Notes. Smith. Book of Learning and Forgetting (Part 1)

For this beautiful and mind-bending book — The Book of Learning and Forgetting by Frank Smith — I only have a print version, no Kindle (lots of cheap used copies at ABE), and it is so important for my JHU book project that it's worth typing up notes from the book (strain on my eyes thought it might be). I only learned about this book last year thanks to recommendations at Twitter, and I cannot believe I went all these years not knowing about it (the book was first published in 1998). If I were to recommend just one single book to people to read about education, it would be this book. So, if you have not read this book: READ IT. It's short, just around 100 pages for the text and 20 pages of notes which are not exactly footnotes but detailed reflections on some of the most important topics covered in the book.

Smith challenges everyone to up-end modern assumptions about teaching and learning (what he calls the "official" view of learning) so that we can get back to something more basic and human, an approach that he calls the classic view of learning. One of my great hopes about online learning is that in moving to a new environment, people will have an opportunity and even obligation to re-examine this official view of learning. They might even jettison that official view of learning, using the freedom and opportunity of the online environment to create courses that promote a different view of learning, one grounded in learner interest and independence.

So, below you will find a TON of quotes I've highlighted. Again, I cannot say enough good things about this book; I'll write up my own thoughts in response in a separate blog post. For now, I'm just focusing on transcribing key passages. Perhaps it's good that I must type them instead of just copying-and-pasting. If I had the freedom just to copy-and-paste, I would be tempted to copy-and-paste the whole book. It is THAT GOOD.

Preface

"We learn effortlessly every moment of our waking lives."

"I also recount some of the damage and injustices caused at all levels of education, not only by the official view that learning requires work — so that failure to learn can be attributed to laziness — but by the intrusive mass of unnecessary external controls in which teaching and learning have become embedded, including testing, grading, and contrived competitiveness."

I. What's Going on Here?

"'C-minus again,' the teacher observes. 'You haven't learned very much have you?' But the student has, on the contrary, learned a great deal. The student has registered the condemnatory look on the instructor's face, experienced the sickening feeling in the stomach, and concluded once more what a fruitless and punishing experience the entire learning situation can be."

1. A Tale of Two Visions

[There is a chart with two columns to show this part.]

The classic view says that learning is: continual, effortless, inconspicuous, boundless, unpremeditated, independent of rewards and punishment, based on self-image, vicarious, never forgotten, inhibited by testing, a social activity, growth.

The official theory says that learning is occasional, hard work, obvious, limited, intentional, dependent on rewards and punishment, based on effort, individualistic, easily forgotten, assured by testing, an intellectual activity, memorization.

"The official theory became an unquestioned part of most of us because it permeates the broad educational culture in which we have grown up."

II. The Classic View of Learning and Forgetting

2. A Question of Identity

"You learn from the company you keep. ... We all know this and organize our lives accordingly. I have found a similar proverb or saying in every language I have encountered."

"To find out what students actually learn, look at the way they leave school. If they leave thinking that "school things" — such as reading, writing, mathematics, or history — are boring, difficult, and irrelevant to their lives and that they are "dummies," this is something they have learned. ... They learn to be nonreaders, or that they are nonspellers, or that they can't do mathematics. They learn who they are. If they learn that they are leaders or geniuses (or clowns or fools) they behave accordingly."

"We don't find out "who we are" by gazing into a mirror and asking profound existential questions. We know who we are — and other people know who we are — from the clubs, formal and informal, which with we associate ourselves; from the company we keep. We begin to worry about our identity if we feel we don't have any link with people around us, especially if we think they may be excluding us."

"We think — if we think about it at all — that the tremendous amount of learning we do all our lives, such as learning to talk... and remembering where we live and who we are and where we were last New Year's Eve, as just 'memory.' We don't call it learning, though it is. It is, however, quite different from the type of learning with which the official theory of learning is concerned."

"The official theory... is primarily concerned with memorization, the effort to store away one thing after another. The classic kind of learning, on the other hand, is growth. It is growth of the mind analogous in every way to the growth of the body."

3. The Immensity of Children's Learning

"There is much about spoken language that is rarely talked about, such as phrasing, intonation, taking turns in conversation, and just how loud and long it is appropriate to say something, for the simple reason that it is too complicated to talk about."

"The first advantage of joining any club is that you find out what the club activities are. Before you join, what goes on in the club is a mystery."

"The second advantage of any club is that once you are a member and discover what activities are available to you, more experienced members help you to do those things that interest you. They don't teach you; they help you."

"The right to ignore anything that doesn't make sense is a crucial element of any child's learning — and the first right children are likely to lose when they get to the controlled learning environment of school."

"A teacher will declare, 'It takes me an hour to teach 10 words on a word list, and I'm lucky if the little devils remember 5 words the next day and 2 at the end of the week. So how could children be learning 27 words a day, with no forgetting?' And I say, 'I suppose it's when they're not working on the word list.'"

"There is no indication that vocabulary learning ever stops, provided we can keep encountering new words in a comprehensible context."

"People who read a lot are likely to learn a large number of words. The researchers didn't find that you need a large vocabulary in order to read, or someone to teach you vocabulary while you read — all you need to become a reader is interesting materials that make sense to you. But if you read, your vocabulary will grow."

"If only we could encourage students to read more, it would take care of many of their problems in school."

"Reading is not a solitary activity. Readers are never alone. Readers can join the company of the characters they read about. ... When we read, we can join any club in the world — a powerful advantage of reading. When we read we can also join the company of authors. ... The prime value of reading and writing is the experience they provide through which we may constantly and unobtrusively learn."

4. Joining the Literacy Club

"Authors have this collaborative role from the very beginning; they are the people who teach children to read. In other words, you learn to read from reading."

"There's a simple yet powerful reason why children will never become dependent upon other people to do anything they think they can do for themselves — they don't have the patience. ... Children normally insist on attending to themselves long before we think they are reading to do so, testing our own patience."

"Every time a child reads a book — especially one of those favorite stories that children enjoy hearing and reading long after they know every word by heart — the author shows the child how to read it. ... In the situation I have just described some misguided parents or teachers may take the book away from the child because they think it is 'too easy' or that the child knows the story already. This is a supreme example of the tragedy of the official theory — that people believe that learning is taking place only if there is difficulty, and that we can't possibly be learning if we are enjoying what we are doing."

5. Learning through Life

"We learn from the company we keep, in person and in print. We doubtless also learn from the company we keep in movies, on television, and through the Internet. But reading must be given special status because of the scope and freedom it allows the imagination."

[Anecdote about a friend fascinated by the royal family. What would happen if that person were tested, scored, graded, perhaps even make his pension dependent on the results.] "He'll come to hate reading about the royal family (and he'll come to hate me as well). He might even give up reading altogether. By making him self-conscious about his learning, I could destroy it, together with his confidence in himself. The official theory that learning requires structure and effort has enormous destructive power."

"The facile forgetfulness that characterizes short-term memory is probably its greatest asset. It ensures that our current attention isn't clogged by what we had to attend to in the recent past. The last few things that the speaker said are erased so that we can get on with understanding what is being sad at present. Imagine the din in our heads if we couldn't clear our attention of every detail of everything that has happened to us in the last hour, let alone the last day."

"Long-term memory is indeed synonymous with learning — it is growth."

"Because the learning is an elaboration of what you already know it takes place without your awareness. You are not trying to force something in but are rather reaching out to make it part of you. Long-term memory is a network put together from all your experience."

[note about book organization: I like the way Smith regularly includes "some typical objects to the classic view of learning" in various chapters, and not in a facile way; I can certainly imagine these are actually objections that people have often voiced.]

"The problem when learning seems blocked is never with learning itself but with comprehending the material to be learned. The difficulty is with nonsense. Make sense of what you want to learn (preferably with the help of other people or other authors), and the learning will, over time, take care of itself. The struggle to learn — when you are a member of the club — is always a struggle to understand."

"There's one other significant factor apart from comprehension. It is confidence. You will never learn anything you want to learn if you are not confident about your learning ability."

"The official theory of learning says that we have to learn something in order to understand it. Once again, this is totally contrary to fact. We have to understand something in order to learn it. We have to make sense of it. And once again, because individuals differ in what they know, in what they are interested in, and in the way they understand things, there is no way that the official theory can cope with approaching learning through understanding."

"If we have learned that we can't do certain things, that we are not a certain kind of person, then we won't succeed no matter how much energy we expend or how much other people exhort us. We need therapy. I'm not being facetious. We're talking about changing the ingrained self-image of a person."

"First, they focus on the learner's self-image. ... They must be persuaded that  ... they are as competent (and as worthwhile) as anyone else — and they probably know a great deal about reading and writing. ... The second intervention is to make learners members of the literacy club, by engaging them in activities that they find comprehensible, interesting, and confidence-building, finding someone who will help them to read what they would like to read and to write what they would like to write."

"They have learned — they have been taught —inappropriate ways of trying to learn. And they have learned — they have been taught — to have little confidence in their ability to learn."

"It is not easy to restore confidence or hope in such students, to make up for years of social and intellectual discrimination. It is not easy to make up for years of hopelessness, learned disinterest, and anger."

"Both music and mnemonics are ways of making sense of something to be learned so that we can relate it to something we know already. But these relations and associations are always idiosyncratic. ... That is the reason that manipulative techniques of the official theory of learning rarely include either music or mnemonics."

"It is always easier to remember the unusual or unpredictable than it is to remember everyday events, and certainly it is much easier to recall them."

III. The Official Theory of Learning and Forgetting
6. Undermining Traditional Wisdom

"Learning can be effortless, continual, permanent — and also pleasant — though it won't take place in the absence of comprehension, interest, or confidence. That is the classic view of learning and forgetting.We can learn without effort if we are interested in what we are doing (or in what someone else is doing), free from confusion, and given assistance when we seek it."

[demise of the one-room schoolhouse] "People of influence thought pupils weren't learning very much during their time in school; pupils seemed to do what they liked while they were there, and their teachers didn't appear to have much control over them. There was a total lack of organization... This was the age when management, drawing on science and technology, seemed capable of solving any problem."

"Students would no longer be mixed up together, but instead they would be grouped according to age and ability, all to be treated in the same way and expected to learn together throughout their school careers until they graduated — a standardized, predictable, and reliable product."

[Lots of examples of the way military vocabulary infiltrated the language of schooling.]

"What is still called 'grouping students by age and ability' really means segregating them according to inexperience and inability, as if the aim were to make it impossible for students to help or to learn from each other."

"And it wasn't just the physical structure of schools that was split into largely meaningless parts. So was time itself. The school day became a grid of 'periods,' devoted to compartmentalized aspects of learning. And the more difficulty students experienced learning something, the more likely they were to receive more fragmented and disjointed things to learn. ... 'Systematic instruction' was the systematic deprivation of experience."

"Science had solved every problem confronting the human race, or was about to do so, and it could certainly solve the problem of education. Teaching would no longer be an art dependent upon the sensitivity and creativity of amateurs; it would become a science controlled by experts. The ground was laid for the official theory of learning."

7. Fabricating a Theory of Learning

"To have a science, you must be able to experiment, which requires making measurements and comparisons. And to be able to measure you must have something you can count."

"Education did not have to anoint psychology as the source of all wisdom about human learning. Education could have turned to anthropology, whose well documented theory was that young people in every culture learn through identification and collaboration with their elders."

"How could anyone make comparisons on any aspect of learning when people are so different, especially in the two things that make learning possible for anyone (according to the classic point of view) — interest and past experience?"

"This was Ebbinghaus's world-changing revelation: If you want to study how people learn without the involvement of interest and past experience — study how they learn nonsense."

"If learners' attention flags, motivate them with incentives or threats. Learning, as one contemporary educational theorist has said, is simply 'a function of time on task.' Learning is a matter of effort, and if you don't learn, you haven't worked long or hard enough. ... Even today, over a century after the introduction of psychology's nonsense-based theory of learning into education, teachers prefer a controlled (or "structured") approach to instruction — if they don't trust students to learn. More significantly, people outside the classroom prefer a controlled (or "structured") approach to instruction if they don't trust teachers to teach."

"Generations have become persuaded that the only way to learn is through work, in the deliberate, determined, organized way that human subjects were expected to memorize nonsense in the experimental laboratory. The more students have failed, and the harder learning has become, the more they have believed in the theory."

"Behaviorism also inspired and justified many authors and publishers of educational materials to produce meaningless and repetitive activities that were guaranteed to teach anything through fragmentation and reinforcement. Every activity — whether on paper or on computer screens — was sugarcoated with frenzied graphics designed to seduce learners and teachers into the belief that all the effort could be 'fun.' Inevitably, it was all accompanied by scores and relentless record keeping."

"When psychology's grotesque convictions about learning came into classrooms out went any possibility that students might learn anything about ethics, respect, loyalty, morality, honesty, charity, collaboration, compassion or care. .... To the extent that any of these values are officially regarded as having educational relevance, they are taught as academic subjects, as the right answers to questions, not as ways of life."

"In such a context, there is no point in even considering how students might acquire patience, persistence, courage, steadfastness, or hope. Or how they could fail to elarn that happiness is material self-satisfaction, together with contempt for authority and helplessness in the face of it."

8. The Entry of the Testers

"While learning is normally inconspicuous, failure to learn can't be concealed. You don't need a test to discover whether individuals are learning, just look at their faces. If they look confused or bored, they are learning (or rather, all they're learning is that whatever they are doing is confusing and boring). ... The official theory says that you are not learning unless you can be seen to be working. The classic view says that if you have to struggle to learn then something must be wrong, but not with your learning ability or desire."

"You also don't need a test to discover if someone is learning a particular thing... Just look at what the individual is doing. ... They are learning through experience."

"Low-scorers ... are supposed to need more 'structure' in their learning — a more rigidly controlled environment — when what they really need is more time, more help, or more encouragement."

"The relationship is totally circular. Testing is good because it follows the precepts of the official theory of learning, and the official theory of learning must be right because it is the basis of testing. ... Teachers and students become marionettes, manipulated by offstage puppet masters."

9. More Spoils of War

[many examples again of the language of logistics in education, as if were all one big D-Day Invasion]

"The effect on the social structures of schools and classrooms was devastating. Students and teachers no longer engaged in activities that they themselves determined, chose, or understood. They were to advance in the direction they were ordered, inspired by slogans such as 'We Aim for Excellence'."

"The solution is not for teachers and students to do better in the circumstances that are imposed on them but for the circumstances in which teaching and learning are supposed to take place to be changed."

"Much of the 'problem solving' that has gone on in school for half a century has been futile attempts to patch a sinking ship. The only way for teachers and students to survive is to stop trying to save the ship and start trying to save themselves."

"Components were assembled separately and labeled modules, such as the lunar module for orbiting the moon and instructional modules for spelling and arithmetic."

"Program specialists would recruit teachers and ask them, 'Tell us what it is that readers can do.' The teachers would say things like 'read books, understand what they read, enjoy stories, talk about them' — and all the teachers' comments were dismissed as unscientific, anecdotal, subjective, and woolly-minded."

I am putting this part in all-caps on purpose; it is not in all-caps in the book:

"PART OF THE TRAGEDY IS THAT TEACHERS THEMSELVES WERE RECRUITED TO PRODUCE — UNDER CAREFUL GUIDANCE — THE OBJECTIVES, MATERIALS, AND TESTS FOR THE PROGRAMS THAT WERE TO UNDERMINE THEIR PROFESSIONAL SKILLS AND AUTHORITY."

The author of a highly successful commercial instructional program that employed all of these fragmented techniques told me why they had to be so detailed and specific — 'You can't trust teachers to teach.' His program was so detailed it even told teachers when to smile, and to ignore student questions if the program hadn't provided answers."

10. The Official Theory Goes On-Line

"Today, learning and education don't mean gaining experience; they mean acquiring, storing, and retrieving information (which is what computers do)."

"Pressure to remove teachers entirely from education — the ultimate mistrust of teachers —is constant and growing."

"All this is related to the development of 'expert systems' in computers. That is, systems in which the computer is the expert, not a human being."

"All learners need structure — but that is structure in their own minds, not in the world around them. You can't learn something unless it makes sense to you, however much it might make sense to other people. You can struggle to memorize something yo udon't understand, but forgetting is the inevitable consequence."

"The way people help learners to make sense of things is by being flexible — by helping them in other ways, by offering alternatives, by finding collaborators, and by protecting them from confusion and frustration. But the official theory of learning takes a confrontation approach, presents rigid barriers to those in difficulty, and then penalizes them for 'failing'."

"The learners who cope best with rigid structures and systematic instruction are those who already understand what they are doing; they make the formal system look good. ... For learners in difficulty, formal structure means the systematic deprivation of meaningful experience; they need more flexibility, not less. ... What they need — before it is too late — is to be put into helpful and non-threatening situations where they can make sense of what is going on."

"The larger the class, the more important it is that students can interact with each other, engage in absorbing and collaborative activities — and take the strain off the teacher. I'm not saying that it is good for teachers to have large classes, but I'm also not saying that smaller classes would solve all problems."

"There's only one time when correction is worthwhile, and then it is invaluable. And that's the time when the learner would be angry or distressed if the correction weren't made. ... If the writing meant something to the learners — if it's a letter to be sent, a story to be published, a poster to be displayed... then the writer would be most anxious not to have mistakes ignored. ... The correction of errors, in this case, could well result in more writing rather than less, as the learner felt empowered. It is a matter of whether the correction is seen as collaboration rather than punishment."

"Trying to force students to learn or threatening to punish them if they don't learn inevitably has the opposite effect from what you want to achieve, no matter how much pressure your teaching responsibilities put on you."

"There will be much less frustration, despair, and resentment on all sides even if your efforts to involve individuals in particular activities fail than if you try to enforce learning with exercises, drills, tests, slogans, and discriminatory labels."

See Part 2 for the optimistic final part of the book: IV. Repairing the Damage: Liberating Our Own Learning, and Liberating Schools and Education.

Notes. Smith. Book of Learning and Forgetting (Part 2)

More notes here for JHU book project ... see Part 1 for context.

IV. Repairing the Damage
11. Liberating Our Own Learning

"The official theory of learning has been doubly detrimental to the way most people approach learning. On the one hand it leads us to overlook the classic belief that the basis of all permanent learning is identification with people who are more experienced in what we would like to learn; it removes the emphasis from people to procedures. On the other hand, the official theory has convinced us that learning necessitates work, so that we regard difficulty as a challenge that we must confront rather than as a warning that we should try a different approach."

"The good news is that learning is most effective when we voluntarily participate in an interesting activity. We should be less puritanical, and look around for ways to enjoy what we want to learn. Unfortunately, most of us have been so corrupted by the official theory of learning that we need considerable support and guidance — if not therapy — to rid ourselves of the conviction that learning has to be an unrewarding chore."

"Lev Vygotsky had a pithy way of describing how collaboration leads to individual learning. Anything children can do with hel ptoday, he said, they will be able to do by themselves tomorrow."

"What Vygotsky didn't point out explicitly is that one of the things constantly in the zone of proximal development is our own self-image, including our beliefs about what we will and will not be capable of doing in the future."

"It is not difficult to see how learning flourishes where there is interest, confidence, and understanding, and how it withers under boredom, trepidation, and confusion. We are bored when we are trapped in the confining inner circle of things we already know and can do, and we are confused when we are lost in the circle of things that are beyond our present capacities."

"Try to be more than an observer in these learning situations, and become a participant. Don't attempt to teach anyone how to do art, science, reading, or writing, or how to behave collaboratively, respectfully, and democratically, and so on, but engage in these things yourself, demonstrating how important they are to you."

"Learning is as natural as breathing, but doing something that you have learned, or from which you will learn, may be intrinsically difficulty and time consuming. Many people seem to believe that once someone has learned to write, for example, writing becomes effortless and can be done to order. But writing — or reading, cooking, gardening, computer programming, or repairing an appliance — may often be a struggle, even for an expert. Patience and effort are required."

"Don't focus on learning; focus on the task to be accomplished."

"I'm being careful to relate learning to enjoyment and satisfaction — not to fun. Many commercial instructional programs, on paper and on computer software, claim that their materials make learning FUN!!! ... They are sugar coating on the bitterness of the official theory of learning. ... "Fun learning" is often the reverse of enjoyment and satisfaction, because there is nothing reflective about it. If anything is learned, it is the mindless activity, the frenzied gimmick, and the desire for a pointless and irrelevant reward."

"Learning will advance in the classic way if learners watch out for two danger signals: (1) when they find themselves trying deliberately to memorize what they are studying or practicing, and (2) when they find themselves plowing through material and activities where they remember nothing, except that they were confused."

"The effort to memorize interferes with memorization because it destroys understanding. Rote memorization puts things in the wrong place, in short-term memory, rather than in long-term memory. ... The way to hold something in long-term memory is to relate it to something you already now. And there is no need to worry about finding something you already know to relate the new knowledge to because that will take place automatically if you understand what you are doing. Understanding means that you are connecting what is new to what you know already. Confusion means there is no such connection."

"Get on with enjoying what you are reading — or look around for something else that is interesting and does make sense to you. The more absorbed we are in an activity, the more we learn and the less likely we are to forget."

"Sometimes things are difficult to understand because we have confused ourselves, by following a false trail or making inappropriate connections. ... More prior knowledge is required. This means finding out as much as we can about what we are trying to learn from another source — a different book, the Internet, a movie or video that might be relevant, or another person."

"There is another resource that opens up fast tracks for learning — the power of imagination. ... Anything that stimulates our imagination and promotes of our enjoyment of an activity is a green light for learning."

"There is great power in reading, which offers supreme opportunities for the imagination to work."

"Read what you can understand. This may sometimes mean literally putting yourself in the place of children. ... the most helpful illustrated books are often produced for young people."

12. Liberating Schools and Education

"Abolition of all of the following: fragmented instructional materials and procedures, drills, memorization and recapitulation exercises, segregation into special ability groups, coercion, and time constraints."

"Teachers must take charge of their own professional lives. How might teachers take charge and improve what goes on in schools? I have a simple answer. They must change the world. And when they ask how they could possibly change the world, I have another simple answer — a little bit at a time."

"It's not necessary to throw out everything is done in schools and to start all over again. The world isn't divided into good schools and bad schools nor into good teachers and bad teachers. In all schools, some good things are done and some bad things are done. ... The main difference lies in the proportions. Good teachers to more good things. What needs to be changed — in schools and in individual teachers —is the proportions."

"The world doesn't have to be perfect for things to be improved. Teachers don't need perfect conditions in order to teach well. Children are remarkably adapatable in their learning. ... But that doesn't mean that adverse conditions should be tolerated or that teachers and learners wouldn't do better if conditions were improved. Everyone, in school and out, might do better with more opportunity in schools for respect, collaboration, reflective thinking, individual initiative, wide experience, and personal interaction."

"Teachers attribute boredom, confusion, apathy, resentment, anger, and despair to the personality of the students, not to the dynamics of the classroom or to disruptive events that may be occurring in the students' lives."

"Teachers may be oblivious to the consequences of what they are doing. How will teachers ever be able to examine critically the significance of their behavior in the classroom? They probably won't if they have no stimulus to shift them out of their habitual way of viewing their world. The solution, once again, is that learning takes place as a consequence of collaboration. Teachers should consider asking their questions and pursuing their inquiries in company with other teachers, with parents, and especially with their students. Everyone's consciousness and understanding can be raised with frank and open inquiry, not to reach conventional or 'right' answers but to reveal the underlying dynamics of every aspect of school activity, social and emotional as well as intellectual."

"The first step, in short, is for teachers to uncover the consequences of what they do; what things are good, and what things are not. The second step is to do more of the productive things, and less of the others."

"Teachers should be honest with their students. Tis is the only sure way of repelling and perhaps eradicating the official theory of learning and all the unnatural practices that it fosters and maintains."

"Most students believe that everything that goes on in school must be good for them. They assimilate the official theory of learning and then help to maintain it. ... Students who do well are inclined to think that all of their educational experience was good for them. Students who do poorly are inclined and encouraged to believe that 'failure' reflects their own inadequacies."

"None of this is difficult to understand for anyone open to seeing the world the way it really is. I have talked to primary grade students about the fluent and inconspicuous way they learned about language and about the world — and about how boredom and confusion can interfere with learning — and they understood exactly what I was talking about."

"Consciousness raising will not immediately eliminate everything that is wrong with schools, but it will make it easier and less traumatic for everyone to survive in them."

"The question should never be 'Are the students learning?' but always 'What are the students learning?" The answer is found not by testing the students but by looking at what they are doing and how they are doing it."

"Abolish the words learning and teaching altogether, and talk instead about doing. ... One thing is clear from the classic view — that people always learn from what they are doing. If they are doing something worthwhile they are learning something worthwhile. If they are engaged in a boring, confusing, or irrelevant activity, then they are learning something that is boring, confusing, or irrelevant. If they feel helpless and angry, then they are learning helplessness and anger."

"No one is suggesting that teachers give up their responsibility for what students should learn. The classic point of view puts greater responsibility on teachers since it asserts that their behavior and attitudes determine what students learn and what students think and feel as well."

"The doubters are wrong in thinking that chaos is the inevitable consequence of relaxed control. The teachers who burn out are the ones who want to control everything that goes on in their classrooms.

"The difficulty in getting many teachers — or their administrators — to change their attitudes and their ways is not that they are ignorant, but that they are insecure. They are afraid their world will fall apart if they give up any of their power or claim their independence."

"Administrators may feel they have even more to lose than teachers. The only way administrators can demonstrate their authority is by demanding a steady stream of numbers. They may require even more reassurance that they are not taking a grave risk by relaxing control."

"Parents who think a child's learning can be gauged by grades need educating, but what eventually will persuade them is actually seeing what their child can do, while the child is doing it."

"When I talk with teachers anxious to liberate their own classrooms from the official theory of learning, I suggest they should try to bring administrators and parents around to viewing the world the way they do. But if they fail, I recommend that they press ahead without the support of administrators and parents. Their first responsibility is to the students."

"The classic vision is neither old-fashioned nor outdated. It respects the challenges to learning of the modern world far better than the puritanical Victorian myth of the official theory."

I'm putting this in ALL-CAPS too (not in all-caps in the book):

TO SAY THAT EVEN SUCH TEACHERS AND STUDENTS CAN BE UNAFFECTED BY THE GENERAL ENVIRONMENT OF EDUCATION IS LIKE SAYING THAT HEALTH-CONSCIOUS INDIVIDUALS CAN SAFELY SWIM IN POLLUTED WATER. NO ONE ESCAPES THE SECOND-HAND SMOKE OF THE OFFICIAL THEORY OF LEARNING. AND THE CONTAMINATION IS SO PERVASIVE, LIKE AN INVISIBLE CLOUD OF POLLUTION HANGING OVER AN OBLIVIOUS CITY, THAT MANY TEACHERS DON'T EVEN SUSPECT ITS EXISTENCE. THEY DON'T QUESTION IT. THEY ACTUALLY GO ALONG WITH IT, HELPING IN THEIR GOODWILL AND PROFESSIONAL ENTHUSIASM TO PROPAGATE THE SYSTEM THAT UNDERMINES THEM.

Objection: "Should teachers do nothing? Should students just be allowed to goof off?" Response: "Teachers aren't doing nothing when they respect the classic view of learning and neither are the students. Some theory of innate wickedness seems to underlie objections such as this — that the natural preference of teachers would be not to teach and the natural preference of learners would be not to learn. Teaching and learning aren't aversive activities that people by nature want to avoid. What is universally unpalatable is the mindless 'work' in schools that gets in the way of sensible teaching and learning."

"It would be the responsibility of teachers to ensure that opportunities to engage in interesting and productive activities are always available."

"A classroom that can't cope with students of different mental, physical, and cultural abilities is a microcosm of a society that doesn't respect such differences. The fault lies with the classroom or the school, not with the individuals who 'don't fit.' The solution lies in changing the school and in changing attitudes, not in promoting and expanding difficulties through discriminatory and undemocratic bureaucratic procedures. Segregating individuals who are different in particular ways is not required because of the nature of people or of teaching and learning. It is required by the mindlessness and heartlessness of the official theory of  learning."

"There can't be any fundamental objection to examinations that license individuals to enter particular occupations... Children and young people have no choice about attending school, and the constant testing is not designed to give them entrance to particular occupations, only to keep them under control and to manipulate their everyday experiences."

"Unremitting experience of competitiveness, apprehension, and triviality doesn't strengthen students for future trials and adversity. The people best able to survive sudden starvation are those who have been well fed, not starved for most of their life. Life is rarely as competitive and undeviatingly challenging outside school as it is inside."

"The essence of any liberated school is that it would be a community — not a hierarchy of principal, teachers, support staff, and students but a place where peopel gather to engage in interesting activities."

"There are some things that all liberated schools would lack in common —there would be an absence of mindless exercises, punitive tests, discrimination, segregation, pointless competition, labeling of individuals, restrictive timetables, and public and private humiliation of teachers and students."

"There would be opportunities for everyone to engage in interesting activities. There would be many interesting activities to engage in. There would be many interesting people around to demonstrate interesting pursuits and to assist interest learners to engage in them."

"Good teachers abound, to the extent that they are able to escape the narrow thinking and destructive interventions of the official theory of learning."

"All the good teachers I have known have been good organizers. Not hierarchical organization from the top, but community organization reaching outward. ... I'm talking about people with the talent and determination to make interesting possibilities occur in a creative and productive way."

[I'm not going to try to type up my notes from the endnotes because they are printed in a smaller font and I just can't manage to look and type, but it is in the endnotes that Smith has some observations about Freire, Csikszentmihalyi, etc. so I will want to come back and look at that again later even if I am not going to try to type stuff up here now.]

Notes. Stachowiak. The Productive Online and Offline Professor.

So, one of the things this JHU book project is going to do for me is to help me get organized about my education-related reading. Although reading is part of what I do in relation to my job teaching online, I am not really systematic about it. Instead, I read articles, and books too, and I learn a lot by absorption, but I'm not systematic about bookmarking or about notetaking, unless it's an article I'm sharing with students (and even there, I've slacked off because, at a certain point, I accumulated such a heap of good stuff to share with students that I didn't really want/need more stuff to share). About my other projects (Latin books, Aesop, and most recently Brer Rabbit), I am maniacally systematic about notetaking and project management, but this Hopkins book is a new experience.....

.....and that's good! It means I can be public about the process from the very beginning, and that includes sharing notes. I really like Kindle books because I can highlight and then access those highlights via the Kindle Notebook (I've found that people often don't know about that; just go to read.amazon.com/kp/notebook and be amazed).

What I'm going to be doing here at the blog is sharing some notes that leap out at me when I go back and read through the highlights I've made in a book. Since this is all about trying to be super-productive in writing this book, I decided to start with Bonni Stachowiak's brand-new book, which I read as soon as the ebook became available: The Productive Online and Offline Professor: A Practical Guide (Amazon). One of the best parts of the book is all about PKM: personal knowledge mastery/management, so it was super-useful to think about that as I am about to embark on this big project. The book is WONDERFUL: well organized, inspiring, and one of my favorite parts is a "take action" checklist that totally resonates with me; that's how I do my classes too: a big long list of things students might choose to do in any given week. I'm pretty sure those kinds of checklists would not fit in the scope of the Hopkins book, but then it just becomes something I can put online as a supplement, right?

So, here are some really great quotes that I'm snagging here (sometimes from Bonni and sometimes people whose work she quotes in the book)... also, a big shout-out for the excellent foreword by Robert Talbert.

These notes are not meant to represent the structure of the book in any comprehensive way; this is just what jumped out as useful/inspiring to me for my own purposes. There is a detailed table of contents that gives very accurate description of the book.

~ ~ ~

"Everything about higher education is based on trust. ... Education is based on trust, which is based on being fully present, which is grounded in control over our work." [Robert Talbert]

We also share ways we can improve our productivity so we can have more peace in our lives and be even more present for our students. [opening to Bonni's podcast episodes]

Being present for our students (online or face-to-face) is vital to our effectiveness as educators.

"I don’t know if it’s time management so much as it is a presence management issue." [statement from study participant; see Whalen in bib]

Pursuing enhanced productivity is not a solo journey.

We need to be careful not to overemphasize making things faster if we are pursuing unproductive or unhealthy aims.

Institutions’ financial challenges can quickly be translated into so-called solutions of implementing larger class sizes, asking faculty to perform administrative tasks outside the scope of their functional roles, and increasing the use of the contingent workforce.

Productivity is about reducing the friction in our systems such that we have more capability for attending to the people we care most about.

We are at our most productive when we can leverage our strengths in our work.

"Productivity practices are predicated on grappling with constant scarcity. Not enough time. Not enough control. Not enough perspective. Not organized enough. Not reliable enough. Not [fill in the blank] enough" [see Robinson in bib]

Most of us have built productivity systems that regularly misinform us about where things stand, or what requires our attention.

It will help you truly adopt what you are reading if you pause along the way and identify steps you want to take to improve your systems. [I love the way Bonni has built taking action into the book!]

The trouble with feeling overwhelmed is that it can prevent us from taking any action at all.

Spend some time reflecting on the meaning and purpose of productivity. If you can achieve “maximum” productivity, what will that free you from and what will you be able to focus more on?

“The mind is for having ideas, not holding them” [Allen, GTD]

“We are naturally creative beings, invested in our existence to list, grow, express, and expand. The challenge is not to be creative—it is to eliminate the barriers to the natural flow of our creative energies”  [Allen, GTD]

A helpful practice can be to identify three to five next actions that, at a minimum, will be completed during a given day. [there was some Gonzalez blog post about this method; need to go find that]

our calendars should be trustworthy, as well, and reflect only specific commitments we have made that need to occur at a particular time and in a designated place

Robert Talbert (personal communication) explains that he has divided the work of various tools as follows: Anything that has a grade associated with it goes in the LMS, files all go inside Google Drive, and everything else goes in Slack.

That particular strength of Slack can also be a weakness. The way in which Slack makes communication easier can also mean that a flurry of messages can come within the various channels.

A PKM system becomes personal when we include resources that will be relevant because of our strengths, our interests, and our motivations.

We create our PKM process by continually reflecting on what is most relevant for our current state and what is emerging as more important as we grow and develop in new areas.

Information is made up of data and context and can be easily reproduced. Knowledge is information that has become most useful to us and allows for learning to take place.

Once a PKM has been established, we continually go through the process of seeking, sensing, and sharing without ever reaching a finish line.

"If you only seek information, you are just a consumer. If you seek and share, then you are a re-broadcaster, adding little value. If you seek and make sense of information, without sharing, you are missing out on opportunities to learn and connect." [Jarche]

"When you work out loud, you feel good and empowered at the same time. ... When you do that—when you work in a more open, connected way—you can build a purposeful network that makes you more effective and provides access to more opportunities." [see Stepper in bibliography]

“Teaching is a creative process, and if you’re not creating, you’re doing it wrong” [Doug McKee]

BATCH PROCESSING. One practice that can slow us down in our work is shifting from one task to the next without regard to the way in which we might group our tasks for greater efficiency.

It makes sense to pick up all the items you need, rather than having to go back and forth between your home and the store until you remember and pick up everything you need. [grocery shopping analogy]

Read-Do: Read each step of the task, and then perform them in order, checking them off as you go, like following a recipe.
Do-Confirm: Perform steps of the task from memory until you reach a defined pause point, when you go through the checklist and confirm that each step has been completed.
[two kinds of checklists; see Houston in bib for more on this + Gawande]

I have a form that I ask students to fill out when they are requesting a reference for applying to an academic program or are asking me for a letter of recommendation. [OMG: I MUST DO THIS!]

specifications grading approach their assignments in a binary way. Students either met the expectations or they did not.

[some of my distributed content stuff got a mention here: yay playlists!]

All the places to which the syllabus has been distributed are difficult to track down to provide an updated file. It can also be challenging to determine whether someone is referencing the most current version. ... Instead of relying on sending out the actual file to the various recipients or posting it on an LMS, it is far more effective to post or send a link to the file after it has been posted on a cloud storage system.

"The kind of teacher you will become is directly related to the kind of teachers you associate with ... Avoid people who are unhappy and disgruntled about the possibilities for transforming education. They are the enemy of the spirit of the teacher." [Emdin]

Although we may not always have the luxury of choosing who we collaborate with in our work, we can select where we direct our attention.

"Crazy-busy is a great armor, it’s a great way for numbing. What a lot of us do is that we stay so busy, and so out in front of our life, that the truth of how we’re feeling and what we really need can’t catch up with us ... It’s like those moving walkways at the airport— you’ve got to really pay attention when you get off them, because it’s disorienting. And when you’re standing still, you become very acutely aware of how you feel and what’s going on in your surroundings." [Brene Brown, 2012]