American television franchises and syndications
Romper Room was a rare case of a series being both franchised and syndicated, so local affiliates—Los Angeles and New York being prime examples—could produce their own versions of the show instead of airing the national telecast. For some time, local shows all over the world used the same script but with local children; some affiliates, starting with KWEX-TV in San Antonio, translated the scripts into Spanish for local airings.[1] Kids would be on waiting lists for years (sometimes before birth) to be on the show.[citation needed] It was called "an actual kindergarten". Originally filmed in Baltimore from its inception in 1953, Romper Room eventually moved its broadcast facilities to Chicago[when?] and then moved back to Baltimore in 1981.
Two thoughts initially provoked this recollection and then I'll try to connect those to a third idea, to illustrate current relevance. Informally, we've had online education for quite some time, with TV the source of the programming, and the kid shows we watched were a mixture of entertainment and education. I grew up before Sesame Street came into existence. Romper Room was the predecessor for my generation. It's incredibly interesting to me to read about the mixed model, with both franchises and syndication (of a nationalized script for the show). This really makes you wonder.
The other initial thought is that we had some formal education via TV in elementary school. I started first grade in 1960, P.S. 31, and President Kennedy came into office in the middle of the school year. I switched schools to a new school for second grade, P.S. 203. The TV programming I'm referring to happened either in fourth, fifth, or sixth grades and possibly in all of them (my memory is not that sharp on this point). By then LBJ was President. The thought was that while our teachers were good at teaching the three R's, they were deficient at teaching science. So, instead, we watched a program aired on WNYC for our science instruction. If you think of screen sizes for TVs back then (21" maybe was the biggest) it is hard to imagine a classroom with about 30 kids all watching the show at the same time. Yet somehow we managed. Perhaps this exposure was supplemented by pieces we read from the Weekly Reader or Junior Scholastic and maybe SRA had some essays that were science based. My memory is not strong enough to know if that happened or not. I also want to note here that while we were drilled somewhat, with Mrs. Stone in 5th grade everyday we had 5 minutes of multiplication quizzes on the times table through 12 x 12, and for spelling the pre-test on Monday followed by the re-test on Friday was common across the grades, we also had a fair amount of time in school to explore on our own. This started through individualized reading, perhaps in 2nd grade, and some kids doing activities that other kids weren't doing, such as painting on an easel in a corner at the back of the classroom, where there was enough space for a few kids only. The point here is that the TV science show was just one part of this mosaic, not a full diet of TV education only.
Now, let me tie this to the present and focus on college education, not K-12. As long as instruction was face-to-face courses, that in the catalog looked pretty much identical from one campus to the next, would be taught independently. The only coordination across such courses will happen if the courses use the same textbook and ancillary materials. Now I will assert, without too much evidence other than the feedback I get from my own students, that in many of these classes lecture is featured and the students view their main job during lecture to produce reasonable lecture notes, which they will subsequently memorize and expect some part of that will have to be reproduced on the exams that are part of the course.
Once going online however, one might reasonably ask: can't one person deliver the lecture that students are getting, rather than have the effort in preparing and delivering the lecture replicated from one campus to the next? Of course, this same thinking is what spawned the MOOC craze earlier in the decade. Higher Ed has a more sanguine view of MOOCs now, part of the education landscape, but surely not the entire solution. So what, if anything, will be learned from this experience where all classes have been put online out of necessity?
As complaints about the quality of instruction accumulate, partially because of technical/access issues, but mainly because so many instructors are inexperienced in teaching this way, it should occur to educators that we don't really know about the quality of instruction in many if not most of the face-to-face offerings that were being taught until the need for social distancing emerged. So, I hope that one good thing coming out of this experience is creating a need to consider the quality of the on-ground offerings and then inquiring about what might be done to raise the quality of instruction.
I want to sketch the quality issue along two different dimensions. The first is about whether we are teaching the right stuff. In a blog post I wrote a decade ago called Excise The Textbook, I argued that too often we're not teaching the right stuff. Students aren't learning how to apply what they are being taught to analyze novel situations based on theory they are learning (in education jargon, this is called transfer). Memorization doesn't help with this. But far too many students see getting a good grade in the course as the main goal. Consequently, the instructors who teach them are under a good deal of pressure to meet the student expectations, which results in a lot of teaching to the test, confirming that memorization can produce good results grade-wise. My conjecture is that this is happening on a broad scale. The current experience may then encourage campus administrators to evaluate courses for whether this is indeed the case and then consider what might be done about it the evaluation confirms my conjecture.
The second dimension is about student multiprocessing, which might be thought of as a hedging strategy regarding how students go about their coursework. In this case the risk is that the subject matter might not be interesting and/or that mastering the material will take more time than the student is willing to devote to the subject. In a recent post about teaching online, I described the issue this way:
If You Build It Will They Come?
This question, of course, also comes up in face-to-face teaching. Here I want to point out the limited efficacy of monitoring. Even if an instructor takes attendance in class, a student can very well be there, but not be all there. When electronic devices are allowed, the student's head might be in that. If there are windows in the classroom, the student might be staring outside. When doing the analog online, clicks can be measured as can how long a video window is kept open with the video playing. But whether the student is paying attention really can't be monitored.
To encourage student behavior that is more committed to the coursework, incentives need to be provided. In that post I argued for a certain type of carrot - moving away from lecture and instead have two instructors discuss the issues in a video chat, kind of like a TV talk show. Then, possibly doing something similar with the instructor and a small group of students in the class. Experimenting with this sort of thing is probably quite limited now, given how just-in-time the move to online has been. But maybe this is where we are heading in the not too distant future.
If students persist in their multiprocessing, so are only skimming the required readings and only watching short segments of the course videos, how can that produce high quality learning? The treatment for this will need to be drastic. Changing the pedagogy in one class only won't achieve the desired result. But before we get there, we might want to simply measure how much of this is happening at present. Getting analytic data on this (for the videos, and perhaps for the reading when there is an eTextbook) would be a good first step in this direction.
What we might learn is apt to be disillusioning. But it seems clear the first step is to understand what's going on now. Improvements in quality of instruction can't happen without such understanding.
No comments:
Post a Comment