NUTSHELL NOTES "Teaching tips in a nutshell" - The University of Colorado at Denver's One-page Newsletter for Teaching Excellence

Welcome back everyone! Also, a warm welcome to new faculty, instructors,  and  members of the Colorado Commission on Higher Education,  housed on our campus in the Lawrence Street Center as of about mid- September.

This issue continues with the theme we began before summer, the Perry model of intellectual development. Perry's work addressed an outcome of education that has to do with students' growing ability to think at higher levels. Thinking is an outcome  less often assessed than student satisfaction or content learning, but it is probably the most important. In Nutshell Notes v8n2 and v8n3, we described the lower stages of development: "dualism" and early "multiplicity" (see the web site given at the bottom of this page).  We noted that working with students in these stages is a source of consternation to those faculty who deduce that their students are inferior if they can't quickly make the leap to the faculty member's level of thinking. Perry's work shows that even Harvard students' intellectual growth takes more time than a single course can provide. The transition from dualism, where every legitimate problem is perceived as having a uniquely "right" solution, to early multiplicity, where recognition occurs (maybe grudgingly) that legitimate problems can have multiple reasonable solutions, may in itself be considered an important advance for a student.

Perry deduced three stages of multiplicity. Early multiplicity, as noted, is a stage accompanied by students' frustrations. It is a stage where students  suspect that authority (the teacher) actually possesses knowledge that allows easy solutions to problems, but the authority is withholding it from them. In this issue we focus on the mid and late stages.

Mid-multiplicity arrives by recognizing the legitimacy of uncertainty, and that  uncertainty and ambiguity are not the results of withheld  knowledge, but rather they are part of the nature of knowledge itself. Students in mid-multiplicity realize that  the ambiguity that frustrates them poses the same challenge for those who are experts in a discipline. Perry captures this realization in a student quote: "Here was this great professor, and he was groping too!" It is at this stage where glimmers of hope appear: the possibility opens for students to move beyond reliance on authority to reliance on obtaining information and working to understand it as a means to construct and master their own knowledge.

Stage 4 multiplicity is thus characterized by recognition of the importance of thought process and, in particular, the need to acquire skills to deal with ambiguity. Perry notes that this level can be reached by either the hard way or an easier way. Students who choose the hard way remain in revolt against authority, and so they oppose it (sometimes in an in-your-face manner) by espousing against almost anything authority espouses. They demand that authority justify itself by reason and maybe even evidence. Thereby they are confronted with the necessity to do the same in order to have any basis for opposition that can be taken seriously. Those on the easier path begin to sense that authority is leading them to acquire skills to confront ambiguous issues with reason and evidence. With this sense comes a realization that process is a learning objective with intrinsic value, perhaps even equal to that of content.

Perry delivers a message to us that is well known to successful writers: "know thy audience." When we recognize the progression of stages of intellectual growth, we can easily accept students at any stage they are at and then help them move on to the next stage. Once we know about Stage 4 growth, we can appreciate the in-your-face student and award ourselves a little kudos  for having helped him or her arrive at recognizing the importance of  evidence. We have a responsibility to enable transitions to higher level thinking, and a way we can do so is to clearly teach and model process.
 

Ed Nuhfer, Director Teaching Effectiveness & Faculty Development
CU-Denver Campus Box 137 PO Box 173364 Denver, CO 80217-3364
(303) 556-4915 Fax (303) 556-5855