| OUR AIM SHOULD BE TO PRODUCE THE WRITTEN EQUIVALENT OF A ONE-TO-ONE TUTORIAL. |
Imagine how you might operate as a tutor or a coach, working with just one learner. You would not expect to ramble on at length about your subject (as you might in a lecture). You would make sure your learner was working with you. You would perhaps present some provocative ideas or give a demonstration—but every so often you would stop and encourage your learner to contribute something. For instance:
- You might simply check that the learner understood what you had been getting at.
- You might ask the learner to suggest examples from his or her own experience.
- You might get the learner to apply the ideas being discussed to a new situation or example.
- You might invite the learner to carry out a practical task involving the new ideas. And so on.
As a tutor or coach, you would be drawing active responses from your learner. You would then comment on each response. You would give your learner feedback as to the strengths /weaknesses of his or her response—or at least say what you found interesting about it. Perhaps also you might mention other possible responses that could have been made to the same question or task. You might then build upon your learner's response in moving on to the next substantive stage in the teaching.
TEACHING THROUGH ACTIVITIES
In short, such a tutorial is an interaction between tutor and learner. This is what we are trying to simulate in the tutorial-in-print. Learners are kept more alert and involved—and learn better—when they are required to use ideas rather than merely reading (or hearing) about them. Bear in mind the old Chinese proverb:
I hear, and I forget;
I see, and I remember,
I do, and I understand.
This is why activities—questions, tasks, exercises—are a vital feature of self-instructional material (see Figure 5.2/A–L on pages 92–117). They are meant to keep learners purposefully engaged with the material. Without them, our learners would be denied a benefit that "face-to-face" learners take for granted—the opportunity to do things with their new learning and get comments on their efforts. Without such activities, our learners might assume that the only objective was to memorize the information we set before them.
Frequency of Activities
So, just like a face-to-face tutor, we structure our discussion around getting the learner to do something. We build in frequent activities. These must be built in throughout the text, to help the learner learn. It is not enough to stick them on at the end, where their only role would be to check whether or not he or she has learned.
Some writers of self-instruction distinguish between what they call:
- SAQs (Self-assessment questions)—which may appear, perhaps several together, testing major objectives, at the end of perhaps an hour or so's reading; and
- ITQs (In-text questions)—which may be used at frequent intervals in the text between SAQs, generating the running dialogue between author and reader.
This terminology may not seem very helpful—since both types of activity are really "in-text" and "self-assessed" (and they may take forms other than questions). Nevertheless, the distinction between these two uses of activities is worth bearing in mind.
Of course, there are no rules about how frequently to insert an activity. You may have noticed, however, that some of the examples shown in Figure 5.2 A–L (pages 92–117) had several activities to a page. Some topics may lend themselves to more activities per hour of reading than others do. But I would be surprised if you could present more than three pages of reading without mentioning something worth asking learners about before they read on. And if more than four or five pages went by without your requiring the learners to do anything but read, then I'd suggest you'd forgotten about them. And I'd expect them to have dozed off!
Varieties of Activity
There are many ways we might categorize activities in a self-instructional text. Three key aspects are:
- How much time are learners expected to spend on each activity?
- What do they have to do to arrive at a response?
- How are they to record their response (if at all)?
Some activities require the reader to do little more than "stop and think". These may require a pause of but a few seconds. Other activities may demand a few minutes' calculation or a brief written answer. Yet others may send the reader away from the text for quarter of an hour or more to carry out some kind of practical work.
What do readers have to do to arrive at their response to the question or instruction? Readers may be required, for example, to:
- Reflect on what they have read or on their experience of the world.
- Read a new piece of text-or view a video, listen to a tape, etc.—in the light of such reflection.
- Engage in an interview or discussion with other learners or with workmates, family members, etc.
- Carry out practical work with equipment and materials—either at home or "in the field"—and record their results.
- Keep a diary or log of work done or observations made over some period of time in preparation for a subsequent lesson.
- Develop a workable proposal—e.g. for a device or procedure to help handicapped colleagues.
- Imagine what they would think/feel/do as one or more of the participants sketched out in the text—e.g. as a farmer faced with a change in the government's agricultural policy.
Some ways in which they might be asked to record their responses—rather than just thinking them—are:
- Ticking boxes to indicate agreement or disagreement with a number of statements.
- Answering a multiple-choice question, perhaps again by ticking boxes.
- Matching items in one list with items in another, by drawing lines from one list to the other.
- Underlining relevant phrases in a piece of text.
- Completing a form or questionnaire.
- Providing the missing word /phrase /number(s) to fill the blank(s) left in a sentence.
- Writing a word /phrase/number in the margin or in a box provided within the body of the text.
- Writing a longer answer, on the page of the text or in a separate notebook (perhaps for showing to a tutor or for discussion with a colleague or mentor).
- Making additions to a printed diagram, chart, graph, etc.
- Drawing a graph, map, flow-diagram, etc.
- Making a tape-recording—perhaps for the benefit of other learners or a tutor/mentor.
- Producing some artefact—e.g. a video-recording.
Such possibilities as those listed above are but a few of the many ways in which we might engage the learner's active participation. (I leave you to check which of them are represented among the sample pages shown in Figure 5.2 and elsewhere in this book.) You will need to decide on ways that are appropriate to your subject, your objectives, and your learners.
Levels of Difficulty
You may also like to consider how difficult or demanding your activities should be. Different types of activity will engage the learner's mind (and heart?) at different levels—making varying demands on his or her ability to apply the ideas that you are discussing.
The list below shows five types of activity I have noticed in self-instructional material. To me, each of the later ones seems likely to be more demanding than those that precede it in the list. What do you think?:
So, the learner might be expected to:
- Report his or her observations or experience in everyday terms—usually as a first step towards learning new ways of seeing them:
e.g. "Who carries out these procedures in your Department and how often are you involved?"
- Pick out, restate, or remember important facts, concepts or principles that you have presented:
e.g. "What is meant to be the chief purpose of the new system?"
- Distinguish between given examples and non-examples of the new concepts and principles that you have presented:
e.g. "Which of the following procedures would be acceptable under the new system ... ?"
- Provide his or her own examples and non-examples—perhaps by reporting his or her observations and experience in terms of the new concepts and principles:
e.g. "Which of your Department's present procedures will be acceptable under the new system and which will not?"
- Apply the new concepts/ principles (plus native wit and personal experience) to analyse, interpret or plan a new situation (one that has not been discussed)—perhaps in the process arriving at a new, personal perspective on the subject:
e.g. "What advice would you offer to staff in the Department described below if their procedures are to fit in with the new system?"
e.g. "What snags do you foresee in implementing the new system in your Department, and how would you suggest trying to overcome them?"
All these types of activity could play a useful part within a single lesson. Type 1 activities might be used where you are about to begin on a new concept or principle. Your readers will not yet have considered the new ways of looking at things. Indeed, Type 1 activities can be used as a basis for the "egrul" or "discovery" learning I discuss in Chapter 7.
Activities of Types 2 and 3 may serve the function of comprehension questions". They can draw your readers' attention to important points in the text and enable them to check that they understand what you are saying.
Type 4 activities go beyond this—by asking learners to relate their existing knowledge to what you have taught them. You are inviting them to rethink their experience in your terms.
Type 5 activities can make the ultimate demand on the learners' learning—by inviting them to analyse, plan and create in the new terms. They may even be faced with situations or problems that are not so cut-and-dried as those they have considered previously. This may require them to extend their learning. Like Type 1 activities, those of Type 5 can push the learners towards new knowledge, enabling them to anticipate or "discover" ideas, connections and relationships for themselves. If the activity is one (perhaps at the end of a lesson or sequence of lessons) where you don't tell the learner which of the several ideas you've discussed are most relevant to the problem—leaving the learners to decide this for themselves (alone or with other learners)—then the activity can be extremely demanding.
I do not claim that my five types cover every possible activity you might think of. Nor do I believe they form a perfect progression of difficulty. You may be able to think up some Type 1 or 2 activities that would be more demanding than some of Type 4 and 5. All the same, even if my list does not seem to relate too closely to the topics you'll be teaching, I hope it will stimulate you in thinking about how you might use different kinds of activity to make the appropriate levels of demand on your own learners at different stages in your lessons
| WHICH OF THE ABOVE (OR OTHER) TYPES OF ACTIVITY CAN YOU FIND AMONG THE SAMPLE PAGES (92–117) OF FIGURE 5.2? |
HOW TO DEVELOP ACTIVITIES
Before we talk about developing activities, let me remind you of the teaching context in which they appear:
- You introduce or explain a particular aspect of your topic—one or more teaching points.
- You ask your learners to make a response on the basis of:
- what you can assume they have already learned or experienced elsewhere; and/or
- what you have told them; and/or
- what they can anticipate, or else find out somewhere other than in your text.
- You tell them what response you'd have expected and why. If there is no one correct answer, mention several possible answers that would have been acceptable—e.g. what other learners may have said; and mention criteria against which they can judge the validity of their own responses.
- You carry on to the next step in your sequence or the next teaching point you wish to introduce (as in 1. above).
At the very least, you should be able to suggest criteria—e.g. a checklist of points that should have been mentioned in an answer—by which your learners can evaluate their own responses. If this seems impossible, re-think the activity.
- Be ample with your feedback. For learners working alone, it may be their only way of assessing their own progress. But if your answers are lengthier or more considered than you'd have expected from them in the time implied for the activity, do let your learners know. The relevance and helpfulness of your feedback can make all the difference to how satisfying the learners find your activities and how likely they are to keep doing them.
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