I'm thinking a lot at the moment about the best way to teach career education. Career training courses advocate an interactive approach to group sessions, with information interspersed with interactive exercises. My experience though suggests that in practice, career sessions tend to end up being more information based and lecture style than interactive. My view is shaped by my own practice, and my observation of colleagues, and although I'm sure there is probably a lot of really excellent interactive practice going on that I haven't come across, I wonder if in general our career group sessions should be more interactive?
Colleagues I speak to give a range of reasons for lecture style input: it's client expectations, it's big groups, it's time pressures. And this all has made me question whether this is actually the best way - are interactive exercises actually helpful? What makes me think they are any better than lecture style?
So I've found a paper. Michael (2006) has done all the hard work for me, and provides a summary of the evidence that active learning works. Michael's agenda is slightly different from mine. He is looking for the best way to teach science to University students whereas I am after good practice for career education. But even though we are not teachers, we are still in the business of getting our clients to learn, so I think there is a lot we can take from this evidence.
Michael comes out very much in favour of active learning, and feels strongly that not enough of it is seen in university education at the moment. In his introduction he goes as far as to say "it would be difficult to design an educational model that is more at odds with current research on human cognition that the one that is used in most colleges and universities".
He presents the 'big five' findings from learning research which to my mind, make a pretty compelling case for keeping career workshops interactive.
1. Learning is all about integrating new information with old. We start with what we already know and add anything new we learn to what is there already. If new information is presented without any reference to existing information, then students don't have the opportunity to integrate the new with the old and learning is less effective.
2. Learning facts is different from learning to do something. Simply teaching the facts does not equip students to do anything with the facts. So telling students that filling their CVs with power words is a good idea is different from equipping them to change their CVs; they need to have a go at doing it and then get feedback on their efforts in order to develop the ability to do anything with the facts.
3. Transferring knowledge from one context to another is surprisingly difficult. Giving an example of how something should be done (eg hearing an excellent interview answer on its own does not allow students to see how they themselves should answer a question). Students need to see how they themselves would answer a tricky interview question in order to understand how to use the information.
4. People learn better when they learn together. Talking and listening to others leads to better learning than sitting and listening to a lecture.
5. Putting ideas into words helps people work out what they think.Interactive exercises allow people to talk about their ideas and in articulating them, their thoughts develop and crystalise.
If these really are the key findings from a generation of research about learning, then I think we need to pay attention. There hasn't been very much research into what works in a career context, but evidence in a range of academic disciplines seems to suggest that this is simply how people learn - and there is nothing to suggest that learning about careers is any different from any other kind of learning.
My confidence is restored. Career sessions should always be interactive. They should always get participants to think about where they are now, and to build on their current position. They should include exercises where they put their own thoughts into words and share those words with others, and they should allow students to try out the skills they're focusing on, not just tell them the theory.
Michael, J. (2006) What's the evidence that active learning works? Advanced Physiological Education 30, 159 - 167
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