Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief: a short, engaging, critical thinking assignment

Below I have pasted the instructions for an assignment in my capstone course that I referenced in a previous blog post. I mentioned in that blog post that I broke up the critical thinking goals for a larger assignment into separate assignments, and that these assignments had the benefit of engaging the students more than the larger assignment did. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to make my case for this smaller assignment in terms of critical thinking.

So take a look at the instructions:

Module 2 writing assignment

Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief

Every day the President of the United States (POTUS) gets a briefing (or report) about the threats to the security of the United States. I want you to write a briefing about empathy instead of national security.  

This Module contained articles about several important social issues, and the role that empathy plays in them. Now that you have this information, I want you to think about how we could use this information to improve the world. If only psychologists know about this information, what good is it to the world? So imagine that you could write a Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief, and you could be sure that s/he would actually read it and is open to the idea of taking some action because of it. What would you want the President to know? (You can have our actual President in mind, or you can imagine a generic President. The important thing is that the President has a lot of power to make things happen.)

Start off by briefly summarizing the research that you think it is important that s/he know about. Remember two important things about the President: s/he is busy, so keep it short and to-the-point, and s/he is not a trained psychologist, so try to avoid using a lot of jargon.

Next, provide some concrete actions the POTUS could take in light of the information you just delivered. What do you think the POTUS could do if s/he wanted to address the social problems you mentioned using empathy to do so? Imagine that you have unlimited funds, and even an unlimited time-frame. Also imagine that Congress will agree to the POTUS’s actions (that seems more far-fetched than the unlimited funds thing at the moment, but we can fantasize, right?).

I want at least three solid proposals from you. The important features of the proposals are:

• that they have to be based on the research about empathy that you read and described to the POTUS. I want your proposals to essentially be about ways to use empathy to address the social problems. Please make the connections between the research and your proposals explicit.
• that they are specific proposals for action (not vague ideas like “make people more empathic” – how?)
• and that they address serious social problems.

Notice that ‘feasibility’ is not a criteria. You can’t propose to do something impossible (like replace everyone’s brain), but expense and time are unlimited. It would be great to have a proposal that could work in 1 year, but your proposal could have a 20 or 50 year time frame if you think that is required.

They could all be about the same social problem (like prejudice), or they could each address different problems, it’s up to you.

Two more questions to answer (DON’T FORGET THESE!). Please address them in a separate section:

• Comment on the predicted effectiveness of your proposals. Assume everything goes as planned – how much change (and where and what type) in the world would you expect? How would the world be different if the POTUS enacted your proposals?
• What would be the significant hurdles or barriers to the effectiveness of the proposals?

This is your chance to be creative and ambitious. I’m offering up the power, prestige, and resources of the Federal Government! Use it!

Module 2 writing assignment

Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief

Grading rubric

Content	Points possible	Points earned
First proposal
based on research about empathy	2
specific proposal for action	2
addresses serious social problems	1
Second proposal
based on research about empathy	2
specific proposal for action	2
addresses serious social problems	1
Third proposal
based on research about empathy	2
specific proposal for action	2
addresses serious social problems	1
Comment on the effectiveness of your proposals	2
Comment on the hurdles or barriers	3
Total	20
Points lost because of writing errors
Final grade

Good writing is important. I expect there to be no spelling or grammatical errors in your paper. It’s worth your time and effort to do multiple drafts (even better would be to have another person read and edit your paper).

Please copy this page and paste it to the end of your paper.

Assignments: difficult and tedious or difficult and engaging

I often teach a capstone course that typically requires students to write a research proposal in the style of my discipline (APA). This, of course, is a perfectly reasonable assignment. As a scholar, I have written dozens of research proposals (and reports) in this complicated style. So requiring our students to write these papers is justified.*

Not only that, but writing a research proposal requires several types of critical thinking and information literacy that we often say are among the goals for our major. For example, research proposals typically have some minimum number of citations, and this requires that students find, read, and evaluate information. The style of argument in the introduction section of a research proposal requires careful synthesis of the previous research. Creating a hypothesis based on that research requires creativity. The methods section also requires creativity, as well as knowledge of the scientific aspects of our discipline. The discussion section requires students to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their proposal, and to put their ideas into a larger context. So for one assignment, the research proposal offers a lot of bang for the buck.

It’s also an assignment that I know my students dread. I know this because they tell me so, and because the papers they produce are often so unsatisfying. To be clear, students in my capstone course have been meticulously taught how to write each and every section of a research proposal before they get to my class. In fact they are taught to write the various sections across three different courses. So by the time they get to my class they have already written several drafts of each section of the proposal. This is not a new task for them.

And I also leave the topic up to them, within the overall topic of the course (I’ve taught the course about three different topics over the years, including prejudice, evolutionary psychology, and empathy). So they should be interested in, if not excited by, the topic of their proposals.

But at some point I just got so frustrated by the poor quality of many of the proposals that I had to make a drastic change. I had exhausted all the ideas I could come up with to make them better, like having them turn in shorter milestone assignments along the way (topics, annotated bibliographies, outlines, rough drafts, etc.). They didn’t help. I required students to visit the writing studio on campus. No help.

At the same time I teach another course where I have an assignment that I intentionally describe in the vaguest terms possible. I simply tell them that they can do anything they want as long as it’s about the topic of the course and has a paper that goes with it that explains what they did and why, and how it relates to the class. I’ve gotten poems, short stories, screenplays, songs (submitted with their recording of it), sculptures, paintings, dramatic performances, analyses of current events, movies, comic books, and videogames. Not all of them are spectacular, but many are, and many clearly required impressive amounts of work and insight, and yes, critical thinking. They key here was that I knew that students at my institution had the ability to produce inspiring products if the assignment was right. So my challenge was to discern what made that class’s assignment produce such outstanding work, and how I could apply that to my capstone course while retaining the rigor and critical thinking that the research proposal required.

I started by thinking about the goals I had for the research proposal assignment. These included the critical thinking and information literacy that I described above, plus a deep dive into a research literature. The economy of the proposal is alluring (all those goals in one assignment!), but I realized that I was ending up with many smaller assignments leading up to the final draft of the big assignment. So what if I could accomplish those same goals in the same number of assignments, but disconnect them so that each might stand on their own? If I could create, say, 7 assignments that each accomplished one of the goals that the proposal accomplished, then I would be requiring the same amount of work and achieving the same goals. So what’s the benefit of the new assignments? I thought I could create individual assignments that would engage the students like the assignment in my other class while retaining the intellectual goals as the proposal.

This blog is already too long for most readers to get even this far, so I won’t bore you, dear reader, with the details of the 7 assignments. But here are the titles:

Analyze a friend’s empathic abilities

Presidential Daily (Empathy) Brief

Wikipedia

Design an empathy-increasing procedure/game/task/intervention

Pay It Forward

Twitter

Reflect on this class, ideas, empathy in your life

I could go through each of them and talk about how they require this or that type of critical thinking. But suffice (here) to say that I think I’ve covered most if not all of the ones that a research proposal requires. They also stretch my students in new areas for them (twitter) and require reflection and foresight, which research on metacognition tells us is important and infrequently required. In addition, students report that they enjoy these assignments, and that some of them (especially the Pay It Forward paper) will stay with them after the class is over. That is a rare reaction to writing a research proposal. Not unheard of, but rare.

I guess my overall point here is that we have choices when we create assignments, and among those choices is between difficult and tedious assignments, and difficult and engaging assignments. I am all for hard work, and research in metacognition also points out that hard work has its own benefits. But I’ve encountered something in my vague-assignment class and my revised capstone class that I very rarely encountered in the research proposals: students doing more work than is really required. I often felt like I was in some twisted arms race between me and my students: how could I get them to work the most, and how could they work the least. But by changing the assignments into ones they found engaging that turned into a more collaborative arrangement where I tried to get them to work hard on an interesting problem, and they tried to do the best they could.

So they do all the critical thinking I want them to, they work as hard (or harder) as I want, and they write things they tell me they will remember after the course is over. And let me tell you another thing: reading those papers is much more rewarding for me than the paltry and barely-sufficient milestone assignments of the research proposal, much less the embarrassing research proposals themselves. Seems like a win-win.

So think about the assignments you most dread getting to grade. If you dread reading them it’s likely the students dreaded writing them. Do yourself – and more importantly, your students – a favor: think about the goals for that assignment and consider if there is another way to accomplish those goals that would engage the students more. You might never go back to the old assignment.

Here’s a comment from one of my capstone students:

"My favorite idea that we did in this class, by far, has to be the two different proposal papers.  I really enjoyed getting a chance to put myself into my work.  Like I said before, all my other classes involved article summaries or critiques.  Once you learn how to do them, and do them correctly, it becomes boring and doesn’t take any fore thought.  Whereas, in this class, I got to exercise my brain and put myself into psychology.  It really makes a difference in understanding the material, because normally studying psychology, I feel like information is just thrown at me, however, this class made me feel like I was actually a part of the psychology community.  My opinion, my voice had a say and was actually heard, thank you for that.

Another favorite idea of mine from this class is that there wasn’t any exams.  This really took the pressure off of studying and instead, I didn’t study, I learned.  I have never been able to take test or exams well; it seems that no matter how much I study or actually understand the information and able to talk about it, I can never reflect this knowledge through a test.  This is just another reason I loved the creative papers so much because I was able to show that I did know the information, clarifying my understanding and thoughts."

*Justified especially if we are preparing students for graduate school, where they will write many more research proposals. If they are not going to graduate school, the research proposal is less justified as preparation for their work after graduation. And most of my students are not going to grad school.

More metacognition

I thought I'd jot down a few notes about metacognition as I learn more about it myself. First, it's clear that there exists a burgeoning literature about the topic that is theoretical, empirical, and applicable. Second, there are many (for me) surprises to be found in that literature.

I just got Using Reflection and Metacognition to Improve Student Learning, edited by Kaplan, Silver, Lavaque-Manty, and Meizlish. It's a slender, accessible book that, as it's name implies, contains many practical tips, but also covers the history and theory of metacognition.

The second chapter is by Lovett and mostly introduces exam wrappers (a cool idea for another time) but she starts the chapter off with some more general points about metacognition. These were helpful for me, so I thought I'd pass them on.

She starts with Flavell's oft-referenced definition of metacognition: thinking about one's own thinking. She adds two other phrases not typically included: knowledge about one's own knowledge, and learning about one's own learning. These additions highlight the link between metacognition and the actions undertaken by instructors and students. Understanding (and utilizing) metacognition can enhance teaching and learning.

By way of demystifying metacognition, Lovett points out 4 things that metacognition is not:

• It's not one thing (one skill), but a combination of skills, such as planning, reflecting, monitoring, and evaluating.
• You don't learn metacognitive skills by doing one specific thing, but rather these skills develop through practice and feedback (just like any skill).
• Although metacognitive skills can be transferred from one domain to another, they are not transferred automatically. The transfer needs to be pointed out and reinforced. And the more varied the domains are, the more difficult the transfer will be.
• Metacognitive skills are not the same as generic study skills, they need to be learned in the context of a particular domain (or discipline). The most useful metacognitive skills for physics are not the same as for composition, for example.

The insight I gained from this material was that metacognitive skills are similar to any other skills one might want to develop: clear instruction is essential, as is practice in diverse contexts. This seems obvious in hindsight, and maybe this was clear to you from the beginning. If so, good on you.

Metacognition

The new buzz-word in education (not that new, of course) is metacognition. There are many definitions of the term, but the most common is thinking about thinking. One of the sources I read the other day suggested that you really need a metaphor to understand or explain metacognition, and they suggested "the controls for your brain", like the controls for a car. Not bad, but I thought of one last night that I like better.

Have you ever been in or watched a 5k race? I used to run in them in my younger days. I was never in the elite group, or even very close, but they were fun community events. The most popular race in my area is held in the summer, right downtown, in a festival atmosphere. There are easily more than 1,000 runners of all ages. As an earnest, if not accomplished runner I was often annoyed by the kids who ran the race. They usually started out or raced to the front of the pack and took off sprinting when the gun sounded. They would run laterally, sometimes chasing each other, and always at top speed. Of course 4 or 5 blocks later they were spent and would stop suddenly, or veer off to the sidewalk. Really a menace. And of course I never saw them at the finish.

At the other end of the spectrum were the truly serious runners, and then the runners like me. For the serious runners, the ones in contention to win outright, a 5k is still not a sprint. I certainly did not sprint during a race. Why? Pacing. Pacing means that I knew that in order to finish, and to run the fastest race I could, I had to set the right pace. Too fast and I would fizzle out, too slow my time would suffer. Pacing was the key. I never got good enough to consider race tactics, but if you were good enough you would consider if you liked to set the pace, or wait for a strong kick. Perhaps the course is important, or the weather. Diet, pre-race routine, etc.

Pacing, tactics, conditions, all of these things are outside of or removed from the actual skill of running. This is what metacognition is to learning. Learning is interacting with the material you are trying to learn; encoding it, storing it, retrieving it, using it. Metacognition is thinking about the best way to do those things. It's both the principles of learning, and your own tendencies, strengths and weaknesses. We now know much from cognitive science about the better and worse ways of storing information so that it can be retrieved later. And skill acquisition. I'm reading make it stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, and they point out many ways that our intuitions about learning are both wrong and misleadingly satisfying. Worth a read.

Just like some people have genetic advantages to running, some people learn better than others. But everyone can benefit from considering their metacognitive practices and abilities, just like all runners need to consider pacing and tactics to perform their best.

There are ways to infuse metacognition into assignments and curricula. We can teach our students about metacognition, and we can create activities that require that they think about their thinking.

The attractive thing about metacognition is that it can be transferred from one setting, or one discipline, to others. There is some debate (and some research) about this, but it looks promising. It now seems painfully clear that our students will forget much of the content of our classes soon after they walk out of our classes, perhaps as soon as they finish an exam. But if we can teach them about metacognition they might be able to learn better in every setting they encounter. I used to think that the key to making life-long learners was to get someone hooked on the content. But maybe the key is to create better learners, so that learning is more successful, and thus more rewarding. We'll see.

NMC Horizon Report

I found an interesting report put out by something called the New Media Consortium. They claim to be an international body of experts on educational technology, which sounds right up my alley. I was less impressed by the amateurish video on their About page, but the goals is still a good one -- to share ideas about new trends in education. They do seem to be focused on technology in the electronic sense, but the report I read contained trends that went beyond computers and software to include technology more widely defined (see below).

The NMC conducts research about educational technology, although I think they mean research in the broader sense, including gathering information about trends, not the narrower sense meaning conducting studies about the various technologies. They also hold a conference every summer (warning: another hokey video). But their main contribution seems to be the annual Horizon Report, which comes in several flavors, including K-12, Museum, and the one I read, the Higher Edition edition. This report is the product of collaboration between 53 "technology experts" from 13 countries on 6 continents. Technology experts can self-nominate, but it's not clear how easy it is to join the panel. So, take what follows for what it's worth. It's clear to me that the report is a compilation of opinions, albeit the opinions of people who consider themselves experts on technology in education and are willing to put their names to the report (they are listed at the end of the report).

The goal of the report is to identify the trends that will affect education in the next five years. They break them down into three categories: trends accelerating adoption of technology, challenges to adopting technology, and important developments in educational technology. Each category has three levels and two trends in each level. That's 18 trends they discuss, and that's a lot. The report is nearly 50 pages but the way they present the information helps you get to the most interesting parts. Each of the 18 trends gets only two pages, and there are clearly identified sections in each trend, including Overview, Relevance for Teaching, and Further Reading. This makes it easy to jump to the trend that looks interesting and get the point quickly. I found some of the links they provide (to sites outside NMC) quite helpful. It really is worth browsing the report.

The reason I found the report (if I remember correctly) is because an author of a research report on flipped classrooms cited it as evidence that flipping is a hot topic and current trend. Indeed, the 2014 Horizon Report does include flipping as an important development, with a time-for-adoption of one year or less.They provide a nice history lesson about flipping, links to several examples of flipped classes, and links for further reading with brief descriptions. Pretty helpful.

Some of the other trends they identify include learning analytics, social media, hybrid courses, the move from students as consumers to students as creators, competition from new models of education (MOOCs), 3D printing, and gamification. It's a broad view of education. I do think they missed a significant challenge for education: rising tuition costs, but maybe that didn't fall into their purview. And what about the digital divide?

Overall, I found the report, and the NMC, to be yet another source of information about education that I didn't know existed. It's not perfect, but I appreciate their efforts and goals.

Model Teaching Criteria: A bit longer post...

I read an article that just came out in Teaching of Psychology by Richmond, Boyse, Gurung, Tazeau, Meyers, and Sciutto (2014). Here's the link, although it's behind a subscription pay-wall. The article is about Model Teaching Criteria (MTC), or the ideal qualities and abilities of teachers in psychology, in their opinion. These authors are seen as experts in this area and were part of an APA presidential task force about this topic.

I will summarize and comment on the set of criteria they propose.

The first criteria is that model teachers are well trained. This means they are up to date in both the content of psychology, but also up on the latest pedagogy. These are two very different criteria, in my opinion. Staying up on the latest research in psychology seems like an obvious requirement, but I think there are some assumptions underlying this recommendation that need exploring.

One is that any one person can be an expert in any substantial area of psychology. Everyone with a PhD knows this to be folly. In my own area of social psychology I am an expert on a very small range of topics, like maybe one or two out of a possible list of 40 or 50 (or more). Am I qualified to teach a social psychology course? Sure, but even in that class I lecture about some topics with not much more knowledge than exists in the textbook. I think the same could be said of most professors in my area, no matter their type of institution (R1 to community college) or experience. I remember one person from graduate school (Mark Zanna) who know about nearly every area of social psychology, but he's exceptional in every sense. APA guidelines suggest that it might be unethical to teach outside of one's area of expertise. Again, that sounds reasonable and prudent, but I admit that I have often violated this principle, without, I believe, disastrous consequences. I would never attempt to teach physics, or even physiological psychology, but I have taught psychology and law, and political psychology, with only my interest and enthusiasm and not much graduate training in the areas. Not to mention interdisciplinary courses team-taught with members of other departments. These were learning experiences for me as much as for the students, and I think that's ok.

Another assumption is that professors are the source of knowledge and the students the receptacles into which professor pour that knowledge. The sage-on-the-stage model. I agree that this is (more) true in lower level courses like Intro, but even there I think this assumption can lead to student disengagement. The best courses are the ones where I feel that I and the students collaborate on covering the material. This requires a certain letting-go, which comes to me with difficulty, I admit. Giving the students control of the course in this way requires that I not get upset if we don't get to or emphasize what I think is important. But it also turns the students into active participants in the learning, and I think that outweighs my anxieties.

Another assumption is that the content of psychology is static, and that the current state of knowledge is the most important thing to get across to the students. Of course today's cutting edge takes on a patina with age, and the cutting edge of tomorrow never arrives. This is not to say that content is irrelevant -- of course it's vital to teach something. But remember that our future selves and academic descendants will view our content the same way we view Wundt or Jung today: interesting history, and perhaps a foundation for later work, but not what we believe is true today. Our discipline is a science, and I tell my students that that means we don't know everything yet, that we are constantly increasing our knowledge. To then act as if our knowledge of today's content is essential seems to ignore the true nature of a science as on-going. Wouldn't it be better to approach the content of our courses as a scientist, an explorer, and pull along the students on our voyage into the dark mysteries of the mind?

The second part of this criteria is that model teachers know about pedagogical practice and theory and I think they are on more solid ground here. I love the idea of the scientist-educator. This idea requires instructors to know about what our science tells us about how the human mind stores, retains, and recalls information. What could be more appropriate? There now many articles and books on the topic. Right now I'm reading Make It Stick by Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel (2014). Good stuff. In addition, model teachers should know about effective pedagogical practices. Like any area of research there have been numerous dead ends, like learning styles. But there are also promising avenues like the flipped class (pay wall) or the jigsaw classroom that deserve our attention.

-------------------

The next criteria address what teachers do in class.  Here they emphasize teaching methods that engage students, and I think they are on-target here. It certainly helps that they cite several studies (including meta-analyses) that support students engagement as the royal road to student learning. They also talk about many of the qualities of excellent teachers that many people think of first when reminiscing about their favorite professors -- enthusiasm, public speaking, organization. They also throw in competence in technology, but it seems like a throw-away addition. This is a mistake, in my opinion. Our students are digital natives, and ignoring this universe is a luxury we can no longer afford. It's not that technology for it's own sake deserves our attention, but rather that the opportunities that now exist to enhance our teaching are too good to ignore. Just as Socrates resisted the technology of his day (the written word, hat tip to William Power's Hamlet's Blackberry), those that resist digital technology today will be be seen as mistaken years hence. Our students live in a digital world, and we have to join them or they will find someone somewhere else who does.


I've just covered the first two of six criteria they propose and this post is already much longer than I thought it would be (congrats on getting this far!). So I'll leave it here and come back to the other four criteria in another post.