One of the main themes of our book was the concept of Authentic Instruction which, Jennifer Diamond, author of chapter 9, refers to as “a learning environment in which students prepare for the workplace”. Many of us incorporate different strategies to try to model the workplace in our classrooms and/or Blackboard shells, but what does this mean in terms of the role the instructor? How does this change what we should or should not be doing?
Having just read the comments from the End of Course Evaluation for spring, I can see how the role of the instructor can be an issue. When we attempt to create an authentic learning environment, many of us assume the role of learning facilitator; we help our students discover new knowledge on their own in ways that are personally relevant and meaningful to them. But is there a wrong way to do this?
I had a number of comments on the EOCEs that seemed to indicate that the facilitation of authentic instruction was being mistaken, by a few students, as a disengaged instructor. Comments like “The instructor isn’t teaching us but is only facilitating our learning” or “I pay a lot of money to just have an instructor who expects to show me how to learn things on my own” seem to indicate that some of our attempts to facilitate authentic instruction are not being perceived as valuable by some of our students.
How can we address this? How can we help our students see the facilitation of authentic instruction as a valuable process? Please share any ideas that you have, or any proven practices that you might be aware of to help your colleagues with this process.
This is a great question, and one that will become even more critical as CityU takes in younger students with less work experience to draw on. Years ago I taught a class to undergraduates at another local university, and several of them made very similar comments on my evaluation at the end of the term.
ReplyDeleteAs with any learning experience, expectations are everything. Taking some time at the start of a course to discuss the expectations for learning, for the students, for the instructor can be time well-spent. In a recent course I asked students to post their own 'learning outcomes' for the class as part of their introductory assignment, and to identify which assignment(s) they would focus on to achieve those outcomes for themselves. At the end of the term, I asked them to go back and read that first post, and talk about how they did. Several indicated this was one of the best parts of the course for them, and helped them to take more ownership of the learning.