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The Didactron
Educators' Lives in a High-Tech Teaching-Learning Space ©
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11. Devoid of Construct
"There are no mice; there are no rats being studied. 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 in a meeting two years earlier, how little he had changed his view, and how pleased he was that Bob had applied for 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 tension-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 become part of the team. 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. We need to use all of the epistemological bases and converge of the probable truth for each student of the best ways at a point of time to cause lasting change in their knowledge or mental processes. We can aid in changing physical processes like dance and sports or sewing and similar activities but we concentrate on the mental dimensions. We cannot gain enough samples, control enough variables, accommodate enough changing values to be able to achieve the perceived demands of the experimenters' scientific method. We conduct 'an educational unit' of a lecture, a demonstration, a set of images. We do so to change behavior and add to that 'at reasonable costs.' In the past we have evaluated the unit by thoughtful reflection, quizz grades, comments by observers (rarely), and asking student's opinions. A negative reaction toward the unit, even a slight one, is often sufficient to cause an unit (even a very effective one) to be discarded and replaced by another, often creative unit.
Strong tests of effectiveness are needed. Those units that are tedious to prepare or require more-than-average logistical arrangements often are scrapped first. Here in the Didactron 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 applied to students, and, like fertilizer, 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 we have made adjustments, and then add it to our resource of recorded 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 sensed 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 people 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 staff of five people. 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 of the five people within a year and set them on course.
Bob had locked on to health as the fundamental core of education for years. It had 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 Didactron graduate -- 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. Extra years with health would count.
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. Teachers cannot, need-not be taught? 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 to be formed 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 tapes appeared in The Shop the next 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 call out 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 of all male adolescents.
Bob had trouble with some of his staff because 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 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. 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 named J-time for joint production, the time for the convergence of research and teaching. He was tired of debating the inefficiencies of joint teaching and research among faculty. Faculty did neither with perfection and conveniently excused incompetence in one by claiming excessive time or budget demands by the other. The claimed advantages of diversifying, doing both teaching and research, were hard to manifest; they were another university legend.
Teaching expertise was poorly rewarded in a system in which promotions and salaries were influenced primarily by committees of researchers based on readily-measured units, i.e., publications about studies conducted. Performance trudged along after the real or reported rewards offered. There were a few exceptional people who could do both well, thus in the house of logic, illogically confirming the rule that doing both teaching and research is best. Administrators, manipulators of budgets, gained added flexibility by mixing research and teaching portions of salaries for individuals. Accountants long ago stopped looking past the ivy of these walls. As long as the mixing of roles reduced efficiency by as much as one-half of a percent, the practice was fair game for Bob. The ends, the behaviors of students who needed help or challenges, were the justifications for the uncommon means.
Bob Karst was also a Machiavellian.
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Last revision January, 2008.