Jul 17

Heutagogical Learning: Engaged Learned

After reading the article on self-evaluated and self-directed heutagogical learning by Blaschke (2012), and reading the feedback on how to engage students online from colleagues reviewing my syllabus draft, I realized I needed to focus my blog this week on learner-centered learning and assessment.  I also was encouraged to try this in light of work in nursing education by Bhoyrub, Hurley, Neilson, Ramsay and Smith (2010) who found heutagogy to be a learning framework that addresses clinical education needs of nursing students who need to learn in complex and constantly changing environments; and need to be lifelong learners.  Bhoyrub et al (2010) also addressed challenges for faculty using a heutagogical approach including, letting go of control of learning experiences, and facilitating the self-directive adult learner to accumulate learning experiences within dynamic and unpredictable clinical environments (p. 322).

I think back to my most engaged learning as a student and my first and last formal educational experiences come to mind and as I reflect on these I think they have a flavor of heutagogy.  First, as a freshman at Florida State University in 1974 I took an experimental history class with Dr. Rubanowiz that allowed us to select and contract for our learning and evaluation in course (e.g., write a diary as the person in the period we were learning about).  My last formal educational experience, my dissertation, was my own creation with expert guidance.  In the qualitative study I conducted I used relevant theories to inform my interpretation of my results and Inadvertently, through miscommunication with my dissertation chair I selected a psychoanalytic scripting theory from experiences in my youth that was not the sexual scripting theory the chair had in mind, but was relevant to the youth participating in my grounded theory study.  As any great qualitative mentor would do my chair encouraged me to take my own path.

The heutagogical framework seems especially relevant to my current course development, a series of 3 DNP Project Development courses.  I think this framework could be used in a progressive manner over the courses allowing for students and faculty to become familiar with the approach in the first course maybe using it with one assignment and then move to a more full course approach in the other two courses.

To begin I could use some of the design elements Blaschke (2012) outlines.  For example, I might start with, “Learner-defined learning contracts: Learning contracts support students in defining and determining their individual learning paths. These individualized contracts, such as those used at distance education institution Empire State College (see www.esc. edu), define what will be learned (e.g., scope), how it will be learned (e.g., teaching and learning approaches, learning activities), and what will be assessed and how it will be assessed (p. 64).  As noted by Blaschke, online teaching methods “. . . support self-directed learning and the instructor role is already one of guide-on-the-side (fits heutagogy) . . . the instructor becomes a facilitator in the learning students’ learning process . . . and ensure that they explain this type of learning to their students from the very start of class” (p. 66).

The 9 key changes made when using a heutagogical approach described by Ashton and Newman (2006) seem worthwhile to share:

1. re-envisioned our conceptual base, examined our students and ourselves and reflected on our personal and group teaching philosophies;

2. set up a process for mapping our entire course and all units embedded within it;

3. embedded learning skills and ICT based approaches into units;

4. outlined the maps already completed for staff and students, who must take responsibility for learning at each point in order for student success in each unit;

5. given students some responsibility for their personal and group learning while initially scaffolding them in this process;

6. acknowledged that staff can learn much from students and that students can teach each other;

7. recognised the value of online teaching to give greater transparency and offer greater support than traditional teaching modes;

8. acknowledged students’ need for face to face interactions alongside online heutagogies; and

9. engaged the professional field in planning and decision making. (p. 835)

Ashton, J., Newman, L., 2006. An unfinished symphony: 21st century teacher education using knowledge creating heutagogies. British Journal of Educational Technology, 37(6), 825e-840.

https://web-a-ebscohost-com.proxy.library.emory.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=be39a76c-8d6b-4a22-824b-6127c0d7c271%40sessionmgr4002&hid=4206

Bhoryrub, J., Hurley, J., Neilson, G.R., Ramsay, M., & Smith, M. (2010). Heutagogy: An alternative practice based learning approach. Nurse Education in Practice, 10(6), 322-326.

http://ac.els-cdn.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/S1471595310000806/1-s2.0-S1471595310000806-main.pdf?_tid=dd946ac0-0d60-11e4-9eb7-00000aab0f02&acdnat=1405567221_db5d5ac7504632796faf4408ee5fcd49

Jul 17

Assessment in 5 easy steps

No I don’t really know how to do assessment in 5 easy steps. Just trying to think of an enticing headline. Sorry to disappoint.

But now that I have your attention….

As an English instructor teaching composition, I would give very elaborate feedback on each writing assignment. Then I was always surprised when I met with students to discuss my feedback on their papers and they didn’t really understand a lot of it. At the time, I thought it was because they hadn’t bothered reading my comments (which of course was probably true in some of the cases). But I wonder now whether providing a rubric beforehand, or maybe going through the student self-assessment process as outlined in the article “Student Self-Evaluation” by Rolheiser and Ross, would have helped them see the problems in their own writing, and thus correct them before turning the papers in.

However, the process outlined in that article would SEEM to take nearly the whole semester to complete! And I wondered “when do you have time to get to the content?” But perhaps going through the self-assessment process with students IS the content if it is making them better at recognizing what is a successful project/performance/assignment. Right? This actually seems like a more effective strategy than providing a rubric, because instead of having them read through a rubric, having them go through the self-assessment steps is having them learn how to assess their work as they are doing it.

I also read an article by Megan Oakleaf “The Information Literacy Instruction Assessment Cycle” that described a seven-stage process of assessment known as ILIAC (Information literacy Instruction Assessment Cycle). The article outlined the process with a specific example and ran through the cycle two times. It was helpful in learning how to put an assessment strategy into practice (7 not entirely easy steps). And I think this combined with the Student Self-Evaluation process might work in an online class.

Example: If I were teaching evaluation of sources, I would choose a few examples for students to evaluate. I would tell them to divide into groups of 3-4, have a synchronous online session with their group (and record it) where they discuss what kinds of things they would look at in order to evaluate the sources. They would need to come up with criteria for judging the source and explain how they made those decisions. I think they could post their findings in a forum or on a blog, and the groups could comment on/critique each other’s work. So the class would come to a shared understanding of how to evaluate a source. Then on their own, they would apply this criteria — using a rubric that was discussed with the class in advance — to another source they found on, and be graded by how well they took into account the criteria. (I realize that’s not following the Student Self-evaluation model exactly.)

Jul 16

Learning Centered Strategies – for older professional students

Learning Centered Assessment

 

Becoming a reflective practitioner is a course objective and learning goal for the DMin class that immediately precedes mine. I hope to build on it in my course, so I state one of my course goals as simply to “enhance students’ self-awareness as reflective practitioners.”  This will involve a series of self-evaluations relating to other course goals, plus one or two learning goals students have identified for themselves at the beginning of the semester.

 

Because these students are all professionals (between the ages of 35-50), most of them will be more mature than undergrads in their capacities for self-assessment, although I continue to appreciate how most of us professionals remain skilled in self-deception, or false notions of ourselves. This is why I appreciate a communal assessment process that compliments the communal learning process. Sometimes I am far more critical of myself than I need to be. Others will observe greater strength, wisdom, or skill than I think I have. And I also have the capacity to be unaware of my areas of growth, to overestimate my accomplishments or skills– as students often do when they receive their final grades.  It takes a community of mature, careful observers and peers to contribute to this assessment process so that it is truly formative and honest.

 

So, to develop a practical process of self-assessment and communal response, I can imagine students working in small cohorts in a four-step process that mirrors some of the steps in Rolheiser and Ross’ Student Self-Evaluation: What Research Says and What Practice Shows. The two differences here are my emphasis on peer responses – made possible by the maturity of our students – and the final action plan that reflects Dweck’s design.

 

  1. Students would help design the self-evaluation form/questions. This allows older, more mature students to assume control over this process, to honor the learning goals they identified at the beginning of the term, and to develop a process that feels safe and constructive. These particular doctoral students are also  informed about why they enrolled in the DMin program, so will have those specific professional goals in mind.
  2. Each student would periodically complete the self-evaluation and submit it to the instructor, as well as to their small cohort of peers (two other students with whom they work throughout the semester on various contextual projects and social analysis tasks).
  3. The three students would then reflect with one another – perhaps with the instructor overhearing the conversation in a synchronous session – about the self-evaluation each has written.
  4. Each student would then design an action plan in response to the conversation with their cohorts.

 

The emphasis – influenced by Carol Dweck’s work – will be on effort and growth, with an action plan that students design together to chart action/reflection needed to promote and sustain the professional growth they have targeted.

 

Hopefully this will also model for students a way of engaging in staff evaluations as most of the students serve on a staff of a congregation or hospital chaplaincy office.

 

The devil is in the details. Most of our authors have been helpful to point out that the assessment process – both self-evaluations and instructor assessments of students – must be detailed and clear so there will be shared meaning.  The particular expertise, knowledge, skill, practice, and characteristic being evaluated needs to be precise, as will the measurements of outcomes. (see Assessment Primer, Bloom’s Taxonomies, p. 9f; Online Assessment Strategies: A Primer, pp. 300f).

 

Jul 16

L. Dee Fink, Creating Significant Learning Experiences, and what’s also going on in the lives of our students

Assessment and integration….

In  Creating Significant Learning Experiences (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass), L. Dee Fink focuses on  integration in course design and assessment. He’s on board with the triangles we see appearing in the work of our assigned authors linking  (1) learning goals to (2) teaching/learning activities to (3) feedback and assessment, however he contributes a fundamental element in our educative assessment process: situational factors. He defines those as “all the major situational constraints and opportunities of the course.” (p. 140) One can imagine those might include the number of students who speak English as their second or third language, the students working part-time or full-time jobs who may not have the same time to invest in the class as others. It might be particular to one student who has a severe learning disability or PTSD after returning from a war zone. Situational factors also include the realities facing the teacher: the death of a parent, illness of a child, or pressure to publish or perish. It might include the wider context of the classroom: imagine teaching in New York City the day after 9/11.  These realities play an important role for Fink in how he assesses an entire course, not simply the learning of the students and pedagogy of the instructor.

 

Fink also encourages teachers to organize their integrated courses into a thematic whole. It is conceivable that we could attend to each of the components we have studied (assessment, learning goals and outcomes, pedagogy and teaching activities, etc.), without attending to a greater coherency. Sequencing of course themes that build on one another and form a coherent whole as they organically integrate the other elements is a hard task for me, I am discovering.

Jul 16

Self-directed Heutagogical Learning

I loved the article on self-directed heutagogical learning. I feel like my online course has found a home. It of course will be a challenge. The concept is still so new and unknown that my computer is telling me it is misspelled. In my course, I am seeking to develop self-motivated ministers to do acts of action, reconciliation and transformation in their respective communities and contexts. If the course itself can help with maturing the ministers and ministerial students to take responsibility and self-initiative, a major goal will have been accomplished. As we give the course to other educational institutions, instructors can come into the online classroom and help more it towards pedagogy as their instiutions so desire. This could work effectively in Baptist educational settings which tend to be localized.

Jul 16

Carol Dweck’s emphasis on growth and direct observation

Carol Dweck

“How Not to Talk to Your Children: The Inverse Power of Praise”  New York Magazine. February 19. 2007

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

 

“Emphasizing effort gives a child a variable that they can control. They come to see themselves as in control of their success. Emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of the child’s control, and it provides no good recipe for responding to failure.”

 

Dweck, a professor of psychology and education at Stanford, is responding to the common mindset that many of us that is convinced we are born with certain innate capacities that shape our success often beyond our control (e.g. great in math, but a terrible speller; a prodigy on the violin, but will never be mechanical; spectacular athlete, but no aptitude for history).  From childhood on we receive positive feedback about those so-called natural skills, gifts, and capacities, while also receiving subtle messages about where will likely fail or interests we should avoid.

 

If a child’s assessment is about their effort and growth, then we share the conviction with the learner that “everyone can change and grow through application and experience.”  Failing – as we all do at various times and in various arenas – will not be about our essential being and innate capacities.  We still have lots of opportunities to try again, to learn important information and skills from failing, not just life’s lessons,  that can lead to more growth.  Students can become comfortable with asking for help, rather than giving up or blaming the one who did the assessment.

 

One of Dweck’s other significant contributions has to do with the significance of direct observation. If in a preaching class the homiletics professor writes on a student’s sermon text, “This is fine work. You’re a great preacher,” nothing helpful has been communicated in that evaluation. The student doesn’t know what specifically about the sermon was fine so that she can repeat those fine qualities in the next sermon. Nor does she know what constitutes a great preacher.  But if the teacher listens and watches carefully as she delivers the sermon in front of the class, then gives very specific feedback about instances that revealed both the kind of delivery and textual work that has already been discussed in class as models of good preaching, the student will know what particular practices, what specific elements of the sermon and sermon preparation were laudable and worthy of repeating. Students involved in field education (nursing, education, public health, medicine, theology, etc.) will require this focused assessment on particular observed practices.

 

 

Jul 16

Incorporating student self-assessment

I like the idea presented in “Student Self-Evaluation: What Research Says and What Practice Shows” (by Rolheiser and Ross), that students can find increased motivation and understanding when they are taught to assess their own progress. The authors qualify this by saying that students must have known standards against which to compare their work, and that the instructor remains important in being in conversation with students and checking in on student progress.

I often try to teach students self-assessment kinds of things, because I know they will go on to use the Bible in their work, and I would prefer that they actually use what I try to teach in class rather than ignore it. 🙂 So I have a list, for example, of what constitutes a good “research question” when they are getting ready to explore a text. I want to teach them how to ask the right kinds of questions, because often students end up with bad results simply because they aren’t asking a question that is likely to be fruitful.

I could easily turn this into a self-assessment rather than a post that is graded by me. They can use the same list about the research question as a rubric to assess the question that they are researching for that week. This would probably be more helpful than my doing it because it would mean that they would have to go back and look at the criteria at least once, and so it would reinforce what I’m trying to teach.

The difficult thing about student self-assessment is teaching them what the criteria are. I don’t think the authors of the article really let on how difficult this can be. It reminds me of when I was teaching undergraduate writing intensive courses, and I realized at some point that I really had to teach them what the difference was between high school and college writing, and then teach them to recognize when they were and weren’t doing that in their own papers. Not easy! But definitely worth doing, since if they can recognize it they are a lot closer to being able to do it consistently.

Jul 14

Self-Evaluated, Self-Directed and Heutagogical Learning – NIMC (Not In My Classroom!)

The prompt asks us to describe our initial thoughts on designing an entire course or a single assignment, and my very first reaction is included in the subject line. Having said that, I think I need to clarify – I’m thinking mostly about the undergraduate prerequisite science courses that I’ll be responsible for in the upcoming academic year. These courses (Human Anatomy and Physiology I and II) are foundational for almost everything that comes afterward in a nursing or allied health professions curriculum. These courses are often listed as 100 / 1000 – level courses (introductory) with no prerequisites of their own, however, they are taught at a 300 / 3000 – level (sophomore or junior). Content and learning objectives in these courses are broad AND deep. My Oxford College and Emory College students are projected to be freshmen or sophomores. Given the cognitive development of these students, coupled with the breadth and depth of content, I don’t believe a completely learner-centered course would not be the best approach. Alison Head and John Wihby stated in their recent Chronicle article, “…It turns out that students are poorly trained in college to effectively navigate the Internet’s indiscriminate glut of information.” (http://chronicle.com/article/At-Sea-in-a-Deluge-of Data/147477/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en). I’m wondering if students who require more structure in assignments would find a completely learner-centered environment to be, “an indiscrimate glut of information,” and have difficulty in making progress in any of the objectives. Further, the time, effort and creativity that are required to develop novel, authentic and alternative assessments that are part of a completely learner-centered approach make this seem completely daunting. Silverthorn, Thorn and Svinicki (2006) found that even when instructors were highly motivated to include alternative assessments and approaches in life science classes, only 22% of those instructors were able to overcome the significant barriers they encountered to actually introduce and utilize active learning modules in their courses.

Reviewing the Blaschke article from the M4 readings, there is an image that really resonated with me (below) where I see these particular students taking the Human Anatomy and Physiology course sequence falling somewhere between Level 1 and Level 2.

Certainly, as students progress through the undergraduate BSN program we can describe them as gaining maturity and autonomy, and requiring different structure from the instructor. As an analogy here – in some ways anatomy and physiology is like learning multiplication tables: there are some things that just need to be learned as facts because they are foundational to other concepts. Students need to be able to see that there is stratified squamous epithelium in the esophagus but simple columnar epithelium in the stomach; that epithelium is different from other tissue types and that each type of epithelium has characteristics that contribute to the overall structure and function of the organ / organ system. Students in Mary Jane’s classes may need to understand how acid reflux from the stomach can damage the epithelium in the esophagus, symptoms that are manifested in patients and appropriate treatments for patients with GERD (particularly pregnant patients), while Phyllis’ students may need to understand how to implement a unit-wide or hospital-wide treatment algorithm for GERD based on the insurance available, evidence-based outcomes and cost analysis between proton-pump inhibitors and H2 blockers; both need to have an understanding that the lining tissue in the esophagus is differently protected than that in the stomach because the function of each organ is different.
Understanding the characteristics of the learner is a part of the instructional design, as we
http://edutechwiki.unige.ch/en/File:Kemp.jpg

discussed earlier. (See Kemp’s model below.) Matching the structure of your course or assignment to the learner optimizes the learning experience (and promoting students’ continued learning and development of self-efficacy). Student characteristics are not superior or inferior, but they should help drive the development of everything else in the course.
However, having my students come into these particular courses requiring more structure and input seems to imply that assignments could be included that develop the skills and attitudes needed for self-directed learning. Interestingly, I’m finding there is a real wealth of already-developed, online support material for Anatomy and Physiology courses in particular, typically packaged with the textbook (animations, e-books with linked content, clinical images, self-testing programs, etc.) Two strategies that I would like to include are formative testing and building a bibliography.
Including formative tests, or self tests, that students must complete throughout the course, allow students to assess their mastery of the content at various points in-between more formal, summative tests. These will be online, timed, automatically graded short tests that students can take multiple times until they reach a minimum level of mastery (for example, selecting the correct answer 80% of the time). I used this particular strategy during the spring 2014 in Human Anatomy and Physiology II, replacing paper-and-pencil lab quizzes. Each quiz was low-stakes (worth only 10 points out of a total of 300 points allocated to the lab component) and the 5 best quizzes (out of 9 or 10) were included in the overall course grade. Building the online quizzes in a variety of formats took significant time and required several iterations before it worked smoothly. My intent was to have students prepare more completely for the in-class practical lab exam. To my surprise, students commented favorably on the inclusion of this strategy.
The second assessment strategy I’d like to include is having students build a course bibliography. In this approach, I would post a prompt related to a particular clinical issue, and have students post their research related to this topic, with a short summary of the piece they’ve posted. For example, in the module where we are studying tissues, I might have students post some research on cystic fibrosis, a disease where the clinical symptoms result from dysfunction at the tissue level. This strategy appeals to me as a way to include student research into my course, and to have students work collaboratively in building the works they can all read. I would include this as a low-stakes assessment, like the quizzes described above.
So, while my initial response to developing my Human Anatomy and Physiology courses as completely learning-centered was, “No way can I do this,” I can see how I can develop components of the courses that are learning-centered alternatives to the largely multiple-choice and short-answer tests that right now are the mainstays of students assessment. Using the technology with which I’m already familiar (Blackboard) and products that have been developed for instructor use by the publisher give me some places to start.

Jul 06

Motivation for teaching online (or how to stop worrying and learn to love the bomb)

Two things motivate me to want to teach in the online classroom. One is that so much instruction is moving online and I need to be part of that to stay relevant. While I am not sure I will ever have a credit course to teach online, I still want to know HOW to teach that way, and what the best practices are. For the courses I have taken online, I found it difficult to feel a part of the class, or connected to the instructor. I am feeling less that way with EFOT probably because Leah is engaged so much and we have options for communicating beyond discussion boards, which are very hard to keep up with if that’s the only peer-to-peer communication for the class. VT, for all its limitations, does make me feel more connected to my classmates because I can hear their voices.

 

It is also possible that if I could do even a one-shot library session online for a class — or even have online office hours — the professor would be more motivated to have me participate more actively in the class.

 

The other motivation is that I HAVE taught online — twice. I taught 45-50 minute workshops on Zotero online using the Bridgit option that Emory has (or had). Basically it’s a desktop sharing application. So they could see what I was doing on my laptop. However, I couldn’t see them because I was teaching to a classroom full of students in Mississippi and they didn’t have a camera for me to see them. It was very strange — I felt like I was not connecting with them at all, even though I kept asking the prof and the students if what I was saying and doing was making sense, and I kept asking them for questions. Not having their faces in front of me to see their reactions was challenging. Now I want to be able to teach a workshop like Zotero or Endnote online and feel comfortable doing that. Also I think it would be quite interesting to teach a technology tool online and useful for Emory folks who can’t make it to the library. When I teach those workshops in person, I sometimes have to run from computer to computer to troubleshoot. How does one do that online, without losing all the other participants? I think the preparation for teaching these workshops online would have to include strategies for dealing with common problems that come up, both with the tools and with the computers people are using (PCs, Macs, different operating systems, issues with downloading the Endnote software from emory, etc.)

Jul 06

My motivation is accessibility, but my fears are many

I am motivated to teach “in the online classroom,”  as Leah describes it, by several factors, some external and some internal.  Several have mentioned in their posts their desire to keep up-to-date, to be able to use some of these resources/ module formats in their face-to-face courses, and to be able to reach a wider audience.  Some have mentioned academic programs that are moving online, and they must move with their courses.  These are all things that that are motivating me as well.  Externally, there is a push to move more courses to the online classroom, particularly those pesky prerequisite courses that interested students may have difficulty finding and completing successfully (like mine).  Offering these courses online means that we may have more control over the quality of instruction, which in turn could lead to better prepared, more successful students matriculating into the SON.  This approach may also allow us to provide supplemental instruction to students who need it AFTER they’ve begun professional nursing coursework.  From the internal viewpoint, the online classroom offers a huge array of novel teaching paradigms and resources that may not translate well to the traditional lecture-based class – for example, simulations, clinical images, teaching activities that seem more like video games.  The online classroom may make it easier for students to establish themselves as self-motivated learners, which is something we want our students to be long after they leave our class.  Students like the idea of having control over their learning environments, and the online classroom gives them flexibility in accessing and managing their interactions with the content.  I think this is my biggest motivator:  accessibility of the content!  By that, I mean not only novel ways for students to access what you want them to learn (e-book vs. traditional bound texts, for example), but also novel resources that persuade them to engage more completely.  At this point, I think it may be too early to say definitively how I’m expecting to have impact in the online classroom.

What makes me anxious about the online classroom?  Gosh, I hardly know where to start.  Most of my cohort have mentioned the things that make me anxious (and I do mean stomach-churningly, cold-sweating anxious….) like management of content, time management, the time required to develop and establish an online (or hybrid) course, the lack of technical savviness (is that a word?), the difficulty in developing meaningful relationships with students, and the giving up control of the course to the students.  That sounds a bit like letting the lunatics run the asylum, and nobody wins there.  Another big concern I have is assessing the learning that occurs in the online classroom.  Novel resources and novel delivery mean that novel assessments will be required, and I worry about the savviness that will be required to make those happen smoothly.  Management of the wide variety of online resources is my biggest worry.  Even in my role as a student in this course, I’m finding it difficult to know where to look to find what I need, what’s due, what should be included, etc.  The thought of managing this as the instructor really gives me chills, particularly when I think of how much more savvy my students are.  Having said that, I think the key to managing the course content as well as the anxieties is to provide choice with limits.  Just like the traditional classroom, assignments should have rubrics or some clearly defined boundaries within which students should be able to respond.  Establishing clearly what you want to do ahead of time seems to be most important.  I also really like the idea of having a set schedule where you take care of class material (and this applies to students and instructors).  Just like your F2F course has a set meeting time / lab time, the online classroom can also have some restrictions on it.  However, establishing these boundaries can also take a good bit of time – I’m remembering every time I have taught a new course (or the same course in a new place) and the few iterations that are required before finding that place where you can say with some authority what content students need to master and the strategies that are effective.