Educational Insanity

A few days ago, Gary Stager sent out a bunch of tweets (on Twitter, for the uninitiated) about an Edward Tufte seminar he had attended.  In responding to my response to one of his tweets, Stager wrote: “any info lit pundit/keynote without a thorough understanding of Tufte’s work is a Ginsu Knife salesman not a serious educator!“  I told him that I agreed and that he should add the word “leader” to his list of info. lit pundit/keynote.  In other words, as I continue to explore what it means to be an educational leader in the 21st century, one set of competencies that, to me, is clearly more important than ever before is the ability to speak and persuade with the aid of visual presentations.  However, that doesn’t mean supporting a speech/presentation with the standard (typically awful) PowerPoint presentation.  In the technologically-advanced world in which we now live, if you combine the brilliant ideas of someone like Tufte with Web 2.0 tools, the ability to craft incredibly appealing and powerful presentations is easier than ever.  Furthermore, in the information age, where data and information are more available than ever, the possibilities of representing data in aesthetically-pleasing and meaningful ways are nearly endless.

As one example, I point you to a website I’ve been touting via Twitter for about a week now.  Fivethirtyeight.com is a blog developed by a couple of data analysts who originally worked as baseball analysts.  They’ve taken many of the analyses and approaches they used to analyze data from baseball games and used them to make projections of the presidential election (and other federal elections).  In a nutshell, as I understand it, the projections are based on a sort of meta-analysis of polling data from various polls.

The formulae or algorithms they use are certainly complicated, but the way they present the data is what is so interesting…and SO simple!  First of all, believe it or not, the site is built on a basic Blogger.com template (free!).  Second, they write that the graphs are designed in MS-EXCEL 2007.  I don’t know what they use to create the maps like the one below, but it’s not that difficult to get an outline map of the U.S. and color in some states.  You could probably do it with something as basic as MS-Paint.

I create a lot of images in PowerPoint these days (just insert an image or clipart into a blank slide and save it as a picture file; that’s it).  The graphic design capabilities added to PowerPoint 2007 are excellent.  You don’t have to be a trained graphic artist to create powerful digital images anymore!

I know a bunch of folks decry or bemoan the use of tag or text clouds, but that’s mostly because it’s hard to find real pedagogical value in them.  But, as visual representations of data, I think they can be very powerful.  For example, in keeping with the presidential election theme, here’s a text cloud representing Michelle Obama’s speech from the DNC last night.  From this picture of the text, you get a really good sense of the foci of her speech.

How did I do that?  Not exactly magic.  I found the text of her speech on the Internet.  Then, I copied and pasted it into a free service called TagCrowd.  TagCrowd generates the HTML code for you to use in your own website (NOTE: it didn’t work for me and I had to do a quick workaround, but nothing fancy).  That’s it.

For our new Ed.D. program in educational leadership, I’m going to insist that we work with our students on presenting or representing data.  Next time you have to make a presentation to your school board or your superintendent, please consider the power of visual imagery and the free and easy ways we now have to (re)present data.

If you’ve ever taken a college or graduate level course, surely you’ve completed some kind of summative evaluation form at the end of the semester.  At Hofstra University, where I worked for 5 years before this past academic year, we called them CTRs (Course and Teacher Ratings).  They consisted of a bunch of Likert scale items (strongly disagree to strongly agree) and a few open-ended questions.  For the most part, students hated doing them and faculty members hated having to use them.  I didn’t love the wording of many of the items, but I always asked my students to please take them seriously as an opportunity to let me know how I was doing.  I told them that I would receive an analysis of the data and their actual responses to the open-ended items.

As part of applying for tenure at VCU, I have to demonstrate growth as an instructor.  So, I plugged the CTR data from my 5 years at Hofstra into EXCEL and discovered some very interesting things.  The graph below represents the data from a scale (composed of 5 items) that purports to be an overall measure of the course and the instructor.  The x-axis represents the time points from Fall 2002 to Spring 2007.  The y-axis represents the range of scores (which can range from 1 to 5).  For this particular scale, the lower the number the better.  But, I flipped the y-axis so that it looks like “better is higher;” a more standard look for such a line graph.  The blue line represents my ratings; the red line represents the average score of the other faculty members (including adjuncts) within the program area.

[NOTE: click on image for larger view]

I entered the professoriate with NO teaching experience.  I guest lectured once while I was getting a masters degree, but that was it.  Hofstra took a bit of chance on me in that respect and I am eternally grateful to them for that.  But, the graph clearly shows that my ratings were not as good early in my teaching career as they were last year.

I should also add that in my first couple of years as a professor, i was asked to teach a few sections of an undergraduate foundations of education course.  I thought I would really enjoy working with undergraduates considering a future as an educator.  But, after teaching a few semesters, I began to really dislike it.  I had a hard time dealing with the students’ limited understanding of and experiences with education.  Seemingly simple concepts such as “charter schools” were completely foreign to them.  My ratings were not terrible for those course sections, but my department chair and my colleagues and I decided that my time and energy was better spent working with graduate students.

Overall though, I think the graph tells an accurate and interesting story.  Quite simply, I’ve improved significantly as an instructor.  The more comfortable I’ve become in my own skin and the more I’ve been able to find my own voice, the more I’ve been able to engage my students.  That’s my interpretation of the data.

Academics bemoan the use of “quantitative” ratings of their work as instructors.  But, I think it’s critically important that we ask our students to reflect on their experiences in our classes and to provide us with data about our work.  I wonder how many of my P-12 colleagues/readers have similar systems in place to collect and analyze summative or formative data about their performance directly from their students.  Do you?