Self-enhancement and imposter syndrome: neither is good for your teaching

Posted on April 27, 2012 by Peter Newbury

I read a terrific paper this week by Jennifer McCrickerd (Drake University) called, “Understanding and Reducing Faculty Reluctance to Improve Teaching.” In it, the author lists 6 reasons why some post-secondary (#highered) instructors are not interested in improving the way they teach:

  1. instructors’ self-identification as members of a discipline (sociologists, biologists, etc.) instead of as members of the teaching profession;
  2. emphasis early in instructors’ careers (graduate school, when working to attain jobs and then tenure) on research and publishing;
  3. instructors’ resistance to being told what to do;
  4. instructors’ unwillingness to sacrifice content delivery for better teaching;
  5. instructors’ momentum and no perception that current practices need to change;
  6. risk to sense of self involve with change by change by instructors

These are succinct descriptions of the anecdotes and grumblings I hear all the time, from instructors who have transformed to student-centered instruction, from instructors who see no need to switch away from traditional lectures and from my colleagues and peers in the teaching and learning community whose enable and support change.

What makes McCrickerd’s paper so good, in my opinion, is she connects the motivation behind these 6 reasons  to research in psychology. In particular, to Dweck’s work [1] on fixed- and mutable-mindsets (with fixed-mindset, you can either teach or you can’t, just like some people can do math and some can’t) and to Fischer’s work [2] on dynamic skill theory (which posits, “skill acquisition always includes drops in proficiency before progress in proficiency returns”).

I won’t go into all the details because McCrickerd’s paper is very nice — you should read it yourself. But there’s one facet that I want to examine because of how it relates to a blog post I recently read, “How I cured my imposter syndrome,” by Jacquelyn Gill (@jacquelyngill on Twitter). She writes,

I felt like I’d somehow fooled everyone into thinking I was qualified to get into graduate school, and couldn’t shake the anxiety that someone would ultimately figure out the error. When something good would happen– a grant, or an award– I subconsciously chalked it up to luck, rather than merit.

With that resonating resonating in my head (yes, resonating: I often feel imposter syndrome), I read that McCrickerd traces some instructors’ reluctance to “self-enhancement” which she describes as follows:

Most Westerners tend, when assessing our own abilities, character or behavior, to judge ourselves to be above average in ability. In particular, we view ourselves as crucial to the success of our accomplishments but when not successful, we attribute the lack of success to things other than our actual abilities.

The streams crossed and I scratched out a little table in the margins of the paper:

McCrickerd points out it is only through dissatisfaction that we change our behavior. An instructor with an overly-enhanced self sees no reason to change when something bad happens in class. “Not my fault they didn’t learn…”

And who else does a lot of teaching? Teaching assistants, that’s who. Graduate students with a raging case of imposter syndrome. When something goes wrong in their classes, “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t even be here in the first place…”

Yeah, that’s a real motivator.

So, what do we do about it.Again, McCrickerd has some excellent ideas:

[I]nstructors need to be understood to be learners with good psychological reasons for their choices and if different choices are going to be encouraged, these reasons must be addressed.

The delicate job of those tasked with helping to improve teaching and learning is to engage these reluctant instructors so they begin to look at learning objectively, then to demonstrate there are more effective ways to teach, to closely support their first attempts (which are likely to result in decrease in proficiency) and to continue to support incremental steps forward. It’s not always easy to start the process but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in my job, it’s the importance of making a connection and then earning the trust of the instructor.

Now, go read the McCrickerd paper. It’s really good.

 

References

[1] Dweck, C. 2000. Self-theories: Their roles in motivation, personality and development. New York, NY: Taylor and Francis Group.

This Scientific American article by Dweck is a nice introduction to fixed and mutable minds-sets

[2] Fischer, K., Z. Yan, & J. Stewart. 2003. Adult cognitive development: Dynamics in the developmental web. In Handbook of developmental psychology, ed. J. Valsiner & K. Connelly, 491-516. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. [pdf from gse.harvard.edu]

 Image “The Show Off. Part 2” by Sister72 on flicker (CC)

Posted in professional develpment, teaching | Tagged , | 5 Comments

What’s your (first) line?

Posted on April 5, 2012 by Peter Newbury

RMS Titanic (Wikimedia Commons)

A friend of mine is near the end of his Ph.D. He’s at the stage where he just wants to get the damn thing done. I asked if he’d written the opening line yet and he said no, he doesn’t care how it starts.

How sad, I thought.

My Ph.D. thesis is probably the most important document I’ve ever written. I’d love to write a book some day but for now, my thesis is the top of my list. When I wrote it, I cared that some parts of it were, well, beautiful, at least to me.  The first lines of my thesis are among the best I’ve written:

A planet, a star, or a galaxy drifts through space like an ocean liner on calm seas. A ray of light, however, is tossed like a leaf floating amongst the ripples.

My research and thesis was about gravitational lensing, how rays of light from extremely distant objects are bent and deflected as they pass through galaxy clusters, and how we can use the distorted images we observe, plus some surprisingly simple physics, to reconstruct the mass distributions of those intermediate galaxy clusters. If you’re interested, here’s a link to a previous life.

This got me thinking: do other people sweat these kinds of details, like the first line of their thesis, its title, the placement of the figures, the orphaned words…like I did?

Would you help me out? Would you drop a comment sharing the part of your thesis you’re still recall proudly and fondly. Was it the first lines, the title, the acknowledgement to your supervisor, the caption of Figure 5.3? Who knows, maybe we can show today’s thesis-writers that it’s okay to spend some precious moments making their theses beautiful.

Posted in communicating science | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Time zones are much older than you think

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Peter Newbury

Skype, facetime and a growing collection of virtual meeting tools like Blackboard Collaborate are making communication easier, cheaper and “almost like being there” with family, friends and colleagues around the World. Scheduling these conversations makes us acutely aware of the different time zones we live in. “PST”, “EDT”, “UT” are all becoming familiar parts of speech. If you think these time zones originated with the railroads of the British Empire, you’re half right. It was an Empire but not British. Try Roman.

Time zones, recall, divide the Earth in 24 strips, each 15 degrees of longitude wide, with local variations which follow political boundaries between countries. Everyone living within a particular strip sets their clocks to their strip’s specified time. The 24 strips, each differing by 1 hour, stay synchronized with the Sun: the Sun passes over the center of each strip (the prime meridian) at 12 noon every day (except when Daylight Saving Time is activated – then “solar noon” occurs at 1 pm local time.)

Time zones divide Earth into 24 one-hour wide strips. (Image: CIA, Wikimedia Commons)

The origin of the time zones is typically traced to British railroad time around 1847. It was difficult to coordinate the train schedule when each city or town along the railway followed their own, local time. A hypothetical train speeding eastward along the Equator at about 1700 km/h could keep up with the rotation of the Earth and it could pass through every station at 12 noon. Just imagine the confusion:

Sir Sanford Fleming by Barbie Jollota (CC, Wikimedia Commons)

“When does the train leave Paddington?”
“Noon, sir.”
“And when does it arrive here?”
“Noon, sir.”

The traditional story continues with Sandford Fleming leading the establishment of World-wide time zones in 1879. This, and a long list of accomplishments, led to his knighthood in 1897.

This traditional account of the origin of the time zones omits their true origin, nearly 2000 years earlier during the time of the Roman Empire.

Roman Ruins at Castelo Belmonte (Wikimedia Commons CC, image by kjfnjy on flickr)

We’re all familiar with accounts of how the Romans used signal fires to communicate.  Roman soldiers manned chains or networks of towers similar to this one at Castelo Belmonte, covering and uncovering the signal fire in a code that relayed information from one tower to the next. However, as pointed out by P. Southern in Signals versus Illumination on Roman Frontiers (1990), the English translation for these towers is “watchtower” or “signal tower”, not “fire tower.” Furthermore, this method of communication was hindered by poor weather. In looking for alternative forms of communication, G.H. Donaldson, in Signaling Communications and the Roman Imperial Army (1988) reports the existence of acoustical horns on some signal towers in Germany.

A Roman clamantia relaying a message verbally (Wikimedia Commons CC)

In fact, these mouthpieces were used by the Roman clamantia to verbally relay messages from location to location. One by one along the line, soldiers listen for the call from their neighbor and then call out that message in the direction of the next soldier. Though this requires soldiers, more to be more closely space than the watchtowers, this system of communication does not require line-of-sight, works in both the day and night, and still functions in rain and fog. A well-trained team of clamantia could relay messages at nearly the speed of sound.

Soldiers stationed on signal chains running primarily east-west were also tasked with relaying the time of day. Starting at noon on the most eastern end of the chain, one by one, westward along the line, soldiers cried out, “Meridiem!” or “Noon!”. This system of time-keeping proved to be remarkably accurate Italy, the heart of the Roman Empire.

The parallel of latitude at latitude θ has radius r = R cos θ (Diagram by me, CC)

This diagram of the Earth shows the Equator and one parallel of latitude in the Northern hemisphere. The radius of the parallel of latitude at latitude θ is r = R cos θ so the circumference of the Earth at latitude t is 2 π r = 2 π R cos θ or (40 000 cos θ) km since the circumference of the Earth is 40 000 km. In the vicinity of Rome at latitude 42 degrees N, the circumference is 40 000 cos (42) = 29 700 km. A hypothetical chain of clamantia strung out along this parallel of latitude, relaying messages westward at the speed of sound, 1225 km/h,  would transmit the “Meridiem!” message all the way around the Earth in

(29 700 km) /(1225 km/h) = 24.2 hours,

almost exactly tracking the daily motion of the Sun.  The establishment of “prime” clamantia every 1225 km along the east-west chains creates a sequence of time zones, each one hour wide.

As the Roman Empire fell, so did this system of time-keeping, only to be revived 2000 years later when, once again, society found it necessary to keep track of time beyond the outskirts of each village, town and city. And next time, don’t fool yourself with that modern tale of railroads and Sandford Fleming.

Posted in communicating science | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Is going over the answers negative reinforcement?

Posted on March 4, 2012 by Peter Newbury

My wife works with people with developmental delays, like autism and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder. Her niche is sexual health.  Imagine the hormones of a teenaged boy with the impulse-control of a 5-year-old. She often gets called in when some Grade 6’er starts whippin’ it out – either for the reaction he gets or because he doesn’t realize that’s not what typical Grade 6ers do.

The other day, we were talking about how to change people’s behaviours and she gave me an example of positive, no wait, negative, erm, reinforcement. I’m out of my depth when it comes to psychology so let me remind me (and you) about the difference, in overly-simplified terms I can get my head around. Oh, and when I’ve mentioned I’m writing this post, everyone I’ve spoken to gives a different definition of negative reinforcement, so it’s possible the one below is different than yours…

Positive reinforcement is something that’s added, typically by the person in authority – a parent, teacher, boss – after a person does something good. Like a high-5 by the coach after a good play, for example. That action strengthens the person’s motivation to repeat the behaviour.

Negative reinforcement strengths the unwanted behaviour. Your kid is having a fit because she doesn’t want to clean her room. Suppose you say, “Okay, I understand you don’t want to do it. Why don’t you watch TV for half an hour, calm down, and then clean your room….” It reinforces the undesired behaviour.

Every source I googled made sure to point out negative reinforcement is not the same as punishment. Getting grounded because you haven’t cleaned your room is not negative reinforcement.

(Geez, this is subtle. I can imagine some amazing clicker questions about positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement and punishment. [Update March 19, 2012: A couple of days after I wrote this post, Derek Bruff wrote about a clicker workshop he gave, including some pos/neg reinforcement clicker questions created by one of the participants.]  Okay, back to the conversation with my wife.)

Scene 1: Grade 6 classroom

There’s this boy, let’s call him John. John like to strip his clothes off at school. Like in the middle of class. His teacher intervenes. Frustrated with John’s continual stripping, the school decides they have no choice but to send John home when he strips, punishing him for his behaviour. But here’s the thing – John might have a developmental delay but he knows what’s what: he doesn’t like school. He strips so he can get sent home. In fact, John has started stripping on the school bus on the way to school so he doesn’t even have to go through the charade of going to class. Sending John home, which the staff feel is punishment for his behaviour, is, in fact, a reward for John. What they think is punishment is, in fact, negative reinforcement for John.

“So what are they supposed to do?” I asked her.

They shouldn’t send John home. And they shouldn’t praise him for keeping his clothes on. Instead, throughout the days when John is at school, the teachers should say, “We’re so glad you’re here with us today, John!” That’s positive reinforcement, something added to John’s school day that strengthens the good behaviour of keeping his clothes on.

What I’ve left out is what to do during the difficult transition time between he continually rips off his clothes and when he keeps them on. The teacher needs to intervene somehow. Calling my wife is a good start!

Scene 2: University physics lecture hall

The physics instructor has realized that his traditional, “all lecture, all the time” style of teaching does not promote learning like he wants.  He’s decided to make the class more student-centered. He gives 10-15 minute mini-lectures and then hands out worksheets which are supposed to guide and scaffold the students through the next stage of the development of the concept. The problem is, the students don’t do the worksheets. They just sit there, staring at the empty spaces on the page or desperately scribbling down formulas like I described here, biding their time, because they know he’ll be going over the answers in a few minutes. Sure enough, after a while, he goes over the answer to Question 1. The students madly scribble down his solution or, increasingly, grab their phones and start snapping pictures.

He’s not punishing them for not doing the worksheets (“Why have you not answered the questions!? You will all Remain. In. This. Classroom. Until I see some work!”) Rather, he’s reinforcing their behaviour of not doing the worksheet. They get what they want (the answers) and he thinks he’s helping. This seems to be an example of negative reinforcement, at least according to the definition I posited earlier.

“So what is he supposed to do?”

Good question.

Let’s look at this top down: What do the students need to get out of the activity? They need feedback on their answers in a timely manner. “Timely” because feedback a month later when they fail the exam is too late. One way to give them feedback is to go over the answers so they can check. That’s not the model used by the significant portion of the astronomy education community who use the Lecture Tutorials worksheets. Instructors do not go over the answers. Instead, the worksheets have built-in feedback and most instructors follow the worksheets with a sequence of peer instruction questions. If you get those questions correct, you know you’re okay on the worksheet. If you don’t get the questions correct, your peers will straighten you out. At the very least, you’ll know which concepts you didn’t get and can talk to the prof or TAs about them. More positive reinforcement comes when you ace those identical or “identical except some parameters changed” questions on the exam.

I’d love to create a sequence of clicker questions to follow the worksheets in this physics class but that’s not the simplest alternative because it requires the instructor to be agile with worksheets AND with peer instruction. One thing at a time…

What about this? The instructor watches the students doing the worksheet questions, monitoring their progress. If everyone is getting along just fine, don’t stop them. When it looks like students are stuck, and individual attention by the instructor or TA can’t handle the widespread confusion, intervene with a class-wide discussion. Don’t begin with, “I’m so happy you answered Questions 1 and 2 by yourselves!” (“John, I’m so glad you kept your pants on today!”) Instead, work together to get past the sticking point. Get the students to contribute to the solution, using the work they’ve already done to chip away at the problem. A pat on the back or a high-5 for a good tidbit of problem solving. The students are praised and rewarded for the work they’ve done, even if it’s not complete. That’s positive reinforcement for good behaviour, right?

(Unless that’s an example of “intermittent” negative reinforcement which, according to my wife, is even stronger than continuous.)

Yes, there will be difficult transition period, when students are not solving the problems and the instructor is not going over all the answers. Sorry, tough it out.

What if the students were never allowed to get into the habit of not doing the questions? What if, from Worksheet 1 on Day 1, this collaborative solution approach was the way it’s done. Ahh, now that would be something, wouldn’t it?

Alright, I’m not exactly sure where I’m at. I know the current method of going over the answers isn’t working. And that if we make changes, there will be a difficult period of transition. I like the collaborative problem solving approach — I’ve seen it happen in a physics class of about 30, where the agile instructor knew everyone’s name and kept track (in his head) of who hadn’t contributed yet, calling on them for input.

One other thing I know:  I should learn some more psychology.

Image: RaaksBeton2 by Dan Kamminga on flickr CC. In my mind, it shows people working together to reinforce what they’re building.

Posted in astro 101, clickers, physics, teaching | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

What does open communication mean to you?

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Peter Newbury

I’m struggling with an issue. I can’t decide, or maybe I’m afraid to admit, if I’m being naive. Or perhaps so inexperienced, I’m blinded by imposter syndrome, the feeling that you really don’t belong in the group of experts you find yourself in. I’m hoping that by the time I get to the end of this post, I’ll at least have a better understanding of my confusion.

In a few months, there will be a Gordon Research Conference (GRC)  that I’d like to go to. It’s called Astronomy’s Discoveries and Physics Education. The theme is finding ways to use the latest discoveries in astronomy (and astronomy education, knowing the invited speakers) to motivate and enhance undergraduate physics education.

I haven’t been to that many conferences – maybe a dozen over my academic career, often by the same organizations. With my limited experience, there are 2 aspects of the GRC that are new to me.

1. Attendance by application and selection

You have to apply and then be accepted to attend. Not the usual,  accepted to present a paper or hang a poster, but accepted to be there. Kind of like TED talks, I hear. I guess that ensures that the people attending are motivated to be there and, more importantly, are sufficiently knowledgeable about the subject that they can make meaningful contributions to the conference.

2. All communication is treated as private.

This is the one that’s got me confused. By accepting the invitation to attend the GRC, you agree to their “Disclaiming Statements” which, because you can’t link directly to them, I’ll reproduce here:

To encourage open communication, each member of a Conference agrees that any information presented at a Gordon Research Conference or Gordon Research Seminar, whether in a formal talk, poster session, or discussion, is a private communication from the individual making the contribution and is presented with the restriction that such information is not for public use. Prior to quoting or publishing any such information presented at a Conference in any publication, written or electronic, written approval of the contributing member must first be obtained. The audio or video recording of lectures by any means, the photography of slide or poster material, and printed or electronic quotes from papers, presentations and discussion at a Conference without written consent of the contributing member is prohibited. Scientific publications are not to be prepared as emanating from the Conferences. Authors are requested to omit references to the Conferences in any publication, written or electronic. These restrictions apply to each member of a Conference and are intended to cover social networks, blogs, tweets or any other publication, distribution, communication or sharing of information presented or discussed at the Conference. Guests are not permitted to attend the Conference lectures and discussion sessions. Each member of a Conference acknowledges and agrees to these restrictions when registration is accepted and as a condition of being permitted to attend a Conference. Although Gordon Research Conference staff will take reasonable steps to enforce the restrictions against recording and photographing Conference presentations, each member of a Conference assumes sole responsibility for the protection and preservation of any intellectual property rights in such member’s contributions to a Conference.

(Source: follow the Disclaiming Statements link on the right-side menu here.)

Buried in the middle of this statement is a restriction on communicating any information from the conference via “social networks, blogs, tweets or any other publication, distribution, communication or sharing of information.”

In other words, I will not be able to tweet from this conference. And that’s got me, well, disturbed.

It’s not that I’ll have to disconnect my iPhone from my hand and won’t be able to follow what @RealSomeFamousPerson had for #theirmeal. Fine, whatever. I can catch up with my followers and those I follow on Twitter each morning at breakfast or evening at the pub.

Rather, it’s that as I’ve attend more conference and benefited from people I follow who share their conference experiences, I’ve learned of 2 remarkable ways that Twitter enhances my conference experience and my professional development:

  1. Twitter creates a forum for people at the conference to share ideas and reactions to the speakers. This “back channel” connects people around the room and in different parallel sessions.
  2. Twitter invites the outside community, the people not at the conference, to be a part of what’s happening there. In fact, and this is the heart of my confusion with the GRC policy, I benefit so much from following colleagues who tweet and blog their conference experiences, I feel an obligation to share the inspiration, ideas and resources that I am privileged to gather in person.

I posed this dilemma on Twitter and received replies from John Burk (@occam98), Chris Goedde (@chrisgoedde), Brian Utter (@quantumtweep), Phillip Cook (@cookp) and Joss Ives (@jossives) that helped me begin to understand the policy. Both Chris and Joss suggested that policy allows people to speak more freely and more easily share their latest ideas and results, without the fear of being scooped. I think that’s what the opening line of the Disclaiming Statement is all about: “To encourage open communication…” I get that, especially if the GRC about breaking research, which many GRC’s are. If you’ve on the verge of discovering a better way to assay your samples or process your data or distill your protein, and want feedback from your peers, then you want to keep that communication private. Phillip suggests this is pretty common with pre-published research.

I’m having a hard time applying this model to education. I suppose I’ll come away from the conference a better science education practitioner, which should cascade to my colleagues and their students. But I don’t feel like I’m doing this for me. I don’t have that killer instinct that might be necessary for academics (see “imposter syndrome”.) In my heart, I do what I do for the students (see “naive”.) Obviously I’m benefiting from this job and salary and perks (like attending conferences) but I continually filter my activities through, “Who will benefit from this?” If the answer isn’t students or their instructors, I think twice. In my mind, I can think of no better way to pique the interest and boost the enthusiasm of science educators than to share the latest discoveries, approaches and practices from the experts in the field.

Hmm, all this writing has helped. I won’t not go to the GRC because of this policy. A colleague who has an important presentation at this GRC has offered to introduce me to the organizer, Charlie Holbrow, so we can talk about the origin of the policy and the breadth of the restrictions it imposes. In the end, perhaps I’ll just have to turn off my phone. But that doesn’t seem like “encouraging open communication” to me.

Have you attended a GRC? Maybe these restrictions are relaxed or ignored. What about other professional events where communication with the outside world is restricted – what have you done before, during or after those? Drop a comment below if you have any thoughts, thanks.

Image: Communications Artwork by thomasfrank09 on flickr CC

Posted in astro 101, communicating science, physics, social media, teaching | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments