Abstract
Resource Description
A number of recent books offer many useful ideas about the connection between teaching and learning (e.g., Bain, 2004; Davis, 2009; Nilson, 2010; Svinicki & McKeachie, 2010). While none focus specifically on management education, college instructors are positioned to learn a great deal from such publications as well as other widely accessible resources (e.g., The Teaching Professor, http://www.teachingprofessor.com/; The Center for Innovation in Teaching & Learning at the University of Illinois, http://cte.illinois.edu/). This review discusses one such resource, a revised and updated edition of Creating Significant Learning Experiences: An Integrated approach to Designing College Courses, by L. Dee Fink (2013). For management and leadership educators who value active and experiential learning or are simply seeking a comprehensive resource for developing or redesigning courses, syllabi, assignments, activities, and assessments, Creating Significant Learning Experiences is a bountiful guidebook. This review will outline the text’s two major frameworks—the Taxonomy of Significant Learning (ToSL) and Integrated Course Design (ICD)—and provide examples of their application within the management/leadership education paradigm.
According to Fink (2003), significant learning experiences are a process or taxonomy that engages students in a high-energy classroom. Following in the footsteps of Barr and Tagg’s (1995) shift from a teaching to a learning paradigm in undergraduate education, significant learning is a learning-centered approach where faculty decides first what students can and should learn in relation to the subject and then identify how this learning will be facilitated (Fink, 2003). In a revised and updated edition, Fink (2013) draws on his more than 26 years as a Director of Instructional Development at the University of Oklahoma and more recently as an international consultant promoting better teaching and learning throughout the “whole campus.” Fink presents an enhanced ToSL that differs from Benjamin Bloom’s (1956) Taxonomy of Learning. Specifically, Fink’s taxonomy classifies levels of intellectual behavior important in learning, is more learner-centered than teaching-centered, and it is more of an interconnected cycle than a hierarchical process or pyramid. Accordingly, Fink’s ToSL is represented in an equally distributed six-piece pie that encompasses the following learning goals: (a) Foundational Knowledge, (b) Application, (c) Integration, (d) Human Dimension, (e) Caring, and (e) Learning How to Learn.
Fink (2013) asserts that creating a complete set of learning activities capable of fostering significant learning requires a comprehensive view of teaching/learning activities. Correspondingly, he advocates following two general principles when selecting learning activities: (a) they should include information and ideas, experience, and reflective dialogue; and (b) they should rely on direct rather than indirect learning activities. With respect to learning goals, Fink posits that learning activities should reflect the instructor’s judgment of how effectively they address these goals. For example, when aligned with Fink’s six-piece taxonomy, students can learn or review the content of the course (Foundational Knowledge), learn how to apply and use the knowledge (Application), explore the personal and social meaning of the subject (Human Dimension), combine one kind of knowledge with other kinds of knowledge (Integration), and so on—all at the same time. (Fink, 2013, p. 124)
Use in the Classroom
By nature, significant learning requires multiple kinds of specific learning by students—more than simply understanding and remembering discipline-related content—and the role of instructors is to help students connect what they learn in their courses with their “life file” rather than just their “course file” (Fink, 2013). In practice, management educators should facilitate student reflection and experiential learning opportunities as a foundation for developing leadership capacity. Accordingly, Fink promotes a variation of the backward design approach to course design and assessment offered by Wiggins and McTighe (2005). Specifically, in following Fink’s ICD, instructors are asked to consider the following questions:
What are the important situational factors in a particular course learning situation?
What should our full set of learning goals be?
What kinds of feedback and assessment should we provide?
What kinds of teaching and learning activities will suffice, in terms of achieving the full set of learning goals we set?
Are all the contents connected and integrated, that is, are they consistent with and supportive of each other? (Fink, 2013, p. 70)
For example, when considering the course learning situation or “situational factors,” management instructors may have to align with the standards and mandates designated by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). Furthermore, instructors must be wise and consider the characteristics of the learners. For example, are the students “traditional,” first-generation, graduate or undergraduate, or adults with jobs and families? According to Fink (2013), instructors often fail to contemplate the most salient variables, setting themselves up for a difficult teaching experience.
Based on the information developed in the situational factors, instructors must next determine what they want students to gain from the course. Over the past few years, I have facilitated numerous workshops for educators at college campuses and professional conferences. I always include Fink’s two major frameworks—ToSL and ICD—and design learning experiences that meet attendees where they are. Likewise, I build activities that demonstrate the connections between each framework and the disciplines where attendees teach. For the purpose of clarity, consider a leadership theory course and an application of Fink’s frameworks based on a model suggested by Northouse (2010) in the online Instructor’s Resources that accompanied the 5th edition of his text Leadership: Theory and Practice. First, consider Foundational Knowledge. In leadership, this includes understanding the history and development as well as the key assumptions, terminology, and components of course-related leadership models, theories, and approaches. Accordingly, I assign reading and reflection-heavy response questions to acclimate students to the language of our course and relate to their own experiences within the frameworks presented. When planning for Application, I encourage instructors to consider the kinds of thinking (e.g., critical, creative, practical) that are important for students to learn, to focus on specific skills required to—for example—manage a complex project. By doing so, I intentionally design activities that involve critical and creative thinking about case studies and other pragmatic applications of course material such as role play, simulation, and games (see, e.g., Jenkins & Cutchens, 2013). When planning for Integration, I empower my students to build bridges between theory and practice. Students reflect on course-related connections between course material and their personal, social, or professional lives. For example, students may prepare written observations of leaders in their organizations composed through the lens of course-related theories or constructs (see, e.g., Jenkins & Dellow, in press). According to Fink (2013), activity that incorporates the Human Dimension involves learning about oneself and others simultaneously. To illustrate this, I often have students consider the utility of theories for developing leadership skills in others as well as how theory helps one function and relate to others more effectively. Caring—the focus on what values or changes students should adopt—describes opportunities where instructors empower students to move beyond the classroom and engage in leadership issues in their own environments and communities. When this occurs during the semester, I encourage or require students to reflect critically on their experiences. Finally, when planning for Learning How to Learn, the chief question to consider is, “What should students learn about how to be good students in a course like this?” Instructors should help students become more aware of their own learning processes and—specifically in leadership—understand the complexities in how others learn leadership as well. Ideally, assignments and activities are amalgams of the aforementioned, provide the representative interconnectedness of multiple components of the ToSL, and reflect the questions offered in the ICD (see, e.g., Flannery & Pragman, 2010).
Constructive Analysis and Comparison
Creating Significant Learning Experiences is a reminder to college faculty to integrate high-impact, rich, teaching and learning activities that enable multiple and simultaneous kinds of significant learning, such as facilitating debates, role plays, simulations, and dramatizations in class, or providing opportunities for service learning, situational observations, and authentic projects outside of class (Fink, 2013). One could realistically—and I recently did—use Fink’s text as a guide to construct or revise a course, syllabus, and learning objectives. In my experience, there were vast improvements to learning goals, teaching and learning activities, and assessment. Fink (2013) not only reminds instructors of the important considerations they should make with respect to teaching, learning, and course design—and guides them pragmatically through the process of doing so—disclaiming that poorly designed courses, even with effective teaching, will have only limited impact.
One potential downside is that readers will have to take Fink lightly at times and expect systematic all-or-nothing statements such as “if someone’s teaching does not meet these criteria, that teaching is poor, not matter what else is good about it” (Fink, 2013, p. 33). In comparison, Shulman (2005)—whose scholarship and impact on college teaching and learning spans a similar timeframe as Fink’s—describes effective teachers not as charismatic figures, but instead as ordinary teachers in challenging disciplines that feel a responsibility that their students learn. According to Shulman, these teachers are not just meeting their students halfway; they are going all the way and bringing them along. That type of responsibility for student learning—the kind of teaching that should be within the grasp of any faculty member—“it is not magic, it’s pedagogy” (Shulman, 2005, p. 25).
In practice, the text is a guidebook and helpful resource for providing structure and organization to course preparation. For example, Fink (2013) includes “Planning Your Course: A Decision Guide” as an appendix. When discussing curriculum with current and aspiring faculty, Fink is my “go to” framework for initiating technique with respect to course design. Arguably, Fink’s approaches are simple, straightforward, and easily duplicated and applied across disciplines.
How to Learn More
As an appendix, Fink (2013) provides a brief, but insightful annotated bibliography of relevant and accessible resources on the following: (a) Course Design in General, (b) Frameworks for Formulating Learning Goals, (c) Assessing Student Learning, (d) Creating Learning Activities, (e) Teaching with Technology, (f) Using Small Groups, and (g) a Compendia of Good Ideas on College Teaching. A plentiful synopsis of Fink’s major frameworks can be found in Integrated Course Design (see Fink, 2005). Finally, Fink has a variety of resources reflective of his scholarship and frameworks posted online at http://www.designlearning.org/. For more information on Fink’s work, visit his website at http://finkconsulting.info/.