Principles of Practice

Introduction

The main purpose of this paper is to continue my ongoing journey of reflection about principles of practice as an instructional designer. I am seeking to apply these principles when designing courses in adult literacy instruction.

As a designer and instructor, I strive to promote a learning climate of safety, caring and trust, and support learners to become less vulnerable and more competent (Pratt, 2002). Respect for learners’ previous experiences and capacities to construct their own understandings is crucial for meaningful learning to take place.

The results from the TPI (Teaching Perspectives Inventory) at the start of the MDDE 603 course identified Nurturing as my most dominant perspective, and Transmission as the most recessive. The other perspectives were slightly less dominant than Nurturing. Undoubtedly, the current learning context has played an important role in sensitizing me to more readily adopt the Nurturing perspective. Learning is a very emotional experience, because “[it] involves great threats to students’ self-esteem, especially when they are exploring new and difficult knowledge and skill domains” (Brookfield, 1990, pg. 204).


I am a strong proponent of the Developmental perspective, or constructivism, which aims “…to develop increasingly complex and sophisticated ways of reasoning and problem solving within a content area or field of practice” (Pratt, 2002, pg. 4). Thus, it is crucial to develop learners’ meta-cognitive skills and critical thinking skills. In addition, learners should encounter information in multiple formats and from various perspectives. Learning involves the use of conversation, of dialogue, to negotiate meanings that results in shared knowledge and understandings. It is from these perspectives and issues from which I will draw upon in the formulation of my key principles of teaching practice.

Principles of Practice

Include activities that enhance learners’ self-efficacy beliefs

Instructors need to strive to provide strategies for learners to bolster their self-efficacy beliefs while engaged in learning. This involves “… activities that enhance learners’ confidence and ability to express viewpoints as well as help learners to develop coherent organization and precise expression of ideas…” (Kanuka & Anderson, pg. 151).

Instruction can be designed to instill confidence in learners by providing clear guidelines and structured assignments broken down in steps so that learners can succeed (Driscoll, 2005). In my experience, when several learners expressed low confidence in their essay-writing ability, I re-structured the exercises so that each successive task involved more detail, but that the end product was the essay. By encouraging the learners through each step, giving feedback at each step, and providing models, checklists of items to watch for, and tip sheets, learners not only gained confidence, but were eventually able to complete the entire assignment.

Bandura (1982, 1987) referred to four sources by which students can gain information that will positively impact their beliefs of self-efficacy. These sources consist of learners’ own previous successes, anecdotes of someone else being successful at the same task, encouragement from others, and gut feelings and intuitions (Driscoll, 2005). Instructional strategies that I have found to be successful among literacy learners that can be built into the learning process to foster learners' self-efficacy are as follows:

Journaling
Students assess their gut feelings and intuitions about their learning experiences, describe their frustrations, and recount previous attempts of learning (successful and unsuccessful). In my own experience, I worked with several learners who grappled with essay-writing because of their concern over the nature of the feedback they would receive from me as their instructor. The process of putting ideas down on paper encouraged learners to place these ideas outside of themselves and commit their personal opinions and feelings to written form. The process of this acknowledging and validating the learners’ own ideas is transformative.

Mentoring/Partnering
Students identify a partner to share learning experiences with, discuss feelings and concerns, and work together to ease isolation and mutually promote success. The process of giving and receiving feedback provides the exchange and discussion of another perspective other than the instructor’s. Many literacy learners enjoy this process of mutual help, and prefer to submit their work informally to one another for checking before handing it over to their instructor.

Meaningful learning occurs when greater learner control over the learning experience is incorporated into the learning experience

The freedoms learners need to have in the context of literacy instruction in such a remote location are: the freedom of time and space, the freedom to pace one’s own learning, the freedom of instructional media, the freedom of access, the freedom of content, and the freedom of relationship (Anderson, 2005).

The concept of learner freedom is relevant for literacy learners in remote First Nations communities because of the varied circumstances that prevent or hinder full participation in traditional instruction. Many of my learners require flexibility with start and end times, extensions on assignments, and request exceptions to classroom participation, opting instead to remain home. The reasons are varied, but compelling. For example, many young women with children rely on extended family for childcare. When unavailable, they are not able to arrange a babysitter at short notice. Other adult learners work seasonal jobs, participate in seasonal family-based food-harvesting activities, and attend family gatherings. In addition, unscheduled absences occur due to power outages, or flooding, or snowstorms, and all these combine to limit scheduled classes. When deaths occur within a small close-knit community, schooling is often interrupted. When someone falls seriously ill and requires medical treatment, a family member needs to escort them for an extended period of time to a larger city where medical treatment is available. Because of the elaborate kinship network, travel between communities to maintain kinship ties is common, and frequently younger students move between communities as their life circumstances change.

As a consequence, cohort-based traditional instruction is very difficult to manage under these circumstances. Several learners, if given the option of accessing instruction online using email, blogs, and forums, would be able to bridge some of these periodic gaps in attendance and participation more successfully. Others would prefer to interact exclusively through electronic means, including via webcam, with the instructor. Others choose to interact with the instructor as little as possible, preferring to participate in study groups or form learning partnerships. Others prefer to start and stop according to their own schedules.

Designing instruction for such circumstances requires a rethinking of the presentation and delivery of content into smaller modules, to allow for more flexibility to improve learner retention and completion rates, and reduce attrition. Providing a variety of online learning activities that learners can opt to take to complete courses irregardless of their location could improve completion rates. The potential for encouraging learners to make use of their informal social networks already in place online to extend it to learning (for example, Bebo or FaceBook) could engage more learners more often than is currently the case.

Instruction needs to facilitate development of greater learner self-directedness

If learners are to be encouraged to be more independent, utilizing their informal networks and tying them to formal learning opportunities, learners must be encouraged towards greater self-directedness, such that students are given choices in and control over learning and motivation, with many opportunities for self-appraisal.” (Driscoll, 2005, pg. 331).

Encouraging learners to be self-directed is a critical skill that students need to acquire in order to be successful in post-secondary education. This method encourages students through supports to build research skills that can be used throughout their educational experiences (Driscoll, 2005).

Meta-cognitive skill development requires learners to undertake a process of taking more and more responsibility for their own learning and performance (Jones et al, 1997). This process involves teaching good strategies to learners, modeling good strategy use, and coaching learners. It also involves a dialogue between the instructor and learners guiding when and why certain strategies may be effectively used (Driscoll, 2005).

Inquiry Based Learning is a form of self-directed learning that develops and practices meta-cognitive skills. Using this approach, students take more responsibility for determining what they need to learn. Students identify resources and how best to learn from them, determine strategies for collecting and using resources, determine how to validate their learning, and conduct their own self-assessments. Teaching through “inquiry” involves an instructor helping to engage students in research and coaching them through the process starting from an appropriate level. The Inquiry-based learning process develops skills to conduct research, drawing from library resources, interviews, and web sites. The process also involves developing critical thinking skills by providing learners with models on how to best report their learning in oral or written form. By providing various methods for learners, such as interviews, progress reports, or checklists, educators help students monitor their progress within the course. (Queen’s University website, 2007)

Instructional strategies that can be built into the learning process to foster learners' self-directedness and meta-cognitive skills are as follows:

Learning Contracts
Students engage in an independent project (related to the academic subject), identify their own learning objectives, timelines, resources, strategies, expert assessors, and means of assessment.
The Learning Contract model is well-suited to the highly mobile learners I work with, drawing upon their previous experiences, using their current networks of contacts, and engaging them in more meaningful, relevant learning.


Interviews of role models
Students set up interviews with role models, or prepare to host a visit by a role model to the "classroom". A student doing an independent project that involved identifying resource experts within the community and then interviewing them explained that the whole process was very elaborate: doing background research, preparing questions, doing the interview, sending thank you letters, note-taking, summarizing notes, preparing it as a short report, preparing a brief talk, and finally discussing the experience with me, the instructor, all engaged her far more than being told how to proceed. Because she had choices over the subject matter and the person who she would interview, the student felt that the assignment was quite worthwhile.

Portfolios
Portfolio assessment using educational social software (ESS) is a form of assessment based on situated learning principles. Anderson (2005) describes the importance of elgg in the roles of interaction and social presence. Student learning objects, discussion postings, and other artefacts could be combined to provide comprehensive assessment. The portfolio is useful for literacy students in remote communities who share photos, poems, blog entries, and other projects involving multimedia. In addition, it is an evolving work in progress, as the student has continuous access to it throughout the course or program of study.

Effective interaction involves personal narratives, inter-subjectivity and scaffolding through reciprocal teaching.

Cognitive learning theory asserts that learning involves a process when learners internalize knowledge, whether discovered, transmitted by others, or experienced during interaction with others (Driscoll, 2005). Thus, my aim is to design courses that incorporate several types of interaction.

When designing instruction, I aim to structure learning activities that revolve around the learner’s personal narratives. As an educator, I strive to assist adult learners to reflect on the manner in which values, beliefs, and behaviors previously deemed unchallengeable can be critically analyzed. (Driscoll, 2005). This reflective process leads to tremendous opportunities for self-transformation. Although one student was shy of speaking in public, by reflecting on her feelings in her journal, and sharing her ideas with me as her instructor, she overcame her shyness and gained confidence gradually to record a short talk. The exchange of personal narratives between the learners among themselves, and between the learners and the instructor, involves learners in the act of reciprocal teaching. It facilitates more interaction once learners are confident their voices are heard, and their stories validated.

Social interaction must involve inter-subjectivity, or joint co-construction and decision-making. Participants would share power and authority, but would be unequal only in their differing levels of understanding. Inter-subjectivity might involve interaction between the student and the instructor, or between learning partners, or amongst a group. The discussions generated between learners would provide a mutual support system. The informal social network is expanded by the new connections among learners. Interaction online can involve members of several communities, so that irregardless of where the students are, they can still participate and become involved in the online community.

Scaffolding involves guiding learners to bridge gaps between their current knowledge or skill level and the desired learning goal (Greenfield, 1984). Instruction needs to be designed that provides examples of previous student projects, templates that outline the steps of a project or assignment, rubrics of incremental complexity, that explain what is being looked for by the instructor, and anecdotes of previous learners’ experiences while completing the assignment.

Blended learning combines different formats and media of delivery, and offers options for learners to use various technologies within learning environments.

I aim to develop instruction that integrates the development of students’ Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) literacy skills with the use of technology-enhanced classrooms, so that students can make use of wireless networks, laptops and other mobile learning technologies. The integration of ICT literacy skills into teaching will facilitate learners’ development of higher order thinking skills (Kanuka & Anderson, 1999) and will provide learners with greater choices to move devices around in the classroom, thereby supporting the various learning contexts they might encounter. Furthermore, combining ICTs and a blending of delivery formats improves learning, as “… learners require a variety of different experiences to advance to different kinds and levels of understanding” (Kanuka & Anderson, 1999, pg. 143).

Currently, literacy courses tend to be either instructor-led, self-paced, or entirely online. For the courses that are not online, computers are commonly in separate locations from where the instruction takes place. Students rarely use any Internet tools for learning while supervised by an instructor, and work individually or in small informal groups when using computers while taking self-paced courses. Learners taking online courses for the first time never meet their fellow students or their instructor face-to-face, and are given a short orientation course to prepare them for online learning. This course is delivered on a cohort basis, so everyone needs to start and finish at the same time.

Designing instruction that incorporates Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) into the literacy curriculum is a necessity. In Weaving the Web, Tim Berners-Lee (2000) states that his driving force to creating the Web back in 1989 “…was communication through shared knowledge, and the driving “market” for it was collaboration among people at work and at home” (pg. 162). To provide literacy learners with the skills and knowledge to become independent, lifelong learners, instruction needs to be designed to develop the skills necessary for these learners to create and maintain their own informal social learning networks.

Conclusion
I will be working to design instruction that takes into account the context of the learners, their goals, their experiences, and their hardships. I will also need to consider the process of facilitating self-direction and meta-cognitive skills, bolstering positive self-efficacy beliefs in learners, and promoting skills and attitudes for lifelong learning.

I think that my greatest challenge and opportunity is to provide greater learner autonomy along with the need to support learners as they move along their learning curves to build meaningful social networks and mutual individual supports (Anderson, 2005). My concern is that without a paradigm shift in the design of the literacy courses for adults in post-secondary institutions, educators might be unwittingly setting up many learners for failure in future, as learner autonomy is not being encouraged, and support for students continues to be limited. Because the students lack the ICT skills and experience interacting as learners in various contexts, their chances to successfully navigate through formal instruction provided by post-secondary institutions in future is reduced. Even though mixed-mode instruction is increasingly common, literacy students are not yet being prepared for participation in this type of instruction.

Although the blended learning paradigm I have described is currently unavailable within my teaching environment, my central aim for this clarification of my principles of instruction is to recommend changes to make persuasive arguments that these students should not be restricted to just one delivery format (self-paced or instructor-led or online) and limited to simply using computer labs unsupported by their instructors, or learning in classrooms unsupported by computer technology.

Learning needs to be extended beyond the traditional classroom, and be respectful of learners’ communities and socio-cultural contexts. Instruction needs to be designed to empower learners to become more confident, more autonomous, and more effective. It is essential that educators teach learners how to learn throughout their lives (Bandura, 1997).


References

Anderson, (2005). Distance learning – Social software’s killer ap? ODLAA Breaking Down Boundaries Conference, Australia, 2005. Retrieved July 17, 2007 from www.unisa.edu.au/odlaaconference/PPDF2s/13%20odlaa%20-%20Anderson.pdf

Berners-Lee, T. (2000). Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web by its inventor. San Francisco: Harper.

Anderson, T. (2002). Getting the mix right: An updated and theoretical rationale for interaction. Instructional Technology Forum, Paper #63. Retrieved March 1, 2005, from http://it.coe.uga.edu/itforum/paper 63.htm

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Freeman: New York (212-258). Retrieved July 14, 2007 from http://www.ldrc.ca/projects/atutor/content/7/bandura.htm

Brookfield, S. (1990). The Skillful Teacher. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Publishers.

Driscoll, M. (2005). Psychology of Learning for Instruction (3rd ed.). Boston MA: Pearson Education, Inc.

Kanuka, H. & Anderson, T. (1999). Using constructivism in technology-mediated learning: Constructing order out of the chaos in the literature. Radical Pedagogy, 1(2).

Pratt, D. D. (2002).Good teaching: one size fits all? In An Up-date on Teaching Theory, Jovita Ross-Gordon (Ed.), San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Publishers.

What is Inquiry-Based Learning? Queen’s University, Centre for Teaching and Learning website. Retrieved July 14, 2007 from http://www.queensu.ca/ctl/goodpractice/inquiry/index.html