Sistemas constitucionales en Asia Oriental 5.5.1.1.1 Datos Básicos del Nivel 3

Being good at science and math, Travis had the assumption in high school that he would go to a university. It was almost a given that he would be an engineer or earn a Phd - except he grew up on a farm enjoying work with his dad. His father was a highly skilled millwright who spent time with Travis in their shop, which gave him an appreciation for working with his hands.

I thought I’d really love to find a career where I could be hands-on as well as use my mind. I didn’t see the two as a dichotomy. It seemed to be a continuum with a lot of different applications.

His high school counselors advocated the university track and ‘to choose anything other than a four-year degree path was less than – not as good – and they made this very clear to me’, Travis said. He took offense to this due to his high regard for his dad and pushed back. His high school counselor eventually directed him towards a technical field at a private school in the state that had a

waiting list. Travis was in the tenth grade when he got on the waiting list so was able to begin attending the summer after he graduated.

Travis noted one of the ways in which his experience at the technical school was transformative was, as the youngest in attendance, for the first time in his life he was peers with people who were older than himself.

You see, I hated high school. Absolutely loathed it. Not for the classes…I actually enjoyed a lot of the classes I took. But for the social environment. I was just not into the social scene; drugs, parties, extracurricular sports and activities. And so high school was one more drudgery I had to put up with in life. Getting picked on by bullies, all of that. And it occurred to me later on, there was a different degree of maturity there at (the technical school).

They were going out to music concerts, museums, oh, there’s an art walk in town… There were all these other aspects in life that I was insulated from as a kid in a small town. And I thought wow this is kind of cool. A whole different group of friends.

Due to his experience from working with his dad, Travis was able to secure a part time job at a shop while going to school. Not only did this empower him to pay for his tuition and provide some food and entertainment money, he found himself again, at only seventeen, in a peer situation with people much older than he was. Travis reflected on this time in his life in consideration of traditional American youth environments through high school:

I met lots of people who I considered mentors, and learned life skills, and interfaced with a whole other set of adults. Reflecting on this later, one thing I’d have to say about the social dimension of high school… I think it has the potential for an almost corrosive effect on young adults, to grow up with people primarily their own age. For most high school kids, the only adults in their life are authority figures. They are not peers. My boss was an authority figure of course, but my co-workers were older than me and they were my peers. My classmates were older than me and they were my peers, and I got to associate with them on a level I had never really interacted on before with other people.

Whether by luck or his personal character, Travis enjoyed great mentoring relationships as a young technician. After completing school, he moved back to his home county and worked at two local companies over the next nine years.

Moving home was not the intention. In fact, he always thought he’d move further away, but there was a good job opportunity near home, so he found himself back where he grew up:

It was a small shop, and despite our varied differences, we all got along. I’ve never worked in a cadre of people that closely associated as I did at (that shop). We had a full spectrum of religious beliefs and political opinions, and we had the most amazing lunch time discussions. We could argue it out, and then the next hour be working on something together with no malice, there was no harm. It was amazing and a transformative part of my life. I think I was 21 at the time so I was still growing into a man, and it was really good to have that experience at that point.

After six and a half years at the smaller shop, Travis found himself getting tired of the job as it no longer provided any technical challenge. Considering other options, he saw an advertisement in the local paper for an instructor at the professional technical college. He always felt a draw towards education and had even volunteered as an assistant one day a week at his high school in physics and shop class. He applied and upon getting the position, he shared:

I had to give my employer notice, so I actually showed up here two weeks into the quarter and my students hadn’t really learned anything. The other person was just kind of babysitting them for the first two weeks. There was no written down curriculum, the text book we were using was no longer being published. It was a nightmare. Baptism by fire. I survived my first year somehow and thought that wasn’t too bad. So, I came back for another year, and have now been here since - over eighteen years.

To support the curriculum he was developing, Travis, knowing his trade well from theory to practice, wrote a manual for teaching his program. It includes the following advice to fellow teachers who might use his work as a resource:

 Do not waste class time transmitting facts to students.

 Use class time to develop high-level thinking skills (e.g.

problem-solving, diagnostic techniques, metacognition).

 Use Socratic dialogue to challenge each and every student on the subject matter.

 Focus on general principles, not specific problems.

 Make lab work as realistic as possible.

 Build diagnostic skill by first exercising deductive reasoning, as a prelude to inductive reasoning.

 Incorporate frequent troubleshooting exercises in the lab.

 Include a broad range of practical topics and aspects in all coursework rather than fall into the convention of focusing on memorizing definitions, stating concepts, and performing quantitative calculations.

This advice is demonstrative of the means by which Travis aims to develop critical thinking and problem-solving skills in his students.

Travis is reflective, highly articulate, and self-proclaimed ‘introverted and socially awkward’. One student participant, Jason, simply said, ‘he’s a genius’.

Regarding the instruction manual written ten years into his teaching career, Travis nonchalantly referred to it as a ‘interesting project’ due to the lack of instruction documents and materials for the program. What started as a

culmination of ‘lessons for my students and short tutorials and things like that’ is an over 3000-page work on theory and application of math and sciences such as calculus, physics, chemistry, mechanics, electricity, and instrumentation. The introduction on teaching advice begins:

If you would like to maximize your students’ learning in a field of study that emphasizes critical thinking as much as (this one), I have one simple piece of advice: engage your students, don’t just present information to them. High achievement happens only in an atmosphere of high expectations. If you design coursework allowing students to expend minimal effort, your students will achieve minimal learning. Alternatively, if you require students to think deeply about their subject of study, challenge them with interesting and relevant assignments, and hold them accountable to rigorous standards of demonstrated competence, your students can and will move mountains.

He goes on to discuss suggested teaching methods, faults in traditional lecture and ‘the ultimate goal of education’:

When I began teaching, my belief was that teaching was a matter of knowledge and skills transference: it was my job as an educator first and foremost to transfer information into my students’ minds.

Now, it is my belief that my primary task is to help my students become autonomous: able to analyze complex data, turn their thoughts into practical action, and continue learning long after they have left the classroom.

Travis came to this revelation by way of a hard lesson from his students during his third or fourth year as an instructor. He used to be satisfied with his ability to deliver a wonderful lecture, but noticed upon reflection, that the better his lectures got, the less his students retained:

They were paying attention. They were really enjoying it. The reviews of the class were rave. But two months later it was like I hadn’t talked about that topic at all. They’d forgotten everything.

I was really mystified. I thought what is going on here? Why am I getting, not just diminishing returns, but reducing returns with my increased effort? And one day I heard a student… well my office didn’t have walls, it was sort of a cubicle, so I could hear

everything in the classroom… I was in my office typing away and I heard one student say to another ‘ah this class is great he lectures so well you never have to open the book.’ And I remember just stopping typing and thinking ‘oh no.’ Because independent effort is a really important part of the learning process, and unwittingly I had let them off the hook for this.

This was the beginning of Travis’s teaching transformation, and the

implementation of Socratic dialogue and inverted classroom methods in his courses. He found it to be much more work than preparing a lesson, but the results ‘are phenomenal’.