Michael Sandel's Justice Course

On September 30th, professor Michael Sandel delivered a lecture in the CFL called "The Lost Art of Democratic Argument."  Sandel teaches a course called "Justice" at Harvard University, which models the ancient Greek assemblies in debating moral and ethical issues.  At the Luther lecture, the assembled students and teachers raised and responded to questions under the moderation of Sandel.  Wireless microphones circulated through the audience in response to the various scenarios Sandel laid before his listeners.  This open forum got to the heart of our ethical values, pitting autonomy against universalism, and asking, "What is the right thing to do?"  The lecture was an introduction to the format of his Justice course, which he claims recaptures 'the lost art of democratic argument.'

Sandel's lecture is a model to teachers for asking good questions, though the scenarios he presented might not be appropriate out of the philosophy classroom.  In our particular lecture, Sandel was dealing with the process by which we arrive at moral decisions.  Example: if a rail car is careening out of control toward five people standing on the tracks and you are standing a switch that could divert the car to a track with only one person on it, would you throw the switch?  The assembled Luther crowd favor numbers until Sandel changed the scenario a bit.  What if you were standing on a ledge overlooking the tracks next to a fat man who could stop the car if you pushed him off the ledge, would you do it?  The numbers were the same, but the ethical dilemma changed dramatically.  This essentially sums up the lecture.  Whenever an audience member came to a definite decision, Sandel tweaked the circumstances to complicate that decision. 

The format was effectively engaging if admittedly limited.  Sandel's strategy was adept at raising ethical issues but did little to resolve them.  Nor was it really meant to.  In altering his fictitious scenarios, Sandel reduced them to the absurd in order to get at the heart of our moral values.  A scenario that began partially based in fact had so many 'ifs' attached to it eventually that such a scenario was reduced to absurdity.  If you were and solider on a covert mission in Afghanistan and came across two civilians and knew those civilians were actually disguised enemy combatants and knew that letting them go would be the deaths of your entire company, would you kill them?  This scenario is ridiculous.  It presents the wrong number of choices, - you could easily tie them up and leave them until later - but it is meant to engage our moral thoughts on loyalty, empathy, and duty

The implications for teaching are quite profound.  The assembly format and general discussion of difficult questions engaged the audience with extraordinary effectiveness.  We analyzed our moderator, our peers, and even ourselves in one assembly.  We thought critically, asked question.  In short, it was one of the most effective lectures I've ever attended.  And it makes me wonder how far that format could be extended.  Is it limited to democratic discourse or could it be applied in Biology and English classrooms?  Sandel's scenarios might no longer be effective, but questions can still be raised to complicate our perceptions and engage a critical response.  Debate and discussion reinforce our abilities to communicate and ask good questions, both of each other and ourselves.  Such discussion stimulates interest in a topic before the particulars are approached, and can therefore be used as an effective teaching mechanism.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9bOIYnGqbs&feature=related

Can Dispositions Be Taught?

Dispositions are reflections of character and must be nurtured rather than taught.  Though nurturing implies some teaching, it has more to do with environment than teachers.  Teaching is certainly part of the environment, but it is unclear what impact it has upon character.  There is no guarantee that all my time at Sunday school is going to make me a generous person, even though that is the lesson being taught.  What might have more impact is being around generous people or being given the opportunity to be generous myself.  In this sense, we must be shown rather than told what a good disposition is to effectively incorporate it into our own characters.  To best enhance dispositions we must lead by example and create an environment that values those dispositions and allows opportunity to exhibit them.

But can we teach ourselves dispositions?  Can an individual change his or her own character?  This is something we would all like to believe but in reality is very difficult to achieve.  We are each of us affected by our circumstances more than anything.  In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates this with a study done on seminary students.  The study was a reenactment of the Good Samaritan story.  Students were told they would be giving a lecture at a specific location.  Along the route to this location, the researchers arranged for an actor to play the injured individual at the side of the road.  The students were then divided into groups along three variables: 1) whether they entered the ministry primarily to attain person fulfillment or to help others, 2) whether the lecture would be on the Good Samaritan or the affects of personal ministry on society, 3) whether they were late or not.  Turns out the only variable that really mattered was time.  Those who were late didn't stop; those who had time did. 

Circumstances not only shape character but can also overwhelm it.  The only way I can see for individuals to control character development is through frequent and critical self-reflection.  It doesn't always work, but it is making a conscious effort to develop character.  It is easy to recognize poor dispositions in others, but it is hardest to recognize it in ourselves.  Yet we must try to route out these faults in our characters if we are to overcome them.  And most of the time we don't succeed, but simply trying encourages humility and self-awareness, two qualities inherent in the best dispositions.  So can dispositions be taught?  Perhaps not... but we may as well try.

How Do We Prepare Teachers for the Stresses of the Teaching Profession?

Greater awareness.  Plain and simple.  Students planning to become teachers must have a greater awareness of both what that job entails and their own motivations for teaching.  What are the stresses of teaching?  Do I really want to teach, considering all these pressures?  Why do I want to do this in the first place.  Too often teachers enter the teaching profession either unaware of what that means or without self-honesty, and those are the fifty percent who change professions in less than three years.  Of that fifty percent, a good portion probably never should have been teacher, whereas others might simply have been shocked and overwhelmed by what they found.  How do we prevent this shock?  More classroom observation, more student teaching, and self-evaluations reflecting on motivations.  How do we encourage resilience?  Experience.  Experience.  Experience.  Only through experience in the classroom, first in moderation and then with greater intensity, will students develop the capacity to deal with the pressures of teaching.  Mere enthusiasm and intelligence are not enough to develop mental resiliency.  Students must question their passion to make it stronger.  And they must do so before they even enter the profession if they are to last as teachers.

Balancing Confidence and Humility: Teachers Asking Questions WITH Students

Nymphenburg Palace in Munich is beautiful.  Unfortunately for me, the place will always remind me of my overconfident display counting the swans in front of it.  I had never seen so many swans gathered in one place!  There were sixty of them!  I counted every last one in video my friend recorded on his camera, and what did I boisterously declare at the end?  "Fifty-nine... sixty!  Sixty swans!  And you want to know how many of them are female?  Two!"  Yea, those two gray swans were signets, young swans, which any person familiar with the 'Ugly Duckling' fable should know, but I had frankly forgotten.  Now this seems a silly but rather small mistake, except that I had declared myself so confidently that no one actually questioned me until a few hours later.  Turns out that if you speak with a loud authoritative voice people believe you.  But if you're wrong, you risk misinforming others.  Luckily, my friends were too discerning to let that one slide for long, so I looked like an idiot, but no one was confused about signets.

In teaching, an air of overconfidence can risk misinforming students, stifling their input, or even encouraging arrogance by example.  Yet no confidence loses classroom discipline and student trust as it makes a teacher look incompetent.  A balance must therefore be struck: be confident but careful.  Certainty is risky.  The single greatest was to avoid this risk and encourage humility in students is to ask questions.  Even if you know what you're talking about, allow students to question you.  Ask questions yourself that will allow students to engage with the answers.  Student participation is key to establishing a confident yet humble example as a teacher.  By encouraging students to question and engage, teachers appear interested in what students have to say without surrendering their authority.  Teachers are guides to student learning, not facilitators.  A teacher who embraces this philosophy will appear humble while still placing his or herself as a valuable resource to students.

Inventiveness in the 21st-Century Classroom

So once upon a time the industrial revolution thrust society's economic power into the hands a of a very few entrepreneurial men.  These men in turn created thousands of strenuous factory jobs that required little to no creativity for their execution, thereby limiting the importance of creativity as skill for centuries to come.  Now the forces of this century have amassed together to renew that importance.  The outsourcing of factory jobs overseas and the emergence of electronic mediums such as the internet have shifted the US economy from industrial to service/information, where communication and creativity are the keys to success.  Greater communicative abilities have allowed for the free flow of ideas and the recognition of societal complexities by a growing number of people.  This awareness has in turn made businesses/governments realize that innovative ideas can come from anywhere, therefore making inventiveness an essential skill in business, service, and citizenship. 

The problem is that educators are ill-equipped to teach creativity.  It is, after all, impossible to teach creativity under any direct instructional approach.  Creativity is an internally developed skill that cannot simply be relayed to students.  Social constructivist approaches must be adopted as teachers realize they can only give students the tools and opportunities to create, not the skill itself.  In English courses we can teach literature/media studies/grammar/writing techniques, but the students must be given the opportunity to do something with it.  Literature exemplifies creativity; grammar provides the framework; writing/media allow for effective communication, but students must be able to use these tools to create.

In my reasoning, there are currently two ways in which English teachers can encouragement student creativity: written and oral communication.  Writing can be analytical, creative, or practical, and students can communicate orally through presentations, debates, or performance.  In all of these cases, since the student is responsible for the work, creativity can be encouraged.  And right now, there seem to be only two main obstacles: 1) rubrics are too specific, and 2) information/resources are not readily available.  So as teachers wishing to encourage creativity, we should not make rubrics unnecessarily specific.  We give them guidance but allow for opportunities to explore and create.  An academic example might be starting as essay question with 'what is the significance of...', knowing that what is significant will be different for each student and allow for many different approaches in answering the question.  That being said, resources and information must be readily available to students to make the creative/exploratory process as painless as possible.  Students should not feel forced to create.  And teachers should reward every facet of creativity - originality, complexity, initiative, etc.  Whether that reward should be a grade is a much trickier question.  How do we assess creativity?  Short answer: I don't know.

Three Elements to Effective Collaboration + Getting to the Guts of Imprecise Terms

Most years my high school basketball team was pretty crap.  Senior year we flopped from one side of the court to the other, running our assignments without purpose or enthusiasm, hoping that one of our shooters might get the ball and do something with it.  We won a few games that year, but not nearly as many as we could have.  We had a lot of problems, but the one I remember most is trust - or in our case, lack thereof.  We didn't respect each others' abilities on the court.  We passed the ball but without confidence.  There were those of us who already lacked confidence in our abilities, and distrusting teammates certainly didn't help the matter. 

But suppose you're just crap at basketball... asking your teammates to trust you on the court would be a bit of a stretch (if the end goal is winning, that is).  Next component: competency.  Simply put, when a group member fails to meet his or her responsibilities, either because they are lazy or incapable, collaboration becomes one-sided.  A resource group in a computer firm cannot effectively solve a customer's technical problem if even one member is struggling to turn on the monitor. But even if trust and competency are present, collaboration is not necessarily effective.  Even if everyone in an architecture firm was competent and trusting,  a failure in communication can destroy a project.  Without a free flow of ideas, the firm loses efficiency and can fumble revolutionary ideas. 

'Collaboration' is a useful term in the education world.  Too often educators have used imprecise phrases such as 'group work' or 'cooperative learning' to describe the action implicit in 'collaboration.'  True, there are varying definitions of what is means to collaborate, but at least it is only word word that describes an action rather than goal or abstraction.  A phrase like 'group work' leaves room for interpretation because the verb 'work' is applied to the group rather than the individuals of that group.  It stresses the importance of the final product rather than the interactions of the individuals.  'Group work' can be lopsided.  Some members do more than others, but it is still 'group work', no matter the proportion.  Similarly, 'cooperative learning' might be equated to 'collaboration', but it can be interpreted in many different ways.  The juxtaposition of 'cooperative' and 'learning' is confusing since 'learning' is traditionally an individual experience, and individuals learn in ways that might not necessarily be cooperative.  'Collaboration' avoids this confusion by implying learning rather than explicitly stating it, allowing us to focus on the action rather than the idea.  In short, 'collaboration' is just a more powerful, succinct way of describing the action that 'group work' and 'cooperative learning' imply.  So instead of talking about 'group work' or 'cooperative learning' we should simply say 'collaborate' and allowing learning and group work to simply happen.

Efficacy in Teaching: A Necessary Balance of Confidence, Self-Awareness, and Persistence

  When I first came to Luther freshman year, I had the unmitigated arrogance to say to a friend that I felt destined for 'greater' things than teaching.  Ironic now, of course, since I feel teachers are the most undervalued workers on the planet, feeling the crushing pressure of expectations while receiving few tangible benefits.  Everyday they are expected to inform and engage students, maintain discipline, satisfy district and national standards of assessment, create appropriate learning environments, submit lesson plans, attend meetings, satisfy parents, organize school events, coach, and remain relentlessly optimistic, despite obstacles, stress, and insufficient pay.  This is a ridiculously long list of things to do, and those with the capacity to get the job done deserve the utmost respect. 

I wonder how many people would take the challenge if they got the whole low-down on the job description.  From the outskirts, teaching appears to be a pretty thankless job for the difficulties entailed.  Altruistic motivation must outweigh tangible benefits if teachers are to be effective in this world.  But a lot of teachers find themselves drained of that internal motivation by the end of their first year.  The task proves too daunting, and altruism is no longer sufficient to motivate teachers.  The teachers who dropped out after the first year lack self-awareness of their capacity for teaching.  They might possess a strong work ethic and confidence in their abilities but are unable to reflect on their own limitations, and so grow frustrated at their failures. 

An effective teacher must be able to maintain a balance of confidence, persistence, and self-awareness in order to be successful. If any one trait is lacking, we witness a breakdown in learning.  A teacher without confidence becomes too oppressed by his or her limitations.  A teacher without a persistent work ethic fails to push his or her students toward learning goals or maintain an effective learning environment.  Without self-awareness, a teacher is trapped by his or her inability to identify and overcome ineffectiveness. 

In the teaching world, efficacy is best developed through outside input.  Communication with other teachers and critical feedback allow teachers to develop and experiment with alternative approaches to teaching that may prove more effective.  This in turn stimulates a more collaborative learning environment.  If teachers understand their individual responsibilities in the community of the school, individual work ethic is reinforced.  If teachers support and encourage one another, confidence is built and restored.  Working together and understanding how others deal with similar situations can make the daunting task of teaching seem more reasonable.  With a collaborative support structure firmly in place, schools will enhance awareness, confidence, work ethic, and the effectiveness of teachers.