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.