Adrianne McAvoy: Freedom to Learn

Notes from McAvoy's talk

[plain text = McAvoy, [] = me, "" = questioner]

Her main source is a guy named Rogers.

Niel Postman *Teaching as a subversive act*

Models for teaching from psychotherapy. Fully student centered. Robert Frost: Tobe a teacher is to be ale listen to anything without loosing composure."

This technique is easiest to implement in upper division stuff.

Let students choose what they read and how they will be assessed. [No way this would work for less advanced students]

you are asking them to make a choice that they are not qualified to make, and that is problematic.

"What if they set the bar low for themselves?" You have to be cool with that, but ...[it looks like their own criteria of success are measured against her explicit meta-level criteria]

At the lower level you don't give them total freedom, you give them little pieces of freedom [now this just sounds like ordinary teaching]

When students fail they choose to fail.

[Fall 2009 intro syllabus: I. The reacting the past game on Socrates. II. Watchmen III. Freedom to learn?????]

I don't give them any grades at all until the end of the semester. There are some checkboxes in a matrix of [meta level?] goals.

[Ack, computer crashed.]

[If you spent the first half of the course emphasizing again and again what skills different exercises develop, and how different evaluations measure levels of competency, and maybe talk about Bloom's taxonomy, they would have skills to design curricula for themselves for the second half of the course.]