During the team presentation on “Improving Performance”, I was always wondering how we can improve the performance of learners in a learning process. In what ways, us the instructors could help the learners to achieve the maximum level of competency and perform to their best.
According to Wikipedia[1], “Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills, and values from one generation to another. Education is the art of learning. Learning includes change.” For me, education are divided into three important elements which are instruction that facilitate the learning, teaching which refers to how an instructor impart learning to learners and finally learning where one is taught and how one can acquire the knowledge, skills or abilities that can be applied in everyday life.
Facilitating Learning in order to Improve Performance
As discussed in above, we could see that in education, instruction, teaching and learning are closely co-related to each other. No one can be excluded. And for me, the same happen in improving performance in learning, facilitation learning, instruction, teaching and learning are closely related to each other. Why do I say so?
According to Peter Smith, facilitation can be used with students to help them grow as learners, with graduate students to help them grow as researchers, with committee members to promote team problem solving, and with professional organizations to create effective mission statements and to accomplish strategic objectives. Facilitation involves a mindset of helping others perform by creating growth opportunities and by providing coaching that allows others to take on more ownership and control of their performance. According to him, a facilitated activity should be planned in advance, thoughtfully and efficiently set-up, and managed continuously with an appropriate level of intervention. The facilitator should also provide effective closure. With the paradigm shift from teacher center teaching to learner centered teaching, nowadays in order to improve the performance of learners, many instructors are interested in what Barr & Tagg(1995) introduced, which is to become less of a “sage on the stage” and more of a “guide on the side”. In this new paradigm, facilitation learning become one important factor in the whole teaching and learning process in order to lead to the improvement of performance or competency of learners. Some people might be confused with the difference of performance and competency but I believe that both competency and performance are important in learning process. In my opinion, while one has the competency then he/she could perform better in real life or practically. In order to become a good facilitator in learning, many scholars have developed their own theories and rules. But for me, none of the theories or rules are mandatory instead again instructors should choose the theories and rules wisely and adopt them according to own context and not blindly follow what is written in the books.
Then you might ask, what are the relationship of instruction, teaching and learning in improving performance? Well, in order to improve performance of one learner, instruction is also important. Proper instruction design that based on different context, learner, environment and etc could produce a productive and effective learning experience to the learners. In other words, without proper instruction design which mean without proper use of instructional strategies or proper apply of learning theories, no learning process can be meaningful or effective. Team 5 had presented Improve performance topic and they had stressed technology is one of the most important factor in 21st century teaching, well, that might not be 100% true. If technologies are use wrongly or inappropriately then the whole learning process might not be meaningful but instead it is a waste of time and resources. Nowadays, advancement and the ever changing technologies have made the life of educators become more difficult and uneasy. Not only they need to instruct, teaching, do admin works, do research but also they always need to keep update to the latest technologies in learning. In conclusion, technology can just be an aided tool in teaching and not the main factors that can influence the performance of a learner.
Teaching and Learning, so what is the relationship of these both in improving performance in learning? In 1954, B. F. Skinner wrote an article that entitled “The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching.” From the title of that, we could see how closely learning and teaching are both related. In my opinion, Skinner was trying to elaborate that instructors need to rely not only on research-based theories and principles but also their own knowledge, experience, judgments and decisions based on different context, environment and etc in order to design an effective instruction that not only maximize the learning process of learners but also can achieve the best learning outcome which mean to improve the learner achievement, performance, competency and also the learners satisfaction and also at the same time can engage and motivate the learner in the whole learning process. So, instructors not only need to design a good instruction but at the same time also need to teach with patience. With a good instruction but without good teaching skills, learners will not gain any benefit from the learning process which lead to not meaningful learning process and again lead on to no competency gain and no performance improve.
Conclusion
Finally, I would like to conclude that in order to improve performance of learner, I believe that besides the four factors that I mentioned which are facilitation learning, instruction, teaching and learning are important to improve performance but at the same time, ET experts and students should also try to investigate more on how to motivate and engage the learners in learning process. We should conduct more research regarding this and to validate the model accordingly so that instructors or teachers can use them as a guideline. Why motivate and engage learners are important in improving performance? I believe that, no matter in order to improve performance either organization level or individual learner, the learner self motivation are important and also the feeling of engagement to one learning process is also important. Lastly, I highly believe that with all the factors combine together then only we can improve the performance of learner. Missing either one of the factor will not lead to performance improvement in the learning process!
References
Peter Smith . Overview of Facilitation. Retrieved May 31, 2011, from http://www.pcrest.com/PC/FGB/4th/demo/3/3_2_1.htm
Roger Chevalier. Evaluation: The link between Learning and Performance. Retrieved May 31, 2011, from http://www.aboutiwp.com/Evaluation.pdf
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