Organization and Balance

This section includes the following pages:

Meaningful Learning

As Jonassen, Peck and Wilson (1999) state, "the primary goal of education at all levels should be to engage students in meaningful learning, which occurs when students are actively making meaning." Before you can do this, however, you must determine answers to the following questions:

What constitutes meaningful learning?
To whom is it meaningful?

Certain factors affect how easy it is to determine what students find meaningful. For instance, instructors may move to a new college or university that has a more diverse student population or, more to the point, a student population about whom the instructor knows very little. Also, student populations change over time. Along with the change in students comes a change in what that demographic finds meaningful. Individual students bring their own ideas of what is meaningful, making it even harder to pin down what makes learning meaningful to a particular group.

For these reasons and more, new instructors, instructors who are teaching a course for the first time, and even veteran instructors should conduct a brief survey to find out what is meaningful to their students at that time. Some survey strategies to get this information include asking for a quick "show of hands", giving students a questionnaire (paper-based or online), or conducting some brief interviews with a random student sample. This does not require a great deal of time, but could lead to a greater number of students who become active learners in your class.

Learning Support

Once you have determined what is meaningful for your students, you must then decide how you will support meaningful learning. Instructors can begin to employ effective teaching practices even before a lecture or presentation. One such practice involves presenting the content in a meaningful way for students. For instance, for the first few lectures, you might discuss how the subject matter relates to students' lives (McGlynn, 2001, p. 79), both professionally and personally.

Another way to make content meaningful is to create a problem-centered lecture (Bligh, 2000, pp. 72-74). Here are some key points to get you started in designing and delivering a problem-centered lecture:

Ask a question or pose a problem.
Make sure that the problem is clear.
Give information, arguments and hypotheses.
Make sure that you explain each hypothesis, or have students explain them out loud, as students do not always make the same inferences or have same background information as the instructor.
Model problem-solving techniques as you go through the lecture.

Activities

Fill out the following tables to help you organize your course content in meaningful ways for students.

Determine how your subject matter relates to your students' lives.

Lecture topic(s)	How Lecture topic(s) relate to students
Lecture topic(s)	Professionally	Personally
1.
2.
3.

Choose a problem around which you could center a lecture.

Problem	Information, arguments and hypotheses	Problem-solving techniques to model
1.
2.
3.

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