The Instructor/Learner Relationship

Higher Education 0 comments

Taken from http://classroom.synonym.com/causes-poor-relationship-between-student-teacher-20337.html

The Instructor/Learner Relationship

By Prof. Jonathan Acuña-Solano, M. Ed.

School of English

Faculty of Social Sciences

Universidad Latina de Costa Rica

Saturday, May 7, 2016

Post 270

“One way to create a positive learning environment in your classroom is to establish and maintain positive relationships with your learners. This can often require sharing authority with your learners” (Laureate Education, 2015). The concept of self-regulation, which is the idea that students need to feel empowered by their instructors to continue to study by themselves, needs to be present at all times in a course and in each of its lessons. “Higher education learners are more engaged in their learning when the instructor allows them time to be in charge of their own learning, instead of the instructor always being in control” (Laureate Education, 2015). Learners must feel and be certain that their professors will allow them to take control of their own learning to have them develop working/studying skills and competencies that are vital for their future or current jobs.

Let’s analyze our relationship with our learners. Let’s take a look at these questions.

· How would you characterize your relationship with your students?

· What is the current instructor/learner relationship model you use in your classes?

· How effective do you believe it is?

· How satisfied are you with this current model?

· How comfortable are you with this model?

When asked about the kind of relationship I have with my higher education students, I must confess that it is open and a way to let them know what I expect from them and a way for me to know what they expect from me as their instructor. My current instructor/learner relationship model is not based on any academic/cognitive model where my students are passive learners, but one in which I want them to exercise their critical thinking by feeling empowered to make their own decisions, those decisions they need to make in regards to their personal learning, regarding what they are being instructed in class and what they want to deepen their knowledge a bit more in addition to what they want to continue exploring on their own.

Once I transitioned my personal teaching into the usage of PBL (Project-Based Learning) reinforced with web-enhanced activities, the experience has been very satisfactory and quite profitable for my students as well for me. Our relationship along with PBL has produced some sort of experiential learning, both for them as it is for me, contextualized in what learners are expected to find in the real working world. I feel very much satisfied with this learning model though I tend to make adjustments here and there to make it more dynamic and interactive for pupils; I really want my students to leave the course with fully-built-in knowledge in our area of expertise and with emerging competencies they can later on replicate in their future or current jobs. And I want them to leave my classroom with a need to quench their needs to know more about what we are studying in the course.

Now let’s confront your teaching/learning beliefs with the following:

· Assess your comfort level with allowing your students to teach each other and learn from each other, instead of always learning from you.

· If you currently have student-to-student teaching and learning in your classroom, how did you become comfortable with it?

To start with, my students come to understand that our class needs to become a community of learning where passive learners must become active and participative. That is, the inner environment of our class fosters the need to learn from one another: student-student, student-teacher, and teacher-student. No one is excluded from the learning equation; every single member of a class is meant to learn (including me, the instructor).

As a language instructor dealing with all sorts of learners, diversity in ethnicity, divergence in cultural and religious backgrounds, and all sorts of personal or professional interests, this heterogeneity is often profitable for every member of the community of learning; everyone learns from others during forums, speeches, topical presentations, exchange of ideas, and so on.

An instructor-student teaching model dates back to the time in which Piaget divorced learning from social interaction and assumed all human beings are just receivers of knowledge. This particular Piagetian style of learning is not practiced in my classrooms; a student-student model is much more based on Vygotsky’s idea that the building of one’s knowledge is done within a social group and not in isolation. For me, once Vygotsky and Dewey’s constructivist concepts were understood, moving towards a model in which I become a facilitator rather than a “dictator” was easy and smooth. This is why I always tell my partners that teaching is a bit of experimentation towards gaining expertise to teach more confidently in the future allowing all students in class to be able to learn the course content deeply.

Reference

Laureate Education. (2015, January). Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Retrieved from Laureate Faculty Development: http://global3.laureate.net/#/faculty/certificate/4