Click here to view Part One of this article
There is often a mismatch between how we want our students to be changed in our courses, and their expectations of those courses. This tension can be particularly acute for first year university students or high school graduates taking a MOOC whose expectations about education arise from previous educational experiences which privilege marks over deep learning and individual performance over working collaboratively.
This second part of two part article suggests some strategies for teachers and educational designers to alter student expectations so that they become more focused on deep learning and the true objectives of the courses they undertake.
What do we want?
As teachers our objective in running a course is ultimately to change our students. Changes in higher-level (Bloom-style) cognition are particular important in tertiary, professional, and adult education. However they can be difficult to bring about. This article considers one factor which contributes to this difficulty - the (often unhelpful) expectations our students have at the start of our courses - and suggests ways to deal with the difficulty created by those expectations.
What can teachers do?
There are a number of ways we can design and teach our courses so that the unhelpful learning expectations of students explored in Part 1 do not become an impediment. I would like to discuss these individually in more detail in a subsequent article but below I set out three key strategies you may find helpful.
1. Focus on learning over marks
2. Focus on high level changes in thinking not just on recall of facts and methods
3. Encourage students to collaborate with peers in a team rather than as a collection of self-interested individuals in a loose group.
In summary students can come into your courses with counterproductive expectations about how they will act and approach their learning, often as a result of their experience in earlier education, and high school in particular (see Part One). However these expectations can be overcome and replaced with more positive expectations, provided you recognise them and make explicit plans to deal with them, including being open with the students about what you are trying to do.
In all of these case it is much easier to bring about a change in students' thinking and expectations at times when they when they are most open to change. For example at the start of a course, and, even better, at the time they first start university, or first commence online education.
Finally it is important that the change be complete and comprehensive. A half-hearted change applied inconstantly over the activities of a course is unlikely to be successful.
If the strategies I have discussed above for course design and the corresponding changes in teaching practice seem daunting to achieve, I suggest you form a community with peers and support each other, and further that you observe the teaching of those who have already successfully brought about the changes you are aiming for. For example, in order to learn abut how to bring about change in general, I find it inspirational to watch the teaching and classroom management practices of successful kindergarten teachers, who are masters at altering the expectations of their students.
Click here to view Part One of this article
Do Your Students Have Harmful Expectations (Part 2) by Richard Buckland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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