From previous research, it appears that students learn more when they have a good relationship with their instructor. From qualitative responses, this relationship seems to be centered on love. Essentially, students learn more when they feel loved. My obvious gut questions would be: how to increase the love, and then how to increase the behavioral cues of that love. However, there are several variations of this question that may capture better my interest in this subject. Virtually no one is writing or researching this issue and therefore, the last “final question” would not be the first question I’d need to answer. Rather, it simply is the most accurate description of my interest regarding this issue.
This question isn’t terribly complex and I doubt I will therefore narrow it. However, this question is rather vague and so this process may actually serve to specify and give researchable context to it. If this process were graphed, I suppose that it would look more like a upward helix and less like an upside-down triangle.
1. How can professors love more fully?
2. How can professors show love more fully? (in addition to the above examples)
3. How can students show love more fully? Does how much a student loves a faculty influence how much he/she can discern a faculty’s love in return?
4. How can professors develop love more fully?
5. Can this love be ‘faked’ or at least mostly supplanted by simple pedagogic training? Which behavioral attributes associated with showing love can be faked?
6. When can showing love be misinterpreted? What hurdles are there to developing love more fully? Can someone love someone, quickly—even within a semester?
7. Does the subject matter of the class matter? Does it matter to differently to different classes of students. (younger, single, gender, subject ect)
8. What are those signs/indicators of love that are common to all students (won’t help some while distracting others?)
9. Are there pedagogic strategies (assumes that it can be taught (see q#5) that can reveal an instructor’s love for students that will increase learning?
10. What are those strategies? Which ones are most efficient (ease of training teachers, is most effective in relying the ‘love’ message to the student body (most bang for buck).
11. What are the most efficient pedagogic strategies, relevant to showing love ,that will lead to the greatest increased student learning.
Having just completed this exercise, I think I may have another question that I’ll have to rapidly move towards. Perhaps one of the nature of an effective moral education curriculum. Of course this connection isn’t readily obvious to the reader of the above post; it is hardly clear myself. Before stepping in that direction, I’ll allow the above question (#11) to sit as is for a few days.
Again, I deviate from the strictly vertical review process (at least at the end). I can't decide if my topics are simply impervious to the full benefit of such a system or if the system is actually revealing the weakness of my original-and thus final-questions. Take two:
ReplyDelete1. (How) can (we use) (educational reforms) to (make) more (morally-sensitive), (productive), (civically-involved) (adults)?
2. How can we use (moral development curriculum) to make more morally-sensitive, productive, civicaly -involved adults?
3. (Can) we use moral development curriculums to make more morally-sensitive, productive, civically-involved adults?
4. What curriculum will make more morally-sensitive, productive, civically-involved adults?
5. What curriculum will make more morally-sensitive, productive, civically-involved adults while escaping absolutism and relativism?
6. Is there a curriculum make more morally-sensitive, productive, civically-involved adults while escaping absolutism and relativism?
How would you advance those ones you isolated (what would that course look like).
7. Which elements (explicitly espoused theories, pedagogic strategies) of that curriculum effectuate the most positive change in pro social behaviors? (Pro social defined/measured by strong familial sentiments, self-informed-active learning habits, less crime, more service)
8. Do these isolated elements have significantly different levels of impact depending on students gender, faith, family composite, age, et cetera? Common across various cultural, familial, and social backgrounds.
9. What are the most effective elements that exist or could exist within a moral development curriculum within a pluralistic, American high-school classroom. Def. moral development—primary purpose is to promote a pro social citizen? (as defined earlier)