For Instructors
- Assignment transparency: always explain the “why” to each assignment and assessment – and do think of this explanation in terms of post-graduation careers.
- Make connections during class presentations and discussions to ways that working professionals are expected to provide citations and work with integrity.
- Resource: Model this in your own course documents and materials by providing a citation where appropriate to images, data, paraphrases of material. These might be formal citations for a research article, or informal citations when drawing colleagues' ideas into a syllabus.
- Create intrinsic motivation; be transparent about how learning; cultivate the love of learning they do bring; acknowledge outside pressures - including those imposed by parents and peers; share the ways that integrity is a basis for lifelong learning and success in their chosen careers – accomplish this with reflection and metacognition assignments, and make the connections verbally in lectures and interactions.
- Learning to learn - whether in a new field of study, or at new and higher levels of education requires both modeling and practice: how do people in the field carry out the work of learning, relearning and unlearning as part of understanding, and how can students new to a field or level of learning begin to practice and incorporate those practices to advance as learners? Barbara Millis addresses this in “Using Metacognition to Promote Learning” (2016) with examples of before, during, and after lessons activities, and suggestions for ways quizzes and tests “can be analyzed for maximizing future performance.
For Students
- It does. If you don’t understand how the content or assignment relates to future assignments, the work of the field, or your personal experiences, reach out to your instructor to understand the purpose of assignments. As an added bonus, you never know how your questions may impact the future of education.
- Context does, too. Course content aside, professional networking begins as a student. What you do now could impact when or if you get a job in the future. And you are learning to learn and to fulfill the expectations of an audience, which is important for whatever personal or professional work you do.