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Dear Angie
Dear Angie – Winter 2005
“Dear Angie” is laying on the beach somewhere in the Pacific Ocean (study leave…ain’t it grand!). She hopes all of you are having as much fun as she is and will read the following with interest. “Dear Angie” will return in the next edition. See you at the conference in Quebec City!
Recently, Howard M. Armitage delivered this speech at an education conference at the University of Wateloo. It is insightful, interesting, and very, very funny. Thanks for sharing Howard.
Confessions of an (Innovative) Educator1
Introduction
Speech overview
It is a great pleasure to be addressing this audience today. I have been looking forward to the occasion largely because for you to be attending this session probably means we are kindred spirits. However, I must admit to some trepidation. Let me explain why.
I have chosen the title word “confessions” for good reason. Throughout my career, I have been fortunate enough to have received a number of teaching awards and honours, including the 3M. Some of the citations accompanying these awards claim I am innovative. I’m also fortunate enough to be at a university that MacLeans, for 11 of the last 12 years, claims is Canada’s most innovative university. So with that double barrel self-acknowledgement, I must be hot stuff. That’s the good news.
The not so good news, however, is what gives rise to my trepidation. The fact is that, until recently, I haven’t really given much thought to the process which has lead to these teaching award outcomes. Like everyone in this room today, I work hard at being a “good” teacher but I’ve never spent much time analyzing my preparation, teaching style, relationship with students, or assessment mechanisms. Some of you may recall the movie, The Natural, with Robert Redford. The film portrays Redford as a natural hitter whose batting average is consistently among the league’s best and who regularly wins awards for his hitting prowess. He works hard at his game but when asked by reporters and sports analysts, “what is it that makes you a great hitter”?, he is genuinely stumped. He doesn’t know how to describe it, and is only able to say, “I’m not sure - it just comes naturally”. It’s only later as his career is winding down does he reflect on what contributed to the success he had in his professional life.
I don’t mean to sound smug, unhumble or anywhere in the vicinity of Robert Redford, actor or hitter, but I do recognize this sense of being unable to explain the factors, traits and attributes of successful outcomes. In fact, I have often been far more successful in explaining why I am unable to do certain things well than I am in explaining why certain things come more easily.
But like Redford, I’ve had a chance recently to think more about these things. The catalyst was a recent 3M retreat. Without trying to make you green with envy, or hate me before I get into the heart of this presentation, 3M treated all of the 2004 winners (as they do every year) with a fully paid retreat at Montebello in Quebec. The purpose was to bring all ten 2004 award winners together. There were no formal expectations of any particular outcome or deliverable. It was simply 3M’s way of recognizing and rewarding accomplishment in the classroom/innovation in curriculum design in a manner that few of our universities are able or willing to do. For example, I am a recipient of the University of Waterloo’s Distinguished Teaching Award – this is given out to three professors each year. I know some of them to greet but, as far as I know, there has never been a meeting of these individuals to share common experiences or problems or to act as reputable body to advance an education agenda at our own university. In Montebello, led by a group of dedicated facilitators, themselves past 3M award winners, we spent two days together in discussions, meals and small breakout groups. It was a riveting experience for all and the opportunity for me to see, perhaps for the first time, a number of common beliefs, practices or theories in action, which made for great teachers and great teaching.
Interestingly, in many ways we couldn’t have been more different. Geographically, we spanned the country from Newfoundland to British Columbia. Our first languages included English, French, Spanish, German and Newfie. Our disciplines included social sciences, psychology, medicine, music, science, mathematics, physical education and me, the accountant and entrepreneurial studies guy. Our personal interests, hobbies, political views and hot and cold buttons had virtually no similarity. We had ranged from self-assured to insecure, rebellious to conventional, confident to timid, blunt to reflective. We carried different academic ranks. We had all met briefly at the awards ceremony in Ottawa earlier this year but only had a short time to introduce ourselves to one another. Quite honestly, at the start of the Montebello retreat, I worried about what we would do for two days, how I could contribute and what I would learn and be able to bring back with me.
I needn’t have worried. Although I walked in as an individual “accidental” educator, I left with (1) a spirit of camaraderie around teaching that I have seldom encountered on my own campus, (2) a renewed sense of the importance of outstanding teaching to the ultimate success of the academy, and (3) a set of factors, that I am now going to impose on you by way of a short list, that helped the Robert Redford in me better understand what it means to be an inspiring and innovative educator.
Before I begin, let me caution that these are my own observations – at the end of my presentation I am going to ask you to contribute your thoughts and add your experiences to my list.
Howard’s top six list
Number 1- There is no order to the list
Well, there probably is but I’m not smart enough to be able to classify it. It seems to me that a number of things that create highly successful educators and highly successful teaching can be observed as separate phenomena, but they happen simultaneously. So I have not spent time trying to rank them - what follows is an unordered list.
Rather, what I will do is say that all of us, to one degree or another, work within the following constrained environment and find our own ways, in our own style, to deal with it.
Irrespective of the province we work in, we have all been faced with many of these facts of life:
We are told that higher education is the key to future wealth generation and national competitiveness but, until recently, cuts to public expenditures have lead to declines in educational outlays. My own president, David Johnson, in arguing for more university funding shows a graph that portrays Ontario as 60th out of 60 North American jurisdictions in terms of overall funding per capita.
We are faced with demands that can be characterized as do “more with less”. As someone whose discipline is closely aligned to the business community, I recognize that this mantra is not unique to education. Nevertheless, it is hard to be innovative when confronted with the demand to:
- Teach larger and larger class sizes
- Manage classes with increasingly diverse background preparations and cultures
- Take on more administrative duties
- Attract more grant money
- Supervise more graduate students
- Produce more research
- We want to be excellent teachers but recognize that even if our institutions claim teaching and research are equally valued, we know they speak with “forked” tongue. In the last few years, partially as a result of the CRC initiative, even those supposed “teaching” universities now wish to become research intensive universities. The result is that while lip service is paid to the equality of teaching and research, the importance of research in one’s career success has become increasingly important and good teaching has become as one of my 3M colleagues commented, “a subversive and lonely activity”.
So there are stresses. And all we have to do is look around us to see colleagues who understand how the game is played and who deliberately orient their scarce resources away from teaching efforts toward research. But let’s also recognize that many of these things have existed in one form or another for a long time<![if !supportFootnotes]>[ii]<![endif]>. I don’t believe we should use these as excuses for poor teaching. This leads me to number 2.
Number 2 – Innovative educators believe good teaching is its own reward
Innovative teachers subscribe to the following core beliefs. First, teaching is one of the most exciting and delightful of all human activities when it is well done. Second, it is one of the most humiliating and tedious when it is done poorly. It is in their DNA that there is nothing more depressing than bad university teaching. It simply offends them to see a well educated, well trained professor standing in front of a class of high achievers lifelessly going through the motions from either last years set of notes or a deadly power point presentation. To them, this is a tragic waste of knowledge, experience, youth, time, and ability. As I listened to my colleagues, I saw this belief manifesting itself time and again. One saw her teaching as a “sacred duty”, another went so far as to say “teaching saves lives”. All saw their actions in the classroom totally aligned with their convictions. There can never be any excuse for poor teaching. As difficult as the situation might be and as stacked as the performance criteria might seem, innovative educators carry an inner, and often lonely, drive that good teaching is its own reward.
Number 3 – Innovative educators share their “love” of their subject matter with their students
I have to confess, it was hard for me to write this line and harder for me to say it. It has to do with the word “love”. I am more at ease with the words “excitement”, “joy”, “enthusiasm”, “zeal”, “fervour”, “dedication” or, if pressed, even “passion”. Remember that I am an accountant and accustomed to a world where excitement includes accelerated depreciation, unfunded pension liabilities or derivative instruments. “Love”, of discipline or otherwise, isn’t a concept that my colleagues or I care to discuss. To give you an idea of the world I live in, let me have you consider the following description of the Typical Accountant.
The typical accountant is a man past middle age, spare
wrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, non-committal, with eyes like a codfish, polite in contact, but at the same time unresponsive, calm and damnably composed as a concrete post or a plaster-of-paris cast; a human petrifaction with a heart of feldspar and without charm of the friendly germ, minus bowels, passion or a sense of humour. Happily, they never reproduce and all of them finally go to hell.
Elbert Hubbert
So you know I must really feel this trait deeply to add it to my list. But “love” is the right word. As I listened to my 3M colleagues, I couldn’t help be impressed by the love they had for their subject matter and how important it was to be able to convey this sense of love to their students. Its importance is so strong that it clearly affects how they see and interact with their students. At first, I was a little taken aback by this conversation that was drifting dangerously into waters and the use of words that, for me, were rather unnerving. Then, one of my colleagues, who had been silent up till then (and who I actually thought was reacting uncomfortably to all this “love” stuff like me) just bowled me over as she described the importance of making her students grasp their subject matter. For her, it went way beyond the “love” of material to the “love” of the recipients of the material. In the morning of the first day, in a matter of fact way, she told us that she says to her students, “I love you and you have no choice but to love me in return”. At that point, I thought – OK – we’re now over the edge. But rather than looking for the nearest exit, the power of this woman’s sentiments and the genuine and simple way she said it, caught me completely off guard. Here I am, a hard nosed accountant, (with a very balanced work and personal life, I might add) and I wanted to be in her class, I wanted to experience her love of the material, I wanted to learn from her.
During the retreat, I saw this same kind of love of discipline manifest itself in very different, but equally compelling ways. And I realized that I was no different. I’ve not said this out loud to many people other than my family but I “love” accounting. I really do. I love its mathematical elegance, I love conveying the implication of good and bad accounting to society, organizations and employees. I love watching TV shows or movies that feature accountants and I’ve even required some of my students to watch the original Japanese version of “Shall We Dance” so they could see the hell that this poor “stereotypical” company accountant went through to learn how to dance. I grieve when my students wallow at the debit/credit level and don’t get to see the sultry, sexy, rich, intoxicating world in which accounting operates. I hadn’t realized it before but I see it now. Innovative educators compulsively share their “love” of their discipline with their students.
Number 4 – Innovative educators connect with their students at their students stage of knowledge
I’m probably dating myself but do any of you remember the movie, To Sir with Love? To most educators, it is one of the all time greats and, I suspect, a major influence on why many of us became educators. In it, Sidney Poitier is thrown into a situation that makes our problems at universities look like pretty small beer. He’s got a predicament – he’s the new kid on the block, there is prejudice, the parents and the principal don’t trust him and the kids are either disasters already made or waiting to happen. But he prevails. He has a love of education and through word and deed, he succeeds in spreading this love of learning to his class.
He has a ton of book and life knowledge – far, far surpassing that of his students. But he understands that he needs to come down from the hill and engage the students with examples and anecdotes that relate to, and elevate them from, the swamp of their everyday lives. By the end of the film, it is clear that these students have gone through an educational experience where they haven’t so much been taught as they have been taught to learn how to approach their education and the reason for learning the materials that Poitier insists they must master. Poitier exhibits a concern and respect for his students so genuine that learning becomes an enjoyable task as students are infected by a new found enthusiasm for, and intellectual involvement with, their material.
No doubt, you have seen this in action at your institutions and I’m sure many of you are highly accomplished in helping bring your material to life for your classes. This ought to be a goal for all of us but how often do you hear our colleagues express the belief that it is the student’s responsibility to sort out what’s being lectured in class. They argue that students are in university now, we are not here to “spoon-feed” them, they need to learn how to learn on their own and failure to learn is the fault of the student. Perversely, they are often vocal about minimizing the accomplishments of those of us who work hard at engaging their students. Their claim is that unpopular, even horrible, teachers may be better than those of us who toil at getting our message across in meaningful ways. In their view, we create dependencies while they create independent thinkers. More on this later.
Another version of this argument is that educators with good student rapport and evaluations tend to be “performers”. When completing teaching evaluation questionnaires, students respond to the sugar not the substance.
Innovative teachers simply believe these claims to be out and out wrong. In contrast, I believe most of us would concur completely with Paul Ramsden’s view, “If we cannot help students to enjoy learning their subjects, however hard they may be, we have not understood anything about teaching at all.” 3 The fact is there are no facts to support the “independence” or “teacher as performer” arguments. Students who have had a bad professor/learning course experience continue to say, years afterward, that what they remember most about the course is that they had a bad professor/learning course experience. Period. There is also ample evidence that students are quite capable of distinguishing between superficial “performers” and educators who truly try to bring deep understanding to their material.
Teaching that relies on vivid illustrations and relevant examples encourages students to see the value of the material they are learning. I have seen my colleagues do this in areas as diverse as taxation and biology. Without realizing it, I have come to understand that this has also been one of my core beliefs and activities. I recalled recently that while I was teaching many years ago at the University of Nairobi in Kenya, I struggled to get students to understand the concept of “interest”. Students in my class were intelligent but had limited exposure to business practices. Most were first generation farm dwellers whose economy was more likely to be based on the barter rather than on the monetary system. They could do the interest calculations but could not understand this “western” concept of interest or what the calculations meant. My credibility as a professor and entire knowledge of the mathematics of finance came under suspicion because I was unable to explain interest in a manner that my audience could appreciate. I overcame this only when I asked them to think of what created wealth in their tribal communities. The answer was the number of cattle owned (the original investment or principal). And how does one increase wealth? By successful breeding (investing). The new calves born are the “interest” obtained from successful breeding and add to the wealth of the family. After that interest was a breeze.
Closer to home, I’ve seen my business colleagues frustrated by students inability to intelligently apply concepts learned in class. Most of these concepts, however, relate to manufacturing or service organizations. We forget that hardly any of these students, particularly in the earlier undergraduate years (but also in masters courses) have ever stepped foot inside one of these organizations, let alone appreciate what goes on inside. So my more inspired colleagues who wish students to really understand manufacturing accounting take the class to Sleeman’s Brewery. It’s not just a great outing that culminates by sampling the beer. Students get to see raw materials inventory, processing equipment, direct and indirect labour, overhead items, waste, factory supervision, idle capacity and plant design. Back in class, they approach their studies of job and process cost accounting with new understanding and vigour.
While the above examples are from my discipline, I believe that these are generalizable observations. Here is an example from a professor who struggled to get his students to differentiate between the meaning of deduction and induction.
Brian invited his mother over for dinner. During the course of the meal, Brian's mother couldn't help but keep noticing that his girl friend, Stephanie, was very, very beautiful. Mrs. Hester had long been suspicious of an intimate relationship between Brian and Stephanie, and this had only made her more curious. Over the course of the evening, while watching the two react, Mrs. Hester's frowns became evident. Reading his mom's thoughts, Brian volunteered, "I know what you must be thinking, but I assure you Stephanie and I are just platonic roommates." About a week later, Stephanie came to Brian saying, "Ever since your mother came to dinner, I've been unable to find our silver gravy ladle. You don't suppose she took it, do you?" Brian said, "Well, I doubt it, but I'll send her an e-mail just to be sure." So he sat down and wrote:
Dear Mother, I'm not saying that you "did" take the silver gravy ladle from the house, I'm not saying that you "did not" take the gravy ladle. But the fact remains that one has been missing ever since you were here for dinner. Love, Brian
Two days later, Brian received a letter from his mother that read:
Dear Son, I'm not saying that you "do" sleep with Stephanie, and I'm not saying that you "do not" sleep with Stephanie. But the fact remains that if you were sleeping in your own bed, you most certainly would've found the gravy ladle by now. Love, Mom
Whether business, social studies or other discipline, innovative teachers connect with their students at their students’ stage of knowledge.
Number 5 – Innovative educators stimulate their students through active learning
I am sure that many of you will have little difficulty appreciating and accepting this trait. If we “love” our material, then we are compelled to make sure that we transmit this sense of passion to our students. Nothing does this better than allowing the student to actively participate in the enjoyment of deeply learning the nature and purpose of the subject matter. While this may seem self evident, it is still instructive to walk around our institutions, peer inside our classrooms and see the disproportionate amount of boring, mind-numbing, passive, putting coffee-to-sleep type of instruction that goes on. Paradoxically, our move to hi-tech classrooms has often made things worse. We see wonderful applications of new teaching techniques but also far too many instances of power point abuse, poorly trained professors fumbling with software and cables, lack of monitoring of chat rooms, etc.
Before I went to Montebello, I wondered if the different nature of our disciplines meant that there were relative differences in our abilities to bring our disciplines to life. For example, while I knew my own to lend itself to independent, active learning, I wondered if I was just lucky. Was it also possible to engage students equally in mathematics, social sciences, science or psychology? Not surprisingly, it turned out that all my colleagues were highly proficient in making learning pleasurable. This didn’t mean it was any less work – in fact, I was deeply impressed by the absorbing, reflective, creative, inspiring, results oriented, ambitious activities they employed to bond their students to the learning process. Interestingly to me, as the only accounting professor in the room, many were quite interested in how I was able to do this. In other words, they had no trouble developing engaging curricula for their students but how is it possible in a subject so mundane, so rules oriented, so debit/credit fixated as accounting to be anything but a number crunching crashing bore.
To be honest, it can be. It all depends on what I call your “personal value proposition” to your students. This goes beyond what you write in your outlines. It really says to students, “in this class, I promise you that you will gain a deep understanding of …”. For example, as a student in my class, I promise you that:
- You will understand that accounting numbers have enormous individual and society consequences. To achieve this objective, you will learn how accounting numbers were complicit in the Challenger spaceship explosion; how poor quality accounting permitted Enron to defraud the public and wipe out the savings of hundreds of thousands of individuals just like yourselves and your parents, and how aggressive accounting is a key contributor to outlandish executive compensation practices.
- You will understand how accounting can serve as a powerful incentive to create best practices leading to productivity gains, high quality and client satisfaction. To achieve this objective, you will work on actual and simulated cases using storyboards to map out existing processes, weed out non-value adding activities and recommend suggestions whose purpose is to enhance stakeholder value.
- You will understand how accounting systems work. To achieve this, you will analyse the financial reports of local technology companies with a goal of recommending whether the stock of the company should be purchased. This will be no idle exercise. You must deeply learn about the company you are analyzing because you will present your findings to the CEO or CFO of the company as well as to me and your TA.
Finally, I’m not averse to making it fun. In one class, I try to summarize the learning by using a version of jeopardy to reinforce accounting concepts.
I have no doubt that many of you have equally compelling stories to tell about your experiences. But what is the objective of all these efforts? Not to be known by our students as great teachers. Rather it is to be seen as effective “change agents” who, by motivating students to be the architects of their learning, become spectators in the educational process and close the loop on learning. Innovative educators provide opportunities for students to practice and imbed the scholarship of their discipline by providing stimulating and active learning enquiries.
Number 6 – Innovative educators give high quality and timely feedback to their students
I’d like to start number 6 by quoting from one of 3M colleagues, Lorne Adams of Brock University.
“I worry that some student might come up some day and say, “you obviously didn’t read my work!” That is why I read every word… I tell you this in the context of one of my students named Vladimir Spehar.
Vladimir was a student in one of my classes, not particularly large - about 50 people. They had to do a journal entry every week about readings, class activities, reflections, etc. As you can imagine, some were quite lengthy and handwritten (my eyes were better then, now my preferred font size is the same as my waist size!) In the middle of this lengthy journal, I came across the sentence “Lorne, Lorne, Lorne - I can’t believe you are really reading all of this. If you are - give me a sign.”
At the end of his project I wrote “Vlad, Vlad, Vlad - of course I read all of this. Now you too will read it all. Your mark is somewhere in your paper - have fun finding it. When you do, give me a sign.”
I’ve always thought that the potential Achilles heel of education is its assessment system. And I confess, that of all the things I do at the university, my least preferred activity is assessment. I’m certainly not alone – I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard my colleagues say they would gladly teach an additional class if they could get someone else to do all the “grunt work”. Yet the methods we use to assess, and the signals we send about the importance of the assessment process, are critical to student learning. This shouldn’t come as any surprise. When students are asked to describe the attributes of their best teachers, in addition to qualities such as organization, clarity and empathy, they almost always mention clear, rapid feedback. (By the way, it is instructive to note that qualities such as professor personality and sense of humour rank way down on the list – further debunking the myth that students respond to professor “performance” rather than professor substance.)
I recognize that assessment has its own substantial body of literature and that assessment has been an active topic in many teaching and resource centres on our campuses. Nevertheless, in my role, not only as professor, but also as a current and former program director of professional business programs, I’m constantly reminded by students how badly we perform this activity. I’m not just speaking here about examinations. I’m referring to the paucity of reinforcement of classroom activity by setting meaningful assignments that employ a student constructively and deeply, by demanding evidence of real understanding of content and theme, by respecting workload and by providing timely feedback.
Comments I receive from students range from overloaded syllabi that lead to a fragmented memorization of a limited number of facts; schemes and styles of examinations that prevent a deep or integrated understanding of the material; feedback that is too often measured in months rather than days; ‘busy” assignments that take time but do little to add to true learning; heavy reliance on multiple choice for easy marking but do little to reinforce the qualities of independent thinking, analysis and problem solving. In summary, there is too often a major disconnect between the lofty learning objectives that we include in our course outlines and the perceptions or signals we send our students through our assessment activities. We claim we want to foster deep understanding and are often frustrated by the superficial scholarship we observe.
Please do not interpret this as “holier than thou”. I recognize myself as a contributor to some of these problems. I also acknowledge that many of the educational constraints mentioned earlier make it difficult to devote the resources needed to raise the assessment bar. However, it is my observation that innovative teachers, like Lorne Adams, do just that. They clearly recognize that assessment is a powerful force that can improve or damage the quality of the learning experience. They refuse to “punt” or take an easy way out. They view good assessment as an OBLIGATION they have to their students. Innovative teachers commit themselves to positively influencing the quality of student learning through excellent assessment practices.
Summary remarks
Some years ago, Stanford University President Donald Kennedy said, “It is time to reaffirm that education - that is, teaching in all its forms - is the primary task of higher education”5
Kennedy views teaching as an element of scholarship, where teaching both educates and entices future scholars. I strongly support this point of view. Excellence in teaching requires no less effort, and is no less important, than excellence in research. I believe that teaching is the highest form of understanding and that at times it can be a lonely activity. I am sincerely fortunate to have had an opportunity of being able to confirm the importance of education with a group of highly innovative individuals who inspired me to assemble this partial list. But we know that while we may have been the “chosen ones”, many, many others are equally deserving and work tirelessly to make education an imaginative, provoking and enjoyable process.
Before I open the floor for questions, I wanted to end with a story I heard from a professor colleague a number of years ago that left a lasting impression on me.
The dinner guests were sitting around the table discussing life. One man, a CEO, decided to explain the problem with education. He argued, "What's a kid going to learn from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?"
He reminded the other dinner guests that it's true what they say about teachers, "Those who can: do. Those who can't: teach." The guests all laughed.
To emphasize his point, he singled out one of the diners, "You're a professor, Susan," he said. "Be honest. What do you make?"
Susan, who had a reputation of honesty and frankness, replied, "You want to know what I make?"
"I make students work harder than they ever thought they could.
"I can make kids sit through 90 minutes of class and completely absorb their attention."
"I can make students want to learn and practice their discipline."
"You want to know what I make?"
"I make students wonder."
"I make them question."
"I make them criticize."
"I make them sensitive to different opinions."
"I make them write."
"I make them read"
"I make them do”.
"I make them know I will review their work for grammar, logic and content”
"I make them experience the joy of learning, to appreciate the meaning of good performance and to take pride in themselves and their accomplishments."
"I make them understand that if you have the brains, then follow your heart...and if someone ever tries to judge you by what you make, you pay them no attention."
"You want to know what I make?"
"I make a difference. What do you make?
Thank you for your attention. I would be happy to respond to questions.
I am indebted to the 2004 3M cohort and superb facilitators at the Montebello retreat for providing the inspiration for this article. I am particularly indebted to Yves Mauffette for assisting me to better understand my own strengths and weaknesses.
This issue has been going on a long time with very little change. The 1990 Smith report said, “teaching is seriously undervalued at Canadian universities and nothing less than a total re-commitment to it is required”. In 1996, the Carnegie Foundation issued a report, “Reinventing Undergraduate Education” suggesting a radical reconstruction of curricula and drastic reengineering of the learning environment. In 2002, the 3M cohort issued a report “Undergraduate Teaching in Canada: What Grade would You Give It” and ended up giving it a C-.
Ramsden, Paul, Learning in Higher Education, Routeledge Press, New York, 1992, p90
See Jeffrey Young, “When Good Technology Means Bad Teaching”, Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov 12, 2004.
Donald Kennedy, “Stanford in Its Second Century,” address to the Stanford community, Stanford University, at the meeting of the Academic Council, April 5, 1990.
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