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Gaining Clarity Through Developing Learning Goals

9/11/2015

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“If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”
-   Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland

Planning a course or even a class session is a bit like planning a road trip. While there may be some enjoyable serendipity in wandering aimlessly in the car and just driving, you’re likely to miss some amazing sites and experiences with a lack of direction. On the other hand, if you over-plan and schedule a trip with a rigid goal at the end, you may end up like a crazed Clark W. Griswold at the end of National Lampoon’s Vacation. Planning for teaching is a bit the same way. You have to know where you’re going, but not plan so rigidly that you don’t have the spontaneity to capitalize on those “teachable moments.”

How then, should we approach setting learning goals or objectives in our teaching? First, it’s helpful to highlight some of the benefits of setting goals for instruction. The Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching (HILT) offers a very helpful resource on setting goals for learning in higher education and identifies the following benefits (with research support):
  • increase motivation
  • increase achievement
  • guide pedagogy and instructional practice
  • provide students with clear expectations
  • increase efficiency of students’ learning efforts

In How Learning Works, Ambrose et al. (2010) offer additional support for the importance of setting goals for learning:
  • When goals are established, students can better direct and monitor their progress.
  • They provide a framework for selecting and organizing course content.
  • They can guide the selection/development of assessment and evaluation methods.                                                                   
It’s one thing, however, to recognize the need for learning goals in a course. It’s quite another to create clear, focused, and measurable goals to guide student learning.

Types of learning goals
A key starting place is to consider the different major types of learning outcomes or goals. Nilson (2010) identifies five general types of learning outcomes:
  • psychomotor – focus on physical performance
  • affective – demonstration of appropriate emotion and affect
  • social – appropriate, productive interaction and behavior
  • ethical – decision making that takes into account moral implications of actions
  • cognitive – focus on facts, terms, concepts, ideas, patterns, etc.

 This framework is helpful because, if you’re like me, you might be tempted to zero in on only the cognitive learning goals for your course and overlook the other possibilities. For example, in a teacher education program like the one in which I teach, if we only focused on cognitive goals like educational theory, human growth and development, and social and historical foundations of education, we would be missing a whole range of absolutely essential learning goals that guide our programs.

Fink (2013) takes a different approach to considering different goals or aims for learning. While he doesn’t discuss goals in the same way as Nilson, he does offer the following taxonomy of significant learning experiences:
  • foundational knowledge
  • application
  • integration
  • human dimension
  • caring
  • learning how to learn

While educators operationalize the types of learning goals in different ways, each approach challenges us to consider a variety of types of learning goals. Identifying a range of options to guide our courses that are relevant to and appropriate for our course content encourages a more well-rounded approach to the course.

Key features of effective learning goals
Not all learning goals are created equal, however. Take, for example, the following two learning goals:
  • By the end of the course, students should understand Irish immigration to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century.
  • By the end of the course, students should be able to define and provide examples of push and pull factors that led to Irish immigration in the mid-nineteenth century.
Which of the two learning goals would be more helpful for you to determine course readings and experiences for students for this portion of the class? Which would provide students with more guidance for your expectations and offer insight on key concepts they should zero in on during the semester?

Ambrose et al. suggest the following attributes of effective learning goals. Goals should:
  • be student-centered, framed around what students should be able to do at the end of a learning experience
  • break down complex tasks into their component parts
  • be framed with action verbs to focus on concrete actions and behaviors (Fresno State offers this helpful list of sample action verbs organized according to Bloom’s Taxonomy)
  • be easily measurable, so that we can gauge students’ progress in mastering them

How to get started in gaining clarity through learning goals
When considering learning goals, you can begin from the big picture perspective of a course or the focused perspective of a single class session. I recommend focusing on the big picture of a whole course at first, and then work towards the more specific foci. Wiggins and McTighe offer a very helpful approach to designing learning goals in a way that will provide great clarity in your teaching called “backward design.” In this approach, you work along these lines:
  1. Bearing in mind the ideas in my earlier post on avoiding the curse of knowledge, identify the key ideas, concepts, and frameworks in your course.
  2. For each of these big ideas, consider what you would like students to be able to do relative to each as specifically as possible. State the goals in a way that is clear, concrete, and action-oriented. 
  3. Ask yourself how you would know if they mastered the goals you’ve outlined above. If you can’t envision a way that you could clearly measure or assess their progress in mastering the goal, try to make the goals more action-oriented and specific.

Once you’ve worked your way through the steps above, you should have a pretty clear focus and direction for your course. You can then begin to unpack the goals further and identify goals for each of your class sessions with your students. Then, you are ready to move forward to the next step of the planning process – considering your learners’ learning needs and preferences. This will be the focus of the next post in this series.


What challenges do you encounter in setting your learning goals?
Please post your comments below.


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Avoiding the Curse of Knowledge in Our Course Planning

9/8/2015

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We just recently passed the six-month anniversary for the blog. To plan for the next six months, I posted a short survey about the kind of content you’d like on the site as well as the challenges you encounter in your teaching. Thanks to those of you who have filled out the survey – you’ve provided some great ideas for future directions. If you’d still like to fill out the survey, I’d love to get your feedback. You could take the survey here.

One of the common themes in the comments was related to the teaching strategies that I’ve been posting on the blog. In different ways, respondents said that while the strategies were helpful, they would like more guidance about how to select and combine them for courses and specific class sessions. To help with that challenge, this is the first in a series of posts on an open-ended strategy to help you think through, select, and combine the strategies into powerful learning experiences for your students.            

In the series, I’ll cover the typical steps in planning for teaching: crafting learning goals, selecting teaching strategies, and selecting assessments. Additionally, I’ll also explore getting to know your students and their needs and helping them to build skills they can leverage across courses and in their life going forward. To start off, I’ll explore the bigger picture of what we’re trying to accomplish in our teaching. What are the big ideas, the keys that you want your students to take with them beyond your course?            

So, what’s the big idea?
Previously on the blog, I’ve written about the importance of starting with your why. What I meant by this was to consider the kind of experience you want to create based on what you think is most important about your course. Only you can determine what the most important ideas of the course are, the essential concepts students need to understand, the key experiences students should have to approach those big ideas, and the kind of overall experience you hope that they’ll have.

All of these considerations are highly contextual and dependent on your particular approach to the content, the course’s place in the program, and the relative experience of the students with the content.  In the course I’m teaching in our teacher preparation program, I’ve designed the experiences in a way that help them to leverage content the students are learning in their other courses with their field experiences in public schools as a means to address the ongoing challenge between the “two worlds” of the university and public school classrooms that is such a persistent challenge for teacher education programs. In my doctoral level course on Media Literacies, I’ve structured the course more in an inquiry format, as students bring considerable knowledge and experience to the course and have varied professional learning goals.

Mitigating the Curse of Knowledge
All college and university faculty are afflicted with the same challenge when it comes to planning for teaching – the curse of knowledge. Ludvig Sunstrom explains the curse of knowledge this way:
“You are suffering from the curse of knowledge when you know things that the other person does not and you have forgotten what it’s like to not have this knowledge. This makes it harder for you to identify with the other person’s situation and explain things in a manner that is easily understandable to someone who is a novice. When you suffer from the curse of knowledge you assume that other people know the things that you do, and this cognitive bias causes you to believe that people understand you a lot better than they really do.”

It can be very difficult to consider the content for a course, or even a single class session with a “beginner’s mind.” Even for advanced students in your discipline, the mental schema that you use to organize and make sense of the relationships between concepts in your discipline is far more sophisticated than their own. Consequently, it can be difficult for us to consider the content from the perspective of one without these sophisticated ways of understanding your discipline. How then to counteract this “affliction?”
  1. Focus
    For a given class session there can be a vast number of interesting ideas to explore, examples to share, and points to consider. For one class session, I listed an entire page’s worth of things I could include in a fifty-minute class. Could I have “covered” all these? Possibly. Would my students have even begun to really grasp them? Doubtful. A more effective approach is to zero in on the 1-3 most essential concepts or ideas to cover in a class session. Then cut yourself off.  Seriously – don’t be tempted to sneak in an additional idea (or six).
  2. Break it down
    For a complex concept, relationship, or process, it’s critical to break it down into digestible “chunks” to help students better understand. With the curse of knowledge, we often intuitively skip over steps or make indirect connections. This will be difficult, if not impossible for your students to follow. One strategy I use to make sure I’m not glossing over any important steps or connections is to first explain it to a colleague in a different field or an unwitting parent at my kids’ soccer or tennis practice. These folks are more likely to experience the concept from a similar perspective to my students and help me to identify any big gaps in my thinking. 
  3. Edit
    Even when we try to put into practice the first two ideas above, our enthusiasm for the content will often encourage us to slip in additional interesting, but not critical examples, stories, etc. into our plans. While they may be fascinating, they can often be a little too complex for our students to grasp and can consequently actually put up a barrier to understanding. Edit them out. Be ruthless. It’s hard, but with practice, it becomes easier. You can always save those stories and examples for the especially eager students who come to office hours. 

There are many things to consider when designing learning experiences for your students. We’ll get into designing effective learning goals, selecting and sequencing learning activities, developing assessments, and all the rest. Without avoiding the curse of knowledge, though, the best laid plans…

How do you try to mitigate the curse of knowledge in your planning?
Please post your comments below.   


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What the Amish Can Teach Faculty About Technology Use

9/4/2015

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A common misconception about the Amish is that they shun all technology. I certainly had this impression growing up in Indiana and watching the slow trot of horse-and-buggies along the side of the road. As a kid, I couldn’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to zip around at breakneck speeds behind the wheel of a sports car.

As an adult who now enjoys the more calm method of train travel to the more efficient 747, I better understand and appreciate their reluctance to adopt technologies as a default option. As a professor of educational technology, it may surprise you to know that I probably have more in common with the Amish in relation to technology adoption than I do with many of my peers in academia.

How the Amish approach new technologies
The Amish have always understood that technology is not neutral or value-free. The use of different technologies changes our relationship with our work, our leisure time, and each other. While Amish children learn to be intentional and skeptical about new innovations, I wasn’t introduced to this concept until my doctoral program in instructional technology at the University of Virginia.

The Amish are not opposed to all forms of technology. Many Amish communities share “phone shanties” – outdoor buildings with a communal phone that serves multiple families. Many own refrigerators and hire drivers when necessary to travel longer distances more quickly.  They don’t view technologies as inherently evil. They also recognize that technologies are not wholly good either. So how do the Amish determine when to embrace technology and when to avoid it?

An Amish community is organized according to carefully established communal values – reflected in the German word “Gelassenheit” which can be translated as “yielding to a higher authority.” One of the core values is that “the welfare of the community ranks above individual rights and choices.” It is through this communal lens that any new technology or innovation is viewed. A central question when considering adopting a new technology is the likely impact the technology will have on the community. Adam Graber explains it this way – “The Gelassenheit posture toward technology could probably best be summed up with this question: ‘Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?’… They think seriously about the long-term effects of technology, and about what technology does to them.”

We could use more of this kind of thinking in education – both in K-12 and higher education. Currently, there is an implicit assumption that more technology equals better/more engaged/deeper/more productive learning for students. In some cases, these assumptions may prove accurate. They may also have less desirable and/or unintended consequences as well. I think we can all benefit from a more deliberate, intentional consideration of technology in our teaching practice – particularly in regards to how its integration benefits or harms the learning communities of our classrooms.

Points to consider and examples of more mindful technology use
On her blog, Struggle to Victory, Kari Scare offers five tips for adopting an Amish approach to technology:
  1. Be deliberate about the technology you choose to use and when you use it.
  2. Don’t assume new technology is always better.
  3. Consider if any given technology helps or hinders your life as a whole.
  4. Ask if a technology will bolster or tear down your relationships.
  5. Make simplicity a priority.

I actively try to consider these questions when I consider how and why I might integrate technology into a course or single class session. For example, in my first class session for Designs for Technology-Enhanced Learning course this semester, I asked students to put away their laptops and capture notes and ideas on paper for a portion of the class. Because they would be shifting back and forth between taking individual notes and working to synthesize ideas in small groups, I didn’t want the laptops to serve as literal and figurative barriers between the students – I wanted them to actively engage with each other.

For the rest of the semester, I have scheduled a number of expert guest speakers on different topics. During these presentations, I will ask students to use a customized Twitter hashtag as a kind of back channel conversation during the talk to share questions and comments. I’ll be monitoring the Tweets to pull out the most common questions and interesting points to begin the Q&A portion of the talks. In this way, the boldest students won’t drive the conversation. Rather, the most important and compelling points will shape the interactions.

Finally, all the courses I teach are hybrid, meaning that some sessions are face-to-face in the classroom together while others take place asynchronously offline.  While in some ways, these online sessions decrease our opportunity to learn from each other in community. They do, however, afford the students the opportunity to think more deeply, explore more broadly, and elicit feedback and perspectives from others outside the class in comparison with a face-to-face class. I very strategically and deliberately select those experiences that will benefit from these affordances when choosing what to put online.

A call to action
An Amish approach to technology integration shouldn’t encourage you to avoid technology use absolutely. It should encourage you to be more deliberate, intentional and mindful of the choices you make. Think about the impact that the use of technology will have on you, your individual students, and the larger learning community. A helpful metric is to ask yourself whether the use of a particular technology will bring you, the students, and the learning closer together or create additional distance. It's easy to be tempted to use the latest, trendiest technology in our teaching...can we take a step back and follow the lead of the Amish in inviting the use of technology into our classrooms? 


How do you determine when and how to integrate technology in your courses?
Please post your comments below.   

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    I'm Mark Hofer, a Professor of Education and Co-Director for the Center for Innovation in Learning Design at the College of William & Mary. I share research and practice on teaching in higher education.
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