As noted in the previous post, I spent a few days last week in Urbana-Champaign, visiting the University of Illinois. This included a lot of meetings with various folks at the university, several of them faculty who did lab tours and shop talk, so I knew what to expect. It’s a tradition in academia that when a professor from another school shows up, you show off all your best toys.
A bunch of my meetings last week, though, were with administrative staff, which was a bit unusual, so I didn’t know what they would involve. As it turns out, they mostly wanted to discuss communications issues— what tips did I have for getting more faculty to communicate with the general public, what advice could I give about how to convey complex science topics, etc. This is not my usual line of meetings, but I was able to improvise answers that I think worked reasonably well. (I joked to Kate afterwards that maybe I should start a side hustle as a public communications consultant, since there seems to be demand for that. I’m not sure any of my honest advice was actually actionable, but that doesn’t seem to stop any other consultants, so…)
This got me thinking a bit about the fact that probably the single most valuable professional skill I know of is ability to think on the fly. I end up doing this a lot in weird places thanks to my existing side hustles— when I give public lectures about physics, or do an interview with a media outlet, I can anticipate many of the questions they’ll ask, but there’s always at least one that comes out of left field. It’s been a while since I completely blanked on one of these, though there have definitely been points mid-question where I was thinking “Oh, my God, this is insane, what do I say to this that isn’t ‘You’re a loony, get away from me…’?” I usually come up with something, and the high-wire aspect of this is kind of a kick.
It’s also a big part of my day job. Every class I teach, I give students chances to ask questions, and there are always a few that I’ve never heard before, even after twenty-odd years of teaching this stuff. More incredibly, every time I teach a lab class, it seems like some student finds a completely unique new way of doing the experiment or the data analysis incorrectly, and I have to figure it out on the fly. The absolute number of failures here— times when I flub an explanation, or can’t debug the experiment— is higher, but these are also more frequent, so the rate of failure might be about the same.
Some of my success with this can undoubtedly be written off as an innate tendency toward bullshit artistry. A lot of it is just practice, though: lots of occasions in which I’m asked questions that come out of nowhere and have to answer them. I’d like to think this is attributable to years and years of elite higher education, in no part because I’m now partly in the business of selling elite higher education to students and families.
This, of course, got me thinking about how to teach this kind of thinking-on-your-feet as a skill. In principle at least, this seems like the kind of thing that ought to be a selling point for liberal arts education— the wider the range of topics you study, the more kinds of questions you have experience in answering, and the less likely you are to encounter something genuinely unfamiliar. Most of the kinds of things I get asked about tend to follow similar general patterns, after all, even if the details are very different, and one of the default techniques for answering them is to try to subtly recast the question as something I already have a ready answer for.
I’m not sure how one would intentionally build this into a curriculum, though. Especially now, when every trend in education generally is toward more and more structure— every question and every assignment needs to have a ton of scaffolding, and when we request approval for anything involving evaluation (a course, a hire, a project) we need to provide detailed rubrics in advance spelling out exactly what we’re looking for and how we weight each component. This extends down to the student level— current students often seem to be looking for specificity in the requirements and standards for every assignment at a level that seems to defeat the purpose of cultivating flexibility in thinking.
This push for structure is often cast as an equity issue, a way around the problem of “hidden curricula” where students from underprivileged backgrounds don’t know that they’re expected to know certain things about how our institutions function. I very much agree that this is a worthy goal, and there are certainly aspects of the higher education experience that would benefit from being spelled out more clearly. I worry, though, that in the push to make every expectation clear, we’re undercutting one of the principal benefits that we have to offer. If every assignment comes with a checklist spelling out what’s expected and what manner it’s expected to be provided in, we’re losing out on that essential element of flexibility in thinking and reacting. Which I think is a valuable skill in absolutely any line of work any of our students might find themselves in down the road.
I don’t have any great ideas on how to square this particular circle, unfortunately, or I would have the opportunity to launch my most lucrative side-hustle yet. I suspect the answer involves something like a large number of on-the-fly sorts of assignments— oral reports, in-class presentations— that are graded very leniently. The numerical stakes of any particular assignment would then be pretty low, but the need to do a real-time response (and if necessary be walked through the solution) adds a risk of embarrassment that gives it some personal stakes that might make the important lessons stick. That’s really not an approach that scales well, though, in terms of faculty time and other resources.
So, this is one of those blog posts that just sort of trails off with a request for suggestions in the comments. (Maybe since Matt Reed has hung up his keyboard, I can steal his “Wise and worldly readers” tagline?) If you know of good and practical ways to intentionally teach students to think on their feet, I’d be happy to hear them.
Yeah, that’s a thing. If you’d like to see whether I learn anything from this that’s worth sharing in a subsequent post, here’s a button:
And if you have suggestions to offer of things I might learn from and re-share later, the comments will be open:
You wrote the following: "Most of the kinds of things I get asked about tend to follow similar general patterns, after all, even if the details are very different, and one of the default techniques for answering them is to try to subtly recast the question as something I already have a ready answer for. I’m not sure how one would intentionally build this into a curriculum, though."
To a large extent, this is the goal of my Test Question Template (TQT) framework. I try very hard to get students away from the memorize-a-million-flashcards approach by explicitly showing them PATTERNS of questions -- each defined by a Lesson Learning Objective directly linked to specific examples of how I might assess that LLO on an exam, along with my promise that the actual exam question they'll get won't be the exact examples shown but will follow the same general pattern. If you read the Introduction of Evans et al. JMBE 2023 (https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/jmbe.00200-22) you'll get the basic idea. The overall strategy relates well to your concern that if we do too much specifying of expectations, there's no need to be an agile thinker. TQTs aim to provide enough structure to usefully constrain students' focus while still keeping things open enough that they can't just plug-and-chug, and thus must be able to think on their feet within the constraints specified. [end of TQT ad for now; please follow up if interested]
It's rather hard to teach people to think on their feet if making them think on their feet has a negative emotional loading. Lawyers have that "Socratic method" in law school in which the professor calls on a particular student for an answer then guides him or her to the answer. It is both effective, since lawyers do need to think on their feet, often literally, but it can also be traumatizing. There might be a way to unload the approach a bit by, as you suggest, decoupling it from grading.