Reflections on PIDP Courses so far

I’ve taken so far 6 courses in the VCC Provincial Instructor Diploma:

• PIDP 3100 Foundations of Adult Education
• PIDP 3210 Curriculum Development
• PIDP 3230 Evaluation of Learning
• PIDP 3240 Media Enhanced Learning
• PIDP 3250 Instructional Strategies
• PIDP 3260 Professional Practice

3100 opened me up to the world of Adult Learning. I had never studied that before, so words like Andragogy and Heutagogy were new to me. Concepts like transformative learning, self-directed learning were brand new. This course definitely broadened my view of all the varieties of adult learning and adult learning theories there are out there. And certainly it helped me start reflecting on my own learning.

3210 helped me get acquainted with curriculum development in the sense of planning out all aspects of how to shape a curriculum into a workable document. Especially helpful was guidance on how to create proper learning outcome statements, and also studying the difference between competency and outcomes based learning.

3230 brought me into the world of assessments and how to properly assess students, especially in informal assessment contexts. Formative/Summative assessment instruments were looked at and constructed. Knowledge instruments were built, norm versus criterion based tests were compared.

3240 introduced me to “Teaching Naked”, how higher education is changing rapidly and ways to incorporate more creative uses of technology in learning. I had never heard of Pecha Kucha slides! That was interesting.

3250 – biggest revelation was the myth of learning styles! Huge revelation for me. I had been sold on this idea until then. That was very insightful, how it’s not that we have different learning styles but that we all are capable of using different learning styles depending on what the learning demands. I think it’s here where I learned about Hattie’s ground breaking Visible Learning research. Very cool!

3260 – Ethical dilemmas, The Skillful Teacher and how student learning experiences must be brought to the light, CIQ and how simple it is to implement to get anonymous feedback from students about their learning. Really interesting, eye-opening stuff!

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David Helfand’s out-of-the-box thinking on higher ed

Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” – Chinese Proverb

David Helfand gives a fascinating TEDTalk on “Designing a university for the new millennium” at TEDxWestVancouverED:

What I found insightful about this TEDTalk was how out of the box Helfand is about his thinking on higher education. He doesn’t believe in tenure (turned it down at Columbia University), believes faculty should not be divided into hierarchies and that their focus should be on the student learning, that they should not silo themselves into departments but instead interact with other disciplines. What he has done as president of Quest University is astounding. Quest University “offers only one degree, a bachelor of arts and sciences, has no departments, and students take just one four-week course at a time through its block plan” (Charbonneau 2015).

This is a radical break from the traditional university, and they’ve not only succeed, they are influencing other similar initiatives around the world. What I especially like about it is the focus on student learning, engaging students in ways that help them learn. Quest University was ranked “highest among Canadian universities on five key criteria: academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, supportive campus environment, active and collaborative learning, and enriching educational experience” (MacQueen 2011). That is pretty astounding, and there are certainly many lessons that traditional universities can and I believe, must learn, to stay viable in the 21st century higher education landscape.

 

References:

Charbonneau, L. (2015). David Helfand reflects back on a decade at the head of Quest University. Available at: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/david-helfand-reflects-back-on-a-decade-at-the-head-of-quest-university/ Accessed May 1, 2016.

MacQueen, Ken (24 February 2011), “The student’s Quest”, Maclean’s. Available at http://www.macleans.ca/culture/the-students-quest/

Having a constant awareness of student learning and teacher perception

Brookfield’s core assumption #3 of skillful teaching in Chapter 2 of his book, The Skillful Teacher, is that “Teachers need a constant awareness of how their students are experiencing their learning and perceiving their teachers’ actions” (Brookfield 2015, p. 22).

Student Learning Awareness

What Brookfield means by an awareness of how students are experiencing their learning is “having some insight into what students are thinking and feeling” (p. 22). He argues that it is crucial to have some awareness of what is going on in the classroom in terms of actual student learning about the subject.  Without that awareness the teacher can be blinded to what is really going on, where the understanding is happening or not happening in the classroom. As a result the choices a teacher makes can be erroneous in trying to address the learning gap in the classroom.

The implications of this are that a teacher’s day to day decisions on how to lead the class, what content to introduce, what problems to go over, what exercises to give, etc.,  must be guided by a very real awareness of how student learning is happening. This ties in with Hattie’s concept of making learning “visible” (Hattie 2012).

Brookfield goes on to note how incredibly tricky it is to get into a student’s mind and really know what’s going on in their heads, so the cardinal rule for getting student learning feedback is to ensure the anonymity of the students’ responses to the questions teachers would ask them about their learning (Brookfield 2015, p. 23). They need to feel safe to express whatever concerns they have, whether positive or negative, about what is going on in the classroom. This holds especially true for “perceiving their teachers’ actions”. Students simply don’t feel safe to openly express any concerns they have in their instructor’s abilities to teach. This can be especially pronounced with students coming from cultures where the teacher as  authority figure is highly respected and where it would be taboo to openly criticize anything they do, with possible harsh repercussions.

 

Winning the trust of your students is hard work but crucial in getting real honest feedback on how learning is happening. When students see that you take their anonymous feedback seriously, there will be a much healthier dynamic of transparency in the classroom. Students are able to reflect and describe how their learning is happening, including what helps and what hinders them from learning, and the instructor is able to bring up these issues with the whole class, especially those issues which impact the majority of the classroom, and provide solutions and teaching improvements moving forward.

References:  

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2013). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Featured image from: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/Awesome_PBL_group.jpg

 

Best Practices in Teaching Online from Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher

Brookfield (2015) claims that the key to effective online instruction is adhering to the same fundamental principles of good teaching that are applied in any environment (p. 170). These principles include:

• setting clear expectations
• establishing the relevance of the learning early in the course
• chunking the content in a manageable way
• using a range of learning modalities
• questioning skillfully
• providing continuous feedback to students
• organizing learning tasks from simple to complex

All of these principles can be applied in an online or blended environment very effectively using standard Learning Management systems. I would add to this list some of Hattie’s most impactful influences on student achievement (Hattie 2013), namely:

1. Formative evaluation (see my blog post on this)
2. Self-report grading 

In addition, Brookfield notes that the online classroom environment is still plagued by the same classroom management problems that face to face classrooms have (see Brookfield 2015, p. 170):

• Reluctant students not wanting to contribute
• Highly articulate minorities wanting to dominate the class discussion
• The needs of diverse learnings needing to be addressed
• How to work with larger groups of students
• Allowing students to work at different paces.

Brookfield offers some suggestions for best practices in an online environment:

• Chunk lecture videos into 10-15 minute blocks
• Set clear expectations (syllabus contains objectives, chief topics and content to be covered, due dates, resources, how students’ work will be assessed)
•  Set ground rules for discussion posting
• Providing grading rubrics
• Create teacher presence (daily summaries, critical incident questionnaires
• Keep online discussion focused
• Require students to appraise and critique peer work.

A lot of these principles apply equally well to the blended classroom, and really there comes a point when a teacher needs to decide the level of “blending” they want to do: more face to face, or more online.

Reflections on my context:

I think there is a huge opportunity in a university setting to enhanced otherwise fully face-t0-face classrooms with a more blended learning approach, taking the best of both worlds. It’s important to note and Brookfield has reminded me that best practices in teaching apply equally to the online environment as well as the classroom. A teacher can’t simply put the online course on autopilot and expect good results. That teacher needs to be “present” in some way – either by weekly video posts, online synchronous collaboration, or prompt feedback to assessments and even personal messages to students. Some instructors automate a personalized email for continuous enrollment courses, so students get timely feedback based on when they began the course. So there are lots of ways to enhance the face-to-face classroom so that students can get more out of the learning outside the classroom. More blogging on that later!

References:

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2006). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Granada Learning.

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2013). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Formative Evaluation in Higher Education

Among Hattie’s most impactful influences on student achievement descibed in his book Visible Learning (Hattie 2013), is formative evaluation. It has an effect ranking of 0.9, so highly impactful on student achievement. Formative evaluation refers to “any activity used as an assessment of learning progress before or during the learning process itself” (Hattie 2012 and Visible Learning Website). Formative evaluation is arguably more important than summative evaluation, because it gives a chance for the students to get relevant feedback on where they are and where they need to go. Watch this video that best explains the difference between formative and summative evaluation:

This is also a great video on formative evaluation based on William & Black 1998:

I love the analogy in the above video about how formative assessment is really like taking a car for air inspection. They don’t just tell you, “Your car failed the test. Now go away.” Instead they say, “Your car failed. These are the reasons (brakes, radiator, muffler, etc.). Go and fix those and come back for another inspection.” That’s exactly what we need to do with students! A summative assessment may tell a student “you failed this course” but then provides no pathway to success. It leaves the student demoralized and discouraged.

Response/Reflection:

My immediate thought is that formative evaluation is not being done enough in the Higher Education classroom. Summative assessment (large end of term final exams worth %40) are given much more focus. But summative assessment that will not affect student learning in the way that formative assessment can, because formative learning allows the student to change course after given constructive feedback from their instructor.  Summative assessment is easier to deploy because no detailed feedback is necessary because now the course is over. It’s therefore less work for the instructor. They’re less involved in the student learning process because they don’t have to work with the student from then on. However Hattie’s research of over 800 meta-analyses proves that formative evaluation is much more effective in improving the quality of student learning.

Some instructors, especially those teaching large courses on campus of 200 or more student, might cringe at the thought of having to give formative assessment feedback to every single student. This process can be simplified through providing rubrics to students that show them how they measure up in the grading process, and some feedback can be automated or pre-written to cover different ranges of student abilities. All that to say that large classrooms should not be a reason to avoid formative assessment considering it is so effective.

For Teacher Training / Professional Development

In order to help change the culture of instructors avoiding formative evaluation, required reading should be Hattie (2012, 2013), Brookfield (2015) and Black & William (2006). Workshops on how to do effective formative evaluation should be set up, guiding instructors step by step in the process. And advocating what Brookfield (2015) calls “critical reflection” should be communicated by administration to faculty, along with tools for classroom research into how the students are experiencing the learning and perceiving the teaching.

References:

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2006). Inside the black box: Raising standards through classroom assessment. Granada Learning.

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Hattie, J. (2012). Visible learning for teachers: Maximizing impact on learning. Routledge.

Hattie, J. (2013). Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. Routledge.

Wise Crowds Liberating Structure – a supplement to CIQ?

The Liberating Structure known as “Wise Crowds” seeks to “tap the wisdom of the whole group in rapid cycles” (see LS 13 – Wise Crowds). I believe it can be used as a different approach to what Brookfield recommends in his The Skillsful Teacher as the CIQ or Critical Incident Questionnaire (Brookfield 2015, p. 34).

Normally in an anonymous CIQ, students are asked to describe their most engaging, confusing, helpful or surprising moments in the class that week. Their comments are then considered, tabulated and analyzed by instructors, who then respond by adjusting their teaching, lecturing, or assessment instruments for the following week.

I believe the CIQ is an incredibly powerful and sadly underused (at least at my institution) classroom research technique that has many merits. It’s an excellent way to get a snapshot of how students are doing with the learning at any point in the course. The challenge comes when you try to address the issues raised in the CIQ in order to help students better learn. Often you may not have time to address every single question or every confusing concept students raised in the anonymous survey. That’s where the Wise Crowds Liberating Structure comes in.

Rather than have the teacher trying to solve all of the students problems with the learning, she can use the  Liberating Structure (LS) known as “Wise Crowds” (Lipmanowicz & McCandless 2013, pg. 217) to allow students to take control of their learning and consult their peers, the Wise Crowds, for answers to their questions. The Wise Crowds LS allows students to  “gain more clarity and increase their capacity for self-correction and self-understanding” by consulting the expertise and inventiveness of everyone in a group (p. 217). A spinoff benefit of Wise Crowds is that students grow in supportive relationships and “deepen inquiry and consulting skills”. This is because student alternate in being a “client” and also a “consultant” to others. Here’s how you would structure it and set it up in real time.

 Applying Wise Crowds to the Classroom

The following is an adaption to a higher education classroom setting of the “Five Structural Elements – Minimum Specifications for a small Wise Crowds” in Lipmanowicz & McCandless 2013, pg. 217.

1. Structuring Invitation
   1. Inform students they will be tapping the wisdom of their peers to help them clarify the most confusing  aspects of the course experienced this past week. They will also get the opportunity to be consultants to other students with their own specific needs for clarity.
   2. Each student briefly describes his or her challenge and asks their peers for help. Peers are consultants who ask clarifying questions and offer ways for student to be more clear about the concept raised.
2. How Space is arranged
   1. Students get into groups of 4 or 5 facing each other, adapting the classroom chairs and setup as necessary
3. How Participation is Distributed
   1. All students allowed to raise their most confusing concept they had last week
   2. All students given equal amount of time to ask for or get help
   3. All students have an equal opportunity to offer help to other students
4. How Groups are configured
   1. 4-5 students
   2. Can either be randomly organized to allow for mix of students, or grouped by team based on the teams that are already set up to work on specific projects
5. Sequence of Steps and Time Allocation
   1. Every student given 5 minutes, broken down as follows: 1 minute to explain most confusing concept, 1 minutes for peers to ask clarifying questions,  2 minutes for advice given by consultants, 1 minute for client to provide feedback to consultants on how useful the advice was.

References:  

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Lipmanowicz, H., & McCandless, K. (2013). The surprising power of liberating structures. New York: Liberating Structures Press.

Liberating Structures content, including the image used in this blog post, is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Reflections on Experiencing Teaching – 1st Chapter in The Skillful Teacher

Some really great quotes from this chapter in The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom:

“The truth is teaching is a gloriously messy pursuit in which shock, contradiction, and risk are endemic” (p. 1)

“Our lives as teachers often boil down to our best attempts to muddle through the complex contexts and configurations that our classrooms represent” (p. 1)

“…teaching is riddled with irresolvable dilemmas and complex uncertainties”  (p. 2)

I like how Brookfield is just very upfront with the realities of teaching and “muddling” through otherwise highly complex and unpredictable situations. I have often found myself in situations where I’ve had to “muddle through” – A student stabs another student in the back with a pencil (this is in Grade 1), I lose complete control of the class because students are restless and bored, I’m playing a video to students and out pops a terrible swear word that has been unexpectedly dubbed over the original in the YouTube video. Those are just a few of the examples where I’ve had to muddle through, improvise, change course suddenly and throw out my otherwise perfectly planned lesson.

‘Growing into the Truth of Teaching’

I also appreciate Brookfield’s honesty and in stating some of the truths he has come to in his teaching career. Here are the ones that stood out to me:

“I will never be able to initiate activities that keep all students engaged all the time” (p. 9)

“Making full disclosure of my expectations and agendas is necessary if I am to establish an authentic presence in the classroom” (p. 9)

“I always have power in the classroom” and can’t make it so that students don’t notice me in the room (p. 9)

That kind of gut level honesty is highly appreciated and makes me reflect more deeply on my own convictions in teaching. It also helps me to know where my role starts and ends, and where the student is responsible for their own learning. After all, I cannot force learning onto a student. They must decide whether they want to learn or not. But I can also not be completely self negating and show no confidence in my teaching skills, or disregard the power and authority I hold as a teacher in the classroom.

Liberating Structures

In reading through Chapter 1, I find that I disagree with Brookfield on one point. He gives an example on pages 4-5 of how he was confronted by a silent classroom where none of the students wanted to speak, despite several successive questions asked by the teacher to the whole classroom. He then goes into a long speech about how no one was obliged to speak and that he wasn’t presuming failure on their part if they didn’t respond. It was a nice speech and I do agree that it probably alleviated some students’ minds to actually want to speak but. However, I think he could have solved this in a much easier, less dramatic way by simply using a “Liberating Structures” technique such as 1-2-4-All. In this simple group configuration activity, the instructor gets students to spend 1 minute thinking about the question, then 2 minutes talking in pairs with another person, then get into groups of 4 to come up with the best response worthy of sharing with the class, then in the final “all” stage, the teacher calls on all groups to share their discussions with the whole class. If Brookfield would have deployed this simple structure for promoting discussion, he would have avoided all the blank stares and the subsequent dramatic speech he had to make, which in the end amounted to simply more “teacher talk time” or TTT.

References:  

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Lipmanowicz, H., & McCandless, K. (2013). The surprising power of liberating structures. New York: Liberating Structures Press.

Teacher Talking Time. British Council. Available at: https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/teacher-talking-time.

Taking the Teaching Perspectives Inventory – reflections

I just tried the Teaching Perspectives Inventory, created by professors from UBC’s Faculty of Education. It’s an interesting tool to “collect your thoughts and summarize your ideas about teaching” (TPI Website). The TPI is supposed to help teachers understand their views on the “5 Perspectives” on Teaching:

1. Transmission – “substantial commitment to the content or subject matter”
2. Apprenticeship – “teachers are highly skilled practitioners of what they teach”
3. Developmental – “planned and conducted from the learner’s point of view”
4. Nurturing – “long-term, hard, persistent effort to achieve comes from the heart, not the head”
5. Social Reform – teaching that “seeks to change society in substantive ways”

(Quotes from TPI Website – The “Five Perspectives”)

I took the TPI and found it quite easy and short to complete. Here are my results:

The context for my “teaching” was more of an instructional design/advisory role in a Career Development co-curricular course. The two nearly dominant teaching perspectives for me were “Apprenticeship” and “Nurturing”. Without going into much more in-depth detail about an exact interpretation of the results (the interpretation page was quite confusing to decipher), I would have to say “off the bat” that it makes sense that Apprenticeship is a dominant perspective, based on what I can reflect on as my beliefs in teaching.

Apprenticeship

I like to “do” things rather than talk about them or “transmit” them to an audience and just have them listen. I’d rather do something, show the student, and have them go on and do it while I watch. It’s much more “hands-on” experiential type of learning. Experiential learning is an ancient approach to learning, with even Aristotle saying “for the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them” – (Experiential Learning in Wikipedia). I like the idea of showing students how to do something, monitoring whether it’s too hard or too easy for them (TPI refers to it as the “zone of development”), and then having them work more independently once they have some mastery of the subject or skill.

Nurturing

I show up as having a “35” in nurturing with an even stronger belief (13 as opposed to 12 in Apprenticeship), so there must be something going on here. I do believe in “promoting a climate of caring and trust” and helping them set “challenging but achievable goals” (TPI Website – The “Five Perspectives”). So this idea of nurturing is focused on caring for the student, having compassion on them but not giving up on principles, goals and learning objectives. It seems that the “Nurturing” perspective is most closely aligned with the concept of the teacher as facilitator or “guide by the side”. That is something I fervently believe in as well.

Developmental

My third,slightly less dominant perspective is “Developmental” and admittedly I don’t do this very well so I’m surprised it is third on the list. The idea of helping students move from more simple to complex thinking, developing “increasingly complex and sophisticated cognitive structures for comprehending content” (TPI Website – The “Five Perspectives”) is quite frankly a daunting task. I can certainly say that I hold these principles as ideals of good teaching, but can’t think immediately of a really good experience where I succeed in actually getting students to move from simpler to more complex thinking. Striving for that would involve a lot of eliciting of critical thinking skills from the students, which is certainly something very needed in the higher education field especially when it comes to student career development.

Other perspectives

Beyond that I see that “Transmission” is much lower and “Social Reform” is a recessive perspective. In my position and influence I simply don’t have the leverage, means or mandate to instil social reform in students. It’s more about empowering individuals to be the best they can, not trying to change society. But I guess you could argue that if you empower enough individuals to pursue their passions, grow in their critical thinking skills and really gain the hands-on experience they need, they you would in the end change society.

 

Balancing Credibility and Authenticity in the Classroom

In this video by Stephen Brookfield, he explains the importance of balancing credibility and authenticity in teaching in a Higher Ed context. He gives examples how teachers can establish credibility and authenticity, and discusses how they can strike a balance between these two using the Critical Incident Questionnaire as a tool to check how they are doing in the classroom.

Credibility

One example he gives of perceived credibility of the teacher by students is the ability for the teacher to answer questions on the fly. If an instructor is able to open up the classroom to any random question on their subject expertise, and be able to answer that question in some satisfactory  way, they gain credibility in the eyes of their students. e says:

“The way students judge we know what we’re doing and that we know our stuff is if we can if we can respond to questions in the moment. It seems that responding to one unanticipated question in a good way demonstrates your knowledge and ability. That seems to really enhance your credibility more in fact than anything else.” – 1:48 in video

Another example he gives is for teachers to explain why they do what they do. Talking out loud about why teachers do what they do, building a rationale for why they are doing a particular thing, also serves to enhance credibility.

Authenticity

Brookfield mentions the importance of full disclosure as a source of authenticity. Instructors must make full disclosure to students of exactly what it is they are assessing in the students, why they are assessing them, for what purpose and with what criteria. Students need to know your agenda, bottom line.

Responsiveness to students is also very important – the ability for an instructor to respond to challenges and difficulties students are facing in the class as they grapple with the course material. Responsiveness “focuses on demonstrating clearly to students that you want to know any concerns and problems they are having with their learning so you can help them deal with them” (Brookfield 2015, p. 51).

Autobiographical disclosure is the last example he gives on authenticity in this video. In his book he refers to it as “disclosing personhood”, the “perception students have that their teachers are flesh-and-blood human beings” (p. 52). There is a right time and a right amount of autobiographical disclosure to do. Too much and it becomes inappropriate and off-topic, but too little and the instructor appears wooden and cold.

 Striking a Balance

Brookfield concludes by talking about how to strike a balance as an instructor between credibility and authenticity. He says none of us can find that perfect balance. It’s the “nature of the pedagogic beast” that you can’t get everything perfectly balanced ever (video, 4:28).  However, what helps Brookfield the most in his own teaching is constantly using a Critical Incident Questionnaire to gauge the appropriate balance he is giving to both credibility and authenticity. The CIQ will reveal how students are feeling about his teaching, and he can make adjustments appropriately based on their feedback.

References:  

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Brookfield’s The Skillful Teacher – Reflections on Researching Student Learning

I am so glad I discovered Brookfield’s “The Skillful Teacher focuses on what students value in teachers”, thanks to the Provincial Instructor Diploma program I course I am taking, 3260 Professional Practice. I was finally got my hands on the 2015 edition. I find his stated purpose for writing the book extremely helpful:

“The essence of skillful teaching lies in the teacher constantly researching how her students are experiencing learning and then making pedagogic decisions informed by the insights she gains from students’ responses” (2015, p. ix)

I’d like to break down that quote in my own context:

Researching how students are experiencing learning

My biggest question in this regard is to what extent instructors are able to do this practically on a day to day basis. Brookfield recommends doing a weekly “Critical Incident Questionnaire” (p. 34) where he asks students to describe when they were engaged, distanced, affirmed, confused or surprised during the course of his lessons. I have not heard of that strategy being implemented before, but it could be very easily done anonymously, online, and even with mobile devices at the end of class using Google Forms.

My concern is not the practically of doing research into student learning experiences, but whether instructors have that curiosity from the get go at all. Do they really have that on their agenda at the beginning of term to monitor how students are doing with the learning? This is especially crucial for 1st year undergraduate Non-commerce students coming to, say, an introductory class on accounting, and having no background in business or accounting whatsoever. Monitoring their learning experiences early on in the term would avoid pitfalls later on when instructors start finding out the majority of students are struggling with the content.

Having in place a standard, efficient and quick means of getting a pulse on the class such as the digital or paper CIQ would be helpful to implement across the faculty, or at least make available to instructors as an option to enhance their awareness of student learning. As part of course design, I plan on raising this issue with instructors at opportune times to help them think of how to better track student learning experiences.

Making informed pedagogic decisions

The concept of making informed pedagogical decisions midway in a course based on student learning experiences happening in real time is a new one to me. I hear more often that instructors are “capitulating” to student demands and either extend a deadline, make an assignment slightly easier, or reduce the deliverables on a group project. But those decisions are often not necessarily “informed pedagogic” decisions based on taking a true snapshot of student learning experiences in the course. There are of course some that do, but part of the problem is the unwieldiness of the surveying technology we have, and the reluctance of instructors to go through the effort of collecting that data, whether in paper or digital form.

This is why data visualization and quick feedback loops tied into learning analytics is so important. If instructors were to have a digital, online, always live and real time data visualization interface to monitor student learning experiences – both of online activity and classroom experience via survey results — they would have a much better pulse on student learning without the time consuming effort to collate, analyze and interpret results of questionnaires manually. Even if the instructor spent a few seconds glancing over a very clear, concise and accurate data visualization chart of student learning (how many students found a particular topic confusing, how many requested more clarity on a certain issue for example), that in itself could foster a rich discussion or a slight but effective turn in the direction of the course that could better assist the students in their learning.

References:  

Brookfield, S. (2015). The Skillful Teacher: On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Critical Incident Questionnaire Resources from Stephen Brookfield’s Website: 

1. ✦The Classroom Critical Incident Questionnaire

2. ✦Understanding Classroom Dynamics: The Critical Incident Questionnaire

3. ✦The Critical Incident Questionnaire (CIQ): From Research to Practice and Back Again   By Jeffrey Keefer, Adult Education Research Conference Proceedings, 2009