Risky business
My new curriculum is very simple. Twelve sessions, each of 2 hours. No lectures (nobody turns up). No scheduled activities, no tutorial plan. All that exists is a set of learning outcomes and an end of module assignment. You won’t find the learning outcomes written in quite the same way as the official documentation. In fact I’ve spent a considerable time re-writing them to make them more meaningful, both to the learners and to me. Hopefully they are better aligned with the assessment task.
Are they aligned with the curriculum? They will be if the learners construct the appropriate activities.
So what do I do in the first session? Make it up as I go along? I don’t take such a cavalier attitude with my class. But I do spend a bit of time explaining that they will need to learn all sorts of things to stand a chance of completing the assignment. They’ll need to learn how to do things, and the best way will be to have focused conversations about relevant tasks. What are the tasks? What do they need to know? What do they know right now?
When faced with this for the first time you can imagine that they are a little phased. So a little structured distraction is called for. What is the agenda for today? Perhaps this will create the illusion of real working life, which in the case of these students is not that far away.
But ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’.
Can you complete the assessment?
Of course not, we’ve only just started the course.
But why can’t you complete the assessment? What can’t you do?
We can’t model processes. We need to see some techniques.
OK. There are a variety of notations for…
There’s no doubt that this is a risky approach. The sessions are tiring to facilitate, but they are extremely enjoyable. There is a strong reliance upon the adaptability of the staff - this is not something for the faint-hearted. Do you need to be a subject expert? It helps, but the more I teach the more I understand that there should be less emphasis upon subject specialisms and more focus on helping them become employable. Change management with IT is mostly about communicating with people in challenging circumstances. It’s about motivating, cajoling, enthusing and persuading. And you have to do a bit of analysis as well.
So let’s say you survive week one; what next?
Have they set an agenda? Did you ask them to? One of my recent classes decided to be revolutionary and reject the University’s VLE in favour of Facebook. They did ask first - and they seemed surprised when I reinforced that their learning was my priority, so if they didn’t want to use Blackboard, then they didn’t have to. I imposed the change in delivery on another class and they didn’t complain (to start with).
Week two came and there was a semblance of an agenda, and some of the questions suggested that some thinking had occurred during the week. But one of the students took one of my dry-wipe pens and started drawing on the board, and proceeded to take charge of the next 20 minutes, a leadership scenario if ever there was one. How would I have facilitated this in the past? If I had tried to design an activity I would have probably attempted to create opportunities for leaders to take charge of several groups. This emergent situation permitted the leader to step forward, and perhaps there is only one in this class. Only time will tell.
There were still some ‘quiet’ students in the class. I prompted them and they responded, but that was the limit of their contributions. Perhaps they were lying in wait…
Week three was more dynamic. More students were displaying some autonomy, initiating conversations to answer questions that were directed at me. I was adopting the role of abiter, helping them when they required some experience to influence the argument. The questions were a bit more abstract; ‘how would you approach this?’, rather than ‘is this correct’.
At week four things were starting to happen. I wasn’t really needed in the conventional sense; I fielded a couple of questions but they were generally down to task. It was interesting to see the behaviours of the less enthusiastic members of the class, those who had not attended all of the sessions so far. They expressed concern, not knowling what to do. But then they appeared to fall into line, taking cues from their more autonomous colleagues. The class leader was in his element, speaking confidently and asking questions. He relinquished ‘the pen’ and supported his class mates, helping them find resolution when discord was evident. Does he recognise his ability?
For week five I decided to do a quick progress check - a simple survey to get a feel for how they were progressing. And here came the surprise - less than half of them responded and the survey indicated that they were not in favour of Facebook. Why? They chose it.
For week six I hijacked the agenda. Item One: explore feedback.
I was willing to let them use the VLE, it made no difference to me as a facilitator. I just wanted to explore the issues surrounding their feelings. By now there was no problem in exploring issues through discussion. Everyone talked freely - this was not possible at the start of the module. The group explored the relative merits of Facebook, and the resistance towards it. Their arguments were articulate, and there was clearly a split in the class. Reason started to emerge and eventually after 20 minutes a consensus formed - prompted by the leader suggesting that 20 minutes was long enough and they were potentially missing out on time with me, which was ironic since I was increasingly becoming a co-learner rather than the teacher.
And to reinforce this they took charge of the agenda again. Once the feedback item had been dealt with it was ‘business as usual’.
‘How can we assess the value of our process improvements…‘
Week seven onwards demonstrated the momentum that was occurring. What was particularly interesting was the fact that I was no longer teaching the whole class by speaking to them as a class. I was having in-depth conversations with individuals and through conversation this knowledge was emerging elsewhere. The ‘leader’ was continuing to develop. He was managing the learning of his colleagues by posing questions and engaging them in dialogue. My tutorials would never be the same again. If only my academic colleagues were as cooperative…
Reward
So do they learn? I certainly did. And they did too. Our conversation was much deeper than before and it was clear that this approach was allowing roles to emerge. So clearly previous attempts to teach this was imposing constraints - how many students had not experienced what they were capable of? The teaching environment was constraining them. I would gladly employ a number of these students after completing this one module. They were not demonstrating the autonomy at the beginning; they were ready to accept, to enquire as to what they thought I wanted to hear, to do what they thought I wanted to mark.
Even if the ‘leader’ student was exceptional, are we not constraining achievement?
It’s important to take risk. At one level it’s invigorating, but it’s also inspirational. I dread to think about all of the missed opportunities in the past.
Tags: curriculum design, innovation