Category: Triggering Event

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Designing Aligned Learning Experiences

Create 2-3 intended learning outcomes for an area of knowledge or skill within your area of expertise or training. Then create a learning activity (or two) aligned to one or more of those intended learning outcomes.

Learners in this course will:

  1. Develop an appreciation of the multi-faceted ways in which interpersonal communication is used in personal and professional contexts;
  2. Develop an understanding of key interpersonal communication approaches – recognizing the importance of context and connection.
  3. Become empowered to seek out areas of personal growth and change agency within interpersonal communication endeavours.

The first activity asks students to describe three different scenarios in their own lives (with names/ identifiers removed for confidentiality purposes) in which interpersonal communication was seen as highly effective – related to work, personal or family relationships, etc. They will reflect on these scenarios in writing, grappling with the following question: What components of the interaction made this communication effective? Students will be then asked to do the same exercise, but to describe instead scenarios in which interpersonal communication was seen as lacking. What elements were seen as lacking, and how could the communication have been improved?

The next part of the activity involves an introduction to the ‘four factors of interpersonal communication’ described as follows by Joe Ricker. With these tools in-hand, students will be asked to break down, in a written statement, one of their above-mentioned ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ interpersonal communication scenarios, reflecting upon these within the context of the four factors – cultural, situational, developmental, physical.

Students will then report out on their reflections, and will be invited to engage with each others’ scenarios through facilitated group dialogue. Through this process, students become aware of a multitude of factors that impact upon interpersonal communications. While not all factors can be controlled, students will be invited to look at those factors over which they as individual agents have control, and to consider ways in which they might extend influence over these.

Through this activity, learners gain an appreciation for how diverse and multi-faceted interpersonal communication is, and of the many factors that influence it. They also begin to grapple with their own interpersonal communication approaches, and to become empowered in their own communicative agency.

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How has your view of the effective practice changed now that you have read more about teaching presence? In what ways did the effective practice that you identified show the characteristics of teaching presence? How could the idea of teaching presence have made the experience even more effective than it was?

The Documentary Communications course was powerful in the overt relevance of its content. I believe more could have been done within the course to spur discourse around student findings stemming from their research. Such tremendous insights emerged from students’ examination of their respective corporations; these might have achieved greater impact had they been skilfully and critically discussed and analyzed within a moderated learning framework.

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Questions 1 and 2: ‘Are there any gaps between your practice of offering feedback tos students and what Hattie recommends?’… and ‘In what ways can you improve the effectiveness of the feedback…”

A key lesson I took from Hattie’s piece relates to the importance of contextualizing feedback. By relating feedback to a student’s current and past relationship to course learning goals/objectives, and by outlining clear steps required by the student in order to close the gap between his/her/their current state of knowledge, understanding and/or action and that required within the course, a pathway is articulated by which a student’s success can be achieved. By focusing on this principle, I believe my feedback to students will gain contextual relevance.

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skarsten Leave a comment

What I now know that I didn’t previously:

I am struck by the difficulty researchers/analysts face in trying to ‘quantify’ participant learning journeys (and their successful completion of learning goals) within online environments. Researchers Garrison, Anderson and Archer, in their piece ‘Critical Thinking, Cognitive Presence, and Computer Conferencing in Distance Education’, attempt to conduct content analysis of particuar online learning texts; their work breaks apart the texts into coded elements which are then categorized and counted. I found this methodology probelmatic. The process, as I understand it, anonymizes and ‘fragments’ student interaction, such that it becomes part of a sea of anonymous data. What would be more interesting, it seems, is to track individual student text-based interactions with the course over time, to see how they shift and change, and to look at these change narratives in juxtaposition against the change narratives of others in the course. Still, though, in doing such work, an element of interpretation is needed… the researcher must at the same time take on the roles of scientist and storyteller.

Gaps/discrepancies:
I look forward to building meaning-making opportunities into the learning journey, recognizing these as tied into social landscapes.

Questions:
I love the notion of a ‘triggering event’, and identify (as a learner) with the feeling of being knocked off-centre / invited to come to terms with new and emerging paradigms. As a teacher, the question I pose to myself is – what are some of the best ways to cause this triggering to occur – to incite participants into a real and sustained mindset of critical thinking and self-reflection.

Examples of cognitive presence:
At one time I was a tutor-marker for an online Communications Course called ‘Documentary Communications’. One of the course aims was to enable students to uncover power dynamics at-play in major multi-national corporations by researching their financial statements, board connections, staff composition, etc. When students began to realize the extent to which these companies (like Amazon, Google, Disney, etc.) were interconnected, and to which power was centralized within them, they encountered an opportunity to undertake a ‘triggering event’, and to then integrate their new knowledge into an emerging framework of understanding. Some students were ready to engage with shift this while otherse were not; in any case, it was an interesting challenge to try and enable it.