Three Musketeers Invent 3-legged Stool

3 Musketeers on the 10th anniversary of SITS in 2014.

L/R Drs. Brian Vogt, Mike Gray, Bill Lovegrove

In 2004 Mike Gray, Brian Vogt, and Bill Lovegrove began the Summer Institute in Teaching Science (SITS). This is simultaneously a faculty and a curriculum development program and it is currently (2023) in its 19th summer with 20 faculty participating. SITS was unique in 2004, so the question naturally arises, “What were the formative influences that led to the creation of the SITS approach to teaching and learning?”

In this episode the three founders (aka three musketeers) discuss the influences that moved them away from transmission (teaching as telling) and to teaching as cognitive transformation. The result of their professional angst in the 1980’s and 90’s was the creation of a model of teaching we now call the three-legged stool.

Read on or listen to the podcast to hear about this fascinating journey and the powerful clarity of the three-legged stool.

Here’s an approximate transcript of the podcast.

[00:00] Mike: Hello.

[00:04] Mike: Welcome to the Deep and Durable Learning Podcast. I'm your host, Mike Gray. I have 45 years of teaching experience in higher education, and I've taught over 10,000 students. Many of my students would say that I taught them how to think, and I believe I can help you as well. I've also been involved in faculty development for over 30 years. For the last 19 years, this has taken the shape of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science, which is ongoing this summer of 2023. As I was returning home from teaching the teachers, my grandson Joshua asked me this perceptive question. “Papa, if you teach teachers, how do you learn?” Join me and my guests today as we talk about how we learn what we now teach others.

[01:07] Mike: Today in our podcast. We've got three long term faculty and I include myself. We have with us today two other faculty who got a long track record in higher education, account as personal friends and as individuals who have sharpened my thinking. Let me just introduce Bill Lovegrove first. Bill has a PhD in engineering, electrical.

[01:36] Bill: Electrical and computer were together back in those days.

[01:38] Mike: Okay.

[01:40] Mike: Electrical engineering and computer engineering. And you've been teaching full time here your entire career at Bob Jones?

[01:47] Bill: Correct. For 34 years.

[01:49] Mike: 34 years and counting, we hope. Definitely. And Brian Vogt, who teaches chemistry and pharmacology. And formally your PhD is in what area?

[02:05] Brian: Pharmaceutical sciences.

[02:07] Mike: Okay. So, Brian's an interdisciplinary guy, although he's definitely chemistry comes first because that's his department. He has been teaching for his entire career at Bob Jones University and for how long?

[02:22] Brian: I just finished my 40th year of teaching here at BJU.

[02:25] Mike: So, we have some experienced individuals who I think are going to be able to shed some light on a journey that we've observed from other faculty who are younger is a pretty typical journey, although it doesn't always end up in a happy place, necessarily, depending on how and whether certain tensions are resolved favorably. So, the natural default setting for most faculty members is teaching as telling. One author characterizes this view as the fundamental act of teaching is to carefully and clearly tell students something they did not previously know. So we often call this also the transmission model, where the teacher is the transmitter of information, knowledge, wisdom, the all-knowing guru in the front of the classroom, some people would say the sage on the stage. And the student is responsible to receive, store, and reproduce that information on demand. So this becomes teaching as telling and learning as remembering. So let me just throw it out. Neither one of you can respond in either order. But was that reflexive model true for you when you began as a faculty member here at BJU?

[04:03] Bill: I'll jump into that first and say that I would agree with that with one modification.

[04:08] Mike: Okay.

[04:09] Bill: I think I would have said as a young teacher that teaching is telling and explaining.

[04:15] Mike: Okay.

[04:15] Mike: So, the telling is a more refined form of the telling.

[04:20] Bill: The explaining is a more refined form of telling because I knew, even as a new teacher, that you can tell people things, and if they don't understand them, they're not going to retain them. So, I had a sense that I need to tell things clearly, although I'm not sure I knew how to do that. But I think I would have had the sense that if you just explain things, if you just tell things clearly enough, that people should get it and understand it and remember it. So, I had a fuzzy sense that there was a connection to understanding, but I would say pretty convinced that by careful explanation, you could accomplish understanding.

[04:55] Mike: Okay.

[04:55] Mike: What about you, Brian?

[04:58] Brian: I would have to agree with Bill that explanation is a very important component of what we do. I think whenever you teach a highly technical area with difficult concepts, I think a major part of the teacher's role is to carefully explain and to dissect out the most important aspects of things. Having said that, when I reflect back on my teaching in my early years, this is back in the days when we had these things called overhead transparencies.

[05:38] Mike: Oh, yes.

[05:38] Brian: So, I was either using a chalkboard or I was using an overhead transparency projected not to the screen or a.

[05:46] Mike: Combination of the two, or maybe even one of those with a crank and an endless supply.

[05:55] Brian: I remember those. I always use the individual sheets.

[05:59] Mike: I did, too.

[06:00] Brian: And I had a reputation of being able to fill out those transparencies and talk through stuff almost as though I were an auctioneer teacher. Okay, now it's time to talk about the general counsel. Then let's do the ideal gas law.

[06:18] Mike: And lots to cover.

[06:19] Brian: Yeah, I had lots to cover. And one of the things that you've emphasized, Mike, over the years, that if you're in this mode, sometimes what we call the coverage model comes to the fore, and I was certainly there. And the problem with that is, while you can in some sense convey a lot of significant things, it doesn't really mean that the students understand what's going on. And I think when Bill pointed to explanation, he was pointing to the limitations of explanation without doing it in a broader, encompassing sense that pays attention to the students learning. Am I right about that, Bill?

[07:00] Bill: This may be jumping ahead to where you want to go, but I think I was a little bit naive in thinking that there's one magic explanation that.

[07:08] Mike: Will work for everyone.

[07:09] Bill: And if I can just find the best explanations, I've come to appreciate that students are different, and there's not necessarily one magic explanation that's going to do the trick forever.

[07:20] Brian: That resonates with me, too. When my assessments didn't lead me to happiness, we'll just put it that way, I resolved that what I needed to do was, and I'm definitely in the explanatory mode, too. To me, that's taking a step toward the student and giving them a rationale even though it's mine. We'll talk some about that later in this podcast, but that if it didn't work well, then the problem was that I didn't explain well, and what I needed to do was up my game in terms of the clarity of my expression or examples that I used or something else.

[08:07] Mike: And those are important.

[08:08] Mike: No doubt. No doubt. So, we certainly don't want to ignore those things, but neither do we want to put all our eggs in that basket. And I think maybe as a follow up then, when did you begin to doubt the efficacy of the transmission and reception model and maybe related, what catalyzed or precipitated your doubt?

[08:38] Bill: I think for me, it was watching senior engineering students do senior projects and making major blunders, big misunderstandings, making big mistakes about things, and you think, wow, we covered that when you were a freshman. How are you making this freshman level mistake as a senior engineering student and realizing that there was a fundamental, in some cases, not just a lack of understanding, like a piece of information they were missing, but actually a misunderstanding, a wrong concept of something in engineering that was leading them astray. And that was, in some cases, students that I taught. It's not just maybe you had a bad freshman teacher. You can think that when you're teaching other people's students, but I know I taught you this. I know I explained this to you back when you were a freshman, and now as a senior, you're exhibiting that you didn't get it. You didn't understand it. You're making a mistake that I don't think you should be making. That was a wakeup call to me that something I was doing wasn't working as well as I thought it was.

[09:51] Mike: If you're judging from the expressions on faces or the performance, maybe on a unit test that's positioned close to when the transmission occurred, you might get a different kind of answer about efficacy than as a capstone kind of evaluation. I had a very similar experience when I came on faculty. The faculty who are here were still doing something, oral examinations for graduating seniors, and that only happened for, like, two more years for some of the same reasons that Bill has talked about here. It was actually not helpful for the students. They just realized from the expressions on my faculty's faces, they are not real happy at this moment. And once the student was out of the room, we were not real happy. And it was not primarily with the student. There was this sense of being demoralized that we've invested in this individual, and we thought better of them. So how much of this is just being emotionally keyed up and having to account for yourself as an undergraduate before this fearsome assembly of faculty and how Much Of It's Real Ignorance. And I think that's why we disbanded that whole approach, because we didn't want to know what that was telling us.

[11:28] Brian: See, you were killing the messenger. Mike so when I came on faculty after my graduate work, there came a point in time after several years where the person that had been teaching organic chemistry retired and we brought Verne Biddle in to teach organic chemistry lecture as well as some other classes. And I took Organic Chemistry lab and I did a full blown, complete revision of both semesters of Organic Chemistry lab. There's a lot of work that needed to be done. I incorporated a lot of additional things into the process that had not been in the process before. And it was substantially better. There's no question about that. And I remember one day, after having taught it for a few years, actually, several years, I was standing out in the hall while I was teaching this section that students were happily working away. And a student walked along that I had had the previous year in the same class. And the student said, oh, what are the students doing today in this section? I said, oh, well, we're doing X, Y and Z and blah, blah. And you remember that when you took the class, right? And I got a blank stare. No one wants to admit to their professor that they don't remember anything at all about what he was talking about. But when it became apparent to me and I thought this particular thing was a very interesting experiment, when it became apparent to me that it hadn't stuck, my heart sank. And I knew I had a problem on my hands. And what I ended up doing was I ended up slowly doing another major revision on both semesters of Organic Chemistry class that more explicitly incorporated things of value. But I was a very unhappy man. It was like I failed. I don't like failing.

[13:51] Mike: None of us do. So, it's one thing to realize the model is not delivering. It's not effective and therefore appears not to be effective. But short of having a ready alternative available, very difficult to move from. Something that admittedly, has, by our experience, immense difficulty attended to it and a solution to the problem. So how did you make that move from a model that was failing you to something else? Did you already have another model in mind? Or were there some years of deliberation where I know this doesn't work and I'm not sure what does work?

[14:49] Bill: I would say the seeds of the solution were in the very thing that was revealing the problem. Because it's when we question the students later, when we get feedback about what's going on in the students’ minds, that it's revealed that there's something wrong with their thinking. And I think I slowly came to the realization that I need this feedback sooner.

[15:15] Mike: When you could still address it.

[15:17] Bill: That's right. I would like to know that they're not understanding as we're going through this material the first time. And I don't have a way to do that the way that I'm teaching right now, that's going to change what happens in the classroom.

[15:31] Brian: Well, I decided I had to put my big boy pants on, as they.

[15:34] Mike: Say, and as opposed to your stretchy.

[15:44] Brian: And bite the bullet and knuckle down, as they say. And I found it necessary to start digging in the literature.

[15:56] Mike: What literature are we talking about? Education literature.

[15:59] Brian: Actually, I was looking at the Journal of Chemical Education.

[16:03] Mike: Which is kind of a hybrid.

[16:06] Brian: Yes, it is a hybrid of sorts. But I could come across some things with sufficient digging that showed great promise. And I could find authors who clearly had shared some of the same concern about what the students were learning and understanding and what was sticking to them and the kind of reasoning they had to do. And this often involved some type of actual of a problem a student had to solve by attacking it in the lab. And the best of those kinds of articles pointed to a student understanding of how to think about the evidence they needed to acquire in the lab, how they needed to base their reasoning and their conclusions on evidence by addressing with chemical understanding something that they were faced, that they couldn't understand without the right kind of reasoning and the right kind of understanding. And so, I started taking those and making them BJU specific. And it took quite a while for me to do this, but as I rolled them out, I could see how things went and I could get feedback and I could fine tune, and I could get feedback and I could fine tune. But I found some things that were helpful in the Journal of Chemical Education, but there were some things in there that weren't terribly helpful either. I had to do some innovating as well.

[17:47] Mike: Was this lab primarily?

[17:49] Brian: This was entirely lab, but that is not to say that there weren't lecture classes that I ended up revising as well. It happened to be during the same rough time frame that I ended up, like, doing a major revision in general chemistry, which I taught for many years. Both semesters I revised because partly because of our discussions, Mike, I realized that things were not going. So, this is really lecture and lab. I had unhappiness in both.

[18:26] Mike: Can I ask about your pain threshold? How many years into your career were you before you felt like, I'm going to have to pursue an alternative, even if it's not clear to me exactly what that alternative looks like.

[18:41] Brian: Okay. For the organic chemistry lab, I think that was probably around twelve to 15 years in. And then the general chemistry, I had unhappiness with it. But I do remember when I dug in and bit the bullet. And I think that was about it was over 20 years into my teaching. Wow. That isn't to say that I hadn't been doing making some changes incrementally before that, but at that point in time, I did a major. I decided I've got to just dig in and I've got to rework this completely. I'm going to pay the price; I'm going to do it.

[19:28] Bill: In my case, I think I was teaching some physics service courses back then, and the problem was more acute.

[19:37] Mike: So, we're talking about non majors?

[19:38] Bill: Non majors or like biology majors taking.

[19:42] Brian: Physics for a graduate school requirement?

[19:45] Mike: Yeah, whatever.

[19:46] Bill: Or whatever.

[19:47] Brian: Medical school.

[19:48] Bill: And in the engineering classes, the good engineering students get it in some cases on their own, but in the service courses especially, they're not getting it, and they're not able to figure it out on their own in a way that maybe you can in your discipline. And some of the cutting-edge exploration of changing models of teaching was happening in physics. Physics teachers around the country experimenting with different models. And I think the Physics Concept Inventory.

[20:27] Mike: Was one of the Force Concept yeah.

[20:29] Bill: The Force Concept Inventory.

[20:32] Mike: That's an interesting story. Do you remember that? That was University of Arizona. Am I remembering right? I'm not sure where that's what memory serves me. And it was published, and Eric Mazur at Harvard said, well, that's because in his own mind he confessed that's because you're at the University of Arizona and I've got really bright kids and I'm.

[20:59] Bill: At Harvard, I'm going to try that on my students.

[21:02] Mike: Yes, he tried it, and he was surprised. Yes, not pleasantly.

[21:08] Bill: That was the experience of a lot of physics teachers around the country who said, I want to try out this concept inventory, and of course my students will do, and they don't. So, I got some helpful kind of direction setting from people like that who were exploring the problem in the context of physics and looking for better ways to teach.

[21:33] Mike: Did that happen earlier than Brian?

[21:35] Bill: I think so, yeah.

[21:37] Mike: Just partly because of the people who were already ahead of the game, at least in trying to construct an alternative. So somehow by the summer of 2004, the three of us who had been talking to one another off and on through the 90s found enough clarity that we felt like we were ready. That's putting a big if around it. We were ready to at least explore in some detail an alternative framework for teaching and learning that became the Summer Institute of Teaching Science. That was 2004. We had some history before that. For me, I'll answer my previous question. For me, though into the late eighty s, I had some serious reservations. So that would have been 15 years in or so to my teaching career. Some reservations, but lack of sense of where to move. But a couple of things happened. One, I encountered an influential thinker, critical thinking specialist by the name of Richard Paul. But Richard Paul was giving workshops, two-day workshops around the country. And I attended one of his workshops. And the reason I attended somehow, I came in contact with his book, which is a tome. If you've seen it, it's about four inches thick, it's bright red, and it has white letters about three inches tall, let's say critical thinking on the side. So, I had read parts of that book and it intrigued me enough that I went to the conference, which was very helpful. And the other part of it was I participated in a program from the American Society for Microbiology funded by National Science Foundation called Not Sits, But Set S-E-T which is scientist, educator, teams. And there were 20 pairs of individuals throughout the US. Who participated. And I ended up being paired with a guy in Oregon. And so I was supposed to help him with his teaching and he was supposed to help me with my research. So, in the process actually had visits paid between our institutions multiple times, and we had expenses paid for going to annual conference of the ASM. So, there were a number of things that happened then. One of them was I heard an address, and off the top of my head, I don't remember the guy's name, but he was well known from the Carnegie or Carnegie Foundation, who had just recently introduced something called SOTL, which is the scholarship of teaching and learning. And he was making the case in a talk where I heard him in person that people who are teaching faculty already had, by virtue of their PhD, they already had some competence in their expertise. But people had played down having demonstrated deep understanding of how people learn and therefore how faculty should teach and that that needed to be addressed in higher education by giving recognition to people who would devote themselves to that kind of scholarship as an adjunct to their already validated scholarship in their subject matter. So those three lines of convergence were really complete in my mind by 1992 to 94. So that's kind of my back story. So maybe I could just enlarge this then. Those were some of the things that gave me some confidence that we could launch something that would be helpful to the rest of our faculty, which became SITS: Summer Institute Teaching Science. And we offered on a very modest scale in the summer of 2004 with four individuals participating for various links. We were two of them and we were two of them, and Bill came in for part of it, and we had another engineering faculty member for part of it. So, what were the things that in your experience might be parallel to what I experienced with this Set program?

[26:56] Brian: I'm not sure I have a direct parallel there, Mike. I would like to tie back to one thing that you mentioned there. And that is the disconnect between expertise in an area and teaching.

[27:09] Mike: Yes.

[27:10] Brian: I'm sure that I'm not the only one that's ever heard a student say something about another professor. And it always starts off with, well, Professor Schmo, he's a brilliant man. And it almost invariably goes just like that. Have you heard that, Bill?

[27:31] Bill: Yeah, but he can't teach, but he can't communicate. Sure is brilliant.

[27:34] Mike: Yes. Right.

[27:35] Mike: We're trying to put up with it because we know he has something to offer if it will just happen.

[27:43] Brian: Students don't usually go out of their way to bring this kind of thing to you unless you're having a problem in somebody else's class and they're desperate to talk to somebody about it. But this kind of thing is not uncommon in reality. And so there is definitely a common disconnect between a faculty's assessment of their ability to teach and what they know. I remember reading a number of years ago a study, I think it was by some people at the University of Michigan where they had surveyed 2000 professors at different universities. That's a pretty big example size. And he analyzed their results. And one of the conclusions they said was they found that 90% of university professors thought that their teaching was above average. Now, there's a mathematical problem with that. That cannot be. So, I think we, as professors naturally tend to overestimate our ability to teach. There comes a point in time where you have to realize that some things are not working. We've discussed that already. But I don't think I had the same kind of workshop experience as you had, Mike, to convince me of that. I know we had many discussions, informal discussions during the school year where we would share our heartaches with each other about what was going on. And I think those are pretty important, actually.

[29:14] Mike: We even had a few sessions at Tom Coss's house with refreshments provided by his wife.

[29:20] Brian: Yeah.

[29:21] Bill: The parallel for me was a couple of those books on physics teaching the people who were writing about models of physics teaching.

[29:29] Mike: So, a lot of this was piecemeal.

[29:33] Brian: Absolutely.

[29:33] Mike: And we encountered things that had potential, I think, but we had not experienced those in the classroom. What persuaded you at the time? And maybe you've increasingly become persuaded that those individuals were onto something and that as you began the implementation and clarification phase for you personally in a real-world environment with real students and real assessment going on, what persuaded you that there was another model to be had? If we could articulate it, and maybe not us from scratch, but we could synthesize a model from the vantage point of people who had already seen further down the road than us that we had something that might be of real benefit to other faculty as well as ourselves.

[30:35] Bill: It might be helpful at this point to bring in the three-legged stool.

[30:40] Mike: Okay.

[30:41] Bill: I don't remember where or how that started. But there are three different problems there and three different solutions. It's really three different discussions. But the middle piece of that, the actual teaching piece, I don't want to overwork or skip over the first piece because as I tried to work on my teaching, I realized there might be some problems in my thinking.

[31:09] Mike: You want to articulate those three? Just succinctly?

[31:12] Brian: Yeah.

[31:13] Bill: So, the first leg is clear thinking teacher, sometimes you're not teaching well because you're not thinking as clearly as you need to be. And then the second one is what you do in the classroom, an effective teacher in the classroom. And the third piece is assessment. But what started me and what connects all of them together is this idea of feedback. And I mentioned this a minute ago that I had a sense that I needed better feedback in the classroom about what was going on. So when teachers are experimenting with teaching methods where the teacher is not doing the talking, if you're going to get feedback about what's going on in the students minds, you can't just be constantly talking. You're going to have to do something else. And I wasn't sure I had a clear concept of what that something else should be, but I think very early on I was asking questions and increasingly asking more questions because I'm trying to get at what's going on in the students’ minds. And the only way I know to do that is to ask questions. And I'm saying all of that to say there's like a reason why another model might work better. Because I have the sense that I need feedback. It's not, for me, really based on a model of human cognition and what's going on in the student's mind. Not in the beginning. It's based on whatever's going on in the students’ minds. I at least need to know, right? I need a way to measure like, how am I even going to know if what I'm doing is working or not unless I'm getting feedback as I'm doing it from the students about what's going on in their mind. That gave me a sense that there's a reason why some of these other models are likely to work, because intrinsic in what they're doing is this idea that I need to pay attention to what's going on in the student's mind while I'm teaching. That's why I assume we're going to find a path forward here.

[33:20] Mike: So, a basic failing of transmission, in spite of the fact I might have a brilliant lecture crafted, is if there's only one direction of transmission, I'm really not going to know how this lands unless I'm prepared to have my receiver transmit back. It's like walkie talkies instead of a radio station where it doesn't matter what the listeners are experiencing. So, the missing piece is to connect and respond to their experience and not simply to take it as a given that there's nothing very complicated about receiving my transmissions. That's huge.

[34:06] Brian: I don't think I ever taught purely from an information transmission perspective. Even in my very early years of teaching, I was always an interactive teacher in some sense, asking questions, evaluating faces. I remember I had one student who was a chemistry major, and when she graduated, she said something about Dr. Vogt always seems to be able to read my mind, which would be scary.

[34:36] Brian: Thing if you're a student, if it was for real.

[34:39] Brian: But she had the sense that I always knew what she was thinking. And, I mean, I'm not the only teacher that reads faces. I think that's a very important part of teaching. But reading faces is not all there is to good teaching. And I would ask questions and give answers, and asking questions and giving answers is not all there is to being a good teacher either. And I would give them the opportunity to ask questions, and I would answer those questions likewise. That alone is not and even putting those all together is not adequate because what we're really talking about here is dissecting how we think about our teaching in a way that appeals to the student so that they will learn most effectively. And one of the driving forces, why would I undergo such pain? Because it's an enormous amount of work to completely rewrite a class, lecture or lab. It's a huge amount of effort. And why am I willing to pay the price? And I am willing to pay the price, and I paid it many times. I'm willing to pay the price because I care about those students so much. I care about where they're going, what they're going to do. I want them to be properly prepared because this is a ministry, after all. We are trying to do things to prepare students to go out, to use the giftedness that God has placed within them for his glory. And so as a Christian teacher, we had to be prepared to do whatever we can. And now that means that there came a point in time where I simply had to humble myself. That's really what I meant when I said, put on my big boy pants. There's a point in time where I have to humble myself and realize, Brian, you can do this better, and you have to do it better. That's where I got to. Not that my teaching was ever awful, but it could have been much better than it was too.

[36:36] Mike: Yes. So, I think all of us have experienced we talked at the outset about people who also get discouraged about their teaching, but bail out of the profession, it's a different thing entirely to say the problem is not with teaching and learning.

[36:53] Brian: It's me.

[36:54] Mike: That's me. And the way I'm approaching this, it's not even the new generation of students who have their quirks. And my jokes don't land, and my analogies are archaic. There's a tendency to put always humanly to put the blame somewhere else. And as you say, it takes a significant amount of God given humility because that's where it's going to have to come from to realize I could be serving my students much more effectively than I am. And I'm responsible to do everything that I can be enabled by God's grace to do to make learning happen on us on a level that's going to bring joy to my students. And because that's true, bring joy to me too.

[37:46] Brian: And that's why we've been willing to do all this work in SITS all these years.

[37:54] Mike: Join me in two weeks as my guest and I talk about how the three-legged stool of teaching and learning became the three intensive summers that comprise the core of the Summer Institute in Teaching Science. Further details about SITS can be found at my website, deepanddurable.com. That's deepand durable.com You can also contact me through that address with questions or comments.