It’s a book about designing conditions and structures, dynamics and experiments, in which students can learn. (Location 187)
your unconscious mind accusing you of a particular kind of earnest, hardworking—what to call it?—laziness. (Location 292)
Note: How to avoid laziness. Fist create time to do actual work. Show people what you are doing. The impact. Try and connect effect to cause as quickly as possible.
The syllabus seemed to us the nexus of big and tight, the place where philosophical ambitions and epistemological assumptions meet next week’s reading assignment and prep for a midterm. (Location 432)
To get to intellectual engagement is the big challenge. It’s more than great lecturing or dazzling PowerPoint (in fact it’s rarely about great lecturing and never about dazzling PowerPoint). (Location 457)
A syllabus is an opportunity to draft a sequence of activities that students will perform in a specific order. Like any time-based medium, the college course needs a narrative, but that narrative will be both enacted and experienced primarily by your students rather than by you. (Location 464)
Here’s where we want to make a move: What changes if you think of a syllabus as a narrative? A good narrative, as every reader knows, is driven by not-knowing. (“No spoilers!”) Every good course, then, sets up mysteries, problems, as-yet-unresolved difficulties with which students will wrestle all term. Narrative is also driven by turns, transformations, moments of recognition. Every good course stacks the deck in favor of these developments, even as it remembers that they’re for the students to find, not for us to “deliver.” (Location 469)
figuring out just how somebody who doesn’t yet understand what good work looks like in your discipline would build the curiosity, technique, habits, and understanding necessary to do that work. (Location 478)
Today we are in the midst of a set of epistemic crises. (Location 522)
The U.S. Constitution engages some of the ways that democratic subjects discover, evaluate, and reason about evidence, but it has produced rules governing these epistemic practices in only certain areas of public life, primarily the law. It leaves room for all sorts of interpretation, the consideration of all manner of evidence, in everyday life—for better and for worse. People are free to reason their way to a belief that the Earth is flat. A syllabus, in contrast, must make rules about epistemic practice. In fact, that is its most important function and the underlying motivation for its content. This is the evidence we will consider. This is how we will consider it. These are the ground rules for how we will work collectively through it. The rights and responsibilities a syllabus sets for knowledge-making ultimately matter far more than those it sets for attendance and grading. (Location 528)
This is the evidence we will consider. This is how we will consider it. These are the ground rules for how we will work collectively through it. (Location 533)
Note: # epistemic health
but those minds are housed in bodies. (Location 543)
Note: Not sure what the point is here, but it may be that The presence of someone indicates self-selection, a desire to transport their body There to learn.,
You tell them that they have to identify three things in the paragraph that they don’t understand. (Location 661)
p—of classroom teaching. Like citizens of the state, citizens of the classroom listen and watch for the experiences of those around them. Our goal is to help students become the kind of citizens (of the classroom, of the state) who understand the whole package of behaviors and attitudes that permit everyone around them to feel recognized and respected, even in serious and sometimes contentious intellectual spaces. (Location 770)
Experienced teachers tend to become more comfortable—or at least more familiar—with silence, with its many types and the many ways we can hear it. There’s the silence of dissidence, when a student stops showing up. There’s the silence borne of student anxiety (“What if I’m wrong?”). There’s the silence of the rest of the room as one student speaks too much, throwing off the delicate social balance that makes a class session hum with productive energy. And there’s the silence of students trying to get out of the way so that others can speak. There’s the silence of students working—writing to themselves in preparation for speaking soon, or completing quizzes, or rereading. There’s your own attentive silence as you wait for students to speak or while they speak in groups. (Location 777)
Communities aren’t just physical gatherings—they’ve got an acoustic, too: noise, sound, questions, counterarguments, even sometimes laughter or the sharp intake of breath that signals complete surprise. We’ll explore these sounds in greater depth in chapter 7. (Location 804)
Let’s just replay that point: A great syllabus invites students to try on new identities as members of a community of practice in a specific field.8 It’s not exactly a theatrical role, but it’s something akin to it: an idea-space in which students try out, and try on, concepts, histories, challenges, experiments—all the things that teaching and learning involve. (Location 811)
Note: there’s a coincidence! see ted chiang story in exhalation
one should bring something back of approximately the same value. One could even bring money—there was nothing inappropriate in that—provided … above all, that one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no longer wishes to have anything to do with a neighbor. (Location 827)
Note: Bringing back more than you were given. Debts of obligation.
In classroom relationships, there must always be a sense that there’s something more coming, that the exchange is unfulfilled, incomplete, because there is always a next exchange that somehow hinges upon this one. (Location 840)
The strongest voices in your classroom, yours and those of the most vocal students, will set community standards. (Location 854)
Whatever else it is, the classroom is a work-space, (Location 859)
Nothing motivates like enthusiasm, which is what we call “belief plus energy”— (Location 872)
Theory implies a body of largely abstract knowledge that explains how more concrete, material things work. (Location 901)
The point here is that we tend to understand abstraction through concretion. (Location 909)
What is the central argument of the text you’ve been assigned? What have you seen in your life that connects to that argument? Can you imagine other experiences that might frame the argument differently? Now, what does that difference—between how your and others’ prior knowledge and knowledge practices shape your relationship to course material—imply about the nature of this type of intellectual work? (Location 922)
This tension between authenticity and performance exists both for you and for your students. (Location 973)
While most of us are horrified by the image of the college classroom as a space for political indoctrination of any kind, we do in fact argue for particular forms of rationalism and reason that are, in a broader sense, political. (Location 982)
Note: One of Adam Elkus’ good faith spaces.
8Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, who gave us the term community of practice, have much to say about identity and knowledge, though their focus is often on the world after college. See Wenger’s Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Lave and Wenger’s Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). (Location 1008)
L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). (Location 1019)
Among the things that make theater so powerful is its impermanence, its gone-in-a-flash presence, the reinvention of a moment so that its effect is a lot more than the minutes it takes to happen. (Location 1052)
chronos, what we think of as chronological time (it’s there in chronology, the report of events as they occurred in sequence), (Location 1057)
kairos, or the moment, the opportunity, the well-timed thing that happens, usually because someone does something. (Location 1058)
Kairos, on the other hand, is a chance, and you either take a chance and seize the moment, or you don’t. (Location 1059)
As a teacher, you can plant critical events in the material, moments so obviously important that every student will know to pay special attention, a bit like the crucial events in act three of a Shakespearean tragedy. (Remember learning about turning points in a play?) Some teachers are brilliant performers, able to divide the hour lecture into acts, with built-in tensions and surprises. We admire—envy, even—that skill. But the kairos of the active classroom isn’t something you can script, the way you cleverly orchestrate the critical moment in your lecture on the fall of Hanoi or the invention of the spinning jenny. (Location 1077)
The syllabus is always an idealized, imaginary vision of a subject—or rather an idealized, imagined vision of the best questions to ask about a subject, accompanied by the best tools with which to ask those questions. That’s a lot of idealism, all of which has to be delivered in practical terms. (Location 1109)
But the body and the mind work in tandem, and the work of thinking—imagining, absorbing, reflecting, challenging, inventing, making big mistakes, making small discoveries—requires a lot of coursetime. (Location 1251)
But suppose you are instead teaching a course called “How to Think Like an Engineer in Society.” Since you would be hard-pressed to locate a single teaching tool that did everything you needed, you diversify what you want your students to encounter. (Location 1327)
Today we’re more likely to consider the readings not only as material to be learned but as the course’s lingua franca—the common trading language—in which ideas will be exchanged. (Location 1510)
How to Read a List, or Pretty Much Anything Else (Location 1621)
Note: How do I better focus my reading? What questions do I need to ask?
Ask a question before you write an essay?
What is the question I am trying to answer?
The precision of engagement has to become a scalable skill, part of a set of skills that are the purpose of the course, whatever its subject. (Location 1639)
Note: Question - what does this mean?
what your students should get from the reading, what connections they should make, what questions they should be asking. (Location 1663)
Imagine, in other words, that you had to come up with the assignments first, and everything else, from lecture topics to textbooks, afterward. (Location 1739)
Note: Final assignment is to pitch a product. First, describe the product lifecycle, the existing products. Build a business case for a thing. Project some revenues.
Identify customer segments and understand differentiators.
It’s one thing to have the brilliant thought that enabled you to finish your first book, the insight that led to your first article. It’s another thing to understand how you had the thought and how you can now help others think like that. Not to think that exact same thought but to develop the instincts and abilities that enable them to think in the special ways your discipline thinks. Work in stages, just as you teach your students to do. First, write out what you want your students to be able to do and then name qualities you want that work to have. Think about how you do those things yourself. When you’re working through a problem and trying to write about it, which activities are nonnegotiable? Which are unavoidable gateways on the path to a finished product? (Location 1766)
“I think this or that” papers are less about thinking than opining.1 (Location 1800)
Students see something happening a certain way—a precipitate forming, a literary technique unmasking a character’s thoughts, a price changing in a particular market—and they see several variations of these phenomena. They learn to name what is happening, to conceptualize the phenomena: solubility, interiority, elasticity. (Location 1817)
Higher-order thinking in most disciplines involves a careful, continual evaluation of our explanatory/analytical frameworks. (Location 1829)
The development of students’ comfort with ambiguity and debate is a powerful stage of cognitive maturity. (Location 1840)
A caveat here is that students need to learn how to articulate, in their own words, the ideas and arguments others have advanced, without flattening the complexity of those ideas. (Location 1858)
Knowing this difference will determine whether they can be responsible citizens of a disciplinary community. (Location 1879)
Do you actually enjoy watching student presentations? Do you get the sense that the students like doing them? What is being accomplished by the presentation (other than your nudging them not to say “like” and to stop fidgeting so much) that you can’t get at any other way? When we ask students to present something, what are we testing for? Rhetorical skills, content knowledge, theatrical flair, IT facility? If we don’t know—and don’t make clear to the student what we expect—we’ve failed them before they’ve had the chance to exercise their agency. (Location 1917)
Assignments may enable students to become more aware of their progress in the course, or to build one particular ability that’s a threshold to the bigger, more difficult work they’ll do next, or to fail at a task they can’t do yet—simply because you know that your students come to you not knowing how to fail, not knowing that failing well is an important skill. (Location 1933)
In place of presentations, students might hold mock academic conference panels, sharing and discussing a semester’s worth of work in front of an audience of students, with a goal of generating a rich intellectual conversation among the entire class. (Location 1939)
Here, in a school, we can try to learn with one another in the spirit of honesty rather than interest, of truth rather than getting ahead or keeping up. (Location 2421)
Note: Build a community
Here’s what we know about the syllabus: It’s a pedagogical contract that invents a community through knowledge— (Location 2424)
Note: Communities are emergent.
And because learning’s goal is for students to be able to do things better than they could before, we need to find ways for class time to be practice time. (Location 2476)
But we’re trying to make it happen for every student, and it’s already trying to happen in every student who’s motivated. We have to listen for the sound that that trying makes. (Location 2519)
We hear learning when we hear students pointing directly at specific details in course materials rather than gesturing vaguely at the gist of those materials. (Location 2521)
And response and response. What does a community sound like? (Location 2663)
In modern usage, the word organization has for so long been fused to business models that there’s a pedagogical pleasure in unveiling its origin in the Greek word organon, “an instrument for acquiring knowledge”—literally, a tool. (Location 2676)
Reflective teaching is just a name for the process of thinking out why you’re doing something—your goals for an assignment, what you envision your students doing with it, and what you might then have the group do with whatever the students did in fact do with it—and why something worked or didn’t. Reflective teaching isn’t about a leather chair by a window that looks out onto the manicured quad. It’s about talking to yourself—out loud if necessary, but definitely on paper or in an electronic file—about what worked or didn’t and what that success or failure impels you to do next. (Location 2847)
Crafting a syllabus involves striking the right balance between things that must be there, things that must happen, and things that might be there, that might happen. (Location 3010)
Dewey’s philosophy of education has formed so much of what we do and think that it’s easy not to see the presence of his ideas in the educational world that’s all around us. In the opening years of the twentieth century, Dewey grappled with the problems not merely of what to teach and how to teach but the bigger questions behind both. We might call those bigger questions the why of the what, the why of the how. This book’s grappling with the problem of the syllabus has tried to reach for the why of the what, the why of the how. (Location 3038)
That alliance cannot happen, however, if there is no person or persons with whom a student can ally. Learning objectives deracinated from the soil of community make poor allies. Algorithms make still worse allies. (Location 3067)
Adult students already know what the younger student does not quite: that the work of learning—anything—is a social project, not merely a factual one. (Location 3131)
We’ve been playing here with Hawkes’s instinct about theorizing—that it made complex thinking available at low cost— (Location 3188)
