ETEC 522 – Sept. 2011

1 PBA Experience

I initially found the excitement about product-based assessment curious… I had to think for awhile before I realized that my own experiences in journalism and law school and a legal apprenticeship were so problem-focused and product-focused that I hadn’t really given much thought to it. Even the exams in law school are cases to be solved.

In high school I did a documentary on my own, wrote a novella and some screenplays. For university, I made a conscious decision to pursue education that was “practical” and “skills-focused”. It’s my natural mode of thinking and working. My brother is a computer scientist who took a co-op education program to ensure he had real-world experience. My partner is a chef who learned through apprenticeships.

I am only visiting the MET program from Concordia’s own MA in Educational Technology. In that program, I enjoyed creating a course from scratch and I enjoyed teaching classes. I didn’t have an issue with the research papers because I used them to think critically about the subject matter and trying to pull it apart. To me, all of this was natural and expected.

I don’t believe that constructivist learning or cognitive tools necessarily create critical thinking skills. I think students often create products that are superficial, at the bottom end of Bloom’s taxonomy. I think formative feedback is often missing and superficial as well, and instructors fear frightening their students so much that they end up not providing worked examples or pushing students to work on their weaknesses by asking challenging questions. Worse, students are not able to improve their products based on feedback to close the loop of learning.

As a teaching assistant in a practical communication class, I spend a lot of time commenting on student assignments and asking them Socratic questions in the assignments. I realize that many of them probably don’t read the comments and only focus on the grade. I regret that they don’t have the opportunity to re-submit assignments based on my comments to have a real learning experience. The assignments are real “products”, but they rarely reflect the kind of critical thinking that supposedly comes out of this pedagogical process.

All this is to say that I value PBA highly, but it’s something I have always expected and pursued for myself. In some ways I’m disturbed at how people are excited at the prospect of something that has been done in apprenticeships for thousands of years, something that employers consistently demand. How often do they hire students who have no practical abilities whatsoever? Why is that?

I don’t know whether this is part of the whole “education vs. skills” debate, or the class-warfare between universities and trade schools. All I can say is that my partner, who is a chef, demonstrates far higher critical thinking, adaptability, and creativity than many people in Masters and Phd programs. Is that a function of the education? Or is a function of the personalities of the people who choose their programs… I chose journalism and law because of their practical foundations. Presumably others take other routes based on their own inclinations.