Intellectual Sprawl

When I began teaching AP Psychology, my mentor Steve Phelps gave me an activity for the Social Psych unit that played with the concept of deindividuation. Generally that’s the loss of self-awareness when in a group; in the worst case scenario it accounts for abberant behaviors when one feels anonymous. The class activity gave each student a slip of paper for them to answer anonymously on, with the prompt: “If you could do anything humanly possible and no one would ever find out that it was you, what would you do?”

After they’d put something down on the slip of paper, I walked around with a bowl, collected them, mixed them up, and then drew each from the bowl, reading it aloud. Answers “ranged” from “Rob a bank” all the way to “Steal millions of dollars.”

In the second year of doing the activity, right in the middle of the littany of sins came, “Cure cancer.” The class erupted, yelling at whoever had written that, saying they’d wasted a perfectly good opportunity. After I calmed the class, I asked who’d written it and why. One kid[1] said, “Cancer will get cured by someone, and it’s not important who does it, just as long as it happens.”

I didn’t realize it at the time, but that was some incredible wisdom — that I’ve now taken to heart. In my own world, there are jobs that need to be done for a school to operate, and it’s not important who does them, just so long as they get done.

I try to incorporate that into a sense of service; I do odd jobs around school that nobody needs to know are me. That I’m doing them isn’t important; what’s important is that they just get done.

From the PsychONE Conference website:

A Problem of the Neophyte: Class Discussions and Introductory Psychology
Led by Eric Castro: Instructors can feel unprepared to lead, and students can be unprepared to participate in, a class discussion. Yet class discussions are a powerful tool for developing critical and active thinking in class. This roundtable will focus on how to overcome class discussion challenges with preparation and simple curricular and instructional strategies.

The questions and areas of exploration that I’d developed to guide the roundtable discussion can be found here.

It is not often that I am so aware of confirmation bias but after reading a study, The effects of taboo-related distraction on driving performance, this morning, I felt its findings on a 5-mile run through my neighborhood and Golden Gate Park.

Chen and her co-authors write, “Interestingly, taboo words were associated with better lane control compared to the other word types. We suggest that taboo-related arousal can enhance attentional focus during a complex task like simulated driving.” As a runner in San Francisco I am all too familiar with the poor attention that drivers pay to pedestrians; but what struck me on today’s run was an apparent increase in eye-contact with drivers and a decrease in driving behaviors that I would label as hazardous to pedestrians (such as cars stopping in the crosswalk, rolling through crosswalks against a red light, immediately making right-hand turns against red lights, and speeding.) It felt as if drivers were more aware of my presence today; drivers seemingly paid more attention to me.

What was different about my running today that might have triggered these changes in driver behavior? I ran bare-chested, with just 5″ racing shorts — which is uncommon in San Francisco for reasons associated with our climate. I think the revealing nature of my dress caught the attention of drivers, and their driving behaviors changed to account for a lone, quick-moving pedestrian.

At a recent faculty meeting the issue of “grit” was raised in reference to a policy introduced at the beginning of the academic year requiring homework due dates and test dates to be posted to our schoolwide learning management system. A significant portion of the teaching faculty expressed concerns that posting such information to the course websites decreased student grit.

Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst, writing for Brookings reviewed the relevant literature and drew the following conclusions in response to what he identified as questions common in schools around the topic of grit.

Is grit a malleable characteristic of students that schools can be held accountable for influencing? No. The twin study finds that the heritability of the perseverance component of grit is 37 percent. In other words, identical twins are substantially more similar on grit than fraternal twins. Importantly for the school malleability issue, the contribution of the shared environment to grit is essentially zero. In other words, children who are raised in the same family and attend the same schools are no more similar on grit than children who do not share their family and school environments (once the contribution of shared genes is removed). As I suggested in my previous report, it seems unreasonable to hold schools accountable for influencing something over which evidence suggests neither the family environment nor schools has any meaningful influence. [emphasis mine]

The entire summary of Whitehurst’s research is worth reading; the above is simply the most relevant to our year-end faculty meeting.

My semester-long Modern World History class for sophomores not only gets to the present, but I try hard to leave a week or so at the end of the course to discuss the future. I ask the students to consider the history of world 25-years out into the future, based on everything they’ve learned over their three semesters of world history. To help them, I give them several articles to read and videos to watch based loosely on the 15 global challenges from the Millennium Project:

Directions

The directions for the assignment are below. Students had to turn in the public URL for their report three times as simple check-ins, following Parts 1, 2, and 3 below.

You are preparing a four-part report:

1. describe the global challenge (both in general terms and with specific sub-challenges),
2. describe the current state of that global challenge,
3. discuss in depth how your global challenge will affect one specific country of your choosing (not the US), and 
4. describe the three best possible solutions to the global challenge

To begin your research, you should look at Global Future Systems (to use, change the drop-down to your selected global challenge). You may also want to use the CIA’s World Factbook or the WHO’s Fact Sheets —in addition to the databases available to you through SI’s library.

Your report should include a significant number of facts and figures from your research, and it should make a persuasive argument in regards to your selected country’s likely future in regards to the global challenge you chose to research.

You will use the Adobe Spark iPad app to create your presentation; the “Avenue of the Giants” sample in the Explore menu is a good example of what your submission should look like. You will submit the URL for your project to this assignment.

• Include maps and relevant pictures
• Include numerous facts, figures, and statistics to support your claims
• Your research should all be cited using hyperlinks.

Exemplar Submissions

Here are five reports by students (in no particular order), produced over nine calendar days:

• Climate Change by Michael H
  
• Status of Women by Mackenzie B
• Status of Women by Katherine P
• Climate Change by Kate A
• Overpopulation by Justin Y

Because my course is based on blended-learning, only two of these days were in-class days; students were released to research and prepare their reports – and read articles and watch videos on several topics – for four days.

When reports were finished, students were grouped by topic (all the Overpopulations got together, all the Clean Waters huddled up, etc) to prepare an oral report on their topic for the rest of the class — which took notes on these oral reports in their physical notebooks. There was a paragraph-length question on the Final exam asking students to discuss two of the global challenges from this unit.

Reflection

Personally, I really like how this turned out. Students explicitly mentioned in class that they liked learning about the current world and that they felt invested in the project because it investigated real problems and real solutions. That speaks to engagement as a function of relevance. I also liked how the report ended up looking; Adobe Spark produced a good looking product — easily. The report could just as easily have been done in Pages on their iPads, but I like how Spark makes the report so sharable. One thing to work on for next year though is actually sharing these reports beyond the class…