A Comparison of Pedagogical Approaches to Teaching Graduate Students in Educational Administration

Journal of Instructional Psychology, Dec, 1999 by Gwen Schroth, Anita Pankake, Gordon Gates

For training school leaders, characteristics of adult learners must guide the planning of curriculum activities in addition to other factors that directly influence learning. For example, Henson (1995) recognizes the need for connecting new learning to old. "Throughout the twentieth century, connectionist psychologists have insisted that when learning occurs, it occurs in steps, each part building on simpler content learned earlier. Constructivists agree that each part of the content should be tied to prior learning" (p. 172). This perspective is used to support the notion of a spiral curriculum which takes connectionism into account by returning periodically to concepts at a later time, when more knowledge, maturity, and understanding have been gained by the learner and by allowing the concepts to be expanded upon at this later time. "For constructivists, knowledge refers to the internal mental constructions of the individual" (Smith, 1995, p. 23). These internal constructions regarding education gleaned from their teaching experiences are what graduate students bring to their classes and provide one half of the link to new learning. By repeatedly connecting what students already know with what they need to learn in order to have successful experiences in the future as administrators, professors provide the other half of the link. But there are other factors to consider as well.

Joyce and Showers (1987) maintain that, to ensure learning that will translate into on-the-job-effectiveness, students must be engaged in their work. There is power in direct instruction; for example, through lecturing, it provides the professor an assurance that the material which should be covered is attended to, yet there is a growing concern regarding the efficacy of direct instruction with regard to the learning of higher-level cognitive skills such as problem-solving (Slavin, Karweit, and Madden, 1989). Therefore, while we strove to ensure that our curriculum was built on understandings already gained by the learners, we also designed activities that maximized techniques to directly involve the students in the learning itself.

A third factor to consider in constructing learning activities for adult learners is the environment in which instruction occurs. Williams (1996) suggests that "when autonomous adults are faced with challenging tasks within a non-stressful collegial environment, these adults may have optimal opportunity to learn" (p. 36). Some brain research points to a "`state of flow' which humans enter when they participate in an activity they find interesting and challenging but not overwhelming" (Mannell, R. C., as cited in Williams, 1996). Recognizing the need for non-stressful learning environments, Costa and Liebmann (1997) stated, "Educators need to return to learners their willingness to be playful, courageous, trusting, and risk taking. We need to invite them to reach for their outermost limits at all times. We need to create environments that allow students to practice freely without fear" (p. xviii). Bennis (1994) connects this need beyond the classroom to the success of leaders. In identifying three basic ingredients for success Bennis names ideas, relationships, and adventure. Adventure, as he describes it, "has to do with risk, with a bias toward action, with curiosity and courage. And the challenge of leadership is to create the social architecture where ideas, relationships, and adventure can flourish" (p. xiv). Bennis goes on to describe a group of highly successful international businessmen who were alike in wanting to work very hard but who "also always had an enormous amount of fun" (p. 95).