Assignment Blogpost

Constructive Alignment is one of those learnings. Alignment is such a wholesome concept. Wheel alignment. Right align. Line up. Paired with ‘Constructive’ the concept is doubly meaningful. The Cambridge Online Dictionary Thesaurus SMART Clouds above reveal for both terms a healthy combination of concepts such as functional, gainful, favourable with harmony, balance, evenness, even equilibrium.

As a learning theory Constructive Alignment refers to the alignment of teaching and learning activities, learning outcomes and assessment (Biggs, 1999). This seems to be a logical progression from Constructivism and Social Constructivism, leading from learner centred approaches, with their empowering and liberating focus on student or learner independence and self-direction to the question of meaningful assessment.

Aligning outcomes, content and assessment seems like a really logical thing to do. Ramsden (1992, cited in Biggs, n.d.) points out how students perceive assessment as similar to learning outcomes, and are likely to work harder towards an effective outcome if assessment was aligned with learning outcomes. Learning activities suggested by Biggs (n.d.) are likely to form part of my students’ daily activities and patterns of interaction, in particular, peer teaching, independent learning and group work.

Scaffolding is another concept I have learned much about (and I’m still learning). Another example of bias that could well be counter-productive is an underestimation of our students (in particular international students), with an over-reliance on scaffolding, where it could lead to well-intentioned though unintended spoon-feeding, a blow-by-blow, step-by-step instruction manual to sleepwalking.  Verenekina (2013) argues that there are differing interpretations of scaffolding, one that could be counter-productive, and another, where the learners’ Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) is meaningfully challenged.  Scaffolding serves to elicit prior knowledge (Shepard, 2005), hence enabling teachers to set learning at the ZPD, making learning challenging and interesting.

And on interesting and challenging lessons, what would Chomsky say?

Finding the gap in students’ knowledge and making it visible, not only to me, but to them, is more likely to give them a reason for learning. For this reason I design deductive learning activities, when appropriate. These may appear the opposite of scaffolding, but are likely within the students’ ZPD, which also correlates with Krashen’s Theory of Input Hypothesis. Krashen (1982) maintains with his Input Hypothesis that, for input/(second) language acquisition to be optimal, it has to be at the level of ‘input + 1’, i.e. one level above the student’s current level of language functioning. Krashen views optimal input as comprehensible, ‘enough’ (as in not too little), relevant and, similar to Chomsky, interesting. In Krashen (2009), he reviews his important work on Second Language Acquisition (SLA), and states that the only aspect of his work on which he had changed his position was to henceforth make the process of SLA visible to learners to enable them to continue their learning independently, aware of the process.

If Vygotsky had been a language learning theorist, he and Krashen might have shared a mutual view on generalisations - Vygotsky on children confusing bats and birds, and Krashen on second language learners generalising language rules (e.g. lower level students -or children- who might say ‘I go-ed to the shop). Teachers might feel exasperation at students not using the irregular verb ‘went’, but the student has achieved a different milestone, i.e. using the past form for regular verbs, i.e. -ed.

Deductive type activities I give students to identify gaps (Vygotsky’s sweet spot) include test-teach-test task types (as opposed to inductive, overly scaffolded tasks). This works better at higher language levels. There is the danger, though, that teachers of second language learners may have a mistaken over-reliance on a Bloom’s Taxonomy low-level questioning style of their learners. Their students may be nuclear physicists, albeit with poor English. This is not dissimilar to teachers speaking loudly or playing audio listening practice exercises loudly to learners with minimal English, as if they’re deaf.

An example of a recent deductive tenses review activity I gave my class, was the picture below of cats (source unknown - I received it via text from a NZ friend and it also appeared on an CoP Group on Facebook, #AusELT, two days later (I shared my activity in the Facebook group - not a complete digital hermit). The students analysed the language in groups, then shared their findings with the class, and I gave additional feedback. This activity was largely relational, and though not at the highest end of abstract reasoning on Biggs’ model of SOLO taxonomy (Biggs, 1999), it was most likely complex enough to extend students in terms of working out similarities and differences in form, meaning, context and interchangeability of tenses.

In terms of my engagement with my Community of Practice (CoP) groups, my life has been online for the past six months. I have spent time demystifying Zoom, making Blackboard more student-friendly, preparing lessons, teaching ELICOS 5 days per week, training a Professional Year (PY) class 6 hours p.d. on Saturdays, doing this wonderful course (my sanity break), watching the course tutorials late night (love them), doing course readings. I have loved setting up the blog post and want to keep this … revert it to a website. I have only made two short entries in the course Blackboard course discussion groups, but have been motivated to prepare and upload large numbers of reading and research materials for my own class on Blackboard … which, I notice, have been removed as we commence a new 5-week cycle tomorrow. It is now clear that Blackboard, for this CoP, is only to be utilised for submission of one assessment per 5-week cycle and as Zoom substitute. My latest learning, and simultaneously my main challenge, which to make lemonade from.

On the upside: below is a photo of a CoP group close to my heart, a class of recent PY students on their graduation day. They were the first group of PY participants who had to complete their internships online due to the pandemic. Though daunting initially, it soon became clear that they were highly skilled in the virtual space, and their usual real-life challenges such as small talk with native speakers, were suddenly not important anymore. This may be a great example of workplace learning (Biggs, n.d.), where learners received feedback in an ungraded learning environment (Duke, 2018).