Nancy Winfrey
Abstract
This article outlines a design framework that moves students through a complete learning cycle requiring critical thinking and collaborative application of content and transfer of learning; and a faculty development workshop where this process was presented to higher education instructors, for use in their courses.
For more than 900 years, lectures have been a backbone of teaching in higher education, and even with the more recent shift from teacher-centered to learner-centered pedagogies, lecturing remains a staple in many college classrooms (Harrington & Zakrajsek, 2017). At our University Center for Teaching Excellence (CTE), we strive to engage faculty in a specific, evidence-based approach that utilizes the familiar lecture, but in conjunction with a framework called the Learning Task from the Learning Dialogue work of Dr. Jane Vella (2008).
The Learning Task taps prior knowledge, and encompasses peer collaboration, critical application, and transfer of learning. Using the Learning Task framework promotes a deeper learning experience for students, compared to simply listening and taking lecture notes. In my role as Faculty Developer, I am a constant advocate for this approach and work to equip our research-focused faculty with this user-friendly and effective strategy. The Learning Task is comprised of four parts, all beginning with the letter “A.” Anchor, Add, Apply, and Away.
The Learning Task Workshop
To prepare faculty to utilize the Learning Task framework, our University Center for Teaching Excellence developed a ninety-minute workshop entitled The Learning Task Framework: Using Dialogue Education to Inform Learning Design. As part of the workshop, our workshop participants model students who are learning via the Learning Task framework.
Vella (2008) advocates for achievement-based objectives. For participants’ enactment of the Learning Task, the achievement-based objective is: Identify the healthiest ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Equally, our overall workshop design adheres to the Learning Task format (Anchor, Add, Apply, Away). The workshop has been provided in-person in our training room, which accommodates 24 faculty, four to a table, with a typical mix of undergraduate and graduate instructors and also through Zoom.
Verbose Presenter Case Study. After the usual welcome, housekeeping details, and agenda overview, the workshop opens with the case study of a community development presentation. In the case study, the trainer is too verbose, and the audience is disengaged. Our workshop participants easily commiserate with the audience in the case study, who came to the community development presentation with hopes of being involved in a collaborative process of change.
This case study provides an affective Anchor, because our workshop participants connect to their own frustration or disengagement with a never-ending speaker, as opposed to an opportunity to engage themselves.
In small groups, faculty work for ten minutes to analyze the scenario with the following discussion prompts: What do you see happening here? Why do you think it is happening? We follow with a brief sampling of how the small group conversations unpacked the scenario, which typically focuses on the extended monologue from the community development presentation facilitator and the lack of audience engagement in any learning activities.
How Adults Learn. The presenter provides a ten-minute overview of the adult education work of Malcolm Knowles’ adult learning assumptions (Knowles, Holton, & Swanson, 1998), and how they are foundational to the Learning Task framework. Knowle’s premises are: adult learners are problem-centered, they learn when they are ready, they are self-directed, and they have varied life experiences. For each assumption, I ask a participant to provide a quick example.
Our workshop participants are deepening their learning by accessing their prior knowledge to provide the illustrations.They are involved in the second Learning Task component, Adding information.
Modeling a Learning Task
Participants then practice the Learning Task’s components – Anchor, Add, Apply, and Away with a fun, mock learning experience. This is our workshop’s Application segment.
Faculty spend fifteen minutes engaging in the Learning Task framework, as they work to achieve the identified learning objective: Identify the healthiest ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Anchor. The participants’ Anchor is the opening question, “What memories do peanut butter and jelly sandwiches have for you? When or where did you eat them?” This open question is an affective connection (for those who ate these sandwiches as a child) and gets the imagination started.
The Anchor taps personal narratives to foster self-reflection, leverages prior experience or knowledge, and creates community in the classroom. Brookfield (2015) encourages faculty to teach students how to articulate what they already know, and to utilize that knowledge in their process of learning new material. Neuroscience suggests that connecting past experiences to new learning facilitates long term memory (Zull, 2002).
Add. For Add, participants are provided with a graphic organizer with three columns: peanut butter, jelly, and bread. Participants list their childhood brands and then do some cell phone research on nutritional information on those brands. This work can be done in collaborative, small groups or as a large group activity. Within Add, learners gain new understanding of concepts, theory, or other relevant information. In a class, lecture would be situated here, or new content can be introduced with video clips, TedTalks, podcasts, cartoons, academic articles – even material generated by the students, themselves.
Apply. Workshop participants analyze their favorite sandwich ingredients and create a “recipe” for the most nutritious peanut butter and jelly sandwich, including the rationale for each choice. In Apply learners use the new content to deepen understanding, advance skill development, or make new connections. To begin the application process immediately in the workshop has several benefits. First, the workshop facilitator is present and can clarify the task, answer process questions, affirm correct answers or solutions, and get a sense of the students’ comprehension level. A second benefit is workshop facilitators can leverage peer instruction, feedback, or group work to deepen the learning. Finally, workshop participants build confidence, as they engage successfully with new information, rather than struggling to implement a practice on their own, back in their classrooms.
Away. The workshop participants transfer the learning experience to their pantry at home, by analyzing another favorite food and considering healthier alternatives. Away refers to contextualization, that is, integrating the content in authentic, meaningful, and critical ways beyond the classroom.
Once the framework is familiar (and the laughter has died down!) faculty create or return to small working groups, three or four at the most, and revisit the community development meeting case study. With a time budget of twenty minutes, each small group uses that context to create one learning objective aligned with Bloom’s taxonomy, followed by a Learning Task designed for a deeper learning experience than the opening scenario is describing. Each group is supplied with markers and chart paper to record the learning objective and their responses to each of the Learning Task’s segments (Anchor, Add, Apply, Away). This is a second layer of Apply where the focus shifts from understanding the process to applying it in a more critical and creative way to a real-life scenario.The process depends on the successful use of communication, respect, and collaboration – all deeper learning components.
As each group completes the Learning Task, they post their chart paper design around the room.Ten minutes is allotted for a Gallery Walk, where faculty move around the room, viewing their colleagues’ work and adding written feedback – affirmation and suggestions to the chart papers.
At the end of the workshop, to debrief, faculty discuss with a colleague the questions,“How might this workshop be useful to you? What is one idea or practice will you take forward?” These reflections provide the Away part of our workshop, as our participants are integrating and contextualizing, to their own students and teaching, what they have learned in the workshop.
Because our workshop participants engage in the Learning Task with peers, it is a safe, productive, and engaging process. A simple lecture on nutrition would be missing the deeper learning of personal connection, critical thinking, creative problem solving, and collaborative engagement.
We use “Identify the healthiest ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich,” as the workshop activity’s achievement-based learning objective to keep the focus neutral, as our participants teach a variety of subjects. Table 1.1 and Table 1.2 exemplify how the Learning Task framework can be used in a biology course, and in a history, civics, or leadership course.
Table 1.1
Specific Learning Task Framework Components Applied to Stated Objective – Biology Class Example
| Achievement-Based Objective: Describe the interconnections of a healthy ecosystem | ||
| 4 As | Process / Content | Materials Needed |
| Anchor | Think/Pair/Share: Remember a time that one crazy thing led to another? What were all the factors involved? Set a timer for one minute of silence. Turn to your neighbor and share stories. Do you see any similarities? Were the details positive or negative? Hear a sampling of conversation by asking for a couple of volunteers to share. Make the point that many things are connected, whether or not they are visible or explicitly stated. Connections can spiral up or down depending on many variables. | Timer |
| Add | Read this short article describing a local ecosystem. Underline any text that addresses, explains, or questions connection. | Copies of the article |
| Apply | Using the large drawing paper provided, map out the cycles mentioned in the article and draw the connections as you imagine them. Include text that explains how, why and/or when the connection has impact on the system. | Large sheets of blank paper |
| Away | Small Group Discussion: In groups of three, share your infographics and rationale. Focus your discussion on these prompts: How is this ecosystem impacted by the human community that surrounds it? Where/when/how are healthy ecological connections disrupted? Why (or why not) should the local community understand these cycles and connections? After discussions, have each group report their conversation and capture the information on the whiteboard. Make connections and summarize as needed. | Whiteboard or Similar |
Table 1.2
The Learning Task Framework Components Applied to Stated Objective – History Class Example
| Achievement-Based Objective: Compare the Leadership Styles of Malcolm X and Dr. King | ||
| 4 As | Process / Content | Materials Needed |
| Anchor | Choose a short quote on the influence of leaders to start and sustain a movement. Project it on a screen or write it on the whiteboard. Direct students to take a couple of minutes to reflect. Small Group Discussion: ask students to gather in groups of three and respond to the quote based on their own experience, providing explanation or justification for their position. No right or wrong answer, just getting connected to the day’s content. | Quote |
| Add | Watch a short documentary comparing the leadership style of Malcom X with that of Dr. King. | Documentary and technology for viewing |
| Apply | Stand Where You Stand Activity: Make the statement, “The civil rights movement would have been more effective under the leadership of Malcom X than Dr. King.” Direct students to “stand” physically where they “stand” ideologically in reference to the statement. They should all get up and move to the posted response of their choice. Once they have three groups, direct them to create a message supporting their position. They should use cell phones to gather data, real evidence, or facts and not simply reply on opinion. You can also assign a visual aid they will display while they present their position. Those in the “Not Sure” category should compile a list of questions and concerns and use the internet to find answers. After 15 minutes of small group work give the “Agree” group five minutes to present their position, followed by five minutes for the “Disagree” group. Direct students once again to “stand” where they “stand” and see if there are any changes. | Signs posted on three different walls reading: Agree Disagree Not Sure Chart paper and markers |
| Away | Large Group Discussion: Why is it important to do your research? How does it feel to change your mind? What connections can you make to the current political and/or civil issues? What is important in a leader? Or any number of good questions that suite your purpose. |
To summarize, let me unpack how our workshop’s overall design implements the Learning Task framework.The case study provides an Anchor to the common experience of boring or irrelevant workshops, classes, or meetings.There is motivation there to make change.
We Added information about the Learning Task framework, as new content, and then Applied it, first collectively in a low-stakes, fun way, and later in small groups focused on authentic learning objectives. The learning was deepened by the collaboration of colleagues in design, and their subsequent feedback during the Gallery Walk. For Away, participants discussed with a partner ways they might utilize the Learning Task framework in their specific courses, taking the learning away from the workshop and into each person’s context.
The Learning Task design model, which is supported by neuroscience research on how the brain learns (Taylor & Marienau, 2016) is simple and useful for structuring both professional development workshops and academic classes. Center for Teaching Excellence provides workshops on a range of topics for faculty from eight of our university colleges. Our workshops are, for example, Learning Task Training Session for Faculty Fellows, which is discussed in Winfrey & Dentith (2020), Teaching in the Virtual Compressed Classroom, Wrapping Up Your Class, and Creating Rubrics for Course Assessment, all of which are structured around the Learning Task.
In designing workshops structured with the Learning Task, we work to overcome the challenge of preparing relevant, interesting, meaningful content and specific activities for each of the four components of the framework. Persuading faculty to adopt new teaching strategies, also, is sometimes a challenge. For example, instructors who were taught via lecture and see their value as a teacher evidenced in the expertise demonstrated in those lectures, may disregard the benefits of structured, active learning. Yet it is their very expertise that enables them to design a Learning Task that is complex, relevant, and engaging!
In our workshops, participants experience the energy of constructive dialogue, outbursts of laughter, support of peer feedback, and the satisfaction of completing the assigned deliverables. It is easier for instructors to implement a new teaching strategy when they, themselves, have engaged in the process. The power of having experienced the process in our workshops is evidenced in the energy with which instructors bring the process into their classrooms. In the end, our students reap the benefits of deeper learning.
References
Brookfield, S. (2015). The skillful teacher: On technique, trust, and responsiveness in the classroom. San
Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishing.
Harrington, C., & Zakrajsek, T. (2017). Dynamic lecturing: Research-based strategies to enhance lecture
effectiveness. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
Knowles, M., Holton, E., & Swanson, R. (1998). The adult learner. Houston, TX: Gulf Publishing
Taylor, K., & Marienau, C. (2016). Facilitating learning with the adult brain in mind: A conceptual and
practical guide. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishing.
Vella, J. (2008). On teaching and learning: Putting principles and practices of dialogue education into
action. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishing.
Winfrey, N., & Dentith, A.M. (2020). Faculty Fellows: A promising program using the power of dialogue
education. Learning and Teaching Journal, (2)2, 464-470.
Zull, J. (2002). The art of changing the brain: Enriching the practice of teaching by exploring the biology of learning. Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.
Nancy Winfrey, PhD is a Faculty Developer at the Center for Teaching Excellence, North Carolina A&T State University. She has 25 years experience in corporate training, nonprofit management, instructional design, and adult education. For future correspondence use nvwinfrey@ncat.edu.