Chapter 7 Self Directed Learning

I would like to begin with a pattern all teachers encounter. The pattern of those who study endlessly and fail paper pencil assessments and those who put no time into studying and identify every skill flawlessly. Why does this happen and how do we provide assistance for those who are trapped in this catch 22 cycle?

According to the book my favorite subject is the key to this problem... Metacognition! The ability to monitor, control, and reflect play a large part in the success of learning. The research says that we should make sure students assess the task at hand, self evaluation of skills, and planing learning. Although the chapter discusses applying self corrective strategies and making adjustments I think just the repetition of the first three will provide valuable assistance. The last two are much higher level and cannot be completed successfully without application and understanding of the first three strategies I mentioned.

The first step is to assess the task at hand. Most of the time I have found students expect for this step to be digested for them. They come into class and want the specific content and approaches to be defined.

The following questions are each asked during my courses. See if you can find any that sound familiar?
 "How long do you want my response to be?"
" What do you mean by new knowledge?"
" Should I just tell you what it said in the book or do you want something else?"
" So should I use headings when I write?"
" Can I just bullet the information?"
Please do not misunderstand my comments here. I am not saying that criteria for assignments should not be presented to the students. On the contrary. I not only tell the students what I want within the content, but also how many points each area is worth. I also model each assignment or provide a model for the students to access. I ask for questions. Then present that information in three ways: an outline, a paragraph, and a table. My hope is that one of these will be the easiest for the students to understand. What the students are not doing is assessing what is being provided.They are not asking themselves: What considerations as the learner do I need to employ to complete this task and show my level of learning?

The next step I believe my students do to a fault. Evaluate their own knowledge and skills.
This is where I go back to the example at the beginning of this blog. Some of my students are sure they know nothing and try to learn every tiny detail presented in class, the book, and the activities. Others assume they know everything and that the information presented is simply a waste of their time. I'll give you an example. Last week I had a student who was self professed gifted come into my office and ask this question, "What do you want in my reflections because I do not seem to be doing them correctly? I stated that the criteria was posted in class and on the syllabus and described in class. However, I restated that the intent of the reflections were two fold; one to show me what they had learned and two to attribute this new knowledge to their future career. The student then told me that is what he/she had done on the prior assignment, there just wasn't much information that was not already known. Most of the time I would attest that patterns are good and very important to the cycle of learning. However, not this pattern. Believing there is nothing new to learn is extremely counter productive.

Now I have been teaching a long time and participate in a lot of professional development as well as personal development. I consider myself a life long learner and the one thing I can say is that I never encounter a new situation where I don't add to my learning. I wish I could say I was shocked with this student's response but it happens almost every semester.

My  other story is about the student who is sure they know nothing. For four year now I have had a student who questions which information is most important. He/she highlights all of the information in her book and takes copious notes during class. This student is so worried about trying to absorb everything that he/she becomes overwhelmed and stagnant in learning. We have discussed repeatedly that if he/she would look for concepts to help categorize the information learned, the task at hand would be much easier. With out students belief in his or her ability to learn, along with confidence in prior knowledge and making connections this student continued to study endlessly and still fail the assessments due to an inability to learn the deeper meaning. Again, this pattern causes problems with learning and inhibits successful self-directed learning.

Let us move on to the third part of this self-directed learning cycle- Planning. I do not know how many times I stand in front of the class and say these words, "See this assignment? The one I just modeled for you? This will take a lot of time. I am sharing this modeling with you early so that you plan to complete one part of the assignment a month. That way whey it is due, you will have it completed and feel good about the information you have shared. YOU CAN NOT COMPLETE THIS THE NIGHT BEFORE. IT IS IMPOSSIBLE. THERE ARE NOT ENOUGH HOURS TO DO IT. However no matter how excited I get there are always students who believe they can start this assignment the night before. We need to take more time to help students  set goals, identify their own work pace, and reward students who use planning in our classes. Without the applications of these three strategies and refinement of student perceptions of teacher guided versus student guided learning....we may never move our students into the self-directed learners we would hope they become.

Patterns are wonderful things when they work in your favor and horrible when we repeat those practices that get in our way of learning!

Thinking about prior knowledge in strategic communication

I really like the way that How Learning Works is organized. The authors start each chapter with a couple of stories on different scenarios but related teaching situations. The stories are analyzed to identify core problems and then the authors cover what the research tells about these challenges. They end the chapter with strategies to mitigate these challenges. So I thought I would take a look at how these strategies work in my online graduate leadership course.

Methods to Gauge the Extent and Nature of Students' Prior Knowledge

MSOD students are adult learners, most of which are actively in the workforce. They come with a wide variety of experiences in leadership - good and bad. As adults they have already formed their attitudes and have preconceived ideas about leadership. The course does not require any prerequisite knowledge.

So I am not sure that formal diagnostic methods are suitable here. But the authors suggest a couple of strategies to expose students' prior knowledge that I think would work. The first is using a brainstorming activity. According to the authors, it can help uncover beliefs, associations, and assumptions. I sort of tried this during the current term. One of the most popular debates in leadership studies is comparing leadership to management so I used this in a discussion forum. It quickly identified students that lean toward behavioral and trait theories with a smaller group leaning toward contingency theories. Knowing this up front really helped me frame subsequent lessons in the course.Another method recommended by the authors is using a concept map which I would love to try but will need to think through how to do this well in an online class.

Methods to Activate Accurate Prior Knowledge

Here I tried a sequence of assignments to help students link prior knowledge to new knowledge. This included:

• Private journal assignments to reflect on how an approach to leadership is currently used, or not, in their existing organization.
• Online Team Learning Activities where a group of students share their experiences and new knowledge on a particular problem.
• Individual case study where they apply the new knowledge. 

I think the strategy is sound but it requires a number of assignments from students during a given period of instruction (in this case a two week period), some of which would normally be done in the classroom that must now be done online. I am anxious to see the course evaluations on how they felt about this.

Methods to Help Students Recognize Inappropriate Prior Knowledge

Normally I use discussion forums late in the sequence of instructional events, but this time I decided to use discussion forums as the first assignment in the instructional sequence to do two things. The first was to see if there were any conceptual issues as we transitioned from one part of the course to the next. The second was to see if there was any inappropriate prior knowledge that I needed to focus on in later assignments within the sequence. I found this very helpful.

Methods to Correct Inaccurate Knowledge

Here I used the strategy of showing where analogies break down. I did this by two methods. The first was providing explicit individual feedback to students that included my solution for the case study. For the second method I created a course instructor leadership blog where I could highlight the limitations of analogies and address other common misconceptions concerning the leadership approach we just studied. I published a blog after each major milestone in the course.

In summary I am finding the book to be a valuable guide in designing learning activities within my course. So far it seems that I am able to accommodate strategies in an online graduate course. Pretty neat...more to come.