This document from the Minnesota Department of Education describes this interesting protocol which describes a procedure for really determining the fundamental causes of a problem (such as student struggle) under the assumption that treating the cause (as best as possible) is more effective than treating just the symptoms. The basic idea is to work to you find a “significant cause that can, in fact, be changed.”
I find this to be an interesting perspective to share when we consider the myriad of unique challenges that our students are facing during this time of COVID-19.
I know the blog has been quiet lately. Like so many others, I have been learning how to juggle everything in this new reality. What time I have found to share with others online has been spent on the page of remote teaching resources I have been curating.
Well, now the semester has finished and I am doing my usual reflecting on how it went and what I can do better for the next round of remote learning in the Spring 2021 semester. A lot happened, so the thoughts are long, but here they are.
Assume that your students are going to have a lot going on, that some of it will be unpredictable, and that none of it is your business to know–and yet you must design a remote course around it.
Rebecca Barrett-Fox
I stumbled on these during the semester and building my remote course. However, I did not have time at that moment to reflect on it here.
This is a really important article, I think. Particularly for those of us who teach large courses: the larger the course, the higher the larger variety of difficult situations your students are facing, and the harder it is to deal with them one-at-a-time. Thus, while such thinking should be standard practice, for large courses, the instructor MUST design in such a way to make the course as equitable as possible. In the remote-teaching world equity includes thinking about the home lives of yourself and your students and how those environments impact teaching and learning. Thinking about digital privacy is another factor that must be considered.
Trying to design a course around challenges that you don’t, and shouldn’t, know exist as well as around difficulties your students don’t know they have is tough, but something important to keep in mind as we plan for the possibility of remote in the fall.
One-half of this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics went to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz for their discovery of 51 Pegasi B – the first planet observed to orbit a sun-like star other than our own. While the work marked a turning point in our understanding of the Universe, more than 4,000 such extrasolar planets have now been discovered, I think that some honest comments about a common experience in science made by Dr. Queloz deserve some attention as well.
The discovery of 51 Pegasi B was during Dr. Queloz’s Ph.D. work, Dr. Mayor was his advisor. At the time, 1992, the only planet outside of our solar system that had been found was around a pulsar: the rapidly spinning ember of a dead large star. The wobble caused by the planet in the otherwise regular radiation emissions of the pulsar made it comparatively easy to detect. However, the probability of life as we know it on such a planet is exceptionally low. One common attitude in the community at that time, according to Dr. Fischer of Yale, was that “Maybe most stars don’t form with planets and our solar system is unusual and life is incredibly rare.”
It was pretty clear I had no hope
Dr. Queloz describing beginning his Ph.D. work which ultimately won the 2019 Nobel Physics Prize
Thus, while starting a Ph.D. to search for extrasolar planets, Dr. Queloz was not expecting to find any, “It was pretty clear, I had no hope,” he said to the New York Times. Part of this hopelessness was rooted in the expectations of the time that any planets whose effects would be large enough to detect would orbit at such a distance that many years would be required to detect them. For example, Jupiter’s impact on our star has a period of over 11 years.
However, I know that these feelings of hopelessness are actually a quite common expectation of many students at the beginning of their Ph.D.’s independent of the particular field of physics. I know I had them. Here you are, joining this community of brilliant, and exceptionally hard working people, and you think to yourself, “what are the odds that I will find something that these other people, who have been working at this potentially their entire lives have not?” These feelings can be quite daunting.
Even when Dr. Queloz did find evidence for 51 Pegasi B in 1994, he was reluctant to show the results to Dr. Mayor, his Ph.D. advisor who was at the time on sabbatical half-way around the world. The evidence pointed to a planet unlike anything in our solar system: a huge Jupiter sized planet that is so close to its parent star that it orbits in only 4 days (Mercury, in inner-most planet in our solar system by comparison, takes about 88 days). Furthermore, the models of planet formation prevalent at the time suggested that forming such a large planet so close to a star should be impossible.
Again, doubt crept into Dr. Queloz’s mind. Which was more likely, that he had found something completely new far faster than anyone had predicted, or that, as a new student he had made a mistake? According to the New York Times:
Dr. Queloz did not feel ecstatic, but rather ashamed, certain that something was wrong with the instrument or his software.
“I really panicked at that time,” Dr. Queloz said. “I didn’t talk to [Dr. Mayor] at all.”
I really feel that this is a set of emotions that all students have at some point: “I must be wrong,” “my advisor is the expert,” “who am I to…” Getting over these feelings is I guess part of maturing into an independent scientist.
In this case, the results were real and 24 years after their announcement in 1995, resulted in a Nobel Prize. I think acknowledging that most most Ph.D. theses don’t follow such a trajectory is important. Instead, we as Ph.D. students add our small bit to the cumulative knowledge of humanity and, perhaps more importantly, learn to become independent scientists along the way. However, the feelings expressed publicly by Dr. Queloz are, I think, common, and I hope that through expressing them we can further debunk the “super-brillant professor” stereotype, which can exacerbate equity issues in science according to Leslie, S.-J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262–265. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261375.
