Writing To Learn - My Take

My mind resides in an analog universe.  While AI seems to be the topic of the day (and of the foreseeable future) I cling to escapes that would be but a trifling for a computer algorithm to solve, yet for me, feeling it a challenge helps to make finding the solution engaging.  My latest in this vein is the Letter Boxed puzzle from the New York Times, where I search for two-word solutions.  Armed with this as example, I sometimes wonder whether such engagement is typical of thoughtful people from my generation, having reached the geezer stage in life so likely with ample leisure time in retirement, but it wouldn't engage younger generations whose universe is entirely digital.  Alternatively, might it be possible that this sort of engagement is characteristic of the human condition, regardless of the generation, as long as the people have ample time for reflective thought?  I don't know how to answer this question.  But on the off chance that it does characterize the human condition, don't we then have a responsibility to educate students in a way that encourages them to be so engaged?  In the rest of this piece, I will sketch a hypothetical first day of class that aims to push students in this direction.

In retirement, I used to teach one upper-level undergraduate course a year on the economics of organizations. It is a good course for considering these issues, as the motivation of employees (or volunteers) within an organization is a natural object of study in this context.  And though this was an economics course, it was quite okay to bring in elements from psychology and sociology in considering the topic.  I will confess here that the last time I taught, fall 2019, things didn't go so well.  I found the students under prepared and not very motivated.  Then I made a botch of things by openly criticizing them in class one day.  I lost many of them after that.  Now, four years later, with no experience teaching during the Pandemic, my own motivation is to try to understand the students better where they are now with their learning, even if this is only a theoretical understanding, and then see if we can converge and come at things with similar expectations as to what should happen in the course.  

This exposition of the hypothetical first day of class is my beginning to produce such a theoretical understanding.  No doubt there is a bias toward wishful thinking in performing such an exercise.  As I will likely not teach again, I can claim no-harm-no-foul for me. But if any other instructor wants to try something similar in their own teaching, they should be aware of this potential pitfall in advance.  With that warning out of the way, let's begin.

Welcome to the Economics of Organizations.  I am Professor Arvan.  Unofficially, you can think of this course as the economics of how managers think.  Managers aim to get the staff who report to them to be as productive as possible, both individually and as a team.  Today we will use the following analogy.  Managers are to their staff like instructors are to their students.  So, as your manager, I want to understand your motivation as students to help encourage you to learn as best as possible.  In today's class we will try to investigate that motivation.  Does anyone have a question or a comment so far?

My experience is that most students are shy in class.  Getting them to speak up is a challenge in itself.  As an instructor who likes to use the Socratic method, my hope is that there are one or two students who enjoy speaking out.  Yet I think this bit of introduction doesn't yet give them much to react to, so I wouldn't expect a question here.  But you never know.

Now I would like to pose a little economics puzzle.  There are certain jobs that feature pay for service.  Examples include being a waiter, driving a cab or an Uber, and many sales jobs.  If the quality of service can vary and the pay can also vary, typically in proportion to the service quality, then we understand that pay for service is a means of incentive to align the providers desires for high pay with the recipients wants of high service quality.  But there are many other jobs where there isn't pay for service.  Instead there is a salary.  There may be a promotion possibility and/or a salary increase in the offing, but that is not immediately present.  It is the cumulative performance that matters for those, as perceived by the manager, and there may be some competition with other staff members for those rewards, though maybe not.  What then motivates the staff member in the present work?  Is it the possibility of those deferred rewards?  Or is there something else in the here and now that motivates the person?

I would hope that at this juncture a couple of students would like to speak up and offer their suggestions, though my guess ahead of time is that they wouldn't yet get at ideas about doing the work. Instead, I'd expect them to talk about manipulating the evaluations. Brownnosing might be one idea mentioned. Sabotaging the work of other staff members might be another idea. Expecting this sort of response in advance, I would acknowledge the possibility but then tell them that today I'd like to consider purer motivation for them to do their best work. I'd then ask if there are any suggestions about how that might happen. My expectation is that there would be silence in the classroom. If so, I would then post the following quote, which is one of my favorites. 

You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.
Warren Beatty

As an aside, the last time I taught I did use this quote.  None of the students then knew who Warren Beatty is.   So I would show them the IMDB page for Bonnie and Clyde, say the movie is one of the classics of American cinema, show them that Beatty played Clyde while Faye Dunaway played Bonnie, and if they are interested they should watch the movie themselves.  (It costs $3 on Amazon Prime.  Alternatively, the U of I Library has some DVD copies. but I'm not sure whether undergrads have access to the Main Stacks.  Then I would use this quote to poll the class.

Let's see where you are on this matter with regard to your coursework, both what you do while attending class and what you do outside of the classroom on your own time.  I will give you three possibilities to consider.  They are: 1) coursework is really all play, 2) coursework is a mixture of play and work, or 3) coursework is all work.  Please raise your hand for one and only one of these.  We'll get a rough sense of where the class is on this from the results.

Here I would guess that the all play alternative would get no takers and the mixture alternative would get only a few. The bulk of the class would opt for the all work alternative.  If that's right, I would then point out that although Warren Beatty isn't a social scientist, by his definition most of the class hasn't yet achieved success as students.  In turn, I would expect this to evoke responses mainly about grades and that those students with reasonably high GPAs would argue that they are successful in their studies and that they'd be quite defensive about this.  Indeed, some student might adopt a pedantic tone and say something like - of course schoolwork is work as work is part of the name.  Reaching this point, I would need to diffuse the reaction in some way.

Let me make a few points that might help you to consider things differently.  Knowledge work is different from physical labor.  While there may be a few people who like to mow their lawn, shovel the snow, or clean their apartment, most people might regard these as necessary tasks, but definitely not as play. It is different with knowledge work.  If you read a good book, you can become so absorbed in the story that you lose all sense of everything else.  Likewise for watching a good movie or playing a video game.  These examples might be thought of as leisure activities, but the same thing can happen with work activities.  This sense of absorption may be so complete that you can't tell whether it is enjoyable or not at the time.  It is only in retrospect that you can tell.  Then, if you want similar such experiences, that would be an indication that the past experience was enjoyable.  This is what is meant by play here.

Then there is the question of whether the play is productive or dissipative.  With regard to learning, the latter means its a time waster but doesn't otherwise help you learn.  I confess that when I'm not teaching I often play Sudoku.  It may help to stave off the Alzheimer's.  But given that my deductive logic skills are already well honed, it doesn't help me learn anything else. We may tend to think of most play as that sort of thing.  But when in that state of full absorption, depending on what it is that has captured your attention, you can learn.  Indeed, you can learn quite a lot.

Now let me say one thing about GPA which you might find disturbing.  It has a short half-life.  You will have it featured on your resume, certainly, so it surely does matter when applying for your first job after graduation.  And if you intend to go to grad school, it matters for that as well.  But after a couple of years out of school, while your degree might still matter some your GPA won't matter at all.  What does matter is your ability to continue to learn, even if this learning happens without taking courses.  Doing knowledge work demands more or less constant additional learning.  Are the skills that produce a high GPA the same skills that will make you good at this additional learning after you are out of school?  If not, what skills will do that?

Now I would expect the class to be quiet, as I'm guessing that they haven't thought through this before and are trying to come to terms with what I said.  After a moment or two I will say something like - I hope it won't surprise you, but I think being a success as a student in the sense that Warren Beatty means is a good indication that you are well prepared for this later learning.  In a little while we will get into how to cultivate those skills, but now I want to give you a different quote to consider.

We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?
Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451

This one needs another aside.  I would first ask the class whether anyone has read the book, Fahrenheit 451.  I would hope to see one or two hands go up, but maybe none would.  Then I would exempt those who raised their hands from answering and ask the rest of the class about what the book title refers to.  Do any of them know that?  When they hear it is the temperature at which paper will burn spontaneously and that the story is about a society that burns books, perhaps they won't need much convincing that the story is still relevant for now.   I will then encourage them to read is for recreation, perhaps over a vacation when they have the free time.  

Then we will move on to being bothered.  I will note first that I am deliberately trying to bother those who answered that schoolwork is all work and that they are not a success at school according to Warren Beatty.  I hope they will consider that further between this class session and the next one, during which we'll discuss the matter further.  For now I will want them to make a distinction between two different types of being bothered.

The first is by an external stimulus that can be removed so that the bother goes away.  An example would be a piece of clothing that is uncomfortable to wear or a type of food where eating it causes an allergic reaction. The second is being bothered by an idea, where once aware of the idea it then becomes difficult and perhaps impossible to make it go away.  

Because I'm afraid that pushing on this second one might create a can of worms, I will then go to a benign example, the face-name matching problem.  If you see a face that you've seen before, can you recall the earlier context and, if so, does that give you the name of the person?  When it's a face from a TV show or the movies, IMDB is incredibly useful for identifying the earlier context and the person's name.  I will then tell that class that these days I do much of my viewing on my computer and I will stop the show then and there to go to IMDB and do a search.  I can't keep watching without knowing where I previously saw the person.  That might generate a little bit of discussion among the class. 

Then I'd go to a less benign example, but one far more relevant for our class.  When you are trying to figure out something you may have a sense of things to try.  If you've gone through your list but still haven't figured it out, you're stuck.  Being stuck is bothersome, no doubt.  You need to find a way to get unstuck, but how is that done?  I would let the class noodle on this for a while.  They'd probably start with the easiest case, where they'd expect that somebody else they already know has the answer.  Then the obvious solution is to ask that person, even if it is a little embarrassing to do so.  Getting past that one, you need them to work through getting unstuck when there is nobody else to ask.  If they can noodle on that some, it would be very good.  If not, I can offer a few different suggestions - do background reading to better understand the situation, sleep on the problem and let the subconscious have a go at it, and reframe the issue to something else that you can solve and that sheds light on the original issue. And I would leave them with this - getting unstuck is a crucial meta-skill for being able to learn on one's own.  It all starts with being bothered.  Being bothered is quite absorbing, but it surely is not enjoyable, which is why we are distinguishing it from play.  And learning this meta-skill requires quite a lot of practice.  Then I would jokingly say, I threw in this last bit to bother about it further.  Are students getting such practice in their classes now?

I want to get to yet a third source of motivation by beginning with this very simple example.  Sometimes when I walk up the stairs and into the building where our class is held, some students will see me coming.  They will notice that I walk slower than they do.  My pace may seem somewhat labored.  On occasion one of them will hold the door open for me.  It is a very small thing, but it definitely an act of of kindness done for another person.  Why do they do it?

My hope is that many students in the room will raise their hands to answer that question.  I'm guessing that most of them will say that they were raised to help others who are in need.  After a few answers of that sort I would do a quick poll of the class to ask them whether they too got such training when they were kids?  And I'd ask a follow up question, where did the training come from?  Was it from within the family, from school, a social organization such as Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts, or somewhere else? 

After that I would bring the idea to focus on such behavior within organizations.  I'd start with academia, where the behavior is termed being collegial - providing an academic favor without any expectation of reciprocation, but with the hope that eventually the recipient would pay it forward.  I would then add that I much prefer to work in a collegial environment and when I was working full time a good chunk of my effort was in making contributions in that vein.  Then I would note that outside of academia the behavior might be referred to as being a good citizen and organizations might encourage good citizenship in each organization member for the benefit of the whole. 

At this point I would guess that some students would want to bring up the sports example and talk about teamwork.  I would tell them that's fine and the notion of being a good team player goes right along with what we've been talking about, but then I'd cut it short because the sports example has a tendency of favoring the boys in the room over the girls and then the conversation can go on and on with no apparent stopping point, while I still have quite a bit else I want to discuss with the class.

These three sources of motivation - turning work into play, being bothered especially by getting stuck, and being a good citizen will be our focus in the course, with the first one receiving the attention in the remainder of the class session.  But for completeness we should also mention yet another source of motivation - pride in one's work.  This is typically present in highly skilled people with a lot of experience.   Taken together, these four sources of motivation might give a reasonable breakdown of what is termed intrinsic motivation.  This is to be contrasted with extrinsic motivation - generated by money pay in the work environment and grades in the school environment.  The psychologists tells us that when both are present, intrinsic motivation is much stronger than extrinsic motivation.  So a good manager will try to tap into their employee's intrinsic motivation if at all possible.

I would hope at this point that some student would ask, are you saying that extrinsic motivation doesn't matter for those who are intrinsically motivated?  I would then respond like this.  If you are a saint or an artist of the ilk of Vincent van Gogh, extrinsic motivation doesn't matter.  Yet very few people are in that category.  For the rest of us, extrinsic motivation matters crucially at certain junctures.  If you have a decent job and then get a job offer to work elsewhere, the pay at the new job will be a significant factor in accepting the offer or not.  And, indeed, my experience is that large pay increases over the life cycle come with job switches, not from staying within the same job.  But once you've taken that new job the pay fades into the background as a motivator and intrinsic motivation can do its thing, at least till the next job offer or promotion opportunity comes along, or somehow you get tapped out on the work because the opportunities for further learning don't appear to be present.  Then you might consider retirement.

I would open the floor for questions and comments on this.  One that the students might not come up with, so I might contribute it on my own, depending on how much time was left in the class session, is that maybe some people rely exclusively on extrinsic motivation in their job but then have a hobby or volunteer work where intrinsic motivation takes over.  And other people may have family obligations that are so intense that there is no time left for the beloved hobby or volunteer work.   To this I would only add the following.  In the twentieth century many were afraid of the consequences of automation, that their jobs would disappear because machines would do the work instead.  Now, even with knowledge work, one might wonder whether AI will be able to perform the job adequately in the not too distant future and therefore render such work obsolete as an employment prospect.  Given that, one either must accumulate enough wealth ahead of time to take (very) early retirement in this case or one must retool to become employable in some other line of work.  Understanding that, the idea of continual learning in the workplace doesn't seem far fetched and indeed probably is a necessity of work life.

* * * * *

Part of learning is telling a story to yourself.  You do such storytelling repeatedly, to reflect your current understanding and to raise sources of confusion or doubt in what you are learning.  A natural question arises. Even if the learning happens in many steps, as it surely will, do you take a step or two and then tell the story so far, or does telling the story get you to think about the next step, where you wouldn't have had that thought had you not told the story?  In my view, it happens both ways.  

Then it may be that you tell the story to others, not just to yourself.  If you have a conversation with a friend or a colleague about what you are learning, storytelling will become part of the conversation.  Alternatively, you can externalize your thinking in writing, have this conversation with a hypothetical reader or perhaps a known reader, if you are so fortunate to have one or perhaps several of those.  Writing for a specific reader may be more enjoyable than writing for a hypothetical one.  The ideas that occur to us while writing that allow us to take the next step in the learning are one of the things that makes it fun. This is why we give the process a distinctive name - writing to learn.

But, actually, much of the thinking happens before your write anything.  You shouldn't expect to be able to sit down at the keyboard and have the words flow out of you.  Instead, you need prior thought about what you will say.  This prior thought is termed pre-writing.  It is a necessary part of the process.  At first, it will seem quite awkward to you, as something new usually is.  But after a while it may very well become enjoyable.  That too is part of the fun.

For economics students, the bulk of their courses don't demand a lot of writing.  Some courses may require a term paper, which many students come to dread as there are a lot of rules they need to follow to produce something that is satisfactory and, perhaps equally important, there is an instructor expectation that the student has done a lot of reading to produce the term paper, yet many students likely take steps to bypass that instructor expectation.  Formative writing in an academic setting, in contrast, is likely not something the students have experienced much if at all.  I make it a feature in my course.

Then I will walk the students through what I think is the likely sequencing of activities in their other economics classes.  Many if not most students come to the class unprepared, in the sense that there may have been required reading to do ahead of time but the students have not done it.  So the lecture becomes their introduction into the topic and their goal in class is to produce good lecture notes.  And if they can't make class, then their goal is to get the lecture notes from somebody who did attend.  Memorizing the lecture notes is the way to prepare for exams and most students seem to expect that the exams are written in a way to reward such preparation.

Prior to the exams there might be lower stakes assessment by way of homework. The homework is intended in part to see what the student got out of lecture and in part as additional preparation for the exam.  An issue is whether students take the homework seriously.  In some classes the homework is given via automated assessment delivered within the campus learning management system and often the homework is set up there so students have multiple tries at the the questions. To the extent that students view this as a hoop to jump through rather than as an opportunity to learn the material, they will either ignore the homework entirely (after all, it is low stakes) or they will find a way to get through it that doesn't enhance their learning.

I want to note here that in upper level classes there are apt to be students who will graduate after the academic year concludes (or even earlier, after the fall semester concludes).  Such students are on the job market and spend considerable time in job interviews or ancillary activities that are part of job seeking.  Alas, that time often overlaps with class meeting time.  So, missing class doesn't necessarily mean the student is cutting (or is sick).  And while I put in my syllabus that a responsible student will let the instructor know ahead of time about the job interview, that pretty much goes for naught.  If one presses students about why they missed class, grandmothers seemingly die at a very high frequency under such circumstances.  

In my class, many of the learning activities will start with a writing-to-learn exercise.  There will be one such exercise each week.  It will enable you to give some early thought on course topics before we get to discuss those topics in class.  We do have an advantage in this course which might not be there in other courses you take.  Each of you have a variety of prior experience in organizations.  By tying those experiences to course themes you can create learning opportunities for yourself.  The writing to learn exercises will encourage that.  I hope they also encourage relevant reading on those same themes, either from our textbook or from pieces you find online that deal with the topic. Weaving together a narrative from the readings and your experience should help in that.

Let me get more concrete.  I will give you a prompt to write to.  The prompt offers a broad strokes way to come up with a writing topic.  You will always have the option, however, of coming up with a prompt of your own and writing to that, provided you can tie it to course themes.  In this way I want accommodate your own curiosity.  If a particular topic is of interest to you and you think it is relevant to the course then choose it over the prompt. You will then write at least 600 words on the topic.  This minimum word requirement is there so you do spend some time in pre-writing and then some additional time in writing to learn activities to generate the text that you submit. You need to make this an effortful activity and such effort takes time.  I will read your piece and give a written reaction to it, providing you with feedback that I hope you will soon learn to want. You will respond to the feedback in a way to show you are still thinking further about what you wrote.

In a subsequent class session we will then discuss the prompt and what students wrote about it, as well as any other topics that have come up by students writing to their own prompt. The discussion will make mention of individual essays that students wrote, in an attempt to let their prior thinking drive the class discussion.  My hope is that we go still further in that discussion, pushing the learning by the class as a whole beyond what individual students came up with.  This is how learning happens in a well-run workplace, where staff members do their homework in advance of a group meeting and where that meeting produces a synthesis of what individual staff members produced in their homework.

I will then let the students know that it will be awkward for them at first, as this practice is different from how things are done in their other classes.  It will take time to adjust to the approach in our class.  My experience is that getting comfortable with the approach takes about four weeks of the process.  Then I will tell them that they should suspend judgment on whether the approach is effective until they've reached that comfort zone.  

Two things will concern the students up front.  Many of the students will believe that they are not good writers.  They will be concerned that they are at a disadvantage as a result. Students will also want to know how this writing to learn homework is graded.  On the first of these, I will talk about the benefits of practice and that weekly formative writing offers just that.  Further, they may begin to anticipate the comments I would make before receiving them and adjust their writing in advance, done to account for this anticipation. So there is a built in mechanism in the class for how their writing might improve.  On the second, I will let them know that we'll use portfolio grading for the writing assignments.  Individual assignments will not be graded, but I will record that the work was submitted.  There will be one grade for those pieces written during the first half of the course and another grade for those written during the second half of the course. This sort of grading is in accord with the idea that the extrinsic motivation is via deferred reward.

What I will not tell them, in part because I hope they will discover this later for themselves, is why they will come to like my comments on their writing.  It will be like I'm coaching their formative thinking and once they get used to it they will want such coaching, especially when it is dissociated from a thumbs up or thumbs down judgment on that thinking.  I should note here that office hours also offer the potential for such coaching, but students tend not to take advantage of office hours.  They are afraid of looking stupid in public, especially in front of an authority figure such as the instructor.  That fear exists with writing as well, which explains some of the awkwardness students will feel early in the semester as they do these assignments.  But it is easier to write to a computer screen, with no immediate evaluation at the time the piece is being composed.  So they can overcome this fear and then reach a comfort zone with the writing.

With all of this, I need to let the students know that real thinking takes time and, consequently, formative writing takes time.  Further, you can't know in advance how much time is needed.  It takes as long as it takes.  For some of the students, especially those who so far haven't been very persuaded, this likely gives them a reason to drop the class.  They will tell themselves that they can't afford to take this class as it will overburden them time-wise and make doing everything else very difficult.  For other students, who may see this approach as a refreshing alternative to what they are getting in their other classes, they may then want to explore my views on how they should go about their studies in their other courses.  Some may note that they likely can manage the increased time requirement that my class will impose on them, but they couldn't manage it if all their classes were being taught in this way.  How would I suggest they go about things?

* * * * *

Much of the previous section is based on my actual teaching of this course - when the approach seemingly worked reasonably well.  Here I want to speculate about something I've never tried.  While I have tried putting the students together in teams of 3 so they'd comment on the writing of other team members, this has not worked very well, as the students were different in their motivation to read the pieces of other team members and make comments on them, even if there was some grade given for the commenting activity.  

So, what I have in mind here would be opt in only.  For those who do opt in I would try to pair them with one other student.  I would ask them for a listing of the courses they were taking (which I can't discover on my own because of FERPA) and tell them in advance that the only reason I want to know this is to see if I can pair students based on them taking at least one other course in common.  Then, I would encourage them to use an approach in this class they have in common that borrows from our course, but is distinctive from it in some ways.

The students would themselves come up with a prompt based on the course syllabus and where they were in the semester.  They'd alternate weeks doing this.  Then they'd do something like pre-writing, but instead of writing a piece about the prompt, they would meet face-to-face (or online in Zoom) and discuss the prompt.  And they'd do this before the instructor lectured on the subject.  As with my class, I would tell them that the process would take some time for them to become comfortable with it.  Once they've reached that comfort zone, the question is whether they thought the discussions were interesting and useful.

In other classes they wouldn't have such a partner and the question then is whether they would continue to rely on their prior methods vis-à-vis the lecture notes, perhaps in the interest of saving time, or if instead they embraced some modified version of the approach in my class.  They'd be in a position to compare their learning across the classes they were taking and compare their enjoyment in these classes as well. Purely as an extra credit exercise, they might write up their findings on this near the end of the semester.  I would be especially interested in the case where they felt the discussions with their fellow students were quite good, but their exam grades suffered some because they didn't spend as much time memorizing the lecture notes and the instructor in the course was teaching to the test.  Such a finding, if it did happen, would give us a lot of fodder for reconsidering how we go about teaching and learning, including its evaluation.

My fear in suggesting this is that the better students might take advantage of having such a partner while the mediocre students would opt out - too shy on these matters because of the fear of looking stupid.  Yet it is the mediocre students who would benefit the most if only they would overcome this fear.  

So, I've also thought of having mandatory office hours with me, scheduled during regular course time, where the student pairs would first meet.  But this begins to look very coercive and frankly it might make the approach objectionable because it isn't in accord with university rules.  So, I'm afraid, there are limits to what can be done here and I lack a sense of how to go beyond those limits.

* * * * *

In this concluding section I want to bring AI back into the picture.  Will students defeat the intent of the pre-writing and the writing to learn activities by using AI instead of thinking things through?  Alternatively, might the sense of Aha still be preserved with these activities even as the student employs AI?  And might some students, while aware they could use AI for doing this homework, nonetheless refrain from doing so because they do want to experience the Aha and are concerned they wouldn't get that with AI?  

I'm afraid that my theorizing can't get beyond posing these questions.  Answers are needed, certainly. But I'm unable to provide them.  However, I do have one other thought that I think worth mentioning here.

Upper level courses in the major sometimes suffer from too many students with senioritis.  I stopped teaching in the spring semester because it was palpable then.  My more recent teaching seemed to show the issue had become relevant even in the fall, when the students were expected to graduate after the following spring semester.  Therefore, some of the method suggested in this piece might be better tried on students before they reach the senior year.  I don't know of any courses that target sophomores or that target juniors.  But there are freshman seminars.  Perhaps such classes would be better candidates for this sort of experimentation.

And then, if the experiments proved somewhat successful, the students could be tracked over their remaining college careers, to see if they went about things in a different manner than other students in their subsequent courses and learned in a deeper way as a result.  Surely, that is the hope we would like to see realized.