Students often ask teaching faculty to help them make important decisions that will affect their lives in significant ways. “Should I drop this course? Should I pursue teaching or industry? Should I do graduate studies?” These questions can only be answered in the context
What do you want your students to learn? What really matters to you?
I’ll give you an example. William Carlos Williams once wrote,
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
“Learning Outcomes for Instructors, Not Just Students.” That was the title—and message—of an earlier article I wrote for The Teaching Professor. Writing it set me on an important path (or perhaps reminded me of the path I was already on): I am a learner alongside
I often wonder what students think about the assignments we create. In my experience, they frequently see assignments as having a limited and somewhat task-oriented relationship with their course work. Their concern about what counts for a grade is frequently one-dimensional and often usurps the
One of the challenges online learners face is sustaining motivation over the duration of the course. In face-to-face classrooms, teachers can personalize motivational strategies to meet the needs of individual students, and the social presence of teachers and fellow learners provides its own motivational incentives.
A learning assessment technique (LAT) is a three-part integrated structure that helps teachers to first identify significant learning goals, then to implement effectively the kinds of learning activities that help achieve those goals, and finally—and perhaps most importantly—to analyze and report on the learning outcomes
In the July 10, 2013 post, I shared some ideas about learning with students precipitated by an article that made an interesting distinction between “doing for” students and “learning with” students. The post generated some good responses and prompted Aron Reppmann, a philosophy professor
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Students often ask teaching faculty to help them make important decisions that will affect their lives in significant ways. “Should I drop this course?" "Should I pursue teaching or industry?" "Should I do graduate studies?” These questions can only be answered in the context of a student’s life goals. Of course, most people are vaguely aware of what they want to do with their lives. But to obtain concrete answers to these big questions, it helps to have explicit life goals. In this article, I describe a short writing exercise that helps students clarify their life goals.
The exercise comes from Alan Lakein’s How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life (1973, pp. 31–33), a classic of time management and goal setting. Throughout, I will describe how I do this exercise with individual students. I find that it is best to do the exercise one-on-one during office hours. To do it, you and a student will each need
I recommend doing the exercise on paper instead of electronically because I find that I engage more fully and write slower on paper. The exercise is described below in a format suitable for reading aloud with a student. It consists of three questions, which we freewrite about for two minutes each with additional time for revision.
Take a final two minutes to look at and revise your answers to all three questions.
At this point, I encourage you to do the exercise yourself before reading on. The three questions have a surprising amount of interplay and can generate rather startling answers. By doing the exercise by yourself, you will be much better prepared to deploy it in a teaching context.
In my experience, students usually ask big, life-altering questions during informal times, such as at the end of lecture or while walking back from class. Instead of immediately launching in to a half-baked answer unsuited to their particular goals, I ask them an even bigger question: “What do you want to do with your life?” This bigger question is usually met with some vague, off-the-cuff response. I then talk about the importance of explicit life goals for answering their question. We then arrange a meeting to do the life goals exercise and answer their original question.
Prior to our meeting, I send them a write-up of the life goals exercise. The intent of sending them the exercise in advance is to familiarize them with the process. At the meeting, I ask them their original question, we discuss the importance of context, then we do the exercise together. This is important; completing the exercise while the student completes it builds a sense of collaboration. (And let’s be honest: What would be weirder than writing down your life goals silently while your professor fiddles with their email?)
Once the exercise is complete, I ask the student their initial question again. With the added context of the exercise, most students come up with a reasonable answer. I never explicitly ask the student to share their life goals with me. If the student doesn’t immediately see the connection from their question to their life goals, then I talk them through possible connections between their studies and their goals. At this point, it is important not to be too heavy handed or preachy. The point of the exercise is to provide context, not a preamble for a lecture.
The life goals exercise is simple and takes almost no time. Yet, it has provoked some of the most meaningful conversations that I’ve ever had with students. It is a great help in contextualizing student’s questions in a way that they themselves find meaningful and helpful. I encourage you to try it out next time a student asks you a big question.
Lakein, A. (1973). How to get control of your time and your life. Signet.
Parker Glynn-Adey, PhD, is an assistant professor, teaching stream, at the University of Toronto Scarborough Campus, where he teaches large, first-year math classes.
