Ten Reflections from the Fall Semester

Notes from this semester. Each semester I jot down observations about organizational practices, usually inspired by events at my place of employment.  Every now and then I try to distill them into advice for myself. Most are obvious, once articulated, but they come to notice, usually, because things happen just the other way round.

1. Always treat the people you work with as if they are smart; explain why you take a stand or make a decision in a manner that demonstrates that you know they are smart, critical, and open to persuasion by evidence and argument. Set high standards for yourself. Your institutional work should be at least as smart as your scholarly work.
   
1. "it is better to be wrong than vague." - Stinchcombe
   
2. If smart people are opposed to your idea, ask them to explain why. And listen non-dismissively and non-defensively. Remember, you goal is to get it right, not to get it your way.
   
2. Do not put people in charge of cost cutting and budget reductions. Put them in charge of producing excellence within a budget constraint.
   
   
3. Make sure everyone is able to say how many Xs one student leaving represents.  How much will it cost to do the thing that reduces the chance a student will get fed up with things?
   
   
4. If most of what a consultant tells you is what you want to hear (or already believe), fire her.
   
   
5. Don't build/design system and policies around worst cases, least cooperative colleagues, people who just don't get it, or individuals with extraordinarily hard luck situations. Do not let people who deal with "problem students" suggest or make rules/policy.
   
   
6. Be wise about what you must/should put up for a vote and what you should not.  And if you don't know how a vote will turn out, they are are not prepared to put it up for a vote.  Do your homework, person by person.
   
   
7. If a top reason for implementing a new academic program is because there's lots of interest among current students, pause. Those students are already at your school. What you want are new programs that are attractive to people who previously would not have given you a second look.
   
   
8. If you are really surprised by the reaction folks have to an announcement or decision then just start your analysis with the realization that YOU screwed up.
   
   
1. Related: and don't assume it was just about the messaging; you might actually be wrong and you should want to know whether that's the case.
   
   
9. If you or someone else's first impulse when asked to get something done is to form a committee, put someone else in charge of getting that thing done.
   
   
10. Train folks to realize that teams and committees in organizations are not representative democracies. The team does not want your opinions, feelings, experiences, or beliefs; it wants you enrich the team's knowledge base by reporting on a part of the world you know something about.  And that usually means going and finding out in a manner that is sensitive to your availability bias.  In the research phase, team members are the sense organs of the team. 

Departmental Collaboration Around Writing

A group of young sociology professors at Oakland University* (MI) got together and collaborated on a concerted effort to improve writing in their department in connection with a wider university project on writing that produced a "Writing to Learn Wiki" for faculty and students**. An account of their efforts was published in Teaching Sociology, our discipline's journal of "the scholarship of teaching and learning." Like much in that genre it is rather basic research and the article is longer than it needs to be, but some useful takeaways can be gleaned. Primary benefit: with this as a humble starting point, one could probably design a more robust and effective version 2.0.

They deployed several tactics: in class exercises, a library research orientation session in each class, peer review, in-class writing workshops, an online plagiarism tutorial, and a "student integrity statement" that students appended to written work. At the end of each semester they surveyed the students about their experiences.

IMHO, the project seems flawed by not including any explicit outcomes (i.e., some measure of whether students became better writers) relying instead on student self assessment ("did technique X help your writing?"), over-emphasis on citation format as a component of "good" writing, and the overarching goal of "writing like a sociologist" as something their graduates should be able to do. Given how sociologists write, this could constitute educational malpractice ;).

A few findings:

• Students found the library research orientation sessions repetitive unless they were tailored to specific topic of a given class. The researchers distinguish between redundant repetition and reinforcing repetition.
• Students did not like peer-feedback. In some cases mis-match of skill level meant lack of helpful feedback. In other cases, concerns about hurting feelings dominated urge to be helpful.
• Focus on plagiarism can create an unproductive plagiarism paranoia - students' worry about committing it outstrips their capacity for writing well while avoiding it.
• Common message from instructors across the program seemed valuable.

The researchers also noted some "accidental" benefits of their collaborative approach:

• Ongoing discussion of process helped them fine tune it along the way.
• Students appreciated consistent message.
• Reduced overhead for individual instructors in terms of thinking through and preparing various writing exercises.
• Discussion of process helped identify more optimal timing/scheduling of the various exercises within courses.

I would add a possible fifth benefit: I bet there is more follow-through among the instructors when they are aware that they are part of the collaborative project. Whether the focus is writing or something else, I suspect that has gigantic pedagogical payoffs.

A side note: Peer feedback is subject to a classic perceptual bias: instructors see it as time saving and thrill at the interaction they are encouraging, but the aggregate amount of person-hours, its ratio to quality results, and the wear and tear of emotions may be very unfavorable.

At the end of the article the authors say that their purpose is NOT to "ease their teaching duties" (it's about "sincere, shared commitment to improving students' writing"). I think this is unfortunate; the latter should be assumed - the problem is that living up to it is really quite labor intensive and we should constantly be on the look out for techniques that improve our efficiency. It's misguided to see these as antithetical.

Notes

* There is an old historical connection between this institution and my own, but I'll leave that to Mills trivia experts.
** Built on the open-source platform PBWorks.

The Cartwheeling Classroom

Cathy Davidson is the author, most recently, of Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn. She is a prof at Duke University where she co-directs the Ph.D. Lab in Digital Knowledge.

READ MORE at FastCoExist

Six Hats and Better Meetings

Almost nobody likes meetings and almost everybody will agree that precious little ever seems to get accomplished in meetings.  And yet we keep on having them.  There are a lot of ideas out there about how to improve meetings and one useful insight is that there are different kinds of meetings and some techniques work better for some kinds than for others.

One intriguing approach for meetings of collaborative teams developed by E. deBono is called "six hats."  I first came across it when my step-son learned about it in a week-long workshop on team-work that he participated in during "Independent Activities Period" (IAP) at MIT.  They are teaching it to young engineers as a set of skills right alongside integration by parts and balancing equations.

The basic idea is to recognize that there are different genres of contribution to conversations and that it can be helpful to recognize and manage/organize these.  They are:

• Yellow = ideas, speculation, "how about...", "what if..."
• Red = feelings, emotions, intuitions
• Blue = agenda, sequence, process, rules of the road
• Green = creative, options, alternatives
• White = facts & figures, observations not interpretations, usuble info, checked facts
• Black = criticism, flaw-finding, no need to be balanced or fair

Participants can self-consciously identify the kind of contribution they are making, a facilitator can ask for specific genres, or the agenda can be dedicated to a specific sequence of contribution types.

Here are some slides from a 2010 talk I gave for Division of Student Life staff on the technique:

See Also

• Wikipedia "Six Thinking Hats"
• MindTools.com "Six Thinking Hats"
• Dava Newman Enhancing Creativity Through …Brainstorming, Six Hats, Mind Mapping (MIT DSpace