Lots of higher education teachers talk about teaching or developing critical thinking skills in students but I’m never sure if (a) we’re all on the same page and (b) if we actually know what we’re doing.  This summary of a great article suggests that some teachers have some good data to make some decisions about how to teach critical thinking.

The original article is Carrithers, D., Ling, T., and Bean, J. C. (2008). Messy problems and lay audiences: Teaching critical thinking within the finance curriculum. Business Communication Quarterly, 71 (2), 152-170.  Available here if you’re a UBC faculty/staff/student. There are five major findings that can help us develop critical thinking in students:

1) Students don’t like “messy”.  They don’t like uncertainty or estimation and try to make the problem as simple as possible.  We need to help students get familiar and comfortable with making decisions with unknowns.

2) Students respond as if the professor is the key stakeholder even when the problem is introduced from a client’s perspective.  We must have them focus on the people involved and make the client central to the process.

3) Strong students write a textbook as their responses.  Students are so keen to show us that they “know it all”, they tell us everything.  Even when such information would not be appropriate for the client.  This relates to #2 above.  We need to get the focus off the professor and the grade and onto the process and the client.

4) Students write textbooks rather than “advice-memos”.  This relates to #2 and #3 – if students write to the professor they want to demonstrate their entire process rather than just give great advice.  Personally I encourage students to show me their thinking process, even if that wouldn’t be appropriate for the client.  Maybe I’m perpetuating #2 and #3 without knowing it?  I suppose I can ask for the process (i.e. how did you come to that conclusion) and the product (written for the client) as two distinct items?

5) Students like words not pictures.  Students do not use graphics effectively, they would prefer to write an entire page when one clear bar graph, pie chart, or table would sum it all up.  Are students unfamiliar with software to produce those graphics or have we focussed on page-length or word-count far too much?

A few thoughts to ponder …

Sandy

This one will be brief – real brief.  I’ve had a few interesting discussions in the past few days and each one included a great quote.  One was Henry Ford’s: “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”  The other was Albert Einstein’s: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing.”

How does this relate to education, teaching and learning?  Ford’s is fantastic – I don’t want to dismiss student input into curricular and methodological issues, but educators need to be VERY careful designing education to suit students.  Just the other day I got my student evaluations from the fall semester – no surprises.  I knew one course had been a struggle, both for me and the students.  I think it was due to trying to do too much – not content, but rather trying to implement a new teaching philosophy too rapidly.  Half way through the course I knew it was not working and the student evals agreed with my assessment.  Was it a failure?  No.  I am still committed to the idea, I just need to implement it differently.  A perfect example of not flogging the same old horse (note: no horses were physically abused in this post:)

What about Einstein’s quote?  Passively accepting injustice or violence is clearly not appropriate, but either is passively accepting violence to one’s soul (reference to Parker Palmer’s deep thoughts).  Palmer claims that each of us needs to find careers that align with our soul – to do otherwise does violence to our soul (his phrase, not mine).  First, we have a responsibility to actively search and pursue our heart’s desire for a career – do not settle for less.  Second, we have a responsibility to help our students do the same.  I am happy to help a student choose not to pursue an accounting career if they are not committed to it.  In the long run, their happiness is at stake.

Kudos to both Ford and Einstein, thanks for the inspirations!

“The customer is always right”.  ”Customer satisfaction”.  Those are phrases that get tossed around in pop culture all the time, but do they have any place on a university campus?  I read an interesting article about rewarding good teaching at Texas A&M by having students judge the best teacher and then giving out substantial sums of money - http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/13/bonuspay.  Seems like a good idea, and it could go a long way to help improve general teaching but does it have any merit?

It reminds me of something I read a month ago about students as consumers of education.  For many years I considered that approach – the product is the degree, the students are paying for it, it made sense to think that the student is the consumer and to carefully consider their satisfaction.  The good news is that I’ve moved on to something I am more philosophically comfortable with, the bad news is that it sounds bad from a student’s perspective.  My new belief is that the learner is NOT the consumer, the learner is the product.

Following that thought, educators should not be focused making or keeping students happy (although that is important).  Rather, we need to ensure that the goals and objectives of your program get instilled and built within each graduating student.  As an analogy, take a raw piece of aluminum and construct an automobile.  Imagining that the aluminum has feelings etc – it is doubtful that the aluminum enjoys being stretched and reshaped from being a block of raw aluminum into some fantastic useful shape but such reshaping is necessary.

So does this mean I don’t care about students?  Absolutely I do, no question.  Caring about a student’s long term growth and development is exactly why I have such a philosophy.  Do I think that a class or a course should be a painful transition or reshaping?  Yes and no.  I have no doubts that a happy learner is a motivated learner.  Learning should be fun, but it shouldn’t be easy.  If your personal trainer only ensured that you were happy and comfortable, its doubtful you’d ever improve your fitness.  Perhaps education is not any different?

Comments from students are definitely appreciated!

I was speaking with some of my colleagues last week, both locally and nationally, and I was disappointed with their comments on students.  Any professor has either heard or thought comments about students’ lack of motivation, poor work ethic, or students’ seemingly disrespectful attitude towards professors.  Maybe I am a push-over or naive, but I have a belief that students are fantastic people that I can learn as much from them as I hope to teach.  Sure some students are keener than others, some are more focused, and some are more similar to “us” – but each student is an important part of this world, needs to be treated as such, and the “more difficult” ones need more care, not less. Someone once told me that when teachers whine about students study skills etc, we should remember our purpose here.  An analogy is like doctors complaining about all the sick people in the hospital and how the doctors’ job would be easier if the people weren’t sick.  Clearly that’s a pretty silly argument and I claim that whining about students is not much different. So, to the students I say thank you for being you, thank you for giving me a chance to interact with you, I really do respect that.  To the faculty I say deflate your ego and rise to the challenge.  The fruit of our labours is worth it, I have immense faith in that.

In my relatively short professional and academic career I have seen first hand the importance of good leadership.  Like most of us, I’ve experienced working for/with fantastic leaders and I’ve also experienced the drudgery of working for (not with) poor leaders.  There are lots of good books on leadership – interestingly, I suspect that the good leaders read none of them, they are, as you say, natural born leaders.  What is good leadership:

•  not following – obviously being a leader means that you can’t be a follower.  What are you doing that is innovative, pushing the boundaries, and making tomorrow’s new product/service?
• you have disciples – not drones, but disciples.  People that understand your vision, believe in your vision, and trust you.
• you have vision – this goes with the first point.  As a leader you must have an idea of where you are headed.  Endless committees, delaying decisions, waiting to see what the market place looks like are not leadership skills.
• you have courage – leading is risky.  If you don’t like risk or can’t handle the potential outcome, don’t take the position.  Warming a leaders chair does not make you a leader – at best you’re a caretaker, at worst you’ve tied up a chair that is critical to the institution.

I have not always agreed with a great leader (and in a few cases there have been some heated debates), but when all is said and done, I would still follow them into battle.  To the great leaders that have shown me the light, thank you.  To the weak leaders that are still warming seats, move on. 

Call me crazy, shake your head – I’m going back to school.  Over the past few years as I’ve realized that I love teaching and how little I really know about teaching and learning, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about doing some formal education on, well, education.  Since I can’t just quit my job and go back to being a grad student (Tessa would kill me), in 2006/07 I enrolled in UBC Vancouver’s Faculty Certificate Program.  Its an 8 month program where I went out to Vancouver once a month to learn some education fundamentals.  While doing that program I met Harry, an education faculty member who specializes in post-secondary curriculum issues – exactly what I was looking for.  With the move to UBCO, the possibility of doing some grad work with Harry has become a reality.  I am officially enrolled as a part-time masters student in the faculty of education at UBCV starting next spring.  I’m going to complete it over the next couple summers so that I can still work full time and pay the bills.  My expectations for the program are high although I suspect that I’ll be left with more questions than when I started – that is generally the sign of successful education.  As Christmas nears I hope you have taken the time to shovel some snow, drink some eggnog, eat some Christmas oranges, and kiss a loved one.  Happy holidays!

So I haven’t posted for awhile, mostly because my thoughts have either been too scattered, too focused on specific classroom stuff that I can’t discuss, or on program development that is hush-hush until formal approval.  At the beginning of November I had a fascinating conversation that really challenged me to think about what are we trying to do here at UBCO that is different than everyone else.  Of course, maybe we don’t have to be different.  Forcing differentiation is not a good thing, it should either come through stakeholder demands, or visionary insight.  I’ve been hoping and praying for some of the latter for a month now!

Note: usually I don’t like to complain without offering potential solutions as well, but today is an exception.  I’ve delayed writing this for a month in hopes that I could find some light at the end of the tunnel, I’m not waiting anymore.

There is substantial literature out there that has suggested that management education needs a serious change of direction.  Personally, I don’t see many significant shifts.  Why?  I think there are three possible (non-independent) reasons: (1) management education doesn’t need to change and the literature is wrong, (2) internally we don’t know how to change nor de we care to learn how, or (3) the risk of failure is too large so we remain in our ruts.Finally,  if all the programs are similar how do we justify what we do?  Why do we all try to replicate the structure of every other major business school?  Maybe, just maybe, there’s room for very unique, very niche management topics.  Perhaps we’ll be offering a management degree for students focusing on alternative travel, real alternative, like time-travel.  Imagine dealing with the human resource or accounting issues involved in that.  Before I work on that program I promise I will first figure out how unique it is, maybe there are already 100 schools offering that program.  Second, I will muddle through my first question in this post which was why can’t management education move forward?