Comfort, control and community

The role of the facilitator/mentor/coach/teacher in the learning community is one that I have spent a great deal of time considering. Like all of you, my view has evolved over the years I have been teaching and I see that comfort and control inform the direction of any learning community that I enter.

Over in EDUC 761 Collaborative Communities in E Learning we are reading the work of Kay Lehmann and Pratt and Palloff. Their views of building learning communities are based upon a constructivist perspective that empowers all members of the learning community. Trust, respect, preparation are all directed toward a learning community that is inclusive, supportive and inviting.

On our discussion board over in EDUC 761 we began to debate the role of the teacher in an online learning community. One of our co instructors raised an interesting set of comments and questions that relate to comfort, control and community.

As I thought about what you posted one thing came back to me from my years of working with student teachers and that is the tendency for teachers to teach from their own learning style.

This is indeed a great point - when I first began to teach, my delivery was a mirror of those teachers I viewed as exceptional. So, I tried to teach in the way I loved to learn. We know that as teachers we do not reflect our students. So, in those first years of teaching, I probably related to and reached the few students with a similar learning style to my own. This reflected my comfort level and my need for control. The preferred teaching style in those early years was lecture, teacher centered, with an attempt to control the environment. I was comfortable with this style and the resulting community was one that, I have come to learn, was not fully realized and certainly not constructivist in nature.

Over the years, I have come to learn that when I am too comfortable, I may need to reflect and stretch my teaching. So, as has been pointed out by my classmates in EDUC 761, giving up the need to control and instead focusing on instructional design that is based upon sound principles (this is the hard work, before teaching begins) that included a consideration of how and were students learn, can allow for a more realized community.

I wonder, though, if the way we design our courses online - text-heavy, tech-heavy, or somewhere in between, has less to do with meeting our students' various learning styles or the contents' delivery needs and more to do with the instructor's personal learning style.

No doubt that our use of instructional design principles and appropriate instructional technology is informed by our comfort level and need for control. These are reflected in what we "see" as important to the process of learning. One thing I really respect are my colleagues, like those in EDUC 761, who are in a state of evolution, a dynamic need to examine alternatives. Like all of us, I work with colleagues who are more static in their teaching approach.

So, having said that, it is clear we need to be aware of how and where our students learn, what they know and feel about the use of various instructional tools and finally consider how best to work toward a community of learners. This may come from giving up comfort and control as instructors.

And how do I know when enough is enough or too much or not enough?

We never do.

Greg