THEME: TAL2023 - Facilitation of groups seen from TEK – the arrow points to the leaders
Lecturer, Steffen Kjær Johansen, Department of Technology and Innovation also participated in TAL Conference 2023. He has agreed to share some of the points that he brought home from the day.
Steffen Kjær Johansen has taught at TEK, SDU for more than a decade and thus comes from a tradition that for many years has emphasised group work in teaching. Teaching at TEK is anchored in The Southern Danish Model for Engineering Education (DSMI), which is a project-based learning strategy. For decades, the engineering studies have emphasized interdisciplinary cooperation and cooperation skills very highly in the overall competence profile of the programmes.
Some of Steffen Kjær Johansen's reflections after the TAL Conference are that, although over a number of years, much emphasis has been placed on various forms of projects and group work in each semester of the education programs, the full potential has not yet been achieved.
There is reasonable agreement about the pedagogical model, but for a model to work in practice, it requires (i) constant vigilance – the model and its rationale must not be 'forgotten' by teachers and management – and it requires (ii) appropriate support structures. If you e.g. want the project groups to be self-facilitating (and for resource reasons alone they cannot be teacher-facilitated), then a decision must be made as to when the students must be trained in facilitation and who will be in charge of it. It is crucial that such a task does not fall between all the teacher's chairs, where the individual teacher expects that the task has already been solved by others. It requires a helicopter perspective, which head of studies and subject managers have rather than the individual teacher.
Steffen Kjær Johansen also insists that with regard to training in self-facilitation in the groups, you can go a long way with little resources. And he also points out that the teachers could have a very strong interest in such a strengthening of the facilitation skills among the students taking place. The more the students throughout the program can facilitate the work of the project groups themselves, the more the lecturers can remain in their research based expert role when they guide the groups - the role they might most want to have. But the prerequisite is, again, that the student management level contributes to ensuring that kind of progression in the study programme. So here, too, the arrow points to management.