LAYERING LEARNING – USING WCB TO TEACH SKILLS IN TEACHER AND COUNSELOR EDUCATION
I teach in two graduate programs – one in Teacher Education and the other in School Counselor Education. The curricula in both of these programs emphasize critical thinking and the development of certain concepts and skills such as:
a)accurately observing children’s behavior
b)engaging in collegial discussions around current topics in the field, or
c)participating as part of a diagnostic child study team (a group of professionals who decide what information is known and what is needed with the goal of providing a better educational experience for the student in question).
Now one of the problems we have in teacher and counselor education at the graduate level is that many students believe that they already possess the skills needed to be successful in these school based professions. Indeed many of the skills and concepts discussed in our courses have been practiced by many of our students before; after all how many people interested in working with children would say that they don’t know how to observe children accurately or have never had practice engaging in collegial discussions? And yet our experience tells us that many students in these professional programs do engage in behaviors that they intuitively believe are proper but may actually be inappropriate in practice.
How do we help students build the skills and concepts that they need to succeed in the profession? I have found that developing them requires students to
a)form initial theories based on their experiences,
b)engage in some activities that may challenge the assumptions on which those theories are based,
c)revise those theories,
d)check the revisions,
e)and then finally, articulate and demonstrate the newly developed skill and/or concept.
I call this “layering learning” – the idea of building up the development of a skill or a concept over a period of time.
This “layering” is really an idea based in the traditional learning theories of Jerome Bruner, Robert Gagne, and Lev Vygotsky, all of whom, in his own way, saw that learning doesn’t happen in one fell swoop, but needs to be developed over time and only after multiple rich experiences which allow students to discover critical connections on their own.
I firmly believe that you cannot provide these rich experiences in a traditional lecture, reading, discussion based course. Even in a course which provides excellent field experiences, as many courses in our professional preparation programs do, students do not get the opportunities to specifically confront their current thinking, have an experience that challenges it, and then re-visit that thinking before developing the new skill or concept that is shaped by that thinking. I believe that WCB has provided an excellent solution to this teaching and learning problem.
There are two activities I have developed for my students in a graduate course in Assessment in the Schools that I want to highlight. This course is a Web supported course – students have significant assignments to do on the web, but we meet face to face on a weekly basis. The first activity is called Controversial Issues. In this activity, students first read the Controversial Issues Lesson posted in the Lessons section of the Web page. As part of that lesson, they read a one sentence description of four different controversial issues in the profession today. They then post a pre-reading response to the Controversial Issues Discussion Forum based on their experiences, what they’ve read and/or heard about the subject. Students then read the Controversial Issues article which is linked to the Links section. This article is selected to provide some deeper background or alternative perspectives about the issue. Students then post a post-reading response to the Controversial Issues Forum. Students then select one Controversial Issue, read all of the pre and post reading responses on that topic, and write a Final Response detailing commonalities in thinking and ways in which their understanding has changed or been clarified.
The second activity is called Diagnostic Detection. In this activity, students are given a short case study about a student with learning and behavioral problems and asked to develop a diagnosis. The problem is that there is not nearly enough information to do so! I’ve done this in two different ways – in a three hour or more class session type class, this is conducted over the course of one class period. I bring students to our discipline lab and they work in small groups to develop requests for more information and then post those requests to the Diagnostic Detection Forum which I then answer. Initially, students are asked to not read each others’ posting. Students continue to post until they feel satisfied that they have an Initial Diagnosis, which they post. They are then encouraged to read each other’s postings while I post the complete case study with all information available. Students are then asked to read through all of the postings and then to post a Final Summary detailing what they learned from the exercise. Invariably, students recognize that their diagnoses are incomplete because they didn’t ask for critical information, relied on their own assumptions, and came to incorrect conclusions. This exercise helps students develop the difficult to learn concept of withholding judgment until all possible information is gathered.
The second way in which I’ve conducted this exercise in a less than three hour class is through using email to post the queries and provide responses, which I then save in a text file. Initial Diagnoses are then posted on the Diagnostic Detection Forum, and I cut and paste the text files into the Forum. Students then post a Final Summary which we then all read before class; we then discuss it in class.
SHOW PAGE AND DO SIMULATION
Before WCB, I used to try to do activities like these. I would engage students in discussions about controversial issues, then give them articles to read, then have another class discussion. But there would always be students who would not participate in the class discussion, or whose thinking would appear to be rather shallow (perhaps because the students hadn’t really allowed him or herself to really think deeply about the issue). The Controversial Issues exercise pushes each student to engage in the exercise in deeper ways than just listening to a lecture-discussion. I used to try to do a Diagnostic Detection exercise as well. I would separate students into 4 groups and send each group to the four corners of the room. I would give the groups the case study and then ask each student group to whisper a question to me which I would then answer by giving them a slip of paper on which I had the information in question. I would go around to each group, whispering, handing out slips of paper. It was an unwieldy process that didn’t allow groups to learn from each other’s process.
In conclusion, I believe that I have found a solution to a vexing teaching and learning problem – how to help students engage in the rich experiences that allow them to build up the skills and concepts needed to be successful in their professions. I believe that WCB has enabled me to help my students layer their learning from initial thinking through to deep conceptual formation.