Terry - this is such an important post and one I really appreciate. I was frankly shocked how little training there was about teaching and instruction when I transitioned from law to the classroom in 1995. For over 30 years, department and faculty meetings have primarily been focused on content, content, content - as if that's the holy grail of working with students. It's been my mission since I started to educate myself and try to improve as a teacher every year. I took two courses from Linda Darling Hammond at Teacher's College and she had us do one of the greatest assignments I've ever had - it was a teacher's log and I still have it. I wrote about it on one of my posts. One of the few times we ran an actual Professional Day about teaching was during a brief period when I held the title of Curriculum Director in our Middle School and brought in someone from Understanding by Design. I remember how many teachers were pleasantly surprised that we actually spent a day with our colleagues talking about teaching - in both Japan and Finland, teacher collaboration is the norm as is rigorous review of lessons. Not so here. Highlights from my professional development were two separate week long stints at Harvard's Project Zero and the work I've done with debate. Also, (and I've linked it below), an SJC preceptorial on Education and Pedagogy (I've linked the course pack below) was a wonderful place to be reminded that humanity has been talking about teaching and learning for millennia. But as far as ongoing support, evaluation, advice, and feedback with respect to the latest research on neuroscience and learning? Barely exists unless you go out and ask for it. Even when we do occasionally bring in someone, within a week it's back to the same old grind because there are no frameworks in place to incentivize change! And yet, as Darling-Hammond points out and I've read elsewhere, the quality of the teacher is the single biggest factor in determining effective learning. A student who attends a lousy school might have the five best teachers in a row and an entirely different experience than another student in the same institution. No business would tolerate such disparities in outcomes. I love teaching but it is the most humbling and complex job I can imagine, especially when we cannot even agree on what the proper outcomes should be - AI, as you say, has only revealed what many have known all along. Where I am, the ultimate arbiter is college placement - as long as that continues the way families who pay full freight want, we don't have any reason to change much. AI might, might just upend that notion but I suspect not, at least as long as the Harvard's, Yale's, and Stanford's still exist. In any case, I enjoyed this one! Happy reading if you're interested! It's a great list!
What’s the title of your post about the teacher’s log? I didn’t see it and would like to read it. Your capacity to reflect on your experiences with students is pretty amazing, based on discussions we’ve had and posts you’ve written, as is your willingness to change when you see a need. LDH has had a profound impact on you as she has had with me. I worked on a team she co-chaired with David Pearson from Berkeley on the design. of a performance-based teaching portfolio which served foe a time in California as a credentialing mechanism. I don’t expect much to change re admission to elite colleges, either, and I understand full well why expensive prep schools would look to college admissions as evidence of effectiveness. Thanks so much for sending along the readings from the course! Some I’ve seen but many I have not. I’m looking forward to seeing what Nietzsche has to say:)
It was a old one. The entire opening passage is just one question from the log - I think my entire thing ran over 20 or 30 pages. TC was big on portfolio's - both students and teachers - you should see the binder I have which I submitted for my degree. It ran over 200 or more pages of reflections, lessons, and other materials from just my first 5 years in the classroom (I got my Masters while teaching and coaching full time over about 2 1/2 years, right before my first child was born. I should have started writing more back then.
The Nietzsche was not especially memorable. I really enjoyed he juxtaposition of Booker T. Washington and DuBois.
"We don’t let climate policy be dictated by people who reject atmospheric science. We don’t staff the CDC with people who dismiss epidemiology. We don’t hand economic policy to people who’ve never studied how markets function. The federal government maintains robust scientific infrastructure for agriculture, weather, public health, land management, and labor relations because we understand that governance requires expertise."
We didn't until l last year. All through reading this the politics kept screaming out. Public schools are so politicized and controlled by so many factions that even if teachers were correctly prepared. Their hands may tied in a manner that prevents them from enacting the curriculum that best serve their students. In my state that attack has reached higher education (which used to have academic freedom) at such a level that this may very well be my last semester teaching. It a student or parent or unaffected but parties send in a complaint about my class, I could be barred from teaching at the community college.
One the major unspoken problems is the lack of valuing scientific thinking, thus devaluing scientific research. I fear it will only get worse as the die is cast. How many time during the pandemic did we hear Joe the plumber types (who wasn't actually a plumber) say things like, "I don't trust the vaccine because I don't know what's in it," as they down their super HFCS soda, and guzzled down their fast food hamburger.
Maybe LLMs can be leveraged to get us their but I fear not as the promises of AI have been over sold and most don't understand the function of predicting the next token much less the significance. We might start by using your words and calling AI what it is mimicked intelligence or mock intelligence (MI).
Thanks for this commentary, Herb. Yep. Nowadays we certainly do trust people who reject atmospheric science as well as immunology—even while we don’t trust them. Depends on who we is. . Let’s hope it’s a blip; seems like people may be beginning to respond to the smelling salts a few brave Republicans are offering. I share your concern about how little AI is understood. Much of that, I believe, stems from the fact that far too many teachers have not done much to experiment with it. I’ve begged former colleagues of mine at Sacramento State to try it, just try it, and to this day I know of people who have done little more than approach it to demonstrate just how screwed up it is—which is easy to do because it can be a dangerously flawed tool if misused (sort of like a gun, I suppose). Once you work with it, you see clearly how limited it is—but also how superhuman it can be as a linguistic analyst. I use it all the time to explore how words have been used during certain time periods, say—Raymond Williams style keyword analysis. What did the word “heart” carry with it in seventeenth century London, say. What are cognates for “river” in ten different languages and how did they change over centuries. It’s not only enlightening, it’s fun. But I happen to admire Raymond William’s work, and I have thought a lot about the extensions AI brings to online dictionaries. Predicting the next word isn’t miraculous, but it is a step up from spell check and offers affordances that open up new ways of working with words. I hope teachers can reach the point where they don’t see it as if it is a writer or a reader but a dynamic dictionary. Could be a remarkable tool if understood, carefully taught, and regulated. Could be a complete disaster if it is feared, avoided, forbidden, and run by market forces.
Really strong case for grounding teaching in actual cognitive science rather than intuition. The point about preconceptions filtering everything students hear hits home—I've definately seen how "clear explanation" alone doesn't dismantle misconceptions. The LLM disruption angle is brilliant too; if a machine can produce the output, we were never assesing understanding in the first place. Integration as a learning-sciences strategy (not just a moral one) is a framing I hadn't considered but the mechanisms make total sense.
Terry - this is such an important post and one I really appreciate. I was frankly shocked how little training there was about teaching and instruction when I transitioned from law to the classroom in 1995. For over 30 years, department and faculty meetings have primarily been focused on content, content, content - as if that's the holy grail of working with students. It's been my mission since I started to educate myself and try to improve as a teacher every year. I took two courses from Linda Darling Hammond at Teacher's College and she had us do one of the greatest assignments I've ever had - it was a teacher's log and I still have it. I wrote about it on one of my posts. One of the few times we ran an actual Professional Day about teaching was during a brief period when I held the title of Curriculum Director in our Middle School and brought in someone from Understanding by Design. I remember how many teachers were pleasantly surprised that we actually spent a day with our colleagues talking about teaching - in both Japan and Finland, teacher collaboration is the norm as is rigorous review of lessons. Not so here. Highlights from my professional development were two separate week long stints at Harvard's Project Zero and the work I've done with debate. Also, (and I've linked it below), an SJC preceptorial on Education and Pedagogy (I've linked the course pack below) was a wonderful place to be reminded that humanity has been talking about teaching and learning for millennia. But as far as ongoing support, evaluation, advice, and feedback with respect to the latest research on neuroscience and learning? Barely exists unless you go out and ask for it. Even when we do occasionally bring in someone, within a week it's back to the same old grind because there are no frameworks in place to incentivize change! And yet, as Darling-Hammond points out and I've read elsewhere, the quality of the teacher is the single biggest factor in determining effective learning. A student who attends a lousy school might have the five best teachers in a row and an entirely different experience than another student in the same institution. No business would tolerate such disparities in outcomes. I love teaching but it is the most humbling and complex job I can imagine, especially when we cannot even agree on what the proper outcomes should be - AI, as you say, has only revealed what many have known all along. Where I am, the ultimate arbiter is college placement - as long as that continues the way families who pay full freight want, we don't have any reason to change much. AI might, might just upend that notion but I suspect not, at least as long as the Harvard's, Yale's, and Stanford's still exist. In any case, I enjoyed this one! Happy reading if you're interested! It's a great list!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NTjo3I6zIFZWFBNiZdikkPXcB-oj8Vuj/view?usp=sharing
What’s the title of your post about the teacher’s log? I didn’t see it and would like to read it. Your capacity to reflect on your experiences with students is pretty amazing, based on discussions we’ve had and posts you’ve written, as is your willingness to change when you see a need. LDH has had a profound impact on you as she has had with me. I worked on a team she co-chaired with David Pearson from Berkeley on the design. of a performance-based teaching portfolio which served foe a time in California as a credentialing mechanism. I don’t expect much to change re admission to elite colleges, either, and I understand full well why expensive prep schools would look to college admissions as evidence of effectiveness. Thanks so much for sending along the readings from the course! Some I’ve seen but many I have not. I’m looking forward to seeing what Nietzsche has to say:)
It was a old one. The entire opening passage is just one question from the log - I think my entire thing ran over 20 or 30 pages. TC was big on portfolio's - both students and teachers - you should see the binder I have which I submitted for my degree. It ran over 200 or more pages of reflections, lessons, and other materials from just my first 5 years in the classroom (I got my Masters while teaching and coaching full time over about 2 1/2 years, right before my first child was born. I should have started writing more back then.
The Nietzsche was not especially memorable. I really enjoyed he juxtaposition of Booker T. Washington and DuBois.
It's this post:
https://fitzyhistory.substack.com/p/how-to-engage-your-students
"We don’t let climate policy be dictated by people who reject atmospheric science. We don’t staff the CDC with people who dismiss epidemiology. We don’t hand economic policy to people who’ve never studied how markets function. The federal government maintains robust scientific infrastructure for agriculture, weather, public health, land management, and labor relations because we understand that governance requires expertise."
We didn't until l last year. All through reading this the politics kept screaming out. Public schools are so politicized and controlled by so many factions that even if teachers were correctly prepared. Their hands may tied in a manner that prevents them from enacting the curriculum that best serve their students. In my state that attack has reached higher education (which used to have academic freedom) at such a level that this may very well be my last semester teaching. It a student or parent or unaffected but parties send in a complaint about my class, I could be barred from teaching at the community college.
One the major unspoken problems is the lack of valuing scientific thinking, thus devaluing scientific research. I fear it will only get worse as the die is cast. How many time during the pandemic did we hear Joe the plumber types (who wasn't actually a plumber) say things like, "I don't trust the vaccine because I don't know what's in it," as they down their super HFCS soda, and guzzled down their fast food hamburger.
Maybe LLMs can be leveraged to get us their but I fear not as the promises of AI have been over sold and most don't understand the function of predicting the next token much less the significance. We might start by using your words and calling AI what it is mimicked intelligence or mock intelligence (MI).
Thanks for this commentary, Herb. Yep. Nowadays we certainly do trust people who reject atmospheric science as well as immunology—even while we don’t trust them. Depends on who we is. . Let’s hope it’s a blip; seems like people may be beginning to respond to the smelling salts a few brave Republicans are offering. I share your concern about how little AI is understood. Much of that, I believe, stems from the fact that far too many teachers have not done much to experiment with it. I’ve begged former colleagues of mine at Sacramento State to try it, just try it, and to this day I know of people who have done little more than approach it to demonstrate just how screwed up it is—which is easy to do because it can be a dangerously flawed tool if misused (sort of like a gun, I suppose). Once you work with it, you see clearly how limited it is—but also how superhuman it can be as a linguistic analyst. I use it all the time to explore how words have been used during certain time periods, say—Raymond Williams style keyword analysis. What did the word “heart” carry with it in seventeenth century London, say. What are cognates for “river” in ten different languages and how did they change over centuries. It’s not only enlightening, it’s fun. But I happen to admire Raymond William’s work, and I have thought a lot about the extensions AI brings to online dictionaries. Predicting the next word isn’t miraculous, but it is a step up from spell check and offers affordances that open up new ways of working with words. I hope teachers can reach the point where they don’t see it as if it is a writer or a reader but a dynamic dictionary. Could be a remarkable tool if understood, carefully taught, and regulated. Could be a complete disaster if it is feared, avoided, forbidden, and run by market forces.
Really strong case for grounding teaching in actual cognitive science rather than intuition. The point about preconceptions filtering everything students hear hits home—I've definately seen how "clear explanation" alone doesn't dismantle misconceptions. The LLM disruption angle is brilliant too; if a machine can produce the output, we were never assesing understanding in the first place. Integration as a learning-sciences strategy (not just a moral one) is a framing I hadn't considered but the mechanisms make total sense.