Two NPR stories grabbed my attention this week because they suggest some lessons about political communication and education.
“Why A Teen Who Talks Back May Have A Bright Future,” by Patti Neighmond, reports on research into parent-child arguments and their impact on development.
[The researchers found] almost all parents and teenagers argue. But it’s the quality of the arguments that makes all the difference.
“We tell parents to think of those arguments not as nuisance but as a critical training ground,” he says. Such arguments, he says, are actually mini life lessons in how to disagree — a necessary skill later on in life with partners, friends and colleagues on the job.
Later in the story:
So, ironically the best thing parents can do is help their teenager argue more effectively. For this, Allen offers one word: listen.
In the study, when parents listened to their kids, their kids listened back. They didn’t necessarily always agree, he says. But if one or the other made a good point, they would acknowledge that point. “They weren’t just trying to fight each other at every step and wear each other down. They were really trying to persuade the other person.”
The second NPR story: “Physicists Seek To Lose The Lecture As Teaching Tool,” by Emily Hanford. It traces the growing realization that the learned professor lecturing to assembled students turns out to be a less than effective form of learning, even when the lectures are popular with students.
Maryland’s Redish says when he lays out the case against lecturing, colleagues often nod their heads, but insist their lectures work just fine. Redish tells them — lecturing isn’t enough anymore.
“With modern technology, if all there is is lectures, we don’t need faculty to do it,” Redish says. “Get ’em to do it once, put it on the Web, and fire the faculty.”
Some faculty are threatened by this, but Mazur says they don’t have to be. Instead, they need to realize that their role has changed.
“It used to be just be the ‘sage on the stage,’ the source of knowledge and information,” he says. “We now know that it’s not good enough to have a source of information.”
Mazur sees himself now as the “guide on the side” – a kind of coach, working to help students understand all the knowledge and information that they have at their fingertips. Mazur says this new role is a more important one.
The difficulty in moving beyond the lecture seems exactly parallel to getting beyond the traditional role of the news media. Providing news is essential, but news is now available from a variety of competing sources. To succeed, being a news source isn’t enough. What does being “the guide on the side” mean for journalists? For the forms that journalism should be taking? It’s an intriguing analogy.
Similarly, looking back to the research on arguments with parents, “it’s the quality of the arguments that makes all the difference.”
Could the way in which those in positions of authority handle public disagreements and arguments from critics make as much difference in the development of our political/civil community as it does in the development of teen skills?
It’s certainly a suggestion worth pursuing, or so it seems to me.
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Here’s a collection of lectures that is changing the way high school teachers may have to function in the future. (Students from all over the world can and do view this, accelerating their use of English.)
http://www.khanacademy.org/
This reverses the role of the classroom, which becomes study hall or tutoring, where students will do their “homework” with teacher assistance; the students will take in the lecture at home (repeatedly, if necessary).
I think this new model has been known for a long time at the high school level, with its focus on teaching, but universities are focused on research and maybe slower to change. Perhaps teachers don’t formally adopt change unless they have been exposed to it in their own lives. So the younger generation of teachers as students will have regularly seen lectures on the Internet and will see the need for change and know how to adapt to it. Since professors don’t become teachers until much later in their careers and are primarily focused on research, they will more likely be late adapters.
As for kids getting smarter because they are exposed to a more rational style of argument with their parents, that reminds me of Jewish culture. It’s a culture of argument, much of which was borrowed from the Greeks when Israel was a Greek colony a long, long time ago. In contrast, the stereotype of Asian kids is that they are smart but not creative or critical since their education is mostly rote learning, whereas Jews are dynamic. In fact, in eastern Europe Jews used to be dirt poor, but the sons would be sent to the yeshiva where they would be forced to argue with the other students. So maybe that will be the school of the future, where the teacher will be, like a rabbi, a referee who walks around the classroom as the students argue one-on-one.
One point of this is that no one knows what the school of the future looks like. There are politicians and others talking about shutting down campuses and putting everything online. Not a good idea. These things play out slowly and unpredictably.