TAADEL503A Provide advanced facilitation to support learning
Reflect on teaching, facilitation and learning practices
Throughout all the sections in the topic and in many of the readings the concept of self-efficacy has been reinforced. While mostly discussed with regard to the student, this focus should be broadened to include the facilitator's own development. The concept of self-reflection, establishing a clear sense of purpose and monitoring progress all are as relevant to the facilitator's own professional development as the learners'.
The wider issues relating to building a professional development plan and linking the development of one's own personal and professional practices to a formal process is covered in detail in TAAENV501A Maintain and Enhance Professional Practice.
The following reading focusses on the learner/student to once again illustrate how self-efficacy and career development are critical factors for the facilitator/teacher.
Reading 6
Brown, BL (1999), ' Self-Efficacy Beliefs and Career Development', ERIC Digest no. 205, Copyright 1998, US Department of Education, with permission from the Adult Career and Vocational Learning (ACVE). Available at http://www.cete.org/acve/docgen.asp?tbl=digests&ID=89 .
Encouraging learning and teaching theory: A cognitive approach
Hint
Cognitive theorists have argued for nine basic instructional design approaches to enhance learning and the transfer of theory to students. The following nine approaches are based on Wilson and Cole (1991), Cognitive teaching models and are covered by more recent works that can be sourced from Reading 1 (Bowles).
- Focus on balancing the tacit or heuristic (unwritten rules) knowledge with the applied and codified knowledge.
- Situate the learning by teaching knowledge and skills in contexts that reflect the way the knowledge will be useful in real life.
- Use modeling and explaining to show how a process unfolds and give reasons it happens that way.
- Coach the learner and observe and give feedback while they complete tasks.
- Enable the learners to think about their actions and articulate why they chose particular decisions and strategies, thus making their tacit knowledge more explicit.
- Encourage reflection so that the learner can look back over their efforts to complete a task and analyse their own performance.
- Encourage learners to explore different strategies and hypotheses, discover and observe their effects.
- Sequence learning from simple to complex, with increasing diversity, and global before local skills.
- Promote improved teaching, facilitation and learning practice ideas and theories.
