Individual task:
Please create a learning contract for the Module using the blog post in the course. Blog posts can be shared to other learners and the facilitator. This enables to use the learning contract as a reflective and conversational tool for guided your professional development. Personal learning contract will be used as a tool for monitoring self-development and linking evidences of learning and providing peer feedback to the evidences.
Personal learning environments and portfolios may be used in this task.
What are learning contracts?
According to Harri-Augstein & Webb: Most of the learners have no operational language with which to analyse, reflect and evaluate learning. This language needs to be personally meaningful to mediate learning processes. The construction and reconstruction of learning process of each individual in community settings and work context is unique.
It should consist of:
– sustaining self-concersation with oneself about learning
– externalizing learning conversation for the learner
– passing the control back to the learner as the language of awareness and skills of learning
– this process goes in spirals, initiating learning networks
All this process is channelled into specific domains and work-settings becaming related wth on-job learning.
In learning contracts the learner and the teacher would agree with a set of rules what they agree to follow, these will be negotiated and mutually agreed and then followed. Learner is prompted to review what were the strenghts, weaknesses of implementing the strategy and what would be the future steps.
The learners must record in timeline evidence of their learning, this evidence of learning must be subjectively traced by someone who guides the learner; learners must be evaluating what were their meaningful outcomes, this has to be also done subjectively by tutor; in addition some objective means must be measured as well which suggest indirectly is the learner successive.
The learning conversations consist of three kinds of dialogues: the process, support and referent dialogue.
1. The process dialogue focuses on gaining awareness of individual personal learning experiences. This takes place in phases:
What is my purpose in learning? (purpose phase)
Which learning startegies do i follow? (startegy phase)
What is my learning outcome? (outcome phase)
How do i evaluate my learning outcome? Was the startegy effective? (review phase)
MA(R)4S startegy is suggested to accomplish the process dialogue:
Monitor yourself
Analyse yourself
Record your activities
Reconstruct your learning
Reflect how you learned
Review your learning from this perspective
Spiral it always
2. The support dialogue enables the learner to cope with the effects of becoming aware of own learning processes.
It is mentioned that becoming aware makes performance worse initially and this scares the learners back to their routine practices. To facilitate, the anxiety and tension must be reduced and the learners need to start trusting the learning situation which gives them more freedom to experiment and take risks in trying out new strategies. This anxiety can be reduced at on-job learning conditions where peer-support, resources and space are provided.
3. The referent dialogue aims at defining the referent as a set of criteria against which learners can begin to assess their competence. This is the process where persons themselves need to identify appropraite criteria amongst wide range of referents. One way it is suggested to happen is of copying the standards of community members as referents.
Task: Create a learning contract for the course. The following aspects must be addressed in your learning contracts:
Learning outcomes: