Just what is this all about? What does “keeping a stiff upper lip” (implying putting a better spin on things than you really perceive them to be) have to do with being truthful to our students? For that matter, how could we consider anything other than being totally truthful with our students?
I never thought I would be asking these questions again. “Again,” because I asked them during my second year of college teaching and thought when I got beyond that, I would never have to ask them again. Quick context: I was an adjunct instructor on a small regional campus of the University of South Carolina. The year was 1968. The Tet offensive had shocked the American people with how ferocious our enemy could be in Vietnam after our being told for years we were “winning.” My male students were loosing their draft deferments if their GPA’s fell below a “B” and I had a number of them begging me for better grades to keep them out of Vietnam. Then Martin Luther King was murdered. And riots followed. Our country was coming apart at the seams. And I was on active duty in the US Air Force as a psychiatric social worker.
One evening before my class, the campus Dean called me into my office and told me he had been receiving complaints from some of my students that I was “anti-war” and a“n----- lover.” I acknowledged that I indeed love people of different hues from mine and had devoted my class immediately following the assassination of Dr. King to a reading from his works. And I explained that I was not “anti-war” and, in fact, had volunteered for my own military service. But, I also explained that what I was doing was explaining the truth to my students, as I saw it, in answer to their many questions.
The Dean explained to me that I really shouldn’t be so truthful; that the male students especially really didn’t need to know the truth because they were going to be drafted anyway and sent to Vietnam and it would be wrong to disillusion them about the sacrifices they were going to have to make. He went on to explain that because of South Carolina’s long history of discrimination against Blacks, and their resulting inferior education, that their failure rate on the Selective Service examinations was very high, thus causing a much higher draft rate for white males. He urged me just not to be truthful about how unnecessary this war was and how badly it was being waged.
I did not take his advice. And began looking for another location for my college teaching.
But here I am now in 2010. And not coincidentally, just after the devastating quake in Haiti, and all the press descriptions of Haiti as a “failed state,” there are more and more references to the US as a “failing state.” This is due especially to the paralysis of the Congress, where even the party with the largest majorities in recent history still cannot achieve the passage of major legislation. We seemingly cannot come to terms with our greatest problems. And the hue and cry about our federal deficit is rising, just at the time we need more government spending to stimulate employment and relief. Millions of Americans are suffering. I have a 58 year old brother who has been unemployed for a year; a sister who was cut from full-time to half-time employment; and a nephew with seven children who lost his job in November. We all have stories like this. Our politicians just don’t seem to get it. They are not hungry. They have the best health insurance and pension plans money can buy—our money.
I am not ready to join the Tea Partyers. But what should we be telling our students? They are REALLY worried, even the best of the partyers among them. Should we keep a stiff upper lip? Urge confidence, hope, optimism? Put this in perspective and remind them this is the great country that fought World War II, conquered past scourges like polio, survived the Great Depression? Our students can’t relate to any of this. All most of them know is what came in on their most recent text messages; and the fact that they and their families are scared to death about the directions they see before them.
I do believe we should be talking about these issues with our students. I hope you will be honest with them. I believe that educators should be teaching a “learned optimism.” And I feel for you in terms of how difficult that has become to do, honestly.
-John N. Gardner
Monday, February 8, 2010
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Receiving is as Important as Giving: As in Compliments!
Recently I wrote a blog on the art of complimenting. One of my readers thoughtfully wrote me and suggested I should now do one of the art of receiving compliments, and responding to them. Hmm, I may really be on to something here.
As a child, I was taught that it was more important to give than to receive. But, as a young professor at the University of South Carolina, in the training they provided for first-time, first-year seminar, University 101 instructors, I learned about the importance of both giving and receiving feedback and its relationship to improving student learning. And once I understood this, it made me a much better teacher.
I realize it is possible that some educators may react that students aren’t really qualified to make a professional judgment of their educators, whether positive or negative. I hope you won’t react that way. We educators know that we can influence student and colleague behaviors by the feedback we give them. We also need to remember that the feedback we receive, particularly the compliments, can influence our behavior too.
So, about receiving compliments, I think it is all part of the need to be intentional about seeking and then responding to feedback. In responding, I don’t think we should debate, deny, or defend it (ourselves). Instead we need to try to appreciate and understand it. And then decide what, if anything, we are going to do with it.
It is especially empowering to students when we come back into a setting with them and tell them: “You told me that when I do XXXX, you really enjoy that and learn from it, and so I am going to do that more often, for example, right now! Thank you so much for helping me understand how to better reach you.” Learning is such an interconnected, inter-dependent process. By giving and receiving feedback, including compliments, we continue our own learning. I think we need to acknowledge this, how important it is, how good it feels, and what positive uses we can make of it.
How lucky and privileged we are to be in a profession where our students and colleagues have good reasons to compliment us. As Thoreau once said, in contrast: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The art of both giving and receiving compliments helps insure that we do not lead lives of quiet desperation, in and out of the academy.
~John N. Gardner
As a child, I was taught that it was more important to give than to receive. But, as a young professor at the University of South Carolina, in the training they provided for first-time, first-year seminar, University 101 instructors, I learned about the importance of both giving and receiving feedback and its relationship to improving student learning. And once I understood this, it made me a much better teacher.
I realize it is possible that some educators may react that students aren’t really qualified to make a professional judgment of their educators, whether positive or negative. I hope you won’t react that way. We educators know that we can influence student and colleague behaviors by the feedback we give them. We also need to remember that the feedback we receive, particularly the compliments, can influence our behavior too.
So, about receiving compliments, I think it is all part of the need to be intentional about seeking and then responding to feedback. In responding, I don’t think we should debate, deny, or defend it (ourselves). Instead we need to try to appreciate and understand it. And then decide what, if anything, we are going to do with it.
It is especially empowering to students when we come back into a setting with them and tell them: “You told me that when I do XXXX, you really enjoy that and learn from it, and so I am going to do that more often, for example, right now! Thank you so much for helping me understand how to better reach you.” Learning is such an interconnected, inter-dependent process. By giving and receiving feedback, including compliments, we continue our own learning. I think we need to acknowledge this, how important it is, how good it feels, and what positive uses we can make of it.
How lucky and privileged we are to be in a profession where our students and colleagues have good reasons to compliment us. As Thoreau once said, in contrast: “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” The art of both giving and receiving compliments helps insure that we do not lead lives of quiet desperation, in and out of the academy.
~John N. Gardner
Monday, February 1, 2010
The Merits of Being Stranded
I write this blog as I am “stranded” in an airport hotel for two nights, not home with my wife on our beautiful North Carolina mountain top as I want to be. This is as a result of my home airport of Asheville, NC being closed by a winter snow storm preventing me from getting in.
My challenge in addition to the expected travel hassles is somehow to make the most of this unplanned for adversity. I am reminded of the thinking and writing of my late, good friend, Al Siebert, who wrote and spoke about the so-called “survivor personality”. Basically, this is a fundamental trait of resiliency and adaptability. As I have been making decisions about how I would use my stranded time, my thoughts have turned to wondering how I am different/similar to the behavior of first-year college students when they are stranded?!
Al Siebert’s work on the “survivor personality” reminds me also of my friend Donald Lifton’s research on “hardiness”. Don is a Business professor at Ithaca College that has been exploring a trait in college students for over fifteen years, which he describes as “hardiness”. He is particularly interested in the correlation of “hardiness” in first-year students and the correlation with persistence in college.
So my thoughts have turned, perhaps to a fantasy, about what might be the value of contriving certain experiences where our first-year students might find themselves “stranded”, i.e. cut off from the ones they love, or at least normally associate socially with, cut off from the conventional surroundings. What would they do? How would they spend their time? How could we use this as an opportunity for reflection, self-appraisal, goal setting, decision making, who knows? Whatever?
I am reminded too of my son’s experience on an Outward Bound expedition. He was a high school senior and on this trip to the Everglades, he and the other students were each left totally alone for about a day, with absolutely none of the gadgets for contemporary distraction and mental occupation: no phones, radios, Ipods, music players of any kind. And they were given a note pad and asked to write their reflections. The experience for my son was quite transformative. Most notably, he discovered silence and its therapeutic effects.
Personally, I believe that the first year of college is an extraordinary “foundational” experience, both for college, and for life.
So, I leave you with these questions: what could you/we do to make our first-year students better “survivors” when life has a way of serendipitously “stranding” them? Make them more “hardy” in their all important temperaments? The knowledge transmission, acquisition, creation, discovery process is, of course, the preeminent academic mission. But how can that knowledge from the beginning college experience be used to increase “success when stranded?” Hundreds of thousands of college educated citizens, like my brother for instance, are asking themselves such questions in the Great Recession, which has “stranded” so many of our higher education graduates.
I know that my college experience is helping me cope with being stranded, but I would still rather not be stranded. I am coping better though because I am “grounded” and I have college to thank for much of that.
-John N. Gardner
My challenge in addition to the expected travel hassles is somehow to make the most of this unplanned for adversity. I am reminded of the thinking and writing of my late, good friend, Al Siebert, who wrote and spoke about the so-called “survivor personality”. Basically, this is a fundamental trait of resiliency and adaptability. As I have been making decisions about how I would use my stranded time, my thoughts have turned to wondering how I am different/similar to the behavior of first-year college students when they are stranded?!
Al Siebert’s work on the “survivor personality” reminds me also of my friend Donald Lifton’s research on “hardiness”. Don is a Business professor at Ithaca College that has been exploring a trait in college students for over fifteen years, which he describes as “hardiness”. He is particularly interested in the correlation of “hardiness” in first-year students and the correlation with persistence in college.
So my thoughts have turned, perhaps to a fantasy, about what might be the value of contriving certain experiences where our first-year students might find themselves “stranded”, i.e. cut off from the ones they love, or at least normally associate socially with, cut off from the conventional surroundings. What would they do? How would they spend their time? How could we use this as an opportunity for reflection, self-appraisal, goal setting, decision making, who knows? Whatever?
I am reminded too of my son’s experience on an Outward Bound expedition. He was a high school senior and on this trip to the Everglades, he and the other students were each left totally alone for about a day, with absolutely none of the gadgets for contemporary distraction and mental occupation: no phones, radios, Ipods, music players of any kind. And they were given a note pad and asked to write their reflections. The experience for my son was quite transformative. Most notably, he discovered silence and its therapeutic effects.
Personally, I believe that the first year of college is an extraordinary “foundational” experience, both for college, and for life.
So, I leave you with these questions: what could you/we do to make our first-year students better “survivors” when life has a way of serendipitously “stranding” them? Make them more “hardy” in their all important temperaments? The knowledge transmission, acquisition, creation, discovery process is, of course, the preeminent academic mission. But how can that knowledge from the beginning college experience be used to increase “success when stranded?” Hundreds of thousands of college educated citizens, like my brother for instance, are asking themselves such questions in the Great Recession, which has “stranded” so many of our higher education graduates.
I know that my college experience is helping me cope with being stranded, but I would still rather not be stranded. I am coping better though because I am “grounded” and I have college to thank for much of that.
-John N. Gardner
Friday, January 29, 2010
Blog: The Art of Complimenting
As a college professor of four decades I have attended my share of “faculty development” activities. And I have always agreed (rather than being offended by) with the notion that we do need to be “developed,” and continually so. I was not “born” a college teacher; I was “made” one, and largely by the professional development, support, encouragement and innovation of my employer: the University of South Carolina.
But in all the “faculty development” workshops that I ever participated in, led myself, or have even heard about, I don’t recall one on the topic of “the Art of Complimenting.” I think it is an art. And I think we need it (we faculty, because many of us are not gifted in this art, and because our students need it both for affirmation and motivation).
This blog is prompted by fact that this past weekend I was in a conference call with three other people, one of whom a woman who has known and worked with me on the national level for almost a decade. She made a sincere comment that I was “charming” but in the context of the subject we were talking about, I needed to be more than that! Agreed.
I think what she was probably referring to is that I love to compliment others. And I have worked and practiced at it for years. I enjoy discovering peoples’ qualities that cry out to me for a compliment. I can tell by their reactions that many people must not be complimented often or enough. I found this particularly to be true with my students. Instead of being in an environment where they were affirmed for what they knew and did, and could do, they were constantly being reminded by powerful people of all they didn’t know and couldn’t do, at least not yet.
My own self reflection on this “art” has led me to conclude that I really started thinking seriously about this as a part of my own personal intellectual quest for “the truth.” It was in my junior year at Marietta College that I was taking a political philosophy course from R.S. Hill who had us reading Plato’s Republic, one of the truly most influential books I have ever read.
I learned from Plato’s rendering of Socrates pedagogy for discovering the truth, that you have to interact with other people and discover in each their “half truths”; that there is something of worth, knowledge and dignity in virtually everyone else. And once you find those half truths, surely there is something there worth complimenting. That became intentionally one of my most characteristic teaching pedagogies.
Another lesson I learned from The Republic, was that the most important question I could be asking as a student, and lifelong learner and journey man through life is: “what is justice?”—the subject for another blog.
I think I should try to write something more extensive on the Art of Complimenting and hope I will.
-John N. Gardner
But in all the “faculty development” workshops that I ever participated in, led myself, or have even heard about, I don’t recall one on the topic of “the Art of Complimenting.” I think it is an art. And I think we need it (we faculty, because many of us are not gifted in this art, and because our students need it both for affirmation and motivation).
This blog is prompted by fact that this past weekend I was in a conference call with three other people, one of whom a woman who has known and worked with me on the national level for almost a decade. She made a sincere comment that I was “charming” but in the context of the subject we were talking about, I needed to be more than that! Agreed.
I think what she was probably referring to is that I love to compliment others. And I have worked and practiced at it for years. I enjoy discovering peoples’ qualities that cry out to me for a compliment. I can tell by their reactions that many people must not be complimented often or enough. I found this particularly to be true with my students. Instead of being in an environment where they were affirmed for what they knew and did, and could do, they were constantly being reminded by powerful people of all they didn’t know and couldn’t do, at least not yet.
My own self reflection on this “art” has led me to conclude that I really started thinking seriously about this as a part of my own personal intellectual quest for “the truth.” It was in my junior year at Marietta College that I was taking a political philosophy course from R.S. Hill who had us reading Plato’s Republic, one of the truly most influential books I have ever read.
I learned from Plato’s rendering of Socrates pedagogy for discovering the truth, that you have to interact with other people and discover in each their “half truths”; that there is something of worth, knowledge and dignity in virtually everyone else. And once you find those half truths, surely there is something there worth complimenting. That became intentionally one of my most characteristic teaching pedagogies.
Another lesson I learned from The Republic, was that the most important question I could be asking as a student, and lifelong learner and journey man through life is: “what is justice?”—the subject for another blog.
I think I should try to write something more extensive on the Art of Complimenting and hope I will.
-John N. Gardner
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
The New Normal: The Transfer Experience
I write this blog as I fly to a conference hosted each year in Dallas, by the University of North Texas’s National Institute for the Study of the Transfer Students. This will be my first time as an attendee, and it is overdue. This conference is about improving the success of transfer students.
Like all educators, I am shaped by my prior life’s experiences. These give me values, knowledge, interest, prejudice, focus, motivation. They shape the way I see and understand anything. And, in that vein, although I have taught thousands of “transfer” students, I was never one myself. And that is a limitation. So why am I concerned about this now and trying to learn more about it?
Because the transfer experience is now the “new normal.” Just over 60% of all currently enrolled college students seeking a BA degree will have attended more than one institution and then “transferred” by the time their BA is awarded.
And because most institutions and educators really know very little about this experience and these students. We just haven’t taken the time to seriously study this.
But we want these students to come to us; we want their money.
And we want this even though many of us have very strong prejudices about transfer students: they are inferior to “native” students; they are less well prepared; their success rates for BA attainment are lower; they bring more “problems” with them. Such are our beliefs, regardless of whether or not they are supported by any evidence.
I care about this issue because unless we pay more attention to these students, learn more about them, offer them more intentional support, we cannot possibly achieve President Obama’s goals to increase BA attainment rates in our country.
And I care about these students for a very practical professional reason, namely, I am the CEO of a small non-profit organization that is engaging in a national pilot this year to help campuses conduct a self study to develop an action plan to improve transfer student performance. This process is known as Foundations of Excellence ® Transfer Focus. We have six four-year colleges undertaking this pilot this year and will add a cohort of two-year colleges next year. For more information see http://www.fyfoudations.org./
Another thing many of us higher educators know nothing about is a sub set of the transfer experience known as “reverse transfer.” This refers to students transferring from baccalaureate level (and higher) institutions to community colleges after receipt of an advanced degree. For example, it was reported in The Chronicle a few years ago, that one of the campuses of Northern Virginia Community College had 350 PhD’s on its faculty and about 500 in its student body: reverse transfers.
So, for me, the transfer population is my new frontier. I have so much more to learn about them and therefore I suspect that I am in good company with you. Please join me. And then let’s do something to more intentionally promote their success.
John N. Gardner
Like all educators, I am shaped by my prior life’s experiences. These give me values, knowledge, interest, prejudice, focus, motivation. They shape the way I see and understand anything. And, in that vein, although I have taught thousands of “transfer” students, I was never one myself. And that is a limitation. So why am I concerned about this now and trying to learn more about it?
Because the transfer experience is now the “new normal.” Just over 60% of all currently enrolled college students seeking a BA degree will have attended more than one institution and then “transferred” by the time their BA is awarded.
And because most institutions and educators really know very little about this experience and these students. We just haven’t taken the time to seriously study this.
But we want these students to come to us; we want their money.
And we want this even though many of us have very strong prejudices about transfer students: they are inferior to “native” students; they are less well prepared; their success rates for BA attainment are lower; they bring more “problems” with them. Such are our beliefs, regardless of whether or not they are supported by any evidence.
I care about this issue because unless we pay more attention to these students, learn more about them, offer them more intentional support, we cannot possibly achieve President Obama’s goals to increase BA attainment rates in our country.
And I care about these students for a very practical professional reason, namely, I am the CEO of a small non-profit organization that is engaging in a national pilot this year to help campuses conduct a self study to develop an action plan to improve transfer student performance. This process is known as Foundations of Excellence ® Transfer Focus. We have six four-year colleges undertaking this pilot this year and will add a cohort of two-year colleges next year. For more information see http://www.fyfoudations.org./
Another thing many of us higher educators know nothing about is a sub set of the transfer experience known as “reverse transfer.” This refers to students transferring from baccalaureate level (and higher) institutions to community colleges after receipt of an advanced degree. For example, it was reported in The Chronicle a few years ago, that one of the campuses of Northern Virginia Community College had 350 PhD’s on its faculty and about 500 in its student body: reverse transfers.
So, for me, the transfer population is my new frontier. I have so much more to learn about them and therefore I suspect that I am in good company with you. Please join me. And then let’s do something to more intentionally promote their success.
John N. Gardner
Monday, January 25, 2010
Relevance: The Week That Was
Some years ago my wife and I had moved to a new community and she was shopping for a church. I went with her a few times but couldn’t stand it. It struck me as if the well educated and likable priest, whom I knew knew there was an outside world, must be assuming his flock did not want to hear of the outside world. This made me think at the time of how many of our students may often wonder the same thing about us academics, where to many of us the word “relevance” is anathema. I am reminded of this matter of relevance in the context of the week we have just been through.
For those of us who think of the classroom as a laboratory, or at least a way of connecting our students to the outside world in order to better understand and cope with it, this past week certainly presented teachable opportunities. And, for any of us who missed it, there is still time. There are so many opportunities to use relevance to create powerful learning, and few weeks with more fresh meat than the one we have just had.
This was the week that: 1) the Democrats lost their “safe” seat in Massachusetts, a citadel of previous Democratic strength; 2) the health insurance reform bill was derailed and millions of Americans lost their chance to have health insurance, surely not for decades now; 3) the President unleashed a populist blast against the bankers and fat cats of Wall Street; 4) that and the health insurance bill demise let to the tanking of the stock market as corporate America watched the biggest corporate welfare bill in history go down the tubes; and 5) the Supreme Court put American government at all levels on sale.
Surely any discipline could relate to any or all of the above. We could examine the math of it; the ethics of it; the history of it; the politics of it; the justice of it. But many of us academics will pass on this moment, some of us out of despair. Our hopes for a new civil rights bill are dashed and we shall adjust by crawling under a rock for a while. Like many of the “haves” who voted in Massachusetts, we too are among the haves; and we are resignate that so many of our fellow citizens do not really want all to have access to health care for we feel it will cost us to provide for others. I hope our students will demand that we help them think through the implications of what this is costing us all now; for as long as all do not have equal access to health care, or as we define that in the US, health “insurance,” we will have a markedly different quality of life and set of values, and certainly not justice for all.
-John Gardner
For those of us who think of the classroom as a laboratory, or at least a way of connecting our students to the outside world in order to better understand and cope with it, this past week certainly presented teachable opportunities. And, for any of us who missed it, there is still time. There are so many opportunities to use relevance to create powerful learning, and few weeks with more fresh meat than the one we have just had.
This was the week that: 1) the Democrats lost their “safe” seat in Massachusetts, a citadel of previous Democratic strength; 2) the health insurance reform bill was derailed and millions of Americans lost their chance to have health insurance, surely not for decades now; 3) the President unleashed a populist blast against the bankers and fat cats of Wall Street; 4) that and the health insurance bill demise let to the tanking of the stock market as corporate America watched the biggest corporate welfare bill in history go down the tubes; and 5) the Supreme Court put American government at all levels on sale.
Surely any discipline could relate to any or all of the above. We could examine the math of it; the ethics of it; the history of it; the politics of it; the justice of it. But many of us academics will pass on this moment, some of us out of despair. Our hopes for a new civil rights bill are dashed and we shall adjust by crawling under a rock for a while. Like many of the “haves” who voted in Massachusetts, we too are among the haves; and we are resignate that so many of our fellow citizens do not really want all to have access to health care for we feel it will cost us to provide for others. I hope our students will demand that we help them think through the implications of what this is costing us all now; for as long as all do not have equal access to health care, or as we define that in the US, health “insurance,” we will have a markedly different quality of life and set of values, and certainly not justice for all.
-John Gardner
Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Just Say Anything
Some years ago there was a film about a student struggling to decide what he would say in a commencement address to his fellow students. He was advised to “just say anything.” That is my thought precisely about what to say to our students regarding this extraordinary tragedy unfolding in Haiti.
No matter what our subject or role with students, we must say something. This is an extraordinary moment to bring into relief the vast difference in quality of lives between American college students, no matter what their means, and the suffering people of Haiti.
We have so many choices for how to approach this. One that comes to mind to me is to go beyond analysis of who Haiti became to be the poorest sovereign nation in the western hemisphere. Indeed it is important for students to understand the role of the US as one of the imperial powers responsible for the culture of this nation (in addition to France). But what strikes me as particularly relevant are all the cries this year from the right about too much government in the US. The lack now of essentially any government in the failed state that is Haiti poses an extraordinary teachable moment for students to examine why human society needs government and what are or should be the minimum essentials of what all governments should provide.
Thank goodness, many of our students will do more than many of us; they will do more than “talk” about this. They will act and go to Haiti to contribute what they have the most of: time, energy, passion, strength, compassion. The impact on our students will be profound.
In the meantime: Just say anything!
-John Gardner
No matter what our subject or role with students, we must say something. This is an extraordinary moment to bring into relief the vast difference in quality of lives between American college students, no matter what their means, and the suffering people of Haiti.
We have so many choices for how to approach this. One that comes to mind to me is to go beyond analysis of who Haiti became to be the poorest sovereign nation in the western hemisphere. Indeed it is important for students to understand the role of the US as one of the imperial powers responsible for the culture of this nation (in addition to France). But what strikes me as particularly relevant are all the cries this year from the right about too much government in the US. The lack now of essentially any government in the failed state that is Haiti poses an extraordinary teachable moment for students to examine why human society needs government and what are or should be the minimum essentials of what all governments should provide.
Thank goodness, many of our students will do more than many of us; they will do more than “talk” about this. They will act and go to Haiti to contribute what they have the most of: time, energy, passion, strength, compassion. The impact on our students will be profound.
In the meantime: Just say anything!
-John Gardner
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