Serendipity35

I often hear it said about college professors and by college professors that they were never taught how to teach, just what to teach. It is true that they are Subject Matter Experts who often formed their pedagogy by the examples of their own teachers. Try to imitate the good ones; avoid the bad examples when you can.

When I started working at New Jersey Institute of Technology after many years in secondary school teaching, I was told that one reason I was hired to work with faculty was because I had a lot of classroom experience and training in pedagogy.

Actually, I was fearful that my background would be my downfall in the job. Did I really think that all these Ph.D's with big research grants were going to listen to this "teacher?" I was thankful to find that the faculty members that came to my instructional technology department for help were quick to point out that they didn't have any formal education training. I was excited that they became excited about things like Bloom's Taxonomy or Multiple Intelligences which they had never heard of but that I knew were everyday knowledge to the K-12 people I had left behind.

Of course, there were also higher ed faculty who had no interest in those things. Content was king. I was used to that too. In doing professional development workshops in my K-12 years, I knew I would get the most cooperation from elementary teachers (in my opinion, generally the best "teachers") and I would get the most resistance from the high school teachers who saw themselves as "professors" (the sage on the stage; master of content; keeper of the answers). In other words, there were good and bad teachers at all levels.

I was thinking about this the past few weeks when I found myself explaining to a professor that I am starting to work with on his course redesign and I tried to explain to him the zone of proximal development.

Everyone who has take educational psychology has studied it. "The distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers" - says Mind in Society. It's that range of tasks that someone cannot yet do alone, but can accomplish when assisted by others. Those others are often parents, teachers or "a knowledgeable other."

Think about that baby learning to walk. The baby can walk fine with one other hand to hold onto; can't walk without it. Educators call that hand "scaffolding" - the assistance that helps learners complete tasks they cannot complete alone. The delicate balance is to provide only enough support for them to progress on their own, and knowing when to take the scaffolding away. If you construct a building with scaffolding but don't take it down when you're done, something is wrong.

I had to double check my memory to make sure I was remembering correctly that this idea came from Vygotsky's sociocultural theories of development. In my head, he is on a compare/contrast chart with Piaget who sounded pretty radical to me as an undergrad by saying that social interaction is a mechanism for "disrupting equilibrium." Adaptation, accommodation and assimilation = cognitive development.

I was talking to that professor about creating writing assignments for his new "writing-intensive" class. I knew he was thinking about his content and he was not feeling so comfortable about "teaching writing." We talked about "learning to write" versus "writing to learn."

Writing-to-learn activities are often short, impromptu or what we call at PCCC "informal" writing tasks. They help students think through key concepts or ideas presented in a course. We don't expect every teacher to be a "writing instructor." 

We do expect them to offer scaffolding to their students through modeling, thinking aloud, prompts, cues etc. We also want them to plan how and when to remove the scaffolding during the semester.

We need teachers to discover their students' zone of proximal development. It's the zone where students really learn - even if they feel a bit unsure there. Of course, what we are asking of our faculty also puts them in that zone.

Our college writing initiative is clearly scaffolding for faculty. It's there in the course development process and it's there for them and their students when they pilot the newly-designed course. But it will go away. Putting people outside that comfort zone can be tough for both parties, but it is so important to learning.