Why do I do what I do? What do I believe? What do I want students to walk away with after taking a course that I've helped design?
I think I'm going to use a metaphor of an over-prepared adventure tour guide. You know, the one with the overstuffed backpack who is prepared for everything, tries to ensure that everyone is safe and having fun, and ready to show people the ropes in a new terrain? Here are a few important skills for this tour guide: Prepared. An important part of learning is having the tools and resources needed to learn. The tour guide seems to have the important things to help you as you travel through your adventure from point A to point Z. Need to make an impromptu fire? The guide has the matches. Hole in your tent? The guide has an extra tarp. An important part of teaching is providing these tools to students and showing them how to use the tools effectively. Knowledgeable. An important part of learning is acquiring new knowledge. The tour guide knows a lot of 'stuff' and helps make connections to previous learning. Know how to make a fire in your back yard fire pit, but not safely in the bush? The tour guide is your person. Unsure how to properly patch a hole in your canoe? The tour guide has the repair kit in his/her back pocket. Teaching involves helping learners acquire new knowledge, effectively use the tools/skills they're acquiring, and making connections to prior knowledge. Flexible. Sometimes things don't go as planned when teaching. The path you were planning to take up to the summit a little messy due to some recent rain? The tour guide is willing to take a different route to get there. Teaching involves being flexible. Flexibility with how quickly (or slowly) you get through your content, flexibility with your students and their ability to grasp that week's content, and flexibility with how to get from point A to point B. Sometimes teaching involves going with the flow - and being ok with this. Safe. Sometimes teaching involves being a confidant and a safe space. The weather getting treacherous on your adventure? The tour guide can help calm down the group and provide some next steps. Much of teaching involves creating safe spaces for learners and recognizing the various ways this can be done. This can involve setting the course climate, making materials accessible, being mindful in the language used, and more. Fun. Adventures should be fun. Teaching should be fun - for both the teacher and the learner. Who wants to go on a 3-day hike with a tour guide who isn't entertaining in some way? Not me. Teaching involves occasionally trying something new. Teaching involves finding ways to make your teaching moments memorable for students. If telling a joke ("I was reading a book about Helium. I couldn't put it down." *ha*) makes students remember something, then tell that joke. If having students debate, role play, discuss, or practice makes it more interesting for us all, then it might be worth a shot. And maybe this will depend on your cohort of students - we aren't all Tetris squares, after all. Sometimes taking the shot is better than not (rhyming is good, too). Reflect. When people say goodbye after a 3-day adventure, they're walking away different people. Both the tour guide and the participants have gained experiences, shared stories, and worked together. They've formed a bond (maybe? I hope?) with their shared memories. The tour guide thinks about what might be done differently next time - both to improve his/her experience and the experience of the participants. And, the participant thinks about what kind of adventure they would like to do next. Part of teaching involves being able to reflect on past experiences in the classroom and considering improvements for the next lesson/semester/offering. Part of learning involves making connections to past and future learning, as well as reflecting on next steps. Make a Difference. Sometimes, your tour guide can make or break a trip for you. Teaching and learning is a shared experience, and ultimately, I went into education in an attempt to make a difference and make student learning the "make it" kind of moment for students. Whether it's directly with students in a face-to-face or screen-to-screen kind of way, or maybe even behind the scenes as an ID, I think both of these types of roles. The way you teach, design, and explore concepts for students can make a student learning experience more enjoyable and effective. So, in a nut shell, I want to help people get to the summit of the mountain. And try to make sure they have a bit of fun and a positive experience while they're doing it.
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"You may not have realized this yet, but our attempts to teach are much like our attempts to play Tetris. We have plans to maneuver students into just the right places so that they all fit nicely and then disappear. But when we play the game, they show up in all these different sizes and shapes and speeds and get jumbled up and the game is over and we reflect on what happened before trying again." (Jodie Black & Terry Greene) This selection from Patch 15 stuck with me when I first read it.
When working in online education, I think this is an important idea to always have at the front of our minds. When designing for online courses at our institution, much of the course content is static. It's designed and then used for a few years until it's revised and revisited. The instructors and assessments may change from term to term, and maybe some small updates will be flagged by the instructor(s) each time a course is offered, but for the most part a course will run for a few offerings before being revisited again. Thinking about our students and the Tetris game we play as instructors and instructional designers, I'm reminded of the importance of using UDL and designing with every student in mind, especially given our process and the way that online courses run. Students are working at their own pace, which can be challenging in and of itself. Add to this that in any teaching situation, it can be hard to identify students who are struggling for any reason, whether this reason is accessibility, struggles with motivation in the online learning world, or other external situations. I think this can be even more challenging when the student is working at the other end of a screen. It's important that we do whatever we can do, in the design/development phase, to help provide students with opportunities, tools, and resources to be successful right from the start. Our instructors are the people who are taking these "course shells" that we've created and helping to facilitate, guide, and direct students. I think it's important for us to take a step back from our "ID hats" and really think about our students and instructors. What are we doing that is super awesome for these students of different shapes, sizes, and speeds? How are we using the knowledge and reflections of our instructors to help us guide future revisions and course developments? How can we encourage a sharing back of course instructor reflections after they've taught one of our online courses? I may have more questions than answers at this point, but I think that's ok. (I'm being a circle. Don't try to fit me into a square.) Since I'm typically talking about education/technology topics with faculty in workshop scenarios, I think an appropriate introductory activity for a workshop about teaching and learning topics could be asking them to reflect on their past experiences. I think this could be useful since it would allow them to think back to their own learning and get them thinking of the student perspective.
Here are a few ideas:
Another activity that has successfully run in one of my colleagues' workshops in past years about creating a Technology Toolbox involved brainstorming (on post-its) the types of technologies that they were currently using and then having them sort their post-its into categories together. This gave the presenter an idea of where their audience was coming from as they were presenting and also allowed the faculty attendees and presenter to add new tools to their already existing toolbox. As an instructional designer, I chat a lot with faculty who are developing courses online, or who are popping by for quick ideas (or problem-solving tips) for use in their classroom.
One topic that I don't think is super understood by those who do not have a specific background in education is backward design. Teachers do get from Point A to Point Z, but sometimes I think teachers plan their content and then think about, "Now, how can I test them on what I've taught?" instead of thinking earlier in the process about "How can I test knowledge of the outcomes I was hoping that they would achieve?" Here's a little graphic about some of the key pieces related to backward design: What's in it for me? I agree that it should be more than just a, "Because you should know it."
Since I'm not currently in a typical classroom scenario, I'm going to consider how one of the faculty workshops I'll be delivering soon can be analyzed in this way... "What's in it for me" with faculty considered as our main attendees. Workshop: Students as Developers This isn't our official workshop description, but in this upcoming workshop, we will explore how students (past or present) can be used as developers. In current classes, how can your students be producing meaningful learning objects for others, or products that can become more than the traditional "throw away" assignment? Thinking of your GTAs and TAs, how can you use their student perspective to help students who may be struggling with specific concepts in the classroom? We will explore some ideas for how students can be used as developers, and then provide examples of success stories where institutions or faculty have already tried using students as developers. WIIFM?
As I'm not currently teaching in a classroom, I've chosen the topic of "Flexible Weighting" for my concept map. I will be co-presenting about this topic later this month. When it comes to assessing student work and determining the level of student understanding, there are multiple ways to do it. Flexible weighting is an "evaluation method created to try to support students' sense of ownership and level of investment and engagement with various assessment types..." (Brockerhoff-Macdonald et al., 2018). Here's my creation - with a bit cut off thanks to the colour copier: Reference:
Learning outcomes are often misunderstood within my discipline of faculty support/instructional design. Instructors often don't understand the importance of learning outcomes at the program, course, and topic level.
Kelly Brennan has already shared a bit of our mapping analogy for learning outcomes, but here's another perspective. Learning outcomes, from the perspective of the instructor, should be emphasized at three levels:
Let's consider the act of knitting a blanket full of different patches. Level 1: Program Level (aka 'The Pattern') At this level, our learning outcomes can be compared to the pattern of a blanket you want to knit. At a big picture level, you can see the pieces that should be completed/accomplished by the end of the project (program/degree, etc.), and the types of stitches, tools, and yarn that are required to get there. Without previous experience in knitting, you would have a hard time sorting through how you would get from the pattern on paper to a finished product. That is, a student entering their first year of university may know that they want to walk out with a biochemistry degree, and may have a list of things they will be able to do when they graduate, but they don't have the skills to get there yet. They can't knit a blanket. Level 2: Course Level (aka 'The Tools and Patches') At this level, you are helping students as they start building pieces of the blanket. Within each course, you are providing different needles and yarn that will help students gain the experience needed to be successful in knitting a patch for the blanket (or, passing a course such as Biology I). At the big picture level here, a student would have the knitting needles and some colourful yellow yarn in front of them. They know that at the end of the course, they will be able to knit a small yellow patch for their bigger blanket, but they may need a little guidance to get to their finished yellow patch. Level 3: Topic Level (aka 'The YouTube Tutorial' or 'How-To Book') At this level, you are walking students through the how-tos of successfully using the needles and yarn to create a finished yellow patch. You are creating small bench marks to help them succeed throughout their course in smaller increments. (This week, we will learn to cast on. Next week, we will learn the "purl" stitch.) Ideally, at the end of this level, students should have a finished patch - and an A on their transcript for Biology I. Then, start over... Once you've got one patch for Biology I, you're ready to move onto a new patch in a different course, finishing with a wonderful blanket of different coloured, sized, or patterned patches at the end of your degree. Each student will be walking away with a slightly different blanket, but hopefully all products resemble blankets at the end! Maybe someday your graduates can take those skills they've learned in their degrees and knit a sock instead? |
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