November 2, 2023 • 52 mins
In episode 143 of The A&P Professor podcast for anatomy and physiology faculty, host Kevin Patton uncovers the super-secret, single, ultimate teaching strategy you need to keep your course tuned up and effective. He also revisits the "out there" transducer model of the brain and suggests a connection with a recent discovery supporting quantum wave activity in brain cell microtubules. Yes, quantum waves in the microtubules. Kevin also clarifies and expands on those wacky "extra" courses he described in Episodes 140 and 141.
00:00 | Introduction
00:51 | Clarifying Kevin's Wacky Supplemental Courses
15:50 | Quantum Activity in Brain Microtubules?
28:15 | Could There Be More Than One Strategy?
34:29 | The TAPP Hotline
35:11 | There Really Is Only One Strategy
48:00 | Staying Connected
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Clarifying Kevin's Wacky Supplemental Courses
15 minutes
In this segment, Kevin clarifies nuances from Episodes 140 & 141. He dives into the evolution of his "wacky grading" approach and reflects on the significance of end-of-semester debriefings—then explores the impact of badges within a courses. Kevin also uncovers the value of persistence, confidence-building, and teacher generosity.
★ A Pre-A&P Course Improves Student Success in Anatomy & Physiology | TAPP 140
★ Study Courses Supercharge Anatomy & Physiology Success | TAPP 141
★ Ungrading With Standards-Based Grading | A Chat With Staci Johnson | TAPP 106
★ Course Materials in AP 1 Supplement in Ep 141 my-ap.us/AP1suppCourseMaterial
★ End-of-Term Reviews Help Keep Your Course on Track | Episode 17 (introduces the idea of debriefing at the end of the semester)
★ Still Moving Our Course to Remote|
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
One of the most influential Americanwriters of the early 20th century was
H.L. Mencken,
and he famously wrote that "thereis always a well-known solution to
every human problem (00:11):
neat, plausible,
and wrong.".
Welcome to The A&P Professor.
A few minutes to focus on teaching humananatomy and physiology with a veteran
educator and teaching mentor,your host, Kevin Patton.
(00:32):
In episode 143, I clarify somethings about my extra courses.
We see why microtubulesmay have magical powers,
and I reveal the one secretstrategy for teaching success.
To start off this episode,
(00:52):
I have a few things that I want to clarifyfrom that two-part series that we did
in episodes 140 and episode141. That first one,
episode 140 , described a pre-A&Pcourse that I taught for many years,
and the second one, episode 141,
described the A&P 1 Supplement course.
(01:12):
And as I make those clarificationsand fill in some blanks and do some
explaining,
I want to share a few things that Ilearned by designing and teaching those
courses. First off, I want to clarifysomething about course materials. Now,
in episode 140 about the Pre-A&P course,
I went into some detail about whatresources I expected students to have
(01:35):
available to get them through the course,
and they were all optional and sort ofused on an as needed basis because, well,
it's a review course, a refresher course,
so they would get stuck in certain places,
but not every place. So they usedthose course materials as needed
as they made their waythrough the course. Now,
as far as the A&P 1 Supplement course,
(01:56):
I did have some specific resources thatI wanted them to have beyond what they
were using for their regular A&P course,
and I realized that after theepisode was published that I kind of
glossed over that.
So I did add a link to theshow notes for episode 141,
and you may have already seen that,
(02:17):
that links you to the list ofresources that were required of
students the last time that Itaught the A&P 1 Supplement course.
But I did want to call yourattention to it in this episode,
and I'll repeat the linkto those items in the show
notes for this episode.
(02:37):
So you can see those show noteswherever you're listening right now,
probably has the show notes and youcan see the link there. Or if not,
go to theAPprofessor.org/143 and you can
get all the links there, including thisone. And if you go through those links,
you'll see what resources are there,
and it's pretty obviouswhy I used those resources,
(03:00):
but there are some stories andexplanations that I think that you'll find
interesting and useful. I just didn'thave time to fit 'em into this episode,
so I'll circle back to that soonand we'll come back to it. Yeah,
it's spacing. That's what I'm doing.I'm trying to, oh, yeah, interleaving,
I'm interleaving this withother topics so that you
(03:22):
learn better, right? See, I'm using mycontemporary teaching strategies here.
Now, something that I forgot toemphasize in that two-part series of
episodes,
especially in episode141 relating to the A&P 1
Supplement course is , ah...,
this is where I really startedto appreciate what is now called
(03:45):
ungrading or alternativegrading, or in my case,
wacky grading.And yeah, I am waiting.
I'm waiting for that term wackygrading to show up in the literature.
That's one of my hopes for the future.
Maybe I'll put that in the predictionepisode that I always do at the beginning
(04:06):
of a new season of this podcast.
But back then I was totally unawareof any unungrading movement or
alternative grading movement,
and maybe it wasn't reallysomething very visible back then.
It's now very visible these days. Now,
if you go back andlisten to episode 141 and
(04:27):
how I assigned points, I did have points,
not a single point was basedon correctness or percent of
competence in any of the assigned tasks.
In that course,
I even let each studentand a peer both review the
portfolio of all their work in thecourse at the end of the semester
(04:52):
and recommend how many pointsthey should get for that
portfolio of work.By the way,
there were always a handful of studentswho were aware of the fact that they
didn't complete every part ofevery task at their best level of
performance, and they weretoo harsh on themselves,
(05:13):
and I ended up raising their pointsthat they were recommending to me at the
end and that their peer hadrecommended. At the end.
I did that because I thought that wasa better reflection of what they were
doing because after all,
and this is one of the things I thinkabout many forms of alternative grading is
students aren't used to it. Theyneed time to get used to it.
(05:34):
They need instruction in getting usedto it. They need experience in using it,
and I think that some studentsprobably are too lenient on
themselves and other studentsare too harsh on themselves.
So that is an issue that I raninto with this wacky grading,
and one way I handled it was I couldalways override the grade they gave
(05:56):
themselves by looking at whatthey were doing, and of course,
I would discuss it with the studentsif I felt it needed discussing. So
yeah, not grading as usual,hardly grading at all,
probably more like pretendingto grade-wacky grading.
I'm thinking more and more that namewacky grading is a good name for it.
(06:20):
I think this course works bestif it's more about a mentoring
experience with a lot ofself-discovery and building confidence
and failing and then getting better.
When we have experiences like that.
Does a performance-basedgrade really mean anything?
(06:41):
No.
You may gain a few things byfollowing this podcast and regularly
listening. I hope you do.
But would you think beinggraded on that would
be helpful to anyone?
Should I assign an A or a B or a C or an F
(07:01):
to listeners of this podcast? Nope. Now,
you can earn a badge forengaging in each episode,
but it's not graded, not really. I mean,
you have to turn in a reflectionat the end to get that badge,
and I suppose if it shows zeroeffort or it's blank or something,
(07:22):
then you're not going to get the badge.But really that's not the same as
grading. That's not anythinglike traditional grading.
Another thing I forgot to emphasizemore was that end of semester
debriefing that I did in that course.
I did mention it a couple of times,
but I kind of glossedover it when I did it.
(07:44):
It took significant time,at least a half hour,
but sometimes it just kept going,okay. Usually it just kept going.
I found that at first I'dhave to ask questions and
sometimes even ask individualsto share a response,
pick on people in other words.
But because of the informalculture of the course all semester,
(08:07):
it didn't take long before they warmedup during that debriefing and start
jumping in and discussingtheir experience of the course.
Casting it as a way for me toimprove the course helped a lot with
that. In other words, I just had aheart-to-heart with them and said, look,
I don't know how this course is supposedto go. This isn't something that you
(08:28):
can look up and see howyou're supposed to do it.
Nobody taught me how to do thiscourse, so I need some help from you.
You've been through the course. Whatworked for you? What didn't work for you?
What suggestions do you have?
It also gave me an opportunity to givethe rationale behind some of the weird
things that I did, why I did what I did,
(08:49):
and that I think helped them appreciatethe things that they didn't really
understand why we were doing it,still getting a benefit from it,
but not really understanding that theywere, it wasn't a graded discussion.
This end of semester debriefing,
I was asking them to be part of thatnever-ending course-design process,
so there was no pressure on themto I have to contribute something.
(09:14):
It has to be in this form. You know howwe often have these rubrics that grade
discussions a lot of times,
not even based on content verymuch, but based on form and format,
and so was none of that. There was nokind of grading pressure on it at all.
Anyway,
I do have a link in the show notesto another episode that I did
(09:38):
explaining more about thoseend-of-term reviews. Now,
I just mentioned badges and badgesin Pre-A&P were mentioned in
episode 140, but aquestion you might have is,
did I award credentialsin A&P 1 Supplement?
And the answer to thatis no. I didn't. I hadn't
(09:59):
broken through the wall yet,
that wall of fear andlethargy and doubt and
being chided for trying yetanother wacky thing in my course.
Remember back when I designedboth of those courses,
badges were new and most of us hadn'teven heard of them yet. I know I hadn't,
(10:20):
or if I had, it hadn'treally registered yet.
It was a few years later that Iadded badges to the Pre-A&P course,
and by the time I worked out all thekinks in using digital credentials in the
Pre-A&P course, I was no longerteaching the A&P 1 Supplement course.
I had handed it over tosomeone else, so nope,
(10:41):
no badges and A&P 1 Supplement. Now,
speaking of badges in thePre-A&P course, in my mind,
I wanted something like badgesto be an incentive and reward
and visible recognition of theobstacles that the students
overcame and the difficultiesthat they push through.
(11:03):
If you go back and listen to mydescription of the Pre-A&P course in
episode 140, you may think, what?!,
isn't that simply a refresher course?
The basics that they alreadylearned in previous courses? Yep,
that's true.
It wasn't Calculus III orAdvanced Physical Chemistry,
(11:27):
but for many students,probably most students,
it seemed just as hard for them.
Probably a lot of that hadto do with the fact that they
thought it was going tobe easy. It's a refresher,
a review after all, and
(11:48):
the grade is based entirelyon open untimed online tests.
Yeah, that's going to be easy.I can breeze through that.
What they didn't expect was toface the fact that they'd forgotten
most of what they'd learned.That's a common experience,
and all of us all thetime with everything,
(12:10):
even if a lot of that learning was recent,
and even if they had received good grades,
they still ran intoobstacles, things they forgot,
things that they had struggled withoriginally and took a low grade on,
and that averaged out for them.
And a big thing was that they could notmove to the next module until they got
(12:31):
a B or better in the module thatthey were working on. Students are
used to that thing I just mentionedof doing badly on a test or two,
but still carving an acceptablegrade out of the remaining tests and
assignments, and of course,
hoping for extra credit at theend to balance out that lack of
(12:54):
learning that they ran intohere or there in the course.
It was hard for them to keepgoing with attempt after attempt.
When they did get stuck,
they weren't used to just keep workingon a problem until it was solved.
They usually just moved on to the nextthing. A lot of courses are designed,
so that's their only choiceis, Nope, you failed it. Sorry,
(13:16):
we're moving on to the next thing,and F is enough, is an F. Sorry.
Take this course againsometime. Why don't you?
And that's not how I wantedthis course to be. So yeah,
that's hard to do that. Hey,
I'm on my fifth attempt. This isridiculous. I'll never get it. Oh, yeah,
(13:38):
you will. People have had far moreattempts than that, and it finally,
they broke through and it worked for them,
and it wasn't easy withtheir hard-case teacher, me,
never, ever, ever allowing themto skip to the next module.
(14:01):
And yes, these were obstacles for them,
challenging to their learning processes,
but also perhaps more importantly,
challenges to their concept ofthemselves as capable students.
That's the source of their frustration.
How could I be takingfive attempts at this?
(14:24):
I just, something is wrong with me.
I recently read an article aboutbuilding confidence in youngsters,
and it resonated with thisexperience facing difficult
challenges and eventuallyovercoming them is probably the
most effective way to learnconfidence and resilience,
(14:47):
and that was something that Ilearned to appreciate while teaching
Pre-A&P. Lastly,
something I learned by teachingboth courses is that it pays to be
generous to students, tobe generous with my time,
to be generous with my effort,
(15:07):
and not always looking for waysto avoid interacting with students
and their work just becauseit's easier that way,
and I'm fundamentally a lazy guy.
I found that when I took abreath and steeled myself
and went ahead and put theeffort into being really present
(15:30):
for my students,
even on my particularly lazy days,
I was rewarded withstudent success and student
appreciation and confirmationthat I really could
do good in the world.
(15:50):
In episode 139 titled,
Thinking New ThoughtsAbout the Human Brain,
one of the segments challengedconventional models of the brain and
introduced what can becalled the Transducer model,
inspired by psychologist Robert Epstein.
This thought provoking modellikens the brain to a two-way,
(16:12):
transducer, sending andretrieving information,
kind of like a mobile phoneaccessing external servers.
While it may sound farfetchedor even outright wacky,
there's that word again, wacky.
The transducer model encouragesus to explore alternative
(16:34):
perspectives and consider,
at least consider the possibilityof information exchange beyond
what we usually consider the naturalboundaries of the brain. Now, recently,
the magazine Popular Mechanics,
which often explores somereally deep things in physics,
I mean, surprisingly deep thingsfor that kind of a magazine.
(16:58):
They recently published an article thatrefers to current research that calls
attention to a view of humanconsciousness, which yes,
is a topic in physics, believe it or not,
physics and biology are crossingover more and more these days,
I'm finding Maybe you found that too.Maybe that's your area of expertise.
(17:19):
If so, hey, come on the podcast,
let's talk about that because I'm veryintrigued by it and know hardly anything
about it, which is reflectedin this segment, I think.
But anyway, they are lookingat human consciousness,
and these are legit scientists who aredoing this, looking at consciousness.
(17:41):
There is this view of consciousnessthat's based on a theory proposed a long
time ago, decades ago byNobel Prize winning physicist,
Roger Penrose and ananesthesiologist working with him
on this, Stuart Hameroff. Now it's called,
this is really weird, talk about wacky,
(18:02):
I don't know where they come up withsome of these names. But anyway,
it's called the OrchestratedObjective Reduction theory. Okay,
that's obvious what that's referring to,
and it's not a very easy touse name if you need to use it
13 times in a paragraph.Well, luckily for us,
(18:22):
it's most often reduced. It has theword reduction in it, so that was a pun.
Boy, that's bad when you needto explain puns like that. Okay,
let's leave that aside. So it'sOrchestrated Objective Reduction.
We can reduce that nameto an abbreviation Orch OR
that is O-R-C-H-space-O-R -so,
(18:44):
Orchestrated ObjectiveReduction Orch OR. So,
that's how I'm going to refer to itbecause easier for me to remember that
name than the full name.So that's the short name.
So in a nutshell, and thenut reference is intentional.
There I go explaining punsagain in a nutshell or
(19:06):
proposes that human consciousnessis a quantum process
facilitated by microtubulesin the neurons of the brain.
Now,
the part of that that I know about isthat there are microtubules in the neurons
of the brain.
I have a very passing,
(19:26):
quickly passing familiarity with what
quantum processes are.I mean, just really very barely,
and I'm afraid that some of what Ithink I know has seeped in from science
fiction stuff, and so itis probably really wrong,
but well, there it is.
(19:48):
Maybe all of us need tolearn more about quantum
processes.
Orch OR says thatconsciousness is a quantum wave
that passes through thosemicrotubules in the brain,
and as every quantum wave, it has quantum,
or at least quantum-likeproperties. For example,
(20:11):
these proposed quantum wavesin the neuron microtubules
may have the property of superposition,
which is the ability to be inmany places at the same time.
Now, I had heard of that.
I probably didn't know thatit was called superposition.
That seemed familiar to mewhen I read that recently,
(20:35):
but I don't know if Ireally knew it as that.
But I knew that there was this idea thata whole bunch of things could be in the
same place at the same time. So I knewthat my brain was going to have a hard
time wrapping around quantum properties,
and that's probably whyI've kind of avoided it,
because thinking that mybrain isn't complex enough to
(20:55):
understand it, and you knowwhat? The more I read about it,
the more I realize that evenexperts in quantum properties don't
really understand it very well yet.
So there's this property ofsuperposition where there
can be particles that are in many placesat the same time, but the thing is,
(21:17):
there are very manyplaces at the same time,
unimaginably many placesas I understand it,
which as I said, isn't reallyvery much understanding at all.
Another quantum property these microtubulewaves could have is entanglement.
That's the possibility that twoparticles that are far away from each
(21:40):
other are connected in someway, or maybe in many ways,
unimaginably far away particles,as I understand it, which, yes,
I'm saying it again, it's a very,
very shallow understanding that I have.I think it is safe to
say that if there are quantumwaves in the brain's microtubules,
(22:00):
they're weird. Hameroff,
one of the originatorsof the Orch OR hypothesis
recently proposed thathuman consciousness is
kind of like a fractal,a fractal put simply,
which is the only way I can putit because it's a mathematical
(22:21):
phenomenon involvingfractional dimensions,
which is way beyond my meagerabilities to calculate heart
rates and stroke volumesand cardiac outputs.
That's the limit of my mathematicalexpertise and understanding.
So put simply a fractalis a never ending pattern,
but it's not just any simple patternthat repeats like a square, or a cube,
(22:45):
or a cone, or a torus, or anyother kind of simple pattern.
It's a pattern that canbe complex -and be very
tiny, tiny, tiny, or gigantically huge,
and exhibit the sameproperties at any scale. Now,
this exhibiting same properties at anyscale that is sometimes it's called
(23:07):
self-similarity,
where you zero in on some littlepart and it looks just like the
whole picture did it.
It has the same similar look to it.
It's not exactly the same.If you go point by point,
you're going to see some differences,
but it looks like it came fromthe same roll of wallpaper.
Let's put it that way. It looks likethe same kind of complex pattern.
(23:33):
Now, that's an essentialfeature of fractals.
That idea that the patternremains recognizably similar,
no matter the level ofmagnification or level of reduction,
if you want to think of it, that in size.
So you can zoom in, you can zoom out.
It's going to look kind of the sameHameroff goes from there to say the
(23:55):
typical conscious states are simply, well,
ordinary.They're just ordinary. For example,
when I know that I exist,
that's a simple kind of consciousness,
a simple state of consciousness,
but perhaps if I'm in ahigher conscious state
(24:18):
according to Hameroff,
it has those weird quantumcharacteristics like being in
all places at the same time. Whoa. Yeah,
I can't say that I recall everbeing in all places at the same
time. I mean, yeah, okay.
My mind is often scatteredand hard to keep focused,
(24:41):
but not really in all possibleplaces at the same time.
But if it can happen,
then maybe my brain can connector entangle with quantum particles
outside of my tiny fractal-like brain.
Maybe my mind can connectanywhere in the universe
(25:02):
or maybe in more than oneuniverse or dimension or whatever,
and if that can happen,
then maybe that idea about the brainbeing more of a transducer that
connects my mind to some quantumcomputing function that resides way
beyond the clouds,
perhaps even connecting all of ustogether at some level is possible.
(25:25):
Like that transducer model Italked about in episode 139,
I know, I know,
this is getting weirder by the moment,
and that's exactly how manyscientists reacted when the Orch OR
idea first came out.Nope, they said, sorry,
(25:47):
too weird to work. So itnever really went anywhere.
But more recently as we learnedmore about the brain and more about
quantum concepts,
there are a group of real scientists,
not pseudoscientists,
maybe I should call them euscientists,
(26:08):
to contrast with pseudoscientists. Anyway,
there's a group of real scientists whoare considering a revival of some of
the Orch OR ideas.
This recent work that Imentioned potentially helps answer one of the arguments
against Orch OR. That is,
there's an argument that it'stoo warm and too wet in organisms
(26:32):
for quantum waves to be sustained.
They're usually only observedin cold controlled laboratory
environments.
What our understanding has been isthat quantum waves should just fall
apart into a pile ofquantum particles, I guess,
that don't have any superpositionand therefore cannot also be
(26:54):
somewhere else far, far away,
but quantum reactions are now beingshown as possible in chlorophyll,
for example,
during photosynthesis and maybein other processes in biology.
The recent research that prompted thatarticle I mentioned at the beginning of
this story,
seems to show that quantumreactions can be sustained in the
(27:17):
tubulin that makes up microtubules,
even in the naturally warmand wet conditions inside of
neurons.
I know this all sounds realscience fictiony, right?
But isn't that how science works,
wacky ideas that are set aside andthen later picked up and examined
(27:39):
again, and then set asideand then examined again,
and at some point theyseem a bit more plausible.
Sometimes they deserve tobe set aside again, sure.
But sometimes, not.
With these quantum wave ideas,
with the ideas that consciousness mayreside in microtubules inside brain cells,
(28:02):
who knows where they'll go? They'llprobably go everywhere at once, right?
Well, wherever these ideas go, itsure will be fun watching it happen.
Earlier, I
promised to tell you the oneteaching strategy that will fix your
Anatomy and Physiologycourse, but the question is,
(28:26):
does your course really need fixing?Well, in one sense,
no, your course does notneed fixing in the sense that
hearing about all kinds ofnew and different ways of teaching A&P and hearing my
peers gushing about this techniqueor that technique makes me
start thinking the way that Iteach A&P must be pretty lame.
(28:51):
It surely has to be, I don't know,
"less than." But I don'tthink that's true. I mean,
if you know that there are things aboutyour course that need attention or
you're not satisfied with the learningoutcomes, well, yeah, then, okay,
it needs fixing to put it one way,
but I think some of us areintimidated by all the different
(29:15):
ways we hear about ourpeers doing their classes,
and we shouldn't be intimidated,
curious, maybe intrigued,probably, but hey,
we all have our ownpaths, and that's good,
but in another sense, theanswer for all of us is yes,
(29:39):
our course needs fixing,
but not necessarily because it's broken.Any
course can and should evolveover time and get better
and more effective.
So what is that onemagical strategy that will
(30:00):
fix my course-that willreally, I don't know,
fix any course? Well, Ihave an answer to that.
It's a two-part answer.Here's the first part.
Part one is there is no one
strategy. Teaching isan art and a science,
(30:23):
and the art of teachingnecessarily implies
choices.
The art of teaching alsoimplies using a variety of
strategies and techniquesoften as needed and mixed
together and layeredon top of one another.
Learning is complex.
(30:45):
Teaching is therefore complex.
Courses are complex,
so it's not surprising thatstrategies for teaching and
course design are complex,
and they are many. Historically,
we've developed a lot ofgreat teaching strategies.
(31:08):
Not all of them can be used in one course,
so we use our artisticteaching sense and our teaching
experience and our training to choose what
fits our objectives,what fits our students,
and what fits all those otheraspects of our situation.
(31:31):
Yeah,
it's true that some of our classictechniques have been shown to be
less effective than some morerecently developed techniques,
and well, robotic machines havereplaced hand carved wood fixtures.
That is sometimes theclassic slightly less favored
(31:52):
techniques are just rightin a particular situation.
Sometimes I want a hand carvedwood fixture with all its flaws,
and sometimes I want somethingthat's perfectly done or maybe more
inexpensively made so
we don't throw the old thingsout always when new things are
(32:15):
developed,
and I think that should betrue of teaching strategies because some of those old
teaching strategies are just right forthis part or that part of a course or
maybe for an entire course,
and our available choices grows over time.
Cognitive science,
and sometimes just a quirkynon-conformist here or there continues
(32:38):
to offer new rarely seen strategies or new
angles to old strategies,and all of these strategies,
classic, contemporary,
and truly wacky may each work well.
There are choices, right? The thing is,
(32:59):
if you take any one ofthose strategies and add,
or maybe swap out, that teachingstrategy into your course,
it could be the one thingthat really cranked things up
a notch in student success.Over the last few years,
I've shared some of the classiccontemporary and truly wacky
(33:23):
strategies that have hadbig impacts on my A&P
courses, whethertraditional, non-traditional,
or from outer space. Iresisted every one of them.
Many of those I thought were ridiculous or
stupid, or Ill-conceived whenI first encountered them.
(33:47):
Oh, I can be so judgmental and full ofmyself about these things sometimes,
and as I've shared before,
I've mulled them overoften reminding myself how
unworkable or heretical they are,
and yeah, I eventually letsome of them win me over,
(34:09):
and then I try 'em out and thentweak 'em a bit and then either
accept them or reject them.Sounds kind of like the scientific method,
doesn't it? Well, whateverit is, it works for me.
Now I have more, justhold on for a second or
two.Before I move on,
(34:31):
I want to invite you toshare teaching strategies or
modifications to teaching strategiesthat you've found to be worthwhile.
Just call the podcasthotline at 1-833-LION-DEN.
That's
1-833-546-6336,
(34:52):
and either leave a recording that wecan use in the podcast or leave me a
message so that we can chat aboutrecording a conversation with me,
or you can send an audio recording to
podcast@theAPprofessor.
I said earlier that I havea two part answer to the
(35:14):
question.
What is that one magicalstrategy that will fix my course?
The one strategy thatwill fix any course? Well,
the first part was my thesisthat there is no one strategy.
The second part is there is one
(35:36):
strategy.
That one's strategy is beopen to all strategies.
Those strategies that have beenaround since the dawn of humanity,
the strategies that were developedand refined more recently,
and those oddball experimental strategies,
(35:58):
even the strategies that suddenly cameto mind are while walking your dog,
because that new strategymay be the one that really
does move your course up a notch ortwo on the student success scale,
and if it doesn't, well, that's okay.
That's part of our profession.We'll just try another one, right?
(36:22):
Based on this message, I have awarning that I hope y'all will heed:
beware of course templates. I should saythat in a spooky voice or something...
Beware of course templates.
Beware of insisting ontoo much uniformity in our
(36:42):
courses. Beware ofso-called master courses.
I don't like that. Oh,
the colonial overtones of usingthe term master for anything.
I explained this back in episode 102,
but that is the term used by Canvasand other learning management systems
and is widely used in academia,but I'm uncomfortable with it,
(37:05):
so I'm going to call them officialcourses or designated courses
or some other synonym like that.Now,
why should we beware of course templates?
Because uniformity in teaching is evil.
It's immoral, and it tendsto wreck learning. Now,
(37:27):
as I look in my notes,
the thought occurs to me that words likeevil and immoral may sound a bit too
hyperbolic or dramatic, but you know what?
I don't think so. Let'slook at my reasons,
and then you can decideif I'm overplaying this.
(37:50):
[melodramatic music clip] Yeah, okay.That's overplaying it, but hear me out.
Why do we think that havingeveryone in our department
or institution or system orstate or nation all use the same
course design or the same learningoutcomes or the same teaching
strategies or the same coursepolicies and on and on and on?
(38:14):
Why do we think that'sacceptable or even desirable?
Is it because it helps learning? No. No,
it does not help learning.
How could it help learning? Yeah,
I know. I suppose one could saythat course templates developed by
(38:35):
experienced educators,
perhaps paired withtrained course designers,
make it more likely thatstudents will succeed. Okay,
maybe. But I think that'strue only for someone new to
teaching, or someone whostruggles with teaching,
or someone who lacks talentor motivation in teaching,
(38:59):
or someone who's maybe newto that particular course.
In that case, having a coursetemplate that's well-designed
is like having training wheelson a bicycle. The goal should
be to wean off of thattemplate or designated course
as soon as possible as westart looking for that one or
(39:23):
two or six strategies ortechniques or redesigns that will
make the course workbetter for all involved.
Imagine how boring anddiscouraging and, well,
just downright insulting toour professional abilities,
it is to lock us into a uniform lockstep,
(39:46):
cookbook of a course for our whole career.
It's already gettingintolerable in modern academia.
Is that really what we want?
An army of drones teaching A&P with no
autonomy, or very little autonomy,
(40:07):
in the courses that they teach?
But wait, we might say, wouldn't rigid,
permanent templates and officiallydesignated courses make it
less likely that anincompetent instructor will
interfere with studentsuccess? Yeah... no.
(40:30):
No, it won't.
An incompetent instructor won'tbe any more competent if they
follow a recipe from a cookbook.It may help them
figure some things out at first,but they need to become competent.
That's another whole conversation.
(40:51):
But getting some counseling and/or some
mentoring and/or some coaching,
getting some direct guidance,engaging in more training,
and having some fun dabbling indesigning new elements in that course,
well, that's a good startto turning the incompetent
(41:11):
instructor into a competent instructor.
I think that rigid courseuniformity can make really good
teachers, whether they're good now orthey have the potential to be good later,
less competent. That is,
the uniformity can make them lesscompetent over time by taking
away their creative autonomy,by taking away their will,
(41:36):
their motivation for continualgrowth and improvement.
Another reason given for the desirabilityof a one-size-fits-all course design,
and a one-size-fits-all course content,
is that it reduces studentconfusion and makes it easier
for students if allcourses are the same. Wow.
(42:00):
Just, wow.
Wait, let's make that fourwows-the highest rating on my
scale (42:08):
wow, wow, wow, wow. Really?
What kind of confusion are wereducing by having a course template?
Students in my A&P course are goingto have very little idea what's going
on in the A&P coursegoing on down the hall,
even as word gets spread amongall the students in both courses,
(42:32):
if the two courses havedifferent characteristics,
what matter does that make?
Those students aren't confusedby that. They're aware of it,
but they're not confused by it, notusually, even if they are confused.
We're educators.
We have ways of helping them clearup their confusion. That's what we're
(42:53):
here for, right?
I've seen so many cases ofstudents failing A&P and
retaking it with a different instructorwho uses different strategies in their
course, and those studentsend up being more comfortable,
more engaged, and more successful.
I've seen it happen in both directions.
(43:16):
Not that one instructor was betteror one course design was better,
it's just that they were different andthose differences mattered to students.
But if we're talking about allcourses in a department having the
same course design and using thesame strategies and techniques,
how does that help learning?
(43:37):
Wouldn't overall learning be improvedby providing opportunities for students
to learn new workflowsin different courses?
Wouldn't facing uncertaintywith a new way to learn in a
course improve their ability toface the uncertainty of real life,
the uncertainties that they'relikely to encounter in their careers?
(44:02):
In episode 135,
my friend Michelle Lazaruschatted about her work,
about her work and her newbook focused on uncertainty.
When I asked her what was itthat led her along that line of
investigation,
she said that our students faceuncertainty all the time as
(44:24):
health professionalsand in related careers,
but they're not well prepared for it.
They need more practice facinguncertainty and moving ahead
successfully.
She calls it uncertainty tolerancethat they have to build up to be
successful. Maybe it shouldbe part of our institutional
(44:48):
or department or course learning outcomes,
this improvement in uncertaintytolerance among our students.
But written or unwritten,
I think we owe that toour students, anyway.
You and I know the real reasonfor designated courses and rigid
templates and the making ofcourses less confusing and easier
(45:11):
for students.
It's so that you and Iand our supervisors and
folks all over the college oruniversity don't have to face
all the questions and commentsand empty complaints of
students who say that a lack ofuniformity makes them uncomfortable
(45:32):
or makes it unable for them to succeed.
That's bunk. It's just not true,
and we're either afraid of or tiredof explaining that to students,
so we make everything uniform.That's not a good answer.
That's not only not a good answer,it's a harmful answer. The thing is,
(45:55):
students still find waysto complain, don't they?
So it really doesn't solve that problem.
They still find ways to deflect fromhaving to overcome obstacles that
they really need to learn toovercome for learning to happen,
to be educated people, to beprepared for their careers,
(46:16):
to be uncertainty tolerant, and yeah.
I know that sometimes thereare logistical reasons for some
uniformity. For example,
everybody having lab practicals onthe same day or in the same week or
having a practical or final exam commonto all courses or things like that,
(46:38):
but having one or two or three commonelements because we can't think of a
better solution to our logisticalchallenges that can still
allow an awful lot of choicesabout teaching strategies. I'm
suggesting that preservinginstructor flexibility and freedom
should be among the highestpriorities as we implement courses.
(47:03):
Okay? Yeah.
Maybe using pre-made courseshas some benefit to starting us
off in teaching in general orteaching a particular course.
So see,
I backed off the hyperbole anddrama a little bit didn't I?
However,
I still think that forcing allcourses to be rigidly uniform
(47:28):
does not do what some say it does,
and it potentially damages students,
and it almost certainly damages educators.
So my warning is (47:41):
resist.
Please be very, very, very,
very careful with forceduniformity. That's four verys,
my highest rating.
In this episode, wewent all over the place.
(48:05):
We started out examiningnuances of my extra
A&P courses from episodes140 and 141, for example.
I further explained the evolutionof my wacky grading approach
and reflected on the significanceof end-of-semester debriefings.
Then I explored the impactof badges within courses.
(48:29):
And I also emphasizedthe value of persistence,
confidence building, and being generous.
I then reviewed thetransducer model of the brain,
first mentioned in episode 139,
where I compared it to a mobilephone accessing external servers.
(48:50):
In this episode,
I briefly explain the OrchOR theory that proposes
consciousness occurs as quantumwaves in the microtubules of brain
neurons.
Quantum properties suchas superposition could
explain how the brainworks as a transducer,
and recent investigation countersthe argument that quantum waves
(49:14):
would break down in thewarm and wet microtubules.
And then we turn to the featuredtopic for this episode, the one,
single, ultimate, sole,
teaching strategy thatwill fix your A&P course.
A&P instructors often wonderif their courses need a revamp.
(49:37):
While no universal teachingstrategy guarantees success,
the art of teaching liesin choosing the right
mix of time-tested and contemporary
techniques. Drawing frompersonal experiences,
I highlighted a journeyof discovering, adapting,
(49:58):
and refining various strategiesto boost student outcomes.
In the final segment,
I addressed the quest for thesingle ultimate course-fixing
strategy.
The emphasis was on flexibility and
continually trying newthings to improve a course.
(50:19):
That flexibility includes havinga very light touch when it
comes to course templates andrigid uniformity among courses,
which could stifle uncertaintytolerance among our students,
and cut us off from experimentingwith better ways to teach.
(50:40):
From age-old techniques tofresh experimental approaches,
being open to allstrategies is really that
one key to teaching and student success.
Now,
as you can imagine, I have a lot of links to past episodes
and external articles andother resources that help you
(51:03):
dive deeper into any ofthese topics that you like.
If you don't see links in your podcastplayer, go to the show notes at the
episode
page
at
theAPprofessor/143
where you can explore any ideasmentioned in this podcast.
And while you're there,
(51:24):
you can claim your digital credentialfor listening to this episode.
I'll see you down the road.
The A&P Professor ishosted by Dr. Kevin Patton,
an award-winning professor and textbookauthor in human anatomy and physiology.
(51:50):
Please keep both hands on the steeringwheel while listening to this episode.
One of the most influential Americanwriters of the early 20th century was
H.L. Mencken,
and he famously wrote that "thereis always a well-known solution to
every human problem (00:11):
neat, plausible,
and wrong.".
Welcome to The A&P Professor.
A few minutes to focus on teaching humananatomy and physiology with a veteran
educator and teaching mentor,your host, Kevin Patton.
(00:32):
In episode 143, I clarify somethings about my extra courses.
We see why microtubulesmay have magical powers,
and I reveal the one secretstrategy for teaching success.
To start off this episode,
(00:52):
I have a few things that I want to clarifyfrom that two-part series that we did
in episodes 140 and episode141. That first one,
episode 140 , described a pre-A&Pcourse that I taught for many years,
and the second one, episode 141,
described the A&P 1 Supplement course.
(01:12):
And as I make those clarificationsand fill in some blanks and do some
explaining,
I want to share a few things that Ilearned by designing and teaching those
courses. First off, I want to clarifysomething about course materials. Now,
in episode 140 about the Pre-A&P course,
I went into some detail about whatresources I expected students to have
(01:35):
available to get them through the course,
and they were all optional and sort ofused on an as needed basis because, well,
it's a review course, a refresher course,
so they would get stuck in certain places,
but not every place. So they usedthose course materials as needed
as they made their waythrough the course. Now,
as far as the A&P 1 Supplement course,
(01:56):
I did have some specific resources thatI wanted them to have beyond what they
were using for their regular A&P course,
and I realized that after theepisode was published that I kind of
glossed over that.
So I did add a link to theshow notes for episode 141,
and you may have already seen that,
(02:17):
that links you to the list ofresources that were required of
students the last time that Itaught the A&P 1 Supplement course.
But I did want to call yourattention to it in this episode,
and I'll repeat the linkto those items in the show
notes for this episode.
(02:37):
So you can see those show noteswherever you're listening right now,
probably has the show notes and youcan see the link there. Or if not,
go to theAPprofessor.org/143 and you can
get all the links there, including thisone. And if you go through those links,
you'll see what resources are there,
and it's pretty obviouswhy I used those resources,
(03:00):
but there are some stories andexplanations that I think that you'll find
interesting and useful. I just didn'thave time to fit 'em into this episode,
so I'll circle back to that soonand we'll come back to it. Yeah,
it's spacing. That's what I'm doing.I'm trying to, oh, yeah, interleaving,
I'm interleaving this withother topics so that you
(03:22):
learn better, right? See, I'm using mycontemporary teaching strategies here.
Now, something that I forgot toemphasize in that two-part series of
episodes,
especially in episode141 relating to the A&P 1
Supplement course is , ah...,
this is where I really startedto appreciate what is now called
(03:45):
ungrading or alternativegrading, or in my case,
wacky grading.And yeah, I am waiting.
I'm waiting for that term wackygrading to show up in the literature.
That's one of my hopes for the future.
Maybe I'll put that in the predictionepisode that I always do at the beginning
(04:06):
of a new season of this podcast.
But back then I was totally unawareof any unungrading movement or
alternative grading movement,
and maybe it wasn't reallysomething very visible back then.
It's now very visible these days. Now,
if you go back andlisten to episode 141 and
(04:27):
how I assigned points, I did have points,
not a single point was basedon correctness or percent of
competence in any of the assigned tasks.
In that course,
I even let each studentand a peer both review the
portfolio of all their work in thecourse at the end of the semester
(04:52):
and recommend how many pointsthey should get for that
portfolio of work.By the way,
there were always a handful of studentswho were aware of the fact that they
didn't complete every part ofevery task at their best level of
performance, and they weretoo harsh on themselves,
(05:13):
and I ended up raising their pointsthat they were recommending to me at the
end and that their peer hadrecommended. At the end.
I did that because I thought that wasa better reflection of what they were
doing because after all,
and this is one of the things I thinkabout many forms of alternative grading is
students aren't used to it. Theyneed time to get used to it.
(05:34):
They need instruction in getting usedto it. They need experience in using it,
and I think that some studentsprobably are too lenient on
themselves and other studentsare too harsh on themselves.
So that is an issue that I raninto with this wacky grading,
and one way I handled it was I couldalways override the grade they gave
(05:56):
themselves by looking at whatthey were doing, and of course,
I would discuss it with the studentsif I felt it needed discussing. So
yeah, not grading as usual,hardly grading at all,
probably more like pretendingto grade-wacky grading.
I'm thinking more and more that namewacky grading is a good name for it.
(06:20):
I think this course works bestif it's more about a mentoring
experience with a lot ofself-discovery and building confidence
and failing and then getting better.
When we have experiences like that.
Does a performance-basedgrade really mean anything?
(06:41):
No.
You may gain a few things byfollowing this podcast and regularly
listening. I hope you do.
But would you think beinggraded on that would
be helpful to anyone?
Should I assign an A or a B or a C or an F
(07:01):
to listeners of this podcast? Nope. Now,
you can earn a badge forengaging in each episode,
but it's not graded, not really. I mean,
you have to turn in a reflectionat the end to get that badge,
and I suppose if it shows zeroeffort or it's blank or something,
(07:22):
then you're not going to get the badge.But really that's not the same as
grading. That's not anythinglike traditional grading.
Another thing I forgot to emphasizemore was that end of semester
debriefing that I did in that course.
I did mention it a couple of times,
but I kind of glossedover it when I did it.
(07:44):
It took significant time,at least a half hour,
but sometimes it just kept going,okay. Usually it just kept going.
I found that at first I'dhave to ask questions and
sometimes even ask individualsto share a response,
pick on people in other words.
But because of the informalculture of the course all semester,
(08:07):
it didn't take long before they warmedup during that debriefing and start
jumping in and discussingtheir experience of the course.
Casting it as a way for me toimprove the course helped a lot with
that. In other words, I just had aheart-to-heart with them and said, look,
I don't know how this course is supposedto go. This isn't something that you
(08:28):
can look up and see howyou're supposed to do it.
Nobody taught me how to do thiscourse, so I need some help from you.
You've been through the course. Whatworked for you? What didn't work for you?
What suggestions do you have?
It also gave me an opportunity to givethe rationale behind some of the weird
things that I did, why I did what I did,
(08:49):
and that I think helped them appreciatethe things that they didn't really
understand why we were doing it,still getting a benefit from it,
but not really understanding that theywere, it wasn't a graded discussion.
This end of semester debriefing,
I was asking them to be part of thatnever-ending course-design process,
so there was no pressure on themto I have to contribute something.
(09:14):
It has to be in this form. You know howwe often have these rubrics that grade
discussions a lot of times,
not even based on content verymuch, but based on form and format,
and so was none of that. There was nokind of grading pressure on it at all.
Anyway,
I do have a link in the show notesto another episode that I did
(09:38):
explaining more about thoseend-of-term reviews. Now,
I just mentioned badges and badgesin Pre-A&P were mentioned in
episode 140, but aquestion you might have is,
did I award credentialsin A&P 1 Supplement?
And the answer to thatis no. I didn't. I hadn't
(09:59):
broken through the wall yet,
that wall of fear andlethargy and doubt and
being chided for trying yetanother wacky thing in my course.
Remember back when I designedboth of those courses,
badges were new and most of us hadn'teven heard of them yet. I know I hadn't,
(10:20):
or if I had, it hadn'treally registered yet.
It was a few years later that Iadded badges to the Pre-A&P course,
and by the time I worked out all thekinks in using digital credentials in the
Pre-A&P course, I was no longerteaching the A&P 1 Supplement course.
I had handed it over tosomeone else, so nope,
(10:41):
no badges and A&P 1 Supplement. Now,
speaking of badges in thePre-A&P course, in my mind,
I wanted something like badgesto be an incentive and reward
and visible recognition of theobstacles that the students
overcame and the difficultiesthat they push through.
(11:03):
If you go back and listen to mydescription of the Pre-A&P course in
episode 140, you may think, what?!,
isn't that simply a refresher course?
The basics that they alreadylearned in previous courses? Yep,
that's true.
It wasn't Calculus III orAdvanced Physical Chemistry,
(11:27):
but for many students,probably most students,
it seemed just as hard for them.
Probably a lot of that hadto do with the fact that they
thought it was going tobe easy. It's a refresher,
a review after all, and
(11:48):
the grade is based entirelyon open untimed online tests.
Yeah, that's going to be easy.I can breeze through that.
What they didn't expect was toface the fact that they'd forgotten
most of what they'd learned.That's a common experience,
and all of us all thetime with everything,
(12:10):
even if a lot of that learning was recent,
and even if they had received good grades,
they still ran intoobstacles, things they forgot,
things that they had struggled withoriginally and took a low grade on,
and that averaged out for them.
And a big thing was that they could notmove to the next module until they got
(12:31):
a B or better in the module thatthey were working on. Students are
used to that thing I just mentionedof doing badly on a test or two,
but still carving an acceptablegrade out of the remaining tests and
assignments, and of course,
hoping for extra credit at theend to balance out that lack of
(12:54):
learning that they ran intohere or there in the course.
It was hard for them to keepgoing with attempt after attempt.
When they did get stuck,
they weren't used to just keep workingon a problem until it was solved.
They usually just moved on to the nextthing. A lot of courses are designed,
so that's their only choiceis, Nope, you failed it. Sorry,
(13:16):
we're moving on to the next thing,and F is enough, is an F. Sorry.
Take this course againsometime. Why don't you?
And that's not how I wantedthis course to be. So yeah,
that's hard to do that. Hey,
I'm on my fifth attempt. This isridiculous. I'll never get it. Oh, yeah,
(13:38):
you will. People have had far moreattempts than that, and it finally,
they broke through and it worked for them,
and it wasn't easy withtheir hard-case teacher, me,
never, ever, ever allowing themto skip to the next module.
(14:01):
And yes, these were obstacles for them,
challenging to their learning processes,
but also perhaps more importantly,
challenges to their concept ofthemselves as capable students.
That's the source of their frustration.
How could I be takingfive attempts at this?
(14:24):
I just, something is wrong with me.
I recently read an article aboutbuilding confidence in youngsters,
and it resonated with thisexperience facing difficult
challenges and eventuallyovercoming them is probably the
most effective way to learnconfidence and resilience,
(14:47):
and that was something that Ilearned to appreciate while teaching
Pre-A&P. Lastly,
something I learned by teachingboth courses is that it pays to be
generous to students, tobe generous with my time,
to be generous with my effort,
(15:07):
and not always looking for waysto avoid interacting with students
and their work just becauseit's easier that way,
and I'm fundamentally a lazy guy.
I found that when I took abreath and steeled myself
and went ahead and put theeffort into being really present
(15:30):
for my students,
even on my particularly lazy days,
I was rewarded withstudent success and student
appreciation and confirmationthat I really could
do good in the world.
(15:50):
In episode 139 titled,
Thinking New ThoughtsAbout the Human Brain,
one of the segments challengedconventional models of the brain and
introduced what can becalled the Transducer model,
inspired by psychologist Robert Epstein.
This thought provoking modellikens the brain to a two-way,
(16:12):
transducer, sending andretrieving information,
kind of like a mobile phoneaccessing external servers.
While it may sound farfetchedor even outright wacky,
there's that word again, wacky.
The transducer model encouragesus to explore alternative
(16:34):
perspectives and consider,
at least consider the possibilityof information exchange beyond
what we usually consider the naturalboundaries of the brain. Now, recently,
the magazine Popular Mechanics,
which often explores somereally deep things in physics,
I mean, surprisingly deep thingsfor that kind of a magazine.
(16:58):
They recently published an article thatrefers to current research that calls
attention to a view of humanconsciousness, which yes,
is a topic in physics, believe it or not,
physics and biology are crossingover more and more these days,
I'm finding Maybe you found that too.Maybe that's your area of expertise.
(17:19):
If so, hey, come on the podcast,
let's talk about that because I'm veryintrigued by it and know hardly anything
about it, which is reflectedin this segment, I think.
But anyway, they are lookingat human consciousness,
and these are legit scientists who aredoing this, looking at consciousness.
(17:41):
There is this view of consciousnessthat's based on a theory proposed a long
time ago, decades ago byNobel Prize winning physicist,
Roger Penrose and ananesthesiologist working with him
on this, Stuart Hameroff. Now it's called,
this is really weird, talk about wacky,
(18:02):
I don't know where they come up withsome of these names. But anyway,
it's called the OrchestratedObjective Reduction theory. Okay,
that's obvious what that's referring to,
and it's not a very easy touse name if you need to use it
13 times in a paragraph.Well, luckily for us,
(18:22):
it's most often reduced. It has theword reduction in it, so that was a pun.
Boy, that's bad when you needto explain puns like that. Okay,
let's leave that aside. So it'sOrchestrated Objective Reduction.
We can reduce that nameto an abbreviation Orch OR
that is O-R-C-H-space-O-R -so,
(18:44):
Orchestrated ObjectiveReduction Orch OR. So,
that's how I'm going to refer to itbecause easier for me to remember that
name than the full name.So that's the short name.
So in a nutshell, and thenut reference is intentional.
There I go explaining punsagain in a nutshell or
(19:06):
proposes that human consciousnessis a quantum process
facilitated by microtubulesin the neurons of the brain.
Now,
the part of that that I know about isthat there are microtubules in the neurons
of the brain.
I have a very passing,
(19:26):
quickly passing familiarity with what
quantum processes are.I mean, just really very barely,
and I'm afraid that some of what Ithink I know has seeped in from science
fiction stuff, and so itis probably really wrong,
but well, there it is.
(19:48):
Maybe all of us need tolearn more about quantum
processes.
Orch OR says thatconsciousness is a quantum wave
that passes through thosemicrotubules in the brain,
and as every quantum wave, it has quantum,
or at least quantum-likeproperties. For example,
(20:11):
these proposed quantum wavesin the neuron microtubules
may have the property of superposition,
which is the ability to be inmany places at the same time.
Now, I had heard of that.
I probably didn't know thatit was called superposition.
That seemed familiar to mewhen I read that recently,
(20:35):
but I don't know if Ireally knew it as that.
But I knew that there was this idea thata whole bunch of things could be in the
same place at the same time. So I knewthat my brain was going to have a hard
time wrapping around quantum properties,
and that's probably whyI've kind of avoided it,
because thinking that mybrain isn't complex enough to
(20:55):
understand it, and you knowwhat? The more I read about it,
the more I realize that evenexperts in quantum properties don't
really understand it very well yet.
So there's this property ofsuperposition where there
can be particles that are in many placesat the same time, but the thing is,
(21:17):
there are very manyplaces at the same time,
unimaginably many placesas I understand it,
which as I said, isn't reallyvery much understanding at all.
Another quantum property these microtubulewaves could have is entanglement.
That's the possibility that twoparticles that are far away from each
(21:40):
other are connected in someway, or maybe in many ways,
unimaginably far away particles,as I understand it, which, yes,
I'm saying it again, it's a very,
very shallow understanding that I have.I think it is safe to
say that if there are quantumwaves in the brain's microtubules,
(22:00):
they're weird. Hameroff,
one of the originatorsof the Orch OR hypothesis
recently proposed thathuman consciousness is
kind of like a fractal,a fractal put simply,
which is the only way I can putit because it's a mathematical
(22:21):
phenomenon involvingfractional dimensions,
which is way beyond my meagerabilities to calculate heart
rates and stroke volumesand cardiac outputs.
That's the limit of my mathematicalexpertise and understanding.
So put simply a fractalis a never ending pattern,
but it's not just any simple patternthat repeats like a square, or a cube,
(22:45):
or a cone, or a torus, or anyother kind of simple pattern.
It's a pattern that canbe complex -and be very
tiny, tiny, tiny, or gigantically huge,
and exhibit the sameproperties at any scale. Now,
this exhibiting same properties at anyscale that is sometimes it's called
(23:07):
self-similarity,
where you zero in on some littlepart and it looks just like the
whole picture did it.
It has the same similar look to it.
It's not exactly the same.If you go point by point,
you're going to see some differences,
but it looks like it came fromthe same roll of wallpaper.
Let's put it that way. It looks likethe same kind of complex pattern.
(23:33):
Now, that's an essentialfeature of fractals.
That idea that the patternremains recognizably similar,
no matter the level ofmagnification or level of reduction,
if you want to think of it, that in size.
So you can zoom in, you can zoom out.
It's going to look kind of the sameHameroff goes from there to say the
(23:55):
typical conscious states are simply, well,
ordinary.They're just ordinary. For example,
when I know that I exist,
that's a simple kind of consciousness,
a simple state of consciousness,
but perhaps if I'm in ahigher conscious state
(24:18):
according to Hameroff,
it has those weird quantumcharacteristics like being in
all places at the same time. Whoa. Yeah,
I can't say that I recall everbeing in all places at the same
time. I mean, yeah, okay.
My mind is often scatteredand hard to keep focused,
(24:41):
but not really in all possibleplaces at the same time.
But if it can happen,
then maybe my brain can connector entangle with quantum particles
outside of my tiny fractal-like brain.
Maybe my mind can connectanywhere in the universe
(25:02):
or maybe in more than oneuniverse or dimension or whatever,
and if that can happen,
then maybe that idea about the brainbeing more of a transducer that
connects my mind to some quantumcomputing function that resides way
beyond the clouds,
perhaps even connecting all of ustogether at some level is possible.
(25:25):
Like that transducer model Italked about in episode 139,
I know, I know,
this is getting weirder by the moment,
and that's exactly how manyscientists reacted when the Orch OR
idea first came out.Nope, they said, sorry,
(25:47):
too weird to work. So itnever really went anywhere.
But more recently as we learnedmore about the brain and more about
quantum concepts,
there are a group of real scientists,
not pseudoscientists,
maybe I should call them euscientists,
(26:08):
to contrast with pseudoscientists. Anyway,
there's a group of real scientists whoare considering a revival of some of
the Orch OR ideas.
This recent work that Imentioned potentially helps answer one of the arguments
against Orch OR. That is,
there's an argument that it'stoo warm and too wet in organisms
(26:32):
for quantum waves to be sustained.
They're usually only observedin cold controlled laboratory
environments.
What our understanding has been isthat quantum waves should just fall
apart into a pile ofquantum particles, I guess,
that don't have any superpositionand therefore cannot also be
(26:54):
somewhere else far, far away,
but quantum reactions are now beingshown as possible in chlorophyll,
for example,
during photosynthesis and maybein other processes in biology.
The recent research that prompted thatarticle I mentioned at the beginning of
this story,
seems to show that quantumreactions can be sustained in the
(27:17):
tubulin that makes up microtubules,
even in the naturally warmand wet conditions inside of
neurons.
I know this all sounds realscience fictiony, right?
But isn't that how science works,
wacky ideas that are set aside andthen later picked up and examined
(27:39):
again, and then set asideand then examined again,
and at some point theyseem a bit more plausible.
Sometimes they deserve tobe set aside again, sure.
But sometimes, not.
With these quantum wave ideas,
with the ideas that consciousness mayreside in microtubules inside brain cells,
(28:02):
who knows where they'll go? They'llprobably go everywhere at once, right?
Well, wherever these ideas go, itsure will be fun watching it happen.
Earlier, I
promised to tell you the oneteaching strategy that will fix your
Anatomy and Physiologycourse, but the question is,
(28:26):
does your course really need fixing?Well, in one sense,
no, your course does notneed fixing in the sense that
hearing about all kinds ofnew and different ways of teaching A&P and hearing my
peers gushing about this techniqueor that technique makes me
start thinking the way that Iteach A&P must be pretty lame.
(28:51):
It surely has to be, I don't know,
"less than." But I don'tthink that's true. I mean,
if you know that there are things aboutyour course that need attention or
you're not satisfied with the learningoutcomes, well, yeah, then, okay,
it needs fixing to put it one way,
but I think some of us areintimidated by all the different
(29:15):
ways we hear about ourpeers doing their classes,
and we shouldn't be intimidated,
curious, maybe intrigued,probably, but hey,
we all have our ownpaths, and that's good,
but in another sense, theanswer for all of us is yes,
(29:39):
our course needs fixing,
but not necessarily because it's broken.Any
course can and should evolveover time and get better
and more effective.
So what is that onemagical strategy that will
(30:00):
fix my course-that willreally, I don't know,
fix any course? Well, Ihave an answer to that.
It's a two-part answer.Here's the first part.
Part one is there is no one
strategy. Teaching isan art and a science,
(30:23):
and the art of teachingnecessarily implies
choices.
The art of teaching alsoimplies using a variety of
strategies and techniquesoften as needed and mixed
together and layeredon top of one another.
Learning is complex.
(30:45):
Teaching is therefore complex.
Courses are complex,
so it's not surprising thatstrategies for teaching and
course design are complex,
and they are many. Historically,
we've developed a lot ofgreat teaching strategies.
(31:08):
Not all of them can be used in one course,
so we use our artisticteaching sense and our teaching
experience and our training to choose what
fits our objectives,what fits our students,
and what fits all those otheraspects of our situation.
(31:31):
Yeah,
it's true that some of our classictechniques have been shown to be
less effective than some morerecently developed techniques,
and well, robotic machines havereplaced hand carved wood fixtures.
That is sometimes theclassic slightly less favored
(31:52):
techniques are just rightin a particular situation.
Sometimes I want a hand carvedwood fixture with all its flaws,
and sometimes I want somethingthat's perfectly done or maybe more
inexpensively made so
we don't throw the old thingsout always when new things are
(32:15):
developed,
and I think that should betrue of teaching strategies because some of those old
teaching strategies are just right forthis part or that part of a course or
maybe for an entire course,
and our available choices grows over time.
Cognitive science,
and sometimes just a quirkynon-conformist here or there continues
(32:38):
to offer new rarely seen strategies or new
angles to old strategies,and all of these strategies,
classic, contemporary,
and truly wacky may each work well.
There are choices, right? The thing is,
(32:59):
if you take any one ofthose strategies and add,
or maybe swap out, that teachingstrategy into your course,
it could be the one thingthat really cranked things up
a notch in student success.Over the last few years,
I've shared some of the classiccontemporary and truly wacky
(33:23):
strategies that have hadbig impacts on my A&P
courses, whethertraditional, non-traditional,
or from outer space. Iresisted every one of them.
Many of those I thought were ridiculous or
stupid, or Ill-conceived whenI first encountered them.
(33:47):
Oh, I can be so judgmental and full ofmyself about these things sometimes,
and as I've shared before,
I've mulled them overoften reminding myself how
unworkable or heretical they are,
and yeah, I eventually letsome of them win me over,
(34:09):
and then I try 'em out and thentweak 'em a bit and then either
accept them or reject them.Sounds kind of like the scientific method,
doesn't it? Well, whateverit is, it works for me.
Now I have more, justhold on for a second or
two.Before I move on,
(34:31):
I want to invite you toshare teaching strategies or
modifications to teaching strategiesthat you've found to be worthwhile.
Just call the podcasthotline at 1-833-LION-DEN.
That's
1-833-546-6336,
(34:52):
and either leave a recording that wecan use in the podcast or leave me a
message so that we can chat aboutrecording a conversation with me,
or you can send an audio recording to
podcast@theAPprofessor.
I said earlier that I havea two part answer to the
(35:14):
question.
What is that one magicalstrategy that will fix my course?
The one strategy thatwill fix any course? Well,
the first part was my thesisthat there is no one strategy.
The second part is there is one
(35:36):
strategy.
That one's strategy is beopen to all strategies.
Those strategies that have beenaround since the dawn of humanity,
the strategies that were developedand refined more recently,
and those oddball experimental strategies,
(35:58):
even the strategies that suddenly cameto mind are while walking your dog,
because that new strategymay be the one that really
does move your course up a notch ortwo on the student success scale,
and if it doesn't, well, that's okay.
That's part of our profession.We'll just try another one, right?
(36:22):
Based on this message, I have awarning that I hope y'all will heed:
beware of course templates. I should saythat in a spooky voice or something...
Beware of course templates.
Beware of insisting ontoo much uniformity in our
(36:42):
courses. Beware ofso-called master courses.
I don't like that. Oh,
the colonial overtones of usingthe term master for anything.
I explained this back in episode 102,
but that is the term used by Canvasand other learning management systems
and is widely used in academia,but I'm uncomfortable with it,
(37:05):
so I'm going to call them officialcourses or designated courses
or some other synonym like that.Now,
why should we beware of course templates?
Because uniformity in teaching is evil.
It's immoral, and it tendsto wreck learning. Now,
(37:27):
as I look in my notes,
the thought occurs to me that words likeevil and immoral may sound a bit too
hyperbolic or dramatic, but you know what?
I don't think so. Let'slook at my reasons,
and then you can decideif I'm overplaying this.
(37:50):
[melodramatic music clip] Yeah, okay.That's overplaying it, but hear me out.
Why do we think that havingeveryone in our department
or institution or system orstate or nation all use the same
course design or the same learningoutcomes or the same teaching
strategies or the same coursepolicies and on and on and on?
(38:14):
Why do we think that'sacceptable or even desirable?
Is it because it helps learning? No. No,
it does not help learning.
How could it help learning? Yeah,
I know. I suppose one could saythat course templates developed by
(38:35):
experienced educators,
perhaps paired withtrained course designers,
make it more likely thatstudents will succeed. Okay,
maybe. But I think that'strue only for someone new to
teaching, or someone whostruggles with teaching,
or someone who lacks talentor motivation in teaching,
(38:59):
or someone who's maybe newto that particular course.
In that case, having a coursetemplate that's well-designed
is like having training wheelson a bicycle. The goal should
be to wean off of thattemplate or designated course
as soon as possible as westart looking for that one or
(39:23):
two or six strategies ortechniques or redesigns that will
make the course workbetter for all involved.
Imagine how boring anddiscouraging and, well,
just downright insulting toour professional abilities,
it is to lock us into a uniform lockstep,
(39:46):
cookbook of a course for our whole career.
It's already gettingintolerable in modern academia.
Is that really what we want?
An army of drones teaching A&P with no
autonomy, or very little autonomy,
(40:07):
in the courses that they teach?
But wait, we might say, wouldn't rigid,
permanent templates and officiallydesignated courses make it
less likely that anincompetent instructor will
interfere with studentsuccess? Yeah... no.
(40:30):
No, it won't.
An incompetent instructor won'tbe any more competent if they
follow a recipe from a cookbook.It may help them
figure some things out at first,but they need to become competent.
That's another whole conversation.
(40:51):
But getting some counseling and/or some
mentoring and/or some coaching,
getting some direct guidance,engaging in more training,
and having some fun dabbling indesigning new elements in that course,
well, that's a good startto turning the incompetent
(41:11):
instructor into a competent instructor.
I think that rigid courseuniformity can make really good
teachers, whether they're good now orthey have the potential to be good later,
less competent. That is,
the uniformity can make them lesscompetent over time by taking
away their creative autonomy,by taking away their will,
(41:36):
their motivation for continualgrowth and improvement.
Another reason given for the desirabilityof a one-size-fits-all course design,
and a one-size-fits-all course content,
is that it reduces studentconfusion and makes it easier
for students if allcourses are the same. Wow.
(42:00):
Just, wow.
Wait, let's make that fourwows-the highest rating on my
scale (42:08):
wow, wow, wow, wow. Really?
What kind of confusion are wereducing by having a course template?
Students in my A&P course are goingto have very little idea what's going
on in the A&P coursegoing on down the hall,
even as word gets spread amongall the students in both courses,
(42:32):
if the two courses havedifferent characteristics,
what matter does that make?
Those students aren't confusedby that. They're aware of it,
but they're not confused by it, notusually, even if they are confused.
We're educators.
We have ways of helping them clearup their confusion. That's what we're
(42:53):
here for, right?
I've seen so many cases ofstudents failing A&P and
retaking it with a different instructorwho uses different strategies in their
course, and those studentsend up being more comfortable,
more engaged, and more successful.
I've seen it happen in both directions.
(43:16):
Not that one instructor was betteror one course design was better,
it's just that they were different andthose differences mattered to students.
But if we're talking about allcourses in a department having the
same course design and using thesame strategies and techniques,
how does that help learning?
(43:37):
Wouldn't overall learning be improvedby providing opportunities for students
to learn new workflowsin different courses?
Wouldn't facing uncertaintywith a new way to learn in a
course improve their ability toface the uncertainty of real life,
the uncertainties that they'relikely to encounter in their careers?
(44:02):
In episode 135,
my friend Michelle Lazaruschatted about her work,
about her work and her newbook focused on uncertainty.
When I asked her what was itthat led her along that line of
investigation,
she said that our students faceuncertainty all the time as
(44:24):
health professionalsand in related careers,
but they're not well prepared for it.
They need more practice facinguncertainty and moving ahead
successfully.
She calls it uncertainty tolerancethat they have to build up to be
successful. Maybe it shouldbe part of our institutional
(44:48):
or department or course learning outcomes,
this improvement in uncertaintytolerance among our students.
But written or unwritten,
I think we owe that toour students, anyway.
You and I know the real reasonfor designated courses and rigid
templates and the making ofcourses less confusing and easier
(45:11):
for students.
It's so that you and Iand our supervisors and
folks all over the college oruniversity don't have to face
all the questions and commentsand empty complaints of
students who say that a lack ofuniformity makes them uncomfortable
(45:32):
or makes it unable for them to succeed.
That's bunk. It's just not true,
and we're either afraid of or tiredof explaining that to students,
so we make everything uniform.That's not a good answer.
That's not only not a good answer,it's a harmful answer. The thing is,
(45:55):
students still find waysto complain, don't they?
So it really doesn't solve that problem.
They still find ways to deflect fromhaving to overcome obstacles that
they really need to learn toovercome for learning to happen,
to be educated people, to beprepared for their careers,
(46:16):
to be uncertainty tolerant, and yeah.
I know that sometimes thereare logistical reasons for some
uniformity. For example,
everybody having lab practicals onthe same day or in the same week or
having a practical or final exam commonto all courses or things like that,
(46:38):
but having one or two or three commonelements because we can't think of a
better solution to our logisticalchallenges that can still
allow an awful lot of choicesabout teaching strategies. I'm
suggesting that preservinginstructor flexibility and freedom
should be among the highestpriorities as we implement courses.
(47:03):
Okay? Yeah.
Maybe using pre-made courseshas some benefit to starting us
off in teaching in general orteaching a particular course.
So see,
I backed off the hyperbole anddrama a little bit didn't I?
However,
I still think that forcing allcourses to be rigidly uniform
(47:28):
does not do what some say it does,
and it potentially damages students,
and it almost certainly damages educators.
So my warning is (47:41):
resist.
Please be very, very, very,
very careful with forceduniformity. That's four verys,
my highest rating.
In this episode, wewent all over the place.
(48:05):
We started out examiningnuances of my extra
A&P courses from episodes140 and 141, for example.
I further explained the evolutionof my wacky grading approach
and reflected on the significanceof end-of-semester debriefings.
Then I explored the impactof badges within courses.
(48:29):
And I also emphasizedthe value of persistence,
confidence building, and being generous.
I then reviewed thetransducer model of the brain,
first mentioned in episode 139,
where I compared it to a mobilephone accessing external servers.
(48:50):
In this episode,
I briefly explain the OrchOR theory that proposes
consciousness occurs as quantumwaves in the microtubules of brain
neurons.
Quantum properties suchas superposition could
explain how the brainworks as a transducer,
and recent investigation countersthe argument that quantum waves
(49:14):
would break down in thewarm and wet microtubules.
And then we turn to the featuredtopic for this episode, the one,
single, ultimate, sole,
teaching strategy thatwill fix your A&P course.
A&P instructors often wonderif their courses need a revamp.
(49:37):
While no universal teachingstrategy guarantees success,
the art of teaching liesin choosing the right
mix of time-tested and contemporary
techniques. Drawing frompersonal experiences,
I highlighted a journeyof discovering, adapting,
(49:58):
and refining various strategiesto boost student outcomes.
In the final segment,
I addressed the quest for thesingle ultimate course-fixing
strategy.
The emphasis was on flexibility and
continually trying newthings to improve a course.
(50:19):
That flexibility includes havinga very light touch when it
comes to course templates andrigid uniformity among courses,
which could stifle uncertaintytolerance among our students,
and cut us off from experimentingwith better ways to teach.
(50:40):
From age-old techniques tofresh experimental approaches,
being open to allstrategies is really that
one key to teaching and student success.
Now,
as you can imagine, I have a lot of links to past episodes
and external articles andother resources that help you
(51:03):
dive deeper into any ofthese topics that you like.
If you don't see links in your podcastplayer, go to the show notes at the
episode
page
at
theAPprofessor/143
where you can explore any ideasmentioned in this podcast.
And while you're there,
(51:24):
you can claim your digital credentialfor listening to this episode.
I'll see you down the road.
The A&P Professor ishosted by Dr. Kevin Patton,
an award-winning professor and textbookauthor in human anatomy and physiology.
(51:50):
Please keep both hands on the steeringwheel while listening to this episode.
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