Good afternoon. I'm Gary Morrison and I'm here talking
with Mike Molenda this afternoon. Uh Mike, I wonder if
you could give us an overview of who you are
, where you live and what are you currently doing
? I am Michael Molenda, live in Bloomington, Indiana.
I'm retired after teaching in the instructional systems technology program
at Indiana University 1972-2005. I live in
Bloomington with my wife Janet, who is a practicing
attorney and I do keep a bit active in the
field, mainly writing things for publication that are of
interest to me. Okay, what was your primary
focus of your work? I didn't have one.
Okay, I was always a generalist. My first
position required me to be a one man Educational media
department. I actually developed courses in educational television,
audiovisual administration, Media utilization, programmed instruction. I
developed, I developed the whole curriculum, taught the
whole curriculum and got used to it and stayed interested
in all of those topics. So over the years
I always stayed involved in the full range of literature
in the field. Is there anyone that really picture
interest that if you were given a full slate of
courses to teach, which one would maybe appear at
the top of your list instructional development that really it's
so central to the field. Everything else revolves around
it. And so I think it's important to get
that right to have healthy perspective on it, have
a big toolkit on instructional development. So I probably
devoted more time and energy to teaching and keeping up
with research in that area than any other area,
especially if you include the design stage of instructional development
, which includes all of those decisions about choosing pedagogical
methods, choosing media, if you add that into
the mix, that incorporates probably 85 of the literature
in our field. So in that sense I can
say I focused on instructional development and still stayed interested
in everything. Okay says there's no undergraduate programs,
so to speak in our field. There comes a
point when we're finishing up for undergrad degree or maybe
the master, we get this a hot point and
we discover our field with called audiovisual communications, educational
media, instructional system technology. What was your ah
ha moment? It was a moment. I was
an undergraduate student in my senior year at Marquette University
in radio and television, and I walked past the
bulletin board and I saw a flyer that said India
fellowships in educational media at Syracuse University. Syracuse had
recently won the national championship in football. So I
knew that was a good school ball and educational media
sounded like it might be related to radio and television
, I didn't really know, but it was better
than looking for a job at that time. It
was the most lucrative fellowship possible. In fact,
I think it paid For a three year period around
$10,000. A lot of money. There was a
lot of money and I I didn't have to hold
any other position. I didn't do graduate assistantship work
or whole part time job. Was able to be
a full time student and live in graduate student luxury
. As it were. Graduate student looks very that's
two pizzas amount rather than 11 hamburger. Right?
Could you describe your career path in terms of education
as soon as you worked at the different jobs that
you help? Yes. Uh I only held to
different positions. The first was at University of north
Carolina at Greensboro. And I got that through a
lucky chance. Also in my 2nd Year of Graduate
Studies ahead an internship, a ford foundation internship in
Washington D. C. And it allowed traveled to
some national education conferences. In fact, it required
that we go to the A. S. A
. National conference school administrators and add a cocktail reception
. I meant the dean of the School of Education
at U. N. C. G. We
struck up a conversation and he must have liked what
he heard because at the end of the conversation he
said well when you finish your degree I'd like you
to come to work for me at U. N
. C. G. And he said well I'll
let you know and so I filed that away and
kind of you know, just naively took that at
face value and counted on it. And so about
two years later I sent him a lighter. I
said I'm just about finished my course work. When
do I start? And sure enough they had a
position waiting for me. The School of education was
building a new media center and I was available just
in time to step in at the architectural planning stage
where I could sit down with the architect and make
sure the rooms were laid out and equipped the way
that would be best for flexible use in the future
. Um, electrical outlets everywhere. Something don't do
today. Right. And, and then start to
work on the curriculum development because he wanted to build
an educational media graduate program and he was very foresighted
in that they did have a library school library program
in the School of education. And in fact I
worked with those people, I joined that department and
then started my own program area from there. So
I was at U. N. C. G
. For four years and then at A D.
A. V. I national convention, I ran
into bob Hynek and we struck up an immediate rapport
and he mentioned that they had a new position opening
up that indiana would I be interested? And I
said I really love it in Greensboro, it's a
dream job but indiana is mecca, so I have
to give it a chance. So I went out
for an interview and met the people and was suitably
impressed and actually had a raise. I think it's
about a$2,000 a year to raise, which was
40 right. Yes. And so I took the
position and it was a dual appointment halftime teaching in
instructional systems technology. It already was I. S
. T. At that time and uh half time
working with bob Hynek in a new instructional development center
that served the teacher education program. Now of course
at that time I didn't know what instructions with Goldman
was, but I knew I was a quick learner
and I would catch on before they caught on to
me. And so actually I give a lot of
credit to graduate students who you know, well you
knew for sure Amos Patterson, he was the head
of the audiovisual sub centre in the school of Education
. And even though I was a professor and he
was a graduate student, I was learning from Amos
because he had been in this business, in the
instructional development business longer than I was and he was
a heck of a good administrator and a leader.
I really learned a lot from him about how to
work with people and how to organize an enterprise.
So I was lucky in that sense that I had
good mentoring there in in that part of the job
. And as it turned out, I never left
. Okay, what was it like you said,
indiana was the mecca and you're walking in with real
giants in the field? Published. Established Mon coming
because I think you're right as a center professor.
So what was it like for a young assistant professor
coming in with folks like this? Well, it
was ideal for me because even though I had been
a big fish in a small pond, it was
the educational media guy, U N. C.
G. And everyone deferred to my wisdom. Uh
even though I was learning on the job there too
. Um I was very happy coming into a situation
where I didn't have to be the world's leading authority
on anything where I could find a niche and learn
from them, observe them and grow into being worthy
of being part of that group. So for me
it was very comfortable, I didn't need to be
acknowledged as a leader in that group. And so
I could sit, it could be a wallflower when
I was uh as long as I needed to be
so nice, that's the best. We need to
keep that lesson of mine. Thinking back when you
, when you first started your career, how would
you maybe describe your research interests but more important,
what were your aspirations at that stage? In terms
of research very low. I did not get a
firm grounding in research methods or educational research methods at
Syracuse. I hope no one from Syracuse. Oh
, they're all gone of. Uh it was probably
as it's always your own fault, I could have
sought it out, I could have worked harder at
finding, but I just wasn't drawn to it and
it wasn't thrust upon me. So I didn't get
a good background in research. My minor area was
comparative government and it was really more interested in the
research, um methodology and atmosphere in in that area
. I I enjoyed reading public opinion quarterly more than
I enjoyed reading a VCR communication review as far as
research, learning from research and about research. So
I actually had more knowledge and interest in political science
research that I did in education and in fact my
dissertation was done on the political life of D.
A. V. I. So I never really
did develop any kind of research agenda at indiana University
shame on me. Um, but I was passionate
about teaching and about service and you know, working
in professional associations and so on and providing leadership where
I could that consumed most of my energy. The
only research thread that I ever really developed was in
the middle of my career. I discovered system analysis
Heaver influenced, will totally influenced by John Tiff ins
dissertation at Florida State University 1971. Yeah, I
came across that in law ruinous to the technology to
educate Eva. And it was just by the purest
chance that I was subscribing to in reading a spanish
language of south american journal. And this article was
in that journal. It was in english though.
So I was especially drawn to it. So he
published a very compelling story based on his dissertation.
Where and it convinced me that this was the kind
of inquiry that should dominate our field as opposed to
experimental psychological research methodology. That's part of the reason
I wasn't drawn education research that just never made sense
to me. I didn't understand how you went from
that kind of inquiry to understand, excuse me,
understanding anything about building systems. Mm But Tiffany,
system analysis made sense. And his work and then
later books by Henry Petroski on Engineering on structural engineering
is popular works from the new yorker best selling books
that he translated ideas about failure analysis, how engineers
learned through analyzing disasters, structural failures. And I
said this is exactly how we ought to be learning
about instructional systems. We ought to be examining the
deficiencies in instructional systems and taking them back to their
causes and then figuring out how to fix that cause
. And so I wrote a little essay on that
subject, sort of bridging Tiffany's work and Petro Skis
work into our field and got some graduate students interested
in it. I never taught a course that it
fit into, but students who came to me looking
for dissertation ideas and I say, well, what
do you think about this? Does this sound interesting
? And eventually there are a half dozen of them
that did these kinds of system analysis of system deficiencies
. And I thought they reached very interesting conclusions,
very useful conclusions. I used the methodology myself in
a consulting job that I did in Egypt and went
to the Minister of Higher Education and explained my findings
and he really encouraged me. I mean, he
was very taken with this way of getting at an
understanding of the problem and it gave me confidence to
give it to students and then my support of them
gave them the confidence to try something that other than
Tiffen. No one had ever done in our field
. And so one of my projects after I finish
for other retirement projects, one of them is to
go back and do kind of a meta analysis of
those dis occasions and put them together into a larger
study and try again to convince the field that this
is a methodology people ought to be using. Um
two of your articles came I think after you retire
. I think there are chapters and one of the
yearbooks. But the one on the anti model and
the other one on the the name of how much
you've learned what you see medium. How did those
come about? And the reason I mean the research
you did on it was different than most research we
do in our field. I wonder if you could
tell us a little about those. Yeah. First
the attic in search of the elusive at the models
. We talked briefly about it when you guys started
on it. Okay. It oh it always burke
me that people refer to an Eddie model and they
would argue about what the G model said. And
I knew very well. There was no such thing
as an Eddie model. There was this abbreviation A
D D I E. But it wasn't based on
a book or a monograph for an essay. Um
there was no there was no text that went with
this visual and yet people acted like there was and
they argued about what was the correct interpretation. So
I was actually asked to do an entry on addie
model for an encyclopedia of educational technology that was being
done at that time. And I readily accepted because
it would give me a chance to pursue this.
And so my methodology was simply to get on the
phone and call everyone I knew who was around In
the 70s and 80s and who would have been in
a position to know when they first heard the term
addie and where they first heard it, who they
heard it from. And as I reported in the
article, the most consistent fucking was when I asked
them who invented it, they said didn't you invent
? I had nothing to do with it. I
know that for sure. Um I think I was
able to find one of the earliest, um,
You know, physical manifestations of the Addie model in
an STD publication from 1981. But I know that
the acronym was in the air before that and around
that time. So anyway, that it was just
a it was just kind of selective sample of people
and narrowed it down to uh, eliminating all the
possibilities. It wasn't it wasn't set asylum tr direction
, it wasn't Michael mullen, it was gary Morris
. And, you know, I went on the
list of all possible um authors and they were in
both informants and deniers. And so they didn't do
it and they didn't know who did it. So
that's what I was able to report with great authority
that there was no original author and there was no
original model and about the same time you did the
other night media affects question. What about you,
remember how much you hear, how much you see
? How much you oh my gosh, I you
know, I I still haven't finished that roger,
but you've touched a raw nerve. I promised Larry
Lipsitz to do a special issue of educational technology on
that subject. And the subject you're talking about is
the misinterpretation of dale's cone. Edgar dale of course
had the famous 1946 visual schema of a cone that
classified different media formats. And later, um a
fellow who we now have been able to identify a
Lieutenant colonel phillips in the army. I haven't refreshed
my memory on this recently, but I have I
have written up an article short, I don't want
this, he develop that little um what can we
call a schema that we remember? 10% Of what
we read, 20 of what we hear, 30%
90 of what we practiced. And then someone along
the way had superimposed that formula On top of Dale's
cone and said Dale said that we remember, you
know the things at the bottom of the cone and
but not the things at the top of the cone
were only 10 of the verbal information. I mean
which is I can see why someone would make that
interpretation or make that super imposition. There's a certain
amount of rough approximate value to it. But it's
the phillips formula was strictly anecdotal, who is not
based on any research. And it's certainly not true
because you can't generalize about how much people remember of
any particular event, auditory or visual or verbal event
. You have to understand the context. What were
there, What were their objectives, who was saying
it was presenting it? And so and so we
clearly can't generalize to that extent. It's just absolutely
obvious and any child would know that. And yet
hundreds and hundreds of grown adults, mainly, professors
have latched onto that and you can go to the
World Wide Web, you can google dale's cone and
you'll find 200,000 entries and many of them will link
into course alibi in teacher education Garces where professors are
advocating this and claiming that they actually give references for
this. And there are a half dozen vagrant references
that have been superimposed on this model. And so
people obviously have been copying from one another. No
one has gone back to our primary source because nobody
cites the places where these two models first appeared and
they certainly don't cite them in the context in which
they were originally presented. So, uh you know
, I did do a little piece on that,
but I promised Larry Lipsitz I would do it much
larger, a comprehensive analysis of all of the claims
that are made and then refuting them one x one
with really scholarly list of of disproves. Um I
haven't done that yet. That's one of the half
a dozen projects that's still on my retirement bucket list
. It's serious. I mean, remember gradual doing
transparency for Danny pet used to model for him to
go off and do this dog and pony show and
we were sort of taught us gospel at the time
. Another one I think, which sort of transition
to our next topic in the original hunting leather russell
, but one of the first editions, if not
in early one. Mhm. You were showing sales
kind of experience over laid with routers, three levels
of male representation and then told us that dale's gonna
experience was out the door and stuff and devastated my
life. Uh I'm teaching, I'm reading the chapter
before the next day, going to lecture and I
think your point dale's gonna experience when I get to
this one and there it is. You can't,
shall not do this anymore with you shouldn't have taken
so seriously. It has always struck me to hear
back from students or from readers what they got out
of something I said or wrote because it's often not
what I meant. And I'm sure this is,
I thought you brought the obituary. There were no
special little blocks. I really didn't intend to.
Um I think it was dale himself, if I
recall correctly who pointed out the correspondence between his cone
and Brunner's then new ideas about iconic and whatever kinds
of learning. Um, and he was the one
who was pointing out the similarity, but I don't
think either of us was saying that it refuted anything
. It was just an interesting parallel thought. So
I'm sorry to spoil your day. Well that brings
up early in your career. You co authored this
Book with Bob and Jim Russell. That's still 9th
, 10th, 11th 12th edition. It's still widely
used in the early editions of the book. You're
able to address a wide variety of media for use
in the classroom as well as development and today it's
all the computer, you know, how has many
utilization changed over the years? I mean if you
were, I don't think directive the book have been
for a while. But have you seen a change
since that first edition? Yeah. One of the
reasons, one of several reasons that I dropped out
of participating in the book was that I was I
wasn't believing in what we had to do to the
book to achieve shift from an audio visual emphasis to
a computer emphasis. I didn't believe in it to
the extent that the publisher wanted us to change it
. Because I had a temple reason to believe survey
evidence for example, the teachers were still using and
probably surely today are still using audiovisual media. No
, I can't make a big deal about this because
I haven't been in schools recently. But I'm willing
to wager that if you walked into a random school
building. Elementary secondary, you would find numerous overhead
projectors still in use and video projecting some video viewing
setups here and there. Not filmstrips probably. Although
in elementary school they would still be useful. Um
Those you know, sound filmstrip players that advanced automatically
. Mhm. I think it would still be attractive
to kids because it's so different from the digital media
that they see. So in a nutshell, I
don't think practice either in school or college has changed
as much as the textbook illustrates. You know the
textbook wanting to be wanting to appear cutting edge is
all about computers and I don't think life is all
about computers yet. I hope it never gets to
be because I still use the overhead projector and it
is still the more appropriate mechanism for many purposes,
especially when you want to have a lit room And
little people are reliable computer most of the time.
Well it's absolutely reliable. If you have a spare
bulb it's 100%. Um and simple. You don't
need an instruction manual to figure out how to use
it. Very few things that can go wrong,
but mainly it's a bright image that you can use
in the lip room. You can draw it on
your docket, you can point to it. You
put colored pictures on it, you can overlay ideas
to show the overlap better than you can in a
computer. Why would a person abandon that? Something
that works? And especially you think of older professors
who have invested a lot of their effort into making
their transparency. They shouldn't have to give. It's
hard to translate those two power point, thank goodness
, thank goodness. They don't, they don't belong
there. It's a different medium with different advantage to
it. So I'm an obvious question. It would
seem that you think maybe we're not as well off
today in the classroom because everything is around the computer
as we were 25 years ago before we had him
major microcomputer influx in the class and we have all
these other rich sources of media. Exactly. And
in fact, that was that was Edgar Dale's original
method message, which I think is still valid.
And that is that for most purposes, especially for
younger learns, we want to give them experiences at
the lower levels of the come, we want to
give them direct hands on kinesthetic and tactile experiences with
real life things. Or if not that then models
of real life things, representations of real life,
but things that they can touch and feel and manipulate
. I don't think most people know what those are
. Yeah, right. And I I am serenely
convinced that Children's needs for those and readiness for those
kinds of materials has not changed and will not change
. It's wired into human reality. I mean a
million years from now, we may have evolved enough
that we don't need, you don't have a need
to touch things or to learn through direct experience.
But right now humans need those things and and they're
still valid and I'll bet Montessori schools still use the
same Macos and are still as supremely effective as they
ever were. Uh huh. I hadn't thought of
that example for another people go to Montessori schools and
see what works because I'll bet they're not abandoning abandoning
manipulative and textiles. 15 point Yeah. Another study
, Yes. Um thinking back, what are some
of the major ideas, approaches and people that influenced
your growth as a, as a professional? Let
me answer that in two categories. First. People
I knew personally who provided role modeling for me,
I want to acknowledge First Donnie lee at Syracuse University
and Eugene Ox handler who fewer people will know because
he died while I was still a graduate student,
but he was very influential with me and ken official
who went on to Higher education administration and so it
was lost to the field early on. So most
people don't know Ox handler an official, but those
three were the father figures at Syracuse when I was
there and all three were sympathetic and helpful and intelligent
and curious mentors, all of which traits I tried
to live up to. So those. But the
biggest one was my first professional colleague mary Frances johnson
, the library education lady at U N C G
, a woman who had all of the professional confidence
is that anyone could wish to have. She was
just classy, she did everything the right way.
She treated people the right way, she treated students
and she approached her teaching the right way. She
thought about her profession and served in major leadership roles
in her profession. She wrote with Grace, she
was just a supreme example of a higher education professional
and I hope I have a quarter of her,
her class in her grace, in my perform.
So those are the people that I knew individually,
the contributors, they intellectual contributors that made a big
impact on me early on were the people who were
working in programmed instruction, BF Skinner, Siegfried Engelmann
who developed direct instruction, Doug Elson who developed programs
, tutoring. It's not only were they courageous enough
and created a creative enough to invent whole new teaching
learning format and who does that anymore. They were
courageous enough, creative enough to do these things advocate
these things, but more importantly, in the long
term, they were all passionately devoted to improving productivity
of learning. They were all concerned about disadvantaged and
handicapped learners, how to help them catch up.
We need accelerated ways of learning. Normal ways aren't
going to be enough for people who are so far
behind, they have to learn twice as fast.
How can we possibly develop a methodology where they can
learn twice as fast, 3g of as organs and
that was their goal was increased productivity of learning and
they achieved it, they achieved miraculous things. Clearly
there were flaws in programmed instruction for me, not
in program tutoring, there was never anything wrong with
that because nelson used social reinforces as the reinforcement in
that system. You would live tutors who actually gave
appropriate social responses to learners as they went through the
lesson, giving them encouragement and hints and so on
. It was a much more flexible kind of reinforcement
. It actually had a reinforcing value, whereas knowledge
of correct results was proven okay we're already limited efficacy
as reinforce er um and secret Engleman with direct instruction
. I think the principles there live teacher adapting to
the Children in front of him or her, but
following a formula in which the students spent most of
their time actively engaged, they were talking or shouting
or calculating or singing, they were busy all the
time exhibiting behaviors that could be encouraged or corrected and
it took great deal of creativity to invent that method
and to research and test it advocated disseminated and to
remain devoted to that ideal of improving productivity, productivity
of learning which I think has been lost over the
years of so when I entered the field this is
what we were trying to do. We're trying to
work miracles. Were trying to find gimmicks and techniques
, new creative ideas that would make a quantum jump
and learning not just peace. Let's do this through
a different medium. Or can we squeeze this into
that box? It was trying to find magic.
And they did it. You bring up an interesting
historical point about programmed instruction. Were you involved in
the soul? Could you describe how you're involved with
this? It's gone from our I mean, it's
out there historically, but it's gone other than a
name. And I never uh huh. Other than
in the most rudimentary way, I never wrote programmed
instruction, I did write some highly structured materials that
we used like in the learning lab in the School
of Education for operating A. V. Equipment.
Um but I was never really a producer of programmed
instruction. And by the time I was examining program
instruction, I was already seeing its flaws. Okay
I could see, I mean if I don't understand
why there was a whole industry built around of lots
of smart people who never stopped to critically evaluate BF
. Skinner's claim because it was B. F.
Skinner who invented the principles of reinforcement and he and
he was the one who said this is how we
should apply it to instruction. So no one thought
to criticize that. How could he be wrong?
He was scared, be scared but he could be
wrong about how to apply a principal. He he
could be absolutely right about what the learning principle was
. His descriptive theory might have been perfectly sound but
his prescriptive theory was as fallible as anyone. Any
man on the street who said well this is how
you should use it, this is how you should
use it, this is how you should. He
came up with an idea that that reef that conf
you did his own claims. He said that no
reinforce er is universal or permanent. They're all independent
on the needs of the organism at the time.
And yet he is programmed instruction gave learners nothing but
knowledge of correct results over and over and over you
whether he needed it wanted it or not. So
it was a terrible example of applying his principles.
So I saw that very quickly but and so I
didn't become an advocate of it, but I also
saw very quickly or I appreciate it very quickly.
Susan Mayer, Mark Als, very early observation that
what was magic about programmed instruction was not the format
, not the reinforcement schedule but the planning process that
went into it In order to work out a schedule
of reinforcements, where the learners were making 90 correct
responses. It had to test each frame to see
if it were and it was that specifying of the
objectives and creating the materials that testing of the materials
. That was the magic of the process. And
that really was the original kernel of instructional development.
And so I was learning that just about the time
I was arriving at indiana and starting to work in
instructional development, these things were coming together. I
was working with people who had come to it more
from film production and media production and they had their
way of developing a product which was very different from
it and didn't share any language or, or history
with the program instruction people two very different fields,
but their focus was beginning to converge in this area
. What was the magic of the process? And
it was the planning and the testing. Thinking back
over your career, um what would you say are
234 the major trends that you've got to observe?
I would say two of the most important one.
The first I've already mentioned the realization of where is
the magic in behavioral technology that gave the rise to
instructional design and development. That was one big movement
that I lived through. Um another one was instigated
by Richard Clark's articles questioning the role of media versus
methods and as you know, that evolved into a
debate that went on over a period of years.
And I think to a great extent, people have
not, don't feel that that has been fully resolved
gift. I lean much more to Clark's position and
and that was the in answer to your question movements
that influenced me. After I saw the insight he
had, it directed my attention away from media per
se and toward pedagogical methods. I hadn't really ever
been taught about pedagogical method. I didn't go through
a teacher training program and it was not no obvious
in our literature, in the educational technology literature.
There wasn't a lot of talk about pedagogy, there
was a lot more after the constructivist moved. But
this came before that and I began to think about
and look for pedagogical treatments of a wider range than
we were used to ones that went beyond the normal
boundaries of what you can do with slides and films
and overhead projectors and so on. So that was
very important for me for clark to trigger that thought
that we need to start exploring over here in the
big world of pedagogical methods. And one of my
half dozen items on my bucket list is to share
some of the insights I've had of how to look
at that in some ways of classifying the methods that
are available to us. One reason that people struggled
select the right methods is that we don't really have
a good typology or taxonomy that allows us to say
well for this kind of problem, you need this
kind of solution and you see that was different than
the media selection models. Yeah, totally different because
it's not about media, it's about methods learning teaching
. Another inside I had and this was I think
on my own. Um there was another great idea
started by robert gagne In the 1st edition of Conditions
of Learning. He had a chapter that was called
modes of instruction. Yeah, No one paid attention
to. It struck me and I talked about it
and I talked about it, but no one else
seemed to pay attention to it and it disappeared in
the second in later editions. But it was a
rough, very primitive typology of pedagogical methods. You
know, he said there are only a half dozen
ways that you can structure teaching learning situations Well,
um, I started, you know, I latched
onto that and I started teaching and working that into
my teaching about media and methods. But in discussion
with students, when we would have this in class
, they would say, well, what about X
or what about why or where does this fit?
And I began to realize that We had to expand
this or not. six, there were eight.
Well, they were not eight, there were 10
. And now I'm up to 11 or 12.
And then it struck me when I was advocating this
list. This is it this is comprehensive. I
think we finally got it. It occurred to me
that these were all teaching methods, and none of
them were learning methods. And when you think about
it, learning, especially for informal education learners spend
far more time reading books, been doing homework with
the writing essays, doing library research, googling it
however they do it. Um you know, they
do far more spend far more time and studying for
exams, studying for an exam. Well isn't that
a way of learning? Why it's not in the
list? It's never mentioned in the list of pedagogical
that studying for an example. So it occurred to
me that this was really, you know, a
dipstick with teaching methods on one side, learning methods
on the other and they overlap a bit in the
middle discussion, for example, is a little bit
of both. It maybe teacher guided, but it's
really learner centered. So the things that teachers do
and things that learners do and the ones that learners
do are probably more important. They occupy more time
and then probably account for more of a learning that
gets done than what the teacher does in the classroom
. I mean we all acknowledge that we all say
we learn more else other clubs and then well then
why don't we account for that in our theories and
in our typology? So my typology will include both
. Because the only way you can use those out
of classroom possibilities if you anticipate them and require them
or encourage them. If you can help students to
read for understanding better, then you have maximized one
of those pedagogical methods in a way that you wouldn't
have if you never thought about your role in entailing
responsibility for out of classrooms work to. So um
robert Kanye triggered it but it took 30 years of
teaching about it and thinking about it before I really
figured it out for myself in a way that I'm
satisfied with instead of growing, it's still going.
But I'm devoted to the idea of a small double
handful. I don't want it to grow beyond that
. And I do believe, you know, I
think I'm now at the point where I can take
120 different named teaching methods like socratic method or um
debate or whatever names, coaching, rehearsing, training
and take all of those different terms and you analyze
what's actually going on under that label and there is
a place for it in this list of about a
dozen configurations. I'm, I'm calling them teaching learning
configurations and there are a finite number and this is
that, this is the book, ideas you thought
that I'm betraying, don't you get out their first
break, That's my idea, your idea, we'll
keep that. What do you think was your greatest
accomplishment during your career and wine? Uh, well
, I hope is yet to come. I hope
it's this book on pedagogical methods. But until and
unless I do that, I would say the instructional
media book, because we really behind Nick Russell and
I really intended to write a book that would be
an exemplary textbook, not just good content, but
something that people from all over would look at this
is the way a textbook should be designed. Um
, and I think, well, I'm not the
one who should judge it, but we had plenty
of reviewers and even more adopters of the book who
told us we were on the right track that we
had created something different, qualitatively different from other available
textbooks in our field. And I think even in
other fields, so I'm very proud of that and
I think that will last a long time, even
even though I was Participating author only in the first
five editions, and now they're up to 10.
Um it's always one of those at least is always
going to be on library shelves somewhere. I feel
like I have like the fourth edition at home.
Okay, so, you know, most people are
, most libraries, we'll have at least one of
those. And so that that's a legacy that I
hope will live on. Well, the book revolutionized
. I'll call me the utilisation of production at the
time. There were several others, but I remember
reading one of the first reviews when that came out
. If you're saying this is revolutionizing the way we
go about teaching this course. Well, I hope
so. And in fact, we also put a
lot of effort into that. Right from the first
edition, we started organizing workshops at the conventions,
pre conference workshops on how to teach media utilization courses
. And we didn't necessarily dictate our purpose was to
help people use the textbook better and to think more
clearly about what they were teaching. But we also
asked people to bring Syllabi and bring suggestions and to
share with others. So we really wanted to be
a clearinghouse of ideas. So we were, that
was part of our mission to help improve the teaching
of what was then the bread and butter of course
, among all of the hundreds of educational media programs
in the country. The one thing they all had
in common was they all taught some kind of course
on media utilization. And so we thought this was
this was a way to make a difference in a
big chunk of what the field was concerned with.
Well, 10, 15 years from now when either
we don't committee strategic because of our golf game soap
operas or wanting that other book. How do you
want this next generation of construction design folks members a
city remember, um I hope they remember me as
someone who sifted through other people's ideas and picked out
the good ones, champion them and explain them clearly
to others. That's really what I saw as my
role as a teacher. And I freely acknowledged the
borrowings wherever is using other people's ideas. And I
didn't, I never positioned myself as an expert.
I've never thought of myself as an expert, but
as someone who was fairly discriminating and picking out good
ideas and repackaging them and presenting them to others so
that as a teller, a teacher and tell her
, and I hope I'm remembered as a team player
. I've always tried to do whatever I could to
help whatever group I was part of um succeed.
In fact, that was a very very powerful lesson
that I learned back when I was in that internship
program in Washington, D. C. 1965 66
. one of our experiences as a group was to
have a t group session training group, which was
really a kind of a marathon and all day is
actually a two day marathon, A group experience on
group process. We were learning about group process by
being stuck in a room together. And the facilitator
really provided almost no guidance. You're here. What
do you all want to do? Well, what
we wanted to do was struggle for power amongst ourselves
. We wanted to debate who is going to be
leader of this group and whose ideas were gonna dominate
. And after about a day of this, the
facilitators spoke, he only spoke once in two days
. May I suggest a different definition of a leader
than you all seem to be pursuing. How about
a leader as someone who helps a group achieve its
objectives? We all sat back and I especially sat
back. I mean it hit me, you know
, like a hammer in the forehead. What am
I doing? Whatever, How foolish I've been all
my life. If I really want to help these
people that I really want this team to succeed,
I should do whatever is necessary to help the team
. If that means being quiet for a while and
supporting other people's ideas, what might be a good
idea to? So it really gave me a whole
different concept of what leadership was and I hope it's
something that I've modeled successfully over the years, but
I owe it all to NTL National Training Labs and
that one facilitator. Well, thank you very much
for taking the time to speak. It's been a
great pleasure for me. Thank you very.