Moving beyond the lecture

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Taken from https://high-speed-business-club.com/

Moving Beyond the Lecture By Prof. Jonathan Acu単a-Solano, M. Ed. School of English Faculty of Social Sciences Universidad Latina de Costa Rica Friday, May 13, 2016 Post 274

As frequently asked by many faculty members across the globe and other teaching professionals in various fields and teaching environments, what are we

teaching for within our classrooms and courses? Students are being taught to get general knowledge. But knowledge is not enough for a graduate student from a university; it must be transformed into skills, which in the course of time must become competencies to be used in the proper working environment. What many instructors are instilling in their learners is to use their already acquired knowledge to what they need to think and perform. If this practice gets to be used anywhere in higher education, then this is indeed a great shift in how academicians ought to be teaching where the contextualization of content is done by means of active, problem-based learning that can be done with peers in the classroom or elsewhere. Then, answering the question about what is being taught in colleges and universities (or elsewhere) can be answered just by saying, learners are taught to be competent at their future or current workplaces by displaying the skills needed to work.


Using active, collaborative, and problem-based learning in your own classroom When asked to what extend I use active, collaborative, and problem-based learning in the hybrid teaching I currently have at Universidad Latina, I must say it is quite ample. It has become active for my students since they are engaged in autonomous learning while using web resources to analyze and spot data they can use in their literary reports. It is collaborative since discussion of content and learning goals need to be attained collectively rather than individually; everyone is invited to join the discussion to facilitate learning. And it is problem-based learning since the whole process is connected to a step-by-step assignment that provides learners with a task that must be solved in connection to what we are studying in class. How about in your particular cases? Is active, collaborative, and problem-based learning part of the norm in your own classrooms?

What recommendations would you make to the faculty member in this scenario? Hector is a professor of history at a large university. One of the learning goals he wants his first-year students to achieve is to be able to relate historical events and trends to events and trends that are evident today. He believes his students are learning the basic facts of the historical periods covered in his class, and most can discuss key issues and trends of a particular period, but they have great difficulty relating the past to the present. They cannot make good connections between past and present events or compare and contrast past issues with current ones. Hector recently attended a faculty development workshop on active, collaborative, and problem-based learning strategies and was provided with information that describes various activities and aligns them with learning goals. Even with this information, Hector is unsure of two things: 1) whether active learning is appropriate for helping to meet the desired learning goal; and 2) which strategy (or strategies) would be the best to help meet the learning goal.


Taken from Laureate Education

A simple piece of advice I would like to provide Hector for his teaching scenario, which can be applied to any place where one teaches: No matter what he decides to do he should carefully review the ADDIE Model of Instructional Design so he can guarantee that whatever he produces can be Analyzed, Designed, Developed, Implemented, and Evaluated. A simple activity in which students are not in a rigid environment where the professor is the one who is always speaking can be a great shift in his class, but Hector needs to create something students relate to and can see how knowledge can be used in the work place, but as proposed above, it needs to be created with a simple instrument, ADDIE. What would be your recommendation? Would you go about the same way I am proposing, or would you rather go in a different direction?


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