Authentic Learning

According to Authentic Learning for the 21st Century: An Overview, an interesting white paper published by EDUCAUSE, we need to immerse our students in authentic learning activities because it is through this sort of learning that they will develop

• The judgment to distinguish reliable from unreliable information
• The patience to follow longer arguments
• The synthetic ability to recognize relevant patterns in unfamiliar contexts
• The flexibility to work across disciplinary and cultural boundaries to generate innovative solutions (p.2) 

If I am a writing teacher, then, my focus should not be what I want to teach my students about writing but how I can teach them to be writers.
 

While the article focuses on technology-based examples, it includes an interesting 10-point checklist that teachers can use to judge the authenticity of any learning component.

1. Real-world relevance: Authentic activities match the real-world tasks of professionals in practice as nearly as possible. Learning rises to the level of authenticity when it asks students to work actively with abstract concepts, facts, and formulae inside a realistic—and highly social—context mimicking “the ordinary practices of the [disciplinary] culture.”
2. Ill-defined problem: Challenges cannot be solved easily by the application of an existing algorithm; instead, authentic activities are relatively undefined and open to multiple interpretations, requiring students to identify for themselves the tasks and subtasks needed to complete the major task.
3. Sustained investigation: Problems cannot be solved in a matter of minutes or even hours. Instead, authentic activities comprise complex tasks to be investigated by students over a sustained period of time, requiring significant investment of time and intellectual resources.
4. Multiple sources and perspectives: Learners are not given a list of resources. Authentic activities provide the opportunity for students to examine the task from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives, using a variety of resources, and requires students to distinguish relevant from irrelevant information in the process.
5. Collaboration: Success is not achievable by an individual learner working alone. Authentic activities make collaboration integral to the task, both within the course and in the real world.
6. Reflection (metacognition): Authentic activities enable learners to make choices and reflect on their learning, both individually and as a team or community.
7. Interdisciplinary perspective: Relevance is not confined to a single domain or subject matter specialization. Instead, authentic activities have consequences that extend beyond a particular discipline, encouraging students to adopt diverse roles and think in interdisciplinary terms.
8. Integrated assessment: Assessment is not merely summative in authentic activities but is woven seamlessly into the major task in a manner that reflects real-world evaluation processes.
9. Polished products: Conclusions are not merely exercises or substeps in preparation for something else. Authentic activities culminate in the creation of a whole product, valuable in its own right.
10. Multiple interpretations and outcomes: Rather than yielding a single correct answer obtained by the application of rules and procedures, authentic activities allow for diverse interpretations and competing solutions.  (pp. 3 – 4)

Do any of those 10 checkpoints stand out to you with respect to an assignment that has worked well in your class? Please share a brief description of that activity—what you do and how it works?  Let’s start an authentic Lincoln learning list!

Problem-Solving Leading to Self-Renewal and Change

Guest Blogger: Dana Flint

Thank you for the opportunity to share some thoughts with you.

Not long before his tragic death in 1951, Albert Barnes sent a couple of pages of John Dewey’s Democracy and Education (pp. 177-178 of the 1916 edition, if you want to know) to his good friend Horace Mann Bond. Those pages emphasized the central role of thinking as problem-solving, and highlighted some educational emphases that Barnes hoped Lincoln would adopt. He highlighted the now familiar problem-solving steps of an initial sense of a problem, observation and investigation of factors, construction of solutions, hypotheses, and conclusions, and testing those constructions. In the spirit of Dewey, he understood that this process of problem-solving towards more “intelligent” adjustments (to use Dewey’s term) would be repeated again and again in the constant self-renewal of human living, and, Barnes hoped, in the self-renewal of the educational process at Lincoln. That was then. Nowadays, it seems that this is what we commonly do in our instructional approaches. Here are a few examples from my FYE class this semester:

• I wanted students to come away with a usable skill associated with each subject area in the course, for example, the module on Research. Previously, I brought students to a Library computer lab to receive instruction on searching Library databases. This year I continued in an analogous manner with an in-class demonstration using my laptop and a projector. But somewhere along the line I had a “sense of a problem.” Do students come away from such demonstrations with a usable skill? How could I know? So I got them to define some problems which were of interest to them: abortion, war and technology, global warming, and violence and Grand Theft Auto. Then I showed them a web site that demonstrated the format of annotated bibliographies, and asked them to submit an annotated bibliography, with five varied references, as a demonstration of their skill in doing research. Well, I am still in the process of “testing” (that is, assessing) this solution.
• Second, I thought the usable skill associated with the Speech module would be pretty easy: Let the students make speeches before the class and have another group of students evaluate them. I have done this before, but this semester I got a surprise. Instead of speeches, the students did PowerPoint presentations with the lights out and which ended with a movie, of course. The trouble was that there was a lot more high tech and a lot less speaking. So I went with the flow and found a web site containing a PowerPoint presentation on how to do PowerPoint presentations, and I presented this PowerPoint presentation while instructing the student-judges to critique the PowerPoint presentations of the students, using what they had learned about PowerPoint presentations. This seemed to represent a double process of self-renewal going on at instructional and learning levels.

Am I right in assuming that nowadays we commonly see the process of teaching and learning as a process of facilitating ever more educated adjustments to ourselves and world? Would the “Fitness for Life” course be another such example of this process, or would it not?