Organizationally Effective Teaching

[Roger Putzel]

At our wonderful post M-OBTS meeting, we discussed how to protect yourself when running a CAO. I just wrote up what I gleaned from that discussion and posted it to Google Drive.  Please comment and edit.  Here's the link: 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uDEh-Imf0CjqIZ55sqtmSmzhLJAjJzPT 

Roger

[Elyssebeth Leigh]

Thanks Roger,

This is a great list.

I think that Anne and I have been doing some of this in Mikkeli  - so this helps to extend how we help Joan and students understand the links between their perceptions of ‘learning’ and ours of supporting learning in new ways.

Great addition to resources.

E

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[steve....@omnicomocc.co.nz]

That seems to me to be a great list Roger. It fits my experience.

 

Based on that experience, I’d add another level of insurance (protection) when running CAO because I got caught out by  strongly entitled students anxiously competing for entry to Medical School from the Health Sciences programme I had developed a CAO course for.  The extra level is the bureaucratic system for written complaints. Here’s the story:

 

I was contracted by the Faculty of Medical Health Sciences’ School of Population Health to develop a new course to fill a gap that they had identified  in their Health Sciences programme. They called the gap Professional Competencies.  Broadly speaking, that meant collaborative behaviours: their graduates didn’t know how to collaborate because their learning experience was entirely individualistic and competitive and collaborative skills are increasingly highlighted as crucially weak in the Health sector in general. The expectation that a single undergraduate course would fix that problem was in itself a warning sign, but I accepted the challenge to develop and deliver a CAO course to expose the students to the experience of collaborative learning and  action.

 

I involved the university learning design specialists and head of programme and collaborated closely with a resident, long serving academic/teacher. My contract was signed by the Dean but it was beneath the Dean to be involved in developing or participating in the new course.  I was warned that students aiming for Medical School were rigid in their expectations: that they would resist any variation from standard academic practice and andragogy because that would put their plans at risk. So we took great pains to spell out, at every opportunity our objectives and the attendant logic of our course and andragogic design. We built internal and external course evaluation into the overall course and andragogical design. We figured we had covered all the bases.  

 

However, in the end we were scuppered by a written complaint, through the bureaucratic complaint system, by some of the most self-entitled  members who needed assurance of A grades. This bypassed all our collegial relationships  and understandings. Although I am skilled and experienced at operating in multicultural environments, the complaint was of cultural insensitivity, which is a hot button. The dean took immediate action to kill the issue by removing me from teaching the course. I stayed on in the background to run the process because no-one else was competent to replace me at that stage. The complaint included that I had referred to the students as raw materials, process operators and products of the education process, which is true: we had characterised the course as an operation to transform students by adding the capability to collaborate.  

 

The moral of the story is that some students may do anything to force the learning and qualification process into a form that’s familiar to them, and they will use any device to achieve that. Written complaints are feared by bureaucracies, and contract-developers are easy to terminate. I was able to force the university to pay me in full for developing the course but the ongoing staff development phase was dumped. I don’t know what happened to the course. My collaborating colleague retired and I think the others may have been commanded to cease connection with me because I threatened legal action to enforce the contract.   

 

It was  bad ending. The bureaucratic system was way bigger than the reach of our collegial development and delivery process and our meticulously designed and delivered andragogy.

 

I do have a good news story too, but another time.

 

Best Regards

 

Steve Barnett

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