Teachers learning about teaching and learning!

When we talk about effective instruction and positioning the learner as an active agent of change who transforms the world in powerful ways, the issue of teacher training becomes central. How do we, as educators, prepare learners to participate in such an interactive way? And also, how do we equip our pre-service teachers to respond to this need and better understand their students’ needs?

A new unit in Quest Atlantis hopes to provide answers to these questions and create a path towards pre-service teachers’ situated and contextualized learning. The unit consists of four missions that focus on cognitive development, learning theories, motivation, and assessment. The unit is currently offered as one of  IU’s undergraduate pre-service classes and is primarly available to teachers who are ready for their field experience. The key themes of providing agency, offering legitimate roles, and the illustrating opportunities to make a change in the world appear strongly throughout the whole experience, just as they do in our student experiences.

Learners enter the game as consultants in an educational evaluation company. The narrative involves a local school facing several dilemmas related toto ways of dealing with students and enhancing their participation, improving instruction and assessing learning. Eva, the boss at the Consulting Company, describes the situation, and then the consultants embark on a journey where they must interview experts, teachers, and students in the space, participate in online discussions, and play mini games that determine their trajectory. Teachers also develop a perspective which they adopt as they engage several key issues.

Throughout the unit teachers can reflect on the effectiveness of the instruction at the fictional school.  Students at this school appear unmotivated when the teacher assigns homework that is abstract or apart from what they know, and the students cannot get good grades on their tests because the knowledge they come across is de-contextualized. Further, teachers struggle as to which approach to adopt to meet the needs of their students. Such dilemmas create the need for investigation. This is where the consultant’s role becomes powerful. By talking to teachers about their practices and approaches and by talking to the students, they develop a greater insight into the atmosphere at the school. At the end of each mission, consultants are required to provide a report to their boss that includes recommendations to solve the dilemmas they encountered.

The results from these pre-service teacher’s test scores are currently being compared with the scores of those undergraduate students that took the same class last fall through Oncourse, the university’s online platform. There, the class was set up providing short cases that needed resolutions. In other words, the same content was taught in a different context. The score comparisons so far indicate several significant differences between the undergraduate students’ performance. The contextualization of the content in Quest Atlantis seems to be providing a coherent understanding of how theory can be reflected into practice, as well as how instructional decisions can impact learning.

Tags: Design, Research