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The Didactron
Educators' Fiction
Life in a High-Tech Teaching-Learning Space
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"There are no mice; there are no rats. There are only humans and they are unique. There is no rational basis for continuing research in the Didactron as educational research is conducted around the world. I don't deny the benefits from some of that research, but it is a mine field with a few scattered flowers. There is beauty there but the costs of picking it in relevant time are now out of the question."
Chance Carrow was trying to recruit Bob Karst. He remembered what he had said two years earlier, how little he had changed his view, and how pleased he was that Bob had taken the job. Hiring is an electricity. It is two forces, plus and minus; one that wants something done, the other worried about what that is exactly, whether it will change, and whether it can be done. The sparks flew, for they both knew there was a gap -- both in concept and known methods. Chance needed a power -- a demonstrated "name," someone who would be recognized because of prior work, but someone who would adopt the program and concept of the Didactron and the new ground it was breaking and do team work. It was an almost impossible requirement: an independent, successful, classical researcher who would be willing to do team work in a game with unwritten rules and no competitors. The high salary had helped, but Chance knew from experience that the person he wanted would not ask that question. Perhaps they would refuse if it was not sufficient, but salary would not have an influence. It was a conditional; concepts drove the people of the Didactron.
"I'm seeking a leader to develop fully our concept of converging guidance. It is equivalent to the self-adaptive role of the human body. It is an alternative to the scientific method that now has education in its vice.
"I hardly want to hear the word research anymore, for it is so confused and confusing that it is almost irrelevant to the tasks we now face -- educating humans.
"converging guidance is based in epistemology. Here in the Didactron we have gone back as far as possible to the fundamental element of philosophy -- the question of 'how we know' and the question we have within the Didactron is: how do we know we are conducting optimal education? It is a sneaky question, much more difficult than 'what is an optimal education?' or worse,' how do we educate?'
"The strategy is to create an educational guidance system that causes an individual or small group to converge dynamically on an objective. This is very far removed from the conventions taught in classes on experimental design. The scientific method is inappropriate for education. 'The method' is a combination of induction and deduction with emphasis on induction. Not bad, or to be discarded, they have absorbed most of the research funds and efforts of the educational community. From induction we pass through the experiment and draw a conclusion. We round the corners on the conclusion and formulate a general idea -- something we think we ought to be able to apply to most students. The crazy hook is that we take a general concept or an analogy and use it to go after a student's problem or to solve a class problem.
"The new 'scientific method' of the Didactron is converging guidance. It is inward focused for outward use. It is a living dialectic; it is applied epistemology; it is a knowledge system."
Bob noticed that in some moments of enthusiasm Chance seemed to surround an idea with words and phrases. He would learn later that there was nothing flat about his mind. It was a diamond-strewn, rolling topography…multi-dimensional.
"Take the epistemological base of authority for example," he said, turning a hall corner. To the side three students sat in an alcove at a triangular table in serious conversation. Notes and portable computer suggested their topic.
"Authority is our base of knowledge for most things important like how to crack eggs and what a heaping spoonful means and whether to use heat or cold after twisting your ankle. By volume, it is the most used; it has great survival value. We cannot re-experiment and re-prove all phenomena! We take a world of stuff on authority. Some is stuff; some is pure genetic information, inherited, but I don't know how much. Nevertheless, we need to look carefully at capture techniques for the hundreds of life experiments done by thoughtful teachers. We must not trashheap this human experience. The retired teachers are a brilliant cadre, a resource base of unlimited potential. Getting the kernel is the job. We need a conceptual 'machine' that is as effective as a pecan cleaner, something to remove the shell and the bitterness. The trick is in the way you ask the questions, allow experienced people to express probable responses, allow them to assign likely maximum change that can be expected, allow them to specify student types or subgroups, and to allow them to estimate trends, likely changes in students over time. They know about receptivity or I like to call it vulnerability to certain ideas. They can specify the age or the condition when an idea was shot at them."
It was as if Chance had been the research director somewhere else. Bob feared he was being hired as a technician and then called an administrator. It was as if Chance knew his thoughts, for he was not talking, only walking along looking at the facilities and being dazzled, not by them as most people were, but by the role for him painted by Chance.
"I need someone here who is a working, thinking, active leader. This is part of a university and you will be faculty, and you will be hired as faculty, but I will have no truck with concepts like tenure or the entropy of academic freedom. You'll gain tenure as soon as we can possibly get it, but I'll assure you I'll un-tenure you so rapidly you'll not notice you have it when you slow down or fail to make this place produce. This is not some haven but a hell where real people in real trouble seek and must be given real answers and new processes, and adaptive methods to achieve their humanness."
They walked down a long hall, silent for a change. Chance was worried about the influence of his un-tenure statement, but then decided that if Bob took it poorly, he probably didn't want him. Bob walked along, wondering whether to run away or lock arms with Chance and stride bravely to the battlefield.
They came to a glass-windowed door to a room where students watched television monitors that demonstrated perfect lab technique. They worked at lab benches, one monitor giving them instructions, the other showing techniques. Headphones gave them verbal instructions. Floor buttons advanced the 'pages' or sections of the instruction. Data from experiments were entered at the desk. Graphs and plots were instantly available. Two students leaned over a terminal screen, one patting the back of the other, one grinning at the beauty of her colorful just-plotted three-dimensional curve of a chemical reaction.
"Look at that, Bob. Look at that! My god, that is feedback!"
They walked a few paces, grinning at the observation. Even though such events were no longer very rare, these two old-timers, these of the before-Didactron era, found them moments of purest joy. Chance had cried on several occasions when he had seen such events. He told no one, for he was mindful of how some people still react to 'emotional instability.'
"Those students are engaged in a mix of sensory, inductive, and deductive knowledge development. They don't know it, but they are loosely speaking, discovering. They are, however, picking flowers. They do not know what to do with what they have learned. They have no basket; they have no sweetie to whom to present their collection; the bunch of flowers may wither.
"The Didactron deal is that you join us and develop a kind of radical platform that says 'how do we know?' and answers it with 'we can't, ever' and then with 'we shall converge on truth' and to 'how?' You will answer epistemologically, using the epistemological bases of (1) induction, (2) deduction, (3) authority, (4) probabilism, (5) pragmatism, (6) sensory, (7) coherence, (8) place, and (9) contextual. None of these yields up truth. None is sufficient. Truth is eel-like; it must be grasped in several ways at once or it may escape…after biting you.
"The reasons may not be clear. You have probably said and heard often that people are unique. Here we take that seriously. We see at least 30 solid identifiable factors about each student. These can be combined in any sequence. The permutations of these 30 factors is 2.6 x 1032. That's a lot! There are only 2.6 x 106 people in the U.S.! Besides there are more than 30 factors. To ignore this ability to name so many possible unique combinations of identifiable factors is to negate or ignore the concepts of population upon which are based conventional statistics. We put 100 mice in cages assuming they are all alike. The Slight differences we group under the word variance. For people we dare not group them so…or at lease we ought not do so. The are not alike. We know at the outset that there are more differences between individuals than there could possibly be between the treatment of an experiment and the no-treatment condition. So it is known in most cases before any study is done that no conclusions can be reached…because the results will be too variable.
"We have a situation in which we must combine several models -- the clinical model of the doctor, the hospital teaching model, the touch for the apprentice, and a new integrative and preservative model. These models are the routes of converging. They are the manifestations of these epistemological bases I keep mentioning.
"There are certain things that cannot be investigated with the classic, inductive, treatments-and-controls models of research. Rabies is an example. No one will allow that model to be used. All infected people die! We cannot do classical research on rabies! We must take a clinical approach to that disease and we need to take a similar approach in education. We joke about 'take two aspirin and call me tomorrow,' but this is the essence of diagnosis, then prescription, and then feedback. It allows the uncertainty of the disease, matched with the uncertainty of the past and present state of the patient to be matched with the uncertainty of limited-but-accumulating knowledge of the medicine. But in a constructive, discovering flow. I call it heuristic convergence. I expect that convergence here…and soon.
" In the Didactron we have three spaces for teaching teachers. All are adjacent to teaching spaces, all are behind one-way glass, all have a light signaling to students when observers are present (which will be much of the time). The idea is to avoid distractions from the observers but to prevent any notion or concerns about 'spying' or invasion of privacy. There is in all classroom situations the watchful teacher or the watchful visitor…typically some administrator or teacher colleague. The full attention of the teacher on the students is needed; the distraction, even a small one, can quash the the peak of the teaching moment. Students have put up with this for years. There is no difference in this situation. Indiscriminate use of these observation areas is prohibited.
"In these places is where some of the clinical models can be worked out. What goes on in them is straight forward. A teacher teaches teachers about a teacher. "There (pointing) she is gesturing too much." "There, note that the attention index on the screen is declining and he sensed it and immediately changed his position in the room. "He has not gotten the necessary response and, if true to form, he will tell a little story about how he once used the concept. He's doing it now!"
"Look at the index! There, ladies and gentlemen is what you must do also. Note, he never let the attention index get below 20 before making enough changes in his presentation to test a substantial increase. Compare that tomorrow when we watch Dr. Sabinoff."
Chance walked with Bob and discussed the spaces as he came to them.
"These are research spaces and teacher teaching spaces. They are equipped with sensory devices that provide real time feedback from the students to the teacher as well as to the students. All teachers expect to be observed most of the time and that influences their daily performances. It is a routine part of life here. They teach their subjects and take great pride in knowing they are helping improve other teachers. They are continually trying new teaching methods and, if you take this job, you will be asked along with your research teams to observe and evaluate particular presentations on appointed days. We do this because a teacher will usually be so busy with their 'newness' that they will not be able to monitor the class as effectively later. This is the essence of the new research. In so many situations a teacher just cannot or will not evaluate a new device, a demonstration, or even a new part to a lecture. An idle comment by a student is often sufficient to cause an exercise to be discarded. Those that are tedious to prepare or require more-than-average logistical arrangements often are scrapped first. Here we have the ability to observe, evaluate, suggest improvements, and capture in high-quality video the new teaching unit. Then the captured unit becomes a relatively uniform 'treatment' that can be presented to individuals or classes and evaluated. Usually complex lab set ups showing chemical processes fit nicely such use. A wonderful demonstration, no matter how wonderful, cannot be done for every class if it costs $500. We capture it after adjustments, and then add it to our resource of potential treatments."
"I'm using 'treatments' in the statistical sense. Do not get the idea that we have, or that I want to encourage, a medical model of educational research. There are elements of it. It only makes some discussions easier when I use it as an analogy."
Bob had listened to Chance Carrow for two days. He had caught the ideas, asked polite and insightful questions, nodded at the right places, and let him have his full say. There was a remarkable union in the interview. He wanted the job, partially because he liked the concept, but mostly because he senses Chance's conviction and dynamism. He was a person who would walk the plank and convince you it was safe to follow. Bob knew what was happening. It was a textbook case; there was no rationality or objectivity to the situation; he could not resist. He would work for Chance. He joined the group and the cause.
Several months later he was yanked away by Chance from some faltering and naive efforts at comparative education. It seemed reasonable (the classroom model) to get a historical running start and find out why all approaches fail. There being no paragon, no accepted way, there was left the options of marching along in place, or picking one or several and "replicating the grand experiment."
Of course none could be replicated; everything has changed; no measures were made of the context. There was a sample size of one. Failure, or success, proves nothing in any formal sense of inductive proof. Educational research, he concluded, was a collection of anecdotes.
His colleagues looked to him for direction and, with Chance, the direction could have been little other than provided by the general system of general systems theory. He hired follow researchers who would and could contribute within the context he had outlined. There was great room for creativity and expression but only within the guidelines and structure outlined. He had long since laid aside the paradox of freedom and constraints. Those are most free who know their bounds. These bounds he provided, with more stimulation for what could be done within them than several people could master in their life times. Each was part of a designed system. The system context was the set of propositions:
Bob had hired a research staff of 5. Each had assigned to them a secretary, 5 graduate research fellowships, and two staff programmers. Each was responsible for a system component: (l) objectives, (2) inputs, (3) processor, (4) feedback, and (5) feedforward.
The objectives groups was most difficult to select but he achieved staffing in a year and set them on course:
Bob had locked on to health as the fundamental core of education for years. It has served him very well for the kind of long-term balance of stress and recovery, of ability to work and play, of mental as well as bodily well-being were highly integrative. It had turned out to be useful but not sufficient as a basis for a life-time of learning in a modern society. He relinquished the analogy, but reluctantly. It kept recurring, but separating personal health, necessary surgery, genetic limits, and public health was inordinately complex. As other analogies, the health analogy failed for him. It was better to drop the analogy and seek a strong basis for his teams. His was now a system of people, spaces, and equipment -- all involved with seeking to improve the cost effectiveness of the Didactron. The units of accomplishments were expressed attitudes and expressions of perceived accomplishments, measured or certified performance. An overall performance measure for the Didactrongraduate -- extra years of life beyond expected life was a seldom-discussed criterion but one he believed to be highly integrative of economic, health, and social wellbeing. It was a statistic, one that did not deny the few sacrificing heroes or the martyrs. It was watched; the hypothesis was that the Didactron graduates would live long, full, diverse, eventful, contributing, supportive lives.
Bob had observed that most educators learned to teach "on the job." What a waste of student time! and of his time! and what a judgement of the teacher-education system. He knew that the observation and teacher teaching spaces of the Didactron could be very helpful. His major hypothesis was that a set of units could be devised to have teachers confront 90 percent of the problems that the average teacher confronts in the first three years of teaching. There is no excuse in letting these occur by chance; in letting each person problem-solve over and over-- often poorly -- when there are clearly demonstrated solutions used in oft-repeated situations and all have various degrees of success. Why use the low-success options?! Like medical students in emergency situations, teacher should have at least two excellent, likely-to-work, pre-formed solutions for each typical problem. With more time and in unique situations, creative efforts will be useful. Teachers could be supported by options for the 50 most likely problems or events that disrupt teaching or learning in a class. His assumption was that excessively large classes would continue and that major improvements can and must be made to overcome the erosive forces of the typical local situation. He carefully edited TV tapes,used student actors, used compress speech to surround each situation, and acted out 5 solutions in rank order. He repeated the situations and listed the two top solutions as a summary. The change in teaching quality scores for student-teachers from the Didactron working in local schools doubled in one year.
The secondary feedback he began creating was for graduates to write brief scripts for problems they encountered that had not been presented to them in school and then how they effectively solved them. This had the effect of causing graduates to continue study of their methods, to feel good about contributing to future students, to gain recognition for that contribution, and to add to the knowledge base of the Didactron unit.Because each situation was key-word related, a teacher could interrogate the Didactron system and receive 10 to 20 units fairly specifically related to his or her problem. While many were disciplinary or related to parent-teacher situations, units began to accumulate on teacher problem solving, relevance of historical events, poetry interpretation, and chemical action.
Once a matter of grave concern about storage and organization, the units in the Didactron were all stored on random-access devices. Thus where they were located was no longer relevant (except for their security). . Where they were, conceptually, remained a problem, but one solved by key words and codes. It was just as easy to callout of storage Thomas Jefferson for presentations on architecture, as for units on presidents, or for units on land use planning. The same was true for a unit on aggressive behavior, body language, parental roots of avoidance behavior, or how to handle aggression in a class with all male adolescents.
Bob had trouble with some of his staff for they had roots deep in authority and analogy.There were people brought up on fuzzy phrases like "self actualization," "cognitive dissonance," "personality adjustment," and "socialization." He had selected against them, but the ideas kept emerging, like certain subdominant genetic traits that will never go away. He insisted that past research in education was largely devoid of construct. He imposed a construct…and that was that! He really didn't say it that way, but if ever pushed because he has too autocratic or because he was too narrow and would not let a researcher deviate down some delightfully interesting pathways, he would raise 20 unanswered questions he felt to be of immediate importance in the domain of the inquisitor. The list tended to discourage their fanciful and usually unproductive ventures into other areas before mastering their own. He rememberted well and often discussed with reluctant staff how he had found it much easier to see how someone else should be doing their job than to improve the home territory. He suspected others were similarly afflicted. He never really said no to the excursions; he just lured them back to the center of their territory with juicy questions.
The problem with which he wrestled most was whether there was a unifying theory of education. Could it be devised by his research group? He argued over whether to…and how much to…spend time on developing theory or solving problems, over constructs or issues, over the relations and meaning of learning, self-teaching, and teaching. He could not resolve whether there was an issue in the haze of words like "problem-solving" or "understanding." While he wrestled, he had achieved a tentative stability. Education was much too big a word symbol. It was so big as to be meaningless. He had a model, one among many, but it was consistent with most of those of Didactron. It was of the system, a kind of pyramid structure, with objectives, inputs, processes, feedback, and feedforward scattered around the corners.
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Secretly, he sought to recruit every teacher into his group and to have each of his staff spend about 10 percent of their time in active teaching or developing teaching units.
The split between researcher and practitioner was not real and was caused more by accountants and like-minded administrators than the educators. The budgeting "slot" for a person is an idea only big enough for accountants, not humans. Ethical people within present accounting structures and categories either do research or teach; they cannot do both without lying in filling in some work-time report; or feeling that they are stealing time and money from some budgeted activity. Since he had been unsuccessful in convincing any accountants to change, he was going to seek another time-category, one that was a named"J-time for joint production, the time for the convergence of research and teaching. In the mean time he was going to help people adjust their ethics. The separations of research and teaching because of budgetary boundaries were intolerable. As long they reduced efficiency by as much as one-half of a percent they were fair game. He was also going to trade researcher time even-up for teacher time, and tell no one. The ends, the students who needed help, were the justification for the unacceptable means.
Bob Karst was also a Machiavellian.
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