E-mail comments to the Editor

Download the complete PDF of this issue

The Writings of Guy Bensusan

Thoughts on How

Guy Bensusan

Thinking about why we should do something is very different than moving into How to Go About It. The former is more conceptual and theoretical, a matter of philosophical questions and relationships. The latter is nuts and bolts, hammer and nails; we shift from postulate to formulate, and become constructivists, building activities for the classroom, not for us teachers, but for all the learners. We assemble assignments, tools, exercises, reinforcement activities plus assessments to prepare the learning pasture.

Pasture is a good word: an expansive field where everyone can do what needs doing, where the cheerful wrangler makes sure food and water abounds, and lets the rest happen. A learning field has four traits:

1. The learners themselves must do the reading, talking, writing, interacting, revising, arguing, and so on. The teacher cannot and should not try to do it for them because that will hinder the process. The teacher should be accessible for help when asked, but otherwise should just be there for support, encouragement and frequent smiles.
2. Learners must interact. They have done it for years and need to continue in a safe, competition-free place, with minimal regulation and control. The pasture is fenced, so let them roam across it to do what they need to do in the space and time they need.
3. Learners will learn at their own pace, which comes from within. They will do so when allowed to and will often help each other through tough spots. Efforts to hurry them along will not improve what they do, and trying to drive the herd means you will lose many of them.
4. Learners are not equals and the pasture is uneven. Let them forage where they are most comfortable. Learning takes time, perhaps the whole term to learn, build, make mistakes, recast and fine-tune. They can be judged and weighed after the term is over. What counts is at the exit.

These four guidelines lead us to The Twelve Pillars:

STRUCTURE

1. Use various out-of-class alternatives for transfer of course content

2. Create useful tools and visual models to awaken ideas and connections

3. Help students investigate; ask questions to denote/explore relationships

4. Use many revisits for idea reinforcement rather than a single immersion

ACTIVITIES

5. Design learning experiences for students to engage in during class time

6. Formulate individualized assignments in several ascending steps and levels

7. Organize and implement multi-level, cooperative, mutually helpful feedback

8. Develop after-class exercises where students can interact, build and learn

RESULTS

9. Use portfolios so students accumulate evidence of their learning growth

10. Establish options to help students cope with access limits and inequities

11. Reward GROWTH; convert misdirection into beneficial learning moments

12. Build grading on personal effort, persistence, evolution and enlightenment

The underlying purpose of the pillars is to shift the emphasis away from us as experts and away from the ever-larger volume of content in our respective disciplines, to focus more attention on how to help learners of varied abilities to move forward and upward successfully in their power to LEARN.

Based on more than four decades of teaching, including seventy fully-interactive comparative arts and humanities courses over television to multiple sites, I have concluded that if each of us would include our own adapted version of all of the above steps in our courses, traditional or innovative, we would help bring about a genuine learning revolution. It would mean some hard struggle on our parts to throw out many habits we are comfortable with, but which are in truth inconsistent, contradictory and counterproductive. It has taken me over ten years to get to where I am now; I had to invent all of my own practices and then test them for each course. There is clearly no "quick fix" for the process, but it may be that each teacher who wants to make this transformation will no longer have to invent the whole wheel. What has been done here may serve for individual adaptation.

The first step in class is to get away from trying to give them only what we know; we can describe milestones and provide maps and travel hints, but they must make the journey for themselves. As brilliant as our lectures may be, they are ineffective with unsophisticated or inexperienced lecture-listeners; students need to read, to see, to hear, to gain the necessary information before they come to class, so that they are pre-prepared to interact in several levels of comprehension beyond data and information.

We need to give them smaller chunks or bytes of information, and even more important, adequate time to "let it all soak in." This does not mean that students are to learn less --- it is clear that in our world we need to know MORE, and it is also clear that the US is no longer the "world leader" as regards subject matter. However, the point is that learning is a process and not a quantity, which means that, for better digestion (as Mother used to say) you must take smaller bites.

The teacher is already familiar with the material by having learned it. Students must be given the opportunity to go through the same process to gain familiarity, to learn how and why this is more important than that, to see how the taxonomies and categorizings exist and work. Students cannot learn to avoid mistakes or learn from them if they are not allowed to make them --- the function of the learner-helper in that situation must be to help with analysis and formulation of coping tactics and methods.

Nor will they learn it all in one sitting. We have to revisit and reinforce, and they must go through the same kind of thing, climbing the ladder a rung at a time. Nor will they learn in the precise order you might want them to; what is logical and reasonable to one person does not work for another, and it may be a bit difficult and frustrating to stand and watch a learner do what needs to be done in a way you think is inefficient and ineffective.

But they can do it, they can get beyond where they are, all of them, in their own ways. They will each be starting at a different place, and none will finish the course at exactly the same spot. But each will have grown, and that is what counts, both for them and for you. If they have been given the tools and experience in using them, they will have been affected for the rest of their lives. An analogy might be a bicycle with training wheels; first they ride with them, then without them, and only at that point does it become useful to start talking about alternatives for and improvements in efficiency.

If the idea of no numerical benchmarks for grading evokes uneasiness, design a pre-test, or present a significant concept on the first day, and ask them all to write down their thoughts about it immediately, sign it, date it, and put it in their portfolio. Do it again with the same concept at mid-term and at the end. Just before the course is over, ask the students to read them in sequence, analyze and compare how the later ones differ from the first. That helps them learn to evaluate themselves, which is vital in their quest for independence. As teacher, when you read them, you will perceive what they have seen, and it gives you another area of common ground for discussing their growth -- one they clearly will understand.

With traditions across the disciplines being overturned by new evidence, with countless new meanings and interpretations becoming part of scholarship, and with multicultural, international and gender perspectives giving us new ways of looking, we are entering new frontiers and we will never again be the way we were. Our measuring sticks are changing, if they have not already changed without our being aware of it. I doubt any of us can predict the future of our disciplines and technolinks with accuracy.

In the classroom, it becomes valuable to indicate many alternative paths and allow learners to choose what they want, and then encourage them to move along at their own rate of comfort, ability and style. Here is where patience and pre-prepared learning tools for them pay off. Many of the ones I have used are described in Chapter A-2. You can expect reluctance at first --- many students are deeply conditioned to dependency on the pulpit and its attendant expectations. Do not be surprised when they beg to be told the specific rules and formulae to follow. They'll even ask for the answers they should memorize for a test!

They will work much harder for themselves than for you. When you turn the learning over to them instead of controlling it yourself, they will not fully believe you for awhile, because they have heard promises before. They will keep watching and waiting for a display of authority, a "pop quiz," or some symbolic act betraying your deception. They will also struggle and curse as they abandon the traditional highway, and may get lost without some alternative "sketches and structures." As you smile, support and encourage, some will traverse the unknown, gain reward and elation, returning with eager stories of their odyssey to pass on to the rest; it is worth class time to hear and talk about these.

Students will help each other, share materials, read each other's work and offer suggestions, especially if the grading policy focuses upon individual growth, making it clear that helping others does not reduce one's own chances for a top grade. Asking several students to discuss aloud their responses to the changing "truths" and schools of thought is very valuable. It helps them see alternative views, and keeps you in constant touch with where they are in their learning.

A most important key to success is to refrain from saying, "you are wrong." The minute that is stated in the classroom by an authority figure, open discussion will taper off and may even cease. In an ambiance overshadowed by grades, it is important to provide a safe harbor. Wherever they may have gone astray, it is important for them to discover it. It is far more useful for all of the learners if you respond instead, "that is one view of it; what assumptions do you think it is based on?" --- followed by, "do you see any implications in that interpretation?"

This idea of not letting grades get in the way of learning is vital. The portfolio system works best if you can lay out a series of steps (with BROAD guidelines) for them to follow. Set things up so each assignment builds on the previous one and anticipates the next, suggesting of course, that you have thought these out, built them into your syllabus, and structured your assignments so the students can go off on their own. Then move aside, out of their way --- though not too far! As the cook says, "if you hover over the soup, it will convey the taste of your anxiety."

When I started back in 1950, I thought my job was going to be that of teacher, instructor and professor. I find instead that I am a guide, planner, foreshadower, and fellow-inquirer with many questions that always evoke more questions, instilling in the learners a set of habits relating to their individual way of moving ahead, forward from where they were. Whereas I used to find pleasure in the applause that followed my finely-honed lectures, I now gain far deeper reward and satisfaction in being the helper --- organizing the field of play, watching the meandering plots unfold, keeping them from going out-of-bounds, enjoying the successful creation of the students' projects for which, believe it or not, they try to give me the credit!

Finally, I offer this mnemonic device for learner-helpers: I call it:

The "S" Curve

SET THINGS UP

START THEM OFF

SUGGEST SOME CHOICES

SURMISE

SUSTAIN

SHOW EXAMPLES

STIMULATE

STEP OUT OF THE WAY

SUPPORT & SMILE

STAY NEAR

Thoughts on Why

Guy Bensusan

One of the longest-standing educational traditions that I can remember is of the teacher walking into class with his manila folder of lecture notes, writing some appropriate terminology on the blackboard (which has changed colors and has even now become an electronic pad!), wait for the bell (which dates me), and then say, "Good Morning," and begin his lecture. I watched the scene for many years and then did it myself for many more.

So just as in the old days, the still-Pavlovian (Neo-Post-Pavlovian?) students chatter away until it is time for the lecture, as noted by the beeps on their watches, at which time they fall silent in their designated seats in neatly arranged rows, with notebooks open on the desk and pens or pencils in hand, poised and ready to record the information.

Of course, with student life being theater, just like most of real life, an occasional bountiful and bedecked beauty (or sartorially substantial stud) will make the grand entry, upstaging the lecturer for a moment --- pausing at the doorway long enough to make a splash, but not so long as to irritate the teacher (unless, of course, his or her mood was overcast to begin with). A few more late arrivals will slip in the back door, take their seats unobtrusively and begin to write. Modernizing technologies have replaced paper, pens and pencils with audio-cassette recorders, laptop computers and even videocamera, but apart from that, conventionally-expected actions will occur in the habitually-expected manner, and with routinely-expected results.

In one sense, there is nothing really new and unusual here. I recall, back in 1950, being the proud possesser of a brand-new Webcor wire recorder. It was the size of a portable typewriter (assuming one can remember what that was) and weighed about twenty pounds. It used half-hour spools of wire, which meant carrying the extras around in a bag (since matched carry-cases had not yet appeared as part of the purchase package), and an attached ceramic microphone with a long cord.

The microphone had to be held up by hand, facing the lecturer, and one had to sit within the first two or three rows to be sure to pick up the words being spoken. The recorder operated on alternating current which meant I always had to be one of the first students into that classroom in order to sit close to the wall-socket (which additionally meant that I needed to carry an extension cord around, just in case). Ah, with Energizers and Duracells, the primitive days of yore are gone forever!

At the time, only two of three of us had such futuristic (though pre-space-age) equipment, and it made us the center of peer attention. Students would gather around us after class in the dormitory lobby (was that our motive?) and we would listen to the lecture and marvel, "what will they think of next?" I am certain the content of the lecture was not the attraction, but rather the novelty and faint potential of liberating us enslaved students from the onerous, demeaning task of taking notes by hand. Even then I wondered why the professor did not have his lectures typed out or printed in outline with factual details, so that we could really listen, think about and follow what he was saying while he talked, and afterwards in our dorms.

Today, though, the world has modernized, miniaturized, materialized and methodologized. We can sympathize with the lecturer, since with our new battery-operated appliances, we can experience the conditions in a large group of students in an amphitheater classroom. There may be as many as four hundred cassette recorders from all over the globe, or four hundred laptop computers, each with its keyboard clicking away. The noise level they generate now forces the teacher to use a public address system so that his lecture, often assisted visually by PowerPoint or some other presentational software, can be heard over the clackety racket.

In their search to avoid "unnecessary" work-time, the more creative students have already figured out that if they establish collaborative groups, they can send one member to class each day to record the information while the rest sleep, work on projects or attend to other duties. After class, the student returns to make copies for the others, either by printing them out, dumping the contents on floppy discs or, if s/he has a cellular phone, modem and the proper connections, can even transmit the information to everyone else's laptop by e-mail.

When test time comes, of course, the hall fills up as everyone (plus a ringer or two) comes to make their marks in appropriate places on the bubble sheet, while proctors check identifications and hover. Would this behavior system not make an amusing study for an anthropologist, if only to demonstrate the tragic waste of time, effort and money?

Class time is of extremely high value. If, as has previously been suggested, we consider class time from an accountant's perspective, we can calculate how much travel and energy (both fossil fuel and human, plus wear and tear on cars and the contribution to pollution) and number of hours (even if only at the minimum wage), have actually been expended to bring all the students, helpers and teacher into one classroom at a specific time. Add these up and the total number of dollars is astronomical! And what purpose does this ritual serve? Yes, each student can take notes --- a practice based on the theory that the act of writing something down commits it automatically to memory. Now however, the new technology can be used to fly far ahead of the old ways, somewhat like the astronaut on the old nag.

Students have taken the bit in their teeth, so to speak, and found ways collectively to magnify their learning efficiency and capability, almost as if there is a cumulative effect. That is, burgeoning technology is eagerly sought after by so many, and is so easily assimilated, that self-learning seems to expand much faster and in more directions as technology becomes more and more accessible. The contradiction is that they must wait, sometimes impatiently, for the old nag and rider to catch up, before they can take their next major leap into learning!

A certain truth exists about writing, nonetheless. If we want to memorize factual information, it certainly does help to put it into the appropriate portion of the brain if you look at it, say it, think it, write it, hear it, and then revisit those steps several times. When I was first learning my Latin American History dates back at UCLA, that was the process I used. However, the memorization is only one small part of the larger picture. During the past fifty years, many aspects of life have changed. There are more facts now, and we have rapidly moved to deconstruct disciplines like history into a variety of sub- and allied fields, each dependent on a particular set of assumptions or way of thinking.

Thus while the facts, or at least some of them, remain important for certain aspects of study, many additional levels of comprehension beyond factual knowledge are more important for students today as they move along the path of awareness about perspectives, ways of seeing, slants of interpretation, purposes for guiding thought, and ultimately, some sort of wisdom about life. The real snag is that our institutions and faculty are so totally integrated to the historic rites of a teacher providing information to the students at a specific time and in a specific way, that we fail to examine the actual effect and implications of what we continue to do, and thus do not seek out alternatives which might revolutionize learning and learner-helping.

Various studies by sociologists and educators do call attention to this dilemma, while alternative educational institutions (often private) spring up to attract large numbers of students dissatisfied with current workings of the system. Guides to degrees by non-traditional paths via correspondence, e-mail, virtual universities, computer networks and other new technologies abound --- for instance, Bears' Guide to Earning College Degrees Non-traditionally by John and Mariah Bear --- and many institutions are slowly becoming aware that in the emerging market of consumer or client-driven education, it will be necessary to change procedures and tactics if they wish to survive the next decades. But institutional change is painfully slow, and the outcry that blasts out at any cyber-learning innovation that offers non-traditional courses toward degree programs is, "Are they fully accredited?" Perhaps in the forthcoming age that will not be a significant matter.

If we summarize these, we can compile them into an interesting list of practices that, in the eyes of many, are counter-productive to learning and only serve to reinforce tradition. The traditions are:

1. The teacher performs regular lectures, defines, makes assignments
2. Data is dumped in class; students take notes, ask occasional questions
3. Emphasis is on information, content, as told by the teacher or text
4. Teacher organizes the flow, substance, schedules, priorities and pace
5. Periodic tests given (usually objective, and on information accuracy)
6. Students do "all-nighters" for short-term memorization of specifics
7. Everyone takes same test, same time; proctors hover to detect cheating
8. Points accumulate, extra-credit, the curve emphasizes competition
9. Factual approach outweighs author-bias, analysis, comparison, concept interpretation and evolution of viewpoints and meanings
10. Minimal flexibility, deadlines, dependencies, equal treatment of unequal individuals of varying majors, cultures, learning styles

Some of the unfortunate consequences of this decalogue can be listed in the following manner:

1. Perpetuates the didactic hierarchy and also the authority and control of the teacher
2. Students remain passive, recipients rather than participants
3. Grade competition discourages cooperation, networking. exploring
4. Scores are emphasized over learning and long-range growth
5. Information and data transcend contexts and perspectives
6. The course is a challenge to surmount, not a building block
7. Internal focus is stressed, rather than lateralization, extension
8. De facto course goals tend to be short-range and immediate
9. Student waits dependently on the teacher for all activities
10. Little attention is given to useful, transferable principles

All of these devaluate the basic purposes and foundations of lifelong learning; they diminish the opportunities for independent growth by students, they negate (or fail to point to) many connections among all areas of human-environmental existence, they diminish the individual and his/her growth potential, and in their emphasis on one or two particularist points of view, they depreciate the validity of the multiple cultures which we claim so piously to value, and which are important to the members of those groups in our civilization who are also citizens, pay taxes and should have equal rights and responsibilities to all of society's benefits and blessings.

Combining testing with learning begets unclear goals; the goals are unclear to the students and also to the teachers, administrators, parents, employers and onlookers. When learning and grades compete, grades win! Does a fundamental conflict of interests eventuate when teachers are responsible for the grading as well as for helping with the learning? Somehow, this overlap is similar to the fox guarding the hen house.

But let us change our focus and our intentions. Let us go back to our teacher in the classroom with the four hundred student laptops, and see if we can brainstorm some options that might lead us in other, more productive directions. One would be for the teacher to put the lecture on a floppy-disc and provide it to students as part of the course-pack. Another is to have all or as many as possible of the students on-line, so that the lecture can be given from the teacher's office at the university or even from his or her home. Oh, but that infringes on two other old traditions --- the teacher is supposed to be "at work" from eight to five!!! And, all students are supposed to do the same thing, except for night courses!!!

Is the effort to change our educational system confronting a huge "house of cards," of interrelated cards? Is it that we cannot change one thing without changing a whole series of laterally dependent other things? Each item relates and in some cases hinges on many others --- which is clearly part of the problem. If we stop giving the lecture by delivering the information in another fashion, then what happens to the lecture hall? Does it sit idle, or do we use it for another course or turn it into a theater? And what about all of the related services, textbooks, photocopy, custodial, maintenance, building security, traffic flow and parking lots, and so on. Everything is related to everything else.

Regarding the requirement that all students do the same tasks, as for instance taking tests or being on line; if any students cannot have access to computers, then should we not use computers? Why? Or rather, why not? If the students are all learners and the teacher has managerial skills or helpers with those capabilities, then why can't each group of learners function in whatever way they can, to get access to the learning-centered teacher? The lock-step mentality fits the teacher-centered model or the content-centered model. If learners want to learn, let them do so, and grade them on their individual growth in understanding and application rather than on some arbitrary percentage of memorized material.

Many of our cultural assumptions and traditions clearly get in our way. We have always assumed, have we not, that students must be watched? They will cheat, won't they? Can we trust them to work unsupervised? We proctor their tests, assuming they will get the answers from each other. We prove their untrustworthiness by continually finding and publicizing incidents where such things happen. It is interesting to me that it is always the students who are blamed in that situation. It is their lack of morality and impatience for instant gratification, without performing the necessary hard work of learning that is criticized for the incident.

Maybe the sword has more than one edge. When competitions are established on a win-lose basis and the value of winning is so very, very high, incentives to seek short cuts and devious tactics are sure to be tempting. Perhaps we should look at some other sides of the picture, and possibly we can individualize the assignments and construct them in steps and stages to produce a special assemblage of learning which they can take ownership of, as well as pride, first in creating them and then in sharing them with course-colleagues. I have now done this for almost two decades, and have found no cases of cheating --- laziness perhaps, but not dishonesty.

Does not the same hold for the teacher? The current clamor over accountability, competence, tenure and abuse by teachers perhaps reflects the same major distrust of humankind. Can we really trust teachers to truly "work" from home rather than be at the office where schmoozing, sleeping or goofing-off will be overtly visible? Is it not ludicrous? We live in a day when businesses utilize various forms of flex-time for a wide group of reasons, some of them related to the changing demography of employees, the changing nature of the market, the effort to move into post-industrial thinking as well as concerns for the environment and the fact that new technologies make new methods possible. Can that not work just as well for students, teachers and universities?

We seem to be headed in new directions, and based on the predictions of futurists, tomorrow will differ greatly and ever faster from yesterday, while our emerging culture, always following way behind the technology, will have to bring up the rear. Old and unchanging institutions may decline, but also may be a haven for those who do not wish change. New ways of organizing and helping learners will come into existence and will have impact on large numbers. Where we are headed, exactly what life will be in twenty-five, fifty or even a hundred years from now is argued ferociously, and no one really knows for sure. We in colleges and universities need to formulate, develop and fine-tune a batch of new learning paths.

About the Author:

Guy Bensusan holds a Ph.D. in History from UCLA and teaches History, Art and Culture at Northern Arizona University. He is published extensively in the history and humanities of Latin America. In the mid seventies, he developed learning programs via radio, then videotapes for teaching at a distance. He was the first NAU professor to teach to multiple sites over Interactive Television.

In the past decade he developed peer-to-peer learning online with continuing online communities of practice. Thousands of students have contributed to the development of his Collaborative Online Learning Algorithm. His system is integrated into Geneva Software (the Learning Trust) and Roadmapping courses for Motorola, as well as the learning tools of his former students who now teach at many levels. USDLA regularly publishes his writings on collaborative online learning.

Dr. Bensusan is Senior Faculty Associate for NAUNet, Online Learning, and Interactive Television and Professor, Department of Humanities, Arts and Religion at Northern Arizona University, Mojave. Email him at: guy.bensusan@nau.edu.