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Designing Classes to Create Significant Learning Experiences
April 14 and 15, 2004
Presenter: Ken Jones
What are our common complaints about students?
- Don’t do reading, don’t come prepared
- Not engaged in class, act bored
- Don’t retain knowledge
- Don’t think clearly, don’t see or seek connections
Since we can’t magically transform the students with whom we work , I want to focus on things we might do to at least mitigate these complaints.
As the announcement indicated, much of what I want to do today is based on Dee Fink’s work, so let me start with his definition of the four aspects of teaching.
Four aspects of teaching:
- Knowledge of Subject Matter – knowing your area
- Teacher-Student Interactions – umbrella term for ways we interact; lecturing, discussions, office conversations
- Course Management – being organized, returning exams quickly
- Design of Instruction – structure of teaching and learning experiences in class
Which of these areas would you focus on if you wanted to have the greatest impact in terms of addressing our complaints about students and creating a better class? If you only have so much time, where would you invest it to get the biggest bang for the buck?
Does increased knowledge of subject matter solve any of problems?
No, most of us have way more content knowledge than we can ever use in an undergraduate course.
Does better course management?
Might make course run more smoothly, but doesn’t get at key issues
What about better teacher student interactions?
Might help create enthusiasm if better at active learning
Might create more engagement if interacted with students outside of class
But, most of us are already doing those things ---
My argument – and Dee’s – is that if you want to improve their learning and your satisfaction, the one area that is going to have the biggest payoff is design of the learning experiences.
Going back to the complaints, let me show you what I mean. If you want to tackle the problem of students not doing the reading/coming to class prepared, it seems to me that you have at least three options.
- You could work in the course management area by imposing bigger penalties for not doing the work
- You could work in the interaction area by doing a pep talk on why they need to do this work in terms of their own education, or,
- You could focus on the design sector. You could design the course so students
have a real reason, a real need to do the readings.
My guess is this is the most effective area.
Imagine, for a moment, you are asked to do a new class – or perhaps you are teaching something you haven’t taught in a long time. In either case, you are in a situation where you need to do more work to get the class ready than you would if it were one you teach year after year.
The classic model – at least in my experience -- of planning for new course is as follows:
- Think about what topics you want to cover
- Look for a text or readings
Organize course according to the reading sequence
Figure you will decide what to do in class each day as you go along
Decide on assessment devices – tests, or papers, etc, but not precise content until you get to the moment.
If you are like me, you probably wouldn’t be real explicit about your learning goals for this new course, but if someone asked, I think most of us would say something about wanting to help students learn the content, and then we would add some higher order skill like “showing them how to integrate this knowledge into what they have learned before,” or “increasing their critical thinking skills,” or “helping them learn to apply their knowledge to new situations.”
We are going to meet the content goal almost automatically, but where do the other goal or goals fit in. Where/how are the students going to learn to do the things that go beyond content like integration, application, and critical thinking? It does seem to me that active learning techniques are more likely to lead to those skills than straight lecture, but even so, the degree of success will depend on whether or not what you choose as an active learning technique really mirrors your goal.
The same is true of exams and papers. If you just test on content, you are abandoning your stated goals and sending message that they don’t need to bother with anything else. Don’t think, just memorize! Or you can test for the higher order stuff, but if you haven’t actually taught it, they won’t do well on the exam, which will leave you feeling frustrated and them seething.
Dee’s argument is that we can avoid frustration, resentment, and at least mitigate our common complaints about students if we put more energy/time into planning our courses – by thinking about them as a cluster of significant learning experiences.
So how do you do this?
The first thing is to actually stop and think about what Dee calls the “situational factors”
Situational list (handout)
- Specific Context of the Teaching and Learning Situation – size, upper or lower division
- Expectations of External Groups – Department or outside accrediting
- Nature of the Subject – Convergent or Divergent Cognitive only or skills as well
- Characteristics of Learners - Any life or professional goals I can hook to?
CORE or majors - Characteristics of Teacher - What do I bring to class
- Special Pedagogical Challenge - Math phobia or pysch, “all common sense” so no need to study
The second step, which for me is both the more exciting and challenging part, is to think about what is it that I want to achieve. What do I want students to get out of this course – not what do they need to know for each exam, but WHAT IS IT THAT I HOPE WILL BE WITH THE STUDENTS A YEAR OR MORE AFTER THE COURSE IS OVER.
This could be anything – a few key content specifics, a central theory, a sense of the way of knowing in the discipline, or a particular skill.
Dee suggests this list of possible learning goals that we can think about – Handout. (Exhibit 3.3; page 75)
As you can see, he starts with things like foundational knowledge, and then moves on to application and integration. He also, however, suggests three other less common ones – the human dimension, caring, and learning how to learn.
Just so you can better conceptualize what he means by all this, here’s another handout (Exhibit 3.4; pages 76-78) where he lays this out in more detail for three different disciplines. I don’t want to spend our time walking through these, but my hope is that they will prompt your thinking.
Ok, so by this point we have taken two steps on the road to creating our new course. We have thought about who we are teaching – the situational piece – and we have pondered the full range of what it is that we want them to carry away from the course.
What we haven’t done, yet, is to address the issue of how we are going to get our students to do what we want in this course – how are we going to get them to end up achieving whatever goals we have set.
According to Dee, tackling this aspect involves at least two more steps. We have to figure out our feedback/assessment procedures, and we have to design our classroom activities. You might think it would make sense to decide what you are going to do in the classroom and then figure out the assessment procedures, but I hope it will become clear in a minute why I’m doing assessment and then classroom activities.
Feedback and assessment procedures
The classic two midterms and a final assessment process that we have all experienced is what Dee calls the “audit-ive” approach – it audits the student – it checks for what they learned or didn’t learn.
Dee suggests that we shift our thinking toward “educative” assessment, where the focus is not just on a grade, but on helping the student become a better learner. Very briefly, this involves four things:
- Instead of looking back over what you have covered and designing a test, think about what you would like students to be able to do in the future with the information they have learned. Then design the exam around that. Rather than requiring regurgitation, push them to apply the knowledge in a slightly different context through a simulation or some similar real world exercise. To put it another way, instead of testing for what they do or don’t remember, test for what they can do with the material.
- Establishing clear criteria framed in ways that are meaningful/understandable to the student. Most of our criteria aren’t meaningful. When we say essays need to be well-written or that explanations have to be thorough, their vision of what these terms mean is very different from ours. Actual examples from the class material are much more effective.
- Designing experiences that develop the student’s ability to assesses their own work.
- Provide Feedback as well as assessment. Assessment is giving a grade. By feedback, Dee means some form of dialogue with the student about how the students sees his/her work, and what you see as the strengths and areas that need to be worked on.
As I hope you can see, if you are going to do this kind of “educative” assessment, you really need to think about it before you get all the everyday classroom assignments set in stone because it needs to be part of the overall process.
Ok, what about designing the actual classroom activities. What am I going to do, and what are the students going to do, that will allow us to achieve the goals I have set?
Research over the last decade has repeatedly shown that students retain more longer and are more able to use what they have learned if instructors employ active, rather than passive, learning techniques.
Information and ideas –
Active learning doesn’t mean you give up content – the question is whether it works best to have kids acquire pre-digested material in the form of texts or lectures, or whether there are ways of having them gather and wrestle with things that haven’t been fully interpreted and analyzed.
Experiences -
We can create situations where students actually do something real in a live
setting, or if that isn’t feasible, we can do it vicariously through things like case
studies, simulations, or role-playing. Basically we are talking about finding ways
to allow the students to do whatever it is that they are learning.
Reflection –
Students need reflection opportunities to make their learning meaningful to themselves. We commonly create reflection opportunities on the material itself through class discussions and writing papers, but minute papers also work really well. Having them write for a couple of minutes about the muddiest point or the most important point they learned this week forces reflection. We can also ask students to reflect on the learning process if that is one of the goals you have chosen. Most often this is done by having them journal on, questions about what they are learning, how they are learning, and what role this learning plays in their lives.
Obviously, the big problem with active learning is that if students are testing and discovering and exploring for themselves, you can’t cover as much material as you can by simply telling them what you think they should know. I’d love to talk about what I have come to see as the fallacy of “coverage,” but let me stay focused here.
Acknowledging this problem, Dee offers a partial solution by stressing the need to think about our teaching activities as taking place both in class and OUT OF CLASS. In other words, as we design our courses, we need to think not just about how we are going to spend the 70 minutes, but what should take place in the days in between. He therefore poses that when we plan our courses, we lay them out spatially in this kind of model. (Castle turret – Figure 4.10; page 135) If we draw out what is supposed to happen outside class as well as in class, we can do a better job of thinking through the connections.
Naturally, if we plan for things to happen outside of class, we have to create a structure to make sure it happens – or at least to insure that there are consequences for a student if they don’t do what they were supposed to.
Now, I’m sure some of you have heard people say kids are lazy and won’t work outside of class or “I’ve got to lecture on the book because they don’t read.” Of course they don’t read if we lecture. They’re not stupid. If we are going to tell them what was in the reading, why should they spend their time outside of class.
To break the cycle, we need to use the class time to do something based on the reading but pushes understanding further. As we do so, we need to make it clear we hold them accountable for the reading. That could be in the form of a brief occasional quiz, minute papers, direct questioning by the instructor, or group work that creates peer pressure for everyone to be prepared.
Once we have reflected on the situational considerations, thought about our learning goals, decided on some procedures for assessment and some learning activities, we need to make sure everything comes together.
Dee suggests that one way to think through this and to check on yourself is to lay out a little grid where each learning goal has a corresponding box for the procedures for assessing student learning and the learning activities that will be employed to reach that goal. (handout – worksheet Exhibit 4.4; page 125) If you lay out what you are going to do in terms of assessment and activities to meet each of the goals you have chosen, then you will have a much better chance of catching the holes and making sure everything fits.
If you look at the bottom of last handout, you can see I now have gotten you through point 5 of Dee’s twelve point list. (handout on twelve steps; page 142).
In the next section – items 6-8 - he is basically talking about more integration, but let me highlight one thing for you because I have found it really helpful.
Dee suggests we differentiate between teaching techniques and teaching or instructional strategies.
A teaching technique is a specific activity like small groups, discussion, lecture, lab, case studies, whatever.
A teaching strategy, on the other hand, is thinking about how you are going to combine a whole series of those activities in a particular sequence in order to move the class toward the goal(s) you have set.
I’m working on a course now I will be teaching next semester for the first time in ages. As I do so, I’m trying to apply Dee’s insight on thinking about a strategy rather than just technique. So far, this has led me to formulate the following questions. When do I want to use a particular technique? Does it work better early in the term or later? With one kind of material rather than another? How does that particular teaching technique advance particular aspects of my overall goals? How often can I/should I use it? How can I create the illusion of variety? What should kids be doing outside of class to make the in-class activity work? How can vary the out of class activities to best achieve my goals?
Key source:
L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated Approach to
Designing College Courses, 2003
Some Teaching Strategy Questions
- When do I want to use a particular technique?
- Does it work better early in the term or later?
- With one kind of material rather than another?
- How does that particular teaching technique advance particular aspects of my overall goals?
- How often can I/should I use it?
- How can I create the illusion of variety?
- What should kids be doing outside of class to make the in-class activity work?
- How can I vary the out of class activities to best achieve my goals?