30-Day Challenge – Day 21 – Crazy Teaching Practices

trust your crazy ideasIlya Pozin, founder of Open Me and Ciplex, and a columnist for Inc, Forbes and LinkedIn, had an article  in LinkedIn called “15 Crazy Best Practices That Really Work.”

Ilya noted that for entrepreneurs, conventional wisdom does not always work, especially in the disruptive market today.  He posted 15 “crazy ideas” from fellow entrepreneurs who “….dared to blaze their own path.”

I thought it might be interesting for today’s 30-Day Challenge question to look at his ideas through the lens of teaching.  After all, our students are leaving higher education and graduating into a world where yesterday’s conventional wisdom would be suspect.

Day 21 – What “crazy” teaching practices might actually better prepare our students for the digital world in which they will live and work?

Ilya’s Crazy Ideas:

1.  Being Messy With Our Employees

Seth Talbott suggested that being involved with employees is messy but worth it.  By involved, he meant building relationships with meaningful connections.  In today’s digital environment, we need to stop being afraid of building social network connections with our students…and facilitate their building of their own learning and professional networks.  See number 2.

2.  Valuing Our Network

Darrah Brustein said that “your network is your net worth.”  My comments to number 1 apply here as well…our role as faculty now involves helping our students cultivate their networks.  One way to do that is modelling networked behavior ourselves.

3.  Making Friends, Not Clients

Vinny Antonio noted that the clear driving factor for success was word-of-mouth advertising, so it was necessary to actually create a relationship with clients and work towards their success.  “Clients” is a loaded word in education…but the intent is spot on.  Parker Palmer, in The Courage To Teach, discussed how teaching is as much about the heart as it is about the content.  Palmer states that:

“…teachers possess the power to create conditions that can help students learn a great deal – or keep them from learning much at all.  Teaching is the intentional act of creating those conditions, and good teaching requires that we understand the inner sources of both the intent and the act.”

4. Obsessing Over Data Analysis

Danny Boice discussed data-driven decisions.  We are just entering the age of learning analytics … yet few of us take advantage of the limited data we now have.  Do you check the analytics in your learning management system to see if any students are not engaged?  What do you do with the data when you have it?  We need to obsess more ourselves!

5.  Being Unforgettable

Dustin Lee’s company takes online learning in a unique direction, offering, in his words, well-crafted courses that are “…insanely fun as well.”  It is a great lesson for those of us in pubic education…and one we take seriously at VCU.  Online@VCU notes:

Focused on distinctiveness, high engagement, and deeper learning, VCU offers quality online programs and courses available wherever you are.

6.  Asking Provocative Questions

Erica Dhawan suggested that tough conversations and productive inquiry lead to success.  That is equally true in the classroom…doubly so if the students are asking the questions!  Enoch Hale’s 30-Day Challenge has this premise at its core.

7.  Building a Culture around Hiring

Matt Mickiewicz noted that recruiting talent can determine success or failure for a company.  We do not “recruit” our students…but a few “crazy” course trailers might attract talent to your courses.

8.  Doing One Thing Well

Ryan Buckley’s company focuses on medium-length blog posts…and that focus has made them successful.  This one is difficult to translate into teaching (other than doing teaching well…but that is a cop out).  So I might spin this to suggest that each course have an opportunity for students to do one thing well…as a capstone project for the course.  After all, is it not our job to help students finish each course with success?

9.  Drinking Our Own Kool-Aid

John Hall is in the influence business…and they leverage their own service to grow their business.  We are in the learning business, and our passion for learning should be evident to our students…and contagious.

10.  Controlling Every Step

Joshua Waldron suggested that one of the keys to his company’s success was to manufacture everything in house.  “…Be lean, be nimble, and don’t let outside vendors influence your bottom line.”  In teaching and learning, I am not for “controlling”…but I am for “scaffolding”…being adaptive so that you can support every student in their learning journey.

11. Documenting the Process

Joe Apfelbaum noted that “…It’s vital to know what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and the step-by-step recipe you’re working with on any project.”  Many of us are in research, so applying the scientific method to our teaching for improvement should be natural.  Given the changes occurring in higher education, the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is a growing opportunity.  So is the journaling that can occur through blogs.  We each have so much we can offer so that we can learn from each other.

12.  Employing Energy and Persistence

Kayvon Olomi suggested that you can do anything you put your mind to.  Are our courses designed to employ (and build) energy and scaffolded to build time on task (persistence) into the learning processes?

13.  Minimizing Distracting Conversations

Jordan Fliegel noted that focus is critical to success.  I think it is an outdated concept for faculty to complain about the use of digital devices in classes “because students will just be on Facebook.”  If students are bored and on Facebook, that may be a problem of motivation and focus rather than distraction.  Get students excited about learning…and the Facebook “problem” becomes less of a problem!

14.  Split-Testing Ideas

Nicolas Gremion suggested that rather than debating what will work, take the top ideas and split-test them.  What comes to mind in a classroom is the Think-Pair-Share technique to promote higher level thinking.  This adds engagement and focus to class sessions…and potentially surfaces misconceptions.

Gone crazy15.  Valuing the Customer

Wade Foster noted that: “Above all, we serve the customer, and we do our best to give them the tools they need to get their jobs done.”  One can debate whether students are our customers or whether our customers are employees or society itself … but in any case, we need to equip our students for success in a digital world.  We also can value what they bring to the class or program.

Crazy, right?  Thoughts?

{Graphic: Jessica Harvey, A.J. Aalto}

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2 thoughts on “30-Day Challenge – Day 21 – Crazy Teaching Practices

  1. Ilya’s “crazy” ideas sound fairly standard and relatively reasonable.

    I might suggest “teacher/textbook as unreliable narrator” in the counter intuitive teaching practices category. Imagine what differing degrees of attention that would necessitate and how it would force a critical lens on everything in the course.

  2. Number 1 has been a hot topic in Inc tweets in the last few weeks. It sure makes me feel better. One of my mentor teachers always justified a messy desk by saying he was to busy teaching to organize his desk.

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