Strange Aeons

An article over at Study Hacks about the traits and practises of good teachers entitled "On Great Teachers and the Remarkable Life: A Deliberate Practise Case Study". Reporting on the Teach for America program and an associated article in the Atlantic called  "What Makes a Great Teacher", there are a couple of things that I found interesting. Some of them were specific techniques such as:

• getting students to write answers onto cards that are simultaneously held aloft so that no student is embarrassed if their answer is incorrect, but also the students who are struggling can be noted by the teacher and given extra support,
• a variation on peer learning that splits the class into small groups to work on new material - with the role of team leader frequently rotating. The aim of this is to build upon the natural tendency of students to listen to their peers
• passing an answer to a question to the teacher on the way out of the door so that there is another opportunity to see which students might need more support.

Just as important were the traits that are identified as most important for high-performing teachers. High performing teachers are those who:

• set big goals for their students,
• continuously look for ways to improve their effectiveness through evaluation & modification,
• obsessively focus class time on student learning,
• exhaustively & purposefully plan,
• relentlessly work towards goals (no matter how hard it becomes),
• keep students involved in the process.

It suggests to me that by cultivating these traits as instructors, by deliberately focussing on ourselves, our abilities, our methods, and the structure of our classes, we can't help but succeed.

Given that my last post talked about habits, their refinement, and occasional replacement I ran across an article that talks about the rituals and habits of effective coders. Of particular interest was this:

"To me, programming is really the 'last mile' to getting something done. When I do the planning and specifications, I go on lots of walks, take lots of time with my wife, and really do as little work in front of the computer as possible.  The more I plan (in my head, on paper, on a whiteboard) the less I program; and all of my rituals are to that end" - Issac Kelly, Lead Developer at Servee.com

I use a version of this technique also but for most of my research related activities. Instead of sitting at my desk worrying away at a problem I also go for walks or sit outside, or at least hang-around somewhere other than at my desk. All the while the particular problem that I am working on moves round and round until I have enough detail worked out that I can make some progress. It is at this point that I sit at my desk and blitz through my ideas, whether coding or writing, making more progress than if I had just sat at my desk chipping away at the problems. Of course I have a number of things that necessitate that I stay at my desk, meetings, marking, and general administrivia, but otherwise I like to get away from it whenever possible. For this to work for me though requires a decent support system: good filing so that I know where everything is, a decent paper notebook so that I can make notes and not forget stuff, a whiteboard at each base, home and office, so that I can work through ideas when I have finished perambulating, and a diary so that I know where I should be at any given point. NB. I have tried and failed to move to an electronic diary and note-taking regime. They just don't work for me. They are slower than paper, less flexible, less robust, and are never there when you need them.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."
28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'
31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

I have been thinking about, and planning a post regarding, the idea of research blogs. I read some posts before christmas on the subject and thought that they were a good idea. Simply stated, a research blog is merely the online equivalent of the lab book that many of us who have a background in sciences such as Chemistry used to keep if we were lab active. Such a book becomes a record of experiments that we have carried out and of ideas that we have had. The advantages of an online version are that the record, which was previously only available to ourselves and possibly our colleagues, now becomes a source of inspiration for others, or at least a source of alternative perspectives and insights for others working in similar arenas. My position was that the research blog is an excellent idea. If the members of an entire research group are all blogging their experimental data then there is the possibility that other researchers working on related but different aspects of the subject might find the data useful. To be honest though, given my own albeit limited experience of research, such an approach might be akin to opening a particularly large can of worms in some research fields. I also thought that the opportunity to use such blogs from a supervisory perspective was a good idea. I have suggested this to past and current students but only one has set up a research blog and he has yet to first post to it as of writing this. My plan was that by reading the daily research posts I can keep track of my students and also give continual feedback rather than sticking with the single weekly meeting which is the norm. The advantage to the student is manyfold, apart from the continuous feedback they are also writing down their ideas in a form which is east to manipulate when it comes time to righting up the final report. To be honest this is an adaptation of the approach that Chris suggested to me when I first started my Ph.D research. In the vein of the salesman who should "always be closing", a researcher, and especially a Ph.D student should always be writing because firstly you can't forget ideas that you have written down, secondly, writing is a muscle insofar as the more you write the better you are at it, and thirdly, the vast majority of Ph.D researchers run out of time so the more that you have written down the easier the thesis writing is. The first two points I completely agree with, the third I am in less agreement with because I don't think that thesis writing is ever easy. Today however I was spurred to revisit my earlier position and think that the same kind of approach, a written record of ongoing work, could equally well be applied to teaching and learning situations as well as pure research. The spur was Morna Simpson's brief introduction to the personal & professional development techniques that she uses with her students in Interactive Media Design. Without going into too much detail she encourages her students, partly using the carrot of academic credit, to explore their learning, to take a step back from the subject matter and consider where they stand personally in respect to the current project, and how it fits into the ongoing project of their education. What I like about this is the opportunity for each student to do active reflection upon the current state of their educational experience. Quite often in SoC there are not that many opportunities to sit back and see how all of the modules that make up an honours degree actually fit together. Additionally, a degree is not solely about the group learning experience of attending lectures and labs but is equally about using those experiences as a spur to finding out more and engaging in self-directed learning. It is this aspect, determining where a persons personal strengths and weaknesses are that is very important and which is addressed through Morna's approach. The meeting at which Morna was speaking then moved on to discuss the wider issue of moving from the spoon-fed approach of delivering lectures to the more active approach of running seminars and tutorials to engage individually with students. This is something that I have managed over the last few years to incorporate into my teaching at both all levels of both undergraduate and advanced postgraduate teaching and which I often find to be a rewarding experience. Of course the outcome of this approach depends upon the calibre of the students and whilst I enjoy setting some reading then meeting to discuss it, and possbily free-forming a lecture around the issues that are raised, I also like to have a prepared lecture to fall back upon if it is just not working. For this reason I try to provide an ample suite of supporting materials which underpin the course and which the students can explore in their own time and allow me to use my time with them in a more valuable way, by interacting with them. To return to the original point of this now overlong post. Research and learning blogs have a position not just in the record of the development of new knowledge but as a record of the personal discovery of existing knowledge. I am sure that there is a whole additional post about the benefits of accreting a kind of coral reef of interpretations over the bedrock of discovered knowledge. I personally benefit from not just reading the primary texts of a given discipline but by also reading other people's interpretations of those primary texts. I think that this approach gives me a better sense of perspective with respect to the subject matter and affords me additional valuable insights which can be hard to come by and develop on your own. To avoid charges of hypocrisy I will admit to advocating the idea of research and personal developments blogs but not necessarily fully taking advantage of them myself. I don't yet post live, unedited ideas and data to my site. This is not to keep my ideas secret but mainly because I work with others who are more careful about the image that they present and would rather place their thinking into the public domain only once it has passed peer review. I therefore cannot make a unilateral decision to post everything publically. Additionally, the way I work means that I go through many many very similar iterations of my ideas, trying to finesse them into an elegant argument or design, a process which does not currently lend itself to a research blog but fits well with my lovely Moleskine notebook. However if the research and learning culture was more open and more people engaged in this kind of public introspection then I think that the opportunities to identify new collaborators and basically learn new stuff would be greatly increased. Maybe I will try this personal development approach with some of my students...