’s CERI (Center for Educational Research and Innovation) to develop a teacher training curriculum for… let’s call it integrating creativity into the online classroom. I’ve been picking away at it all summer and have come up with a list of critical discussion that I ‘think’ should be included in this kind of course. I’ve been designing activities and such for them, and I kind of want to pin them to the wall in this blog post, and see how much of it still rings true in October when the project needs to be delivered.

What’s the deliverable?

It’s pretty straightforward actually. They are looking for a ‘teacher syllabus’ and about 30 minutes of video addressing some of the key concepts. The idea is that these could be taken, presumably as a whole or in part, and used to train in-service or pre-service teachers to include ‘creativity’ in the classroom.

So… creativity?

The word creativity, for me, fits way more in with words like ‘fun’ and ‘love’ and ‘friendly’ than it does with words like ‘slope’ or ‘equilateral’ or ‘cat’. Imagine for a second what it would be like to have a specific definition of fun that you applied to everyone. In order to not make the process ridiculous you end up having to append ‘for the individual or group’ to the definition making it meaningless in practical application. I can, however, talk about what fun probably isn’t, and I can talk about what it looks like when different people talk to me about it. I think our working definitions of creativity are going to look like this.

Potentially more importantly to the process, I think a teacher is going to struggle trying to implement someone else’s idea of creativity in the classroom. I am, for instance, not a very arty person, neither through talent nor through inclination. When I think of creativity I think of a novel approach to a given idea, a new perspective for that individual. Am I wrong about that being creativity? Students are going to be better served, i think, by getting different versions of creativity from different teachers than by some centralized concept.

Pretty sure we’re going to have to spend some time talking about our own feelings about creativity and the kinds of things that it means to other people – both inside and outside the classroom community.

Another critical question here is how to balance different teachers attempts to encourage their own kind of creativity and the space for students to perform THEIR own kind of creativity. I think this just underlines how important the public discussion of different people’s views of creativity are going to be in the course…

Well-defined problems and compliance

Friends of this blog will know that I am constantly on about ill-defined/ill-structured/complex challenges and what they mean in terms of making space for learning. A well-defined challenge (one where the teacher knows the input, the process and the outcome) can certainly be a good way to develop certain kinds of skills, but they are mostly about compliance. Success for a student given a well-defined problem is to figure out what the teacher wants and give it to the teacher.

This relationship between compliance and creativity is going to be a tough one I think. For one, so much of our systems of education are about compliance. Teacher’s set a standard, choose (or have chosen for them by their systems) the things a student ‘needs to know’ and then reward those students with grades for performing appropriately.

And yeah, about grades. It’s a whole other post, but I don’t really think you can put a number grade on the creative part of creativity. It opens you up to so many problems.

Ill-defined problems and engagement

It is my belief (i don’t really have another word for it) that there is a fundamental relationship between ill-defined problems and student engagement. I mean… there’s lots of research that supports it, but there’s just as much research that says it’s nonsense, that you need to offer clear learning objectives, clear processes and defined outcomes for students to learn. Given this contradiction, I choose the word belief rather than just choosing a faction in the literature and ignoring the ‘other side’.

I’ve been using Schlechty’s distinction between compliance and engagement for the last six months or so, and am finding it really useful.

The argument, I guess, goes like this. In order to support students to be creative, they need to be personally engaged in an activity and not simply compliant IF our desired outcome is for students to genuinely create and not just deliver on a well-defined outcome.

That means as a teacher you’re going to be asking students to do something without a clear sense of what you’re going to be getting back. Tricky. Not enough scaffolding? Students will panic and not be able to do anything. You’ll also be open to things that are wildly out of scope (students working too much, ritually compliant students working to the letter and not the spirit of an activity). Too much structure and you’ll only be encouraging compliance in students and you’ll get 27 copies of the same ‘creative product’.

Being creative online

The course is meant to be about doing this online, or at least with access to the internet, necessitating me to talk about abundance and scarcity again :). Imagine a simple task like “draw me an interesting circle”. Without touching your computer, take out a pen and, in 60 seconds or so, go ahead and complete that task. Now, after you’re done, do a google image search for ‘interesting circle’ and contemplate doing the task again. It’s different. Very, very different.

You can take two different perspectives on this.

You can try and recreate that scarcity environment, where I only have my own brain to work with, for your students to be creative in. You can ‘try’ and do this. This is what teachers all over the world are doing now, and they are fighting a losing battle against students who are ‘cheating’ by using any number of online resources to help them with their work.

OR

You can give in to the abundance of the Internet and you can get students to cite where their inspirations came from. All of our creativity, one could argue, comes from bits we’ve seen and done combined together in a novel way. Or, put another way…

the writer’s fictive illusion is made up of bits of true autobiographical and factual detail but the whole thing is a lie

O. S. Mitchell on W. O. Mitchell’s writing strategy

The lie, in this case, is our own creative insertion. The way in which we’ve combined a thing. Our own spin. Our interpretation. The difference between the scarcity model (all the things i can remember) and the abundance model (all the things i can find that other people remembered) is both an acceptance of where our bits of true came from and the quantity of bits we have to work with.

I mean… we can also make the workforce readiness argument here, but lets take it as read.

Thoughts going forward

This seems like three big enough issues for go forward with for now.

• The nature of creativity and the balance between a teacher’s sense of creativity and different sense of it in different students
• The relationship between ill-defined problems and the kind of engagement that leads to the fostering of creativity
• The challenges and opportunities of doing creativity with access to such an abundance of influences.

Thoughts for other big issues that need to be addressed? Comments on these gratefully accepted.

My dad died five days ago. I wrote a dedication for my father (appended at the end of this post) the day that he died… and then remembered this old short story, which I eventually found.

This is a mostly true story I wrote about my Father and I when I was about 19 y/o. I’m not sure that the coast was actually ‘nightmarish’ or that we were quite that ‘wind-torn’ but I’ve resisted the urge to give this an edit for adjectives and posted it like it was submitted to a writing contest 27 years ago. All the boat/fishing stuff is true. The laughter part is definitely true. I may have exaggerated about the… well… I was trying to be ‘real’ at the time. I’m so happy about it now. 

He would have been just a few years older than I am now when this was written. 

@@@@@ THE BOAT

“Nice night,” I offered easily as I opened the passenger side door of his truck to get in out of the downpour. I was met by the familiar smells of sea salt and outboard motor exhaust that always surrounded the man when he was fishing. We sat there together for a short while in a silence broken only by his heavy breathing and the soft hum of the engine. We never did talk much when we were together like this, and even if we did talk, it was usually only after careful thought. He seemed to think that the ‘conversation’ was the awkward part of any relationship, not the silence. I think that’s one of the things about him that I appreciate more and more every year.

“I should have known this storm would…” he started and then stopped, shaking his head, “…no I shouldn’t have – and I know better than to talk like that – I’ve let it go through storms like this before; I just didn’t think that it would flip over.” I never heard any fisherman I know call their boats ‘she’ or use words like ‘capsize’; I really don’t know why.

I’d seen the ageing fisherman every summer when I came home from university in Halifax to work at the local refinery. I’d help him in and around his boat, and he’d let me make my own mistakes. He always treated me like a real person that way. He’d work at the refinery and haul lobster traps all spring on next to no sleep, and never seemed to miss a step. He’d changed this time though; the first change I’d seen in him since I could remember. He had the same wind-weathered face, red and wrinkled. He had the same strong squat body, the same lumbering walk; he always moved better when he was on the water. I remember seeing him play old timers hockey when I was younger. The old timers teams were always understaffed and he used to play sixty minutes a game on defence. He tried his best, worked hard for all sixty minutes, but he was clumsy; he’d panic in a tight situation. Put him on the outboard in a storm on the other hand, and the man was an artist, every movement smooth and efficient. It always mystified me the way he seemed to be two different athletic entities. Looking back at it now, it doesn’t really seem that strange. Everything he did was driven by practicality; if he needed to be able to do something, he did it.

He motioned his hand in the direction of the boat. I followed his pointing finger, and I could just make out a whitish lump through the sheering rain. My face twisted in sickened fascination as I realised that, yes, the boat had flipped over. And, what’s more, it had drug the anchor about 50 yards.

‘Oopsy…’ I muttered.

‘Yeah… that’s just what I said.’ He returned.

I smiled slightly at the oft mentioned remark and looked out over the rest of the wind-torn water. It foamed and churned more violently than I’d seen in the fifteen or so years that I could remember. It was late, much later than the time when the wind was likely to give that retched boat any rest. The current was going with the wind, slowly pushing the boat toward that nightmare shore. We sat there. Silent. Waiting.

The sun set slowly somewhere behind those dark, grey clouds. We were calculating the drift of the boat again and again in the fading light. If it didn’t grab that little rock bed we both knew it was floating over, or there wasn’t enough of the anchor left to dig into the bottom of the bay, we had two choices: let the boat be beaten to splinters by the crashing waves on the shore, or risk being beaten into splinters ourselves by trying to haul it to safety in the middle of a storm.

I glanced over at him from the passenger seat of his ageing 4X4. There really was a difference in him this year. The dry teasing wit was the same. The solidity from which he spoke about all the things he knew was unshaken. But his drive was failing. Granted he’d had a severe snowmobile accident last year and smashed up his leg; he’d really only started walking right again in January. Sure, the arthritis in his left elbow was getting a little bit worse and his other injuries old and new acted up more and more every year. But it was more than that. This is the man that I had watched stand on one leg – his other one was in a cast – and haul lobster traps into the boat. He didn’t do this because he had to or because he was greedy, he had hired me to haul the traps for him for that spring. It was his will (not that he would call it that) that did not allow him to be stopped by something as insignificant as a broken leg. He seemed different now. He wouldn’t go out on the water if the wind was blowing too hard. If he was tired from working shift at the refinery, he would go down to the beach, check his boat and just got to bed. There was a time when he would have just shrugged and gone out on the water anyway. This is not to say that he’d become lazy. He was still doing more work in a day that I do in a month. He just seemed to have lost his edge. He started to buy things instead of make them himself, and he would bring his boat motors into the shop instead of fixing them himself in his garage. Little things had changed that would only be noticed by someone who’d watched him with so much fascination for so many years.

“I’ll take the rowboat and go out… ” I began, but was immediately cut off by his stern voice that always carried such a tone of finality. “It’s not worth it.”

It was the indifference that caused me to wonder about how much energy the man still had. True, it was only in the last year or two that I was experienced enough to actually take part in the decision making process. True, I was twenty and he was over fifty. It just seemed to me that five years before we would have tried to save that boat before it made its own decision as to whether or not it was going to smash into the coast of our small village.

I drove up and down the coast of the beach on the three wheeler that evening, recovering the refuse that the Bay had spit out all over the shore. We recovered one of the gas tanks, a couple of tubs, and a few other odds and ends all tangled in the seaweed that had been torn off the bottom of the bay. The boat had already been safely hauled on shore the few other times that I’d done the floating equipment run. It was just one more thing that felt out of place that night.

“I think it caught,” he said, as I got back into the truck after putting the gear I’d found on the beach in his fishing shed. “You’re all wet. You might as well go to the house, take a shower, and call it a night. There’s nothing else we can do here until the wind dies down.”

I went to bed that night with mixed feelings. I had the same rush that I always had after being so close to the pounding sea and being trusted as a compatriot by the man I’ve always admired so much. I was troubled though; the man had been so calm, so dispassionate. I could not understand how, in the face of such a beautiful challenge, he could simply tell me to go to bed. I realise now how romanticism comes quite naturally to a twenty-year-old who is not forced into a situation where his own living – or someone’s life – depends on the outcome.

“Wake up…” he whispered at five the next morning, accompanied by a strong gentle shove, ” the wind’s calmed down.” The memory of the night before blew through me, and I jumped in the air and into an old pair of jeans. I charged down the hall pulling my T-shirt over my head. “Better put on something warm,” he said, “it’s cool out.” I glanced at the old thermometer that has always been outside the side window; five meager Coastal Canadian degrees. shit. That is cold.

I reached the side of the bay, rubber boots on, and my rugby jacket pulled over my shoulders. The sight that greeted me was possibly the most forlorn of my life. I saw a figure outlined in the Bay, standing alone on the seaweed strewn beach, shaking its head. I turned my eyes in the direction of the shoal that we had hoped the boat had caught on the night before. The boat was there all right. It was floating alone, upside down, with nothing else visible in the wide bay that was post-fury green, pale and dirty. The waves were rolling long and high, the aftershocks of the night’s violence continuing their slow deliberate journey to crash to peace on the rocky shore.

“What the hell can we do with that mess?” I whispered half to myself. “’Don’t know”, he replied in his unstudied monotone. I watched him as he glanced around first at the sky, then at the water, and finally at his mistreated boat. The sky was flat grey. Ugly. The boat was bobbing upside down like a dead whale, its white belly turned up to the sky and being slowly eaten by the barnacles, being tugged to and fro’ by the careless current. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, I saw the old fisherman’s shoulders straighten. He turned and he began stomping toward the shed.

He hauled out about fifty feet of black rope – the thickness of my wrist – and threw it on the ground. We both glanced at it, and mechanically moved together to drag the rowboat into the water so I could go out and at least get hold of his much abused boat. It was a completely different challenge than we faced when the boat had sunk the year before. When a boat sinks right-side up, all you have to do to bring it safely to shore is to attach one end of a rope to the ring at the front of the boat and the other to the truck, and drive like hell. Now, with the boat belly up, we had to somehow flip it over before it reached shallow water. A boat upside down on the beach isn’t such a bad thing, but if we hauled it in with the outboard attached it would rip the motor to pieces.

I rowed out over the huge long waves, moving in slow motion, timing to the beat of the tired bay. I grabbed on to the end of the massive rope that I had taken with me and attached it to the ring at the front of the boat, which was now underwater. I then grabbed on to the boat’s anchor rope, which had, incidentally, hooked on to that rock bed the night before. It was the small spare anchor that I found at the end of the thin nylon rope, the one that was used when we made quick stops mackerel fishing in the current. The three massive anchors that are supposed to hold the boat in a storm we found later, pretzled: Isn’t irony beautiful.

The old fisherman started to haul in the boat with the truck and stopped when it was about twenty feet from shore. “Hold it there, I’ll be right back.” He ‘sprinted’ up the beach hill to the house and came back about five minutes later pulling a familiar black wetsuit over his head. The wetsuit was torn and partially rotted with age, his once firmly muscled body seeping out in places. He waded out into the cold bay, hardly wincing as the icy water made its way through to his body that was covered in silver hair so thick it looked like a rug. He swam over, grabbed hold of the boat and said, ‘go take the truck.”

I rowed back the short way to the sea littered beach, jumped on shore, and started to haul in the rowboat. I then heard the last thing I had expected; the old fisherman had started to laugh. I turned back to one of the most remarkable sights I’ve ever seen, and indeed that I’m ever likely to see. My father perched cat-like on the bottom of a boat that was floating upside down, in the middle of the bay, in an old bedraggled wet suit, red faced and laughing. It had started to snow. I turned my back on him and started to walk to the truck, shaking my head and smiling.

We tried every way we could think of to turn that boat over, ripping off the motor in the process. All in all, it went rather badly. After the motor fiasco, we just hauled the boat into shore and flipped it over by hand. We had absolutely no idea we could even do that. I was smiling the whole time. It appears I was wrong about my old man. He may not have been as reckless as he used to be, just a little slower and maybe more stoic because of the obstacles life has thrown in his way. But the strength of character that I had always admired in him hadn’t changed a bit. I still smile now every time I think about him that day. I’d like to remember my father exactly like that. Crouched on the bottom of his boat in his wetsuit, laughing at the snow.

Rene Cormier – a dedication

This is the post from Facebook the day dad died, which i wanted to have my own copy of it on the blog. I haven’t edited it… though I clearly didn’t quite have all my marbles rolling when I wrote it. I’ll leave it as is.

My father died today.

It was sudden, though he hasn’t been particularly well. It’s a shock, though not an incredible surprise, with his first cancer scare over 20 years behind him. It’s a kind of slow, creeping emptiness as the person who has been the ‘adult in the room’ in so many of the things I’ve done is no longer in the room. “hey dad, does this sound like a good idea to you?” He’d probably say no about this blog post… as unlike his son, he was never particularly interested in attention.

Attention is Mom’s job. We like to tease her about it, but she gave him his space for almost 55 years. Allowing to be who he was. More on this in a future post.Bonnie scanned through our pictures of him today and in most of them he was making something with the kids, watching them kiss fish (a long story for another time) or standing in front of cake. It says something about when we take pictures, in a sense, because while it does say a great deal about the man, it doesn’t tell the whole story. I mean. He was super handy. And he did know a great deal about fish. Also. Lover of cake. All true. What I’ll miss the most though is something that escapes the camera.

In the conversations I’m having in the background with people who knew him… it’s his wisdom that keeps coming up. Bits of advice, a kind quiet look, a short talk stolen on the sidelines of a gathering. Quiet moments watching the sun rise over the water in a fishing boat. Watching the flick of his fishing rod in a brook that never seemed to catch a branch. The way his voice could cut through (and often end) a conversation with one comment. I learned so much watching that man go through the world.

He was THERE. He was very, very honest. If you asked for that wisdom, you got it. Unvarnished. When he engaged, you got all of him. When you needed helping, he helped. If you were figuring something… you couldn’t find a better partner to figure with you. Needed someone to tell you what’s what? He had a 100 year old expression for you. He was so present.

Smart man. So many things i learned how to do from the way that man approaches a challenge. “Why do we need to do it that way?” “if any idiot can do something you can be that idiot, you can do it”. He approached everything like he could, given enough time, given enough staring at it, actually do something about it. I loved watching him discover youtube. A lifelong fisher, the first time he ever did a proper rope splice was at, like 65 after watching a youtube video. He also read almost everything I ever wrote… as ridiculously pedantic as my language gets, with a grade 9 education, he followed along.

A good man my father. Something I’ve said hundreds of times. He was proud that his kids were leading lives they were happy with. He was endlessly amazed that he had four grandkids who he was fascinated by, who he was proud of each in different ways. He wanted to make a difference for his family. To leave them more secure than he started. To give them the skills he’d learned and help them be ready for the world they were in.

A job well done old man. We thank you. Rest.

I start teaching a one week short course with some friends at the Office of Open Learning @ UWindsor tomorrow on student engagement. Can’t think of another topic that has come up more in the last year or so, nor one that is more pervasively ignored in our general discussion about education. It’s right up there with “what is learning” for topics that will basically end your conversation about the system.

And yet. Here we are. I want to get some thoughts clear in my head before tomorrow and, well, that’s what this blog is for :). For someone who randomly lands on this blog, then, please understand that this is a collection of thoughts and not meant to be a fully coherent narrative.

Engagement: What do we mean by engagement?

I’ve decided to use this handy framework put together my Phillip Schlechty about the various levels of student engagement. The elaborations are, of course, mine.

1. Engaged – Intrinsically motivated
2. Strategic Compliance – Grade motivated for achievement
3. Ritual Compliance – Grade motivated for ‘just enough’
4. Retreatism – Passively resistant
5. Rebellion – Actively resistant

The key here is separating conversations about motivation and compliance. I want to have people think about whether they are, in effect, only interested in compliance or if they are willing to reach for engagement. You could almost put a hard line between the 1 and 2 on that list, as they are almost totally different visions for what education is for or what learning is. (note: we have returned to ‘what is learning’ again. Sorry.)

Engagement is way harder. It involves trying to design an environment that allows for genuine curiosity. For failure. For student investment. This also requires that you meet those students where they are currently and help them walk towards that goal. A good curriculum design is not enough.

Students: What do students look like now?

This has been a point of emphasis for me for the last year. I’ve had an incredible opportunity to work with a few dozen CoOp students on education projects and we’ve gotten lots of time to work on thinking about learning. They’ve been good to share their thoughts with me… and I kind of feel like we’re not always taking their current status into account.

According to StatsCan, full-time participation in university in 1950 was about 6%. We’ve increased from 19% to 30% since 1995. I keep moving through this data, and its really not clear to me how many of those are international students… the statscan data is take from the Labour Force Survey etc… One way or the other we have WAY more people in higher education than we used to. Lots of people (statistically) who can afford to go to a university, can apply to a university, with an expectation that they will get in. We still have too many barriers for entry, but there are definitely fewer than there used to be.

Broadly speaking, students go to university because students go to university. When I used to do recruitment, someone once explained to me how they had watched the decisions of the high school hockey captain impacting post-k12 decisions more than anything else. I’ve worked with hundreds (upon hundreds) of new students at university, a LARGE percentage of them are taking a degree because they were told to, because they picked what their friend picked or almost at random. That’s not to say there aren’t focused students who come to do exactly one thing, there are, but given that 30% number, we’re looking at a large number of people who don’t have an intrinsic motivation to do their studies. They aren’t starting ‘for a love of biology’ but because their mom told them to do sciences so they could get a job (not true) and they liked their high school biology teacher (a story i’ve heard, weirdly, several times).

Those students are also coming out of an increasingly (my belief, a thing i also keep hearing) structured high school system that is focused on strategic compliance. That strategy, often, is the attainment of high enough grades to get a guaranteed scholarship.

They are not coming to university with an intrinsic motivation to learn.

These kids are also working paid jobs more than their predecessors, are currently living through a pandemic and live in a world of information abundance… leading us to…

Online: The internet changes things too right?

Well… it does and it doesn’t. I don’t think the existence of the Internet changes what it means to be engaged in your learning. I’ve written extensively on this blog about the impact of the internet on what might be important to learn. I think the biggest difference with engagement is on the tools of compliance.

Our face 2 face schools are very effective tools for compliance.

• It provides distraction (interest) free environment.
• It allows for effective surveillance
• It allows for controlled (content) inputs
• It’s easy to do stuff like put people into groups

It’s also, frankly, a lot easier to keep people’s attention. If I’m stuck in a room with nothing else to do and you see me peek at my phone, I’m probably just going to pay attention to you. That doesn’t necessarily mean you were doing a GOOD job of engaging me, it’s that, given the environment, there wasn’t really anything else for me to do.

What online learning forces us to do is come to terms with our f2f tools of compliance and convenience. Does it make it harder to keep students engaged? I mean… maybe. What it does is force us to think about what we’re trying to get done.

So… are they kids or adults?

I got a pretty serious negative response on twitter when i suggested that I was going to make this separation in the course. I was only going to make it to try and prove the point that teaching is teaching, regardless of how old a student is. We have things to learn from the k12 research and things to learn from the adult-ed research, and, frankly, they should probably be combined. If we take the Malcolm Knowles description of good andragogy [sic – that means ‘man learning’], i’m probably good with it.

1. There is a need to explain why specific things are being taught (e.g., certain commands, functions, operations, etc.)
2. Instruction should be task-oriented instead of memorization — learning activities should be in the context of common tasks to be performed.
3. Instruction should take into account the wide range of different backgrounds of learners; learning materials and activities should allow for different levels/types of previous experience with computers.
4. Since adults are self-directed, instruction should allow learners to discover things for themselves, providing guidance and help when mistakes are made.

Andragogy (Malcolm Knowles)

You can just go ahead and swap in ‘learners’ instead of adults and that’s probably most of what I want to say about designing for engagement.

Designing for engagement NEEDS to include lots of thoughts about the learners. Not some imaginary group of elites who have been filtered by interest and socio-economic privilege into your class, but your real actual students. This article, sent to me on twitter by @doctorkayleigh does a nice job of talking about it.

Students are way happier when they are intrinsically motivated

I totally think it’s possible. Not all students. Not all the time. But I think we can have an effective education system based on intrinsic motivation. The problem, for many, is that you can’t MAKE people intrinsically motivated. You have to encourage it.