Small children are innately curious about the world around them. This curiosity, though, is often stifled in traditional educational pathways. Dr. Josh Eyler joins us in this episode to discuss how research on how humans learn can help us build a more productive learning environment for all our students. Josh is the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at Rice University.
- Eyler, J. R. (2018). How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories behind Effective College Teaching. West Virginia University Press.
- Miller, M. D. (2014). Minds online: Teaching effectively with technology. Harvard University Press.
- Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick. Harvard University Press.
- Lang, J. M. (2016). Small teaching: Everyday lessons from the science of learning. John Wiley & Sons.
- Peters, R. A. (1978). Effects of anxiety, curiosity, and perceived instructor threat on student verbal behavior in the college classroom. Journal of Educational Psychology, 70(3), 388.
- Bandura, A. (1965). Influence of models’ reinforcement contingencies on the acquisition of imitative responses. Journal of personality and social psychology, 1(6), 589.
- Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of aggression through imitation of aggressive models. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63(3), 575.
- Bandura, A., Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1963). Vicarious reinforcement and imitative learning. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 67(6), 601.
- Bandura, A. (1969). Social-learning theory of identificatory processes. Handbook of socialization theory and research, 213, 262.
- Vygotsky, L. (1987). Zone of proximal development. Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes, 5291, 157.
- Bjork, R.A. (1994). “Institutional Impediments to Effective Training”. Learning, remembering, believing: Enhancing human performance.
- Bjork, R.A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In J. Metcalfe & A. Shimamura (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185-205). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- Reacting to the Past – This site describes the Reacting to the Past methodology.
- Yue, C. L., Bjork, E. L., & Bjork, R. A. (2013). Reducing verbal redundancy in multimedia learning: An undesired desirable difficulty?. Journal of Educational Psychology, 105(2), 266.
- Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Kuhl, P. K. (1999). The scientist in the crib: Minds, brains, and how children learn. William Morrow & Co.
- Eagleman, D., & Brandt, A. (2017). The Runaway Species: How human creativity remakes the world. Catapult.
John: Small children are innately curious about the world around them. This curiosity, though, is often stifled in traditional educational pathways. In this episode, we examine how research on how humans learn can help us build a more productive learning environment for all our students.
John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.
Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…
John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.
Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.
John: Today our guest is Josh Eyler, the Director of the Center for Teaching Excellence and an adjunct Associate Professor of Humanities at Rice University. Welcome, Josh.
Josh: Thanks for having me.
Rebecca: We’re really glad to have you. Today’s teas are:
Josh: [LAUGHTER] I’m not drinking tea. I’m afraid I’m more of a coffee person. But I have water today.
Rebecca: We still have to stay hydrated. So waters good.
John: I’m drinking bing cherry tea.
Rebecca: I’m drinking Christmas tea mixed with Prince of Wales tea because I just kind of re-upped with a different tea bag.
Rebecca: On campus, we have a reading group that we have in the fall. So a lot of our faculty have read Minds Online, Make it Stick and Small Teaching. And I was hoping you could address how your book is a bit different in approach to those. I know that you know those authors and have worked with some of them. So can you talk a little bit about how How Humans Learn, which is your new book that just came out is a bit different?
Josh: Sure. Well, I think I’ll start with a similarity. And I think that the one similarity that connects all of them is that we all try to weave in practical suggestions for the classroom as well, taking the research and heading in that direction with it. I do think the one of the things that separates my book from the others is that I look at science very broadly. So the great thing about Make it Stick is that it engages cognitive psychology, the testing effect, desirable difficulties, ways to remember and to encode things in memory more deeply. And I think that’s very important and fascinating. But my book goes in a different direction to look at the evolutionary history of learning, developmental psychology, other biological views on learning. So it takes a different track on science and I think with Small Teaching and Minds Online, they also touch on cognitive science as well, which I do too. But I’m very interested in placing our students into a much larger conversation about the development of learning over time.
John: And you mentioned that your daughter played a role in influencing your decision to write this and investigate this. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Josh: I did. Sure. So right around the time that I began moving into the world of teaching and learning centers, and was doing a lot of research and wondering about why certain teaching practices work, and others don’t. I also became a dad and got to experience the wonder of seeing my daughter explore the world for the first time, a baby trying to figure out and explore. …this curiosity in the flesh… and everything is driven by curiosity. And it just really started to make me wonder about these fundamental ways of experiencing the world and learning about the world. And really, two big questions emerged. Number one, it was pretty clear that some of these were consistent over time, this natural curiosity about the world… we continue to have that and continue to learn from it. The other thing was this what happens to some of these learning strategies that are so prominent when we’re at our youngest ages and It’s clear are so important for learning about the world. How do those shift? Where do they go? How can we utilize them and tap back into them as college instructors. So she was a really important part of this book.
Rebecca: It’s funny that the first thing that I commented to John, after having read some of your book was “Man, this is so fascinating,” because I also have a small child. [LAUGHTER]
John: …and I had two. It was a few decades ago, but I remember seeing the things that you talk about there.
John: You mentioned though, this evolutionary perspective, and you use the term Evo Devo to capture that which I think you made a reference to a bad alt-rock band. Can you tell us a little bit about what Evo Devo represents?
Josh: Sure. Evo Devo isn’t my term; it’s one that I, to my great delight, discovered as I was looking at the research on this. And so as a preface to this, in the humanities and exploring fields that I never engaged in before. And so it took me five years to write this book, because I was teaching myself how to read these papers, the methods, etc. It was really important to me that what I said would be credible with scientists. They didn’t have to believe me or agree with me, but they had to find it credible. And so part of the research then led me into this, I don’t want to say is brand new, because it’s been around for a few decades, but in terms of scientific sub disciplines, is pretty new, evolutionary developmental biology. And the practitioners of this call it Evo Devo, for short. And it just struck me as the name of a bad band that you might have heard of in the 90s. But at the core of that research is the study of how developmental processes evolved over time. And so if we think about young children again, why do they do what they do? What evolutionary advantage did it have? What kind of adaptation? Which parts of the brain develop first? And why is that important for understanding cognition? …things like that. So they tackle big questions both in humans and in other animal species. But yeah, it was the name that really kind of jumped out at me.
Rebecca: One of the things I really love about your book is the interdisciplinary nature of it. And that you are tackling all these scientific principles, but really putting it into plain language that faculty from any discipline (and other people who are not faculty) can easily understand. So I immediately got sucked into the language that you were using, because I understand it, I could put it into practice. And so I think other faculty will really enjoy that as well.
Josh: Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. I really was trying hard to take what I saw as really important concepts and make them accessible to all.
John: So you take a number of broad themes and you investigate that and talk about ways in which faculty can use these principles to help improve learning, and the first one you start with is curiosity, which is certainly apparent in small children. Could you talk a little bit about the role of curiosity in learning?
Josh: Definitely, I start with this one for two reasons. The first is that as individual learners, it becomes clear that curiosity is a prime driver for the way we learn new things the way we experience the world. The other reason, though, is that when you begin to look in these various corners of scientific research, it’s also clear that curiosity has been explored in great detail in many different disciplines. And so it’s one of those that I think is a great example of why I wanted to write the book in the first place. Lots of fields are talking about it. And if we just kind of brought those conversations together, we might be able to utilize that information. So curiosity was a fundamental element in the evolution of some of our cognitive processes. It defines us as a species, that we are a curious species, if nothing else; that the way we approach the world and try to figure out the world is driven by needing to know something and seeking out the answer. And then as we see that play out in our own lives, we’ve already talked about children but some of the most famous developmental psychologists (Piaget and others, actually), began a long time ago, studying curiosity by looking at children’s questions like the kinds of questions that they asked. And early on, they were particularly interested in how many questions they asked. So you can see large catalogues of quantitative data on the number of questions kids ask. But more recently, people have really been looking at the kinds of questions and what that might say about different developmental stages. And so what I took from all this, I took several things, but I think the most important thing for college teachers is that the question itself is the unit of curiosity. To what degree can we utilize questions and inquiry to tap back into this natural curiosity that has faded over time as students have learned what they needed to do in educational systems in order to succeed. …and sad to say that curiosity is in some ways a prime casualty of those educational systems… and so, how can we tap back into questions become a really important way for us to do that.
John: In terms of questions, you suggest that when we give students questions to address, that we try to use open-ended questions to allow students perhaps more direction in that. Could you talk about that just a little bit?
Josh: Sure. And open ended questions that can really fascinate them and engage them as well… some of which might come from them. But the distinction I made primarily is between open-ended versus closed-ended questions in designing discussions and closed-ended questions… questions to which there is one distinct answer can shut down discussions pretty quickly. They’re okay for warming up discussions. I think they do have some value. If we really want to get to a place where we’re using questions and discussion to help students collectively generate knowledge, they have to be questions that are open enough to prioritize multiple interpretations or multiple approaches, and in some cases, they can be questions to which we don’t know the answer… that we’re all just sort of exploring possibilities together. And so one of the things I recommend both in the book and in my work with faculty here at Rice, look into questions that you generally ask or have designed for a discussion and see if there are ways to take some of those close-ended questions and push them into more open-ended questions. Not “What is the name of this thing?” but “Why is this thing so important for our understanding?” …approaches like that.
John: You also discussed in this chapter, the trade off between novelty and anxiety. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Josh: Sure. And there’s some researchers who have built their career looking at this curve, the novelty-anxiety curve. Some novelty, because of our curiosity, is very important. But when we get the curve up to the point where it becomes so new and unfamiliar that it kicks in some anxiety, the learning process begins to shut down… so you start to move back down on the other side of that curve. So anxiety has been shown in a variety of learning settings to shut down the cognitive processes. It’s at an emotional level and the psychological level that if we’re anxious or fearful, we can’t really focus on the subject at hand. It’s adding a cognitive load that just becomes insurmountable in terms of learning. There’s the study that I cite in that chapter from 1978. I still think it’s really fascinating. I’d love to see people try to replicate it. A researcher named Ruth Peters was looking at evidence of curiosity in classes where students had rated their instructors based on how intimidating they found those instructors and even those students who had rated themselves as being relatively high on the curiosity scale, asked fewer questions and engaged in fewer incidence of curiosity in those situations where they were intimidated or felt that the instructor was intimidating. Now an important caveat that I don’t, I think, do as well as I could have done in the book in making is that the issue of intimidation and how students feel about faculty members can differ greatly depending on who the students are and who the instructors are, and how that dynamic plays out could be very gendered. And there are lots of dynamics, I think, that complicate the notion of intimidation that I didn’t dive into that chapter. But they’re very important, I think, to think about. On the whole, though, the point remains, and there’s a lot of consensus on it I would say, that anxiety shuts down curiosity.
John: And one of the points you used to emphasize that is a recommendation to not be scary.
John: …which is not a bad suggestion for faculty. Because I think sometimes we can be and making sure that students see us as more open to them could be useful.
Rebecca: …or even as human.
John: …even as humans… [LAUGHTER] … that we could appear human to them. They don’t always see it that way. But it would be nice to encourage that more personal connection.
Rebecca: One of the other topics that you tackle as a theme in your book is tied to failure and risk taking, and I often think about curiosity and failure and risk taking together as someone from the arts. So I often see curiosity feeds risk taking. And if you don’t have failures, you don’t continue to learn and get excited about what you’re doing.
Rebecca: But I also know that students often (and all of us often), if we fail, can feel really bad about that and then not continue to propel forward. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between curiosity and…
John: …the fear of failure.
Josh: Yes, definitely. And I completely agree with you that there’s a link there between those two, because curiosity often takes us into places where we don’t know the answers. This is how great research happens, right? We want to know the answer to a question. So we pursue it but there’s a lot of failure along the way. And so it has the potential to open great doors, but those kinds of intellectual risks that follow curiosity, we haven’t necessarily developed educational systems that value taking those intellectual risks. In fact, as researchers and scholars and artists know, there’s so much trial and error along the way, but we’ve set up the opposite system for our students where they have these high stakes assessments, they get one shot. And that is the kind of environment that will cultivate a fear of any kind of failure or mistake. And so the linkage then, in order to try and help them take those intellectual risks, is to build opportunities in our courses for students to be able to utilize that natural learning process: to make mistakes, to learn from them to get feedback, and to move on. So there’s a variety of ways that we can do it, but it runs counter to traditional modes of teaching and course design.
Rebecca: If we think about being in an institutional structure that imposes certain kinds of systems on us like grades that can cause anxiety, and maybe shut some of this down, what can we do within that system to still foster risk taking?
Josh: Right. That’s in some ways the hardest question to answer and it’s the hardest thing to wrestle with if you’re suggesting to faculty that we can, within our own courses, create opportunities for students to do that. So I have two answers. And the first is that one thing that we can do that will pay students dividends down the line is to help them divest learning from grades. This is the absolute foundation for our work in this area. And one way to do that is to have more assignments with lower stakes. So if you have five assignments each worth 20% of the final grade, breaking that up a little bit more and including smaller assignments in there. The other is to have assignments where you give feedback, but no grades. And this takes some conditioning over time. But eventually students can begin to see learning as an opportunity for feedback, not evaluation. The other thing that I would say that I recommend in the book… The people who are experimenting with alternative grading models, I think, are leading the charge on this question. And so things like contract grading or specifications grading, portfolio grading. There are even some well known folks are experimenting with student self grading, self assessment, peer assessment. And so those are models that shift the value and the meaning of what is a grade. And those systems a grade is not necessarily an evaluation, but it is a culmination of feedback, a culmination of learning over time. The emphasis becomes, in those systems, much more on feedback and development and on evaluation of selected attempts at a task.
John: You also emphasize the roles we have as social creatures in the chapter on sociality and in particular, one of the things you talked about there is imitative learning. Could you talk a little bit about that and how that can be implemented in the classroom?
Josh: Sure, yes. The book began with curiosity because that’s individually how I think we’re driven to learn but sociality, I think it’s one of the most important topics that we can think about with education. We are deeply social beings at heart. And in fact, humans are among the most social creatures in the world. And so that greatly influenced how we developed over time and how we’ve learned. And so a lot of the evolutionary biologists who study, for example, language point back to our imitative gestures. They either preceded language or they co evolved with language. There’s a lot of disagreement about that. But there are fundamental aspects of the way we communicate with people and ultimately teach and learn from each other. And so, the extension of that to our work as teachers? It can be as basic as the gestures that we make and how we communicate the importance of a particular topics. I’m making gestures right now… maybe you can’t see… but that underscores… to hit the emphasis to underscore the importance or to communicate to the students in ways other than verbally, and I was blown away by some of the fascinating research on gestures to prove how important they are to learning. There was one study, for example, of foreign language learning where students were watching videos of a speaker speaking and fully making the normal gestures that you would have in teaching. And then other students were watching videos with no gestures, the speaker was taught to eliminate all gestures as much as possible. And on the assessments afterwards, the students in the gesture condition scored far better than those in the non gesture. So that’s a fundamental level, but there is a social psychologist in the mid 20th century, Albert Bandura, who talks about modeling. And so imitative learning can really connect in an essential way to our modeling for students. They imitate us, even sometimes our manners of speech, but really what I’m most interested in is the way we engage with them. They will often use that as a model for engaging with each other… the way we engage with our subject matter… relative enthusiasm or lack thereof,… they will use us as models for that. And so imitative learning, I’m not going to say that necessarily enhances the content to a large degree, but it does influence the learning processes that are underneath the mastery of the content.
Rebecca: How does sociality relate to group learning and group work that we might do in our classes? So it’s peer instruction, but also other collaborative work that we might do.
Josh: This is a topic that I think is really important to many who teach in college and so it’s one that I wanted to spend some time covering and if we are going to utilize our social natures to maximize learning, we have to design collaborative assignments that, out of necessity, students must work together in order to generate the knowledge in order to fulfill the goals of that assignment. Too often, and I am guilty of this myself, group assignments are designed in such a way that students can “divide and conquer.” And so they say “I’ll take this part, you take this part and you take that part and we’ll come together right before the presentation and we’ll debrief each other.” Certainly they can learn some things individually from that if they’re well designed; that is not making use of our social natures to enhance learning, that is just creating an avenue where they’re talking to each other and making a plan for presentation. The assignments where they have to actually work together to develop the new knowledge, to construct it, those are the kinds of assignments that are taking advantage of our social natures to really enhance it.
Rebecca: Why is it then that students, even in a situation where it might be that they need to collaborate to come up with that new knowledge or information, there’s still this tendency to try to figure out how to divide and conquer even if it doesn’t match up? [LAUGHTER}
Rebecca: How do we help students understand the differences in those different scenarios or even how we help faculty understand the differences that happens in committee work and stuff as well?
Josh: Right. Yes, it does. Well, I think some of that is that they’re simply trying to employ strategies that have worked for them in the past. And so even if the assignment isn’t designed for divide and conquer, they’ll try it because that’s what they’ve done in the past. There’s also some reticence often to working together initially. So faculty need to communicate the value of the nature of the assignment as a group assignment: What will you gain from working with each other? I do think there are some examples here in my home campus, and many campuses across the country, have faculty who do a lot of work up front on the team and group dynamics in order to make those assignments and activities more productive. And so bring experts on team dynamics into the classroom to talk to groups and to maximize the way they’ll work together… assessment systems where people are evaluating themselves and each other… warm-up activities or shorter, very small activities over time to help students in the group learn to trust each other before we give them the big assignment… trying to clear some of those social hurdles in order to really use those social elements for their gain.
Rebecca: I think that’s an important piece there… that we put them in groups, or they even put themselves into groups and we just assume that like, “Oh, now they’re a happy little group.” [LAUGHTER] But unless they get to know each other and develop that trust that you just emphasize, really, things can fall flat really quickly.
John: But there’s other types of assignments where you can do that such as you mentioned in your book: the Reacting to the Past methodology and many forms or peer instruction where that sort of collaborative work is inherent in the process. When they’re not presenting something they can divide, but when they all have to debate something or present something from different perspectives, it naturally brings them together. So I think you do provide some suggestions on ways to do it, but it doesn’t work with all projects. If they’re writing a paper or presentation, you have to cultivate that. And it may not always work.
Rebecca: …especially if it’s something long term. There’s a difference between peer instruction and class that might happen over a short moment or two versus something that might take weeks.
Josh: Yes, definitely.
John: You also have a chapter on emotion. Could you talk a little bit about how emotion influences learning?
Josh: Yes, in some ways, this is the heart of the book from the start… thinking about our interactions with students at this level. For a long time, psychologists believed that emotion and cognition were entirely separate. And then they thought that they were connected, but one was dominant. But now biologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, they have really shown us that emotion and thinking are completely interlinked. I described them as dance partners in the book and really, that’s what they are. When everything’s going well, the two are working hand in hand, the primed emotions enhance the learning and the learning imbues the emotion with different levels. So, when everything’s working really well, they go hand in hand. And that can look at the span of what we’re talking about, the spectrum of utilizing emotion in our teaching is very broad. And so it can be everything from being enthusiastic about what we’re teaching to using humor, helping students see the joy of the subject matter; it can be that. But it can be also finding the emotion at the heart of the content that we’re teaching. So I’ve used an example a lot of two biology classes both teaching about cancer; one is teaching it entirely about the cellular level and another’s doing that but also showing videos of survivors and talking about the disease at the human level. That kind of scenario primes the students’ emotions which helps them in turn remember that material more effectively… develop better conceptual understanding: “Oh, here’s the long term resonance of this disease and there’s the human impact of this.” And so finding the emotional aspect of our content… And then simply, I think if I had to get one message out about that chapter, and maybe even about the book. is students will learn more if they think we care about them as learners. And that doesn’t mean that we have to tear down professional boundaries that might be important, but it does mean that students have to see us as being actively involved with their learning, as actually caring about their success in the classroom. And if that were the only thing that we did, we’d be making a lot of headway.
John: You mentioned just learning their names could be effective in helping to show that.
Josh: Yes, in fact, often I say that probably the easiest thing we could do to initially show students that we’re invested in them. And often people say rightly that teaching huge classes, it’s really hard to remember names, things like that. …an easy suggestion about that (and I got this from my friend Bethany Usher, George Mason University), hand everyone a table tent… a name card… at the beginning of the semester… have them write their names on it. So even if you can’t memorize all 200 names in your class, you can refer to people by name, which accomplishes in many ways, the same purpose.
Rebecca: Sneaky… It sounds very sneaky. [LAUGHTER]
John: It’s not a bad idea. Actually, when I teach small classes at Duke in the summer, I do that for the first couple of days until I get to know their names. In the class of three to four hundred, it may be a little tougher, at least to get them to come back and do it. I can imagine my students swapping the names just to mess with me a bit. Mybw… I’m not so sure. [LAUGHTER]
Josh: Bethany uses it… and others do for attendance purposes as well. So everyone has to put their name card back on the table when they leave and the date on the inside that they were there. So it’s a way to take attendance too.
John: You also talk about the importance of authenticity, of creating assignments and tasks that are authentic for the students. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Josh: Yeah, and authentic and authenticity have a wide range of meanings in higher ed these days. But what I was particularly looking at is the research on what folks have called cognitive authenticity or situated cognition, and that’s the degree to which our brains pick up on a learning environment as either being artificial or real – authentic. So the degree to which we can help students to engage in work that mirrors the work of scholars in the discipline or has relevance to their lives or application to their careers or application to the world writ large, we’re moving closer to authenticity and the kinds of learning environments that the brain responds to really well. It’s a ruthlessly pragmatic organ that will quickly turn this attention elsewhere if it doesn’t think what is happening is necessary for it. So I talked a lot about undergraduate research or projects or even shorter projects that we do in the classroom where students are doing what actual historians or sociologists or artists or biologists really do. The difference between memorizing the names of a hundreds insects and going out in the field and combining that information with finding them. I think that’s an authentic activity, an authentic learning environment.
John: In your book you Bjork and Bjork’s “desirable difficulties,” which suggest that students learn the most when they’re faced with this feasible challenge… where if something’s really easy, they get bored; If something’s too difficult, you have anxiety and things that interfere with learning.
John: One of the problems that people have in implementing that, is the range of backgrounds and skills of students. Can you suggest any ways of trying to reach that zone for all students when students come in with very different prior knowledge and skills.
Josh: Yes, that’s a really great question. It get really happy when I talk about Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development… maybe others don’t, but I think it’s fascinating and deeply important and it ties to desirable difficulties, I think. Simply because what Vygotsky was saying was that each of us for… pick a topic… but for any type of each of us has a zone in which we can learn as individuals, but eventually we will hit a point… the end of that when we need what he called a “knowledgeable other” to help us develop mastery beyond that… and so that’s going to differ depending on topic and depending on individual… and as faculty, if we were in our best position… if we know our students well enough to understand where each of them are within those zones… The “desirable difficulty” by the Bjork’s… things like spaced practice or interleaving… which means don’t study in blocks… study a little bit of topic “A” a little bit of topic “B,” a little bit of topic “C” et cetera… then go back. It’s really hard, but in it’s being hard, the brain encodes ot more effectively… and that matches up well with the zone of proximal development because it is a way for us to design activities where: number one we can see a little bit better where students individually are; number two. though. it helps push past those ending points or the sticking points that students can encounter when they hit the wall with a particular topic.
Rebecca: After writing this book, and spending five years deep into all this material, what have you found most useful as a teacher?
Josh: This has been such an amazing process for me. I’ve learned so much. The chapter on failure, though, has been the most eye opening for me. I’ve certainly redesigned discussions based on curiosity. And I tried to build more stories into my teaching to draw on those emotional social connections. But partly because we’re not taught in graduate school to privilege failure and errors and mistakes… and it’s not necessarily a fundamental element of any pedagogical training that we get even as faculty… I found that research to be extremely important for me as a teacher. And so it has changed the way I designed courses, I have more assignments and more opportunities to just give them feedback in order to manage the load that that brings with it. I have more face-to-face conversations, quicker sessions to give targeted feedback. I have activities like reading responses where all they have to do is complete the set number that I have for them. If you do 12 reading responses over the course of the semester you get the “A” for this activity… really to engage them in the thinking process in ways that will contribute to their work, but without the necessity: “I have to get it right.” I can just think and explore some ideas. In my undergraduate courses. I’ve switched entirely to portfolio grading for all of them. It does take time I have found to help students see that this isn’t a trick or you’re not trying to pull the carpet out from underneath them. But it has really transformed the way I work with students. More of them come see me in office hours because there are no grades. So they just want to talk about the feedback that I’m giving and ways to revise and improve. And I would say that the grad courses that I teach… we team-teach those courses on pedagogy… and those are all contract grading. And so we want the emphasis to be on mentorship for them as new teachers and not evaluation. So that chapter has really made the most difference to me as an individual teacher.
Rebecca: Can you elaborate a little bit more on what it means to portfolio grade.
Rebecca: I think people have a general idea of what that means in like a writing class, something that might not have a clear idea of what it might mean in a different kind of course.
Josh: Right. Sure. And actually, I know that there are very specific models of portfolio grading too… some of which come out of writing studies. I take a very broad look at… actually my wife, teachers art as well… and so I borrow some of the notion of a portfolio from what artists do and how they grade student work over time. And so my own definition of portfolio grading is a developmental approach where all assignments are turned in but only given feedback on… multiple opportunities for revision… and the only thing that gets a grade is the final submission of all the revised work. Even quizzes and exams, you can think about in a portfolio model as adapting and revising answers over time within certain constraints, and then giving a grade on the final product that also includes a reflective introduction. How did I learn over time? How did I improve over time? What areas do I still have left to explore?
Rebecca: Thanks. That’s helpful. I have a question about when you’re writing the book, as someone who’s not a scientist and you’re digging into all this science stuff, it seems interesting that you’re writing about learning where you were probably also actively engaging in all of these things. I’m wondering if that writing process influenced and that experience influenced how you wrote this book?
Josh: It did. Yes. I think part of the process was being in uncomfortable territory, novel territory for myself. In many ways. I was in the same situation as an introductory student in a lot of these disciplines and certainly having patience with myself. As I was writing what I was doing my work with faculty and then with students was understanding (because I was going through it myself) a little bit better how someone from a different discipline might be hearing and responding to another disciplinary approach with an unfamiliarity… not a resistance to… but an unfamiliarity that we need to kind of break down and have a common language for. And so that was a part of it. The other thing, though, was being in that position, kind of like a student myself, I reached out to colleagues here at Rice. So when I had questions about evolutionary biology, I would call up my friend Scott Solomon and say: “Here’s what I’m thinking, am I on the right track?” And he would say: “Well, not really. But why don’t you look at this and this…” and eventually, through those interactions with him, I can get to something that I thought that folks would find credible and that process also helps you to see that students, especially those who are new to a subject, there’s the vulnerability and having to say, “Am I right about this? Do I know what I’m talking about.” And I think that’s worth taking very seriously. And I haven’t been in that role for a very long time. And so it was really helpful, I think, to be in that situation again for my own teaching, and to be able to talk about that with faculty. It was fun to write it. One of the reasons I wanted to move into working at a teaching and learning center was the opportunity to work with faculty from all disciplines. And this really helped me in that role, and that I was learning the contours of a lot of different disciplines. And I learned different kinds of questions to ask and different kind of perspective.
John: Yeah, we enjoy that for much too.
John: Are there any aspects of your book that some readers might find controversial? The argument that I make in the book that as adults, we still learn in the same ways that we did when we were children. And I wouldn’t say that that probably will be one the biggest points of argument or discussion over time. Certainly not everyone agrees with that. But what I simply mean by that is that our processes for learning really don’t change that much from the time when we’re very little as we grow older. Our brains certainly mature. We have different life experiences that we’re bringing. Our ability to regulate our emotions is not the same as the three year old that’s very, very different.
Josh: …at least hopefully. [LAUGHTER] But, the way we learn remains relatively the same. And I draw on the work of a fabulous psychologist named Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist, and she’s done a lot of papers on this. But she wrote a pretty popular book with two others, Andrew Meltzoff and someone else (his name is escaping me). And that book’s called The Scientist in the Crib. They make the case very clearly. They say something almost to the effect that scientists can develop the knowledge that they can and experiment the way they can, because they’re utilizing processes and structures that were designed for children. So we are still learning in the same way that we did when we were very young. We’re just approaching it a little bit differently and we’ve matured along the way. So I really hope we can use that information in our work in the classroom to say, “There are things about learning that we know will work and have always worked because this is who we are.” And so if we can use that, if we can build pedagogies that tap into those things that we know that never change about learning, then we will always be serving our students well.
Rebecca: I think that’s a good point.
John: It makes sense. We evolved to learn in a certain way. We take things in from our senses, we encode it, and we’re still using the same processes ultimately.
Josh: Yes, I agree.
John: We always end the podcast with the question, “What are you doing next?”
Josh: I recently gave a talk called “Teaching as a Creative Endeavor.” So kind of the other side of the coin… the creativity that goes into teaching… teaching as an art and some of the things that actually can’t be measured, but that we hope we might be achieving. And so I think that I’ll probably continue down that road… a bigger project on the creative art of teaching… what that means… and the research on creativity and how that can apply. I’m not sure if it’ll be a book yet, but I’m definitely really interested in that aspect of teaching as well.
Rebecca: Yeah, that’s something that faculty here have expressed some interest in, as well… of creativity and what that looks like. So I thank you might have an audience
Josh: Well, that would be great.
John: In our past reading groups,that is one of the questions that came up the most: “How can we encourage the development of creativity?” And I don’t think there’s a lot out there on it that we’ve seen at least
Josh: No, I don’t think that there is. I think that there are faculty in the arts who are thinking a lot about it. A number of books, not related to education, but that have come out in the last 10 years on what is creativity. And in fact, one of my colleagues here, Tony Brandt wrote a book with David Eagleman on creativity and the creative brain and humans as the creative species. So I think there’s a lot of room to really use that information to think about our work as teachers.
Rebecca: Excellent. Look forward to finding out what you end up doing with that information and how you explore it.
Josh: Thank you.
John: Well, thank you for joining us. This was a fascinating conversation and I really loved your book.
Josh: Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. Both those kind of comments and also the opportunity to talk with you today.
Rebecca: Yeah, thanks for taking time.
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Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.