Connecting the Dots

Once my implementation plan has been approved, course development will be one of the most important tasks I take on to ensure significant learning environments are being created for students on my campus. For students to truly be able to maximize learning in these environments, I need to design courses that are just as significant and do not follow the typical teaching mode. I need to design courses that will allow learners to connect dots rather than collect dots.

Although making meaningful connections is central to learning, many in the teaching field do not subscribe to it often. One reason this may be is because connecting dots is often more difficult to assess. Collecting dots is a task of “understanding and remembering” facts. As teachers, we just have to teach the information and have learners give it right back to us via a competency-based assessment. Connecting dots, however, requires more thought. Rather than just remembering facts, students have to understand the relationship between those facts and how they all work together towards a common idea. This makes connecting dots more difficult to “put a grade on”. Another reason many in education may not subscribe to connecting dots too often is because the outcome-based, connecting dots style of teaching is one that most of us did not experience very much throughout our own educational careers. With standardized testing, most of us have been trained in the more competency-based collecting dots model that mirrors the conceptual regurgitation they will need to exhibit to pass the test. Since this is all we have known, this is what we practice with our students. After reading and listening about the effectiveness of connecting dots this week, however, I realize I must make a change now from the collecting dots model to connecting dots model. And that change starts with course design, more specifically, the BHAG.

By establishing a BHAG (“big hairy audacious goal”) first in the course development process I am able to create a defining purpose for the course. The BHAG provides me with the holistic goal or ultimate destination I want learners to reach by the end of the course. If I know where I want my learners to go from the beginning, I am better equipped to design effective learning outcomes, activities, and assessments that can all align to help students make connections and stay on the right path towards successfully reaching the BHAG.

REFERENCES:

Fink, L. (2003). A Self-Directed Guide to Designing Courses for Significant ... Retrieved from https://learn-us-east-1-prod-fleet01-xythos.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/5c082f78d4ba4/2416403?response-content-disposition=inline; filename*=UTF-8''Self-Directed%20Guide%20to%20Course%20Design%20-%20Fink%20Summary.pdf&response-content-type=application/pdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20200316T112331Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=21599&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAZH6WM4PLTYPZRQMY/20200316/us-east-1/s3/aws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=3df80ceafec1564b01b49c5883b3ae0976d43dee5b7333590e739d37d4768ee2.

Harapnuik, D. (2015, August 15). EDLD 5313 Module 3. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=107&v=-QeLlWXdg_0&feature=emb_logo.

Harapnuik, D. (2016, June 16). Mapping Your Learner’s Journey. Retrieved from http://www.harapnuik.org/?p=6420.

TEDxYouth. (2012, October 16). STOP STEALING DREAMS: Seth Godin at TEDxYouth@BFS. [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXpbONjV1Jc.