Work - knowing and doing
I've been running workshops for Leeds Metropolitan University to support a booklet they asked me to write on writing and using good learning outcomes.
In preparation for writing the booklet and running the workshops I looked at a range of course documents from around the country.
A frequent format for learning outcomes in the course documents was, first to describe what students should know, and then (sometimes) to describe what students should be able to do - implicitly or explicitly, do with the knowledge they had learned.
The structure of the course often embodied this implicit pedagogic epistemology - teach students the knowledge, then teach students to use it.
I suspect, strongly, that many learners learn knowledge best in the act of using (which includes analysing and critiquing) the knowledge.
This obviously has implications for course structure. In conventional terms, it suggests a closer integration of theory and practice, perhaps more helpfully the closer integration of knowledge as content and knowledge as action.
Maybe we can bring all this together by suggesting that the overall learning outcome for the course in any subject is that the student should be to do (which includes analysing and critiquing) the subject?
Reactions welcomed.
I'll probably return to this.
Life - swans and cygnets
In May, after (we understand from people who have lived here longer than we have) two previous years where their eggs did not hatch, the swans hatched six cygnets. In the first few days, the pen stayed close to the young whilst the cob saw off all threats, real, potential and occasionally imaginary.
More to come.
Other stuff - dictating
I'm not writing this. I'm speaking it. Dragon Naturally Speaking V 10 does a good job of transcribing what I say.
I've had to learn to speak in written English. And my writing styles may have become slightly less formal. I really do have to proofread, and to check that it reads like writing rather than like speech, and works for the intended audience. And I've learned not to leave it turned on during a telephone conversation! But it makes - I'll still call it writing - faster and easier. It makes it easier to try out a new and speculative thought - if it doesn't work, little is lost, I'm less attached to it, more willing to cut it.
Have you used it?
What have you found?
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I've just read an article that touches on this related to learners in the digital age and learning spaces. Whilst describing the migration that older generation learners have had to make towards the new forms of pedagogy, the new generation are digital natives and don't struggle with the new forms of learning. It goes on to explain that learners need a phase of deep learning to occur as well as strategic learning - one joined with the process of understanding and the other with techniques of doing. The author goes onto say that facilitators need to be more explicit in the mashing up of different approaches to teaching that suit particular styles of learning with the new tools and more traditional resources - to aim towards a more robust educational experience where the learner is equipped with not just knowledge but the strategies to achieve its application in the real world. I always think this brings with it a further debate about how this measured in on an empirical scale and whether those outcomes can be directly associated with what happens in the classroom. Here I suppose learning reaches an interesting stage of development where less tangible forms of influence on the individual arise from inherent behaviours, the environment, beliefs etc. I believe that learners can be quite savvy when it come to choosing facets of knowledge that are beneficial to processes that they may undertake outside the learning zone. This might mean that for them that part of an episteme becomes redundant whilst other parts are galvanised into tangible skills the important being that the learning chooses which parts and then applies them accordingly be it consciously or implicitly. A further part of the article describes that it's important for learners to be able to analyse and reflect on knowledge that is absorbed, but an aspect of their learning should enable the development of critical analysis.
ReplyDeleteDuncan