Next in my continuing series of public commentary on WYPR. You can listen here

As high school seniors and their parents enter the stressful college decision time, here is some advice. Relax.

Where you go to college matters a lot less than how you go to college. We have know this for years, but it is hard to accept. Surely being around all of those future titans of industry at Harvard has some advantage. Probably, but much of that seems to be correlation not causal: people who exercise also tend to eat better. 

What we do know is that college provides the most benefit when students are engaged in their own learning. Find a mentor. Do research. Spend the time to meet new people. Finding a person who believes in you and your potential matters far more than anything you will do in class. 

If you find a place where you seem to fit in and it feels right—that is probably the right place for you. But if you picked wrong, you will probably never know. Most students are pretty happy with where they have picked: in truth, any college feels way better than high school. 

What you do while you are in college—any college–really matters. Take advantage of the diversity of new people. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. Go to exhibitions, events and talks you think you will hate.  Any one of them could change your life. So pick a school and then relax. But once you arrive make new friends and most importantly—go visit staff and faculty.

Teaching Naked Techniques: A Practical Guide to Designing Better Classes by José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson is now available (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2017).  Early reviews call it “as rich a resource…to improve students’ learning as has been written in a generation.” (More early reviews below.)

Use this discount code at Wiley “TNT30” for 30% off.

 Teaching Naked Techniques (TNT) is a practical guide of proven quick ideas for improving classes and essential information for designing anything from one lesson or a group of lessons to an entire course. TNT is both a design guide and a “sourcebook” of new ideas: despite masses of new research, technology and ideas, it is a more focused, detailed and immediately useful book than the original Teaching Naked.

If you want to understand why technology has had such a powerful impact on teaching, student learning, and the future of higher education (everything from faculty workloads to tuition and pricing) then you might want to start with the original Teaching Naked (2012). TNT includes some newer technology, but mostly we wanted to write a more practical book for faculty (especially new faculty) who wanted a one-stop shop for the latest research on how students learn distilled into tested techniques and best practices that work.

The premise remains the same: we need to use technology and apply new research on how the brain learns to redesign our courses and classrooms. Decades of research have brought an explosion of knowledge about how human evolution has shaped the way we process, think, and remember. Teaching is largely a design problem, and we need to design our classes for the brain in the body.

Research informs the book, but the focus is on practical and discipline-specific applications for faculty. At the same time that psychology and research have given us new insights into student learning, students now have much more to learn and new technologies to help or inhibit how they learn. We are already in a new learning economy, where, thanks to this same explosion of knowledge creation and technology, most of what students will need to learn, they will need to learn after they leave our classrooms. What we know in our disciplines will remain important, but what we know about student learning and development will also grow in importance. The future will belong to self-regulating, life-long learners, and we now know how to create them.

As faculty, of course, we have spent a lot of time in school, and we assume that gives us some insight into how people learn. Sadly, the opposite is probably true. As faculty, we may have understood the value of paying attention even when bored, long sessions of single focus without distraction, distributed repetition, the futility of cramming, discovering why the professor assigned the reading, the importance of re-writing notes and probably naps. All of these are now proven learning enhancers, but none of them are obvious. If we are to turn students into self-regulated learners, we will need to be more explicit in designing environments that help students learn for themselves.

Terry Doyle (2008, p. 25) sums it up this way: “the one who does the work, does the learning.” That does not mean teachers only need to put content out there and let students work; if that is all you do, the Internet does it better. Rather, it means that the value of the teacher is in the way he or she can stimulate good behaviors in students: pedagogy is a design problem and it involves motivating and nudging students in the right direction. The fitness coach does not exercise for us, but still provides enormous value. More exercise equipment will not increase your fitness, in the same way that more content will not increase your learning: faculty being the exception. Normal learners need a person who understands their anxieties and what motivates them and can then create structures that will allow them to succeed.

Teaching Naked Techniques will help higher education faculty design more effective and engaging classrooms. The book focuses on each step of class preparation from the entry point and first encounter with content to the classroom “surprise.” There is a chapter on each step in the cycle with an abundance of discipline-specific examples, plus the latest research on cognition and technology, quick lists of ideas, and additional resources.

By rethinking the how, when, and why of technology, faculty are able to create exponentially more opportunities for practical student engagement. Student-centered, activity-driven, and proven again and again, these techniques can revolutionize your classroom.

“Teaching Naked” flips the classroom by placing the student’s first contact with the material outside of class. This places the burden of learning on the learner, ensures student preparation, and frees up class time for active engagement with the material for more effective learning and retention. Teaching Naked Techniques is the practical guide for bringing better learning to your classroom.

Teaching Naked Techniques is a practical guide of proven quick ideas for improving classes and essential information for designing anything from one lesson or a group of lessons to an entire course. TNT also corresponds to my most popular faculty workshop. You can find out more here.

I just spent a couple of days at the Reacting to the Past  16th annual institute at Barnard last week. Reacting was first developed by Mark Carnes (who has now written an excellent Harvard University Press book about this pedagogy) and it has now grown enormously and is used at hundreds of schools in many different disciplines. While I was a fan before, after playing, I certainly understand much more deeply both how these “games” work and what the benefits are.

Hearing both from students who have played and from research studies about outcomes, it is clear that these experiences lead to better academic learning, more engagement, more motivation and confidence and perhaps most interesting for the first-year seminar—better relationships and wider friendship patterns.

It is hard to describe, but every student is given a substantial book that includes historical essays, primary texts and other background information that students must read. Each student is assigned a role with an accompanying “role sheet” of several pages that includes biographical information, victory objectives to work to achieve in the games, and specific strategy advice. The first class or two might be background on the period, then introductions are made in roles and the game begins.

The game I played was Modernism vs. Traditionalism: Art in Paris, 1888-89 ( find out more from the author Gretchen McKay, who discusses the genesis of the game here). This game, based in the discipline of art history, includes students playing artists, critics, and dealers. We started with learning to talk about art with formal, visual analysis, and subsequently gave presentations trying to persuade others why and how some art was better than others. Learning to discuss the merits of art is the key to this game, and is achieved through lots of debates and organizing of shows (and who would and should show together). The culmination of the game is the final show in 1889 at the World Exposition, where buyers (new players) showed up within a crowd. We all had to persuade others to buy “our art” using the language of art we had just learned. We alternated between faction meetings, which afforded time to make connections, and more formal debate periods, which included speeches and presentations followed by audience questions (in roles). It was indeed a rapid see one, do one and teach one.

The benefits of this approach are far reaching.

Better Academic Learning
We know that the human brain remembers more when we read with purpose. I always suggest that faculty put more than “read chapter 2 for Tuesday” on the syllabus, because just a little added purpose improves retention: read the chapter and (for example) find an argument you hate, an insight that broadens your perspective, or a relative who has the problem described. Reading any text with a purpose improves learning, and Reacting immediately puts students in that frame of mind. I was reading to find arguments for or against something.

In Reacting, students then make presentations (everyone has to make at least one speech and write papers) supporting or attacking positions. Writing to persuade is, of course, one of the core skills we teach in college and something that students often find difficult. Reacting is all about persuasion and persuasive communication.

In the game I played, set in Paris in 1888, I learned a lot about the art of the period. I sat in a darkened room through multiple presentations about paintings—much like I would have in any art history class. These, however, were presentations from other students, and all of the content I expected to learn was there. Yes, some presentations were better than others, and they were not presented “fairly” or with an academic perspective. But we were all learning to see together and because we all had a bias, due to our assigned roles, we were again, looking with purpose. Of course, the student who presented each painting learned his or her works in more depth.

In short, the reading, discussion and papers are the standard currency of academic learning, but they were placed in a different context that made the entire process more engaging.

Engagement, Motivation and Confidence
Reacting gives students license to act out in class. This is fun, but also intense. For many students, the potential to “win” provides motivation, but there is also a potent energy of learning in this environment. People are laughing and yelling and interrupting. Even I was surprised at how freeing it was to be in a role, and how it changed my classroom persona and participation.

Another interesting benefit is that each character is given unique information. So you know (in your role) something others do not. This is power, of course. But it FEELS great the first time you say something in class and others get excited.

So the cycle starts with the motivation not to be embarrassed in front of your peers, but then you immediately feel the joy of success and eventually mastery (very much the micro-rewards that video games use). How often will students give a research paper to loud cheers from other students?!? In the guise of a role, however, I presented research (original for me) that bolstered the position of my faction and the (partisan) audience roared. This was a good feeling, and reinforced the idea that –when I read carefully and prepare, there is a reward.

Friendship Patterns
One of the most interesting outcomes I learned about is that first-year students who play RTTP games end up with much broader friendship patterns in their second semester. Games are organized into factions (in the Athens game, for example, they include Oligarchs, who generally don’t care much about Socrates, the Socratic faction who are his devotees and want him to either be martyred or spared, the Radical Democrats who find him a threat, and the Moderate Democrats who while they really want every one to get along, can’t abide by Socrates’ anti-democratic ideas) and students then have to work together.

Initially, I was skeptical to hear that students often have trouble disengaging from the role (and need to be told they can’t talk about the game on weekends sometimes!), but after playing (even an abbreviated game) I still knew most of my colleagues by their roles, “Hi Monet, so what is your real name?” I am sure that for years to come, I will remember our Renoir, Seurat, Van Gogh and Gauguin in their roles.

Reacting is about relationships. On the surface, this is helping students build relationships in roles, but there is an extra benefit that these students now do indeed know each other. There are multiple benefits to getting first-year students into working groups that have this level of energy.

Job Skills
Leadership, writing, oral communication, working with others to solve a common goal, persuasion and responding to changing conditions are all, of course, widely desired job skills. Some students may need you to make this connection, but students themselves articulated that a common interview question is “can you describe a situation when you worked in a diverse group and took a leadership role to solve a problem?” Employers may not be expecting an answer about saving Socrates, but this may indeed be the only answer a student can muster from college.

But don’t take my word for it: the research about the benefits of playing Reacting games is already quite compelling. The most complete evaluation of Reacting came from a FIPSE grant allowing a psychologist, Steve Stroessner to compare Reacting and non-Reacting sections within and across half-a-dozen colleges. Students who played Reaching games demonstrated
•      An elevated self-esteem. Reacting students both showed a higher self-esteem compared to students in non-Reacting sections and a higher level of self-esteem at the end of the semester compared to the beginning of the semester.
•      An increase in empathy – compared to a decrease (!) for students in the control sections
•      More external locus of control, i.e. level of belief that outcomes often are influenced by forces that are external to self.
•      Greater endorsement of the belief that human beings are malleable, contributing to a belief in the possibility of incremental change, that people can change over time and across contexts.
•      Enhanced verbal and rhetorical skills – Reacting students demonstrated a greater ability to make an oral argument.
Steven J. Stroessner, Laurie Susser Beckerman, and Alexis Whittaker “All the World’s a Stage? Consequences of a Role-Playing Pedagogy on Psychological Factors and Writing and Rhetorical Skill in College Undergraduates,” Journal of Educational Psychology (2009).

You can find more articles about the efficacy of Reacting here:

Faculty who try these games overwhelmingly find that they work. In 2013 a survey of 100 faculty found that faculty were clear that students in Reacting games achieved AAC&U LEAP Essential Learning Outcomes and found that the faculty overwhelmingly assert that it helps achieve those outcomes. Percentage of faculty who agreed on outcomes that Reacting develops:
97% – Providing academic challenge
96% – Engaging with “Big” questions
96% – Connecting knowledge with choices and actions
91% – Developing students’ ability to apply learning to complex problems
91% –  Teaching the art of inquiry
85% –  Fostering civic learning
82% –  Fostering Intercultural Learning
79% – Teaching the art of innovation
78% – Fostering Ethical Learning

Many faculty also talk about these games have rejuvenated their teaching. A couple of sample comments:
•      surprisingly, incredibly effective at seducing students into deep meditation on–and creative explication of—primary sources
•      It’s the most rewarding teaching you can do, because students will take ownership of their learning.
•      Reacting has completely transformed my approach to teaching. I find that it forces me as an instructor to be much more invested in my students… I have rethought my role as a teacher: I no longer try to cover “everything” in lectures, but rather I see myself as a coach in helping students navigate through the exciting avalanche of information that is available.
•      For me as an instructor, it’s made teaching fun again.  I’ve begun to revise all my courses around either Reacting games or simplified versions. …Students regularly tell me that they learn more preparing for the simulations than they would sitting through traditional lectures.
•      These RTTP games bring a level of engagement and learning to my classroom that has helped take me back to the level of excitement about entering the classroom that I felt when I was just starting to teach 20 years ago.

Like many folks, I expected Reacting largely to be about history. Indeed, the games take place with real historical figures in specific moments in time, but the skill sets are broad and the subject matter ranges from science to art. This is a pedagogy that will revitalize your classroom, change you and your students—whatever you teach. Take a look at RTTP:

As Andrew DelBarco, director of American studies at Columbia University, notes, most of the media discussion today tells us very little about “what a good college ought to be” and what we do (or should do) for students.

There is, for example, the potentially distracting conversation about the economic return of individual majors. In many ways, this is an entirely reasonable concern. College is a tremendously important investment of time and money, and thinking about the practical return should form some part of the decision. First-generation and immigrant students know this well from their families. My first degree was in chemistry because my parents and I were given the deeply practical advice: If there is anything else you can do other than music and be happy, do it. My mother was immensely relieved by this advice, and I was not given the opportunity to try a higher-risk major.

I’d like to think that the choice of major could balance economics, aptitude, and passion. I tell students that their major now matters less because so much of what they will need to learn for their career, they will have to learn later, anyway. One new study confirms that there is no difference in the critical-thinking stills of graduates from different majors. That is good news, and the authors also find that college increases critical thinking. They also find, however, that graduates’ critical-thinking skills have declined over the last 48 years, despite their increasing importance and a new emphasis on colleges teaching students these skills.

We clearly need to do better at improving critical thinking, but what other skills should a modern curriculum address?

Jobs that require both thinking and social skills are growing, and the combination of math plus social skills seem a great hedge against technology. (Would it be bad to include social skills as a part of general education?) There is clearly a social and public good in our graduates getting jobs. We want to prepare them for the future, and that surely includes both intangible qualities of life and the ability to be self-sufficient financially.

Jobs that require both thinking and social skills are growing, and the combination of math and social skills seems to be a great hedge against being replaced by technology. Here at Goucher, we want to prepare students for the future, and this surely includes both being able to enjoy life (as a well-rounded person) and the ability to be financially self-sufficient.

At Goucher, we are thinking about how to combine all of these ideas. We have already started a new required three-year writing program for all students and hope to follow this with a similar requirement in data analytics. We are also focused on relationships, resilience, and reflection (what we call our 3Rs). We want to improve the relationships and mentoring that are so critical for later success and workplace satisfaction.

All of these things intersect. As a parent, what I really want for my child is happiness, and that comes from both some workplace satisfaction, but also some (paid!) work. Can we design a curriculum that combines both the abstract and the practical, prepares both the head and soul, and ultimately delivers both happiness and a job? Is all of that possible? Is all of that our responsibility? U.S. colleges have always been aspirational, so we are going to keep trying to deliver on all of those promises.

The Internet is fundamentally disaggregated. There is more and more information on our phones every day, but Siri is not getting any smarter because she remains disaggregated: More and more pieces of information just mean more bits and bytes. Ultimately, content only becomes knowledge when it is combined with wisdom. Content has to be integrated within people and thinking minds, and this happens best in a community. College and our general-education curriculum have to be about more than content. Our real products are integrated and happy people who are voracious, self-regulated learners.

Most liberal arts colleges still have some general-education requirements, although many only require some distribution of academic areas. We are still hesitant to define a core of knowledge, and I find that healthy (despite my personal enthusiasm for Plato and his audacious attempt in The Republic to prove that doing good is really good for us. Perhaps I just find this a core question for any happy life.)

What are we actually trying to accomplish, and how might we rethink general education in a liberal arts context?

U.S. writer and academic Louis Menand suggests that the liberal arts have their roots in knowledge we pursue with “disinterest.” As Menand writes: “Garbage is garbage, but the history of garbage is scholarship.” (This idea has its roots in some of the academic history discussed in part one of this blog series. Academic freedom and the move to distinguish scholarship as “value-neutral” were a way of balancing the religious roots of most U.S. universities. John Dewey and Arthur Lovejoy founded the American Association of University Professors in 1915 partly to make sure religious or political views were not the basis for hiring, but it was also part of the professionalization of faculty. Is scholarship really disinterested and devoid of personal values? Should it be?

One side of the coin is the benefit to analyzing all sides of an issue from the relative safety of the blackboard (or the Ivory Tower). Americans tend to use “academic” as a pejorative synonym for “theoretical,” “abstract,” or even “useless,” but theory and “disinterest” are useful precisely because they provide us with an abstract space to play with alternatives without having to make up our minds. Planning for contingencies that have not and might not happen is the essence of practical strategy—for games, business, or life.

The ability to always see the other side of a debate or issue can, of course, also be debilitating (and incredibly irritating to your children). While we mistakenly draw a clear bright line between theory and practice, we do, in fact, often need action, which requires a decision. Art works the same way: There may be lots of equally good or interesting ways to play Hamlet or paint a tree, but picking one at a time and doing it with conviction is essential for any good performance.

“Disinterest” is also seen as a pillar of science. We tend to privilege the “scientific method” as being separate from politics or bias, but even science is guided by the interests and priorities of scientists and the government. We can’t ever be entirely disinterested or rational, but disciplinary training provides a framework.

This is sometimes used as a justification for the humanities: Science may be peering intently at the real world, but it is using a lens, and the humanities is the study of that lens. Similarly, the “academic disinterest” of majors like classics or art is defended precisely because it is abstract and removed from the practical.

In his book Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation economist Tyler Cowan argues that we should emphasize the economic power of the humanities in business. He has a point: Creativity and an understanding of the human condition are surely useful in any enterprise. And these skills easily and often translate into employment. Still, I hesitate to make the value of general or liberal education purely economic.

As a musician and historian, I recognize that I am odd. I am comfortable with Kant’s definition of aesthetics as only the “useless” bit. (And while I think Kant’s task is impossible, I LOVE that he is trying to separate judgments of taste from judgments of beauty. So I find it a bit odd when folks try to defend something (the humanities or the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, for example) that I don’t feel needs defending. (No one feels the need to defend ice cream or chocolate.) But I am odd.

Academics call the units or departments of our world “disciplines.” These are internally consistent and self-governing systems of value. As the word “disciplines” implies, they provide discipline—a structure for organizing and verifying knowledge. They can, equally, be confining.

Another common function of general education, therefore, is to introduce students to the different disciplines (or systems of thought). More recently, some general-education programs are trying to create a space for a renewed desire for interdisciplinarity. (Remember that the question of whether to teach general education inside or outside the disciplines was an important difference between the distribution and core systems of general education.)

For all of this history and suspicion of the practical, the liberal arts are not truly disinterested. Many disciplines and institutions (like Goucher) are also deeply invested in the world, real problems, the character of our students, and especially our local community. Many liberal arts skills are also manifestly practical. Writing skills, for example, are at once a prime vehicle for thinking through abstract complex problems and the world’s most important job skill.

The Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce has demonstrated that a college degree does, indeed, have a lifetime economic benefit: A bachelor’s degree is on average worth $1.3M more over a lifetime of earnings. That is great news, but I hope it is worth even more than that.

Goucher has joined the small group of schools using the Gallup/Purdue index to measure how specific experiences in college (like having a professor believe in your future success) have a profound impact on future workplace happiness.

General education has then been conceived as a way:
1- to stimulate learning for its own sake
2- to connect students to the real world
3- to give students a common cultural or intellectual vocabulary
4- to introduce students to a variety of ways of thinking.

Some of these seem mutually exclusive, and clarifying which of these matters for each program is an important first step in helping students understand how the pieces of a distribution system come together.

Content was never the primary goal of a liberal arts education, but with the increased pace of new knowledge and our easy access to more content on every device, thinking and analysis have become even more important. This makes integration evermore important in the design of our new general-education systems. The whole now truly has to be more than the sum of the pieces.

LAST PART: Happiness, values, and integration

In part two of our discussion about general education, we saw how making the bachelor’s degree a prerequisite for professional school create the U.S. liberal arts curriculum, but simultaneously it separated undergraduate education from the “real world.”

General education requirements were introduced to try and bridge this gap.

We can see early examples of this in the core courses universities introduced during the First World War. Columbia’s famous contemporary civilization course was initially called “War Aims.” Stanford and Dartmouth followed suit with courses on “Problems of Citizenship.” Williams called its version “American National Problems.” Eventually these became the common “Western Civ” requirements.

These core courses had a social motive to give students a common understanding of society, shared value judgments, universal traits and outlooks, and a collective experience that would bind society together. Columbia’s other famous core course, “Literature Humanities,” was organized initially by English Professor John Erskine, who was worried that new immigrants and especially Jewish students, would not share in the common culture of the “great Anglo-Saxon writers.” In 1934, Jacques Barzun and Lionel Trilling (a student of Erskine’s) revived this as “The Colloquium in Important Books.”

Harvard’s core originated in a 1945 report “General Education in a Free Society,” which became known as “The Redbook” (because of its crimson binding). Harvard President James Bryant Conant (who served from 1933 to 1953) discovered that the elective system had, indeed, created more courses, but he also hoped to create a meritocracy and began using the new SAT test for admissions. Conant thought the elective system was too easy to game and not integrated enough. But “The Redbook” also had a clear social motive to give students “a common … understanding of the society which they will possess in common” as Americans at the beginning of the Cold War. General education was, in other words, driven by fears of increasing social mobility and declining moral authority in a time of national crisis.

To make a long story very short, as both the canon and society were opened up in the 1960s, curricular cores had to change; they became about method and learning how to learn. Brown introduced “Modes of Thought” courses in 1969, and Harvard created a core in 1970 requiring students to take courses in 7 or 11 areas (still extra-departmental). In 1974, Michigan introduced “Approaches to Knowledge.”

Some of this also represents a crisis of confidence in what the “core” knowledge or context might be for all students, which was also part of the 1960s revolution. As the college population and the faculty began to diversify, scholars began to study new and more diverse traditions. Faculty and students specifically rejected many of the common “value judgments” of the old core. The same books assigned to bind us together, could also alienate.

In the same way that Barzun and Trilling at Columbia taught books that were “important” (and not because of great truths they contained), the renamed “Western Civ” programs justified their core texts simply as a common heritage. I taught in a Great Works first-year course at Stanford in the 1980s. While it did include great works by women and colonized people, it was still largely the Western intellectual tradition. I liked that the title made clear it was a value judgment, but I am still of two minds about this issue.

As a musician, I want to teach work I think is great, but I also feel compelled to teach work I think is important (even when it is not to my taste). A work can be “great” for a variety of reasons and within a tremendous variety of aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual systems. (All judgments are institutional or cultural in a way.) As a teacher, I try to help students understand why someone thinks these works are important, and having a wider variety of texts and cultures is helpful in that. (It demonstrates, for example, that there are many ways to evaluate greatness.) But I also think understanding the Western intellectual tradition is important—and useful!—for living in the West, in the same way that being able to write clear standard English is useful.

Teaching in England taught me that I write like an American: One of my British department chairs took the time to point out that my style was “far too breezy, direct, and concise.” I was encouraged to be “less Hemingway and more scholarly”—even in email! My point is I learned to recognize the value of different styles without having to prioritize one as being best. I still speak to my jazz friends in a very different language than I use in class or in my academic prose. Is there a way to teach both great works and important skills without privileging one tradition? Is there a way to keep one foot in the real world, while still fostering that love of learning for its own sake?

Suppose the point of general education (and perhaps even the graduation standard) was the ability to hold two opposing ideas in your mind at once? Previous editions of general education tried both to bridge the gap between the liberal arts and the real world and prepare students to live in that same real world. Imagine the real-world implications for our nation if opening minds was the outcome of general education?

PART FOUR: Ways of Knowing