Triple E Education

Good teachers make their students into better people?

2012-01-06T15:18:00.001-06:00

A somewhat different take about the effects of good teaching than I’ve read before. The study applies to elementary and middle school teachers, but the implications are probably relevant for all teaching, that good teachers help people do better in life as a whole, not just in terms of better subject scores. Intuitively, we’ve always argued something like this for our work at JBU, but this article makes the argument more concrete.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/education/big-study-links-good-teachers-to-lasting-gain.html?src=me&ref=general

From the authors of "The Innovative University"

2012-01-03T14:27:00.001-06:00

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/guest-post-eight-thoughts-on-higher-education-in-2012/2011/12/22/gIQA0RwXBP_blog.html?tid=sm_btn_linkedIn

This is pretty much standard fare for those following these issues, but this book is probably one of the better summaries of the general situation that is confronting higher education.

The transition from professor to administrator

2011-12-21T08:35:00.000-06:00

http://www.insidehighered.com/advice/2011/12/21/essay-professorial-traits-administrators-need-drop

I resonated with a number of items on his top 10 list, though I think that much of what he talks about applies much more to state schools than to our Christian college setting.

Moneyball comes to college?

2011-12-13T11:06:00.003-06:00

http://chronicle.com/article/A-Moneyball-Approach-to/130062/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Taking data-mining too far or wave of the future?

Everything you know about education is wrong?

2011-12-10T11:44:00.002-06:00

Another of these pieces that argue that our traditional markers for quality education (small classes, lots of resources, highly credentialed teachers, etc.) do not correlate much if at all with student learning. It's not resources that matter, but culture, namely a culture of setting high standards and rigorous expectations.

http://m.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/12/everything-you-know-about-education-is-wrong/249722/

How College Affects Students

2011-11-15T09:16:00.000-06:00

http://chronicle.com/article/What-Spurs-Students-to-Stay-in/129670/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

These authors are a couple of the gurus of higher education research, and their book, How College Affects Students, has been cited over the past couple of decades more than any other book of its type. This Chronicle story is about their presentation at the CIC conference that I attended. They are essentially summarizing the research that various graduate students have been doing, harnessing the results of the Wabash Study in particular. Mandy is doing her dissertation using this Wabash Study data and, I believe, in conjunction with one of the presenters. I’m also attaching my notes from the session I attended at the CIC meeting. Much of the information is similar. The CCCU dinner then held a response panel on this topic, in which I was one of the presenters. As you might expect, the 7 respondents had very different things that they focused on. The provost at IWU, for instance, noted that most of our graduates in the CCCU are in adult programs, but that we don’t have very good data on these kinds of topics as they relate to adult learners. Others noted the role of diversity in developing critical thinking skills.

My response focused on the “knowing-doing gap” in that all of our institutions hear these sorts of explanations about academic challenge and student learning outcomes, but we really don’t change much of what we’re doing to accommodate this information. To take just one example, our salary systems are predicated on a 19th century German research model (hierarchical, knowledge based, oriented toward scholarship) instead of rewarding those who produce the best outcomes by these measures of academic challenge and student learning. At the institution-wide level at JBU, for instance, we have almost an inverse relationship between pay levels and academic challenge/student learning outcomes. But it’s obvious that these structures are so firmly ingrained in our academic cultures and that we have such significant questions about the validity or applicability of this type of research (perhaps because these structures are so firmly ingrained?), that I concluded in my talk that we were unlikely in the near future to see any real movement toward taking this data seriously. After my depressing presentation, my fellow panelists felt so bad for me that they gave me a group hug. 

Evidence on student learning - Pascarella & Terenzini

- Wabash Study results of longitudinal studies of 49 institutions and 17,000 students
- conservative approach designed to produce lots and lots of complicated data
- nsse is a reasonable approach at the institutional level to figuring out whether these experiences are leading to the desired outcomes, but much of these outcomes are due to the kinds of students that we recruit and not the programs and activities that we're running
- they replicated academically adrift results with different tests and different students. 17 percentile points over 4 years, roughly 1/3 making non-significant four year gains, spending 15 hours a week studying. But what kind of change and how much should we be looking for? Kids not going through college can also change, some for the better and some for the worse (such as in faith development).
- good teaching does make a difference in engagement and re-enrollment, and they are learnable skills. One standard deviation increase leads to 30% increase in re-enrollment.
- diversity experiences counted more than anything else in developing critical thinking skills. Had the most effect on students with lower ACT scores.
- effect of study abroad is weak, perhaps because of selection effect. Factor that out and it does impact orientation toward engaging in diverse social and cultural activities.
- liberal arts colleges have higher levels of perceived good teaching, high quality of interaction with faculty, academic challenge, high academic expectations, liberal political views
- why does collaborative learning approaches look good here but bad in academically adrift.
- curriculum that is interdisciplinary, integrated, and academically challenging
- out of class experiences have significant effects not just on psychosocial and related social skills but also academic and intellectual skills. Students do have to be involved with this to make it work.
- same with in class experiences affecting social outcomes
- experiences that influence student learning include experiencing different ideas and people, that requires active engagement with this cognitive dissonance, that occurs in a supportive environment, that confronts real world problems, that deals with relationships, that incites reflection and analysis.
- there are many roads to being an effective educational institution, but it does need to follow these approaches and themes
- focusing too much on parts or on best practices is a problem. Focus on the larger themes and on being effectives (outcomes)
- the peer and organizational contexts also affect student learning. It's not only the direct experiences people have but the context within which everyone operates.
- set the culture in the first year

Steve Jobs - Tweaker

2011-11-09T08:40:00.002-06:00

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/11/14/111114fa_fact_gladwell

As usual, I enjoyed Gladwell's explanation of the influence that Jobs has had and why he had it. As with much of Gladwell's work, the argument is that genius is seldom (and less and less so) the lone individual creating ex-nihilo but someone why knows greatness "when he sees it" and then "tweaks" from there to create something much more refined.

Our Universities: Why are they failing?

2011-11-09T08:38:00.001-06:00

Good review of some recent books on the topic.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/nov/24/our-universities-why-are-they-failing/?pagination=false

Daniel Kahneman, the top social scientist of the last half century?

2011-11-09T08:33:00.003-06:00

http://chronicle.com/article/The-Anatomy-of-Influence/129688/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/12/michael-lewis-201112

Much of what I've been reading in recent years really comes back to Kahneman's work from the 70s.

The West and the Rest?

2011-11-01T10:00:00.000-05:00

Niall Ferguson is something of a “bad boy” economic historian from England known for his controversial stances. He’s also become something of a PBS celebrity. Here’s the summary version of his new book and his new PBS series.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/10/30/niall-ferguson-how-american-civilization-can-avoid-collapse.html

Sexual Relationships in the 21st Century

2011-10-17T09:39:00.000-05:00

Combine these two Atlantic articles, and you have a whole new cultural world that our kids are coming out of. What’s also interesting to me as an historian, however, is that we seem to have a “whole new world” every century or so. Such a dramatic shift in cultural norms isn’t unprecedented, in other words, but it sure is making our lives more complicated.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-single-ladies/8654/

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

The University of Wherever

2011-10-03T11:10:00.001-05:00

Another "change in higher education" article, this one focused on the discussions at Stanford.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/opinion/the-university-of-wherever.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=opinion

California AND Bust

2011-10-03T11:09:00.001-05:00

Michael Lewis is a fun writer, one of my favorites, so even though this isn't an education story, I'm posting the link. I particularly enjoyed page 6 of this article, the story of the fat pheasant.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-lewis-201111

"Badges" instead of bachelors

2011-09-23T08:35:00.001-05:00

While I’m in the midst of visiting with academic groups about possible changes in higher education, I’ll keep sending around the occasional article that seems to touch on these subjects. The other day it was an article about Straighterline. Today’s interesting thought piece comes from the government’s recent endorsement of an alternative credentialing system called “badges.” The question is, what might happen to higher education if businesses look less and less to a bachelor’s degree as the “signal” of quality, and universities like ours thereby lose our corner on the “credentialing” market?

http://chronicle.com/blogs/next/2011/09/22/think-different-not-in-higher-ed/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

The secret to success is failure?

2011-09-21T11:38:00.002-05:00

An interesting (but long) article on pedagogical theory, character education, and the secrets to success. As Christians, we won't be at all surprised that "character education" is central to these discussions.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/what-if-the-secret-to-success-is-failure.html?_r=3&ref=education

Another "wave of the future" essay

2011-09-01T07:54:00.004-05:00

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/online-education-is-everywhere-whats-the-next-big-thing/32898?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

This "Western Governor's" model is so much in the air right now, but I don't yet see it affecting numbers at most of our educational instutions, at least not with the people I engage with. 20 years from now, however? Who knows.

Here's another summary version of some of these "wave of the future" essays.

http://chronicle.com/blognetwork/tenuredradical/2011/11/on-the-nature-of-change-in-higher-ed-part-ii-education-and-the-new-economy/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Teachers earn less for a reason?

2011-08-31T11:46:00.002-05:00

Interesting argument. The average ACT of Education students at JBU is a bit lower than average, the GPA averages are a bit higher than average, and the average "difficulty" rating on student evaluations is a bit lower. We do seem to follow some of this pattern, in other words.

http://blog.american.com/2011/08/teachers-earn-less-for-a-reason/

How innovation "really" occurs?

2011-08-31T11:44:00.003-05:00

Hat tip to Brent Swearingen, who forwarded this link to me. The basic argument is that innovation occurs not because of one person with a grand idea but by way of lots of "small bets" made over time. Drucker talks about the "pilot project" approach to innovation. Probably similar concepts.

http://keithsawyer.wordpress.com/2011/05/18/the-emerging-consensus-view-of-innovation/

A "nearly free" university?

2011-08-31T11:41:00.002-05:00

Another example of a low-cost on-line provider, this one specializing in providing higher education to third-world countries. Interesting possibilities and another example of the "Wave of the Future"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/25/education/25future_people.html

Games in the Classroom

2011-08-31T11:38:00.000-05:00

This used to be my "thing," using games in the classroom, so I felt compelled to note this article.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/games-in-the-classroom-part-1/35596?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Whither the Humanities

2011-08-30T08:12:00.001-05:00

Another of these perennial articles and another call for Humanities to work more closely with professional programs. "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em"?

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/08/30/essay_on_how_humanities_can_be_strengthened_by_embracing_ties_to_professional_education

Higher education "premium"

2011-08-29T08:26:00.002-05:00

The supposed "premium" for in lifetime earnings from attending college has clearly been declining, most likely because we're now producing many more college graduates (at least in certain fields) than our economy can really handle. The "supply" of college graduates is oustripping the "demand" for them, hence the decline in the average "premium" and the search on the part of many for more financially feasible means to get that degree. On-line, as a result, continues to increase. Peter Wood's answer is that we should all try to be elite, academically-rigorous institutions because, he believes, everything else is going to get gobbled up by the on-line behemoths. Hmm. . . Call me skeptical, both that on-line will take over the way Wood seems to believe and that the rest of us can create (or be seen to be creating) an "academically rigorous" college climate. What would that really take? How would people really know? I can't get the faculty at my own institution to understand the nuances of such issues and agree on what we should do. Now multiply my problems by, say, a million. Creating that "brand" and having it really stick is really, really hard.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/too-much-for-too-little/30220?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Mergers on the horizon?

2011-08-18T08:24:00.002-05:00

The medical field certainly moved in this direction, but higher education, so far, has not. We'll see if this is a precursor of things to come. My conclusion, however, is that we're more likely to see the big getting bigger and the small going out of business instead of mergers.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/18/assemblies_of_god_looks_to_merge_three_institutions_to_manage_costs

Student surveys about Straighterline

2011-08-17T14:26:00.002-05:00

"Straighterline" and "Western Governor's" are creating new models that may be the future of higher education, but many argue that "you get what you pay for" in these low cost models. Here's a survey of what students at Straighterline have had to say about the program.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/college-inc/post/straighterline-survey-shows-student-satisfaction/2011/08/17/gIQArW9CLJ_blog.html?wprss=college-inc

Outsourcing grading?

2011-08-09T08:22:00.003-05:00

Once again, Western Governor's appears to be leading the way with some innovative thinking. I tried to outsource as much of my grading to TAs as I could reasonably do, but I always felt that that was a less effective approach. These ideas, however, seem more in keeping with what I really had in mind.

http://chronicle.com/article/To-Justify-Every-A-Some/128528/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Here's another article on grading from the vantage point of a professor. Similar issues and concerns come up.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/08/09/essay_on_why_faculty_members_participate_in_grade_inflation

More education does not mean less faith, at least not in the U.S.

2011-08-08T08:30:00.001-05:00

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/08/study_says_more_education_doesn_t_mean_a_loss_of_faith

The belief that more education yields less faith is also a result of a limited definition of religion, Schwadel said. "Are more highly educated people less likely to hold certain beliefs, such as the Bible being the literal word of God? Yes. Does this mean more highly educated Americans are less religious? Well, if you define religion as literal belief in the Bible, then yes. If you define religion as attending services, however, then the highly educated appear to be more religious. The main point is, it all depends on how you define 'religious,' " he said.

Interestingly, this pattern may not hold true in other cultures that are less overtly religious to begin with, say in Europe.

The Trajectory of the new Christian Colleges

2011-08-05T08:48:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Riley about what appears to be the overly politicized trajectory of the new Christian colleges that have formed in the last decade (Patrick Henry, Ave Maria, and Kings).

http://www.philanthropydaily.com/?p=6050

AG Schools Merge

2011-08-05T07:56:00.003-05:00

There's been a lot of talk about the need for consolidation in higher education, but little move to do so. Well, it's happening in at least one instance.

http://ag.org/colleges/articles.cfm?targetBay=0439b34f-3625-444a-bb49-6d459da7d256&ModID=2&Process=DisplayArticle&RSS_RSSContentID=19872&RSS_OriginatingChannelID=1056&RSS_OriginatingRSSFeedID=1016&RSS_Sourc

At a conference I was just at, there was also a lot of talk about coordination in large systems when it comes to curricular, IT, and other issues. So maybe it's just our small liberal arts schools who think that we're so unique that we can't ever consolidate with other organizations?

Length of school year?

2011-08-05T07:54:00.003-05:00

I've long heard that we have shorter school years, and that that's a problem. This piece begs to differ.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/malcolm-gladwell-and-president-obama-are-wrong/27841?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Productivity in Higher Education?

2011-07-25T13:44:00.003-05:00

Another hot topic in these economically difficult times. Texas A&M has been making a big push (for a state institution) along these lines. There's been a lot of opposition to the effort, but it's clearly put these important issues more clearly on the table. It's my view that a lot of our smaller institutions may not survive the next couple of decades if we don't confront these productivity concerns head on, so I'm glad to see the ideas being discussed, even if I don't always agree with the specific approaches.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/07/20/o_donnell_on_faculty_productivity_data

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/college-inefficiency-resource-misallocation-or-underutilization/29844

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/faculty-productivity-is-coming/37718?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Higher Education Bubble?

2011-07-25T13:38:00.003-05:00

Here's some more on what many see as a possible higher education bubble.

http://blog.american.com/2011/07/chart-of-the-day-the-higher-education-bubble/

http://washingtonexaminer.com/politics/2011/07/will-college-bubble-burst-public-subisidies

But what many of these stories miss is that "net tuition," as opposed to stated price, has actually stayed pretty much flat, at least for CIC institutions, over the last decade or so. Aid of various sorts (instiutional, state, and federal) has kept pace and then some in the last 10 years. You can see the consequences in the budget woes of many of our CCCU brethren, as this story notes.

http://www.cccu.org/news/cccu_tuition_student_aid_increases_for_2011_2012

Classical Christian Colleges on the Rise?

2011-07-18T08:25:00.002-05:00

We've been having some discussions with Classical Christian groups at times. As usual, in a short article, the author doesn't have room to identify all the streams of thought here, but it's good to see the attention that's being given to these efforts.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/12/classical_christian_college_movement_offers_great_books_curriculum

Fall of the Faculty

2011-07-18T08:22:00.000-05:00

We've met the enemy, and it's us. Hmm . . .

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/14/new_book_argues_bloated_administration_is_what_ails_higher_education

Heroic Academics

2011-07-18T08:18:00.001-05:00

Cute story about University of the Ozarks prof who creates action figures of real-life colleagues and students at his school.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/18/ozarks_professor_makes_action_figures_of_his_colleagues_and_students

Are productivity gains possible in higher education?

2011-06-27T12:40:00.001-05:00

Answer: Maybe? See the author’s suggestions for bridge programs instead of remediation and outcomes-based Core courses. I’m surprised that he didn’t mention some of the other usual suspects when it comes to experiments in “productivity” increases in higher education (Straighterline, Western Governor’s University, for-profits more generally, and so on), but he may have wanted to focus on endeavors that appear to increase both productivity and quality.

http://www.american.com/archive/2011/june/are-productivity-gains-in-higher-education-possible

Do Majors Matter?

2011-06-25T12:55:00.002-05:00

Does what you study in college matter? It certainly does when it comes to how much you'll make on average when you graduate. Counseling Psychology students just out of college make on average about $29K. Petroleum Engineers make about $100K above that figure.

http://cew.georgetown.edu/whatsitworth/

But what students study in college also matters a lot when it comes to how much students improve their critical thinking abilities. Interestingly, fields such as sociology and foreign languages appear to come out the best on this latter scale, with physical education and business close behind. Economics and Architecture bring up the rear. The author of the following piece has a few theories about why that might be.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/16/connor_essay_on_why_majors_matter_in_how_much_college_students_learn

Perhaps not surprisingly, these two sets of data are not at all correlated.

The Economic Upside to Ending Tenure?

2011-06-25T12:42:00.002-05:00

Here's Naomi Riley's take on this perennial hot-button topic. Riley has been more sympathetic to CCCU types of institutions than many higher education writers, witness her earlier book "God on the Quad," so she's someone I read with interest.

http://chronicle.com/article/Smart-Ways-to-End-Tenure/127940/

More "future of higher education" articles

2011-06-14T09:28:00.000-05:00

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/gates-wikipedia-university/29541?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2011/06/14/essay_rejecting_idea_of_a_higher_education_bubble

Learning outcomes replace college?

2011-06-01T09:05:00.001-05:00

Back to the “self-educated” man concept from the Renaissance, what if we really believed that learning outcomes were all that mattered and not “inputs” or the format in which those outcomes were delivered. With existing and developing on-line resources, could people skip the credentialing middle-man (higher education institutions) and take their self-developed skills and learning outcomes directly to employers? Perhaps, though the model presented in this article assumes some things about higher education that we would not completely agree with here at JBU.

http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Learning-Portals-/127694/

If higher education is only about information delivery and skill development, then yes, there are probably other ways to develop and demonstrate those outcomes. But if higher education is also about the signaling of a certain “prestige,” social interactions, and whole person development, then this type of self-directed credentialing can’t measure up. Nonetheless, it is true that for many people, these other functions of higher education are not that important (or at least will not be seen as that important). And if “information wants to be free,” we’re going to have difficulty running our university for “free.” Straighterline, for instance, offers many of our Core courses for $100/course compared to our TUG costs of roughly $5,000/course. In short, we can’t compete, especially when it comes to “general education,” if all that matters is just information delivery and skill development. We clearly need to be about (and be seen as being about) much more than just that.

http://www.straighterline.com/

Whither Evangelical Colleges?

2011-05-25T14:03:00.002-05:00

Guelzo's arguments have caused a fair bit of discussion here at JBU. While acknowledging his general points about the growing financial strains on our schools and the need to stay focued on transmitting our cultural vision, many of us have commented that his reliance on USNWR survey data is often misleading but that even by his standards, JBU is clearly doing well.

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=24-03-029-f

Here's a rejoinder from Hunter Baker, who spoke at JBU this spring.

http://hunterbaker.wordpress.com/2011/05/10/the-state-of-christian-higher-education-a-response-to-allen-guelzo/

The "argumentative" theory of reasoning

2011-05-18T13:13:00.002-05:00

And here I thought that all of my high school debate experience of trying to win arguments regardless of their validity was divorced from real world circumstances like my father's academic life where "reason" reigned supreme. Turns out, we're hard-wired more for "arguments" than "reason" after all. Hmm . . .

http://edge.org/conversation/the-argumentative-theory

Competency based learning gains traction

2011-05-09T08:56:00.000-05:00

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/05/09/western_governors_university_and_online_competency_based_learning_model_gain_traction

Imagine a university for working adults based almost entirely on credit for prior learning and on-line, tutor-supported CLEP tests. That’s pretty much what Western Governors does. As we’re working on our own alternative “modalities” for delivering JBU’s education, are there elements of this model that we might want to incorporate even more than we already do? And if so, how would these efforts mesh with our existing “modalities”? That’s obviously one of the questions that we’ll be dealing with in the coming years.

At the same time that this model gains traction, by the way, the Obama administration is pushing in exactly the opposite direction with its increasing pressure on credit hour definitions and state authorization. Hard to tell where all of this is going to land.

What college (or at least business) education should be about?

2011-04-12T15:29:00.001-05:00

From the creator of Dilbert. Very funny and insightful.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704101604576247143383496656.html

Expert predictions are wrong?

2011-04-10T18:38:00.004-05:00

Similar to some other books I've read, the review of this new book argues that in general, formulas do a better of job of predicting things than experts do. Formulas tend to be better "foxes," taking into account more of the nuances that go into real life changes. Experts tend to be "hedgehogs" who focus on one "big idea." That "big idea" is wrong more often than not, but when it's right, it's spectacularly right, which leads to people paying attention to it in all kinds of matters. The author gives the example of Churchill's view of Hitler being spectacularly right in contrast to the more nuanced views of the time, but that Churchill was frequently wrong about other matters, such as independence in India. Sounds like a good read.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205crbo_books1

Bias in Higher Education?

2011-04-07T08:35:00.000-05:00

Another book in this long debate, this one arguing that Christians (especially of the evangelical and fundamentalist persuasions) are the most discriminated against, especially in the social sciences.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/preferred-colleagues/29160#

Practical Implications of "Academically Adrift"

2011-03-22T14:34:00.000-05:00

More pragmatically, here are ten conclusions (some of them counterintuitive?) that could be drawn from the book.

1) Academic rigor is the key to student learning, and that means, more than anything else, time on task. Our JBU data would indicate that we’re requiring more work on average than many institutions do, but still not nearly as much as the authors would recommend. Would we as a campus community be interested in moving more toward some of the minimums that they suggest (at least 40 pages of reading per week, at least 20 pages of writing per semester, at least 2 hours and preferably 3 hours of assigned work “out” for every hour “in”), especially for our Core courses? (Oh, and by implication, our semesters should be as long as we can make them? )

2) Faculty scholarship and teaching are inversely correlated, at least at the national level, and especially at R1 schools. That doesn’t seem to fit the general patterns here at JBU (our “best scholars” tend to be our “best teachers” as well), but might this general conclusion be another reason to consider allowing more flexibility in our evaluation system for those who want to put more time into teaching, service, and spiritual mentoring instead of scholarship?

3) The clear implication of the book is that “difficulty” and “rigor” should be emphasized more than “engagement.” This is easier said than done, of course. I’ve yet to see a college that has created a successful “learning focused” assessment process at the individual course level. Also, I’ve made money available to divisions to pilot “learning outcomes oriented” assessments at the individual course level that might replace some of our existing instruments. I’ve had very few takers and none of them “successful.” But the door is certainly open to more of these types of efforts (that’s an invitation to talk to your division chair and then to me). We might also consider weighting even more heavily than we already do the “difficulty” and “rigor” elements of our evaluation and ancillary budget systems.

4) Studying alone is superior to studying in groups. The authors explain that collaborative learning can indeed be a better way to educate students, but that most faculty members don’t know how to run such collaborative processes well enough to leverage their potential. As a consequence, group activities in and out of the classroom do foster engagement and retention, but they on average hinder the development of the types of skills that CLA tests for.

5) The Collegiate Learning Assessment is the best instrument available to assess student learning. In the past, we’ve skipped the CLA because of the cost and time involved and the questions about its accuracy at the individual student level. But CLA has clearly garnered some momentum, and this book will likely further that momentum.

6) Living and working on campus may foster both learning and retention. At worst, they don’t undermine learning. Not so living and working off campus. Those clearly undermine both retention and student learning. Being a residential institution certainly helps us in all sorts of ways.

7) High expectations from faculty members are crucial (this is the main argument from Teach for America as well). Medium or low expectations aren’t much different from each other in their effects, and they both clearly limit student learning.

8) Which institution you attend matters in fostering student learning. Which professors you take within that institution, however, matters even more. Teach for America and other groups have been making the same argument.

9) If you want to learn critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing (i.e. what CLA tests for), get a degree in the Sciences, Social Sciences, or Humanities. If you want to be challenged to read at least 40 pages a week and write at least 20 pages a semester in a course, get a degree in the Social Sciences or the Humanities. The more academically prepared you are entering college, the more likely you are to major in exactly these “challenging” areas.

10) Capitalism is evil! (Thought I’d throw in that subtext conclusion from the book for those of you so inclined.)

Review of "Academically Adrift"

2011-03-22T14:32:00.002-05:00

I wrote this for the CCCU Advance magazine.

Sometimes a book comes along that crystallizes much of what people have intuited to be true but that they haven’t yet been able to substantiate or put into words. This is such a book. Most of us in higher education have this innate sense that something is amiss in our ivory towers. We’re just not sure what that “something” is. Sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa do us the great service of bringing together disparate pieces of evidence that have been accumulating over the years and combining it with their own painstaking research in order to give us a much clearer picture of some of the problems confronting us.

And problems there are aplenty, as the title would imply. The authors are circumspect, however, in not criticizing the entire higher education apparatus. In fact, they repeatedly argue that the current system “works” quite well. Just not for the reasons, or the people, that most of us typically imagine. Students are mostly happy with their college experiences, faculty are mostly satisfied with their academic pursuits, and various external constituents are mostly content with what they see being accomplished.

But amidst this general approval, are students actually learning? For the vast majority, the answer appears to be “no.” The authors rely heavily on the results of the Collegiate Learning Assessment to argue their case, and there are potential problems with putting so much weight on a single assessment instrument, especially one that focuses only on critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills. College is certainly about more than just these things, and the CLA data does not provide definite answers on even this narrow range of learning outcomes.

Nevertheless, the CLA is probably the best we have, and the results the authors cull from this data are both compelling and corroborated by other evidence that they have amassed. Furthermore, all colleges and universities would say that critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills are at the heart of the higher education enterprise.

So what went wrong to sideline in practice what in theory should be our main endeavors? From my perspective, the authors are dead on when it comes to the proximate cause and completely off the mark when it comes to the ultimate cause for our having gone “adrift.” The short term culprit is clearly a lack of academic rigor, which by all accounts has declined precipitously in recent decades, especially in comparison to developments in other countries and especially outside of the rarified air of the elite liberal arts institutions.
• “College students on average report spending only twenty-seven hours per week on academic activities.”
• “Only one in five full-time college students report devoting more than twenty hours per week on studying.”
• “Fifty percent of students in our [representative] sample reported that they had not taken a single course during the prior semester that required more than twenty pages of writing, and one third had not taken one that required even forty pages of reading per week.”
In other words, if there is one thing that we as educators can do to provide better direction to this “adrift” academic culture, it would be to provide more impetus for a challenging curriculum.

So why don’t we? Here’s where I believe the authors themselves are adrift in their analysis. They astutely, and understandably given their backgrounds as sociologists, focus on a change in “culture” as the problem. They even note that there used to be both a moral and academic function in higher education, but that once the moral function was discarded, the remaining academic function was fragmented into whatever served the needs of each constituent. A “disengagement compact” took over in which each party wanted more or less to be left alone.

While recognizing and bemoaning the loss of central moral authority that has resulted in this “adrift” culture, the authors clearly don’t share our Christian understanding of how the integration of faith and learning can help restore that sense of order. Their proposed solution, therefore, is to substitute “moral” force with “political” force, i.e. to have the federal government impose testing and accountability standards for higher education along the lines of what “No Child Left Behind” has done for K-12 education. A worse and more unlikely prescription would be hard to imagine.

The sour ending of this book, however, should not put us off to the fruits of the main arguments about the ways in which our higher education culture has become “adrift.” This is an important book that should provoke some valuable conversations at the local and national levels.

Building a Better Boss?

2011-03-16T09:37:00.002-05:00

Interesting analysis by the management team at Google. The basic argument appears to be that you don't hire as the boss the person with the best technical skills. You hire the "people person." I guess most of us knew that intuitively, but it's nice to have that conclusion confirmed with more data. And for a technical type like myself, that's a bit of a challenge to me to figure out what changes I might want to make as a leader and how.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/13/business/13hire.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp

Weapons "cause" the development of civilization?

2011-03-16T09:34:00.001-05:00

As a military historian, I had to include this one. Reminds me of that opening scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/science/15humans.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Follow the Leader?

2011-02-23T09:12:00.001-06:00

Hat tip to Frank Niles, who often sends me these kinds of interesting social science articles. Here's the key quote.

It turns out that only a few individuals in a group need to know where they are going in order to lead the group, even if they don't do anything to communicate their leadership role other than move. Also, the larger a group gets, the smaller the percentage of "knowledgeable" or "leader" individuals that are needed. The limit seems to be about five percent; the remaining 95 percent simply followed the herd.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/02/the-mathematics-of-fish-schools-and-flocks-of-humans.ars

Academically Adrift?

2011-01-18T10:25:00.000-06:00

http://chronicle.com/article/New-Book-Lays-Failure-to-Learn/125983/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much

The basic thesis appears to be that writing-intensive and reading-intensive programs can succeed in improving student learning (as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment), but most teachers, programs, and schools are not rigorous enough to have a significant impact on student learning. Here’s a quote from a commentary on the book that summarizes the argument.

"The study makes clear that there are two kinds of college students in America. A minority of them start with a good high-school education and attend colleges that challenge them with hard work. They learn some things worth knowing. The rest—most college students—start underprepared, and go to colleges that ask little of them and provide little in return. Their learning gains are minimal or nonexistent. Among them, those with a reasonable facility for getting out of bed in the morning and navigating a bureaucracy receive a credential that falsely certifies learning. Others don't get even that. Consider too that the study measured the growth of only those students who were still in college two and four years later. The all-too-common dropouts weren't included. It's a fair bet their results were even worse."

Needless to say, not everyone concurs with the findings, but the book is certainly sparking a lot of debate.

Another "what works in recruitment" article

2010-12-20T08:43:00.001-06:00

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?

2010-12-10T08:32:00.001-06:00

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

2010-11-01T09:16:00.001-05:00

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

2010-10-28T08:52:00.001-05:00

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"

2010-10-26T18:09:00.003-05:00

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?

2010-10-19T07:06:00.001-05:00

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?

2010-10-18T16:07:00.000-05:00

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

2010-10-15T09:40:00.002-05:00

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?

2010-10-11T08:24:00.001-05:00

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"

2010-09-27T09:34:00.002-05:00

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?

2010-09-20T12:04:00.001-05:00

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

2010-09-09T11:25:00.003-05:00

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"

2010-08-31T13:48:00.000-05:00

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

2010-08-19T11:59:00.001-05:00

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

2010-07-28T08:51:00.002-05:00

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"

2010-07-22T12:16:00.002-05:00

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

2010-07-20T08:10:00.003-05:00

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?

2010-07-12T09:03:00.000-05:00

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

2010-07-09T10:44:00.001-05:00

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"?

2010-06-28T10:12:00.002-05:00

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"

2010-06-25T11:51:00.002-05:00

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"

2010-06-25T11:47:00.002-05:00

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"

2010-06-25T11:38:00.002-05:00

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?

2010-06-25T11:35:00.002-05:00

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"?

2010-04-27T09:48:00.001-05:00

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?

2010-04-15T11:57:00.001-05:00

Grow a beard?

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

Department of Higher Education data

2010-04-07T09:17:00.001-05:00

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

2010-04-05T09:13:00.000-05:00

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?

2010-03-26T09:08:00.002-05:00

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"

2010-03-23T19:20:00.002-05:00

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"

2010-03-23T19:13:00.002-05:00

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

2010-03-04T07:54:00.001-06:00

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?

2010-02-28T13:35:00.003-06:00

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"?

2010-02-10T15:27:00.001-06:00

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?

2010-02-10T06:19:00.002-06:00

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

2010-02-03T08:52:00.000-06:00

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?

2010-02-01T08:08:00.002-06:00

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

2010-01-08T11:55:00.000-06:00

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

2010-01-08T11:21:00.001-06:00

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."

Interdisciplinary hype?

2009-11-30T10:01:00.000-06:00

My thoughts exactly.

http://chronicle.com/article/Interdisciplinary-Hype/49191/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

Waiting to choose a major?

2009-11-25T06:08:00.000-06:00

Interesting piece. The basic argument appears to be that the earlier you choose a major, the more likely you are to make a mistake and choose something that doesn't really fit who you are. One conclusion might be that educational institutions should try to delay that choice as long as possible and also help students figure out who they are and what their life goals are as soon as possible.

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/11/25/nber

The promise of e-book readers?

2009-11-03T08:08:00.003-06:00

I now have a Kindle myself, and I have enjoyed some of its features, but as this article explains, it's not for everyone, especially academics, and it's not for every function, such as textbooks.

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/11/03/golub

Motivation in the workplace

2009-10-19T11:04:00.000-05:00

Mandy put me on to these TED talks. Here’s one from Dan Pink who has a new book on Motivation coming out this fall.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/dan_pink_on_motivation.html

Pink wrote a book on creativity (A Whole New Brain), which Rick quoted approvingly in his Gateway text. The argument there is that left brain thinking was more useful for a 19th/20th century industrial age while right brain thinking is more useful for our 21st century knowledge-worker age (not that far off from Drucker’s ideas, by the way). I’m reading that book right now, and I’m only partly persuaded (mostly because it seems to me that it’s still a bunch of left-brain types like the Google guys who are analyzing the quirkiness of our right-brain elements in order to create systems that will accommodate for that quirkiness).

But given that “right brain types rule the world” assumption, Pink argues that our typical organizational model of performance-based evaluations and rewards is problematic. These “extrinsic” motivating techniques typically work only in very narrow contexts in which the goal is clear and the means to that goal are even clearer. Because that method worked so well for our industrial age and for much of our sports world, we’ve come to assume that it will work everywhere. It doesn’t. In fact, the higher the reward offered for any cognitively complex assignment, the lower the performance. Creativity is what is needed, but creativity is dampened when given a clear goal and a clear path to that goal. We get tunnel vision.

Better instead to focus on intrinsic motivation. This sounds familiar to the arguments made by Dan Ariely in Predictably Irrational, which I summarized awhile back. In fact, Pink quotes from Ariely in this TED talk. To heighten our intrinsic motivation, we should emphasize autonomy (allowing for more self motivation and less direct supervision), mastery (our desire to constantly improve), and purpose (our sense of calling to a higher goal). Ariely focused on the third piece (people are more motivated by a “cause” than they are by money). Pink focuses here on the first piece and notes the success of Wikipedia in comparison to Microsoft’s Encarta program.

Pink then suggests as a consequence of this thinking such ideas as Google’s 20% time (do whatever you want related to the company with 20% of your time) or a system called ROWE (results oriented work environment where people have no set work hours only project goals that they can complete how and when they want). I’m not exactly sure how to apply some of these ideas to our academic context, since we already do a lot of this on the faculty side by the very nature of faculty work. In fact, I kept thinking throughout that these arguments are really an inversion of the usual conversation in which business types tell academic types how to run their organizations whereas here we have academic types telling business types that their business models are skewed and that they should look instead more like academic organizations.

But I will say that some of these arguments challenge my very left-brained, competitive convictions. For example, I’m not quite sure what to think about Kent State’s new bonus pay system. It’s certainly too beholden to the faculty union, for one, and it’s not clear they’ve done much study about the correlations involved, but I appreciate that it’s a “group bonus” targeted at institutional goals. That seems more in keeping with the concepts noted above. As someone who’s argued for a long time that we need more “bonus pay” type systems at JBU, I’ll have to give these issues more thought.

http://chronicle.com/article/Kent-State-Says-It-Will-Pay/48768/

Review of "Predictably Irrational"

2009-09-16T11:30:00.000-05:00

As most of you know, I’ve been on a social science kick for the last few years, most of my reading being popular level books in behavioral economics (Nudge, Freakonomics, Wisdom of the Crowds, anything by Gladwell, etc.). Here are some notes from another such work, entitled “Predictably Irrational” (which pretty much sums up the focus of the book), and some of my reflections thereon (consider these “Ed’s Cliffnotes”). If you’re not that interested in the economic questions, you might want to look only at Chapter 4 or Chapters 12/13, which deal with “social” issues.

Chap. 1 – It’s All Relative: We make decisions not as rational analyses but always in comparison to something else. The example given is that when offered the choice of a $59 electronic subscription to “The Economist” or a $125 combined electronic & paper subscription, people split about 68-32, but when given a third option of a $125 paper subscription only, the combined subscription suddenly seemed much more valuable with the split now being 16-84. The choice was the same (electronic vs. electronic & paper), but the context for the decision had changed.

Another example came from the world of CEO salaries. In 1976, the average CEO was paid 36 times as much as the average worker, but by 1993, it was 131 times as much. In an effort to rein in that increase, federal regulators forced the top people at a company to have their salaries made public (that 990 form we all know about). Almost another 17 years later, and the figure is now 369 times as much as everyone at top wants to be paid more than the “average” of their peers. Oops!

There are lots of possible applications of this “keeping up with the Joneses” dilemma. One is that we might apply some of the marketing ideas from the first example to how we pitch ourselves in comparison to our main competition. People typically want the “good” option for close to the “low” price. Could we include a chart in our promotion literature, for instance, showing TRBF for Wheaton, JBU, and “out of state” UofA (or maybe Oklahoma Wesleyan)?

An application of the second example is that, contrary to my usual inclination, we shouldn’t distribute too much information that might disrupt “the social contract” in some way, such as GPA data (which we haven't but which I've supported doing in the past). On the other hand, in areas where you want people to compete, such as in the ancillary budget process, you probably want to distribute as much information as possible. Finding that balance, obviously, is the difficult part.

Chap. 2 – The Fallacy of Supply & Demand: This is something my game theory reading pointed to a lot as well, that determining the “value” of anything is much more difficult than we might think. The author calls this “arbitrary coherence.” Our initial “anchor” for any particular price is pretty arbitrary, but once that anchor is set, everything else compares to that anchor. Ask people how old their infant child is and then ask them to bid on an item, and they bid much lower than the average. Ask people how old their aging grandparent is and then ask them to bid, and they offer much higher than the average. The initial “anchor” is completely arbitrary, but people can be “fooled” pretty easily. In game theory, one would call this the “first mover” advantage.

I try to follow this approach, for example, in my salary negotiations with faculty in which I first tell people how we rank in cost-adjusted terms compared to the rest of the CCCU or in absolute terms compared to our regional CCCU peers. I don’t start with comparisons to the UofA. I’m sure there are lots of additional examples people could give about setting the initial reference points for a conversation.

Chap. 3 – The Cost of Zero Cost: For those of you who’ve seen the book “Free!” (or Gladstone’s rejection of many of its more radical ideas), you’ll understand the argument that we don’t act rationally when something is “Free!” (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free?currentPage=all). If you take two items and sell one at $15 and the other at $1, for instance, people might chose the $15 item that they think is a great deal more frequently than the $1 item that they think is only a mediocre deal. But change the prices to $14 and “Free!” and guess what, everyone takes the free item. Why? It’s the same price differential and the same value proposition, but “Free!” means “no risk,” apparently, so we no longer pay attention to the real value of something. We’ll wait in line for an hour for a cheap item that’s “Free!” when we could have worked the extra hour and made five times as much money.

I’m sure the marketing types already think in these terms (a “Free!” gift or “premium” for joining the Leadership Circle or a “Free!” application process if you submit your information on time), but this concept got me to wondering whether we should be focused on giving scholarship “discounts” but should instead offer “Free!” things. What if we said that all your books would be “Free!,” perhaps if you qualified at a certain level. What about “Free!” room or “Free!” board? According to the theory, the initial attraction of getting something “Free!” would help attract interest, and it should, again in theory, be cheaper to give away some “Free!” things than to try to buy students with sale prices on tuition.

Chap. 4 – The Cost of Social Norms: This chapter has been the most valuable to me so far. The argument is that we typically operate in one of two worlds, a “market” world and a “social” world. The boundaries are hard to define, but if we transgress them in a major way, watch out. One of the interesting conclusions is people work even harder for “social” reasons than for “market” reasons. People always feel that they should be paid a little more (the famous Carnegie line when asked how much money he needed, he responded “just a little more”), so when they feel that they’re working “for a paycheck,” they generally feel undervalued and they therefore don’t work quite as hard as they really could. But ask people to help out a “cause,” and people generally work even harder than if they were paid well. Giving “cause” people the impression that money is a key factor disrupts the whole calculus, and once they start thinking in market terms, you can’t go back.

A couple conclusions from this argument that the author makes is that you should put everyone on monthly or annual pay (and no one on hourly pay, which is what Bakke argued in “Joy at Work” as well) and you should be wary of merit or market pay systems in a “cause-related” organization. Hmm . . . I’ve been fully supportive of the former, contra Pat, but Pat was opposed to the latter, which I was in favor of.

But then it gets really interesting because it turns out that you can give “gifts” of the equivalent value as a monetary wage without disrupting the “social calculus” that people are working for a cause or a friend and not for money. “Gifts” are still socially okay. Money is not. (I’m not quite sure how “gift cards” fit into this line of thinking, though I’m guessing that it depends on the amounts involved.) Are there “big” gifts that we could give people that would still be socially acceptable? A week’s stay at Lakeside Manor? A course release or other time off? A public recognition that doesn’t have a monetary award attached to it? Professional development resources (conferences, research stipends, etc.)? A “gift card” to JBU food services (this might work well if we ever got to the personalized budget accounts I’ve been talking to Tom, Pat, Kim, and Paul about)?

Once we’ve agreed that staying on the “social norm” side of the ledger is a good thing, that decision really should reorient much of how we operate as an organization, but we usually don’t make that transition. One conclusion, for example, is that social groups protect their own from outside forces, so we should try to avoid as much as possible reducing positions for financial (outside) reasons, but that we should instead have higher bars for “performance” (internal) reasons. We typically think the opposite (it’s easier to fire people in an economic downturn), but doing so creates the impression that money (the market) is the primary driver of the organization and not the social group. Enforcing rules narrowly, using monetary “sticks” (ancillary budget process?) to enforce compliance, and talking a lot about the business end of the operation all transgress the “social” exchange and move us into the “market” exchange. The bottom line is that if we’re going to talk the “family” talk, we have to be more willing to walk that walk as well, though again, determining where those lines are is difficult.

Chap. 5 – Hot is Hotter than you Think: Basically, when people are in their cool “Dr. Jekyl” moments, they really can’t imagine what they will say or do when they’re in their emotional “Mr. Hyde” moments. So if you want to keep people (he focuses on teens) from doing stupid things, it’s not enough to just teach them what not to do. You have to help them avoid situations where their emotions can take over. Our "prudential" alcohol policy might be an example?

Chap. 6 - The Problem of Procrastination: The author's research shows that, sure enough, people procrastinate, that tightly restricting people's freedom (think deadlines for turning in assignments) is the best cure for procrastination, but that simply offering a tool for pre-commitment helps a lot (this would be the "Nudge" argument), especially for people who recognize their tendency toward procrastination. His favorite pre-commitment device is something like a deposit where you are forced to put money down up front, but you get it back if you do the "right" thing. He also likes the simplicity of "bundling" services (the one-stop shop idea, for example, when it comes to student services) and accountability partners (real or virtual).

Chap. 7 - The High Price of Ownership: Once we "own" something, we value it much more highly than before. And I mean MUCH more highly (about 14 times as much in the experiment the author presents). Reminded me a lot of our "name" feedback. People didn't know or care about the name John Brown before they came to the school, but afterwards, they "owned" it and were very intense about not wanting to see it changed. People attach very quickly, they focus on loss more than gain (witness the recent health care debate), and they have a hard time seeing anyone else's perspective (again, witness the health care debate). The more time people spend with something, even before they actually buy it, the more attached they are. Our visit program is probably a good example of that philosophy. Our discussions about "trial" courses might be another example (take a summer course from JBU for "Free!" but the credit only counts if you come to JBU).

Chap. 8 - Keeping Doors Open: Options distract us, so while we might think we're happier having lots of choices, in fact, we are typically much worse off trying to keep all of our options on the table. I see it all the time on the faculty growth plans where faculty note that they really need to say "no" more frequently, but they have real difficulty doing so. Drucker's time studies show the same results for executives. And being willing to "abandon" is one of the hardest things to do as an organization.

Chap. 9 - The Effect of Expectations: We generally get what we think we're going to get, which is why the placebo effect is so powerful and why "presentation" matters so much in fine dining. In terms of education, for example, Harold Heie used to say that he had long thought that it was the faculty that attracted students to a university but after decades of experience, he had to conclude that it was the buildings. Having visited a few dozen campuses myself, I would have to concur.

Chap. 10 - The Power of Price: Another version of the expectations game is that if something costs a lot, we assume it will be better, and voila, it “actually” is. 50 cent aspirin works much better than 1 cent aspirin, even though they use the same ingredients. Hendrix concludes that they can keep raising their prices because the more expensive they are, the more people will think that they're really great, and the more that, in fact, the students will feel that they're getting a great education (they must be, right, because they're paying all of this money?).

Chap. 11 – The Content of our Character, Part I – Why We Are Dishonest: “So we learned that people cheat when they have a chance to do so, but they don’t cheat as much as they could. Moreover, once they begin to think about honesty—whether by recalling the Ten Commandments or by signing a simple statement—they stop cheating completely. In other words, when we are removed from any benchmarks of ethical thought, we tend to stray into dishonesty. But if we are reminded of morality at the moment we are tempted, then we are much more likely to be honest.” Honor codes, for example, might work, but they have to be reiterated at “the moment we are tempted.”

Chap. 12 – The Content of our Character, Part II – Why Dealing with Cash Makes Us More Honest: Cheating, it turns out, is a lot easier when it’s one step or more removed from real, physical money. Interestingly, few seem to realize that this will be true and predict the same levels of cheating regardless of what the “payout” will be. All of this is why, perhaps, direct theft (burglaries and the like) are miniscule in dollar terms compared to exaggerated expense accounting, IRS fraud, etc. The author’s best guess as to why “hard cash” is different is all of the “sacred symbolism” on the bills themselves as well as the importance we as a society place on those bills.

Chap. 13 – Beer and Free Lunches: When people order food (or beer), the first person to order gets what he or she really wants (and enjoys it accordingly), but those later in the sequence will often choose food not because it’s what they want (or will like) but because it provides some social benefit (to show that they are “unique” in a culture that values uniqueness, for example). In short, people don’t always make rational decisions (the basic point of the book), so there are changes we can make that will indeed help everyone (provide a “free lunch”). The author mentions the “save more tomorrow” mechanism that the Nudge authors highlighted as being a great example (people commit today to save more of their paycheck for retirement in future years).

As you can probably tell, I liked the book, but since it’s on my Kindle, I don’t have a copy to give anyone. The downside of this new technology, huh?

The Case Worker Approach in Action?

2009-09-04T06:27:00.001-05:00

Here's a real world example of the case worker approach that I've been talking about for awhile. Of course, I've been talking about this as something of a replacement/retasking of some existing personnel, while Mercy College in New York has added these slots on top of the existing systems. But the idea is there, to have a single mentor for each student to help them from before they enroll to after they graduate. Each mentor would have a case load of about 100. Perhaps this is model to keep an eye on?

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/09/04/mercy

https://www.mercy.edu/pages/1180.asp

The $99/month university?

2009-09-03T12:00:00.000-05:00

If “information wants to be free,” and we’re in the information business, what’s our long-term fate in higher education? That’s the general concern raised in this Chronicle piece.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/College-for-99-a-Month-/7898/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

I’ve passed along some articles about “Facebook University” and other “cheap” higher education options that are now out there. Here’s another one, the $99/month university called “StraighterLine.”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/college_guide/feature/college_for_99_a_month.php

http://www.straighterline.com/

The basic idea is to offer pre-packaged Core courses in an on-line environment with various support elements (on-line tutors, web modules, an assigned advisor/professor with a Ph.D., etc.). You can take as many courses for credit as you can handle at $99/month. This is akin to what that Global Campus at Illinois was trying to do in a larger format but failed to implement.

So what happens to places like JBU if people decide to take the “cheap” courses elsewhere and transfer in all of those credits and only take the “expensive” courses at the “elite” schools? We’d probably see increasing numbers of transfers, traditional undergraduate populations skewing more toward upper classmen, fewer students living on campus, more students taking graduate courses, fewer students taking face to face degree completion programs, and more students looking for on-line options. Hmm . . . that pretty much describes our experience in the last few years. Extend these trends a bit further, and our “money making programs” in Advance, undergraduate “core,” and room/board get squeezed more and more. Another hmm . . .

Of course, what some commentators note is that places like JBU are not at all in the information business, but in the whole person development business. Whether our external constituencies will agree with us, however, is another question, and if they don’t, is higher education headed increasingly along the path already trod by the newspaper business? Aren’t you glad that we’ve started a strategic planning process in which we all get to think about such matters?

Peer pressure "nudges"

2009-09-02T11:38:00.001-05:00

I read yesterday another one of those short pieces explaining how to use social peer pressure (“nudging”?) to increase compliance with some stated goal. In this case, the studies cited were on reducing energy consumption and on reusing hotel towels . Both studies explained that you didn’t need to set specific quotas or make specific rules, but you did need to have specific and public recognition of who was doing what.

1) For energy consumption, the energy company sent notices on a regular basis showing how much homeowners were using in comparison with people in their neighborhood. You got a smiley face notice if you used less than your neighbors and a frown face if you used more. They then offered suggestions of how you could save energy. Usage rates dropped significantly as a result of this simple campaign. As I’ve noted before to the Steve’s, this sounds somewhat like what we did with the Captain Planet initiative and something that we could do with the rest of the campus facilities. We also already do something similar with the ancillary budget process. I’ve suggested to Jerry and Cal that we do something like this with our alumni giving percentages as well.

2) For towel usage, they tested various messages placed in the bathrooms. Simple requests to reuse had limited effect. Providing people with a financial incentive (discount on their bill for reusing) were apparently too minimal to have much of an effect either. What worked was a statement that most people who had stayed in that particular room had reused their towels (the study didn’t comment on whether such a note was actually true when they first placed it in the room, by the way, just that doing so increased towel reusage by 33%). The application here might be for recycling efforts (especially if we develop a more fully developed system), Wellness efforts, and various survey (such as for NSSE or strategic planning).

The key in all of these “peer pressure” efforts appears to be that the information is relevant (people, places, or activities that the target audiences know very well) and potentially public. It’s this last piece that might be trickier in our situation, especially if it includes some type of public “shaming.” But hey, in some cases, that might be what it takes (to get the faculty to fill out a survey, for example).

Review of Moreton's "To Serve God & Wal-Mart"

2009-08-30T16:45:00.002-05:00

I was first made aware of Bethany's work when I saw her being interviewed on Book TV. It was fascinating, seeing an east coast labor and gender historian talk about "my" world in ways that were nuanced, balanced, and insightful. I told her so, ordered her book, and then found out that she had interviewed and done some work with JBU's own Rick Ostrander and Joe Walenciak. Now it became clearer why Bethany did indeed understand our Wal-Mart and Ozark Christian College worlds at a fairly intimate level. She had spent some serious time getting to know us.

The book itself is not always up my alley. Bethany is still a gender and labor historian, and those are fields that don't thrill me very much. But in the second half of the book, Bethany offers some profound reflections that I haven't heard anyone else encapsulate quite so well.

1) The service industry in the south goes directly from farm service to retail service without ever really participating in the heirarchical industrial period where "service" is defined more as "servitude." That unique historical transition requires a completely different way of creating and harnessing service work.

2) Wal-Mart figures out how to do that work somewhat by accident as the employees of the eventual behemoth teach the leadership about what they need. Sam Walton and others are willing students, but they didn't really plan in advance how to "exploit" the abilities of their workforce. They just figured out how to get in front of the parade once it was already going.

3) That parade was driven by working mothers who wanted flexibility and respect in a community-friendly environment. Wal-Mart gave it to them, not the other way around. Exchanging labor for money in typical "industrial society" formats was much lower on the totem pole for all involved.

4) With "Service" largely unmoored from its industrial base, Christian interpretations of service became much more prominent with these working mothers being lauded and elevated as the pinnacle of what the company was about, even if they weren't being paid the most.

5) These Christian connections spiraled out to various organizations, such as SIFE, WISP, Christian colleges, various churches, etc. Wal-Mart was not a Christian company, but the "Wal-Mart Way" and Christian understandings of service and free enterprise dovetailed nicely to form a new service-oriented mentality.

6) This happy story has its usual embellishments and hypocracies involved (Sam didn't really start out poor, Wal-Mart got lots of money and support from the government, Christianity doesn't sit as easily with capitalism as these parties often seemed to indicate, etc.), but in general, the various players were sincere in their ideas and arguments, which is why this synergy has been so effective for so long.

At least that's my understanding of what Bethany had to say. We're looking at inviting her to JBU sometime this year, so perhaps I'll find out then whether my interpretations of her conclusions are on target.

Review of Smith's "Desiring the Kingdom"

2009-08-30T16:34:00.002-05:00

I've looked through (read the intro and conclusion and skimmed the rest) Smith's new book, the first in his three volume "Cultural Liturgies" about spiritual formation. With that brief of a survey, I may not have understood the nuances of all of Smith's ideas, but my short response is that I didn't really like it. Maybe I'm just too wedded to the Calvin "world and life view" approach that he's rejecting (or at least the straw man version of that view that he's rejecting), but I much preferred Crouch's "Culture Making" approach to Smith's "spiritual formation ueber alles" argument. I can certainly understand, however, why a number of people at JBU might be more sympathetic than I am, at the very least for the support he would offer to the "spiritual formation" discussion and the challenges he would make to much of what we're currently doing.

Smith notes on page 219 (in footnote 6) that people have resisted some of his ideas (that the university is a subset of the church, that it should function more like a monastery, and that it should replace worldview language with spiritual formation language) for four reasons: it makes the university an extension of Sunday school, it violates "sphere sovereignty" separations, "spiritual formation" language is often considered too "fuzzy" and too dominated by SD folk, and, most importantly, we in contemporary culture are too wedded to modern (and almost "evil") notions of liberal autonomy when we should be returning instead to previous ancient and medieval understandings of human nature. I am guilty as charged, especially on that last one. I do not want some spiritual formation "philosopher kings" requiring me to participate in their specially designed set of discipline-focused small group activities, which is pretty much what Smith proposes in the last chapter as being the only "Christian" education worth its salt. Blech! I am actually joining a small group at church based on the work of James B. Smith (of Friends) that will emphasize spiritual disciplines, but hey, that's my choice, not something imposed on me by the spiritual formation cognoscenti.

In short, while I find Smith's arguments interesting and sometimes in keeping with my Episcopal inclinations, and while I can see how conversations with him might be valuable for a lot of people at JBU, I personally have very little desire to have his ideas become the centerpiece of a lot of our strategic planning work the way that Crouch's book so helpfully is becoming such a centerpiece. If we took Smith seriously, for example, we probably could not use the word "excellent" in our list of values, we would probably have to include words like "spiritual formation," "worship," or "liturgy" in our list of values, we'd probably have to shift from calling ourselves "interdenominational" to "nondenominational" (you have to be connected to some specific church in order to do Christian education, right?), and we'd have to up-end much of our Core Curriculum as well as our approach to integration of faith and learning. I would personally oppose all of those moves.

In short, it's not my cup of tea. Then again, neither was Wolterstorff, whose "Until Justice and Peace Embrace" ideas seem to undergird some of this work.