Trickle-down and Bubble-up Pedagogy

"Trickle-down economics" and "the trickle-down theory" are terms in United States politics to refer to the idea that tax breaks or other economic benefits provided by government to businesses and the wealthy will benefit poorer members of society by improving the economy as a whole.

Though many people today associate it with Reaganomics or supply-side economics, the term has been attributed to humorist Will Rogers, who said during the Great Depression that "money was all appropriated for the top in hopes that it would trickle down to the needy."

In some ways, there is a “trickle-down pedagogy" theory around in education - especially in the use of technology. The theory is that innovation starts in higher ed and then works its way down into K-12.

Examples might be the use of learning management systems, or 1:1 computing, or giving students iPods, tablets and phones. A lot of this innovation is economically motivated. Colleges have more to spend and can require students to spend. They also have fewer restrictions on what they can do with adult students.

Right now, MOOCs (massive open online courses) are a hot topic in higher ed. Though I can't imagine a K-12 school or system being able to offer a MOOC, I can see high school students and teachers participating in them, In fact, I can imagine more of the secondary school people participating than in higher ed.

More and more vendors of educational software are looking to K-12 as an untapped market for products and services that were seen as more suited to colleges. Learning management systems is a good example.

I feel pretty safe saying that the innovation in pure pedagogy - how we teach - comes from the lower grades and sometimes bubbles up to higher ed.

Is there any trickle-down pedagogy?

When I moved from secondary education to higher ed in 2000, I was amazed at what pofessor had not heard of in education. Topics and movements that I had been exposed to ten or even twenty years earlier were unheard of on campus. I blew the dust off materials I had about Bloom's taxonomy, learning styles, backwards design, rubrics, problem-based learning etc. and presented them to educational theory virgins who were surprisingly interested. More than a few faculty confessed to me that they knew almost nothing about educational theory and research. Some said, "I try to be like the good teachers I had and not like the poor ones."

I guess that would be a form of bubble-up pedagogy.

When the college I was working at back then offered some days of professional development for high school teachers, we had a hard time finding professors and topics that would be new to the teachers that they could actually do in their classrooms. They loved seeing our labs and toys, but they knew they had no chance of using what they saw in their classes. In teaching those workshops and sitting in other professors sessions, I often heard the high school teachers suggest to the presenters ways that they taught the content that seemed more innovative than our pedagogy.

And I don't want to get started on the blame game that trickles down from every higher level about how the students are unprepared by the earlier levels. That game extends even beyond schools. Primary teachers can blame pre-schools who can blame parents. Employers can blame the universities.

Of course, the best pedagogy sharing would be bidirectional and we would each learn from the other levels. It's unfortunate that upper level teachers (high school and college) often look down on teachers in K-8 because the content is so "simple" and ignore the innovative ways it is being presented and assessed. College professors are often seen as working in ivory towers of rarefied academic air that has little application to the teaching of "children."

Trickle-down or bubble up. We need good pedagogy to move across all levels of education.

Cross-posted from Serendipity35

Formal and Informal and Lifelong Learning

We always include in our workshops for faculty on writing a discussion on informal and formal writing assignments. Reading a post by Jared Stein recently, I started thinking about adding the element of lifelong learning.

I agree with Stein that lifelong and continual learning is critical to success. He also feels that we are "moving from an era of 'universal schooling' to an era of 'lifelong learning.'"

That means that learning not only happens continually, but it occurs anywhere, not just in classrooms or in online spaces controlled by schools.

It is also important to lifelong learning that the learning is self-selected for the learner's needs, not because of the needs or limitations of the school's offerings.

That's why the Internet -without any help or interference from schools and educators - became such an important learning resource.

Classrooms are chock full of formal writing, and informal writing often doesn't carry much "weight" with teachers - and therefore not much weight with students. So, not surprisingly, formal educational  experiences like the typical course taken for credit and paid for by tax dollars or tuition are valued over informal learning experiences. That has always been true, still is true, but may not be true in the next decade or two.

When we discuss in/formal writing, we start with the easy modes. Everyone in the group agrees that the research paper is formal. Most teachers agree that student notes are informal. Someone always brings up text messages, twitter, Facebook and social media as informal. They probably also blame all that informality for the poor quality of the formal writing (and possibly for the decline of civilization).

But it's not a black and white topic.  That email to a friend asking if we are still on for a Friday movie seems clearly informal. But the cover email that has your reume attached for the job you really want at the company that only accepts electronic applications is definitely formal.

Perhaps, my students' lecture notes are informal in structure, not required and ungraded, but the lab notes for anatomy lab are very structured, required and a significant part of the course grade.

Our discussions always lead us to a series of similar conclusions, including observations like:

• formal isn't formal just because of a grade or weight (though formal tends to be graded)
• informal writing is often the best way to move towards formal writing
• informal writing is often more "real world" and is more often done outside the classroom for personal reasons
• informal writing often has a structure
• the higher stakes nature of formal assignments allows less room for experimentation and risk-taking by students
• teacher comments and intervention is important in the writing process and far less important (to students) when a formal graded paper is returned

How many of those conclusions are also true of lifelong learning experiences?

How might we compare the research a student does before buying a big-screen TV to the research they do on an author? Do they even consider the TV consumer research to be"research" in the same sense as the author assignment?  That's one reason why we prefer the term information literacy for assignments rather than research, which still makes students think about something that leads to a "research paper" rather than a well reasoned conclusion.

Are lifelong learners more likely to take risks with informal learning - such as when taking a free online course from a university or any provider? I would say that is an absolute "Yes."

Since I see the future of learning as being less formalized and less likely to be provided by traditional educational institutions, thinking about these distinctions is increasingly important. That may be especially true for formal institutions of learning who have the most to lose in this paradigm shift.

Is Technology Changing Teaching Models?

We often hear that technology is changing the way we teach and the way students learn, but that doesn't always seem evident. In an article titled "Technology Driving Widespread Shift in Teaching Models" the indicators are that change is occurring. The article was in THE Journal (which is focused on K-12 education) but certainly much of this applies to us in higher ed too.

Their main point is that, according to the report referenced, "over the last two years, nearly half of faculty have moved away from a traditional lecture model and adopted a range of technology-driven teaching practices."  That report, "Learn Now, Lecture Later," was done for the tech vendor CDW-G.

They found an increase in the adoption of classroom-based technology use which resulted in a variety of changes to teaching and learning.

The vast majority of faculty and students, for example, now use notebooks and netbooks as classroom learning tools (75 percent of students and 72 percent of faculty overall), as well as digital content (69 percent of students and 73 percent of faculty).

Learning management systems were in use by a smaller majority, with 56 percent of students and 58 percent of faculty members reporting they use an LMS in the classroom.

What changed in the pedagogy? The increase of tech led to an increase in the use of non-lecture-based instructional delivery methods during class time. Those were identified as s hands-on learning, group projects, guided independent study, distance learning, and one-on-one instruction.

The majority of students participating in the study indicated they'd prefer a mix of delivery models, including:

    Distance learning (the choice of 11 percent of students);
    One-on-one tutoring (8 percent);
    Independent study (14 percent);
    Group projects (12 percent); and
    Hands-on projects (17 percent).

Additional findings included:

    69 percent of students reported they want to see more technology used in the classroom;
    26 percent of students reported they have used tablets in the classroom;
    34 percent of faculty have used tablets in the classroom;
    33 percent of students have used telepresence in their classrooms; and
    31 percent of faculty reported used telepresence.

No surprise that 76% of campus IT pros reported that teacher requests for classroom technologies have increased over the last two years.

A University Open Textbook Project

I have been an advocate for open textbooks. I think they are a good way to cut costs and put more textbooks in the hands of our students. But I'll admit that they are not widely used.

There are a number of possible reasons for that. They aren't easy to find, even though there are a number of sites that collect open and free titles. Instructors don't always trust that titles are "as good" as commercial textbooks. It also takes time to review titles for adoption.

The University of Minnesota has started its own online catalog of open books. In an effort to reduce costs for students, the College of Education and Human Development created the catalog to be reviewed by faculty members. The books are all released under a Creative Commons, or similar, license, and instructors can customize the books to fit their course needs.

Students can access free digital versions or purchase low-cost print copies of open textbooks. The university will pay its professors $500 each time they post an evaluation of one of those books, and professors who have already adopted open-source texts will also receive $500. (The money comes from donor funds.)

They hope to address faculty concerns about locating texts and having quality control over titles that have been peer-reviewed. They have almost a hundred books in the catalog.

Although it is encouraging that UM is working to get open textbooks used on campus, I find it discouraging that they need to duplicate the efforts of other repositories that are collecting textbooks and reviews on a larger scale.

What do you consider the most important criteria in choosing an open textbook for use in your teaching? Check my list and vote here.

Can You Flip a College Classroom?

If you haven't heard, the "flipped classroom" is a big concept in education this year, especially in the upper grades of K-12.

It's the idea of using technology like online video instruction, laptops, DVDs of lessons etc. to flip/reverse what students have traditionally done in class and at home to learn. For example, listening to lectures becomes the homework assignment and teachers use the class time for more one-on-one attention in class and students can work at their own pace or with other students.

Though an article I read traced the flipped classroom to a 2008 experiment by two Colorado chemistry teachers, Aaron Sams and Jonathan Bergmann, it's not so different from other concepts we have seen in educating with tech. Their idea that students need their teachers there to answer questions or to provide help if they get stuck on an assignment, but they might not need teachers present to listen to a lecture or review content.

When I was at NJIT and we launched our podcasting initiative and became one of the first schools on Apple's iTunes U, we were trying some of the same things. Have students watch and listen to a lecture before class and use the time in class to follow up with discussion and questions.

Of course, professors have been doing that for a long time with readings. And the two forms of content have the same problem. What if students don't do the reading or watch the lecture? I hear many professors complain that students 1) don't buy the book(s)   2) even if they do, they don't read them  3) if they do read them, they don't seem to retain or understand any of what they read.

You might assume that students are more likely to watch a lecture than read a chapter, but I don't think the evidence for that is clear.

Flipped classrooms allow students to work at their own pace and allow teachers to tailor their instruction to individual students.

Those two teachers have a book, Flip Your Classroom: Reach Every Student in Every Class Every Day and there is a Flipped Learning Network, a nonprofit organization launched this spring to train teachers from schools across the socio-economic spectrum in the strategy.

A article I read this week about an attempt to flip a classroom in a Portland, Oregon elementary school, points out one major obstacle. "Flipped Classroom' Model's Promise Eludes Poorer School Districts" shows that the teacher discovered that none of her students had computers at home. She had just one in the classroom.

Sometimes we make the assumption that there is ubiquitous computing and (high-speed) Internet access amongst our students. That is particularly true with college students who we imagine all being plugged in via their smartphones 24/7. The article points out that anecdotal evidence suggests that flipping classrooms is a more popular practice in wealthier suburban communities where nearly all students have Internet access at home and schools are more likely to have computers in classrooms.

Another criticism of the flipped classroom is that it still relies on lectures by teachers. Remember that over-used mantra of "guide on the side rather than the sage on the stage?" What happened?

In higher ed, blended learning (AKA hybrid learning) is probably the closest thing in place now to the flipped classroom. It too attempts to move some of the learning online, or at least out of the classroom space, and using the face-to-face time for what works best in that setting.

When I was designing hybrid courses, I always told faculty right off that they should do in the classroom whatever worked best in the classroom. If that meant having their truly dynamic lectures live and moving the discussion online, then do that.

Are you doing anything like a flipped classroom?  How would the flipped writing class work? Would it be like the low-residency MFA writing program?

We would love to get your comments.

Dissertation Dissing

The average humanities doctoral student takes nine years to earn a Ph.D.

At least that's what I read was said at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association held this year at Rutgers.

Students finishing dissertations now probably started them before Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Kindles, iPads and many other technologies existed.

In the article "Dissing the Dissertation," Scott Jaschik is writing about graduate students, so this may seem far off track for a blog about writing at a community college. But I have had my own discussions with colleagues and students here and at a university where I teach in a graduate program about dissertations. For undergrads, the idea of writing a book that almost no one will ever read sounds quite absurd.

The question in the article is really whether or not dissertations prepare students to work in this century in any place other than academia?

The discussion at the MLA conference seems to have centered around not only the time required to complete a dissertation but also the topics and format.

Is it possible that digital projects and publishing, and "public scholarship" may actually become alternatives? That stone wheel turns very slowly. The MLA actually issued a report back in 2006 about promotion and tenure practices that had also questioned this monograph (or "proto-book") production process.

At PCCC, we often question the writing exam we require students to pass in order to graduate. (We are the only college in NJ to require one.)  It's no dissertation, but might there also be better ways to measure writing ability at this level than the snapshot but "classic" five-paragraph essay written on the spot?

It's one thing to diss dissertations but it would be a whole other thing to actually see schools ditch dissertations. Still, the discussions in places like the MLA adds further fuel to the movement towards another kind of University 2.0 that I think institutions will be pushed towards harder by the workplace and by their students.

Occupy the Classroom

Occupy the Classroom is the theme of the 2012 NJCTE Conference this Saturday, March 31st.

NJCTE is hardly a radical organization. And "Occupy the ______ " (fill in the blank) has been a popular meme the past six months.

We best know it for the Occupy Wall Street protest movement that began September 17, 2011 in Zuccotti Park, located in New York City's Wall Street financial district.

OWS has led to Occupy protests and movements around the world. These protests are focused on social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector.

Their rallying slogan, We are the 99%, addresses the growing inequality between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population in America when it comes to income and wealth.

So, why Occupy the Classroom?  Since the movement was intended to effect change by "direct action" (instead of petitioning authorities) maybe it is a call for teachers to take action in their classrooms.

I read a piece by Nicholas Kristof on Occupy Wall Street that also touched on education. He wrote about the expansion of early childhood education and the inequity that may well result if many young people never get the skills to compete.

He quotes Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as saying “This is where inequality starts.The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success. And success breeds success.”

She shows Kristof a chart showing that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students that widen further in school.

Do we need to occupy the classroom in order to point to inequities in childhood education, technology use and access to resources?

Kristof also mentions that President Obama "often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda."

NJEDge.net Faculty Showcase

PCCC faculty and staff are presenting at the NJEDge.net Best Practices Faculty Showcase on March 16, 2012, held at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ.

The Best Practices Faculty Showcase is a place for NJ faculty and academics to share innovative teaching methods that involve technology. Each year, over 20 sessions are presented at this one-day event.

PCCC will have the following presenters this year.

Kenneth Ronkowitz, "Unintended Consequences: Measuring Faculty Buy-in to Instructional Technology"

"Besides redesigning 25 GenEd courses across disciplines to include more writing, an initiative at PCCC has been to introduce instructional technology into those same courses. Now in its fifth year, we have found varied success with the six technology components. This presentation looks at the assessment of "faculty buy-in" (or lack thereof) for e-portfolios, video lecture capture, supplementary websites, streaming media, reusable learning objects and online gaming. Through surveys of faculty and students and focus groups, we have tried to determine the best practices that led to faculty using technology in the intended and some unintended ways. Through data from institutional research, we have determined what impact the initiative has had on overall student success. Our efforts have been the 2012 National Council of the Teachers of English (NCTE) Award for Two-Year Colleges in fostering student success."

Elizabeth Nesius, "Creating a Helpdesk Where None Exists"

"As the use of technology in education continues to increase, so does the need to train people to use it effectively. When an institution cannot provide a 24/7 helpdesk to assist students, faculty are often level one support for students, although the faculty themselves may not know how to help with technological issues students have. At PCCC, one way we have found to address the growing need for technology training is through the use of "lecture capture" software like ECHO 360 or Camtasia Relay to create short training videos on specific topics. Not only have training videos reduced the amount of technology training faculty need, but they also have had the unintended consequence of reaching a broader audience than a help desk or in-person training session, which has allowed for broader adoption of new technology. It can also reduce costs, as it provides an alternative to a help desk when dealing with common problems. In the future, we intend to develop short videos not only for technology training, but also for concepts that apply across disciplines so that some content can be offloaded from the classroom, giving faculty more time to spend on course content."

Richard Lauria, "Wiki-fy Your Class"

"A wiki is web page that you create and use to help you teach your classes. It's more than a blog and less than a LMS (Learning Management System). At a minimum, wikis can be used for organizing your class: an electronic bulletin board with your syllabus, course schedule and contact information posted. Another possibility is to use it as a resource: a repository of links, articles and videos to supplement what gets taught in the classroom. To truly wiki-fy your class, you let the students build it. You start with an address and a skeleton structure, but you give students access and let them populate the pages of the wiki. Regardless how you decide to use it, a wiki can be a very powerful tool. I will demonstrate how to create your very own wiki and start using it in your class today."


NJEDge.net is a consortium of academic and research institutions in NJ. Their main focus is innovative uses of education technology and the development of new technologies.

For more information on NJEDge.net, go to http://njedge.net/. For more information about the Best Practices Faculty Showcase, go to http://njedge.net/activities/facultyshowcase/2012/index.php.

It Is All About Disruption

Over the break, I was reading The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out . Not exactly beach reading, but I didn't get away to any beaches, so...


It is co-written by Clayton Christensen, which is what initially caught my eye. He is considered "the father of the theory of disruptive innovation."  His previous books include The Innovator's Dilemma, which examined business innovation, and The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.

The Innovative University is an analysis of the traditional university we know to get at its "DNA" which then leads to how (and why) higher education needs to change to have any future success.

From the book jacket:

The language of crisis is nothing new in higher education—for years critics have raised alarms about rising tuition, compromised access, out of control costs, and a host of other issues. Yet, though those issues are still part of the current crisis, it is not the same as past ones. For the first time, disruptive technologies are at work in higher education. For most of their histories, traditional universities and colleges have had no serious competition except from institutions with similar operating models. Now, though, there are disruptive competitors offering online degrees. Many of these institutions operate as for-profit entities, emphasizing marketable degrees for working adults. Traditional colleges and universities have valuable qualities and capacities that can offset those disruptors' advantages—but not for everyone who aspires to higher education, and not without real innovation. How can institutions of higher education think constructively and creatively about their response to impending disruption?

Throughout the book Christensen and Eyring show what it takes to apply Christensen's acclaimed model of disruptive innovation to a higher education environment. The Innovative University explores how universities can find innovative, less costly ways of performing their uniquely valuable functions and thereby save themselves from decline

Disruptive innovation is a term coined by Clayton Christensen to describe a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.

Some examples of disruptive innovation would include cellular phones disrupting fixed line telephony, the traditional full-service department store and doctor's office being disrupted by online and discount retailers and retail medical clinics. Christensen also sees an earlier disruptor of the four-year college experience as being community colleges.


I agree with him that companies tend to innovate faster than their customers’ lives change - newer phones but customers who don't want to upgrade yet - and so most organizations end up producing products or services that are actually too good and too expensive for many of their customers. But I don't think that model works for education.

In education, customers/students innovate faster than the schools. They have the technology in their hands before we have it or a way to use it in our classrooms. And yet, schools continue to charge too much for an inferior product.

I wish I believed that education was consciously opening the door to “disruptive innovations,” but that is not what I see.

Clayton Christensen is Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Although he has had health issues the past few years, he continues to write and I discovered that he has a newer book, Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, out that I will need to order.


It seems that in education, Christensen and the other authors are pointing to "student-centric education" as the disruptor of our current "interdependent curricular architecture." Much of that is made possible through technology.


He has written about online learning for student-centered innovation and many educators and institutions will be pleased to hear that disruptive technology/innovation in education can help create a new market and value network.

They will be less pleased to know that it eventually goes on to disrupt the existing market and eventually displaces it.

Disruptive ideas improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect. Those ideas will be designed for a different set of consumers. They will probably lower the cost in the existing market.

That might translate into the new, improved School 2.0 for Student 2.0. And all at a lower cost. But who will be providing that education? Harvard, Rutgers, NJIT, Passaic County Community College, MITx, University of Phoenix, The Open University, Google, Facebook or some new entity that doesn't even exist today?

Cross-posted from Serendipity35

Questioning the Socratic Method and Academic Integrity

After I read an article on insidehighered.com, I wondered about the state of the Socratic method in American classrooms. The article chronicles the case of Professor Steven Maranville at Utah Valley University. He teaches a capstone business course and his style is to ask questions even if students don't volunteer to answer.

It seems that students complained about that (and pedagogical choices) and that those complaints contributed to the university denying him tenure.

I won't attempt to judge his employment status or his classroom teaching, but the article points to other cases where the power of student evaluations and opinions on faculty rehiring was significant. Professors at Louisiana State University and  at Norfolk State University are noted. I also noticed a number of online posts recently about an article headlined "NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash."

Maranville's style of pedadgogy is described as Socratic, "engaged learning" in which he "pushed for students to go beyond lectures" and created teams for assignments outside class. I don't hear anything very radical in any of that. If done well, it sounds quite admirable.

The Socratic Method as a style of teaching is named after the classical Greek philosopher Socrates who used this method of inquiry. It is covered in chapter one of the textbook I use in my critical thinking course, and I can't really imagine teaching a class face-to-face or online without using some form of this questioning technique.

This kind of inquiry and debate between individuals is popular in law schools and probably used more in the humanities and the social sciences. Using opposing viewpoints and asking and answering questions stimulates critical thinking and often illuminate ideas.

It is a dialectical method, and so it can often generate oppositional discussion and the defense of one point of view is up against the defense of another. I suppose that opposition can, if the discussion lacks discipline, lead to out and out arguing.

Maybe the Socratic method seems negative because it uses a method of hypothesis elimination. The stronger hypotheses are found by identifying and eliminating those that lead to contradictions or that cannot be defended.

As the article points out, one advantage of this kind of teaching is that it challenges students "to learn how to think on their feet." In general, I find that students at the undergraduate and graduate level don't like that challenge, especially if they have been not been asked to do it in other classes.

It wasn't Socratic teaching that got the NYU prof mentioned above in trouble. It was his attempt to be more aggressive about cheating and plagiarism in his introductory information technology class. Perhaps feeling safer because he had tenure, he decided to use the Blackboard course-management system and Turnitin's plagiarism-detection software together for the first time. Those integrated software packages allows assignments that are submitted to be automatically checked for matches to materials online.

He found that plagiarism was "pervasive" and 22 of the 108 students admitted cheating by the end of the semester.

The connections to the earlier Socratic case? Students, especially those in certain majors, are simply not asked to do much writing. (It is one of the reasons the Writing Initiative at PCCC was launched.) And faculty in those disciplines often feel unprepared to evaluate writing "as writing" as opposed to grading based on subject matter content. Students have not been asked to do this kind of writing, and instructors are not prepared or unwilling to "police" writing for plagiarism.

Introduce some powerful software that detects it automatically, even on papers or students that you would not have suspected, and an ugly truth is revealed.

Of course, the other connection in these two cases is that the teachers paid for their actions with bad student reviews. Professor Ipeirotis dropped to a below-average score of 5.3 (of 7.0) from his usual 6.0 to 6.5. He claims that "The Dean’s office and my chair ‘expressed their appreciation’ for me chasing such cases (in December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than inflation, as my teaching evaluations took a hit this year."

As anyone who has pursued an academic integrity case at a college with the administration probably discovered, it can take up many hours away from your actual teaching or research. Sadly, when he posted on a blog that he had decided to no longer pursue cheating instances, that too was met with a backlash.

Lesson learned? Well, I completely agree with what he says: "Rather than police plagiarism, professors should design assignments that cannot be plagiarized."  I am actually presenting tomorrow at a writing across the curriculum faculty roundtable here at PCCC on just that topic. I hope to get a positive response from faculty, and will report back here soon.

This is a cross-posting from my blog at Serendipity35.net