Beckyb: What she said.

Today, I gave this speech to one of my favorite communities: engineering educators and engineering education researchers. I had two minutes to give an overview of my 2011 paper that won a best paper award. It read like one of my blog entries so I figured it should go here.

Thank you. I am really happy to be here, with my engineering education community. In particular, with my co-author Andrew who brought an international perspective to the paper.

Connection to community is important to us all. And possibly even more so to our students, who don’t yet know if they belong to our community of engineers. This paper is about a social instruction strategy called team testing. The idea behind social instruction strategies is that we can use social experiences of learning to improve student engagement with the technical content we are teaching.

By creating situations where students are prepared to engage with the content (they studied for the exam, right?), we can ask them to talk, intelligently, about problems or content they have already struggled with, and perhaps mastered.

We tried two approaches: repeating an individual exam for bonus points or partitioning the exam into individual and group components.

What makes this strategy social? One rule we used was that all students had to agree on the submitted solution. No divide and conquer. Another was that everyone had to speak and everyone had to write part of the solution. Students teach each other, learn from each other, and negotiate their ways to answers that are, on average, more correct than they are on individual exams.

As professors, we relish the easy engagement and on-task conversation of our students. And we all appreciated the faster feedback mechanism for student learning. Lower-division students begin to feel a sense of camaraderie and belonging. Upper-division students feel the safety net of working on difficult problems together.

Team testing is an easy way to implement a social instruction strategy and help build a community of learners within your classroom.

Why don’t you try it next year?

I've had many opportunities in my life. My parents worked very hard to give many of these to me. But many of them were also triggered by attending public schools, supported not just by local taxes but also by money distributed by the federal government. I've been working in a federal agency this year and I've been closer to the issues of broken budget processes in the federal government. I wanted to write about what some opportunities, supported by our larger, national community, meant to me growing up.

I transferred from a parochial school to a public school in the middle of fifth grade. It was disorienting and difficult, in part because my new classmates decided I was a freak who had skipped a grade and should be tormented. I found this out many, many years later and laughed that all of that ostracism was based on something that had never been true.

A saving grace for me came towards the end of that year when the orchestra teacher decided to let students interested in playing an instrument pick out a string instrument to try. The "normal" time to start learning an instrument in my public school was in fourth grade but I hadn't been there. Without that invitation, I wouldn't have known I could also have started in the summer after fifth grade. I remember being excited and eager, feeling small in the cramped room full of music, chairs, stands and instruments. I picked the cello. I remember reaching towards it and smiling at a fourth grade friend who also chose the cello. I loved the smooth, deeper sound and you didn't have to scrunch it under your neck to play it. Plus I could carry it, unlike the huge bass. They let me take a cello home and I started practicing and taking lessons that spring and into the summer.

My advantage? My mom's cousin Marlise and later Mrs. Cogswell had taught me how to read music and play the piano. I never got good enough to play left hand completely independently of right hand but that's okay, because piano wasn't my instrument. Cello was.

Sometime that next spring, there was an opening in the all-city orchestra for a cellist. As a sixth grader, it was the last year I could join. They asked me and I had the experience of being the last seat in the cello section in a large, orchestra room at a junior high, on Saturday mornings. Our elementary orchestra was small and didn't include the full symphony so this was my first experience of being surrounded by orchestra music in a resonant room. I learned to play Finlandia, a song I still love to hear, but it isn't the same as being surrounded by and contributing to the music as I was back in that orchestra.

In junior high, I mostly didn't speak. I read, I listened, I wrote, and didn't speak unless called on. But I had a place in orchestra. I was last (or maybe next-to-last) seat in 7th grade and first seat in 9th grade. I had this place, I had this music, I had this voice, because there was a music program. Much of my improvement was because mom insisted I practice and paid for weekly private lessons. Dad picked me up after lessons. I usually had to wait. Often the person whose lesson was after mine was picked up before I was, but if I had a book, I never really minded.

Clearly, my family put a lot into this, but without a music program in the public school, I would never have met a cello. I would never have experienced music as community, as a thing bigger than I could make on my own. Without support for musicians to come into my town, and whatever support they had as artists learning their craft, I wouldn't have had teachers and experiences seeing people in my community coming together to play music. The list of people in the local symphony orchestra who were doctors and professionals was long. But the list of kids in my junior high and high school orchestras whose families couldn't support their learning outside of school was even longer. Without these classmates, I wouldn't have had a community. Without funding, they wouldn't have had an instrument to play.

I'm grateful for the advantages I had, because of my family and local community, but I am also grateful that there was national recognition of the value of all kinds of learning in our school systems. As a Minnesota tax payer, I am happy that some percentage of my taxes goes to help support education in states like Montana, Mississipi and North Dakota, where students deserve the possibility of experiencing music, or sports, or art, whether or not their families and local communities can afford it on their own. My research, partly funded by taxpayer dollars, shows that the connections students have to their communities makes it easier to be engaged in their learning, and to persist in studying when things get hard. In many ways, music was the base of my learning community as I grew up. My family was a strong community, but for students who don't have that, activities like playing the cello in a junior high orchestra can be that community that keeps them learning throughout the day.

Being in Brazil always makes me want to write. I am more sensual in Brazil. I notice the tastes, I notice the breezes, I notice the flowers and the bugs, I notice the sounds. I slept badly last night because I didn't set an alarm clock. I kept checking to see if it was 5:45 yet, even though I really wanted to sleep through puja. At 5:42, I got up, did my morning shrine, and slowly made my way to the temple. Puja was beautiful and I'm glad I was there but every once in a while, I did the arithmetic. You know, it's really only 3:45am right now. You know, it's really only 4:25 right now.

I am sitting in a hot car, with the doors open, waiting for the friend that is supposed to drive me and the lama husband to the beach. We are wondering if we will have to figure out how to get there ourselves. A not-so-small part of me would be happy to stay here and spend the next four days in my apartment, but all my friends will be at the beach. Oh! Time to go!

Moving as slow as molasses is not in my psyche. It's not embedded in my body. My cello teacher never let me play The Swan, even though I loved it. I think a few more days of hot mugginess in DC might beat some sense of still into me. I move too quickly for this space and it is uncomfortable. Once I get where I am going, I have to sit and let the sweat drip off me until it's done.

I'm up late because I had a lovely nap this afternoon. I'm sunburnt, definitely on my shoulders and possibly on my head, something that has never happened before but the itchiness and no-hat while planting yesterday leads me to believe sunburn is likely.

I thought I had finished my planting, both at home (flowers, tomatoes and vegetables) and at the foodshelf garden but forgot about the gift of 6 lovely pepper plants. They'll go in when they are too big to be appealing to the rabbits.

My lilacs are blooming, a month later than was promised. It's so hot now (to me) that I don't think the blooms will last very long. Meanwhile, the scent fills my yard and wafts around my neighborhood.

Job things continue to fall into place but they aren't completely set yet. I feel very fortunate though.

I taught my favorite class in the universe this summer and it's all done but the grading. Writing intensive class = grading intensive class.

I just paid my membership for the year so figured I should post something. My life has been reduced to reacting to deadlines. I have a goal of being able to act with forethought and after reflection. It may need to be a longterm goal.

Winter is here and, although we lost a lot of trees on campus and around town, it's comforting to have this season blanket me in.

So, colleges and universities within my system are required to send me letters informing me of jobs I may be qualified for within the system. They are usually wildly inappropriate for my background and skills. Today I received two notices. One was for theatre (yes, spelled that way) adjunct faculty. The other was for associate vice president for student affairs and enrollment management.

I need to send out applications for real jobs. Although my representatives to the state legislature and US congress actually represent me (hurray!), the legislature in Minnesota flipped. I expect that it will be hard times for higher education for a while.

I'd like to connect but I don't want to write. I'd like to just sit near the people I love. And not have to talk. I'm still thinking about my deep attachment to words and sometimes, I just let go of them. And sometimes, I'm so full of words and typing and writing that my massage therapist scolds me when she gets to my arms.

But hello.

I just found out that you can get this little display that plugs into your car's computer and see pretty much all of the data that your car creates. I totally want one. But! My experience is that I am learning to drive with a lot more visual information right now and I'm not sure getting a cute little ScanGauge would be a good idea. I've driven for years, quite well thank you, using my hearing and touch to judge engine speed through noise and vibration. I haven't burned out my clutch from driving (just years) and I've never had a tachometer. Using auditory and physical input is a lot harder when you have a partially electric system.

It may be just as dangerous to wallow in all of the gorgeous data as I drive as it would be to send and receive text messages. At least it's related to driving.

Monday: I bought a new car. I now own a 2007 Civic Hybrid that I can't yet make have good gas mileage. I need to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Or I need to stop obsessing over the electronic estimate and calculate mileage based on filling up the gas tank and doing simple math.

Tuesday: My driver's side window won't roll up on its own. As soon as I have time, they get to fix it.

Wednesday: I harvested 3 lbs of tomatoes and a few little peppers and met Sr. Alice, who recently retired back to Minnesota after years of working with victims of torture. She has some amazing stories but we were too busy trying to quickly harvest before being eaten alive by mosquitoes.

Thursday: I submitted a big proposal. My arms were really tired from typing and clicking a lot this week.

Friday: I woke up swearing because I forgot to include something in the proposal that I should have. Hopefully it's good enough and they'll ask us for clarification questions.
I got a haircut and, even though it looks a little like something Pat Nixon would wear right now, I think it's going to be really cute. And it cost about a 1/4 of what my last haircut cost.
I also saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World tonight. I loved it. But then I like movies that make me feel like I'm reading a comic book.