What if We Actually Taught Critical Thinking Explicitly?

For all of our talk about critical thinking, how many of the following do you think our average graduate would be able to describe or recognize? How many come up in any of YOUR classes? I could imagine a general education program and assessment based only on these. Probably more productive of that elusive “responsible citizen” than all of the ideological tripe we try to wedge into GE. Can I fantasize about a curriculum built around these and some affirmative evidentiary and analytical skills? One where we start with a framework of such and design our courses to resonate with it (wouldn’t have to change a lot – just reference these as touchstones and cultivate styles of thinking that recognize bad arguments and can generate good ones.

It might help to develop the critical thinking skills of the faculty and administration, too, and make for big improvements in how those two polities perform.

From “A List Of Fallacious Arguments” by Don Lindsay (h/t Victoria Stodden)

The "Completion Agenda" and GenEd Reform

Discussions and debates among faculty and administrators often occur in the context of conversations and machinations happening several levels up from faculty meetings and the gatherings of deans.

In 28 March Chronicle of Higher Education Dan Berrett describes several institutions where administrators and faculty don’t see eye to eye about curricular changes associated with “the completion agenda.” Of note:

curricular changes get pushed through over objections with justified by the need to “smooth the transfer of credits between institutions”
supporters of credit hour changes trumpet state concerns as “a big problem”
the debate is framed as changes that support completion vs. academic quality
the Lumina Foundation and its “Degree Qualifications Profile” are in the background
at one school, a core humanities requirement gets replaced by a course on “leadership “based in part on a self-help book by Steven R. Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People.”

The institutions mentioned include Alamo Colleges in Texas, CUNY’s Queens College, Fort Lewis College in Colorado.

A Modest Suggestion for GE Reform

From Majoring in the 21st Century blog…

When, as is usually the case, nobody has actually put forward a coherent critique that exposes what’s wrong with the current system and why it needs to be thrown out and replaced, consider an innovation process that’s different from the usual approach in higher education.

What if we challenge ourselves to start by repackaging and repurposing what we have, thereby really identifying what things about it could be corrected, tweaked, turbo-charged, etc. to make it live up to its promise. Usually, the fact of the matter is we were stoked about it when we invented it and neither world nor students nor we have changed that much; it’s what we’ve let happen to it since that is the problem. Unless we can focus on how one deals with those things, we will almost certainly see the same thing happen to a new plan.

So before embarking on a giant do-over, perhaps…

Tell Them Why I

Develop coherent and persuasive description of why we have a GE program and what it is supposed to achieve.

Tell Them Why II

Build into orientation each year an academic address in which a faculty member is charged with coming up with a creative and compelling explanation of, argument for, the GE program both in principle and in particular. A few years of this will provide us with some internal dialog on what it means and why it is there as well as providing a foundation for all subsequent advising around GE.

Collect data

Write a short bit of code which would count ALL gen-ed fulfilling courses to see how the distribution is. In other words, take as given that we have a set of areas and we have a set of courses that relate to them. Apart from meeting minimal requirements, what does the distribution of “general education” actually look like for a class of graduates? (coding note: need to filter by major so we do not bias results based on distribution of majors).

Use Design to Change Attitudes

Move away from the “check box” mentality by re-configuring Banner and MAPs so they don’t simply indicate that a requirement has been fulfilled, but rather track and document how and how many times each requirement has been fulfilled, providing both student and anyone who looks at the transcript a visualization of her general education. Include the rationales described above in the transcript/MAP.

Thus, instead of this…

They’d see this:

From the Majoring in the 21st Century Blog

(Not 95) Theses on General Education, etc.

General Education reform has a long history in higher education of being a no-win zone. Correct that: in any given GenEd campaign there is often a player or group of players (e.g., an administrator or administrator want-to-be who gets credit for shepherding the program through to approval (and to be fair, it’s probably good training) or a department that gets a influx of resources it will never lose (even when GE is next revised) or a group of faculty who have opted out of discipline-based work and now rise to institutional importance) who manage to get something out of it.

The kudos and benefits, though, are almost never dependent on whether the program actually works and there is never any accountability for problems associated with the diversion of time, energy, and resources required by the program.

I share the Camelot-esque urge to champion the life of the mind, to fight against the forces of mediocrity in the modern world, really educate our students for the 21st century, and just generally to work for a better tomorrow, but I’ve seen this windmill tilted at too many times not to offer some ideas, collected over the years, about GenEd revisions. Offered partly in the spirit of provocation and healthy debate, but mostly on the (naive) optimistic belief that it IS possible to do better at higher education reform than is usually the case. The problem is that the ruts in the road are deep ones indeed.

Read the rest at Major 21

(Not 95) Theses on General Education Reform, etc.

General Education reform has a long history in higher education of being a no-win zone. Correct that: in any given GenEd campaign there is often a player or group of players who manage to get something out of it (e.g., an administrator or administrator want-to-be who gets credit for shepherding the program through to approval (and to be fair, it’s probably good training) or a department that gets a influx of resources it will never lose (even when GE is next revised) or sometimes a group of faculty who have opted out of discipline-based work and now rise to institutional importance).

IT MAY JUST NOT MATTER

Almost no one will ever select a college on the basis of a general education program unless the program is that there are no GE requirements.
The process usually begins with someone saying “everyone knows the current system is broken and needs to be updated.” Ever was it so. Ever will it be.
After the program is in place, students and faculty will invest a lot of time and energy “getting around the rules” to make individual educations make sense.
GenEd gets revamped every decade or so. Neither the stuff of GenEd nor the nature of students really changes THAT much. Thus the “new” is mostly recapitulations and recombinations of old.
Where is cost-benefit analysis when you need it? How much goes into the process? How much does it cost to implement? What’s the outcome? Listen and you’ll hear that the value can’t be measured.

DECIDE ON FUNDAMENTALS

GenEd is an introduction to the breadth of inquiry in the university?
GenEd is a set of skills and areas of knowledge that every graduate should possess?
GenEd should inculcate a set of values that specialized training in majors omit?
GenEd is basic skills that are necessary to succeed in specialized training in majors?
GenEd should inculcate ideas students need as citizen but not taught in the major?
GenEd should insure that students do not graduate as narrow vocational specialists?
GenEd should be material common to all/most majors to make education more efficient?

ORGANIZATIONAL DECISION MAKING IS ORGANIZATIONAL

The design of a GenEd program is an organizational process, not an intellectual one.
GenEd rules shape/channel resources (enrollment, FTE, budget); much of the conversation is actually about that.
No GE program worth doing will please all. A compromise no one opposes is likely crap.
Who is GenEd for? What is GenEd for? Who benefits? Who pays? Write the answers out.
The problem with the current program is usually implementation, not concept. “GE is a mess” is unhelpful starting point; it’s a mess because of implementation, and the same people will implement the new one so it likely will have the same implementation failures.
Least Common Denominator is very weak conceptual foundation for GenEd. Be skeptical about “what EVERY student should have.”

PROJECTION AND PROCESS

Many proposals for GenEd translate as (1) students should have my (our!) values (2) every student should study what I teach.

General rule: if it’s my pet peeve or my pet project, it’s not general education.
Leaders should discourage “my ‘baby’ is the be all and end all” talk.
Perhaps a simple rule that you cannot advocate for your own area as part of GE.
Keep track of which disciplines’ are most certain their subject is essential.

Alternatively, use bottom up approach. Ask each “major” to write down: “A student of X needs some W and Y as foundations for, extensions of, and complements to X.” Encourage inventive thinking. Then build on that database.

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

Look to history: GenEd as contrasted with major course of study.
Liberal arts is not same as humanities and fine arts.
How come it’s not a crisis that art students can’t do math?
“The Core” and related terms mean different things in different institutional contexts.
The “outside the course” rhetoric in higher ed discourse is sort of “anti-professor.”
When did “community engagement” become a fundamental responsibility of educational institutions? Why did this happen? Ask questions; don’t take things for granted.

REQUIREMENTS

Let’s be at a little skeptical about imposing morality/ideology via “requiring everyone to take a course on X.” Very hard to find examples in history of this working well.
Best test of a GE concept might be thought experiment: would it work if not required?
All of the “values,” “mindsets,” “orientations,” etc. that one is inclined to require courses on because they are institutionally important should be a part of everything we teach. If not, then they are NOT actually institutionally important, you are just wishing they were.

CRITICAL THINKING

Nobody knows what critical thinking is. Perhaps start by figuring out what we mean by it.
Ask anyone who says “it’s a problem that…” to explain how they know that it is a problem and how we could detect when it was not a problem anymore.
Purge all documents of “red herrings” (things that might very well be true and good but which distract from matter at hand). For example “faculty need support for digital technologies and data management in the classroom” or “need to acknowledge how hard faculty already work blah blah blah.”
Perhaps outlaw any sentence that included the phrase “we used to…”
“Competencies” is a buzz word. Interrogate buzzwords; don’t parrot buzzwords.

LANGUAGES AND GLOBAL LITERACY

Arguments for foreign languages often amount to (1) other schools do it; or (2) it’s good for you (plus, usually, unsaid, “it was good for me”). Maybe, but, as champions of critical thinking, we should do better at motivating what would be a really big student and institutional investment and diversion of resources.
Studying a language or going on a study abroad may not provide “global literacy” – it often turns one into a fan of one country, region, language, etc. It may transcend localism, but it’s not necessarily “global” per se.
Do students currently chose to take foreign languages? Have the foreign language departments managed to enroll to capacity? Find out why before trying to accomplish this with a requirement.
Ask why would we require, say, four semesters of this one of area of learning but not others?

GET EMPIRICAL

What is the actual evidence that things like “community engagement” are really something that we are not doing enough of? How do you know?
The future of higher ed for small second tier institutions will be strongly based on transfer students. Almost all GenEd will of necessity be something we accept as already done as a part of the transfer articulation agreements. This is likely simply part of the physics of the future of higher education in the US for many schools.
Every time someone suggests “X” is our core value, ask two things. First, does X really distinguish us from other places? Second, can we ethically have students on average incur $30k in debt for an education based on X? Is that what families sacrifice for?

BUILD ON GOOD IDEAS

Is your accreditation agency dominated by people from institutions you admire? Are its publications ones you look to for inspiration? What good is likely to come from basing a curriculum on their concepts? The answer is one thing: it is a path to a “compromise” that would not be a mere medley of all the competing ideas we faculty have. This might be important, but be clear about it.
Are you impressed by the ideas of the folks who are pushing assessment nationally? Do they strike you as the right sources of new GE ideas?
Are the thought leaders from American K12 education who have started to work in higher ed space the ones you would turn to for ideas on improving college and university education?

BOLDNESS

Institute multiple general education requirement schemes. See which ones students opt for. See which ones seem to deliver best results.
Have a fully articulated general education program but don’t make it required. Can you persuade students it is a good idea.
Structure your requirements as “do at least 4 of these 7 things” and keep track of what people do and engage in some serious research about why they make those choices.
Provide a strict, cohort based option (you are given a schedule of GE courses when you start and the group takes them together over a few years) and see how many students sign up for it and what effects it has.

Is this Bandwagon a Handbasket?

One of the most reliable reflex actions in higher education is the urge to re-make general education every decade or so. The effort described in this article is exemplary for its inclusion of just about every current buzzword and trendy reform. Competencies. Portability. “Outside the classroom.” Design thinking. Learning Outcomes. Value of degree. Measuring outcomes. Marketable skills.

My prediction: schools will come up with cute names that offer a local brand for a program that is a hybrid of existing models dressed up with features that are buzz-wordable. None of it will be based on known outcomes – methods and models will be attractive because school X tried it (and each of our institutions will fixate on a small number of role model institutions), not because of evidence that it works. A small group of faculty will champion it and non-tenure stream faculty will be recruited to support it with implicit promises of employment. The more entrepreneurial departments will help craft the program in a manner that generates enrollments and a share of the “new resources” that will be necessary to make the program a success.

The efforts will be marked by no real documentation of what the failings of the current system are and even if some are identified, the new program will not demonstrably address those failings. Political considerations will dominate so that even if the underlying trope is about basic skills, marketability, and preparation, the new program will have heavy doses of “values” education around race, class, gender, social justice, etc. and the content will be more political compromise than coherent. No one will articulate criteria by which the success or failure of the new program can be evaluated. And in ten years it will need to be replaced, primarily because “we never really implemented it as we planned.”

Most of all, schools that are really concerned about enrollment and career placement will never seriously consider the fact that almost no one enrolls at a college because of its general education program and almost no employer hires a graduate on the basis of general education skills. This is especially true when every school is jumping on the bandwagon – the illusion of uniqueness in general education is just that, an illusion. And for four year schools, it’s a funny strategy to put ooodles of energy into the one part of their curriculum that is the same as what students get in community or junior colleges.

And, not to put too fine a point on it, but by now we should have learned to be wary of things with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation stamp on them. Be sure to read the press release behind this story. There you will see that this effort is an extension of Gates’ ongoing efforts to import ideas from K12 into higher education and it’s tied very closely to the Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile. Expect more rubrics, more mapping of curricula, and more efforts to turn faculty judgments of student work into grist for the big data mill.

Category: general education