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.