Another "what works in recruitment" article

My friend, Sherilyn Emberton, was the provost at LMU. It sounds like this is the kind of thing I’ve been suggesting at a broader scale with the student information database and what we seem to be doing in a more targeted way by hiring Scannell & Kurz.

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Small-University-Embraces-a/125612/

Notice, by the way, some of the interesting conclusions about what seems to work and doesn’t work in small college recruiting. We’re clearly trying to do some of the things that this experiment might say actually deter students (such as faculty contacting prospective students and marketing materials emphasizing the university’s distinctiveness).

"Although Ms. Skaruppa credits some of the new strategies for those increases, the results of the experiment surprised her. Some ideas that she had pegged as sure-fire strategies did not seem to work.

For instance, the results suggested that the "top 10" T-shirts had deterred applicants. Ditto for faculty members contacting prospective students, letters sent to parents, marketing materials emphasizing the university's distinctiveness, and a presence on Facebook.

What helped? Recruitment outreach by the students themselves, for one thing. Lincoln Memorial also saw positive effects from more-frequent recruitment visits to high schools, calling students within 24 hours of their first inquiry, and including a letter about financial aid in a follow-up mailing to prospective applicants.
The findings prompted Ms. Skaruppa to further adjust her office's strategies. This year, for instance, Lincoln Memorial is sending parents of prospective students a link to the Web site of its parent club. In addition, instead of sending them just the one letter, the university is communicating more frequently with parents, and sending them tickets to athletic events."

What works in retention?

The short version appears to be first to do the kinds of things that Kim Eldridge has been suggesting (centralized follow up systems) as well as more full-time faculty and more remediation programs. Class size doesn’t seem to matter as much (at least from a student retention perspective, though I can tell you as someone who taught 240 students my first semester at JBU, class size does indeed matter from a faculty perspective).

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/12/10/productivity

“In addition to call centers and the greater use of full-time faculty, remediation holds up well as a cost-effective way to improve college completion, Harris said. Yet, strategies like cutting class sizes can drive rankings, increase prestige and garner attention.”

On-line pricing models

Do we follow the Grad & TUG models (individual profs teaching individualized courses with on-line being an “added” cost) or the Advance model (with “master teachers” working with instructional designers to develop standardized curriculum that can be delivered on-line for a cheaper cost). This article argues that with pressure from companies like Straighterline, we’ll be compelled to follow the latter approach and reduce our on-line pricing accordingly.

http://chronicle.com/article/Such-a-Deal-Maybe-Not/125103/

Another "end of the textbook" article

This one’s a little different in that the university buys e-readers for students, downloads the texts, and then charges students a “course materials fee” instead of asking students to buy textbooks on their own. It’s sort of an electronic version of what we historically did with the Advance program (serving as the middleman to ensure textbook delivery). Then again, we just moved away from this “university delivered content” approach in Advance.

http://chronicle.com/article/The-End-of-the-Textbook-as-We/125044/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Review of "Influencers"

Another one of the social science books that I've been reading for the last few years. The key argument here is that we really can change individual and group behavior much more effectively than we might imagine because behaviors are really just skills that with enough "directed experiences" can be learned(going back to the "expertise" literature). Lots of examples follow, but I'll just summarize the key three things that I learned from the book.

1) Changing behavior requires a variety of influence strategies and you really need to harness multiple approaches at the same time in order to be effective.

2) But there is a heirarchy in terms of these approaches, and we typically start at the wrong end with punishments. We should start instead with personal motivation (back to Pink's "intrinsic motivation" ideas), especially by helping people understand that there is a real problem and that they can solve that problem (storytelling and directed experiences are particularly helpful). Social context comes next, and structural factors (transactional leadership in terms of rewards and punishments)are the least effective influence strategies. I personally probably spend too much time on structure and social context and not enough on the personal aspects of influencing people.

3) Within that "personal" context, focusing on "vital behaviors" is key. I've been trying to apply that concept in our retention discussions by emphasizing the use of our "Early Alert System" as the key behavior that we'd like to foster.

All in all a worthwhile book and certainly more helpful for people in leadership contexts than some of the others that I've read. At times, however, it did feel like it was written by a couple of consultants who were trying to tell me their tales and sell me on their services. Gladwell is definitely a better storyteller.

Why Colleges Cost So Much?

Good article picking apart some of the standard arguments and explanations. The authors point more to long-term trends in which a service industry relies on a highly trained workforce using highly sophisticated technology. All of those "external" elements (service sector, high levels of training, technological demands) drive college pricing above CPI much more so than the standard "internal" list of public financial aid, gold plated residence life, irrelevant research, and administrative bloat.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/10/19/feldman

The "virtual" future of engaged learning?

UoP seems to be experimenting with that "school of one" idea connected to an on-line environment. It probably won't be long before Blackboard is doing something similar.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/18/phoenix

Gaming and Education

As a lifelong game geek, the arguments presented here ring true to my own personal experience.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/10/15/games

Will technology kill the academic semester?

When I was in my first few years of school, I took a bunch of self-paced coursework, and suddenly I was two grades ahead. Then we moved, and the new school system wouldn’t allow me to be in a class of kids older than I was, so back I went for a couple years of redoing the same material I had just done. What a waste of time. Let’s just say that I’m personally sympathetic, therefore, to the new combination of “self-paced” coursework with “social learning networks.” Any possibilities for us to consider some of these ideas here at JBU?

http://chronicle.com/article/Will-Technology-Kill-the/124857/

Social Networking and "Small Change"

We've been having a similar discussion at JBU in which we've debated whether major change can occur from bottom-up brainstorming or whether it needs to occur from top-down strategic thinking. This Gladwell argument would say that bottom-up social networking is good for efficiency and adaptability, but "big change" requires more top-down heirarchies.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

The effects of the proposed "gainful employment" rule?

As I’ve heard Chip note a few times, if the proposed “gainful employment” rule about debt-to-salary ratios combined with default percentages were actually implemented, all of the HBCUs and many other schools would go out of business. Which raises the question of whether the for-profit schools have such poor numbers in these areas because they are unscrupulous or because they look more like the HBCUs in terms of their student numbers.

http://blog.american.com/?page_id=19885#hotspot

Another "Future of Higher Education" Article

While I tend to agree that the existing education "credential cartel" and various government subsidies both tend to stifle innovation, I don't see either system changing much in the near future.

http://www.american.com/archive/2010/september/whats-stalling-the-next-economic-revolution

Review of "Who: The 'A' Method for Hiring"

The basic argument of the book is the typical social science critique, that shows up in particular in Dan Ariely’s “Predictably Irrational,” that we are much less rational and much less capable than we typically think. When it comes to hiring, for example, we say that “personnel is the key,” but then we in practice mostly ignore that advice by waiting until there’s an opening to put out a “standard” advertisement that gets only a few decent candidates that we then put through a mostly hit or miss screening and interview process predicated on a few people’s personal judgments. Because we’ve run a “process” and because we trust our own personal judgments much more than we should, we fail in the hiring process more often than we would like to admit.

To give a JBU example, I personally would like to think that we have a fairly rigorous screening and evaluation process for faculty candidates at JBU (more so than we do for academic staff, for example), and I would like to say that we’ve done a pretty good job in hiring people in the 8 years I’ve been in this role. And it turns out that we are indeed following some (much?) of the advice in this book. Nevertheless, our success rate (defined as faculty who stay in their roles for more than 3 years and who score above our teaching and OCR goals) is at best 50%. That’s pretty much what all of the studies on hiring would indicate, that the typical hiring process is about as good roughly as flipping a coin (50% success). Sigh.

So what can we do better here at JBU? Here’s the advice from this book (with accommodations for the “business speak” which almost killed the book for me).

1) “Who” matters more than “what.” In theory, this is just another example of the “personnel is the key” argument, but in practice, very few of us really believe this (we talk about “mission,” for example, way more than we do “people”), and it’s taken me 20 years in higher education and 7 years in this role to take this idea really seriously and to begin to study the issues in more depth. The authors suggest that you should shoot for candidates “who have a 90% chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10% of possible candidates could achieve.” My bar has been lower than that, and I know that my bar has typically been higher than the faculty on the search committees (primarily because of the usual pressures to hire “someone” before the year begins).

2) So if we really wanted to aim higher in our hiring process (especially our faculty hiring process), what might we do differently? The authors suggest a 4-step approach: scorecard, source, select, and sell. I’ll take them each in turn, but to get away from the usual approach of waiting to “source” until the search has already begun, I’m reversing the order of the first two items and putting “source” first.

3) “Source” just means creating and maintaining networks. For example, the Bible and Business divisions probably do this better than the rest of us, and those two divisions have scored the best on our various measures over the last five years in part as a consequence. Again, we all know the theory here, but few of us probably do the kinds of things that this book suggests.
- How many of us keep a list of possible people we’d like to consider hiring someday and then actively keep in touch with those people?
- How many of us ask our colleagues at other institutions “who are the best people in your organization” and then keep notes for later reference?
- How many of us encourage our subordinates (with pay bonuses, for instance) to feed us the names of the people in their fields who we should keep an eye on for potential hires at some point?
- How many of us actively try to develop those who work in our areas (which also means saying “no” to some others) instead of just allowing the seniority system to take its normal course?
- How many of us actually reward (financially or otherwise) those employees or those colleagues at JBU or at other institutions who’ve given us a referral that has eventually panned out?
- How many of our units have created advisory boards, one of whose main purposes it to create connections (to students, to alums, AND to possible future employees)?
- How many of us know the “connectors” in our fields who “know everyone” and how many of us have been tapping those people for possible referrals?
In short, how many of us actually do the kinds of things that we know we should if we really thought that “personnel is the key”? My own personal take-away is that I need to create a better tracking system for potential recruits to JBU and to follow up more diligently in looking for these individuals. Whenever I hear a presenter I like or see someone interesting on a list of people who’ve attended a CCCU/CIC leadership event, I need to get that person on my list and follow up with them whenever possible. For example, there were a couple people at the CCCU Forum last spring that in retrospect, I really should have said hello to and gotten to know better.

4) “Scorecards describe the mission for the position, outcomes that must be accomplished, and competencies that fit with both the culture of the company and the role.” As a mission driven institution with a fairly detailed evaluation system, we probably have some of these pieces in place, at least on the faculty end of things. We even have an actual scorecard that I fill out for each faculty candidate with various groups feeding into this system along the same lines as what we do with our formal evaluation system. That’s a relatively new effort on our part, but it’s very consistent with what this book suggests, i.e. to create a detailed set of quantifiable outcomes for each position that everyone has agreed on before the search begins and that each candidate will be judged on. I’ll be looking to see over the next few years whether our judgments during the search process turn out to be on the mark or not when people finish up their 3-year evaluations. From two years of data, I can already tell that our judgments during the search process tend to be higher than our judgments after someone’s been here awhile. With this book’s conclusions in mind, we might tighten up this faculty “scorecard” practice even more and, once we have a more consistent staff evaluation process in place, perhaps apply some of this thinking to this area as well. We’ll see.

5) “Select” basically refers to “winnowing the candidates that you have found through your sourcing process.” This is the section of the book that I learned the most from. The authors suggest a four-part “structured” interview process that seems to comport well with the arguments I’ve read in other books and articles on hiring.

- “Screening” interviews are short phone calls using a standard list of questions. The authors give lots of suggestions for what to look for in these conversations and how to follow up on points of potential interest with “what, how, and tell me more” questions. The screening process is designed to winnow down the field to no more than 3 and maybe just to 1 or 2 candidates.
1) What are your career goals?
2) What are you really good at professionally?
3) What are you not good at or not interested in professionally?
4) Who were your last five bosses, and how will they each rate your performance on a 1-10 scale when we talk to them?

- “Topgrading” interviews (pardon the abysmal business speak) are the main interviews of 2-3 hours. Again, these are very structured interviews with a small group (perhaps our search committee?) in which you look for patterns of behavior instead of just trying to “get a feel” for an individual (which is what most of our interviews do). It’s essentially a chronological walk-through of a person’s career in which you ask related to each job (or “chunks” of jobs if the person has moved around a lot) the following 5 questions. And again, the authors offer lots of suggestions for how to maneuver through each question including a sample script for the beginning of the interview.
1) What were you hired to do?
2) What accomplishments are you most proud of?
3) What were some low points during that job?
4) Who were the people you worked with? Specifically . . .
a) What was your boss’s name, and how do you spell that? What was it like working with him or her? What will he or she tell me were your biggest strengths and areas for improvement?
b) How would you rate the team you inherited on an A, B, C scale? What changes did you make? Did you hire anybody? Fire anybody? How would you rate the team when you left it on an A, B, C scale?
5) Why did you leave that job?

- “Focused” interviews are chances for wider input on specific elements of the scorecard, especially regarding cultural fit. We already do much of this by having the candidate meet with the faculty status committee (regarding the “spiritual modeling/cultural fit” outcome), a class (regarding the “teaching” outcome), and the president, VPAA, and Dean (regarding multiple outcomes but again primarily regarding “fit”). I’m not sure if we want to modify our system much to get even more “focused” feedback, but here’s what the authors might suggest if we were to consider heading more in this direction. We’d again have a structured list of questions as follows that a few small groups would each ask (for up to an hour) regarding one of the outcomes and/or a couple of competencies on the scorecard.
1) The purpose of this interview is to talk about (fill in the blank regarding the outcome and/or competencies).
2) What are your biggest accomplishments in this area during your career?
3) What are your insights into your biggest mistakes and lessons learned in this area?

- “Reference” interviews are, interestingly, done after the main interview and not before. After comparing notes among the team based on the interview day (how well does this person match the scorecard), you may decide to continue with this candidate. At that point, you need to pick the references, especially those not given to you initially by the candidate but instead those that came up during the interview process. Then you need to ask the candidate to set up the reference checks (apparently for legal and “transparency” reasons). Finally, you need to call 4-7 of these references—three past bosses, two peers, and two “subordinates” (assuming the person is in an administrative capacity). You can divide these checks between the small group running the search. Again, there’s a structured list of questions to ask. I was particularly intrigued by their tips for the “code” to look for in risky candidates because I’ve said or heard many of these things (“if . . . then” statements in particular) and hadn’t always recognized the “code.”
1) In what context did you work with the person?
2) What were the person’s biggest strengths?
3) What were the person’s biggest areas for improvement back then?
4) How would you rate his/her overall performance in that job on a 1-10 scale? What about his or her performance causes you to give that rating?
5) The person mentioned that he/she struggled with (fill in the blank) in that job. Can you tell me more about that?

6) “Selling” is something I think we have a fairly good sense of, living in rural Arkansas as we do, but we might learn something from the author’s breakdown of the things to talk about. That list includes fit, family, freedom, fortune, and fun. Okay, we can’t sell “fortune,” but the others we can. Again, there’s lots of follow up here, but notice that “fit” is the first item, even in a profit-driven context. The other thing to note is that “selling” takes place throughout the entire process, not just at the end. Basically, persistence pays off.

So, what does all of this mean for how we might function here at JBU? I’m sure some of you can see potential applications in your areas, but I’ll just focus on how we might run our faculty candidate process a bit differently in the future as a consequence of these ideas.

1) I’m going to be more proactive about networking and keeping notes about prospects.

2) I may refine the faculty scorecard process, perhaps by making that scorecard more transparent to all parties, including the candidates.

3) I’ll be more involved in the screening process than I’ve been in the past, including participating in the screening phone calls, which I’ve only done on occasion up to this point. And I’ll probably use this list of questions for those screening interviews, perhaps along with a couple JBU-specific questions.

4) For the interview day, I’d like to combine the search committee and VPAA interviews into a 2-hour “chronological review” interview more along the lines of what this book is suggesting, again by using the list of questions included here. Rob (or Dick) will probably still do a short “welcome and review the day” meeting, perhaps over breakfast, and the rest of the interviews will probably stay pretty much the same.

5) I’ll probably move the reference checks to after the interview day and follow more of the format noted here.

6) “Persistence” has never been a problem for me, so I’m not sure how much I’ll change here. 

7) I do want to follow up on some of these ideas for a possible staff hiring and evaluation process that Darrin and I are likely going to work on this year.

8) I would encourage those on the academic side of the house to consider adopting some of these ideas, as appropriate, when hiring adjuncts and staff members in your areas.

If you’re still reading, thanks for hanging in there. As usual, if you have any thoughts, feel free to send them along.

It's the teacher, not the school, that matters

I keep seeing articles along these lines.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-teachers-value-20100815,0,258862,full.story

Teach for America has made the biggest splash using this argument, but others seem to be reaching similar conclusions. Here’s a synopsis of the new TFA book. Perhaps something to talk about in our faculty development and education groups?

http://www.teachforamerica.org/the-corps-experience/becoming-an-exceptional-teacher/

Here's a link to an earlier post I made on this topic.

http://triple-e-education.blogspot.com/2010/01/teaching-tips-from-teach-for-america.html

I-Pad goes to college

We'll know a lot more in a year or two about the possibilities of using this new technology in an academic context, but it certainly has more promise than the Kindle DX (to which I can personally attest).

http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/mobile/07/26/ipad.university.ars/index.html?hpt=Sbin

Review of "Checklist Manifesto"

As usual when I read something that might have some practical implications for how we do our jobs, I pass along some of the basic ideas. This time, the book was “Checklist Manifesto.” It’s written by a doctor, so it’s mostly about taking the “checklist” systems prevalent in the construction and aviation industries and applying those concepts to the medical world. But there are implications for any organization.

The basic concept is that “the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably.” “Checklists seem to provide protection against such failures. They remind us of the minimum necessary steps and make them explicit. They not only offer the possibility of verification but also instill a kind of discipline of higher performance.” “The philosophy is that you push the power of decision making out to the periphery and away from the center. You give people the room to adapt, based on their experience and expertise. All that you ask is that they talk to one another and take responsibility. That is what works.” “Under conditions of true complexity, efforts to dictate every step from the center will fail. Yet they cannot succeed as isolated individuals, either.” “Under conditions of complexity, not only are checklists a help, they are required for success. There must always be room for judgment, but judgment aided—and even enhanced—by procedure.”

“Good checklists are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professional using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.” “The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.” “The wording should be simple and exact and use the familiar language of the profession. Even the look of the checklist matters. Ideally, it should fit on one page. It should be free of clutter and unnecessary colors,” and so on.

“Discipline is hard. We are by nature flawed and inconstant creatures. We are built for novelty and excitement, not for careful attention to detail.” “We’re obsessed with great components, but pay little attention to how to make them fit together.” “We don’t study routine failures in teaching . . . or elsewhere.” “But we could, and that is the ultimate point.”

While it’s clearer how this theory might apply to the world of medicine where teams of people have to get on the same page quickly in order to make highly complex decisions with very few errors, I think there might be some application to our JBU context as well. Agendas for committees are one example of a checklist. Lesson plans are another. I’ll note a few other areas as food for thought. And in many (all?) of these cases, we at JBU probably already have some type of checklist process in place, so I’m mostly just suggesting refinements and/or making explicit the kinds of things academic institutions already do to some extent.

1) Our emergency preparedness committee could revise their procedures with more of this “checklist” mindset. I’m one of the people who is supposed to be “in the know” in some of these emergency situations, but I’m fairly clueless about what I’m supposed to do or where I’m supposed to get that information. That’s probably somewhat my fault, but if, as with airline pilots, I had both an electronic and paper back-up manual with these types of short, “key steps” checklists, that might help should a real emergency occur.

2) Our advising process, especially with the new ERP in place, could probably use some updating along these lines. Could we have, for instance, a list of the key 5 things that each advisor needs to check off with each student, perhaps with a physical (or virtual) “check” besides each box, before a student can actually register?

3) With more emphasis in our new evaluation process on having lots of documents put together (and put together well), could we develop a clearer checklist for people going through the process (what needs to be done when, by whom, how, etc.)? It might be a one-page document attached to the faculty evaluation document and distributed to everyone as a reminder when they go through the process.

4) Along similar lines, could we have a “key components” syllabi checklist created by people like Holly and Mandy that we ask all faculty to follow to make sure that whenever courses are created at JBU, they meet some basic institutional and pedagogical standards? That might help people with their PERC process as well.

5) What about with any student needing special support? I had a situation last year, for example, in which a parent had requested that we develop and implement a more detailed checklist for her child. There were some coordination issues between various offices and faculty members that such a system would have helped with.

6) So to with our retention efforts in general, perhaps in combination with points #2 and #5?

7) Going even broader, any of our “comparative decision making” systems might be improved by such efforts, such as in hiring and budgeting.

As I mentioned earlier, I think JBU has already got something like a checklist for many of these areas, but those checklists could probably be improved and made more explicit. The point is that just having a “mental” checklist often isn’t enough. And just having the information buried in handbooks and manuals isn’t enough. You need to have short, explicit checklists for some key components of any process in order to make sure that among the blizzard of information, people focus on the most important things.

CIC CAOs and the presidency

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/20/cao

http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Do-Few-Provosts-Want-to-Be/123614/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.cic.edu/projects_services/infoservices/CICCAOSurvey.pdf

Compared to other CAOs, CIC CAOs are younger (average 57), more satisfied with their jobs, and less interested in being a president (primarily because they see the work of a president as being unsatisfying). A bit confusingly, however, they also stay in the job for less time (average of only four years), typically going back into the faculty or moving to another institution in a similar role.

Recessionary Psychology?

We've been talking a lot about the recessionary psychology as a possible explanation for why our current crop of TUG applicants is the largest and has the most ability to pay ever, yet our enrollment numbers are still a bit soft and we have even more pressure on our discount rate than is typical. In short, why are these "rich" people so much more focused on finances than just a few years ago?

This article by Newsweek economist Samuelson, quoting from a Pew study, fleshes out the argument that we've all been making about the effects of the "recessionary psychology." Namely, this recession hit the upper classes in ways that past recessions typically did not. So while the brunt of the recession has been felt by the young and the lower socio-economic groups, those groups are actually more optimistic about the future than the richer, whiter, older, and more conservative types (i.e. our typical constituents). It's the kinds of people sending their kids to our school who are particularly pessimistic and cautious at this point in time and who are therefore being especially frugal.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2010/07/12/the_great_stranglehold_106258.html

Study about student study habits

For those of you who haven’t yet seen one of the recent stories about this study, here’s a short summary. Basically, and no surprise, students study a lot less than they used to. The drop off happened mostly in the 60s and 70s, but the slide has continued since then. As to why and what to do about it, there appears much less agreement.

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/07/04/what_happened_to_studying/?page=full

A new model for "engaged learning"?

We've been talking a lot about "engaged learning" at JBU. Perhaps this "personalized curriculum" approach will be the way a lot of institutions help students learn in the future?

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-littlest-schoolhouse/8132

http://schools.nyc.gov/community/innovation/SchoolofOne/default.htm

Review of "Cry, the Beloved Country"

We're using this 1940's classic for our Freshman Reading program at JBU. We even got some plaudits from a national conservative scholars' group for making this pick (not that everyone is happy about that recommendation). It's a powerful book about truth, justice, and reconciliation, and I think our students (those who engage with it) will get a lot out of this work.

But it was written over 60 years ago, and there are times that you feel that some of the issues involved have passed us by. The blatant racism in the book will be hard for our "uber-tolerant" teenagers to relate to. I keep thinking, as a consequence, is that our students need to be challenged where their current blindspots are. Perhaps this book will do that on the materialism side of things or the call to personal faithfulness in an unjust world? We'll see.

Review of "The Reason for God"

Keller's the man. Sometimes I felt like I was reading a repackaged C.S. Lewis, but hey, you can't go wrong with that approach. Keller's particularly effective ju-jitsuing the usual "rationalist" arguments against Christianity (if you attack religion for being based on "presuppositions," for example, you need to come clean about your own presuppositions as well). It's easy to see what Keller has had such success, particularly with young, urban intellectuals.

Review of "The Big Short"

As part of a reading group that I'm in, we discussed "The Big Short" by Michael Lewis. Lewis is always enjoyable to read, though, as with many such efforts, I'm always left wondering whether the story is too "neat" and "coherent." Maybe this is just my historian's bias to believe that reality is always a lot messier than a journalist, businessman, or political scientist might make it out to be.

The narrative force of the book sometimes resulted in me rooting for the coming economic meltdown just so that all of those bad guys would get what's coming to them. That ain't good. But it's also not what happened. The guys (and they're all guys) at the top on both sides of these big bets still came out fine. So for me the bigger conclusion is that having big business and big government working closely together and being staffed by the same ivy league crowd isn't good for the our country no matter who's in charge. I guess I find myself siding with those on the left and the right who want to see the big banks broken up, which doesn't seem to be what's going to happen with the current financial reform package. The "establishment" wins again!

The End of Men?

Here's an article that's been getting a lot of attention, in particular in regards to gender and higher education. There's no doubt that there's a major and world-wide cultural shift taking place. The causes and consequences of this shift are much more difficult to ascertain.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/8135

Another take on "genius"?

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/the-science-of-genius-a-qa-with-author-david-shenk/

Frank and I have been discussing these “genius” questions for awhile, though from his side at a much more sophisticated level (I read Gladwell’s “Outliers” while he read “The Cambridge Manual on Expertise”). This short Q&A gets at the basic ideas rather well.

Of course, Frank and I then take these ideas in different directions. I tend to think that these concepts supported the whole “engaged learning” paradigm (one element of which is Strengthsquest) because “anyone” can be a “genius” if you find the right ways to engage people’s interests and help direct their efforts. My understanding of Frank’s argument is that the engaged learning paradigm (especially the Strengthsquest version of it) can pigeon hole people too much in terms of which expression of “genius” should be fostered and how instead of focusing on the malleability of the possible paths people might take and the “directed feedback” process that seems to be at the heart of effective learning. I think Frank’s arguments are a misreading of what engaged learning in general and Strengthsquest in particular are about, but I can understand why people view these efforts this way.

How to become a more trustworthy leader?

Grow a beard?

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/The-Trustworthiness-of-Beards/22581/

Department of Higher Education data

No surprises. Enrollments are up overall, especially at for-profits. But revenues held steady despite the increase in student numbers because more students are receiving financial aid. Everyone’s margins are down, therefore, especially because of the stock market declines. Oh, and retention rates were flat, but because of the way the data is reported, that one's hard to track because it doesn't take account of the increasing numbers of transfer students. All of the above applies pretty much to JBU as well.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/07/enroll

More on the great "unbundling" of higher education

Here’s another story along these lines. If “Statistics.com” offers some of the best stats material at low cost (via a combination of content from “all stars” and outsourced support from India), then why not take these classes from this company instead of from JBU, especially if this is one of those fields where “integration” at the course level is much less explicit? And if that’s the future of technical education in particular (Engineering, Science, Math, etc.), what happens to our “all in one” education model at a place like JBU? These are the kinds of questions that are the focus nowadays of our CAO conferences and that keep me awake at night.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/04/05/statistics

Adapt or Decline?

Another article arguing that only the elite 20% of universities will be able to continue operating pretty much as they already are and that the rest of us will need to “adapt or decline.”

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/03/26/kamenetz

This is a pretty good summary of a lot of the concerns and ideas I've been hearing at conferences and from various higher education outlets over the last few years.

Review of "Drive"

Another enjoyable read, and for someone who hasn't looked much at "intrinsic" vs. "extrinsic" motivation in the past, the basic ideas were interesting and helpful. Of course, they also fit well with my religious beliefs (that we're created in the image of our Creator to be creative beings, so we're naturally more motivated by trying to create things than by just earning money). But as with much of this "social science for the masses" kind of writing, Pink tries to make too many pieces fit into this one particular box. When I discussed this book with some experts, therefore, they pretty much trashed large sections of the book. For me, however, it was helpful, especially in trying to think through such things as merit pay, providing autonomy to employees, and how to set up a compensation system. In short, it was worth my time. You can get the really condensed version in Pink's TEDS lecture, so I would encourage people to start there.

Review of "Superfreakonomics"

Maybe I've read too many of these kinds of books or maybe this one didn't have as much "edge" as some of the other "social science for laymen" monographs, but for all practical purposes, "Superfreakonomics" went down the hatch without much impact on the system. It's a month after I finished the book, for example, and all that I really recall is that I enjoyed the experience and that the main methodology appeared to be "randomized experiments." There were a few tidbits that stayed with me (like walking drunk being more dangerous per mile than driving drunk), but I'd have to dig it up again to see if there was anything else that I learned that might be worth hanging onto down the road.

More on Making Teachers Better

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

Another article that emphasizes the ability of the teacher as the crucial element in improving education. A few quotes.

"When Doug Lemov conducted his own search for those magical ingredients, he noticed something about most successful teachers that he hadn’t expected to find: what looked like natural-born genius was often deliberate technique in disguise."

"Lemov's odyssey produced a 357-page treatise known among its hundreds of underground fans as Lemov’s Taxonomy. (The official title, attached to a book version being released in April, is “Teach Like a Champion: The 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College.”)"

"Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. . . . At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

"Indeed, while Ball has proved that teachers with M.K.T. help students learn more, she has not yet been able to find the best way to teach it. And while Lemov has faith in his taxonomy because he chose his champions based on their students’ test scores, this is far from scientific proof. The best evidence Lemov has now is anecdotal."

More on the direction of higher education?

This from an Eduventures report. Even more reason why private higher education has to focus on its distinctive Christian mission and its "engaged learning" educational philosophy.

https://www1.vtrenz.net/imarkownerfiles/ownerassets/884/Eduventures%202009%20Annual%20Report%20Summary.pdf

In a very simple sense, a college or university is three things in combination: curriculum, faculty, and credentials. Students, for the most part, attend these institutions in order to study subjects with experienced teachers to earn degrees. Together, these three elements comprise a “value chain,” or set of interlocking
services and products that in combination are transacted in such a ways as to provide more value than they might independently. Recent, disruptive innovations within higher education, however, suggest that new forms of value might be emerging that could undo the traditional higher education value chain. Take, for example,
MIT’s Open Courseware initiative, nearly a decade old now, which allows individuals from around the world to view digital materials associated with nearly all of the courses delivered by the institution. Consider also the growing interest in competency-based credentials such as those offered by Western Governors University.
And fi nally, look at StraighterLine, a recently launched subscription service that offers self-paced, online general education courses at $99 a month. Through its relationship with the American Council on Education’s Transcript Services, StraighterLine offers its customers access to college credits at a fraction of the cost of traditional colleges and universities. Interestingly, StraighterLine emerged as a standalone enterprise after being incubated within the online tutoring company Smarthinking – suggesting that the establishment of a curriculum company was a natural outgrowth from what is essentially a teaching organization.

Now imagine a scenario where an individual (the “student”) somewhere in the world hires a tutor (the “faculty”) somewhere else in the world to guide her through freely available course materials (the “curriculum”), which might be available anywhere in the world, before taking a competency-based exam (the “credential”) that has recognized market value in one or another profession. Would there even be a
need for universities anymore?

The effectiveness of "awe"?

This article offered an interesting explanation for why I so frequently forward articles to people around JBU and around the world (i.e. I'm really looking for emotional bonding?).


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/science/09tier.html?em

The "Future of the Library" Debate?

There have been a lot of these types of pieces recently regarding whether the library will increasingly go virtual or, more accurately, how fast the library will go virtual and in what form. As this article suggests, I tend to think it will happen more slowly with incremental gains over a couple of decades.

"Taken together, these studies point to twin conclusions: The sooner professors and students embrace e-books, the sooner their libraries can start saving money -- but that might not happen for a while."

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/10/libraries

Attention and learning

Basically, most scholars think multi-tasking is bad for learning, even to the point of banning people from taking notes (let alone having any electronic devices) in class. A small cadre, however, thinks that we should be leveraging our students’ “hyper-attentive” proclivities instead of trying to reroute them into “deep attention.” But the bottom line is that those who think they are good multi-taskers probably aren’t. They’re just getting a buzz from juggling all of these balls at the same time.

http://chronicle.com/article/Scholars-Turn-Their-Attention/63746/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Losing the faith at college?

This study says similar things to what I’ve seen for other studies on faith-based institutions. If people lose their faith, they tend to go down that path in their teens and twenties. They are most likely to lose their faith, however, if they never attend college. Fewer lose their faith if they attend any college, even a secular institution. Even fewer lose their faith if they attend a faith-based institution. What I believe has the Cardinal Newman society upset is not just the loss of faith by some at Catholic colleges but that the type of faith students come out of college with tends to skew more to the political left than it did when students come into those institutions. Again, that’s fairly typical of people in their teens and twenties, but perhaps it’s even more so the case in our contemporary academic culture. (I’m reminded of Churchill’s self-serving quotation that “if you’re young and conservative, you have no heart, but if you’re old and liberal, you have no mind.”)

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/01/catholic

And to confirm the point that people who go to college tend to be more liberal (whether there's causation or just correlation here is another question), there's this recent study from ISI, a study which also shows that colleges don't appear to foster much in the way of civics education.

http://chronicle.com/article/College-Makes-Students-More/64040/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Right Brain Rising

This book has been out awhile, but I finally got around to reading Pink's "A Whole New Mind." His basic argument is an age of abundance with automation and outsourcing picking up many of the industrial-age left-brain tasks, right brain concerns (high concept, high touch) are more and more predominant. As a consequence, we need to emphasize things like design, story telling, symphony (connectedness), empathy, play, and meaning. Here's the Wikipedia summary - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Whole_New_Mind.

As a dedicated left-brain type, I found some of the argument overdone, especially as I read arguments on the other end of the spectrum about how understanding number crunching is more and more important in the modern world (see Supercrunchers, for example, www.supercrunchers.com). But there's clearly a lot of interesting material in Pink's book. For anyone doing design, to take one example, you can follow IDEO's "method card" approach (http://www.ideo.com/work/item/method-cards). The chapter on play is obviously dear to my heart, but the chapter on meaning seems particularly relevant to our JBU world. Each chapter has possible ways to improve your right brain skills. The author likes labyrinths, for example, which I've only done half a dozen times, but I'll be more conscious of in the future, as I will in a number of these right-brain areas.

Teaching Tips from Teach for America

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching

One of the better articles I've read about teaching. A few snippets. (And here's the link to the forthcoming book - http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0470432861/theatlanticmonthA/ref=nosim/).

"the most stunning finding to come out of education research in the past decade: more than any other variable in education—more than schools or curriculum—teachers matter."

"Parents have always worried about where to send their children to school; but the school, statistically speaking, does not matter as much as which adult stands in front of their children. Teacher quality tends to vary more within schools—even supposedly good schools—than among schools."

"First, great teachers tended to set big goals for their students. They were also perpetually looking for ways to improve their effectiveness."

"Superstar teachers had four other tendencies in common: they avidly recruited students and their families into the process; they maintained focus, ensuring that everything they did contributed to student learning; they planned exhaustively and purposefully—for the next day or the year ahead—by working backward from the desired outcome; and they worked relentlessly, refusing to surrender to the combined menaces of poverty, bureaucracy, and budgetary shortfalls."

"one way that great teachers ensure that kids are learning is to frequently check for understanding: Are the kids—all of the kids—following what you are saying? Asking “Does anyone have any questions?” does not work, and it’s a classic rookie mistake"

"In fact, for many highly effective teachers, the measure of a well-executed routine is that it continues in the teacher’s absence.”

"What did predict success, interestingly, was a history of perseverance—not just an attitude, but a track record. . . . Gritty people, the theory goes, work harder and stay committed to their goals longer. (Grit also predicts retention of cadets at West Point, Duckworth has found.)"

"But another trait seemed to matter even more. Teachers who scored high in “life satisfaction”—reporting that they were very content with their lives—were 43 percent more likely to perform well in the classroom than their less satisfied colleagues."

"In general, though, Teach for America’s staffers have discovered that past performance—especially the kind you can measure—is the best predictor of future performance. Recruits who have achieved big, measurable goals in college tend to do so as teachers. And the two best metrics of previous success tend to be grade-point average and “leadership achievement”—a record of running something and showing tangible results. If you not only led a tutoring program but doubled its size, that’s promising."