What I required my college students to agree to

Teaching at UC Berkeley and Stanford, I quickly understood:

• If I wanted to grant more agency over their learning to students, I would have relinquish authority.

• If I wanted students to become co-learners, I had to overcome my fear of disclosing that although I am comfortable in my expertise regarding the subject matter, I was learning how to teach as I went along.

• As well-tuned as my students were to getting good grades, motivation to learn for learning's sake was tempered by the learned helplessness of schooling and grading.

So I asked the students who signed up for my class to agree to commit themselves to learn in a different way than the one they were accustomed to:

Welcome! This course is going to be fun and enriching for those who choose to get involved in doing classwork in new ways. We’re going to experiment.  The success of our experiment will depend on our work together as a learning community – in class and online. Please click and read each link on this page – and ask yourself if you are ready to continue at this level of commitment through the rest of the quarter. Each one of us will be required to work differently than we usually do. Most courses focus on the delivery by a teacher of a specific body of knowledge to students, who are held accountable as individuals for retaining and comprehending that knowledge. In this learning community, we’re going to be inquiring and reflecting more than delivering and memorizing, and we’re going to be thinking, discussing, learning as a group as well as learning individually — we’re going to be both collaborative (working together on projects) and cooperative (co-responsible for each other’s learning). That part alone is going to require more work on your part than you might think.

I wish I had trusted learners earlier. I did begin to experiment with collaborative curriculum construction in my last quarter. Some students will take advantage, others will reawaken their enthusiasm for learning.