Bridging the Divide Between Amateurs and Professionals

Benjamin Spock

For a while now, I've been writing about home education, online resources, and creative learning experiences. However, a few weeks ago, I saw a post in a Google+ forum that unnerved me—I haven't written anything on this blog since then.

Was the post hostile? offensive? obnoxious? No, it was polite and vaguely solicitous, written by a professional educator who mentioned she had a PhD as she wrote about her desire to instruct home educators. Although she had no experience with homeschooling, she was about to start homeschooling her daughter, and she was enthusiastic about the idea of helping other homeschoolers learn how to become better teachers.

I like to think I would have been open and receptive to this woman's kind and charitable intentions on a better day, but my immediate, less admirable reaction was anger and annoyance. "What makes her think she can start dishing out advice to home educators when she has no experience with homeschooling?" I thought to myself. I then became painfully aware of the hypocrisy in that question, because for quite some time I had been imagining that I (an amateur, home educator) might have something worthwhile to add to the ongoing conversation among professional educators about how to make teaching more effective.

Ye Without Training, Proceed No Further

Disheartened, I began to scrutinize everything I'd said or written about education while wondering how a professional educator might view my attempts to contribute. During this period of intense self-doubt, I began to question the entire premise of this blog and my tentative plans for working in partnership with faculty and students to create effective online content.

I was disillusioned even more when I read a post by respected author and consultant Tony Bates, who questioned the effectiveness of faculty who have received no training in teaching methods ("Online Learning, Faculty Development and Academic Freedom"). He writes:

" . . . [W]e don’t allow pilots to fly commercial aircraft without training, we place very high standards on doctors before they are allowed to practice medicine, and we wouldn’t tolerate engineers building roads, tunnels or bridges without very high levels of training. Then why is it OK for faculty to spend 40% or more of their time doing something for which they have had no or minimal training, and which for most students is the most important thing they are paying tuition fees for?" 

Now, of course, I don't imagine Dr. Bates was aiming his question directly at me—most likely, he wasn't thinking about home educators at all—but as I read his words I started to construct a rebuttal. I recalled the talented professors I've known who had become insightful instructors without explicit teacher training; the trained, certified teachers I've met who were uninspiring; and all the non-professional educators (like me) who have no formal training but who somehow do a decent job of nurturing learning in others.

Enter, the Power of Participation

All of these thoughts about what it means to be "qualified" were on my mind as I spent the past few months exploring articles and TED Talks about "cognitive surplus" (to use Clay Shirky's term) and the power of online participation. Initially, my focus was on preparing for upcoming classes (Thriving in the Digital Age), so I hadn't planned to connect what I was learning about collective intelligence to my concerns about being an amateur in a professional field (i.e., education). Fortunately, as I continued to read and browse, the connections were impossible to ignore.

One of the major concerns addressed by Clay Shirky, Howard Rheingold, Steven Johnson and others, is whether amateur participation is a good thing. "Won't all those lesser contributions to online content," the reasoning goes, "merely add to the already overwhelming volume of information without improving the overall quality?" Put another way, aren't we amateurs just adding to the noise and making it harder for people to find the truly useful content?

It's a valid question. What makes Jane Average think her blog is worth reading? Why should people regard a news report tweeted by the guy next door as noteworthy? Or, getting back to my original quandary: What makes a home educator think her experiences and curated content might be valuable to those who already have years of training and experience as professional educators?

Shirky et al argue that the benefits of expanded participation more than make up for the "noise." So, even if my naive reflections and nascent thoughts about education aren't revolutionary, perhaps what I share will help someone else make an important connection. As Matt Ridley explains in his TED Talk ("When Ideas Have Sex"):

"What's relevant to a society is how well people are communicating their ideas, and how well they're cooperating, not how clever the individuals are. [. . .] It's the interchange of ideas, the meeting and mating of ideas between them, that is causing technological progress, incrementally, bit by bit. [. . .] Because through the cloud, through crowd sourcing, through the bottom-up world that we've created, where not just the elites but everybody is able to have their ideas and make them meet and mate, we are surely accelerating the rate of innovation."

In Conclusion

I began this post with a photo of Dr. Spock intentionally, because he was a professional who advised parents to trust themselves. His book, Baby and Child Care, came out at a time when people seemed to have stopped believing in their own ability to be good parents.

"Before [Dr. Spock] came along, advice to parents was very didactic. He opened the whole area of empowered parenting. He gave parents choices and encouraged them to think things out for themselves" (T. Berry Brazelton, quoted in the New York Times).

Giving people choices and encouraging them to think for themselves is what I believe education is all about, too.

I don't care whether you're an amateur or a professional. If you're passionate about learning and helping others to learn, then we already have something in common. Let's exchange ideas and work towards making the world a better place. If any of my writings are useful to you as we learn and grow together, I hope you'll let me know.

Thank you.

Can a Class Be Too Small?

In his book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Malcolm Gladwell opens a can of worms when he asks the question, "Can a class be too small?" When it comes to the number of students in a classroom, most of us assume smaller is better. I know I do. The low student-to-teacher ratio makes sense to me intuitively: the fewer students a teacher has in his or her class, the more individualized attention each student would receive.

And yet, Gladwell argues that "The small class is potentially as difficult for a teacher to manage as the very large class size." To test his theory, Gladwell polled a large number of teachers in the United States and Canada. In David and Goliath, he quotes some of those teachers as they offer plausible explanations for why small class sizes are problematic:

• Interactions are too intense. While there are, presumably, fewer interactions in a small class for a teacher to manage, the interactions that do occur are more difficult to handle. "There is simply no way for the cantankerous kids to get away from one another." There's no place for students to hide. According to one teacher, "the students start acting 'like siblings in the backseat of a car.'" 
• Insufficient "critical mass" for discussions and group activities. As a middle school teacher explains, "students are awkward and self-conscious and anxious about seeming too smart. Getting them to engage . . . can be 'like pulling teeth.'" Also, as one teacher states, "It's difficult to play games . . . the  momentum just isn't there." 
• Lack of peers at a similar academic level within a class.  In a really small class, it is harder to find others who are just like you. There are no subgroups. Complains one teacher, "The chances that children are surrounded by a critical mass of other people like them start to get really low." As one teacher explains: "What you need [as a student] is to have people around you asking the same questions, wrestling with the same issues, and worrying about the same things as you are, so that you feel a little less isolated and a little more normal." 
• Lack of diversity in discussions. Fewer students means fewer (if any!) participants in a discussion. If the group is too small, "it's like they have a muzzle on." 

The magic number for class size, according to the teachers Gladwell polled, seems to be between 18 and 30 students. Since I have trouble understanding why a teacher would actually prefer to work with so many students at one time, I would like to contrast my experiences as a homeschooler with the experiences of the teachers Gladwell interviewed. The main question I'm attempting to answer is this:

Exactly what is it about certain settings—in particular, the various discussion-based classes that are taught by homeschooling parents like myself—that makes small class sizes desirable?  

(Although my response is necessarily based on my experiences as a home educator, I imagine there are many other situations where small class sizes are preferable, too.)

Building on TED Talks: A Course for High School Seniors

I have been co-teaching a class for homeschooled high school students for the past five years. The  course content has varied from one year to the next, but always our focus has been on learning about human society in different times and places, or what we broadly define as "social studies." So far, we have studied world history, world conflicts and international relations, political philosophy, U.S. history, and Early Modern European history.

Next year will be the last year for our group because most of the students (including my son) will be graduating and going on to college. For this reason, I would like to design for them an especially meaningful course, one that asks them to think seriously about their own place in the world, where they are now and where they are headed.

The rest of this post will provide a rough outline of what I have in mind (so far). I am interested in your feedback and suggestions on how I might make the course more interesting or worthwhile! In particular, what type of hands-on explorations, real-world experiences or "tinkering" might I be able to incorporate?

Not Close Enough: Using Google Hangouts for Group Discussions

As I type this, my son and his friends are using Skype to rehearse lines for their production of Shakespeare's "King Lear." This afternoon's practice was cancelled due to icy roads, and given how difficult it usually is to reschedule, an alternative was sought. While the kids can't do anything about the vagaries of New Hampshire weather, new technologies provide a reasonable alternative to meeting in person.

For those who are new to Skype and similar video-chat tools: video chat is faster than email, more personal than instant messaging, and cheaper than long-distance phone calls. Note: "video chat" refers to a one-on-one conversation; video conferencing is conducted with a group.

Google Hangouts uses a multi-user video chat room viewed through a browser. A few weeks ago, I made my first attempt at using Google Hangouts. According to the website, you can "video chat with up to nine friends." Perhaps I was naive, but I thought I would be able to see video images of all the people with whom I would be chatting (as this Google+ video implies). As it turns it, "your 'mileage' may vary."

Getting Started with Google Hangouts, April 2013

My goal was to hold a dynamic class discussion, where everyone would have a chance to talk and contribute, as they do during our usual face-to-face meetings. Of the seven people who participated in our Google Hangout, two were in the same building and five joined from remote locations. We quickly discovered that having two computers in close proximity distorted the audio significantly. To stop the annoying feedback and reverberations, we turned off the audio on one of the computers. That seemed to solve the problem.

Social Learning: Deciding to Host a Study Group

We all have a basic human need to connect with others. Spending too much time alone is detrimental to our emotional, spiritual and psychological well-being. We're all aware of this, and so we make an effort to get out and meet people. As parents, we arrange "play dates" for our children and take them to social gatherings. As homeschoolers, we actively pursue opportunities for meeting and keeping in touch with other homeschooling families. Usually, friendship and a sense of community are the main goals, but there's an added benefit: "social learning," or learning through collaboration and discussion within a group. Studies have shown that learning with others is good for our intellectual development. As John Seely Brown and Richard Adler write in their article, "Minds on Fire" (Educause, 2008):

". . . our understanding of content is socially constructed through conversations about that content and through grounded interactions, especially with others, around problems or actions. The focus is not so much on what we are learning but on how we are learning."

What does this mean to us, as educators? It means we need to remember that studying and socializing are not necessarily separate things to be done at separate times. Like chocolate and peanut butter, they go better together. It isn't enough for kids to get together to play after all their studies are done. They also need opportunities to learn with, and from, each other.

Social Learning: From Play Dates to Study Groups

"What about socialization?" is a question every homeschooler is asked, usually more than once. The question is so ubiquitous, books about homeschooling typically include a section devoted to the topic (as one example, see Addressing Homeschool Socialization in Homeschooling for Dummies). Homeschoolers soon learn to ask for clarification: Is the questioner asking whether their homeschooled children have any friends? Or are they worried that their children will become social misfits? By now, enough research has been done to put both of these questions to rest (see Socialization: A Great Reason Not to Go to School by Karl M. Bunday), and my own experience during the past two decades supports the prevailing research: homeschooled kids enjoy a reasonable social life and possess decent social skills.

By the time they are three or four years old, kids show an interest in making friends. So, when my kids reached that age, I found or formed playgroups and arranged "play dates" for them. As they got older, I drove them to social activities: dance, music and art classes; book groups; scout meetings; science workshops; homeschool group "field trips" and science fairs; special days at nature centers, science museums, and historical landmarks. There was rarely a shortage of things to do or people to meet, and socialization wasn't a big concern.

I noticed a change, though, at around the age of 10 or 12. There were three new developments:

1. My kids began to crave meaningful, lasting relationships with a group of their peers. It wasn't enough for them to participate in large group activities with kids of all ages. Although those activities were fun, opportunities to make friends and "really talk," one-on-one, tended to be limited. 
2. They became more selective about their friendships. Unlike younger children, who seem willing to play with almost anyone they meet, my preteens wanted to spend time with people who were special to them in one way or another. They needed to find their "tribe." As they connected with a handful of friends who shared similar interests and a passion for life and learning, they favored time with those friends over other opportunities for "socializing." 
3. They wanted company during the long hours their more in-depth studies now required. They wanted to engage in serious conversations about what they were studying, and it was more interesting to learn with friends.

It was at this point that a handful of parents and preteens got together to brainstorm ways to combine academics with socializing. Without ever having heard of "social learning," we helped our kids form various study groups (book clubs and poetry workshops; cooking, sewing, science, and history classes). Most groups met once a week. The format usually included an adult mentor (one of the parents or an outside tutor) and four to eight kids whose ages were within a few years of each other. When it came to participating, maturity level mattered more than chronological age. From one year to the next, the group would change slightly as a few kids moved, went back to school, or graduated, and new members joined.