Kulam: new Jewish study in Pittsburgh, and challenges of chevruta study

[cellio]

Last week I went to the first session of Kulam Pittsburgh (warning: website design has, um, issues). "Kulam" means "all of us", and the goal is beit-midrash style learning for Jews of all flavors. I've experienced this style learning at Hebrew College, at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and select other places, but it hasn't been very available to me locally. The Kollel does this style of learning, but as a woman and as somebody who's not really part of the Orthodox community here, I have trouble navigating it. (Most classes are for men only, and many of the ones that are for women are on topics that aren't especially engaging for me. I'm not faulting them; I am not their target.)

What do I mean by beit-midrash-style learning? I'm talking about text-based study, with a significant part of it being deep dives in chevruta (partnered learning). It's a style where you look at text, what that text implies, how that squares with other text and what it implies... with the goal of coming out with a deeper understanding of whatever question sent you down that path in the first place. This kind of study relies on conversations, on back-and-forth, and on an inclination toward certain analytical styles. I'm not describing this very well, I don't think. Maybe you have to experience it.

The Kulam program is being led by Rabbi Will Friedman from the Pardes Institute. On first encounter I really like him; he's accessible, knowledgable, good at guiding a conversation, and seems like somebody who really cares about helping people learn. He's from the Boston area and flew down here for this; he'll do that monthly, and between those sessions there'll be other ones with a more local focus (he'll join by video call). The sessions stand alone, though each of those "local" ones is related to the previous one that he led in person.

The topic of last week's was: "Interpersonal Responsibility in a Global Age". Rabbi Friedman gave an introduction, including explaining the basic idea of chevruta study for those unfamiliar with it, and then had us pair up and dive into texts for about an hour. We were given a packet of materials -- a text, some questions to discuss, and then the next text and its questions, about a dozen in all. The first few texts came from torah, then talmud, then later commentaries. After the chevruta study Rabbi Friedman led a discussion that he used to draw out the key points he wanted us to take away. I found this last part very useful, as he picked up on some themes we talked about and drew out some things I hadn't figured out on my own. (Maybe I'll write more about the specific content some other time.)

But there's one big challenge of this sort of community-wide learning, and I don't know how we address it. Rabbi Friedman introduced chevruta study by quoting the passage in Mishelei (Proverbs) that iron sharpens iron, and said it's essential to study torah with somebody else and not alone so we can challenge and be challenged and, thus, be sharpened. I agree; well-matched chevruta study is really effective. This kind of study is traditionally done in Orthodox yeshivot where all of the participants have a common educational background. Some are more learned than others of course, and some are more skilled than others, and some specialize in particular topics, but everybody there has a good grounding and you can build on that.

Iron sharpens iron. But it dents bronze and splinters wood. Meanwhile, wood can ding bronze some and doesn't do much to iron. None of this is the fault of the wood or the bronze or the iron. But you really do want to try to match people somewhat. In a group where people don't know each other, don't have a shared context, and are encouraged to not just pair up with the people they came with, how do you do that? A good match makes for a great experience at any level; a poor match leaves both people frustrated, as one feels overwhelmed and the other feels hindered. And if the bulk of the session is the chevruta study, that can be frustrating. I want neither to frustrate nor to be frustrated by the luck of the draw.

I'm currently planning to go to all of the sessions where Rabbi Friedman will be here in person -- I really like him so far. But I'm not sure about the others (which will have an even higher proportion of chevruta study because it's hard to facilitate a discussion via Skype). I don't know if I should just recruit a well-matched chevruta to go with (BYOCh?), or if there's some way to -- without causing anybody to feel awkward -- do better match-making.

Comments

[hudebnik]

Matching people up for pair learning is a perennial problem in education, with the additional problem in a traditional classroom that if you pair up the two sharpest tacks in the room, they'll (probably) produce something awesome and blow the curve for everybody else, leaving the rest demoralized. So it's not only inevitable but desirable that there be some heterogeneity within pairs.

There's a LOT of published research in the pedagogy-research community about pair work and small-group work. In teaching computer programming, I've made a lot of use of Pair Programming (lfor an approachable description, see https://collaboration.csc.ncsu.edu/laurie/Papers/Kindergarten.PDF). Some of the advice there is specific to programming, but much of it might be adaptable to Torah/Talmud study.

I've often said "there's no way to learn a subject like teaching it." When you're the stronger half of your pair, you still have something to learn: you will almost certainly clarify and deepen your own understanding in the process of explaining it to someone else.

The goal is a joint product, not "mine" or "yours". In your case, the goal hasn't been reached unless both members of the pair feel that they understand the passage better than they did before. Ideally, they would largely agree on an interpretation; if not, they should each be able to present the other's interpretation and explain why the other reached a different conclusion.

In Pair Programming, the partners take turns "driving" (i.e. typing code), but if there's a significant difference in background (that the partners recognize and agree on), the less-experienced partner does the majority of the driving. This way (a) the less-experienced partner doesn't "zone out", and (b) the more-experienced partner can immediately tell when something (s)he said has been misunderstood. I don't know whether your pair study sessions involve taking written notes, but you could try something like this.

[siderea]

with the additional problem in a traditional classroom that if you pair up the two sharpest tacks in the room, they'll (probably) produce something awesome and blow the curve for everybody else, leaving the rest demoralized.

This, this right here, is the fork in the road, one branch of which leads kids to Galt's Gulch. It teaches smart kids that people unlike them – "normals" – have a vested interest in repressing their success, their development, and their self-expression. If we let you do the best you can do, if we let you be you, it will be a detriment to everyone else; you are a danger to others just for being intelligent, curious, and avid; you threaten us by your existence.

This... doesn't end well.

[hudebnik]

Yes, every teacher in history has faced this dilemma. You want every student in the class to reach his/her potential and learn as much as (s)he can, but the ways to achieve that are very different for different kinds of students.

For most people, seeing a peer doing easily something that gives you great difficulty leaves you feeling demoralized and more likely to give up. One of a teacher's challenges is to prevent most of the students from giving up. If your star students excel but the other 95% drop your class, you won't be employed as a teacher very long.

There may be teachers somewhere who have succeeded by putting the strongest students together on one team, and the weakest students together on another team, but I've never gotten that to work. In my experience, it results in one awesome project and a whole bunch of students who conclude they're innately incapable of ever learning this stuff and should go become business majors. On the other hand, I've put what I thought were weak students on a team with fairly-strong students, and seen the former rise to the challenge and become fairly-strong students.

So what do you do with the star students? When they're bored with the ordinary stuff, you give them challenge assignments. Which is more work for the teacher, so it's less likely to happen if the teacher is especially overworked. And you try to get a bunch of star students into a class together, so they can challenge one another without fear of demoralizing the weaker students because the weak students aren't in that class. That class is the most fun to teach, of course.

[siderea]

You're an instructor. Tell me stories about demoralization due to other students' achievements that you've actually witnessed.

[hudebnik]

Demoralization stories are easy. Demoralization that students explicitly attribute to the achievements of other students in the class is harder, whether because students are unwilling to admit to the professor that that's how they feel or because the whole phenomenon is a figment of my imagination.

In a hurry right now. Let me look through some of my class diaries and see if I have good examples; if not, the latter explanation is quite possible.

[siderea]

Oh, even if they do own up to being demoralized (which they may not even realize, even if it's what's happening), even if they do attribute that demoralization to the acheivements of others (which they may not realize, either, even if it is what's happening), it may be a figment of their imaginations. :)

People being wrong about the causes of their own motivations and feelings – and people being wrong about the causes of others' motivations and feelings – is pretty much the bankable core of my business models. :) :) :)

Questions for the provocation of thought:

1) Athletics don't seem to care about the possibility of demotivating young athletes by exposing them to the superior acheivements of other young athletes. Are they doing it wrong? How do they do it? Is what they do not applicable?

1a) Music, ditto.

2) If demotivation of many is the product of being exposed to superior acheivements by a few, why is the solution to prevent superior acheivement, rather than prevent exposure? If knowing how others are doing in your class is so toxic, why is student work made public to the class? Are the benefits of doing so justified in the face of the risk? Do those benefits justify sacrificing the educational utility of the class for some students?

3) Presumably you wouldn't do things to reduce acheivement when students are working independently, just to protect the motivation of students who aren't the top acheivers. You wouldn't silently handicap the highest acheiving students on exams, so they had to perform at a higher level to get the same grades as their peers, so that they wouldn't skew the curve. I'm guessing the idea would strike you as horrible – unjust, unfair, mean, and fundamentally immoral. If so, why is doing that to group work, in service of the same ends, not also immoral?[*]

4) If students become "demoralized", in the sense that they decide that they come to the conclusion they are not able enough to be competitive in a field, when exposed to higher acheivement in that field by their peers, is that not a conclusion they have a right to come to? Are you not, by manipulating the acheivement level to be more narrow than it might naturally be, in a sense deceiving the students, misleading them about their prospects in the field? If your class is not the place to expose them to that information, because they are very much beginners, at what point should they be exposed to that information?

5) If it is the case, as some have suggested, that there is an issue in the socialization of girls that causes a problem in the self-assessment of highly-able female students even through college, where they downplay and discount the evidence of their aptitude, what are the motivational consequences for those young women to be assigned to pairs or groups, the unannounced intention of which is to limit how much of an acheivement that young woman's work is? Does putting highly-able young women in such situations contribute to their tendency to conclude they are only average, and not competitive in the field? More broadly, why is there an assumption that doing this has no emotional consequences, such as demotivation, for the people it's being done to?

6) If demotivation is an issue, is this the only way, or the most effective way, to address it? If students become demotivated to see others do better than them in their classes, what does that imply about how they are relating to the class, the material, themselves, others, the idea of acheivement, the idea of education? Is there some more fundamental problem that needs to be addressed? Are students bringing unreasonable and possibly unconscious expectations or demands into the classroom, such as "If I can't get the highest grade, it's not worth my time to do" or "If I'm not better at it than everyone else, I hate myself" or "There's no place in this field for the lower 95% percent" or "I shouldn't have to feel that something is hard and I shouldn't have to be challenged by course material" or "If this class is hard for me, this means I will never be 'good' at this"? Are your motivations, as the instructor, at odds with their motivations? Are you dealing with students who are minimaxing their effort in a way which results in them not investing effort in your class as you would prefer? For instance, "This class not being particularly core to my interests, if I can't get an A with only a modicum of effort, I'm going to stop trying so hard, take the C or D, and focus my effort on a class closer to my interests"?

It's not that I don't think demotivation isn't an issue. It's that I think it's an enormously complicated issue, about which lay people project naive folk psychology theories on, and leap to "common sense" solutions which are often unwitting justifications for unconcious prejudices and values. I'm not even against mixed-ability groups; it's the assumptions, the over-simplication, and the prejudices that I'm against, and, unsurprisingly, I'm against the values I'm against. I'm particularly against the unthinking recapituation and propagation of assumptions about how people are or how they work, which serve poorly those who hold them. Which brings me to:

7) What do we believe about motivation and how it works? Is it true? We "know" that being exposed to superior acheivement deters people from pursuing study. Yet we simultaneously "know" that nothing about watching Magic Johnson play basketball has deterred young people from taking up basketball and nothing about Jimi Hendrix's guitar playing slowed the sales of guitars; quite to the contrary. We "know" there's nothing counterintuitive about an uptick in girls' gymnastics after Kerri Strug's heroics at the 1996 Olympics. Why is that? We "know" about "inspiration", this idea that extraordinary achievement motivates followers, without recognizing that it conflicts with this other thing we apparently "know".
When we assume that others' acheivement is something that students have to be protected from for them to maintain emotional resilience, are we making that a self-fullfiling prophecy? Are we teaching young people that it's normal, natural, right, and inevitable to have negative feelings about one's self, one's prospects, one's field, when exposed to others' acheivements in it? Are we cultivating brittleness and emotional insecurity? Are we enabling toxic perfectionism and indulging narcissistic grandiosity? Are we teaching students to hate and fear the acheivement of others as an intolerable ego threat? Are we teaching students they are entitled not to know things that make them feel bad? Why is it that some people go to a concert and abandon their music studies in despair, and other people go to a concert and come home and practice for hours? And can we move people from the first category to the second? And can it be done efficiently in the classroom?

Still very interested to hear your recollections of observations of motivation in your classes.

[* There is a hell of a discussion of the ethical complexities of grading, particularly around motivation, in Wad-Ja-Get? The Grading Game in American Education by Kirschenbaum, Simon, and Napier, which is a novelization of the topic and some actual incidents and research. Chapter 7. I think it's out of print; I can slap it on the scanner and send it to you, at least that one chapter, if you want. Spoiler: it winds up pretty anti-grades, coming to the conclusion the ethical problems aren't solvable.]

[hudebnik]

Thanks; a lot to think about there.

On the subject of athletics, I can testify that I was very much demoralized by being (close to) the worst athlete in my peer group, being consistently one of the last picked for a team, etc. from ages 12-17. I can't say for sure it was because of comparison with the best athletes in my peer group; more likely with the central mass of the bell curve. My conclusion was to avoid any kind of athletics that involved direct competition (which is what school athletics are ALL ABOUT), because I would lose. In the intervening forty years, I've done weight-lifting, archery, long-distance hiking... things in which I'm pushing myself, but not competing with a specific other person or team.

The obvious analogy in a computer science class would be a student who is not only "not-the-best" but among the worst students in the class, and there's a legitimate argument that that student should become a business major.

I haven't forgotten about looking for examples in classroom experience :-)

[cellio]

I was usually the last or second-last to be picked for sports teams too. I wasn't paying attention to the top achievers; my demoralization came from being so far below the center of the bell curve. I just wanted to blend in; I didn't need to excel.

Anecdotally and looking back (both dangerous), I think a lot of my classmates were like that when it came to academics. Kids who could have been B+ or even A students were satisfied to be closer to the center. (Other kids were doing the best they could and that was C-level.)

[cellio]

I don't have much experience with pair programming, but I've seen it work well with unequal pairs, particularly in explicit mentoring situations.

Chevruta learning is supposed to involve equal give and take, both participants fully engaging. I have been the weaker partner where the other was explicitly teaching/guiding me and that was fine (part of the deal up front). I think the same pairing at Kulam ("everybody", not rabbi and student) would have been frustrating; I would most definitely have been holding the other back. And he could be gracious and pretend not to mind, but if he came in looking for a balanced pair, it's hard to think he wouldn't have been disappointed.


You know a lot more about formal teaching methods (and the associated literature) than I do. But I have an extremely strong, negative reaction to what you said about intentionally pairing up students unequally. I was the smartest kid in my class for my entire time in public school. With very few exceptions, all of them outside the formal system, I was actively hindered rather than nurtured by my educators -- by class composition, by group assignments, and by being advanced only at the customary rate. I paid the price when I got to college and was actually challenged for the first time -- and found out I didn't have basic student skills. I felt extremely ill-served by my pre-college education. (And it would have been even worse if my super-capable father hadn't encouraged me at home.)

Within the school system, no one ever sharpened me. Worse yet, no one ever seemed to think it was worth doing so. I was a "have", intellectually, and "haves" didn't merit support.

I don't think I benefited from that.

[hudebnik]

I don't think Pair Programming is intended for unequal pairs. It is very definitely intended for pairs in which both participants are fully engaging; the challenge (which the linked article addresses) is how to make sure both participants are fully engaged and learning even when, as will inevitably happen from time to time, one has a much stronger background than the other.