Responding to Feedback
I’ve received very specific feedback from students, which is taken seriously and incorporated into courses when feasible.
DHD 555 Changes
- Shortened legal quiz
- Reduced reading list
- Changing the nature of discussion posts (see below)
DHD 548 Changes
- Restructured course to better align lectures with assignments
- Cut assignments in half and alternated them (posts vs assignments)
- Reduced training critiques
Infusing Social Learning
My course (DHD 555) is project-based. Each student in the course selects a child/young adult with whom they work professionally in the schools. (Flexibility of using one’s own child or an acquaintance is offered). The project is divided into five components that build on each other and function as formative assessments (if the student doesn’t perform well, they are given feedback and an opportunity to re-do case study assignments without penalty). The final project is an AT assessment report that combines the component assignments. It must be written in lay-person language (i.e. parent-friendly) and the way the report is constructed should represent the professional’s understanding of the AT process in schools.
My teaching philosophy is basically constructivist (the case study project) with a strong emphasis on cognitive apprenticeship. I designed the course as an individual apprenticeship (with me as the experienced coach) given the constraints of asynchronous online teaching. But what’s missing is a strong element of social learning. Optional live Zoom session every three weeks provide a little bit of social learning. These live sessions are not lectures. Instead, students share their case study component assignments with each other and get feedback from me and other students. However, they only occur four times during the course. In between, students submit their work to me inside private Bb assignment modules. The only public posting of their work is at the very end of the course, when they post their final report in a discussion thread.
When I originally designed the course, I assumed the students would be more comfortable with private submissions. I could give them individual feedback and they wouldn’t be forced to share. There was also a concern for privacy, as the case-study projects involve real children. But as I reflected on the social construction of learning (social cognitivism), I realized that I had deliberately prevented students from interacting with each other around their case study project because it seemed too messy, too risky, and too hard to do asynchronously. Yes, students post weekly to the discussion board, but I framed these posts as “reflections” – essentially private musings on questions related to course content with no expectation that students interact with each other in their discussion posts. Several years ago, I did try requiring “responses” within the discussion forum but was dissatisfied with the interactions. The weekly flow of units had to be interrupted with a mid-week deadline for the first post so that students would have time to respond to each other by the end of the week. This meant that my students, busy working professionals, would have to digest the course content sufficiently at the beginning of the week to make a coherent discussion post by midweek, whereas I wanted them to have the full week (including the weekend) to fit in the content acquisition (video lectures and readings). So, I turned the discussion post into blog-like reflections with no interaction between students. I personally enjoyed reading these posts because my grading rubric asked students to make connections to personal experiences. Later, I asked them to post two quotes from the readings and reflect on them. I found these posts helpful as a gauge of student learning, but they completely lacked social interaction. Although the posts are public, and although I sometimes responded to students in the public thread, the students did not respond to each other and it was clear they were writing the post to me. Essentially, it was a journaling activity, which is sometimes an appropriate strategy but precludes social learning. I’ve realized that I want to turn the discussion forum (or some version of it) into a social learning activity that is centered around the case study project. But how?
I found the answer in an exploration of the Community of Inquiry model. I concluded that I can use discussion posts or similar asynchronous technology (e.g. VoiceThread, FlipGrid) to infuse social learning in my course if it is embedded in the process of inquiry. The essential question that drives my course is: What should the process for considering and assessing assistive technology in schools look like? There is no research-based answer to this question, only a few practice guides, some of which are more developed than others. I propose two models in my course: My own problem-solving-based model and Education Tech Points (Bowser & Reed, 2012). I actually steer students to my own process in the way I constructed the assignments, but I would like the students to grapple more deeply with questions about the “black box” of AT assessment process so that they make it their own.
According to the Community of Inquiry model, social learning needs to be tightly integrated with the inquiry. So, there needs to be more than just having students post their assignment in a public thread and comment on each other’s case studies. There needs to be a structure that facilitates asking questions about the AT assessment process rather than just posting superficial comments (e.g. “Good job. Nice work.”). The students probably need a “teaching presence” in the form of guiding questions that need to be posed to themselves (reflection) and of each other.
My next project is to draft a completely different structure for the discussion posts that I think will increase the amount of social learning in my course. I’ve decided to address the problem of post frequency by using a 2-week model, where posts in the first week are responded to in the second week. Students will share their case study assignments as springboards for inquiry around the AT process in schools. Some posts will be in the Bb discussion forum, others will use VoiceThread (assignment sharing). Implementation planned for Spring 2021.