Students joining universities sometimes lack the agency to lead their lives and succeed in higher education. In the educational context, agency refers to the more empowered positioning of students to be active agents in their own learning lives. Enhancing life skills/competencies can facilitate students’ agency when they instill positive set beliefs and personal competencies, creating agentic capacity. Action Learning is one of the methods used to enhance life skills/competencies by engaging students in real life problems, taking action, and continuously reflecting on their actions. This paper presents a suggested program for building firs-year university students’ agency through a balanced approach of Competency-based Learning, Action Learning, and Reflective Learning.
The abrupt shift to full online learning due to COVID-19, displaced students and teachers, created multiple barriers in teaching and learning, and caused some instructors not being able to build and maintain an online learning community. This situation resulted in students’ detachment from their instructor and peers causing lack of motivation and increase of failure chances. First the paper explores the challenges and opportunities of building and online learning community highlighting the needs, and reviewes some past frameworks in the field. Second, a framework is proposed that identifies four factors that help the growth of online learning communities. Those facots are; teacher presence, social presence, cognitive presence and students’ emotional engagement. Further the framework specifies type of actions and activities that teachers/instructors should be adopting throughout the course. The paper adds to the growing knowledge on Coronavirus effects on the educational sector and highlights the need for the efficeint use of technology in education.
Although there are a variety of perspectives and conceptualisations by different researchers of what it means to reflect critically about teaching (Poblete, 1999), there is an agreement that critical reflection entails higher, more complicated level that challenges the educator (Lucas, 2012). This paper is discussing critical reflection frameworks available in literature and suggesting a new framework that is able to capture a complete picture of what critical reflection entails. The framework has five levels of reflection; reacting, recalling, realising, reconsidering, and reflecting. Those levels stimulate accessing teachers’ thoughts and feelings taking them though a thought and action process that helps them discover; what is happening, why what is happening is happening, how it can change, and ensures continuouity of this process. The framework forms a reflective spiral of self-construction of learning that transforms the teacher’s behavior and leads to growth competence.
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