Learning Opportunities versus Activities:

To what extent are the program activities learning opportunities or mere activities?

A big epiphany I had through working with Anita and Sherry this year is that there’s a difference between a learning opportunity and an activity.  The difference between these two kinds of experiences has to do with whether someone simply practices and applies their existing knowledge and skills, or whether their knowledge and skills become challenged and ultimately more sophisticated and informed.

    

 activity   
    

learning opportunity

I was surprised to see how the kinds of things I’ve asked undergraduates to do over the last 5 years seem relevant to the six expectations.  Pretty remarkable given that I didn’t plan the programs with these things in mind.  I do need to check in with the meaning of these expectations. Is the way I interpret the look of these skills what is meant by them? 

I also realize though, that I am not entirely certain about the degree to which I’ve actually helped students DEVELOP skills in these areas.  Just because students were regularly asked to work in groups, doesn’t mean that they developed in their skills for “assuming responsibility for their actions” or that they are now somehow better at “exercising power responsibly.”   Students could just be leaning on what they already know, and the groups could be dysfunctional rather than supportive, interdependent units. 

What does a learning opportunity look like?  Well, I understand the general premise:

What I’m less certain of is how the general idea translates into practice.  And furthermore, to what extent are the program activities I’ve developed have been learning opportunities.   Are the workshops that have felt the most successful – successful because they have these key elements of a learning opportunity in them?  Might the times when I’ve felt most disappointed in a workshop be informed by examining whether or not I’ve built in a real learning opportunity?  (Then there’s the all important question: just because I like a workshop, does that mean it’s useful or effective for the student in front of me?) 

Seminar

An example of a place that might just be engaging in a series of neat activities is seminar.  Seminar can be a place where students just say what they think.  Parallel talk.  It’s only when students need to actively engage with and negotiate the implications of the texts, and their colleagues contributions, that there is the possibility of shifting knowledge and ways of thinking about issues.  Even if students are reading texts that acknowledge a pluralistic society and challenge the dominant narrative, when some students of color talk about seminar being such a painful place to work, is it because there’s no “bump” to check in with white students’ assumptions and skills in talking about this new narrative?   Even in the face of new information, students may resort to their existing, oftentimes insufficient, skills for analysis, dialogue and deliberation which may not help them to fully make meaning of that new information. 

I used to have a very hands-off approach to the discussion, where students decided on and led the focus of the discussions.  It’s been a very uncomfortable space for me.  I’ve never been sure or purposeful about it’s function in the program beyond talking about the texts.  Over the years, I’ve borrowed and built in several activities to help me deal with the uncomfortable space of seminar.  And yet I didn’t have a clear learning goal for these activities – so I’ve continued to be unsatisfied with seminar as a learning space.   Now in hindsight, I am beginning to be able to name the skills that students need to develop as part of seminar discussions:  group skills and analytical skills for unpacking, examining and evaluating the text.  The author is the lecturer and the seminar becomes the place for making sense of the lecturers’ argument and evidence.

The key thing is to have students use their existing skills, and discover a need to refine those skills.  That’s my job – the wedding planner, mistress of ceremonies and maitre d’ – to organize an event that has students bumping into the need and developing a strategy for helping them to meet the need.

Sample activities to support seminar discussions that in and of themselves do not necessarily provide learning opportunities.

Building in a learning opportunity is tied to how reflection, experimentation, information , and feedback loops are built into the activity.

Covenant

Group agreements sound so lovely!  I have built them in as part of the ritual of starting a seminar group.  I even have explored integrating statements from this very powerful set of expectations by Lynne Weber Cannon.  The problem is I rarely go back to see how well we are meeting the agreements, or, if we developed them, how functional the agreements we made are!!

Following the above heuristic, I see several potential learning opportunities in using the seminar covenant:

  1. group develops expectations and then both assesses and evaluates seminar according to the agreements
  2. Some students may experience bumps when they find that even with the expectations they developed, seminar still doesn’t “feel right”
  3. Some students may think seminar is great – others may feel silenced.  Faculty could bring in either a bump/information over time by asking students to attend to the degree to which agreements ask people to solicit and integrate multiple perspectives, address assumptions,  work directly with authors’ arguments/examples,  etc. 
  4. Students continue to assess and evaluate seminar.  My job as faculty is to help students recognize/name the bumps and to turn them into questions that require more information/skill.

Task and maintenance roles

I’ve started using elaborate ways to get students to assess their group roles as a way to get students to be more self-conscious of the dialogue process.  I like this set of criteria that Sherry drew my attention to.  Again, just getting the students to evaluate themselves does not guarantee that students will integrate any of this information into their discussion practices.  I need to build in a better way of using it: 

  • Assess group effectiveness  strengths and weakness   brainstorm what would strengthen discussion provide inform about  effective group roles set goals for group assess try again
  • Self-assess    determine effectiveness      set goal   get feedback/input   try again 

Student facilitated seminar

Giving students the chance to lead seminar is a great idea.  Many students like having the ownership over what happens in the group.  I used to do facilitation without any structure.  Sometimes students organized a thoughtful discussion, others brought in feel good activities the equivalent of party games that weren’t always useful in exploring program ideas.    Often students tell me that they want me to play a more vocal proactive role in seminar.  What I think students really need is a clearer opportunity to learn the skills associated with facilitating seminar:

  • First quarter -- model different ways to facilitate seminar – get students to discuss function and effectiveness of structure.  Provide students with written information about different protocols for facilitating seminar.
  • Group of student facilitators design plan for seminar that takes into account content and group dynamics.  Meet with faculty before seminar to discuss plan.  Faculty asks questions about logic and purpose of plan  (bump)    faculty or peers provide input/suggestions/information Seminar (potential bump) Feedback from seminar colleagues (potential bump and input) debrief with faculty (potential bump and input)

Seminar preparation &Analysis of text

So often I notice that students use the text as a diving board for talking about existing opinions and beliefs, rather than as a way to inform or investigate a question.  I also notice that students don’t always identify or work with the author’s argument and evidence.  

For each of these activities there needs to be a feedback loop that incorporates new information which needs to be built in.  For example, the visual map seminar preparation.  I’ve asked students to do visual seminar preparations for several years now.  Students often produce the same kind of thinking as with written seminar preparations described above.  I finally realized that if I want students to analyze the text, figure out the main argument and supporting details, that I need to show students how to do it.  Duh!

In this workshop students need to:

  • Identify they argument  (student disagreement creates bump, text supports arrival at mutually agreed upon answer) 
  • Identify type of argument, i.e. proposal, critique, description, etc. (student disagreement  creates bump,  writing center handout provides info about types of argument, text and faculty help students land on type of argument.)
  • Identity appropriate visual map to communicate type of argument and sort key supporting details (students use existing visual literacy to develop maps, guessing game for kind of argument – bump occurs when peers guess the wrong type of argument.  Provide information through visual map text that provides sample maps). 
  • Students create maps each week.   Need to build in peer review feedback loop to get students to evaluate type of argument and appropriateness of map to organize supporting details.

Workshops that get students self-conscious about the values and beliefs,

  • Belief perseverance ( MIT ) part 1, 2 , 3 & 4
  • Historical shift and influences on values - Trash

Developing workshops where students are self-conscious of their lenses when encountering new / challenging information also seems important.

I've started developing a workshop that seems to be relevant no matter what the topic of the program on belief perseverance. I've noticed that students will refer to this concept in seminar when discussing their opinions about ideas they encounter in the reading. They say things like: "it may be my belief perserverance, but..." Which indicates to me that the workshop may have had the impact of making them self conscious of their strongly held beliefs. I think this workshop has the potential of actually creating a learning opportunity.

The gist of the steps are:

  • share your opinion about some issue (I change issue from year to year so it's relevant to the program theme)
  • provide infomation that comes from different perspectives on the issue. (prior knowledge)
  • students examine their opinion in light of information.
  • evaluate whether their belief has changed any and why.
  • students read research article on phenomenon of bp where people tend to be hypercritical of info that challenges beliefs and undercritical of that which doesn't ( information)
  • evaluate their opinion and rationale in light of this phenomenon and examine whether they were under it's influence (bump)

 

 

I notice several hurdles for myself in applying this heuristic.  One is that it requires that I am not only clear about what I want students to learn, it also requires that I am prepared to follow through on the expectations I have for student learning.  If there are skills that students are supposed to be practicing and developing, I need to push students’ use of those skills.  Too often do I loose track of the learning goal when I look at student work and then I am not systematic or focused enough about the feedback I give.  Suddenly I notice the 50 odd ways in which the student could improve their work, rather than just that of the prime directive.  It’s not only time consuming for me, the student also doesn’t necessarily get a clear directive. 

Another hurdle is that when students don’t demonstrate the skill, I assume that I haven’t taught it well, and then I back off.  Hah!  I understand learning is a process and yet my practice suggests otherwise.  I get apologetic, and the potential learning opportunity is not made use of.  What I should be doing is use what I learn from students first approximations to lean in and develop the next workshop to help them take the next step, i.e. formative assessment. 

I also am tentative about the value of what I’m asking students to learn.  My lingering question as a college faculty:  What is this for?  How am I deciding that of all the things students need to learn that this is important?  I’m uncertain about how to both direct and structure the learning process without getting in the way of emergent student centered/directed focus.  Dewey has a lot to say to me here.  As does Freire.   The metaphor that I need to ponder is that of an experienced sailor.  The students may be involved in deciding the destination.  I need to help them learn to manage the ship, factor in the tide and wind when steering, read the navigational charts, etc.   I know that being a teacher who is clear, structured and provides effective learning opportunities is different than a dogmatic, authoritarian teacher.  There’s something I still need to unpack about these two conceptions of a teacher.

Finally, I realize that part of the puzzle in developing learning opportunities also must lie in the structure of the syllabi I create.  In all the examples above, there are multiple opportunities to try something out, assess, inform, reflect, apply, assess, revisit,  etc.  With projects that involve writing, it’s clear to me that drafts and peer review are part of the process.  I’m less clear on how to build in this learning process when teaching content.   I have a feeling that I say:  This is the “belief perseverance workshop.”  This is the “theories of intelligence workshop.”  While I sometimes provide students opportunities within or around those workshops to examine and inform their prior knowledge, there isn’t always a concrete need to use the knowledge after the workshop.  It’s left up to students to decide what to apply.  I also don’t always check in with the accuracy of students use of the knowledge,  i.e. I don’t always check in with the depth of students understanding.  My implicit practice is “students learned it because they’ve encountered the information”   or “they didn’t learn it because the workshop sucked.” 

This realization is interesting to me in light of the feedback students have given me over the years ranging from concerns about my lack of clarity to a desire to hear more about what I “know” and for more “factual” information.  What might be going on in the way I teach concepts,  is that according to Anita, I often respond to students questions/guesses with more questions rather than information.  In the learning loop of things, I provide bumps without always providing the necessary resources to help students check in with /inform their understandings.  This may explain why one student said, “ sometimes the open-ended questions and workshops leave me feeling without direction and ground to stand on.”

I’m not yet sure how to turn my content focused workshops into better learning opportunities.  It seems that the first thing I need to do is look for where in my workshops I tend pose questions (prior knowledge & potential bumps), where I provide information, opportunities to apply knowledge and feedback (new knowledge and potential bumps).  Is the problem that there is no information, or is it in the timing of when I give the information, or is it that there is not enough direction/focus in the kind and amount of information I ask students to sift through.  

Two more areas in my teaching that are implicated in providing learning opportunities versus activities.  Each of these skills could invite pages more of reflection .  I’m going to pause here and simply state the issue.  We can have more conversation in the meeting later. 

Plans to refine my skills in providing learning opportunities: