Robert Bok, pastry tutor and WelTec Staff Award recipient 2015 (Emerging Teacher category), explains how he follows the progress of each of his students. With simple but thorough organisation, and using online and hard copy methods, he monitors each learner’s development.
Gerard Duignan speaks to him on this YouTube video for Spark
While facilitating a workshop with the automotive tutors, we discovered this gem of a sequence that relates to the systems in a car. Suck, squeeze, bang, blow. Think about it.
Not wanting to waste a good metaphor, I decided to extend it.
The purpose of the workshop was to bring the auto tutors up to speed with learning design principles in the shortest time. We also wanted to model some teaching practices and explore the ideas of different learning environments by setting the workshop at the Centre for Academic Development room at Victoria University. We chose this room because it has moveable furniture, computer screens at each set of tables and because it is far from the usual workshop environment these guys inhabit.
So, as I was driving home (Mazda 3) I reflected on the day and some of the workshop sessions and, while this may not be a new idea, I began to see how suck, squeeze, bang and blow could be a metaphor for learning. Just to help out I’ve added some links to related theories below.
1. Suck. We enticed and pushed the guys into the workshop. Their manager pushed but a major redesign of the programme later in the year was a major external prompt for everyone. We lured with free lunch and a day away from routine. We started the day with some collaborative workshops, sharing sessions, and got them talking about stuff they knew already – themselves, the students and the skills the students needed.
2. Squeeze. In the second part of the workshops we introduced some ideas that would have been new to some of them (perhaps the language if not the ideas: constructive alignment, threshold learning, for example). We demanded a bit more from them. We exerted some pressure. On day two we exerted more pressure by focussing on more learning design principles and using language introduced on day one.
3. Bang. An interactive session on programme documentation and the demands, expectations and idiosyncrasies may have produced the bang for some. For others it may have occurred at other intervals during the day. Certainly by this part of the workshop there was more talking, sharing, joking, moving around the room and the body language had changed.
4. Blow. This won’t have happened yet. I’m picking the blow will have a long effect and will impact on their work, course design and general ability to share ideas, language and perspectives. That means the students will get an even better deal than the great one they get from these great tutors. I’m aware that this stretches the metaphor overly – perhaps the blow bit comes a while later but for me the blow isn’t the waste it’s the effect. Yep. The metaphor is over extended.
A bit of musing about something that was a productive, enjoyable and useful start to a process.
And here’s some feedback from one of the automotive tutors: “Final thoughts on blow. Perhaps the blow does come later, after we have had time to reflect on the workshops and we start discarding some of the waste, get rid of the things we did “just because” and focus on having reasons for doing what we do, blow off the dust of our teaching practice and freshen it up…………………………….it’s not to say that we are doing a bad job, quite the opposite, even the best engine needs an oil change to ensure its running at maximum efficiency, the engine hasn’t changed, just been flushed of the accumulated dust and debris, so it can run at peak performance………………”
These theories talk about the need to be ready to learn, the levels of instruction (Gagne) and in my mind have an association with suck, squeeze, bang and blow.
Feel free to disagree.
The Meyer and Land Threshold Concept
Vygotsky’s Constructivist Approach
While my colleagues were attending the WelTec Whitireia Research Symposium in between finishing a project I was elected (or did I offer) to attend the Victoria University of Wellington Unconference.
It was fun. Why?
Well because I had the opportunity to throw ideas around with several people whom I had never met before.
What happened?
I entered the room (a bit cold on a sunny Welly day) to find several people linking into the VUW guest access. Uhoh I had forgotten to take the work ipad but I did have my phone. And I sat at the table with two VUW staff who led me through the activity (which was easier to do on an ipad). We had a list of activities to choose from then to go to Gosoapbox to rank the activities we wished to attend.The organisers then devised a programme for the day with various offerings in 4 streams. These offerings had been suggested by people when they registered.
Then what?
We went to the allocated rooms where on the first occasion the suggester who was present led us in an interesting discussion about episteme and phronesis. The next session on technology versus pedagogy had no leader so we gathered and discussed. Lunch (brown paper bag, very nice) then student directed learning followed by MOOCS – neither of which had leaders.
What did I learn?
Strangely ( :-)) that we all have similar issues. That we believe pedagogy is more important than technology. That there are practices and ideas we can share. That being online is not much different from being offline. That we struggle within the bounds of our institutions and the larger environment to find approaches to meaningful learning. That there are people in the institutions that I can talk with and share ideas with and that VUW have a space for purposeful play which we are able to use. That large institutions have larger staff development/edtech teams. That learning design and tutor facilitation skills are important. That student directed learning is a many faceted thing that should be tried.
Was it worth it?
Oh yes. Sharing ideas is always worth it.
Yes, ok it’s one of my pet ideas……but read on.
There’s been a lot of information lately about digital storytelling in education, and this paper Enhancing Student Engagement with Their Studies: A Digital Storytelling Approach says (in the abstract) ‘Results showed that the production of digital stories enhanced student engagement with their studies which led to high levels of reflection on the subject matter, which as a result led to a deep understanding of the subject matter.’
At the University of Houston there is a big focus on digital storytelling, and the University of Valencia also promotes it through publications like Appraising Digital Storytelling across Educational Contexts edited by Gregori-Signes and Brigado_Corachan where ‘each article explores the key role played by digital storytelling in the development and strengthening of multimodal literacies….’
In New Zealand Alterio and Woodhouse’s latest research Creating digital stories to enhance vocational learning makes these recommendations:
Alterio and McDrury have long promoted the use of digital storytelling in education and you can find a chapter Collaborative learning using reflective storytelling in the excellent book Reflection to Transformation, edited by Zepke and Leach.
Search online for digital storytelling and you’ll find a wealth of information, for example the article How My Students and I Benefit from Digital Storytelling from which I re-used the image, after checking for copyright restrictions..
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We are a team with a keen interest in teaching and learning and we test, use and trial educational technology.
Our title edtech.ako refers to the use in Aotearoa New Zealand of the term ako which indicates both teaching and learning.
As we teach, so we learn.
As we blog, we reflect.
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