Pre-term Prep

“We teach to change the world,” says Stephen Brookfield. “The hope that undergirds our efforts to help students learn is that doing this will help them act toward each other, and toward their environment, with compassion, understanding, and fairness.” The brief calm before the start of the term is a perfect time to reflect on how you can build the sort of powerful learning experiences we really want for our students.

What are your goals?

What do you really want your students to know or to be able to do when they’ve successfully completed your course? What should they gain from the experience? How will they be changed? For most of us, a list of content isn’t enough. We also want our students to gain a set of perspectives, priorities, or even shifted values.

When we allow a reading list or textbook to shape our course design, we tend to pack in too much, so we don’t leave room for students to grow as critical thinkers. Learning requires reflection, practice, and feedback--and (paradoxically) an abundance of content gets in the way (Nelson, 1999). The impact of your course will be far greater when you begin with meaningful goals for student learning.

After you’ve fine-tuned your goals, you can take a closer look at the alignment among the goals, the ways you attempt to measure students’ progress, and the practice and feedback they get along the way. In other words, your tests, papers, and projects should help you (and students) gauge their attainment of course goals. If they don't, you may need to adjust either the goals or the ways you assess students’ progress toward them.

Fink (2003) reminds us that gathering evidence of student learning “will usually involve some paper/pencil tests, but we will probably need to include other activities as well,” and he adds that “when we become clear about what constitutes successful student performance, it is much easier to develop effective teaching/learning activities.”

These activities should provide adequate opportunities for students to get practice and feedback. As Terry Doyle (2011) reminds us, “the one who does the work does the learning.” The more students have to do—the more they have to think through, puzzle out, solve, inquire, explore—the more they’ll learn, and the better they’ll remember it. This means that if we want our students to learn more, we have to resist the temptation to tell. We need to deploy our expertise differently, designing experiences that lead to learning. When we let students do the work, we guide them through the thinking processes we want them to practice, but they have to do the thinking for themselves.

This will probably involve lots of talking, writing, and collaborating, as students explore new concepts. Informal, low-stakes opportunities for you and your students to find out whether (and how much) they’re “getting it” are sometimes called Classroom Assessment Techniques (another kind of CATs) and are also great ways to use class time. You might want to use think-pair-share.