Judgment – The Rhetorical WHY

The Other A.I.

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The academic community – a community to which I have belonged for decades – trades in ideas, and thinking is our currency-in-trade.

Throughout my teaching career, as I’ve offered elsewhere, I’ve devoted my practice to helping people make thinking a habit:

Thinking is the value in our ideas, and since we’re accountable by means of personal responsibility to defend these, there’s our incentive for thinking to be informed by knowledge, practised with discipline, and weighed by healthy scepticism. Discussing and testing ideas is the purview of thinking, and as such, thinking’s an invaluable skill.

Along the way, as our thinking skills mature, we yet retain at our core something personalised and uniquely individual: let’s call this integrity, which literally derives from roots that combine to mean something “untouched,” i.e. something “pure.” As puzzle pieces integrate to form a whole picture, so we might imagine all the pieces that form 'ourselves'. Full integrity finds every piece contributing, no piece erroneous or superfluous although, unlike puzzle pieces, ours we are able to enhance and improve. Distinct from “integrity the buzzword,” integrity is the character and experience to cope, or else not cope, with real consequences. Integrity is how we spot adversity, and it fuels our will to leave comfort zones in order to measure how much we’ve grown.

As a coach since 1990 and a teacher since 1999, I’ve long felt my responsibility, on behalf of people, to help players and students find ways to grow and contribute in accordance with their own integrity.

Fuel for this growth includes the earnest effort we expend in the academic setting to develop and explore imaginative, inventive, even original ideas, and then to properly credit the earlier thinkers who provided our source material. Citation is a formal way to indicate where other thinkers’ ideas ended and our ideas began. But such ‘academic integrity’ goes beyond formal citation.

Academic work is an investment – rigour now for pay-off later. Investing in the development and expression of ideas now, out of what came before, not only works the thinker’s valuable skill, it also advances the growth and maturity of broader confidence and social esteem into the future. This is one reason, from my experience, for tying student success directly to engagement with others in a classroom… p.s. that’s hardly some revelation, but it remains important enough to justify reiteration.

When I teach, I need to hear from students too, particularly in person, although whatever the case, in their own words. Of course, I also appreciate the utility of a Zoom call. But in-person contact time between students and teachers is such a precious commodity that face-to-face teaching-and-learning – for me, anyway, not sure for you – is simply irreplaceable and will never be going away… not unless we so utterly lose our broader social integrity that we just stop being human.

That said, we do manage to prove, now and again, that the pieces comprising our integrity seem to contain at least a few impurities. For instance, you may be surprised to learn how, even before the Digital Age, we found ourselves facing opportunities and enticements not only to draw upon others’ ideas, words, images, and videos but also to risk presenting these irresponsibly as our own.

These days, as we have access to scads of text and media literally in the palm of our hands, legitimate schools are left to counter our worser nature by emphasising quaint abstractions like honesty, fairness, and respect. Such schools expect students and teachers to behave as honest and responsible members of an academic community by complying with policies, regulations, and prohibitions that uphold that academic integrity thing.

One common prohibition is plagiarism, which means submitting the oral or written ideas, words, images, or videos of another person as one’s own without giving that other person proper credit or acknowledgement. Plagiarism is intellectual theft though, more simply put, plagiarism is cheating, by which I mean falsifying anything that is subject to formal evaluation or peer review. And again in my experience, I’ve found plagiarism is far more common than most students ever realise. But whether it is or isn’t tantamount to stealing or cheating, plagiarism is a form of academic dishonesty that we absolutely must not tolerate, much less accept. Why?

Plagiarism is a serious academic obstacle that poses significant, permanent consequences, whether detected or not. Ideas that are not one’s own must be given credit at all times – perhaps this is the fundamental precept of academics – because, without respecting this credit, any pursuit or growth or refinement of existing knowledge is fruitless, and any working of the skill of thinking utterly ceases for having no available fuel… well, apart from ‘How can I steal and get away with it?’ or maybe ‘How can I justify being lazy?’ or how about ‘How can I excel at being an ‘Enter’ button presser?’ Presenting the same or substantially the same work more than once, in the longer-term, gains us nothing beyond the muddled growth of thinking about ‘how to cheat and prosper at the same time’.

How about the uncredited use of Generative Artificial Intelligence tools, as in ‘Gen A.I.’ – the other A.I.… is this also plagiarism? Honestly, how can it not be? In order to draw upon what’s available, Gen A.I. scours and indexes all available ideas, words, images, and videos, and these not just from some other person but from most everybody out there who’s accessibly published on-line.

*Not a search engine in sight… no people either*
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This being the case, then what of any work completed with Gen A.I. – correctly cited or not… what isn’t plagiarism? Good question, one that evidently poses an inconvenient truth yet to be addressed by the euphoric mania, beyond watery defenses like “pattern matching,” “fair use,” and “non-human agency”… bullshit excuses as evasive and lazy as the humans whose use of Gen A.I. warrants all concern for academic integrity in the first place.

“Always ask when you are unsure…”

Thus far, to students who ask me, I’ve found myself able to suggest that Gen A.I. – like Wikipedia before it – makes for a poor academic resource, which is to say, “An easy place to start is rarely a good place to finish.”

Upon saying this to students, I’ve occasionally faced a reminder that the analogue world of my past experience is something to smirk at. Don’t get me wrong, we did have electricity and computers back then, but I’ll grant it was also a time when TVs received broadcast signals, telephones had a dial tone, the Commodore Amiga was cutting-edge technology, and everyone wore Lacoste. More to the point, though… back then, when the encyclopædia on your shelf was all you had, it was also your motive to visit the library, or a magazine stand, or your friendly neighbourhood teacher, who’d also done those same things.

As for those students who smirk at me today, I gather that somebody they’ve never met must have laid my past to rest on their behalf, and therefore nothing – repeat, nothing – from that past had better even try holding threat upon their attention, especially not when it can’t be accessed via smart phone.

By the same turn, I hold what seems to me a reasonable expectation on behalf of these Students of the Digital Age, namely that they appreciate their responsibility to…

understand how ‘academic integrity’ applies to each activity across a program of study
clarify not merely what constitutes ‘academic misconduct’ but also why its consequences threaten our whole endeavour
- p.s. while you’re at it, also take note whether your school has any kind of “Student Declaration of Responsibility” to which you may have assented upon registration – and then, whether you find one or not, respect it anyway

I should say, I never smirk when I expect all this because, at its core, academics is about broader growth and human progress. It’s about human lives and our livelihoods underway. It’s about how well we expect to be doing once we pass things on… things like ideas and how to think them through.

And hey, if you don’t feel like this endeavour requires work compelled by sincerity and integrity, then maybe it’s time to re-think your involvement. Or maybe just get out of the business altogether because it’s every scholar’s responsibility on everyone else’s behalf to respect the principles of academic integrity, foremost by applying those principles in your own practice.

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Is Something Wrong with Bloom’s Taxonomy?

Feature Image Credit by John Manuel Kennedy Traverso on Wikipedia

Some thoughts prompted by this article by Ron Berger in EdWeek.

Early in my teaching, I decided to write prompts instead of questions. In fact, what I wrote were called imperatives or commands, a type of sentence that drops the second-person singular subject, “You,” and opens with the predicate verb:

“(You) Explain the irony of the outdoor scene from Chapter 3.”
“(You) Organise your ideas into three categories and (you) list 3–5 details beneath each one.”
“(You) Provide at least two explanations that support your conclusion.”

I decided to write prompts for two reasons. Teaching English, I wanted to practice what I preached: the verb is the most important word in a sentence. And, as a new teacher, I wanted to use Bloom’s Taxonomy because I bought into its gradual climb up the higher-order ladder, which at the time seemed to me correct.

As time went on, though, the ‘higher-order’ interpretation seemed mistaken, and was maybe fostering poorer teaching than otherwise. But I knew the importance of verbs and the power a word could have, so I started mixing so-called ‘lower-order’ commands, e.g. list, describe, explain, into ‘higher-order’ tasks and thinking, e.g. analyse, evaluate, justify. For one class, I adapted an old novel study quiz comprising uncomplicated interrogative sentences.

An inherent message to such a quiz, I felt, was essentially a teacher saying to students, “Prove that you actually read the book,” which opened up somewhat dubious questions about trust and earning grades. By rewording the quiz questions into imperatives, I wanted students to write something beyond the one-and-done sentence response.

Revising interrogative questions into imperative prompts eventually contributed to my questioning one of the structural premises behind our revised Government Curriculum, which currently emphasises skill over content. Where this Curriculum does prescribe some limited content knowledge, called “Big Ideas,” its inquiry pedagogy and student-centred approach are inherently individualised and thereby prone to opinion, which for me alters the common curricular debate over what knowledge is of most worth into a debate over whose knowledge is of most worth. Of itself, I’d say this is a worthwhile development although, in context, I think things tend to get a lot more nuanced.

So-called ‘lower-level’ skills seem no less important to me than so-called ‘higher-level’ (or the more snobbish ‘higher-order’) skills; in fact, so-called higher-order critical thinking skills depend not only on what we immediately read or hear but on what we can remember and recall from longer-term memory. And I tend to see content and skill not as discrete but integrated. To emphasise either one over the other is something akin to affixing ‘knowing’ to the bottom and ‘doing’ to the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy.

In teachers and in students, we find both the reflection of thinking and the action of doing – content as well as skill – in simultaneous tandem dynamic. To ignore their inseparability risks a curricular blunder: as skill without content is aimless, so content without skill is inert. We’re wise to conclude the same about teachers and students, who study content and skill: to each, the other is indispensible.

As to those prompts I revised, students’ submissions let me know pretty quickly that they were provoking a lot more careful, imaginative thinking. Responses were detailed, thoughtful, far more personal – I knew they couldn’t be searching Google. Students often told me, “These questions are so hard,” which was honestly what I wanted to hear. I also took note that students still called them questions.

And I soon realised how much longer these responses took to read… 30min per student, 15hrs per class. I came to assigning only two prompts per chapter, and later only one, which later became “five throughout the book that you trace and develop into questions of your own.” By the time I read Ron Berger’s article, critiquing the ‘higher-order’ interpretation, my own experience was enough to confirm his assessment:

“… the root problem with [Bloom’s] framework is that it does not accurately represent the way that we learn things. We don’t start by remembering things, then understand them, then apply them, and move up the pyramid in steps as our capacity grows. Instead, much of the time we build understanding by applying knowledge and by creating things.”

Bloom’s original taxonomy has ‘knowing’ at the bottom and ‘doing’ at the top, as if to suggest that doing is contingent upon knowing. But I agree with Berger: “Every part of the framework matters, [and] teachers should instead strive for balance and integration.” Learning is neither hierarchical nor linear. If anything, as Berger mentions, we tend to create and analyse by applying what we remember in an ongoing simultaneous process. For example, consider the old adage…

I read, and I forget. I see, and I remember. I do, and I understand.

This adage is an analogy, and analogies aren’t meant to be perfect, which makes them just as instructive where their comparisons break down, showing us both what something is as well as what something is not. Ambiguity falls to context, which in turn falls at the feet of a teacher’s professional judgment: decisions really are the core of teaching.

This adage is also a simple taxonomy, one that no academic is likely to endorse – what is meant by “reading,” for example, and how is this distinguished from “seeing,” and aren’t both unique kinds of “doing”? Still, it does seem to express a bit of wisdom.

Who believes what you see? Edgar Dale’s Pyramid has been granted some pride of place in Education… looks like he must have sat through some boring lectures or something

What you may have seen from academics is something similar called the Learning Pyramid or the Cone of Experience, attributed to Edgar Dale. But don’t think that simply adding someone’s name underscores its validity or contends with other wrinkles called e-learning and machine learning.

Anyway, as an attempt to describe learning, the adage is an analogy, like Bloom’s taxonomy or any framework: fixed and rigid and literally contrived. Such things hardly represent our lived experiences although, in fairness, every perspective carries a unique set of assumptions inside its luggage.

The Measure of Our Own

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How many of you, I wonder, wear shoes that fit. No need to raise hands, but just now consider, “Yes or No… I’m wearing shoes that fit.”

As you consider this about yourself, ask as well whether you’re thinking not solely of your shoes but also of your feet.

This is an illustration of the way to think as a teacher: keeping two ideas in mind at the same time. For most teachers, there’s typically even three or more ideas to keep in mind, but two will do for now, or perhaps better just to say, “For now, more than one.”

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

(F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1936, “The Crack-Up”)

And why say anything at all? Because suspending our judgment helps prevent leaping to conclusions, which inescapably leaves someone out, and leaving someone out is anathema to teachers, literally the opposite of good teaching. Leaving people out is politics.

Reflective thinking, in short, means judgment suspended during further inquiry; and suspense is likely to be somewhat painful… the most important factor in the training of good mental habits consists in acquiring the attitude of suspended conclusion, and in mastering the various methods of searching for new materials to corroborate or to refute the first suggestions that occur. To maintain the state of doubt and to carry on systematic and protracted inquiry ― these are the essentials of thinking.

(John Dewey, 1910, p. 13, ‘How We Think’)

The point to stress, beyond keeping in mind more than one idea at a time, is the sense of what we value – that sense of what ‘fits’ – which is to say no longer simply the shoes or the feet contained inside them, but what most appropriately suits in their coming together. In assessing ‘appropriate’ value, that sense of what ‘fits’, we weigh more than any single consideration – even when we don’t recognise them all: we lump more than one consideration together and treat them as ‘one’ consideration, like a kind of rational shorthand. When asked about the fit of our shoes, we may think shoes, we may think feet, or we may think distinctly both at once. The point to stress is that shorthand is subtle enough to go undetected.

The point to heed is that talk about ‘fit’ is talk about more than just the assessment of our satisfaction or frustration – our emotions. Any satisfaction or frustration we feel about the fit of our shoes will have arisen from that pair of shoes, now bought and paid for – and buyer beware! So as we feel those emotions, let’s heed how they arise from an empirical objectivity: “I paid $200 for these blasted things – and look at these blisters!”

Money, foot care, bandaids, a trip to the pharmacy, maybe a trip back to the shoe store… even if tangentially, then still no less materially, all these considerations plus how-many-others will factor in to our satisfaction or frustration, our emotional approval or disapproval, of the fit of our shoes – what better measure or evidence, what better empirical objectivity, for assessing the fit of our shoes than a blister on the back of our heel?

The fit of shoes is a congruous match-up of size and shape, the shoes and the feet that wear them. It’s something any good sales person comes to learn over time: as much as you must know your product – available in these shapes and sizes – you must also come to know people because customers also come in all imaginable shapes and sizes, and unimaginable ones, too – did you know the same person might have two differently sized feet? What on earth to do then!

In the same way we might consider feet while we consider the fit of shoes, let’s now put on our teacher hats and consider what makes an appropriate learning environment for young people. For starters, count how many things we’re now bringing to consideration… at the very least, I count two:

• learning environments, and
• young people

… and what else?

I’m sure we would all share similar feelings about the fit of a poor learning environment for young people. So, as we put on those teacher hats and consider what makes for an appropriate learning environment for young people, zero-in on that word, ‘appropriate’, and ask yourself what informs it… its prescription, its sense of value. Ask yourself, “Beyond what I value, what I say ‘fits’, what is my source of that value?”

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I’m pretty sure we could eventually reach some consensus on the empirical objectivity of an appropriate learning environment for young people although I hesitate to suggest what that consensus might actually be. But while we decided, what exactly would account for our initial reactions? What would we lump together in shorthand, and why that, and what could we factor in to more considered measure, and why that?

It’s as if to say of young people and learning environments, both at once, that each one doesn’t just stir its own reaction within us; rather, together they prompt a reaction from us, on account of something about each one of them, something not just worthy but something that warrants our appreciation: young people, for instance, evoke from us emotions like humility and compassion, on account of their vulnerability; and learning environments provoke emotions of respect and approval, on account of their helpfulness.

So ask yourself… what empirical objectivity arises from this combination of young people on the one hand and learning environments on the other: in their coming together, what is it that makes us so certain? And beyond mere nature, how do we measure – how do we know – what’s most appropriate… almost as if to ask, “What does each one deserve?” And, in between ‘what each one deserves’, how do we not simply describe but also account for what’s most ‘appropriate’?

Before blisters and complaining and asking for our money back, before even spending as much as one thin dime, how do we know if the shoe fits?

Share the WHY...

Share the WHY...

Share the WHY...