Wednesday 21 July 2010
Customer Journey
The blog I just posted is called 'slacking on the customer journey'. Why the customer journey? Well, that's to be taken up in my next blog. Right now, it's time to think about logging off for the day.
Slacking on the customer journey
Recently, my wife and I watched a DVD of 'Julie and Julia' in which an aspiring young author in contemporary New York uses a blog on her year long attempt to cook all the recipes in Julia Child's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' as a form of therapy and self actualization. Initially, she is reluctant to start a blog, regarding them, as I largely still do, as a form of self indulgence. However, she persists, demonstrating considerable self discipline in not only cooking a dish a day (and some of the recipes are pretty time consuming) but also writing up a blog reporting and reflecting on her culinary efforts. Phew!
I see that it's a month since I posted my last blog on course development. Since then I've chatted with a teacher trainer and a former DOS on this topic, the gist of which is that the ideal approach to course development, rather like the ideal lesson plan, is not much witnessed in the real world of the language teaching organization (LTO). In fact, it's rare for totally new courses to be designed from scratch, repackaging existing courses being more common. The idea of tightly determining in fine detail the aims, content and session by session provision of a course is not one which, in the view of the teacher trainer, would be readily accepted by many teachers, as it would remove initiative and the use of their own judgment. However, the former DOS did say that teachers were required to maintain a record of the work they covered, which is essentially an after the event record. Ensuring that they did so was always a bit of an effort, and, of course, it is essential to have some such record so that other teachers who are teaching the same student group know what they have been taught, or when a teacher has to cover for an absent colleague.
The teacher trainer noted that a course outline was very useful for inexperienced teachers who need and often welcome such guidance. However, the course outline should avoid being too detailed and prescriptive and the trainer was critical of course outlines which advised the teacher to cover specific pages in the course book, to skip specific exercises or activities, and, in short, held the teacher's hand so as to remove any initiative.
A curriculum and course outlines are requirements of most accreditation schemes, so DOSs will ensure that such documentation exists when an inspection is imminent. Likewise, teachers will produce lesson plans and schemes of work. Once the inspection is over, old habits reassert themselves.
What isn't absolutely clear is what these old habits actually are. So, what I want to do is to find out what academic managers and teachers actually do in practice when it comes to developing courses and writing course outlines. I believe it's always best to start with actual practice rather than simply impose an ideal scheme, since people usually ignore or at best modify any such scheme to match their own requirements -- or to use a term that is now being bandied about regarding the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, 'conditions on the ground'.
So, what are the conditions on the ground which influence the way course development (and delivery) is actually carried out in the LTO?
I see that it's a month since I posted my last blog on course development. Since then I've chatted with a teacher trainer and a former DOS on this topic, the gist of which is that the ideal approach to course development, rather like the ideal lesson plan, is not much witnessed in the real world of the language teaching organization (LTO). In fact, it's rare for totally new courses to be designed from scratch, repackaging existing courses being more common. The idea of tightly determining in fine detail the aims, content and session by session provision of a course is not one which, in the view of the teacher trainer, would be readily accepted by many teachers, as it would remove initiative and the use of their own judgment. However, the former DOS did say that teachers were required to maintain a record of the work they covered, which is essentially an after the event record. Ensuring that they did so was always a bit of an effort, and, of course, it is essential to have some such record so that other teachers who are teaching the same student group know what they have been taught, or when a teacher has to cover for an absent colleague.
The teacher trainer noted that a course outline was very useful for inexperienced teachers who need and often welcome such guidance. However, the course outline should avoid being too detailed and prescriptive and the trainer was critical of course outlines which advised the teacher to cover specific pages in the course book, to skip specific exercises or activities, and, in short, held the teacher's hand so as to remove any initiative.
A curriculum and course outlines are requirements of most accreditation schemes, so DOSs will ensure that such documentation exists when an inspection is imminent. Likewise, teachers will produce lesson plans and schemes of work. Once the inspection is over, old habits reassert themselves.
What isn't absolutely clear is what these old habits actually are. So, what I want to do is to find out what academic managers and teachers actually do in practice when it comes to developing courses and writing course outlines. I believe it's always best to start with actual practice rather than simply impose an ideal scheme, since people usually ignore or at best modify any such scheme to match their own requirements -- or to use a term that is now being bandied about regarding the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, 'conditions on the ground'.
So, what are the conditions on the ground which influence the way course development (and delivery) is actually carried out in the LTO?
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