Possibilities at CPCS: Instructional Activities

An instructional activity – a class or a workshop – is one way to acquire and demonstrate a competency. It is but one course of action among several. A teacher helps the students in a class develop the skills and/or knowledge spelled out in a Competency Statement or, often, in more than one Competency Statement. The students demonstrate that they have learned the skills and/or knowledge by successfully completing the work assigned in the class. In the Critical Learning Seminar, for instance, a student can acquire and demonstrate the Dimensions of Learning and the Critical Inquiry competencies, as well as work on aspects of the Communications Portfolio I competency (writing and computer skills).

 

Students often like to take this path because it is familiar to them through earlier school experiences or because they recognize that they would best develop a particular competency if they were working in a classroom setting. Instructors sometimes like students to take this path because they believe that a particular competency is usually best developed in a classroom setting or that a classroom setting would be more effective for a particular student.

 

But research investigating how people learn has shown that individuals most effectively learn a lot of things when they work with peers or on their own. Individuals who have a good deal of experience as learners – adult learners, that is – often have particularly strong abilities to work on their own or with others, taking advantage of faculty expertise when it might be useful. They may not need to take a class. So CPCS students, rather than enrolling in courses by default, are encouraged to think seriously about when a class will be useful to them and when an alternative mode of learning might be more effective.