by Dan Apple
During my Keynote Address at a Professional Development Symposium, I asked teams of the 130 participants to reflect on three aspects of successful teaching and learning and to identify a key characteristic for each. Here are the prompts that I gave them:
Questions – Take 2 minutes to think:
- About your own best learning experience: What was the key characteristic in that learning environment?
- About your best teaching experience: What was the key characteristic you produced in the learning environment?
- About when you visit someone’s classroom and it just feels very productive – What is the key characteristic?
The responses were then inventoried and collected into 14 representative characteristics:
Passion/Enthusiasm/Energy, Peer Learning, Expertise, Relevance/Current, Flexibility/Variety, Supportive, Ability to Articulate, Praise Effort/Results, Level of Engagement, Don’t Embarrass/Put Down, Collective Decision Making, Humor, Active Learning, Caring
The majority of these characteristics are actually attributes of successful instructors (one aspect of a successful educational experience) as opposed to descriptions of the learners or environment (two other possible aspects). I realized that each of these characteristics can, however, be applied to any of the three aspects: Faculty-centered, Learner-centered, and Environment:
In other words, if you want LEARNERS who accept the responsibility of choice, the INSTRUCTOR needs to solicit input and the ENVIRONMENT needs to be geared toward consensus-building (through learning activities or even components of course/class structure). Do you see the potential here?
One of the sources of frustration I hear most often from faculty is that even when they know what they need to do, the burden of doing it ALL is overwhelming. Being passionate, enthusiastic, an expert, supportive, flexible, praising of results, engaged, accepting, and caring (to name just a few characteristics from the table and list) is a lot to ask from an instructor.
And it is. But as the table demonstrates, much of that ‘burden’ can be carried by a carefully crafted learning environment. You can create an ENVIRONMENT where the characteristic of “flexible” on the part of the INSTRUCTOR and the characteristic of “adaptable” on the part of the LEARNER is met through the use of a diverse set of learning activities.
It is possible to shift faculty perspectives from:
Faculty-centered (What am I doing to contribute to successful learning?)
To…
Learner-centered (What are my students learning and doing that contributes to their success?)
And…
the Environment (What does our learning environment contribute to student success?)
Willingness to engage in this kind of shift is absolutely critical if you want to move from one-one relationships to building a community of self-directed learners.
