Helping Students Take a Greater Responsibility for Their Learning

1. Helping Students Take a Greater Responsibility for Their Learning How do post secondary students interact with activities so that they can gradually take greater responsibility for their learning, while at the same time succeeding at constructing a deeper understanding of course content ? In this workshop we will present case studies of how students differ in their responses to the same activities during a semester course. These studies are based on interviews taken at the beginning, middle and end of a course. Some audio taped segments from these interviews will be aired. We especially focus on how students are alike and different and the nature of changes which occur in their perceptions of activities across the course. This is an interactive workshop and participants will have hands on experiences with activities. The workshop will conclude with two model activities which attempt to scaffold student participation across a course .The models are drawn from the two different disciplines of the presenters.

2. Helping Students Take a Greater Responsibility for Their Learning The title of this presentation naturally arose from our shared philosophy of learning derived from our experience in teaching physics and psychology to different levels of students at the university: We both hold a constructivist view of learning in the context of schools and other life contexts.

3. Principles Of The Constructivist Teaching/learning Process • All people are learners, always actively searching for and constructing new meanings . • The best predictor of what and how someone will learn is what they already know. • Learning is not memorizing but understanding and often procedes from whole to part to whole. • Errors are critical to learning • The individual’s active construction of their own knowledge in classrooms is often embedded in social situations and the classroom culture. • The individual’s learning activity is profoundly influenced by his or her participation in encompassing and situated classroom cultural practices jointly constructed by the teacher and students over the duration of a course.

4. Teacher Centred Learning Course Content Professor Lectures —Professor takes responsibility for Learning Student- tries to understand WHEN? That night?Next week? Just Before the exam?

5. StudentCentred Learning Student reads one section of course contentBEFORE class.Student thinks that S/He understands material. Student freewrites on material. Student realizes that S/He doesn’t understand certain parts What do I understand? What don’t I understand Student uses class to clarify points that are not understood.

6. What happens in the University classroom? Teaching is what the teacher does in the classroom. Instruction is what the student and teacher do to jointly construct academic content and the classroom culture for a course of study in a semester. Instruction entails multiple elements of context: ( a ) what the teacher does, ( b ) what the students do, (c ), activities, (d ) a hierarchically organized body of content, ( e ) time, and ( f ) the configuration of physical objects, space and resource materials.

7. Activities • The more interactive the learner is with content to be learned, the more likely s/he will succeed in learning new content. • Activities are a resource which provides opportunities to actively process course content.

8. Activities An academic activity is defined by a goal for students or a product to be handed in, a set of resources available in a situation and a set of cognitive operations that can be applied to the resources to reach the goal or to generate a product (Doyle, 1983, 1991; Brophy, 1993).

9. Functions Of Academic Activities • To organize students social participation in classroom learning. • To organize students cognitive operations in order to encode content, to understand content, and to use content knowledge.

10. Academic Activities As Instruction Maximum impact of activities on content learning and participation in instruction depends upon : (a) introduction by the teacher to clarify its purpose, (b) use of teacher class dialogue before, during and following an activity or series of activities accomplishment add coherence between purpose and the resulting product.

11. Academic Activities As Instruction • Sets of activities done alone and in small groups during a course facilitates elaborative encoding of content where the same content is presented for processing in slightly different ways. • Sets of activities and co-occurring kinds of teacher-class discourse build a means to scaffold learning by offering different roles and responsibilities for what is learned and how learning occurs.

12. Task Model goal or product cognitive operations 4 Task Types Curriculum • memory • procedure or routine • comprehension or understanding • opinion resources • texts,materials • students • teacher instruction

13. START WRITING AND KEEP WRITING • write quickly without editing • if you are not used to it you will find it difficult • you hear seventeen reasons why it is unsatisfactory Slightly emended selected passages from “Writing without teachers" by Peter Elbow Oxford paperbacks 1973

14. Read the selection:Feyerabend on critical discussion • What kind of learning do you think that you are experiencing while doing this? • Freewrite on the selection

15. Concept Assignment In advance of the class read the assigned material for the next week's lecture(s). After you finish each section write freely about what you read. Suggested length three pages, but there is no page limit. Students will receive 4 points if they hand in an adequate amount of freewriting at the end of the first lecture of the week. At the end of the week reread your jottings and write three separate sentences about three important ideas discussed in class that week. Hand in your jottings plus the three sentences at the first lecture of the following week. Students will receive up to 2 points for each concept sentence. Mark for each students' nine best submissions is worth 15% of the total mark.

16. In Class Group Exercise Examination of a sandbag dropped from a hot air balloon rising at constant speed. It is pointed that no information or experiment done up to this point of the course can be used to predict the outcome of this experiment. The comment is made that we can logically construct many possible outcomes to the experiment, but we must do the experiment to test which outcome is in accord with nature. A conceptual conflict collaborative group exercise follows. During the exercise students realize that various students in the class hold different viewpoints.

17. Basic Procedure • Three to four students were assigned to a collaborative group. • The students remain in the same group for all exercises, but may change roles of reporter, scribe, timekeeper or critic in each activity. • Students are presented with a demonstration or qualitative problem and are asked to discuss it for a fixed time limit. • A conceptual conflict is set up by having two groups with different concepts report to the class.

18. Basic procedure (2) • The spokespersons of each group then debate the issue between themselves and then the rest of the students are invited to address questions to this panel of "experts". • The two opposing issues presented by the two groups are clearly stated and the class then votes on which concept resolves the demonstration or qualitative problem. • Then the professor resolves the conflict by explaining how the replacement concept describes the demonstration or qualitative problem in accord with experimental findings.

19. It is not sufficient simply to have students work together Nelson: “When students see that there is no guaranteed right answer in an area, their typical response is that all opinions in the area are equally valid…we must adjudicate various combinations in different contexts. Thinking becomes more complex we come to see knowledge as constructed rather than discovered…For collaborative learning to be most effective, it is not sufficient simply to have students work together. …

20. Critique Exercise After completing the collaborative group conceptual conflict exercise, students were required to write a critique as a homework exercise due one to two weeks later. In writing the critiques, students must clearly elucidate the contrasts between two perceptions of physics principles. Students have to give convincing arguments for both an alternative explanation and an explanation deriving from the Newtonian framework. They must also clearly state which viewpoint is “correct” in the sense that it agrees with experiment.