Working on my literature review today, comforted with hot and delicious loose leaf tea and a ziplock bag full of my favourite chocolate pieces. I started out my work today with a bit of an attitude - psychologically, mentally, and emotionally I am so very ready to be finished this body of work. However, I was reminded how much I love they way transformational learning (TL) connects effortlessly to other areas of knowing and study. Jack Mezirow (2009), the Father of TL writes about how TL is connected to Jungian Psychology. He writes,

“The content or process of formal learning evokes images realized through dialogue. In the course of this interaction, both content and ourselves are potentially transformed. Individuation is an ongoing psychic process. When entered into consciously and imaginatively, it provides a deepening awareness of the self, and expansion of one’s consciousness, and an engendering of soul. We become more fully who we are, and we are more fully able to enter into the community of humans. In Jungian terms, this is transformation - the emergence of the self” (p.24).

To me this is an incredibly beautiful connection. 

- Lindy Garneau, The Professor’s Apprentice 

Mezirow, J., Taylor, E.W., & Associates. (2009). Transformative learning in practice: Insights from community, workplace, and higher education. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

livingintotransformation:

HAPPY is an award-winning, feature-length documentary that takes us on a journey from the swamps of Louisiana to the slums of Kolkata in search of what really makes people happy. Combining real life stories of people from around the world and powerful interviews with the leading scientists in happiness research, HAPPY brings to life the science and application of the film’s themes.

The field of psychology’s preoccupation with dysfunction produced approximately 40,000 labels identifying what is wrong with people (dysfunction) and only 4,000 labels addressing what is right about individuals. In an examination of 100 years of literature published in psychology, there are 8,000 articles on anger, 58,000 on anxiety, 71,000 on depression and only 850 articles on joy, 3,000 on happiness, and 5,700 on life satisfaction (The Gallup Organization, 2010).

http://www.thehappymovie.com/educational/

I have a picture of a quote from Rita Schiano that reads “Talking about our problems is our greatest addiction. Break the habit. Talk about your joys”. Positive psychology is about understanding our greatest joys and happiness. I believe in focusing on the things in life that make us the happiest, that bring out the best in us, and that make us feel grateful. To me, this is the best way to approach life. However, as we can see from the above note our society tends to focus more time and resources on the areas of life that deal with dysfunction rather than on areas of well-being.

Imagine what could happen if educators were to create their courses based on the teachings and values of positive psychology? Imagine what could happen if students had a better understanding of what they are really good at and what brings them joy in their lives? How could shifting the way we teach  impact the learning journey’s of the students we interact with everyday? How could this shift impact our lives, both inside and outside the classroom?

Positive psychology is the exploration of possibility and the understanding of the power of YES! in your life. It opens doors and creates transformational learning environments. Check out this movie. Check out the education guideline. Be aware that the word education, means to draw out.

How can positive psychology and the principles of coaching support you in truly educating students? 

- Living into Transformation

livingintotransformation:

Academic coaching is slowly gaining popularity in colleges and universities both in Canada and in the United States. However, permanent funding for this student service is rare. Most academic coaching programs are pilot-project based and operate out of already established student services departments such as counselling and access centres. Much like admissions and recruitment offices focus on recruiting additional students to the institution, academic coaching focuses on the retention of students.

Working with an academic coach provides students with the tools to explore their goals, wishes, and dreams as they relate to their academic journey and career interests. Students are coached through the obstacles that get in the way of living their best post-secondary experience. Students are coached through fear, doubt, and uncertainly and into a place of empowerment and confidence. This process can have a huge positive impact on the overall student experience.

Academic coaching still has a long way to go in terms of securing funding and establishing itself as a stand-alone essential student service. Until this can be done I encourage students to enquire about the possibility of working with an academic coach at their Office of Student Services.

Alternatively, students can hire their own academic coach. I suggest checking out Living into Transformation: Professional & Academic Coaching Services ;)

- Living into Transformation

I could have used a guide like this two years ago. I was researching student engagement in a PSE program I had been helping to co-build. For about a 6 week period my research colleague and I met with students over lunch and asked them about their first year experience. I took notes on our conversations and created lists of the main factors that kept coming up in each conversation. My colleague and I discussed and analysed these notes. From the analysis a report was written. The report helped us to better understand the students we serve, however the knowledge gained never went beyond us and the work we did together. Having a guide to follow as part of teaching and learning practices would have made a difference to our research project and the way it was performed and reported.

Going forward, I’m glad we now have a guide to help inform good research.

- Lindy Garneau, The Professor’s Apprentice

Research Teaching and Student Outcomes in Postsecondary Education: A Guide is a new resource produced by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario (HEQCO) in collaboration with McMaster University’s Centre for Leadership in Learning and the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, and is endorsed by the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services (CACUSS). The free, 40-page online guide serves as an introduction to research methods and techniques that foster innovation and evaluation of practices to improve student success. Created to provide an entry point for people interested in engaging as researchers and evaluators of PSE outcomes, the guide will be of particular interest to college and university professors and educational developers seeking innovative approaches to enhanced learning, program administrators, student service providers, and others interested in effective teaching and learning and student success.

livingintotransformation:

It is simply impossible to become a great leader without being a great communicator. I hope you noticed the previous sentence didn’t refer to being a great talker – big difference. 

- Mike Myatt, Contributor at Forbes Magazine

To be a great educator or to be a great coach one must also be a great communicator. This means listening more then you speak and truly understanding the emotions and feelings of the people around you. When you do speak, your words hold the dreams, wishes, and aspirations of others and only than do your ideas resonate and take hold of people, because you are communicating to them what they already know to be true. This is the mark of great leadership. 

- Living into Transformation  

Living into Transformation: Professional & Academic Coaching Services 

MAKE A WISH. MAKE IT HAPPEN.

www.lindygarneau.ca

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#education #teaching #learning #highereducation #academia

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: “We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” (John Cage)

HINTS: Always be around. Come or go to everything. Always go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully, often. Save everything — it might come in handy later.

While this strategy was originally created with public school / high school teaching in mind, moving away from the “Sage on the Stage” model of teaching works really well in the post-secondary classroom. Adult students require increased autonomy in their learning and bring rich life experience to the course. It has been my experience that when you give students the opportunity to actively contribute to the learning in the classroom, there is increased buy-in, their is increased excitement and enjoyment in the course, and their is an increased possibility that students will have a transformational learning experience.

- The Professor’s Apprentice   

unlearningschool:

The basics of engaging students.  People talk about all these fancy strategies for student engagement and inclusion, but it’s pretty simple - just talk less.  If you do, amazing things will happen.  You’ll realize you like your students more than you thought you did.  Your students will like you more than they thought they did.  They will like coming to class.  They will stop you in the hallway to say hi.  They will do their homework more often, and with more quality.  They will tell other teachers that they like you.  You will like your job more.  And you’ll find that the inverse of this graph is also true: the more they talk the less bored you will be.  

Give them some control over what to study.  Put them in front of the room.   Ask them for help with rubrics.  Have them write your tests.  Bring in an expert.  Have them interview each other.  Have a seminar — but whatever you do, for pete’s sake, talk less.

1. A Glimpse Into A Mobile Learning Future: The iPhone has allowed us to clearly peer in our learning future, and that future is mobile. The only limitation will be that processing power, storage and software will improve faster than our ability to re-engineer learning tools around the mobile form factor. What would an LMS (learning management system) designed from scratch for Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android look like? Can we imagine virtual synchronous classroom/meeting tools such as Adobe Connect and Blackboard Collaborate look like with a native mobile design?). The iPhone screen seems plenty big enough, the rate-limiting step of the iPhone as a learning platform seems to be the keyboard. Mobile devices are great for content consumption, not so wonderful for creation (and education depends on creation). Despite the challenges, it seems clear that the ubiquitousness nature (always with us, always connected) of the iPhone type device will make mobile the primary platform for 21st century learning. We are evolving to a place where our mobiles are extensions of ourselves, our outboard brains and always at hand communications and entertainment devices. Where gaming and social media and communication go, education will soon follow.

2. The Apps vs. Browser Debate: To a great and growing extent education is already mediated through technology. We interact with our fellow students, professors, and course content via software. This software is moving from our computers to our smart phones (and tablets). The question is, how what form will this software take? Will it be delivered through the browser or an app? Perhaps the browser/app debate will soon fade, as native apps become web apps - simple shells around browser based content and data exchange. The desire to avoid the expense and complication of coding separate apps for each platform (iOS, Android) and for the Web is understandable. I’m unconvinced, however, that this approach will provide us with high quality mobile (and mobile educational) experiences. The gold standard for apps in my experience is the NYTimes and Amazon Kindle iPhone app. These apps are easy to navigate, sync automatically, and work offline. Reading a book with the Kindle app or news through the NYTimes app causes the device to recede into the background. I don’t know of any education app that performs as well as these two examples, and I have a hard time believing that when that app comes it will not be a native mobile app.   

3. The Mobile Services Imperative: Every college and university feels the pressure to mobilize our web content. All the work we have done in the past 20 or so years to get our higher ed content and services to the web seems inadequate if this same content and services are not available for smart phones. Where we are going to get the resources to bring everything we do on the web to the mobile screen is a reasonable question. The web work will not go away (it will expand), and the pull to mobile will only get stronger. Will web sites designed with RWD (responsive web design) techniques be robust enough to perform on iPhones at the level that our students, faculty, staff, alumni, potential students expect? Can we avoid coding around native apps, and instead go with a write-once display everywhere web app strategy, allow us to move rapidly and cost-effectively enough into our mobile campus future?

4. Device Proliferation and Support Challenges: Campus technology services and campus applications now need to work with both computers and mobile devices. Do you have an easy way that your students, faculty and staff can get their iPhones on your secure wireless network, your printing and application authentication systems? What devices will you support in your student help desk? How far will you go to help your professors troubleshoot their mobile devices? What training, advice, and support will you offer instructors on incorporating mobile phones into teaching?    

5. A BRIC Education Growth Roadmap: The BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India and China - they are the fast growing emerging economies with huge populations and a rapidly increasing role in global trade, manufacturing, services and consumption. We could (and should) spend lots of time thinking about the opportunity to export US higher education to the BRICS, and to grow the footprint of our educational technology and educational publishing companies in these countries.   As the action in higher education moves from the already wealthy to the growth economies (the BRICs and beyond … such as South Korea, Turkey, Mexico, Indonesia, and Nigeria), the mediating technology will be the mobile device. The BRICS largely skipped over landline technology, jumping directly to cellular phones. The demand for educational services at every level will be way larger than traditional place based (campus based) institutions could ever provide.  Education will be mobile. Campuses will still be built, but the great volume of educational interactions will take place on the mobile phone.

6. The Disappointment of Unrealized Mobile Education Potential: The final way that the iPhone has changed higher ed over the past 5 years is the degree to which the iPhone has not changed higher ed. The mobile education hype has outpaced the mobile education reality. Smart phone education applications and service continue to be an appendage to those designed for the web.  We lag behind in delivering our students the course, library, and campus services and content that they want on their mobile devices.  We have very little understanding of how we can incorporate these handheld mobile computers into our teaching. And from what I can tell, Apple, Google or Microsoft have not made education a core part of their long-term mobile strategies.    

- Joshua Kim, Director of Learning and Technology for the Master of Health Care Delivery Science program at Dartmouth College

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/technology-and-learning/6-ways-iphone-changed-higher-ed#ixzz20F2YwMnH 
Inside Higher Ed