Not the Teacher’s Role

Module 3 of my PGCTHE studies commenced with the following task:

“What are the essential skills your students need to learn? … The aim here is to define the "right skills" the students need to learn in order to survive in the working life - how else can you tell if you are teaching the right things if you have not identified what the right skills are?”

The above question was based on the sequence of thoughts generated from the following video: “Teaching Teaching and Understanding”.

Many years ago, at least 4 or 5, Mark Curcher shared this video with DMC community, I watched it carefully then and found it very interesting and making loads of sense. From my experience in developing Course Outlines, it is not the teacher’s role to identify the “right skills” that students need to be equipped with. The task requires a holistic perspective, considering various factors outside a single institution boundary, which a teacher specialized in a specific discipline cannot easily grasp. Then who should do so?

This is quite an easy question to answer, since the task is already done. Fortunately, HCT leaders have already identified the “right skills” that our students need to survive in the working life. Those skills are the core of “The HCT Learning Model” that is published in the 20^th page of our institution catalogue, year after year, well, probably not always in the same page! Of course, a teacher won’t be able to develop the right skills in his/her own students if those skills are not identified first, to give a sense of direction for all the following efforts in guiding the students as they are making their way  towards their careers.

According to the authors of “The HCT Catalogue”:

“HCT has identified the following graduate characteristics under four categories that should guide program and course development and approaches to teaching and assessments:

I.                     Knowledge of Core Subjects and Global Issues: Knowledge of specific discipline, Global awareness, Civic literacy, Health literacy, and Environmental literacy.

II.                    Learning and Innovation Skills: Entrepreneurial literacy, Creativity and innovation, Critical thinking and Problem solving, Communication and Collaboration.

III.                  Information, Media, and Technology Skills: Information literacy, Media literacy, and ICT literacy.

IV.                  Transferable Lifelong Characteristics: Flexibility and adaptability, Initiative and self-direction, Social and cross-cultural skills, Productivity and accountability, Leadership and responsibility.“

Reflecting again on my experience with developing Course Outlines, aligning the individual course Learning Outcomes to the identified Graduate Outcomes is a corner stone in the overall Course Outlines development. The Learning Outcomes are further defined with the specific Cognitive Level following Bloom’s Taxonomy. The main challenge I believe is in actually implementing this blue print in the classrooms. The development of standardized assessments, like the SWAs, is supposed to be a measure of Quality Control to ensure the fulfillment of each course specification across the HCT system. However, standardized assessments come with their own set of challenges that hinders the achievement of this goal.

My argument, in brief, is that Teachers' role is to equip students with "the right skills", but identifying those skills need to continue to be the role of curriculum leaders.

References

HCT Central Academic and Students Services. (2011). Higher Colleges of Technology 2011 - 2012 CATALOGUE. UAE.

Bloom B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook I: The Cognitive Domain. New York: David McKay Co Inc.