Professor John Tagg initiates his call for an educational paradigm shift by asking a most basic question, “what are colleges for?” * He then presents evidence of a growing disconnection between the sort of education we provide and the sort of education that contemporary students need.

In 1984, the Study Group on the Conditions of Excellence in American Higher Education suggested that institutions with undergraduate programs look at demonstrably attained learning outcomes rather than attempting to defend current practices by repeatedly pointing to institutional inputs as “proxies for educational excellence.” This gave rise to the beloved assessment movement and shifted the attention of accreditors from examining the adequacy of drivers to reviewing educational outcomes. At least, that was the theory.

In 1985, a select committee of the American Association of Colleges & Universities concluded that there was a profound ‘loss of integrity in the bachelor's degree” and that “evidence of decline and devaluation was everywhere.” Institutions responded to this and similar reports by redesigning degree programs.

In 1991, Profs. Pascarella (U of Illinois) and Terenzini ( Penn State ) compiled an enormous body of research which examined the various ways four years of college actually impact students. They concluded that “there is little consistent evidence to indicate that college selectivity, prestige, or educational resources have any important net impact on students in such areas as learning, cognitive and intellectual development, other psychosocial changes, the development of principled moral reasoning, or shift in other attitudes and values.” In response to this and other associated reports, many leading institutions reexamined and redesigned their general education programs.

In 1993, Sandy Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, concluded that America 's undergraduate educational programs appeared to be more concerned with balancing their books than improving their educational offerings. Also in 1993, the Wingspread Group on Higher Education concluded that “a disturbing mismatch exists between what American society needs of higher education and what it is receiving. Nowhere is the mismatch more dangerous that in the quality of undergraduate preparation provided on many campuses.” The academy responded to these challenges with a host of reform activities including continuing reexaminations of assessment, pedagogy, course design, advisement, and the very structure of undergraduate programs.

Tagg asserts that the 1990's could thus rightfully be dubbed the Decade of Innovation in higher education. However, a 1999 study of many such contemporary reform efforts conducted by the Center for the Study of Innovations in Higher Education concluded that “many educational innovations were relatively short-lived because they were unable to compete for scarce resources with vested practices or were unseated by the forces of conventional wisdom.” Ted Marchese, executive editor of AAHE's Change magazine observed, for example, that the much ballyhooed assessment movement “produced widely observed rituals of compliance on campus, but these have had only minor impacts on the aims of the practice --- to improve student learning and public understanding of our contributions to it.”

                                   CHAPTER  II 

In his new volume, The Learning Paradigm College, Professor John Tagg suggests that undergraduate educational programs must adopt an entirely new paradigm if they are to better serve the needs of contemporary students and society. He maintains that two decades of piecemeal reform efforts including assessment, instructional redesign, various advisement and tutoring strategies, curricular reform, and a host of other approaches have failed to substantially transform colleges to better meet the needs of students or to quiet the rising chorus of critical voices from various institutional stakeholders. Educational institutions, Tagg concludes, remain “mired in bureaucracies, buried in regulations, hampered by apathy or limited by inadequate resources,” and highly resistant to change.*

The sort of paradigm shift Tagg advocates was foreshadowed in a 1993 report by the Wingspread Group. That report asserted,” there is a growing body of knowledge about learning and the implications of that knowledge for teaching. What is known, however, is rarely applied by individual teachers, much less in concert by entire faculties. We know that teaching is more than lecturing. We know that active engagement in learning is more productive than passive listening. We know that experiential learning can be even more so… We know all of this, but appear unable to act on it.”*

The root of Tagg's case is that institutions with undergraduate programs continue to pursue what he terms an “instructional paradigm” even though the body of evidence suggests that a fundamentally different sort of paradigm is needed to foster deeper and more durable learning for more and more of our students. The traditional instructional paradigm is built on the idea that college instruction happens when classrooms full of students sit passively and listen to lectures. Groups of lectures form courses and groups of courses constitute degree programs. In essence, seat time and the capacity to regurgitate lecture material and problem solving protocols equals education.

Taggs says that the fundamental problem with the instructional paradigm is that it substitutes a means for an end; confusing process with purpose. Australian scholar John Biggs says “the view of university teaching as transmitting information is so widely accepted that delivery and assessment systems the world over are based on it. Teaching rooms and media are specifically designed for one-way delivery. A teacher is the knowledgeable expert, the sage-on-the-stage, who expounds the information that students are to absorb and report back accurately…” When students fail to “learn” via this method, we presume that they, and not the process, are deficient. After all, it used to work when we we're trying to educate a very small percentage of the population, didn't it? Or did it?

Concerned reformers, still mired in the instructional paradigm, most commonly migrate to the idea that better teaching might yield better learning. We observe the flurry of attempts to redesign programs, rethink courses, assess learning, and to fiddle with delivery methods. In this view, poor learning flows from poor teaching. If we taught better, they'd learn better. At least, that was the hope.

Whether teachers blame students for superficial or lackluster performance or choose to blame themselves, the point is that little productive change has occurred through efforts to revive the instructional paradigm. To improve learning in the instructional paradigm, institutions typically attempt 1) to provide more resources (smaller classes, better tutoring), 2) admit better students, or 3) teach better. The problem is we are getting shorter on resources, ever more fiercely competing for a diminishing pool of properly motivated and adequately prepared students, and running out of ideas for improving classroom teaching.

Next week, we'll examine Tagg's vision replacing the instructional paradigm with he terms a learning paradigm.

                                       CHAPTER  III 

John Tagg argues in his new volume, “The Learning Paradigm College,” that colleges need to rethink their entire approach to undergraduate education if they are to successfully engage a growing number of contemporary students and fulfill their fundamental educational missions.* Tagg cites three decades of studies that demonstrate that teacher-centered instructional methods are failing to engage a larger and larger percentage of our students. He calls for a rethinking of the entire undergraduate enterprise, rebuilding it on principles arising from research on human learning.

Learning, according to scholar of higher education John Biggs is “a way of interacting with the world. As we learn, our conceptions of phenomena change, and we see the world differently. The acquisition of information in itself does not bring about such a change, but the way we structure that information and think with it does. Thus, education is about conceptual change, not just the acquisition of information.”*

Biologically, we know that learning actually changes a brain in ways that other activities do not. In animal studies, researchers conclude that “learning imposes new patterns of organization on the brain, and this phenomenon has been confirmed by electrophysiological recordings of the activity of nerve cells.”*

Learning is related to memory. Researchers have long sought to explain the obvious variations in memory that we commonly experience. Why do we remember some things and forget others? Some contemporary researchers suggest that memories are initially stored episodically and only later transferred to semantic memory systems. Episodic memories are retrieved by attempting to replay an entire experience including its associated context. Semantic memories, on the other hand, are distilled and stripped of contextual information and are stored like entries in a thesaurus where they can be reliably retrieved.

When a teacher tries to help a student with a math problem, for example, she unconsciously and effortlessly draws upon a vast reservoir of semantic memories to select the proper method to solve the problem. Students, on the other hand, retrieve similar information by having to replay the entire learning experience episodically; experience fraught with detail and contextual noise. This view of the role of memory in learning might help to explain why students seem to forget so much information from one term to the next. It may be that the information retained for the test, but lost between terms, was yet to be translated from episodic to semantic memory. .

Scholar Paul Ramsden, argues that how students learn something largely determines what they will ultimately retain and be able to use. Swedish researchers Marton and Saljo contend that students who learn through rote, sequential recall, retain information only superficially and temporarily. Students who actually engage and process the incoming information, genuinely looking for patterns or levels of meaning and relating the new ideas with presently held conceptions, retain and can use that information in a deeper, more long lasting way.

The pedagogical implications of these ideas are clear. Creating learning environments which make students active agents in classroom learning rather than passive recipients increases the odds for genuine intellectual engagement for many of our students. Intellectual engagement enables deeper learning. Deeper learning and active learning techniques encourage the transfer of newly acquired information from episodic to semantic memory. Semantic memory enables problem solving, retention, and further inquiry in other domains.

Whitehead observed in 1929, “In my own work at universities, I have been struck by the paralysis of thought induced in pupils by the aimless accumulation of precise knowledge, inert and unutilized… The details of knowledge which are important will be picked up ad hoc in each avocation of life, but the habit of the active utilization of well-understood principles is the final possession of wisdom.”**

Harvard's David Perkins first coined the phrase “cognitive economy” to describe features of instructional practices in elementary education. He suggested that the cognitive economy of the typical grade school classroom was quite “cool,” meaning that most classrooms did not demand intense engagement or special effort on the part of the average student. He found that the demands were mostly very predictable and were achievable by rote learning and routine practice. A “hot” cognitive economy, on the other hand, would be a learning environment that requires intense personal engagement, risk taking, and sustained personal attention and performance.

John Tagg applies this notion of the “cognitive economy” to his analysis of contemporary undergraduate education. Tagg compares and contrasts students' personal constraints and choices while in college with the constraints and choices that they will likely face in the world outside of college. His conducts this analysis along the lines of goals, activity, assessment, time, community, and alignment.*

Tagg suggests that unlike market economies that vigorously strive to adjust their products and services to meet the demands of the marketplace, colleges have tended to ignore the changing values, beliefs, and priorities that drive incoming students. The imposition of external goals without regard or awareness of intrinsic drivers may foster superficial compliance and surface learning with grades regrettably becoming the only tangible drivers. Tagg asserts that widespread grade inflation may be emblematic of what seems to be an uneasy détente between faculty and students. Students quickly discover that superficial learning and cramming for exams is sufficient to earn acceptable grades, and so most avoid the additional time and effort required to truly master ideas and genuinely wrestle with and fully integrate new concepts into their thinking and acting. Tagg says that a hot cognitive economy would reward students who immerse themselves in performance and activity related to the intended course goals. Almost half the students surveyed in the National Survey of Student Engagement reported spending less than ten hours per week on their studies. Rhetoric aside, it seems that in most cases we don't require too much and students rise to meet our limited expectations.

Our assessment procedures may also encourage students to take a superficial approach to the things that they learn according to Tagg. Despite our protestations, systematic surveys of typical tests and examinations indicate that we have developed a marked tendency to equate learning with the capacity to reproduce course content. We persist in a ghoulish game of “what will be on the test” and wonder why students flail about looking for crib sheets. All in all, we tend to emphasize compliance, memory, and the capacity of a student to regurgitate what we think is important as our measure of student success. A hot cognitive economy would encourage continuous and authentic student performance, especially recognizing those students who truly excel in putting vital course ideas and their own ideas to work to do something

In colleges and universities, the time for learning is set. If you don't finish the course in fifteen weeks, you fail. Students take the final and then try to put the whole mess out of their minds. The artifacts of public education, fifty minute periods, uniform semesters, course-based instruction all work against the idea that university level learning is intended to be transformative and to change students' very interactions with the world that they experience and will be expected to shape.

UCLA's Sandy Astin observed that a “student's peer group is the single most potent source of influence on growth and development during the undergraduate years.”** Successful students, he found, quickly develop a network of friends and associates. Still, over half of the students who enter the average American college fail to graduate from that institution. A hot cognitive economy would work to intentionally encourage students to form community attachments in and out of the classroom.

Finally, Tagg suggests that most colleges have failed to provides students with a coherent, compelling, and cohesive educational experience that transforms them from passive recipients of course material to active and engaged lifelong learners.

We'll take up the notion of creating hot cognitive economies next  CHAPTER

                               CHAPTER  V

 

Parker Palmer wrote in his 1998 book, The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher's Life, “…in lecture halls, seminar rooms, field settings, labs, and even electronic classrooms --- the places where most people receive their formal education --- teachers possess the power to create conditions that can help students learn a great deal --- or keep them from learning much at all.”*

Palmer recalls an experience, common to many of us, of attempting to teach the very same material to two different sections of students. The first group remained stoically silent and listless despite his best efforts while the second group, to his amazement, spontaneously and consistently engaged in animated discussion of the course ideas and learned a great deal more about the subject and about themselves. Experiences like this should clue us into the notion that teaching is more of an art than a science. In fact, the foundational premise of Palmer's book is, “good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.*

Yeats had it, “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” In modern pedagogical lingo we might say, “teaching is much more than covering the material in an organized way.” Palmer argues that a teacher's capacity to successfully connect with students has less to do with techniques and more to do with genuine “engagement” in the teaching event. In this line of thinking, as teaching becomes second nature, it becomes second rate.

Palmer argues that good teaching is an act of the heart as well as of the head. Aristotle contended, as well, that effective teachers must be masters of pathos, ethos, and logos; they must be people who can inflame passion and curiosity, gain the trust of the learner, as well as “know their stuff”. Talk of techniques is clearly secondary to this primary consideration. “A good teacher weaves the fabric that joins them with students and subjects. The heart is the loom on which the threads are tied, the tension is held, the shuttle flies, and the fabric is stretched tight. Small wonder, then, that teaching tugs at the heart, opens the heart, even breaks the heart --- and the more that one loves teaching, the more heartbreaking it can be.”

Parker suggests that many of us become teachers primarily for reasons of the heart. He observes, as well, that many teachers lose heart over the years of teaching. We lose heart because teaching is risky and sometimes hurtful and frustrating. We lose heart because sometimes, despite our best efforts, we fail to connect with our students. We lose heart because connecting ourselves, our students, and our disciplines is very challenging work. We lose heart when we allow ourselves to fall into the dreary belief that teaching is only about information transfer.

We surely live in a time when facts and figures have achieved full ascendancy over feelings and dreams. It is a time when even first year students wax cynical with questions like, “will I actually need this in the real world?” Students have been taught to believe that reality and power are to be found primarily in the province of the pragmatic. If Parker is right, perhaps the only agent that can truly pry open their hearts and reignite the flames of hopes and dreams is a teacher exposing her own heart and dreams; sharing vulnerability and passion.

Palmer's voice is joined by a rising chorus of others who believe that reconnecting with our students goes well beyond experimenting with teaching techniques.