Learning Reconsidered

National Association of Student Personnel Administrators & American College Personnel Association. Learning reconsidered a campus-wide focus on the student experience. Washington, DC: Keeling, R.P.

On this report published by ACPA and NASPA a shift in the way that learning should take place is proposed. That shift is to transformative education. According to the report transformative education really builds on the idea of a liberal education, meaning that we need to look at developing the whole student versus teaching only a skill set and required courses. This idea recognized that in classroom and out of classroom learning are interconnected and that both vital to the development of students.

According to the report "Student affair, in this conceptualization, is integral to the learning process because of the opportunities it provides students to learn through action, contemplation, reflection and emotional engagement as well as information acquisition" (Keeling, p. 12). The text stresses the importance of having faculty involved in the process, adapting there teaching styles to incorporate these opportunities to meet the learning needs of students today. To summarize, student affairs and faculty need to work together to provide opportunities for students to take what they learn in the class room and have real world applications. Students need to be able to develop there leadership skills, learn about there strengths and weaknesses, and seek to understand others.

Once an institution make a commitment to change they need to set well defined outcomes. This will help students understand what they are suppose to learn both in and out of the classroom and will help guide the institutional goals and programs. According to the reading the main outcomes are similar for most institutions but the ones that are emphasised will be determined by the mission of the institution. a land grant university will have different priorities than a faith based private school or a for profit college. The key is that every campus need to clearly define the outcomes and ensure that they are evaluated. Page 18 and 19 of this report contains a matrix that has some good examples of specific outcomes including what is learned within each outcome and what body of knowledge they come from.

When it comes down to the assessment of the outcomes the text emphasises the importance of collaboration between student affairs and faculty. It also states that student learning should really become the focus of the assessment tools, recognizing that student satisfaction is important and can valuable it does not tell us how students are learning. The text recognizes that some learning outcomes are hard to measure, particularly those related to personal and social growth. These can often be the most important outcomes to asses and innovative assessment tools need to be created to measure them.

The text points out the importance of closing the loop, "In order to facilitate continuous improvements, the assessment data must be used in a timely fashion" (p. 24). I was a little disappointed that there was not some good suggestions on how to make that happen in the text.

The two main ideas that a got from this reading is that transformation education needs to take place to prepare students, and that the university needs to work in collaboration to make sure that it happens. It was reassuring to read some of the same ideas that we have been talking about in class such as assessing student learning and closing the loop. I know that there is a learning reconsidered 2 and I am going to try and get a hold of that for a future blog