Next Book: The Age of Reform

Since I love Richard Hofstadter so much, my next read will be The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter.  This book is, on the surface, not about education at all, but about the Progressive Era and (to a lesser extent) the New Deal Era.  The book is not offered as a detailed account of policy-making and the associated negotiations among players, much less a detailed and quantitative account of the consequences of those policies.  Rather, it is a story of the ideas that were popular in the broad middle of American culture, to get a sense of Americans as a people.

Already, just in the introduction, I can tell that I will like this book.  I shall quote from page 16:

A great part of both the strength and the weakness of our national existence lies in the fact that Americans do not abide very quietly the evils of life.  We are forever restlessly pitting against them, demanding changes, improvements, remedies, but not often with sufficient sense of the limits that the human condition will in the end insistently impose upon us. This restlessness is most valuable and has its most successful consequences wherever dealing with things is involved, in technology and invention, in productivity, in the ability to meet needs and provide comforts. In this sphere we have surpassed all other peoples. But in dealing with human beings and institutions, in matters of morals and politics, the limits of this undying, absolutist restlessness quickly become evidence.  At the so-called grass roots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe--I hasten to add that the majority of Americans do not habitually succumb to this tendency--that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented by the "gold bugs", the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the liquor interests and the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment. It is widely assumed that some technique can be found that will really do this, though there is always likely to be a good deal of argument as to what that technique is.

Indeed, am I not myself pitting myself against the perceived great evil of edufads?  What could be more American than for me to go off on this crusade?

Edufads come, of course, from our adorably earnest belief that there is some secret trick that will surely fix our social problems.  We need only find it and adopt it whole-heartedly and it will be great, and if it isn't it will be because some insufficiently dedicated professors didn't really adopt them with the proper enthusiasm.  It was our selfishness and conservatism that kept us from fixing timeless problems.  But if we had just adopted the fad then we could have made American schools great again and there would have been so much winning on the international comparisons that we'd frankly get bored of it.

Anyway, it occurs to me that not only do edufads come from this restless desire to fix problems, but also that the particular form of edufads these days arises from the determination to personify the stubbornness of educational problems.  There are many things that one can do to improve the structure of a course and help students learn more, including more frequent tests and checkpoints (as noted in the book Make It Stick), and better-crafted assignments, but education reformers in higher ed mostly aim their fire at professors for their manner of presenting and interacting and discussing.  I am more personified in my presentations and Q&A's than I am in my assignments, so that is what physics education reformers largely focus on.  Interestingly, the physics education community has put a lot of effort into developing online homework systems, and there's even a buzzword called "Just In Time Teaching" (JITT) which involves a lot of pre-lecture quizzes to help the professor make better use of class time and incentivize students to prepare (and also echoes a buzzword in business management), but most education reformers aim most of their rhetoric at the professor for being a "sage on a stage."  It fulfills our need to personify the perceived obstacles to achieving universal success.

(A tempting rejoinder to my contention that edufads fit this cultural strain identified by Hofstadter might be that some of the most enthusiastic adopters and promoters of edufads are immigrants, but, as I have said before, immigrants are Americans par excellence. If even the immigrants are playing along that's just another way of saying that you're tapping deep into the American psyche.)

Finally, I continue to find comfort in the fact that the things that frustrate me have happened before and will happen again.

Sticking point

I am currently reading Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel. It's a book that, on one level, I ought to dislike: Heavy use of anecdotes (as illustration rather than an attempt at proof, I hasten to add), the mood that shows through is often more optimistic than critical, and it says nice things about Eric Mazur.  It's a light read, one that I often find myself skimming rather than deeply digesting.  Despite that, I like it.  Not as much as I like some of the other books that I've blogged here, and I won't have as much to say about it as some of the other books, but I nonetheless consider it a welcome addition to the genre.  Why?

First, whatever flaws it has in common with so many other books in its genre, it has them in far lesser degree.  It does not preach nearly as heavily.  It is optimistic but not breathless.  It uses anecdotes to illustrate but does not shy away from citing data and studies.  When it cites studies, it doesn't just cite the handful of famous studies that every good, decent academic has heard of if they've ever attended even one pedagogy seminar.  It is an easy read (at least for one accustomed to the conventions of this genre) but not a fluffy read.  I see a powerful case for recommending this book to brand new faculty* so that they can be socialized into what they will soon inevitably encounter in interactions with well-meaning (and sometimes not-so-well-meaning) faculty and presenters, but get it in a far better-reasoned form, from authors who (as far as I can tell) aren't selling anything besides this one book that you already bought.

However, Make It Stick is more than just "one of the good ones." There are key ways in which this book differs from the genre of books about teaching (or, at least, the higher ed sub-genre). It's a book that is adamant about the importance of frequent testing, frequent practice, and frequent (well-constructed) assignments. (Indeed, I am reading it specifically because one of the authors was recently interviewed about the importance of tests in The Chronicle.) The authors' strong endorsement of constant practice and testing is, admittedly, consistent with the embrace of popular things like clickers (though that's not necessarily bad; I use clickers in some classes), and also with some of the surface features of "flipped classes" (the topic of an excellent post today by my friend Xykademiqz), but there's none of the "Now, now, you have to understand, you're doing it wrong and need to be more progressive..." tone that usually comes from flipped class discussions and drives me and Xykademiqz and others up the wall.  (Indeed, the term "flipped class" appears nowhere in the index.)  I can think of at least one person who has gone on the public record to argue that progressive educational methods eliminate the need for reading or other substantive work or study outside of class time, and it is only my thin (though fading) residue of semi-civility that keep me from linking to this person's published statements on the matter.  The authors of this book would not be nodding along with that person.

Interestingly, Make It Stick is also a book that cautiously declines to join in casting stones at standardized tests as a category, an inclination that I equivocally share, and an inclination so outside the norms of polite academic tropes that seeing it in a book automatically warms my contrarian heart.  

I am about 2/3 of the way through this book, and I intend to finish it.  It is a worthy addition to the conversation.  I would love to live in a world where the most populated portion of the spectrum of pedagogical discourse stretched from historically literate curmudgeons like Hofstadter on one side to psychologists like Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel on the other side.

*This mention of recommended reading for new faculty brings something to mind:  In 2006, before I was about to begin my second adjunct gig, I read Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do.  I don't know how I'd react to it now, after 9 years of encounters with edu-fads and their promoters, but at the time it struck me as non-preachy, non-ideological, and consistent with the instincts of a concerned teacher.  Perhaps Bain's book, Make it Stick, and Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life would make a nice trio of gifts for new faculty...