I have been working on instructional goals for a class assignment. I am reworking my Dreamweaver classes based on backwards design and Fink’s significant learning, and I am struggling with how to translate my goals into significant learning. I want to teach my students more than Dreamweaver; my students must learn how to use Dreamweaver as a tool to meet their site’s and user’s needs.
Fink (2003) has devised a Taxonomy of Significant Learning (see figure below). He posits that quality teaching involves teaching Learning How to Learn, Foundational Knowledge, Application, Integration, Human Dimension, and Caring. I am working to integrate all these aspects into my for-credit classes, but I also teach all day technology education classes. I don’t have time to teach caring and human dimension, and I don’t know that these aspects would be appropriate in my classes. Let me know what you think.
Anyway, I have decided to integrate Learning How to Learn, Foundational Knowledge, Application, and Integration into my course design. These aspects are really important so my students will actually learn (I talked about this in a previous post). During class, my students not only need to tell me how to do a skill, but they need to demonstrate the skill, and integrate the skill into a project of their own.
Significant Learning Taxonomy
adapted from Fink, 2005
I need to figure out how to add a personal project into a one-day training, but how? An entry level class like Dreamweaver 1 requires more scaffolding, whereas Dreamweaver 2 students can tolerate less scaffolding and more personal work. This is where accounting for and integrating Foundational Knowledge (prior knowledge) will be important to helping students succeed when working on personal mini-projects during class.
I also need to think about teaching my students how to learn. I often tell them how to take notes, how to follow through on the projects, and how to use the learning materials. This seems to help them quite a bit. I have also been thinking about modeling good learning practices like using situational learning activities and social learning activities into my class.
References
Fink, L. D. (2003). Creating significant learning experiences. San Francisco, CA: John-Wiley & Sons.
Fink, L. D. (2005). Integrated course design [Electronic Version]. IDEA Center
Stout, J. C. (2001). Radical course revision: A case study. The National Teaching & Learning Forum, 10(4).
Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.
One Comment
Laura, what a thorough job you did on your situational factors and goals/objectives. The last page of your document, the learning goals really are what you need to turn your learning goals into significant learning. I see them as “value added goals” that when coupled with your technical software skill goals will meet the needs of your students and when they leave your class they will know so much more than just what menu/icon they need to click on.
As far as incorporating goals such as caring and human dimension into your technology courses, I think you can integrate them without having to add them on top of what you already do. But take caring for example, you want your students to value the technology skills you are teaching them and one way to do that is to make it relevant to their lives and needs. You want to make it more than just a skill they “have to” learn but instead something that when they learn it will empower them. Also, you do not have to include all of the 6 Fink taxonomy goals into one course, some goals lend themselves better to different types of courses and yo have to decide what you value and what you want to pass onto your students. There may actually be more goals than the 6 that Fink outlines.
How do you integrate a personal project into a one day entry level workshop? That is a tough one. But one suggestion may be to break what you will teach into generic topics. Like maybe setting up a page, adding text, adding graphic, adding links and linking pages and then have people work on adding their personal content as you walk them through the process so that you can scaffold them all going through the same process but they will be adding different text, picts and links. This way you will be focusing on providing foundational knowledge for the dreamweaver 1 students, and applying that to their own materials which is really a more appropriate goal for entry level students than integration.