Thoughts on 35 Years in Academia

It’s 35 years since I first taught in NIHE/DCU and I’m inspired to write down some thoughts on my experience, inspired partly by this article by Trinity Professor, Brian Lucey. Now I don’t know Brian personally and no doubt his achievements, at least in terms of metrics, far exceed mine. But I thought his thoughts on his own experience in academia were a little…soulless. Sorry Brian. So here are my thoughts.

1. The most important part of your job is your teaching. You are in the extraordinarily privileged position of being able to affect, for the better, young people’s lives. Go the extra mile. Students are not your customers, for sure, but it’s often the little extras you do for them that impacts them the most: like writing that reference on Friday at 5pm, or writing that letter for them so they can get a medical card, or being flexible with deadlines and schedules when you know they’re genuinely struggling. In other words, be kind as well as fair.
2. Teaching involves a lot more than standing up at the front of a hall going through 30 PowerPoints. Reflect on everything you do. Don’t do something because “we’ve always done it that way”. Don’t be afraid to innovate and remember that in the real-world (not the published literature), innovations don’t always work.
3. Get to know the names of students and try to learn something about them as people. I’ve become bad at this in recent years – probably an age thing.
4. If you’re a junior member of staff, don’t be afraid to offer your opinion. In my experience, younger staff bring a fresh perspective and often see things to which older staff have become blind.
5. Be prepared for the fact that running a research group, especially in the laboratory sciences, is an awful lot of hassle and the logistics of research can take the joy out of it.
6. Although research is often the tie breaker, you must score well in teaching and service if you want to get promoted. So, you will have to show evidence of teaching competence and innovation, and you will have to show evidence of taking on administrative/service roles.
7. Academics make a big deal out of administration. Some of it, like filling our postgraduate student forms, is tedious, but much of it, like the admin involved when you are chair of a programme, is often quite satisfying.
8. Be willing to take on faculty-level roles, like Associate Dean. By doing so you will be able to influence strategy and get an appreciation for the constraints under which the system works. Being involved in decision-making gets you out of your bubble and (in my case) makes you a little less judgmental.
9. If your research enters a slump – as it will – think about writing a book. I did and it was one of the best things I’ve ever done.
10. Many academics are introverts and find networking and forming collaborations challenging. Unfortunately, if you really want to excel in research, you’re going to have to just suck it up. So, take a deep breath and take the plunge.
11. Most successful researchers are flexible – they are willing to move into new fields, even fields that they are not particularly interested in – at least initially. You must follow the money if you want to sustain a long research career. C’est la vie.
12. No man is an island and as an academic you will be working as part of a team. So be positive and supportive and don’t fall into the habit of constantly griping about the system.
13. Develop your communication and media skills and get involved in national debates. Try to make a difference.
14. If you’re a young member of staff, find a mentor. Most older academics will be delighted to pass on what they’re learned.
15. Mind your mental and physical health. This job can take over your life. Set boundaries.

Does education kill creativity?

Ever since the late Sir Ken Robinson gave his famous Ted Talk, “Do schools kill creativity?”, educators have grappled with various issues around critical thinking and creativity. On the one side, there are those who would suggest that without knowledge, meaningful creativity is impossible, while others seem to suggest that acquiring knowledge impedes creativity.

I’m pretty much in the knowledge-is-good camp but I do think that the way we assess students seems to impede their ability to think – creatively and otherwise.

Recently, I’ve started asking students questions that I label as “The critical and creative thinking question”. Students are ok with this. Once they expect the unexpected, they’re fine with the concept.

And one thing I’ve noticed is that although a small number of students have adapted really well, most students seem to approach these questions in a sort of Pavlovian way. It’s as if they have been conditioned to answer certain kinds of questions and find it difficult to think through the question that is actually being asked. And so recently when I asked a question that was ultimately about calibration, I got a variety of really strange answers that simply baffled me.

The thing is, the students I teach are smart – I know that from working with them in the lab – but somehow they seemed unable to engage their natural thinking ability. For me, that’s not their fault – it’s ours.

Whatever we’re doing (and I think the fundamental problem here is how we assess students) it’s not encouraging or incentivising students to actually think.

Some thinking of our own is in order.

Thinking about critical thinking

I’m increasingly struck by the extent to which education commentary has found itself in a bit of a rut.  As someone who is broadly conservative and in favour of what’s known as “knowledge-rich” curricula, I find it a little bit disappointing that the same arguments are being rehashed over and over. Yes, critical thinking requires relevant knowledge. Yes, skills tend to be discipline-specific and not generic and yes, attempting to teach skills in a context-free way has proven to be ineffective. But also, yes, Geary’s ideas about biologically primary and biologically secondary knowledge are still just that – ideas. There’s no ‘beef’ there. And, no, critical thinking does not ‘emerge’ simply from teaching a knowledge-rich curriculum.

As I think about a new undergraduate programme I am developing, I must reconcile a few conflicting ideas in my head. On the one hand I’d love to be able to use the approach that was used on me when I was a student: pack in the content and rely on students’ own motivation to knuckle down and do the work. On the other hand, I know that such an approach simply doesn’t work anymore – the world is utterly changed from when I was a student.

The thing is, the modern university system is characterised by short, intense periods of learning (12 weeks typically), packed with assessments, and creating a sort of pressure-cooker atmosphere for students, many of whom are working long hours in part-time jobs to make ends meet.

In this kind of environment, there is little time for reflection and most students adopt a very tactical approach to learning. You can’t blame them. And so, memorisation, question-spotting, scatter-gun answers and trying to second guess what the lecturer “wants” are the order of the day.

Issues like these must be fixed and this will require us to resort to actually “teaching” critical thinking. I know this sounds like heresy to those of a more conservative mindset but if you don’t actively “teach” critical thinking, it simply won’t happen. The temptation to adopt tactical approaches to learning is too strong.

So when I say “teach” critical thinking, what do I mean? I mean this: we have to create an environment where thinking critically and originally is expected and incentivised, and becomes routine. Human beings are well able to think but we can be lazy at times. We don’t need special classes in thinking skills, but we need some sort of reward to incentivise us to think rather than just recall things that are related, even in a peripheral way, to the problem at hand.

One of the problems we have to overcome is the conflating of fairness with predictability.  If we ask a problem that is unlike any problem done in class, students will perceive it as being unfair and even cruel. But I like to think about my Latin exam when I did the Leaving Cert. There was always the “unseen” question – a short piece of text, usually a paragraph of philosophy by Cicero, that you’d never encountered before and which you had to translate. It was a real test of your knowledge of Latin vocabulary and grammar. No one thought it was unfair because everyone knew that we’d be tested in a way that really required us to think. The text was unseen but not unexpected. These days I include in my assessments a “Critical thinking and Creativity” question. It’s worth 20% of the marks and students do not complain about it. It know it’s coming even if they don’t know what it is. I think they actually enjoy the challenge.

But it’s not all about assessment. The actual process of learning needs to involve a lot more actual thinking. Laboratory teaching, for example, can often suffer from the “autopilot” effect – students following recipes without giving much thought to what they are doing. And if we’re to be honest, we have to admit that traditional lectures, while wonderful at their best, are typically uninspiring and downright dull. Walk past any large lecture theatre and take a peep in the door and you’ll see large numbers of students looking at their phones or their laptops. It’s no way to teach, at least to undergraduates, but maybe our experience during the Covid era has convinced a lot of us that change is required.

Thoughts on student engagement

One of my favourite education quotes is Robert Coe’s “Engagement is a poor proxy for learning”. It’s very easy to presume that just because students are busy doing stuff that they are actually learning something. This is not necessarily the case and it seems to me that an awful lot of innovation in education focuses on engagement without really asking if students are learning anything of substance.

But the corollary is also true. If students are not engaged, well, then, they have no chance of learning. By “engaged” I don’t necessarily mean having fun; I just mean being committed, being focused and showing a reasonable level of general interest in their chosen discipline.

I think many of us teaching in the higher education system find it difficult to empathise with the unmotivated student. Most of us were high-performing students with high levels of intrinsic motivation. We find it hard to get our heads around the idea that a student might be happy to do the minimum amount of study and employ a bit of rote learning to scrape through assessments.

One of our ‘solutions’ to the engagement problem is to assess students into a state of engagement. The Covid19 crisis has only exacerbated this trend and I have noticed an increasing tendency to put more and more hurdles in front of students as a means of ensuring that they study. We’re locked into a cycle that despite being well-intentioned is, I believe, simply adding to the problem and taking away any sense of enjoyment that education might bring.

So what do we do? First we have to recognise that we do have an engagement problem and that it is not a reflection of some sort of deficiency on the part of students but more a feature of the world we live in. Studying for a degree in 2021 is very different from studying for a degree in 1984. In 2021, the distractions are immense and the fact that so many of our students work part time means that we cannot just carry on as if our students are 100% committed to their studies, at least when looked at within the totality of all their commitments.

What this means is that we must try harder to engage students – to inspire them even. As someone who has a broadly traditional view of education, it has taken me a while to recognise this. A year of online teaching in which, for the first time in many years, I have been able to give teaching my best shot, has changed my outlook considerably. I keep thinking of the episode of the Simpsons when Marge develops a gambling addiction and she says to Homer that she needs to go to counselling, and Homer says, “just stop”. But it’s never that simple. Saying to students that they just have to suck it up, attend their lectures and study hard is like saying “stop” to the addict. It leads nowhere.

At the moment, I’m working on the development of a new programme in DCU and one of the challenges for me will be to tackle the engagement problem while also retaining a strong focus on knowledge and basic skill acquisition. It can’t be all fun and games, but it can’t be more of the same either.

Bubbles, radio and TV: the joys of online teaching

I’ve been teaching in third level since I was 23 and at the end of every year since I first started, I’ve had a nagging sense that I could have done better. I started each year full of enthusiasm and ready to try new approaches but I invariably I found that half-way through the second semester, fatigue set in and the quality of my teaching began to slip.

Although I am an academic who has always prioritised teaching (my research output is modest) there have been times over the years when I have stood outside classrooms dreading the prospect of opening the door, walking across the room and “performing”. The thing is, no matter how much you like teaching, there are days when you would rather get your teeth drilled without anaesthetic than suffer the exposure that teaching demands.

In normal times, teaching is dictated by the timetable and you must teach at certain times regardless of how you are feeling emotionally or physically. You might be in a good space, in the zone, doing some calculations for a research project, and suddenly you have to teach. You might have had a terrible night sleep and yet you’ve to face the class at 9am. Or you might be simply in bad form, longing for a bit of quiet time, and once again the teaching must be done at certain times.

I truly believe that teaching is not like other jobs. When I first started teaching, I was struck by that feeling of nakedness when I walked into a class. Standing in front of 40 students when you’re feeling vulnerable is a lot different from sitting at your desk working on your in-tray or going to meetings where you can keep a low profile.

One aspect of face-to-face teaching which is often presented as a positive but can often be a negative, is the human interaction. Many people have expressed their sense of loss, induced by the lack of face-to-face teaching. And course, face-to-face teaching can be good fun especially when there is a lot of interaction with the students. That’s why I always adopt a hands-on approach to my lab modules. But classroom teaching it can also be a bit soul destroying at times. The blank faces, the phones, the unwillingness to take part. It only has to be a few students to throw you off. Or maybe I’m oversensitive.

Online teaching in asynchronous mode is so much easier. I have a formula: Lecture notes in Word form, screencasts to deal with technical issues in the notes, videos that explain things that are not easily explained with the spoken or written word, problem sets and, finally, solutions to those problems in the form of mini screencasts. Students seem to like the consistency of it all.

More importantly, I record my screencasts when I am ‘up’ for it, usually around 7am. I’m in my own bubble of enthusiasm and I imagine my students hanging on my every word. I’m insulated from all negativity, there’s no stress due to exposure and I’m pretty sure that I am far more authentic than I ever was as a face-to-face lecturer. It’s a bit like what people used to say about Pat Kenny or Terry Wogan: great on radio but not so great on TV.

So the bottom line is that, this year, I don’t have that nagging sense that I need to try harder. I’m a radio person.

Education and Davos Man

One of the worrying trends in education in recent years is the increasing influence that corporations and corporate organisations have on education. The Lego corporation is busily promoting play-based learning while Microsoft and Apple constantly promote their software (and hardware in the case of Apple) as tools for promoting so-called, but essentially non-existent, “21^st century skills”. These companies have a vested interest in asserting that traditional education is not fit for purpose and vigorously promote teaching practices that have absolutely no evidence base. Yet they are highly influential in our universities. What we have is a coming together of needs: corporations want to make money while universities want to appear innovative and forward-looking.

Likewise, the OECD and the World Economic Forum, have wormed their ways into modern thinking on education and relentlessly promote a view of education as being little more than a service to the business world. If you took the word “skills” out of OECD Education position papers, you’d be left with a series of pamphlets. Meanwhile The WEF produces an annual list of the most desirable skills, skills that are ill defined and, even if they made sense, are thoroughly elitist and clearly the product of the mind of Davos Man.

Meanwhile back home, Simon Harris is accusing parents of being snobbish because they want their kids to go to university and acquire those very same skills that the OECD and the WEF (and now the universities) say are essential if a young person is to “thrive” and become an “engaged citizen”, or whatever the latest buzzword is. But it’s a case of “Do apprenticehips!”, from the Minister. Who’d be a school-leaver?

Language is important and if universities continue to talk in the language of Davos Man, we will be part of the problem. We need to reclaim the idea that education is about enriching people’s lives, and we should be spending a lot more time worrying about the needs of the most disadvantaged in our society and not the needs of corporations and corporate organisations who seem to exist in an elitist bubble.

Paying Nursing Students

In my department in DCU, our third year students will soon go out on work placement (INTRA). Most will be paid the minimum wage at least: that’s about €400 per week. There was a time, during the financial crisis, when employers took advantage of the situation and did not pay students at all but thankfully those days are behind us – as far as I know.

For many the INTRA placement is the highlight of their degree programme and it is in this period that they learn the importance of communication, time management, initiative and all those soft skills that are best taught in the work environment.

Even though the INTRA placement is a key part of our students’ education and is assessed on a pass/fail basis, it has never occurred to us to link this fact with whether or not our students should be paid. The employers are gaining something from employing our students so it’s just taken as a given that they should have to pay for whatever service our students are providing.

So why is this argument – namely that a nursing placement is part of their education and therefore payment should not be part of the deal – made when it comes to nursing students?

It makes no sense and it has the marks of the permanent civil service all over it. Not for the first time, the state is acting to serve itself and nursing students are the victims this time around.

The state is behaving like the most exploitative employers that I had the ‘pleasure’ to visit during the height of the financial crisis. It’s not a good look.

Covid and PISA

The parallels between the response to the Covid pandemic and PISA scores are striking. In both situations, observers, often ideologues, cranks or “influencers” trying to make a quick buck, seize on a single idea, or two, and perform extraordinarily mental contortions to justify their motivated reasoning.

Most people involved in education will be familiar with the argument, “Finland does X, we need to do something, let’s do X”. The fact that Finland’s PISA scores (On which its reputation is based) are in decline, and have been for some time, doesn’t seem to matter.

With Covid, the argument is often, “Sweden didn’t do Y, we need to do something, let’s not do Y”. The fact that Sweden is experiencing a massive surge of Covid doesn’t seem to matter either.

The “teaching moment” for me in 2020 has been this: it’s ok to admit you don’t know.

We need to reclaim that idea that science is about seeking “truth”; it’s not about proving you’re right and everyone else is wrong.

Although we cannot change human nature, we can at least make sure our students think about the nature of science itself. Instead of relying on osmosis, we need to actively teach students about the sociology, and the psychology, of science. A little bit of self-awareness is good for us all.

Engagement and learning

A few years ago, English teacher and blogger, Adam Boxer, wrote a very interesting blog (I’m sure you’ll be able to track it down!) in which he made a very interesting point, which was this: when we consider approaches to teaching, whether they be innovative or traditional, we need to look beyond whether they “work” or not. We also need to consider how hard they are to implement. I would put group work in this category; it’s potentially extremely useful especially as a preparation for the workplace but it comes with a whole package of practical difficulties that are well documented at this stage. So although it “works” in principle, the reality is often quite different.

A related argument is this: sometimes the “best way” of teaching does not work all that well because teaching and learning is a partnership, especially at university level, and if students do not engage, no matter how evidenced-based your approach is, they will not learn. Note that they might not engage for all sorts of social, personal and financial reasons and not just because of how we teach.

So I’ve come to believe is that sometimes we might have to focus on engagement, knowing that when we consider the full range of everything that the student is taught in any given year, sacrificing some time for engaging activities of some kind* leads to a greater net amount of “learning”. It’s an optimisation problem.

*For example, a few years ago we got our students to design and build a heat exchanger. It took time and there was an opportunity cost (it was time consuming) , but the feedback was so good that it was hard to argue against its value whether it be in terms of motivation or additional knowledge acquired. Crucially, students had been given prior instruction in fluid flow and heat transfer before they embarked on their design. This was not inquiry learning.

Why we need to teach about the culture of science

Following the Covid pandemic on Twitter is a maddening experience and I, for my sanity, have been weaning myself off engaging with numerous Covid deniers who, despite their claims to be “scientific”, are anything but.

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Stuart Richie’s excellent book, Science Fictions, a book about bias and malpractice in science that should be required reading for all undergraduates. I don’t think students really understand the underlying culture of science and they need to do so.

What emerges from interacting with Covid deniers on Twitter and from reading Richie’s book is that an awful lot of scientists bring a huge amount of unconscious emotional baggage to their work, and the idea of the disinterested scientist, making completely objective judgments about data, is a myth.

Instead, many highly successful scientists, including Nobel Prize winners, not to mention interlopers who have suddenly become experts on viral biology and epidemiology, is that motivated reasoning is almost the norm. People believe what they want to believe and then engage in elaborate post-hoc rationalisation to justify their original biased feelings. Sometimes this is due to a natural tendency towards contrarianism, other times it’s a a cynical exercise in making money, but most often I think it’s due to smart people’s deep-seated need to prove that they are cleverer than everyone else – it’s the “best boy/girl in the class syndrome”. In short, it’s usually about ego.

It’s no surprise to me that many of the Covid deniers on Twitter are actually quite successful people, albeit not in epidemiology or public health policy. Indeed, many of them, despite their impressive track record in other areas, often engage in highly simplistic black-box thinking and focus on correlations between variables rather than real depth of understanding. BUt that’s never the point. It’s all about demonstrating how clever they are.

We need to teach our students about the human side of science: the biases, the underlying psychology (e.g. the Hawthorne Effect which many education researchers ignore), and also about systemic problems like publication bias.

This won’t fix the problem of motivated reasoning and confirmation bias but it will at least create an awareness amongst students that science is not necessarily the dispassionate activity that many claim it is and that those who constantly claim to be acting “scientifically” are probably the very people who are most in the grip of motivated reasoning.

I think students would enjoy a module like this.