An Instructional Approach for Improving the Writing of Literature Reviews

Abstract

The modeling of effective instructional techniques is an essential component of college instruction. This modeling encompasses both the pedagogical choices that are evidenced during teaching and the decision process that leads toward broader change (Freer & Craig, 2003). In the case of college faculty members, such pedagogical decisions are often based on intuition and emotion rather than on the diagnosis of problems, analysis of evidence, and systematic evaluation of adjustments to course content and/or instructional techniques (Weimer, 2001). In this article, we outline a project undertaken with two graduate classes in music education. We first identified a problem that our students were having, developed an instructional plan to address the problem, examined evidence about the effectiveness of the plan, and drew implications for teaching and learning in our other courses.For our students to learn our intended content (in this case, about literature reviews), we realized that we needed to begin with what students knew and build from that point. Taking students from the known to the unknown required us to connect the content to instructional techniques, continually assessing and adjusting those techniques in response to the learning we saw in our classrooms (Meyer-Mork, 2007). Weimer (2003) writes, "We have stopped assuming that learning is the automatic, inevitable outcome of teaching. Certainly, good teaching and learning are related. However, when we . . . start with learning, connecting what is known about how people learn to instructional practice, we come at teaching and its improvement from a very different direction" (p. 49).Literature Reviews -2 Weimer (2003) has also developed a list of "Five Key Changes to Practice," of which two are especially pertinent to our project. First, the balance of power within the classroom cannot be too focused on faculty decisions; faculty need to share decision-making with students.Second, college classrooms tend to feature teachers, though a heightened level of student agency is necessary for knowledge acquisition. We decided to approach these two areas of potential change by highlighting our own recent experiences as graduate students.We often commented that the collegiality we felt as graduate students stood in marked contrast to the isolation we had previously felt as music teachers. Since all of the students in our classes were music educators who traveled to campus for night classes, we decided to model collaboration and scholarship utilizing a team-teaching approach. Clandinin and Connelly obtaining additional, necessary information. Most graduate programs in music education focus at least some attention on written communication, given that much of the professional knowledge is archived in reports, articles, theses and books. At our university, the early courses in the MMlevel sequence are designed to promote the ability to read scholarly materials with understanding, synthesize contents across a broad spectrum of sources, and critically analyze the methods and ...

Team teaching in the conservatoire: The views of music performance staff and students

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Marketing education and the employability challenge

“…It is worth noting that, with the exception of Freer and Barker (2008) and Gordon and Stewart (2002), advice on writing a literature review assumes that individuals will work alone or at most will engage with peers in a virtual classroom or in the review of their work. This is in contrast to the number of academic studies which are co-authored by teams of academics.…”