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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
"Dee Fink challenges our conventional assumptions and practices and offers an insightful approach to expanding our learning goals, making higher education more meaningful. This is a gem of a book that every college teacher should read." --Ken Bain, author, What the Best College Students Do Since the original publication of L. Dee Fink's Creating Significant Learning Experiences, higher education has continued to move in two opposite directions: more institutions encourage faculty to focus on research, obtaining grants, and publishing, while accreditation agencies, policy-makers, and students themselves emphasize the need for greater attention to the quality of teaching and learning. Now the author has updated his bestselling classic, providing busy faculty with invaluable conceptual and procedural tools for instructional design. Step by step, Fink shows how to use a taxonomy of significant learning and systematically combine the best research-based practices for learning-centered teaching with a teaching strategy in a way that results in powerful learning experiences. This edition addresses new research on how people learn, active learning, and student engagement; includes illustrative examples from online teaching; and reports on the effectiveness of Fink's time-tested model. Fink also explores recent changes in higher education nationally and internationally and offers more proven strategies for dealing with student resistance to innovative teaching. Tapping into the knowledge, tools, and strategies in Creating Significant Learning Experiences empowers educators to creatively design courses that will result in significant learning for their students. "As thought-provoking and inspiring today as it was when it was first published, it is a 'must' for anyone serious about creating courses that challenge students to learn deeply." --Elizabeth F. Barkley, author, Student Engagement Techniques
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013
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CONTENTS
Note to Updated Edition
Preface
Acknowledgments
The Author
Chapter One: Creating Significant Learning Experiences
How Satisfactory Are Current Forms of Instruction?
Base Need: Significant Learning Experiences for Students
Faculty: Ready for Change?
Institutional Change: Coming, Ready or Not!
Are Significantly Better Kinds of Learning Really Possible?
The Significance of Learning About Course Design
An Invitation to a New Way of Thinking About Teaching
Chapter Two: A Taxonomy of Significant Learning
Beginning the Journey
What Makes Learning Significant?
Formulating Course Goals Around Significant Learning
Significant Learning and the Literature on College Teaching
How Do We Achieve Significant Learning?
Chapter Three: Designing Significant Learning Experiences I: Getting Started
Three Basic Ways of Putting a Course Together
Integrated Course Design: A New Model
Getting Started with Designing a Course
Initial Phase: Build Strong Primary Components
Review of the Course Design Process Thus Far
Chapter Four: Designing Significant Learning Experiences II: Shaping the Learning Experience
Initial Phase, Continued
Intermediate Phase: Assemble the Primary Components into a Coherent Whole
Final Phase: Four Tasks to Finish the Design
Three General Tips
Benefits of This Model of Course Design
Good Course Design and Flow Experiences
Chapter Five: Changing the Way We Teach
Is It Really Possible?
How Can I Overcome the Challenges of Change?
How Do I Change? A Case Study
Will It Make Any Difference?
Update on “Changing the Way We Teach”
Concluding Comments
Chapter Six: Better Organizational Support for Faculty
Problems Faculty Face at the Present Time
What Do Faculty Need?
Support from Colleges and Universities
Four Specific Recommendations
Helping Colleges and Universities Define Good Teaching
Support from Other National Organizations
Bringing It All Together for Better Faculty Support
Chapter Seven: The Human Significance of Good Teaching and Learning
Teaching, Learning, and the Dance of Life
The Meaning and Significance of Good Learning
The Meaning and Significance of Good Teaching
A New Metaphor for Teaching: Helmsman
The Role of the Ideas in This Book
Making the Most of Teacher-Student Interactions
Should We Abandon Traditional Ways of Teaching?
The Principles and Spirit of Good Teaching
A Dream of What Might Be, If . . .
Appendix A: Planning Your Course: A Decision Guide
Appendix B: Suggested Readings
References
Index
Cover design by Michael Cook
Cover image ©Antishock/iStockphoto
Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
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The materials that appear in this book (except those for which reprint permission must be obtained from the primary sources) may be reproduced for educational/training activities. We do, however, require that the following statement appear on all reproductions:
Creating Significant Learning Experiences, Revised and Updated by L. Dee Fink. Copyright © 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
AAC&U, 2007. College Learning for the New Global Century: A Report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.
Figure 4.16: Copyright © 1997 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, a member of Perseus Books, LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and is on file with the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-118-12425-3 (paper); ISBN 978-1-118-41632-7 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-118-41901-4 (ebk)
The Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education Series
This book is dedicated to
the hundreds of teachers who have inspired me
because of how much they care
NOTE TO UPDATED EDITION
It has been ten years since the original publication of this book. When writing a book like this, you are inclined to believe the ideas have some value but you don’t know whether others will also value the ideas until you see how they respond to the book. It has been extremely rewarding and humbling to see how widely the book has been accepted and used. Reports from individual professors on the impact of these ideas have been very heartwarming.
Part of this success, of course, can be attributed to several changes that have been occurring in higher education. In the United States—and even more so in some other countries—civic and higher education leaders have felt a growing concern that even when students graduate from college, they are not learning what they need to be learning to face the challenges of life in the twenty-first century. In his influential book, The World Is Flat (2005), Thomas Friedman described how the world has become interconnected in multiple ways here at the beginning of the current century. Based on this, he also argued that all countries need college graduates who have a new and better kind of learning that will equip them to deal with the challenges and the opportunities of this more-complex world.
The next year Derek Bok, then-president of Harvard University, published a widely read book, Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More (2006). He gathered data from already existing research on how well college students in the United States are achieving eight kinds of generally valued kinds of learning, for example, communication skills, critical thinking, character, preparation for citizenship, living with diversity, and so on. With all eight kinds of learning, his conclusion was the same: students are achieving some of this learning but nowhere near the level that they could and should be achieving.
At the same time this realization was spreading, the concept of “learning-centered higher education” has been steadily gaining acceptance. Basically this perspective believes that our institutions should be focused not just on offering courses and granting degrees but also on generating valuable kinds of learning and certifying that those kinds of learning have been achieved.
These changes have led people to ask what college students should be learning and how these kinds of learning can be achieved more widely. With these questions, there has been an increasing realization that, regardless of whether the learning is being done in traditional, face-to-face settings or in an online environment, these important—or in my language—significant kinds of learning need to be designed into individual courses and built into the curriculum. Only then will there be a high likelihood that most students will achieve the kinds of learning that they and society need for them to achieve.
These changes in higher education were the context into which the original edition of my book was published in 2003. Partially as a result of all this, many people quickly saw the value of my taxonomy of significant learning for defining what those important kinds of learning might be. And the model of integrated course design offered a learning-centered approach for designing that significant learning into a course or even a curriculum.
As a result of this fortuitous timing, the original book was rapidly and widely embraced. It became one of Jossey-Bass’s best sellers; it has been adopted as a textbook for many graduate courses on college teaching; it has been translated into four languages as of this date; and I have been invited to do workshops on the ideas of the book on campuses in nearly every state in the United States and nearly every region of the world. In fact, the volume of workshop requests prompted me to recruit other experienced workshop leaders to conduct some of these workshops; this group is known now as Dee Fink & Associates.
My experience doing these workshops forms the first reason for my needing to update the book. Although the basic ideas and their layout in this book remain sound and do not need any major changes, I have learned a lot from workshop participants and from the associates about what helps college teachers understand these ideas as fully as possible.
The other reason for wanting to update the book is that, during the past decade, numerous researchers and writers have continued to publish books with extremely valuable ideas on college teaching as part of their work in the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). Consequently I felt a need to update some of the literature cited in the book.
Given all this, what changes have I made here? In numerous places throughout the book, I have clarified the language and terminology. In some cases, I have expanded and refined the comments about the concepts themselves, for example, when discussing the task of integrating the course and procedures for evaluating the design of the course.
Another substantial change occurs in Chapter Six, which is about organizational support for better teaching and learning. I have added comments there to reflect some of the national and global changes that, for the most part, are having a positive influence on the support needed.
And finally, as already mentioned, I have incorporated references to many of the new books on college teaching that have been written in the last decade by the dedicated and talented scholars of SoTL! This community of thinkers, teachers, and writers are building a body of ideas that are already making a difference and will continue to be even more influential as world leaders grow in their realization of the importance of high-quality teaching and learning in colleges and universities everywhere.
March 2013
L. Dee Fink
PREFACE
This book has been written in response to two widespread problems that I see in much of college teaching today. The first is that the majority of college teachers do not seem to have learning goals that go much beyond an understand-and-remember type of learning. A few extend into certain aspects of application learning—such as problem solving, thinking, and decision making. But even those who offer a decent version of application learning are notable by their exception. As a result, sitting in many courses gives one the feeling that teachers are doing an information dump. They have collected and organized all the information and ideas they have on a given topic and are dumping their knowledge onto (and they hope into) the heads of their listeners. When these courses are over, one has the scary feeling that the students are also about to engage in some information dumping of their own.
The second problem is that most teachers seem to have difficulty figuring out what teaching activities they might use in addition to the two traditional standbys: lecturing and leading discussions. Studies have been done in which someone goes into college classrooms and measures what teachers actually do. The number of times that a teacher even asks a question in a one-hour class period is remarkably low. In-depth, sustained discussions—when students respond to other students as well as to the teacher—are extremely rare. Although the language and vision of active learning have initiated a significant movement in the United States and Canada, professional practice still lags woefully behind.
The fact that teachers have these problems is not entirely their fault. They are put through graduate programs that by and large dishonor the challenge and complexity of good teaching. Graduate students’ time and attention is almost exclusively directed to the challenge and complexity of doing good research. Then, once the graduating PhD students assume full-time positions as college professors, they are told to “just teach” if they’ve joined a teaching institution or to “get busy with research and publishing” if their institution has research aspirations. Seldom if ever are they provided with the means to learn how to be better teachers. And the reward system delivers a clear message, especially at larger institutions: “Your number one priority is to get some publications out!”
Central Message
The whole point of this book is to offer ideas that can improve the way teaching is usually practiced in higher education. For this to happen, readers who teach will need to see, first, that there are ways of teaching that are different, significantly different, from what they are doing now. Second, they will need to be persuaded that these new and different ways of teaching will result in good things happening, both for their students and for themselves. Third, they will need guidance in figuring out how to teach in new and different ways. Finally, their institutions and other important organizations in higher education will need to recognize the worth of this effort and provide a proper level of encouragement and support. My hope is that this book will succeed in addressing all four needs and thereby help teachers find new and better ways to engage in one of the most important and potentially satisfying professions in the world. To accomplish this goal, I lay out a new vision of what teaching and learning can be, based on three major ideas: significant learning, integrated course design, and better organizational support.
Significant Learning
The first idea is a new taxonomy of significant learning that offers teachers a set of terms for formulating learning goals for their courses. This taxonomy goes beyond understand-and-remember and even beyond application learning. For teachers and institutions that want to provide a learning-centered education, this taxonomy offers a road map to a variety of significant kinds of learning.
Integrated Course Design
The book also contains a model of integrated course design. This model builds on and incorporates many ideas that already exist in the published literature on instructional design and good teaching. But I have presented these ideas in a new way that will make it easier for teachers and instructional designers to see what they can actually do—and have students do—to promote such things as significant learning, active learning, and educative assessment. By emphasizing the integrated nature of instructional design, the model also shows that the real power of these ideas will come only when they are properly linked with each other. Having students engage in an experiential exercise, for example, becomes much more potent when it is linked with reflective dialogue. Authentic assessment becomes even more meaningful when it is linked to opportunities for students to engage in self-assessment. When the two concepts of significant learning and integrated course design are linked, teachers will have powerful new tools to analyze and reshape their own teaching. These tools will allow them to more fully understand what it is they are doing now that is worthwhile, why that is worthwhile, and what else they can do to make their teaching even more effective.
Better Organizational Support
The first two ideas are intended primarily for teachers. But learning about and implementing new ideas on teaching require time, effort, and support. This means college teachers will need strong support for changing how they teach, stronger support than most have at the present time. Chapter Six presents some recommendations for better institutional support that is linked to six specific needs of faculty. Most of the support needed will have to come from the faculty’s home institution but a number of other organizations also significantly influence how faculty members work, so their role in supporting better teaching is also examined.
Plan of the Book
The general plan of this book is as follows. First I will describe what I see happening in higher education at the present time (Chapter One). This situation, as I see it, calls for substantial changes in the way we teach but at the same time offers numerous new ideas on how this might be done. Then I will lay out two of the major ideas in this book. The first is a taxonomy of significant learning that provides us with a new language for setting learning goals (Chapter Two). Following this, the key ideas of integrated course design are presented to give teachers new tools for achieving a more challenging set of learning goals (Chapters Three and Four).
Teachers may still feel the need for suggestions on how to change the way they teach, so this issue is addressed in Chapter Five. Assuming faculty members are ready to make this kind of personal and individual change, they will need better organizational support from the various organizations that influence how they work (Chapter Six). Finally, in Chapter Seven, I share my dream of what higher education would be like if all the groups involved in this enterprise aligned themselves to support more significant learning during the transformation of higher education that lies ahead of us at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
Web Site on Significant Learning
I also invite readers to visit a Web site on course design and significant learning that has been set up to keep the conversation going. The main goal of the Web site is to allow teachers to ask questions and share successes and to archive valuable materials and ideas on designing courses for significant learning in all educational contexts. The structure of this Web site will undoubtedly evolve over time but it will initially contain a discussion list, materials to assist teachers in the design process, and a description of courses that promote significant learning. The URL for this Web site is www.designlearning.org.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To paraphrase a modern aphorism, “It takes a village to write a book.” That has never been more true of a book than of this one. A very important part of my village consists of the other people who have written about college teaching. The key ideas presented here build on a number of classic works in higher education and incorporate exciting ideas from several contemporary publications. A quick look through the text, the list of references, and the suggested readings in Appendix B will illustrate how deeply my own education is indebted to the published works of others.
Others have contributed in an even more direct fashion. Although the questions and ideas presented here have been brewing for many years, several insights crystallized in 1996 when I was teaching a course titled “Instructional Strategies in Adult and Higher Education” at the University of Oklahoma. The response of the graduate students in that class prompted me to undertake an intense journey of searching, reading, creating, discussing, testing, and revising ideas.
Along the way, a number of individuals were instrumental in furthering that journey. Steve Paul, an exceptional music educator then at Oklahoma and later at the University of Arizona, pushed me in a series of conversations that lasted a year and a half and resulted in the initial outline of the key ideas presented here. Bill McKeachie, the person who more than anyone else legitimized scholarly work on college teaching, provided important encouragement during the early stages of this journey, a time when I was unsure about the worth of the ideas and my own ability to put them in book form. Tom Angelo generously took time from a very busy schedule to read an early draft and pointed out some needed changes.
During the last few years, faculty members at my own institution and elsewhere have listened to these ideas in informal conversations and in formal workshops. Although this is a task that never ends, their response has brought me a long way toward understanding what needs to be said to make these ideas meaningful to people who care about teaching and who want to teach well. One faculty member in particular, John Furneaux, a physics professor at Oklahoma, not only listened but also offered his own course as a lab for testing the worth of the ideas. The results of that experiment are shared in Chapter Five.
I also wish to pay tribute to two people who served as mentors to me at various times early in my life: Thomas Ludlum and William Pattison. Both of them modeled a level of intellectual and humane excellence that has served as a guidepost throughout my personal and professional life.
Lynn Sorenson, formerly at Oklahoma and now associate director of the Faculty Center at Brigham Young University, generously gave of her time and expertise in suggesting changes that made this book more coherent and readable.
Finally, I must mention the influence of Arletta Knight, who also works in the field of instructional development and who has given me marvelous feedback on multiple drafts of the manuscript. She offered continual moral encouragement and extremely valuable suggestions on changes that would help the book make better sense to others. I am extremely fortunate to have such a person in my life—and to have such a person as my wife!
THE AUTHOR
L. Dee Fink served as director of the Instructional Development Program and an adjunct professor of geography at the University of Oklahoma for twenty-nine years. He received his PhD and MA degrees from the University of Chicago and his BA from Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. When he first came to Oklahoma from graduate school in 1976, he taught courses in geography and higher education. In 1979 he proposed and established the Instructional Development Program and has served as its director ever since. At Oklahoma he was also a faculty member for fifteen years in the College of Liberal Studies, a special program of interdisciplinary studies for adult, nonresidential students, and served as the first director of Oklahoma’s Gateway to College Learning, a course intended to orient freshmen to college. In 2005 he retired from the University of Oklahoma in order to devote more time to consulting with universities nationally and internationally on ways to promote better teaching and learning throughout the whole campus.
His work as a campus-based instructional consultant for more than twenty-five years provides the primary basis for the ideas in this book. He has observed the classroom teaching of hundreds of faculty members, consulted with them individually to enhance student learning in their courses and solve teaching problems, and led numerous faculty discussions and workshops. These consulting experiences, in addition to his own teaching experience, have given him an intimate feel for the situation, thoughts, feelings, and actions of college teachers.
He has also been active nationally and internationally in faculty development. He initiated the Great Plains regional consortium for faculty developers in 1981, has been a member of the Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education for over twenty years, served on the POD executive committee, and codirected the workshop called “Getting Started in Faculty Development” at the annual POD conference for several years in the 1990s. He has served on the editorial boards of the ASHE Higher Education Reports and the Journal of Staff, Program, and Organization Development. In 2002, he was elected president of the POD network, which is the largest faculty development organization in the world.
In 1989 he was a recipient of the American Association for Higher Education’s Jaime Escalante “Stand and Deliver” Award, and in 1992 he received the Outstanding Faculty Award from the College of Liberal Studies at the University of Oklahoma.
One of his first major publications was an empirical study of a hundred beginning college teachers that appeared in Jossey-Bass’s New Directions for Teaching and Learning, no. 17, in 1984. Since then he has published numerous articles and book chapters on college teaching, evaluating college teaching, new faculty members, and instructional development programs. He is also coeditor of Team-Based Learning (Stylus, 2004). The URL for his professional Web site is www.finkconsulting.info.
CHAPTER ONE
CREATING SIGNIFICANT LEARNING EXPERIENCES
The Key to Quality in Educational Programs
We won’t meet the needs for more and better higher education until professors become designers of learning experiences and not teachers.
—Larry Spence (2001)
Every year, in the United States alone, more than one million college teachers prepare to teach classes, and more than twenty million students come to learn. Most of us teach four to eight courses a year. As we engage in this task, we have two options. We can continue to follow traditional ways of teaching, repeating the same practices that we and others in our disciplines have used for years. Or we can dare to dream about doing something different, something special in our courses that would significantly improve the quality of student learning. This option leads to the question faced by teachers everywhere and at all levels of education: Should we make the effort to change or not?
Given the scale of education and its significance for individual lives and society at large, the response of teachers to this enduring question is of immense importance. What are the factors affecting our response? This chapter and this book will present some ideas about this question. As Spence asserts in the chapter-opening epigraph, I, too, will argue that college teachers need to learn how to design courses more effectively for higher education to significantly improve the quality of its educational programs.
The primary intent of this opening chapter is to describe the unusual and exciting situation in higher education at the present time. A variety of developments have created an extremely strong need to improve the quality of our educational programs. At the same time a wealth of new ideas on teaching have emerged since the 1990s that offer college teachers unusual opportunities to make a creative response to this situation. Near the end of this chapter I will present the reasons why course design, in my view, is the right place to integrate several of these new ideas and, at the same time, constitutes the single most significant change most teachers can make to improve the quality of their teaching and of student learning.
How Satisfactory Are Current Forms of Instruction?
When examined from outside the academy, our present teaching practices appear to be not only adequate but even quite good. The demand for our services remains high. The percentage of graduating high school students who choose to come to college is nearly 70 percent and continues to rise. The percentage of adults enrolling in some kind of higher education program also remains strong and growing. And American higher education continues to be very attractive to students from around the world.
But when we examine the situation from inside the academy and look at the quality of student learning, we find a more disturbing picture. How well are college students learning what they should be learning? People obviously have different views about what they think students ought to be learning in college but many people have shown some concern about the results of some recent studies. In 2006, Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, published a book called Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Students Learn and Why They Should Be Learning More. He conducted a meta-analysis of studies examining how well students in American universities achieved eight different kinds of learning, for example, how to communicate, how to think, preparing for citizenship, and so on. With all eight kinds of learning, his conclusion was the same: Students are achieving some level of learning—but nowhere near what they could be learning and should be learning. More recently, Arum and Roksa (2011) raised many eyebrows with the conclusion that 45 percent of the 2,300 students assessed in twenty-four institutions showed no statistically significant improvement in their critical thinking skills during the first year and a half of college.
Similarly, an expanding study of liberal arts education in a sample of institutional types currently involves over seventeen thousand students in forty-nine institutions (Blaich and Wise, 2011). They are studying seven outcomes: critical thinking, need for cognition, interest in diversity, attitudes toward diversity, moral reasoning, leadership, and well-being. Their data so far indicate that although a majority of students show “moderate” improvement in some thinking skills, more than a third demonstrate a decline in these same skills. Of more concern is the data that the majority of seniors actually graduate with less academic motivation and openness to diversity than when they started. Of special concern to this study is the conclusion by the authors that “we also identified a set of teaching practices and conditions that predict student growth on a wide variety of outcomes. This would seem to suggest that across the institutions in the study, these effective teaching practices and institutional conditions are not prevalent enough to produce widespread change (www.liberalarts.wabash.edu/study-research). In other words, when the institution and the professors practice what we know to be good educational practice, students show growth. But these practices are hardly being used at all!
These studies suggest that current practices in higher education are not succeeding in generating the kind of learning among graduates that societal leaders believe are important for individuals and for society in the twenty-first century. Why might this be?
Cause of These Shortcomings
The basic problem is that, although faculty members want their students to achieve higher kinds of learning, they continue to use teaching practices that are not effective at promoting such learning. When interviewed, faculty often make reference to higher-level learning goals such as critical thinking but they have traditionally relied heavily on lecturing as their main form of teaching. In a study in 1980 of eighteen hundred faculty in five different types of institutions (including small private colleges), 73 to 83 percent chose lectures as their primary method of instruction (Blackburn and others, 1980). A survey nearly two decades later involving nearly a third of all US faculty, found the same results: 76 percent identified lecture as their primary instructional method (Finkelstein, Seal, and Schuster, 1998). Although those percentages may have dropped slightly since that second report, my interactions with faculty suggest that lecturing is still by far the dominant mode of teaching.
What kinds of results does lecturing, even good lecturing, produce? A long history of research indicates lecturing has limited effectiveness in helping students
Retain information after a course is over.
Develop an ability to transfer knowledge to novel situations.
Develop skill in thinking or problem solving.
Achieve affective outcomes, such as motivation for additional learning or a change in attitude.
Although the following two studies were conducted some years ago, there is no reason to believe that the impact of lecturing demonstrated by them has changed. In the first, a carefully designed test at Norwich University in England, teachers gave a lecture specifically designed to be effective (McLeish, 1968). Students were given a test on their recall of facts, theory, and application of the content. They were allowed to use their own lecture notes and even a printed summary of the lecture. At the end of the lecture, the average level of the students’ recall of information was 42 percent. One week later, even with the benefit of taking the same test a second time, students’ recall had dropped to 20 percent—a drop of over 50 percent in one week!
In another study, in the United States, students who took a year-long, two-semester course on introductory economics were compared with students who had never had the course at all (Saunders, 1980). More than twelve hundred students in the two groups were given a test on the content of the course.
At the end of the course, students who took the course scored only 20 percent higher than students who had never had the course. Two years later, the difference was 15 percent. Seven years later, the difference was only 10 percent.
Collectively the results from these and other studies (many of which are summarized in an excellent study by Lion Gardiner, 1994) suggest that our current instructional procedures are not working very well. Students are not learning even basic general knowledge, they are not developing higher-level cognitive skills, and they are not retaining their knowledge very well. In fact, there is no significant difference between students who take courses and students who do not.
Are People Concerned About These Problems?
Clearly not everyone is concerned about the results of present forms of instructional practice; otherwise, there would be greater pressure to make substantial changes. However, when one looks carefully at the reactions of many faculty, students, and the public to the quality of student learning, one finds an awareness, perhaps even a growing awareness, that something is not right.
Faculty Concerns
When I talk with faculty, many say their biggest concern is low student attendance in class. Many see daily class attendance running around 50 percent by mid-semester in their lower division courses. And they report other problems as well. Many of the students who do attend spend much of their class time checking their phone message and so on. Students do not complete reading assignments. The energy level in class discussions is low. Students focus on grades rather than on learning. Textbooks keep getting larger and larger, which means teachers have to work harder and harder to cover the material. Many say they have lost the joy in their teaching. And when they try to change, they often feel unsupported by students, colleagues, and their institution.
Student Concerns
Students, for their part, have similar concerns. They often complain about courses not being very interesting, that they just sit and take notes and then cram for exam after exam. They have difficulty seeing the value or significance of what they are learning. They, too, see the textbooks getting larger and larger; for them this means greater cost as well as more material that they have to learn, master, or memorize for the test.
In one extensive study of student reaction to their instruction (summarized in Courts and McInerney, 1993, pp. 33–38), students’ most common criticism was focused on the quality of their overall education, the way teachers teach, and the level of performance expected of the students. By far the most common concern was directed specifically at the tendency of teachers to rely primarily on lectures and workbook exercises to transmit information, on the absence of interaction, and on the lack of what student after student referred to as “hands-on learning.” Additional conclusions included the following:
Students were not self-directed learners. They were not confident in their ability to approach a problem and figure it out on their own.
The students evidenced a powerful sense that they were not learning as much as they could or should be.
Many of the students voiced a belief that their college teachers do not really care much about them or about promoting their learning or interacting with them.
The result? Students do not engage fully or energetically in learning something they do not want to learn or see no reason for learning.
My conversations with students on my own campus and elsewhere indicate that they also are feeling very fragmented and isolated. The fragmented feeling comes from their observation that their courses do not connect to each other; there is “this course” and “that course” but no coherent education. Their feelings of isolation come from not having much interaction with other students, either in class or out of class, about course-related matters. The net result? Low intellectual effort by students. Although most college teachers say they expect two hours of out-of-class study time for each hour of class, students are spending much less than that. Teachers’ expectations would mean that a full-time student who is enrolled in five three-credit-hour courses would need to study thirty hours per week. However, studies of actual student study time repeatedly indicate that most students spend six hours or less per week—for all their courses combined! They spend much more time socializing, working, or watching TV (several studies, cited in Gardiner, 1994, p. 52).
Public Concerns
The public is also beginning to be concerned about what they perceive to be the poor quality of higher education in this country. This is a significant part of the impetus behind the move in many state legislatures to set up accountability programs and even performance-based appropriations. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that, as of that date [1998], “11 states tie some appropriations to measures of public institutions’ performance, and 15 more are likely to follow suit within the next five years” (Carnevale, Johnson, and Edwards, 1998, p. B6). Two years later the Chronicle published an article about a proposal by the Board of Regents for the whole University of Texas system to set up competency tests (Schmidt, 2000). The article noted that a “growing number of states [were looking] to the large-scale administering of competency tests as a means of setting standards for public colleges, or students, or both” (p. A35). In this article, the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems was quoted as reporting that, in the past two years, there has been a “significant increase in the number of states seriously considering—or actively piloting—standardized testing as a deliberate element of higher education policy.”
Clearly many people believe we need to improve the quality of higher education. But what changes need to be made?
Base Need: Significant Learning Experiences for Students
Beneath each of these several levels of concern is a fundamental need and that is for students to have a significant learning experience. If this could happen more frequently and more consistently in higher education, everyone—faculty, students, parents, institutions, and society at large—would be much more satisfied with the quality of higher education than they are at the present time.
Significant Learning Experiences
One way of focusing this issue is to search for ways of providing students with significant learning experiences. If we can find ways to identify and create learning experiences that students and others can agree are truly significant, we will have made important progress in our effort to improve the quality of higher education. What might such learning experiences be like?
The central idea of this phrase—“significant learning”—is that teaching should result in something others can look at and say, “That learning experience resulted in something that is truly significant in terms of the students’ lives.” How can we properly define and characterize that kind of learning experience?
First of all, it means that we want students in our courses to do something more than just put information about the course content into their short-term memory. Research has shown that this kind of learning results in most students not being able to recall this information even a short time later. By contrast, significant learning is learning that makes a difference in how people live—and the kind of life they are capable of living. We want that which students learn to become part of how they think, what they can and want to do, what they believe is true about life, and what they value—and we want it to increase their capability for living life fully and meaningfully.
This ambitious goal in teaching has two requirements. First, it requires multiple kinds of specific learning by students, that is, something more than understanding and remembering discipline-related information. The taxonomy of significant learning that will be introduced in the next chapter identifies six kinds of learning that can contribute to this requirement. Second, significant learning requires that we help students connect what they learn in our courses with their “life file” rather than just with their “course file.” This reflects my observation that students seem to have two files in their head. The course file is where they put everything they learn in school or in the university; they draw on this file only when they take tests, do homework, and so on. The other is their life file; this is where they put the lessons from their everyday life, and they draw on this file for all their life decisions, questions, actions, and so on. Sometimes it seems like these two files are totally disconnected. If we want to promote significant learning, we need to help students connect what they learn in our courses with their life file. In general, this means drawing from students’ past and current life experiences when building the basis for their learning and then linking new learning to possible future life experiences.
We also need to recognize that a significant learning experience has both a process and an outcome dimension. And each of these dimensions has two features, as shown in Exhibit 1.1.
In a powerful learning experience, students will be engaged in their own learning, there will be a high energy level associated with it, and the whole process will have important outcomes or results. Not only will students learn throughout the course but by the end of the course they will also clearly have changed in some important way—they will have learned something important. And that learning will have the potential for changing their lives in an important way. It has been my observation that all significant learning has the potential to improve people’s lives in one or more of the following ways:
Enhancing our individual lives:
Developing an ability, for example, to enjoy good art and music, developing a thoughtful philosophy of life, and so on
Enhancing our social interactions with others:
Knowing how to engage others in more positive ways in both formal and informal relationships
Become more informed and thoughtful citizens:
Developing our readiness to participate in civic activities at one or more levels, for example, the local community, state government, national government, and international advocate groups
Preparing us for the world of work:
Developing the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for being effective in one or more professional fields
An Analogy
As a person who enjoys good restaurants, I see an analogy between what restaurants have to do to provide a high-quality dining experience and what colleges have to do to provide a high-quality educational experience. Without meaning to slight other important factors, three key aspects of a good dining experience are an inviting menu, well-prepared food, and prompt and thoughtful service. If any one of these ingredients is missing, the quality of the dining experience is significantly lowered. But the quality of the food is especially important: this is the fundamental reason for going to a restaurant in the first place. If the food is not well prepared, the restaurant is going to have problems, no matter how exciting the menu or how friendly the wait staff.
Similarly, in higher education, colleges need to assemble good curricula, good instruction, and good faculty who can interact well with students. If any one of these is not done well, the quality of the educational experience suffers significantly. Again, though, the quality of the instruction is critically important. This is the fundamental reason people go to college. If the instruction is not done well, it does not matter how exciting the course titles in the curriculum or how kind the faculty; the overall learning experience will be deficient.
If we propose to change and improve higher education so that students will have more significant learning experiences, both the faculty and the institutions will need to make some big changes. Is this possible and likely?
Faculty: Ready for Change?
The question that all faculty face is this: “Should I spend the time and effort to learn about and implement new ways of teaching?” Essentially all faculty members feel more than fully loaded already with all their present teaching, research, and service obligations. So suggesting that faculty members take on a substantial new task aimed at their own professional development is no small issue. Their response to this question, then, would appear to rest on the issue of whether there is a good basis for saying, “Yes, I should invest in learning how to teach better.” Is there a potential benefit that has sufficient value and sufficient likelihood of happening that would justify the time and effort required?
The answer to this question lies within each faculty member. It is my experience and belief that nearly all faculty have deep inner dreams of what they would like their teaching to be like—and those dreams are significantly different from their ordinary, everyday experiences in the classroom. If some way could be found to encourage faculty to dream their dreams and to have a realistic hope of making these dreams a reality, they would have the basis they need for saying, “Yes, it is worthwhile for me to invest in learning how to be a better teacher.”
Do they have such dreams? Not only do they have dreams but they also have wonderful dreams. I have been giving numerous workshops on the subject of designing courses since 2001 from California to Connecticut, in large state universities, regional colleges, small private colleges, special-purpose institutions, and community colleges. The task of designing something is inherently creative, so I ask faculty to exercise their creativity by “dreaming and imagining” for a moment.
Imagine yourself teaching in a perfect situation, where the students will do anything and everything you ask of them. They will read everything and write everything you ask them to. They will do it on time and do it well. In this special situation, you can do anything you want as a teacher and can have any kind of impact on students that you desire. The only limitation is your own imagination.
Question: In your deepest, fondest dreams, what kind of impact would you most like to have on your students? That is, when the course is over and it is now one or two years later, what would you like to be true about students who have participated in your courses that is not true of others? What is the distinctive educational impact you would like for your teaching and your courses to have on your students?”
The creative energy that teachers pour into answering this question is immense, and the answers themselves are absolutely marvelous to behold. Typical responses include statements such as the following:
My dream is that students, one to two years after the course is over, will be able to . . .
Apply and use what they learn in real-life situations.
Find ways to make the world better, be able to make a difference.
Develop a deep curiosity.
Engage in lifelong learning.
Experience the “joy of learning.”
Take pride in what they have done and can accomplish, in whatever discipline or line of work they choose.
See the importance of community building, both at work and in their personal lives.
See the connections between themselves and their own beliefs, values, and actions and those of others.
Think about problems and issues in integrated ways rather than in separated and compartmentalized ways.
See connections among multiple perspectives.
See the need for change in the world and be a change agent.
Be creative problem solvers.
Develop key skills in life, such as communication skills.
Understand and be able to use the basic principles of my course.
Stay positive, despite the setbacks and challenges of life and work.
Mentor others.
Continue to grow as critical thinkers.
Value continuous improvement.
Following this dreaming exercise, I also ask faculty to individually make an artistic representation of their dream. This can be in whatever form they choose: a picture, a poem, a song, a mime, a simple dramatization, or whatever. Making a picture is the most common response but almost every workshop has elicited all the other forms as well. Then participants are asked to share their dreams and the artistic representations in small groups. Following this, each group selects something to share with the whole set of participants.
The process of illustrating and sharing dreams has the effect of enlarging and enhancing them in valuable ways. An example of this is the dream of Gina Masequesmay, a professor of Asian American studies at California State University at Northridge:
My dream is for my students to be able to think critically, to incorporate this thinking in their daily lives, and to share that knowledge and compassion with others in order to work toward a just world for all.
To be able to think critically is to first realize that knowledge/truth is conditioned by power. What that means is that one’s understanding of the world is biased by one’s social location in society, and therefore, all perspectives are partial. In order to have a fuller view of what is really happening in the world, one needs to step outside of one’s biased/cultural lens that limits one’s view and to be reflective of this process of attempting to be “critical” as opposed to accepting authority without questions.
The rest of her group then added their dreams to hers. They integrated critical thinking, compassion, and sharing with the dreams of reflexive thinking, continuity over time, and the goal of developing this learning in a step-by-step process.
These are exciting dreams. If we can find ways to do whatever needs to be done to make such dreams a reality, higher education will be more exciting and students will graduate with a very different kind of education than seems to be the norm at the present time.
Dreams such as these, though, raise the question of whether institutions of higher education—the places where faculty work and where these events all take place—are ready to change in ways that will support faculty change more effectively.
Institutional Change: Coming, Ready or Not!
Faculty members are not likely to make the decision to change without support from their institutions. They need to feel that their institutions truly value better learning and better teaching and are willing to provide faculty with what they need in order to learn new ways of teaching: time, encouragement, institutional centers that can provide the ideas that faculty need, reward, and so on. Are institutions ready to change? The view in many circles is that such change is not an option or a choice for institutions; it is inevitable. Change is going to happen, whether institutions are ready for it or not. What is the nature of this change and what is driving it?
The Forces Driving Institutional Change
Since about 1990, a number of voices have been predicting that higher education is about to undergo major change and have advocated for that change. What they see coming is a structural change, prompted in part but not solely by new technology. Included in this change is the need for a new vision of what constitutes “good learning” and the kind of pedagogy that will generate that kind of learning.
One of the voices is that of Dolence and Norris, whose short but visionary report, Transforming Higher Education (1995), presents the general view that society is undergoing a fundamental transformation from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. One consequence of that change is that most social institutions will also be transformed, including higher education. Society and individual learners now have different needs, in terms of both what people need to learn and how they can and should learn. Dolence and Norris’s formulation of the different characteristics associated with learning in the Industrial Age and the Information Age are shown in Exhibit 1.2.
Based in part on the special capabilities of information technology, the primary force that will drive change in higher education is the fact that traditional institutions are about to lose their “exclusive franchise,” that is, their monopoly on providing postsecondary learning. New providers have already appeared and are competing effectively for students: corporate universities, the University of Phoenix (offering a combination of classes at distributed sites and online courses; see http://www.phoenix.edu), and Virtual University (a completely online university; see http://ksurf.net/vu). Universities that stick to the Industrial Age or factory model will probably continue to exist but will increasingly be at a competitive disadvantage. Traditional universities are insufficiently flexible; they focus on processes and outputs (graduates) rather than on outcomes (significant learning) and they operate in a way that generates high cost (Dolence and Norris, 1995). If the new vendors succeed in unbundling the degree package and offering students a high-quality learning experience focused on what learners need and want, offering certification of that learning, and doing so at greater convenience or lower cost or both, they will attract a significant amount of enrollment away from traditional institutions and deservedly so. Unless, of course, traditional institutions make some significant changes and offer programs that meet these same requirements. Either way, the key requirement will be the ability to offer a high-quality learning experience. The advantage will go to those institutions that learn how to do that better, sooner, and at the least cost (calculated in terms of time and effort as well as money).
Does anyone else think these changes are likely to happen? Frank Newman, former president of the Education Commission of the States, argued that higher education is entering a period of major change and, at the beginning of this century he identified four major forces that are driving this change (Newman, Couturier, and Seurey, 2004):
In Newman’s view, the first of the four forces driving many of the other changes is information technology. This technology is now sufficiently widespread and sufficiently sophisticated that whole courses and curricula offered completely online are rapidly becoming commonplace.
The unique capabilities of information technology are stimulating a second force for change, the rapid emergence of new providers of educational services. Corporate organizations and for-profit educational companies are growing rapidly in their offerings of discrete learning packages as well as traditional degree programs.
This combination of new providers and new modes of delivering educational services is leading to the third force for change: the globalization of higher education. Educational institutions both in the United States and elsewhere are marketing and offering their courses and degree programs worldwide. One highly visible example of this is Cardean University, a consortium of four American universities (Chicago, Stanford, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon) and the London School of Economics, which are offering business degrees globally.
Finally, the foregoing changes also interact with new kinds of students. In the United States, increasing numbers of older students, minority students, and first-generation students continue to seek higher education. In addition, traditional kinds of students are coming into higher education with a greater familiarity with computers and often with part-time jobs. Some of these students will be looking for traditional kinds of educational experiences; others will stay at home and seek their education in a new form of delivery from a provider who can be located anywhere in the world.
Newman predicted that, as a result of these four forces for change, a much higher level of competition than in the past will characterize higher education in the future and the whole enterprise will become much more learning centered. In the years since 2000, we have seen all of Newman’s predictions affirmed. As a result, institutions of higher education are facing significant new pressures to become more open to change. And as this happens, leaders in colleges and universities are realizing they must be more ready than in times past to make significant changes in the way they operate.
Leading Toward the Right Kind of Change
As administrative and faculty leaders face this era of major change, the question clearly is not whether they should change but what kind of change they should attempt to make. Historically, higher education in the United States has responded to calls for change when these voices became strong enough. This happened, for example, in the mid-1800s when land-grant universities were established for the purpose of providing a more application-oriented education, in the late 1800s when universities introduced discipline-based research and departments, and in the mid-1900s when society called for greater access to higher education by nontraditional kinds of students.
Since the 1980s a similar chorus of voices has been calling for another change, a change in how students learn and especially in what they learn. In a sense, these voices are describing the dreams that others in society have for higher education, and these dreams are coming from both national organizations and from well-informed individuals.
National Organizations
One of the earliest voices to catch national attention on this subject came from a study group in the National Institute of Education (NIE). Their report, Involvement in Learning (1984), acknowledged the positive changes that have occurred in American higher education but also expressed their concern about some problems: problems in student achievement, a shift in undergraduate programs toward narrow specialization, a decline in the attractiveness of faculty careers, and others. They also noted that traditional ways of measuring excellence were inadequate because they focused on resources and inputs, not on “what students actually learn and how much they grow as a result of higher education” (p. 15). The group then urged institutions of higher education to produce demonstrable improvements, not only of “student knowledge” but also in students’ “capabilities, skills, and attitudes between entrance and graduation” (p. 15). This was one of the earliest and strongest calls for college courses to go beyond “content learning.”
One year later the Association of American Colleges (AAC) sponsored a project called “Redefining the Meaning and Purpose of Baccalaureate Degrees.” The language and tone of this report was stronger and even more critical than the NIE report. The opening statement sounded a wake-up call to American higher education:
The educational failures of the United States are emerging as a major concern of the 1980s. . . . Our report addresses the crisis in American education as it is revealed in the decay of the college course of study and in the role of college faculties in creating and nurturing that decay. . . .
As for what passes for a college curriculum, almost anything goes. We have reached a point where we are more confident about the length of a college education than about its content or purpose. [AAC, 1985, pp. 1–2]
