Methodology
Many Wilmette Institute instructors have no formal training as teachers, and WI does not expect its instructors to be expert teachers. However, WI does expect them to plan their methodology carefully to provide a rewarding experience to participants.
Methodology is the means through which instructors aim to achieve the course objectives. Why should course developers consider methodology when content is often the main or only consideration? The methodological approach is a key design element because it dictates many tasks like resource selection, time considerations, and use of technology. To achieve coherence among all of these elements, developers and instructors are urged to consider the following guidance.
Exploring social issues from a Baha'i perspective
Book 14 of the Ruhi Institute (Participating in Public Discourse) provides a framework for exploring social issues from a Baha'i perspective. In unit 1, section 10, participants have an opportunity to ask themselves a fundamental question: "How do we go about understanding and analyzing issues of social import in light of the Bahá’í teachings?" This question is very relevant for a teacher of WI courses, as most WI courses aim to analyze issues of social import in light of the Baha'i teachings. An attempt to answer this question leads to a host of further questions:
How did I develop the perception I have of this or that issue?
To what extent are my views on social issues influenced by informal conversation with friends, neighbors, and coworkers?
Given that I am constantly exposed to a wide range of convincing arguments, often stemming from conflicting ideological perspectives, each aggressively propagated by the media, how do I go about separating truth from propaganda?
What criteria do I use to distinguish between fact and opinion?
How do I avoid presenting as the Bahá’í view on a particular issue a set of ideas in vogue that are superficially akin to certain beliefs of the Faith?
How do I ensure that my thought pattern becomes more and more aligned with the teachings?
WI sees great value in having its course developers and instructors reflect on these same questions raised in Book 14. Meaningful answers will enhance your capacity to converse on social issues and teach course participants to do the same.
Active Methodology
Many course developers and instructors aim for cognitive understanding as the course goal. Having participants read a passage or a book or watch a video, or even understand the reading or the video does not achieve full understanding as we defined it on the Learning Outcomes page. In this sense, cognitive understanding is not the end -- it is a means to a greater end. We must ask ourselves why we feel it is necessary for participants to read a certain book. What should participants be able to do with their new understanding?
A methodology is active when:
participants are doing a variety of activities that apply their new knowledge,
participants have opportunities to compare and contrast perspectives using critical thinking skills,
participants are actively involved in teaching their classmates,
participants collaborate with classmates or people outside of class to engage with complex issues, and
participants see themselves as self-motivated learners.
As long as participants feel that their learning is completely dependent on the instructor, their learning will be passive. When the course has identified action-based learning objectives, then the learning process takes a high priority for the instructor. The more active participants are, the more powerful will be their learning experience.
Inclusion and engagement
Some participants are more active and louder than others. There are many legitimate reasons that some participants are quiet, and here is a sample:
English may be a second or third language and the learner is not comfortable in writing or may be quite challenged in writing in English.
The learner may not consider themselves to be a “good” writer, and is worried about spelling, etc.
The learner may only have one day a week to sit down at a computer, and if it is late in the unit, everything may have already been said.
The learner may be on a tablet or e-reader where it is easy enough to read the materials, but harder to use a small keyboard.
The learner may feel uncomfortable in discussing certain subjects in a forum, and would much rather communicate with the instructor by email. This happens often and isn’t captured in statistics.
Some people are very careful about how much they say in any forum, about anything, to anyone because of negative experiences.
The learner may feel strongly that they are there to learn from others and may not feel like they are ready to offer any understandings or comments.
The learner is one of those people who always sits at the back of the classroom and never raises their hand -- that’s just who they are.
It may be easier for the instructor to give attention to the "active" participants, but this often comes at the expense of the quieter participants. It is a key responsibility of the instructor to see the learning experience each participant is having and make adjustments as the course progresses. The goal is to facilitate achieving course objectives for all participants.
How can this happen? It is important to have individual and group activities. The instructor can take advantage of individual assignments to maintain a private dialog with each participant about their learning in reference to the course objectives. Dialog of this kind implies high quality feedback, asking questions, giving space for participants to respond to feedback and carefully listening. Through this type of dialog, the instructor should be able to encourage the participant and to perceive issues like lack of motivation, lack of understanding, or alienation, among others.
Faculty and resource diversity
The Wilmette Institute puts great importance on faculty diversity to model the messages shared through the courses. Having diverse faculty is also a methodological decision as it values diverse perspectives, communication strategies, and sources. There is an expectation that instructors will also value diversity among the participants through purposeful methodological decisions that give voice to that diversity.
Similarly, the resources (readings, videos, etc.) should emphasize voices of traditionally marginalized groups. This design choice will require extra effort on behalf of the instructor because these resources may not be the most readily available. However, diverse voices may cause as much or more impact on learners in our goal to build unity in diversity than the other methodological strategies in this section.
Technology
There is a whole page dedicated to technology on this site, so this brief exploration will focus on technology as a methodological tool.
Technology is a means to achieving methodological ends, and it should be treated as such. Instructors should ask themselves why they have chosen to use each technological tool in the course. It is fine to use a tool because it is innovative, or because it is fun, or engaging, if the purpose is to innovate or have fun or engage students. Those moments have their place in quality courses. However, after engaging the students, the lesson needs to proceed to use other technological tools that directly facilitate achieving the course or unit objectives. Keeping in mind the course or unit objectives helps select the appropriate technological tool for the job.
Quality over quantity
A key methodological decision hinges on how much content to use. Instructors who want participants to know a lot about the topic under study will tend to add a lot of content to each unit. However, this approach is usually not conducive to achieving objectives that are active or applied. To facilitate achieving active objectives, it is preferable to include only necessary content. What do participants need to know in order to fulfill the objectives? Once that has been defined, then stop at that because any further content is superfluous. Superfluous content will detract from achieving active objectives because it gets participants to focus on content, and away from the activities defined in the objectives. In this sense, methodological decisions focus on quality of content and activities over quantity.
People often learn more from peers than from the instructor
Given the proper spaces to have structured and directed dialog with classmates, participants can often gain considerable insight into the topics at hand. Participants are often in similar processes that can help make sense of content in a way that instructors cannot facilitate. The best spaces for this type of dialog is in forums and in class, or video conferences. If an instructor answers a student's question right away, other students will learn to treat the instructor's ideas as expert contributions, and students will refrain from answering each other. For this reason, we suggest for faculty to wait to answer a student for maybe 24 hours to give other students time to discuss the ideas among themselves. Such spaces and strategies need to be planned - time, technology, essential questions, rubrics and instructor support - to ensure success.
WI sees its role in the framework for action as an agent of capacity building. Supporting instructors and participants to engage in community building, in social action, and particularly participating in the discourses of society needs to be central to the objectives of each course, which is another reason that setting quality course objectives takes on such importance. Building capacity in these areas also requires an active methodology as described above to push participants to apply their new knowledge in one of these areas of endeavor and reflect on their actions to make modifications and improvements. All courses should plan for some action - reflection in one of the three areas identified in the global plans to build capacity in participants (teaching and consolidation, social action, and participation in social discourse) as detailed on the Framework for Action page.
If this is new to a course developer or instructor, WI can provide assistance to design capacity building into a course.
Resource selection. Resources are vehicles to help participants achieve the objectives. This is why establishing high quality objectives is so important. Reading assignments could be from book chapters, Bahá’í texts, scholarly papers, compilations from the Bahá’í writings, transcripts of talks, poetry, news articles, web pages, encyclopedia entries, government reports, selections from the sacred writings and commentaries of the world’s religions, etc. Videos are more and more essential resources. TED Talks, short films, online lectures, talks from Bahá’í conferences, excerpts from popular film and music can greatly enhance a course. Entire podcasts, or specific episodes, are a growing source of high quality material. Instructors can also record their own lectures. The goal is to present stimulating resources which enlighten and encourage learners to deepen on the subject and discuss it with each other. (All documents must have an author, so please do not include anonymous articles.)
Forum discussions. These are different from study guide questions. (If the course developer wants to use a study guide, how should it be used?) A common activity is the discussion forum. To stimulate the discussion, you can provide 2 or 3 discussion questions or topics and ask the learners to answer at least one or make some other sort of posting about the topic. (It is generally not good practice to offer more than 3 questions because discussion tends to get too scattered). Answering questions can generate dialog among learners depending on how the questions are framed. It is recommended to use open questions that require higher order thinking skills to answer because those tend to help learners explore subtleties and they also facilitate dialog among students. Learners often ask the best questions, so leaving a space where they can do that can be a great idea. Further, it is of the highest priority that forums be safe and brave places for respectfully raising difficult discussions. This idea needs to be expressed clearly throughout the course, so participants can keep it in mind at all times. It may be necessary to speak privately with a participant who has difficulties fulfilling this directive. Course instructors should reach out to WI administrators for support on this issue when necessary.
Video conferences. All courses should include video conferences, and it is recommended to hold them once per unit. These can last as little as an hour, but 90 minutes seems to be optimum for most courses. As with all other aspects of a course, these spaces need to be carefully planned around fulfilling the course or unit objectives. These classes are not spaces for instructors to give lectures, although the lecture can be used sporadically. Rather, it is recommended that participants be given a few days to work with the resources and activities and come up with questions about the content that can be explored in the video conference. Video conferences do not have to be participant led, but participants should have ample space to express their understandings in dialog with others.
Essential questions. Essential questions is a methodological tool to spur deep exploration of the topic under study. The idea is to ask a well-crafted question that helps students get to the heart of the subject. This article by Grant Wiggins is highly recommended. "A question is essential when it: causes genuine and relevant inquiry into the big ideas and core content; provokes deep thought, lively discussion, sustained inquiry, and new understanding as well as more questions; requires students to consider alternatives, weigh evidence, support their ideas, and justify their answers; stimulates vital, on-going rethinking of big ideas, assumptions, and prior lessons; sparks meaningful connections with prior learning and personal experiences; naturally recurs, creating opportunities for transfer to other situations and subjects."
Final projects. A final project in which participants demonstrate what they have learned in the course can be a motivating way to finalize a course successfully. Projects can also be a great way to collect evidence that a participant has fulfilled the course objectives. If the course learning outcomes or objectives are well-written they should contain possible projects. Depending on the time participants have available to them, projects could be simple presentations or they could be field or community work that is later reported to the class. Project-based learning is a proven methodology for teachers who want to carry out active methodologies and motivate students. If you want to use a final project, be sure to give out the assignment with several weeks of anticipation to give students time to formulate, execute, and report on their experience. The Wilmette Institute has published many past final projects here on this page. If you would like support in setting up a final project, please let us know.
Local study-action groups. Some Wilmette Institute participants have had success in courses through forming local study groups. These groups meet to further discuss questions and issues explored through the course. Such study groups are autonomous so they decide their meeting frequency as well as their agendas. Instructors should encourage the formation of such groups. Here is further information about the study groups.
Non-Bahá'í resources. The Wilmette Institute wants its courses, if at all possible, to have non-Bahá’í resources as well as Bahá’í resources, because the combination often brings new perspectives to the learners and encourages an outward-looking orientation toward the world.
Quizzes. Quizzes are usually less appropriate for community courses because they convey to participants a focus on knowing things, and not so much on analysis, creativity, or deeper comprehension. Quizzes that are not graded and are used to help students engage with the text can be helpful and even fun. If an instructor would like to use quizzes, Moodle has a quiz function that can be used for short essays, true/false, and multiple choice questions where the answers are simple and factual. We can help you create a quiz, which is a better way to ask about factual knowledge than discussion questions, which can be answered usefully only by one person.
Lectures. Lectures can be used effectively on a limited basis when the instructor has something to convey through audio or video that cannot wait for the video conference. Also, you can include lectures of other teachers on the subject matter. If you plan to record a faculty lecture for a unit which includes a slide presentation such as PowerPoint, be sure to include a PDF version of the slide show. When the lecture video is uploaded to YouTube, a transcript will be automatically created.
Inviting people to help with the course
Guest speakers. There are many qualified people who may be happy to speak about a topic with your participants and answer their questions. Bringing in guest experts is an excellent strategy to motivate participants. For example, if you assign a book, article or video, you can consider bringing in the author or director to share insights that enrich participant understanding and achieve a personal connection to the topic. To invite a guest speaker, tell them exactly what you want to achieve with their presence, how their intervention ties into the course objectives, how many participants there are, and how much time you have designated to the activity. The instructor should facilitate at all times to make sure the guest has enough time to fulfill the objectives and all participants have an opportunity to comment and ask questions.
Here are some tips about guest speaker engagements:
Don’t promise a guest or a guest presentation in the course until you have confirmation.
It is best to check with Wilmette Institute staff before issuing an invitation, as they might have some further useful information about your proposed guest speaker.
If a video meeting is involved and staff time will be required, be sure to get that organized at the same time as issuing the invite.
A recorded dialog between a guest and the faculty can also be useful in a course and doesn’t require trying to get a majority of participants in a webinar at the same time, which can be complex.
Teacher assistants (TA's). There are a couple of reasons for assigning a TA to a course. One is to provide support for lead faculty to offer high quality methodology. For example, maybe a lead faculty does not have the time to engage students in the forums, or provide proper feedback on assignments, but a TA can. A second reason is to build capacity in young scholars who aspire to be lead faculty. In either case, TA's are valuable resources that can enhance participant experience. WI asks lead faculty to take TA's seriously and plan with them to coordinate course responsibilities in a way that gives the TA experience as faculty. TA's are not to be used as secretaries because lead faculty should fulfill their core responsibilities as such, and TA's should support participants to fulfill course objectives.
Revised: 04/01/2022