2 Learning Objectives

This supplemental resource builds on the straightforward, honest recognition that the complex reality of authentic learning is often obscured by celebratory hype that highlights dramatic successes and understates the range of actual results. Ironically, by downplaying the risks and overselling successes, proponents overlook the rewards that can be realized by helping students identify barriers and solve emergent problems.

In this course, we will provide intellectual scaffolding that will help you to make preparations that raise your odds of success (in large part by rethinking what “success” means). We will offer supporting strategies to help you adapt when things go awry. Most importantly, we will ask you to complete exercises in authentic learning that will help you build empathy for your students should you decide to develop authentic learning assignments. Along the way, we will ask you to engage in formative reflections on questions you might not have considered.

Like other teaching strategies, authentic learning doesn’t work for everyone all of the time. It doesn’t fit every class, and it comes with few guarantees. Everyone involved– instructor and students– usually experiences a different blend of success and failure. Making authentic learning work requires discovering how to identify and navigate barriers, take risks without guarantees, plan for uncertain outcomes, and persist through the ups and downs. It also requires communication. It is important for you to develop and convey to students a mindset that supports resilience in the face of obstacles; an approach to assessment that values effort over outcomes; and learning outcomes that find lessons in losses. Readers familiar with design thinking will note some strong similarities. There is a reason for that, as we will soon discuss.

In this course, we want to help you develop a mindset appropriate to teaching with authentic learning strategies and encourage you to convey that mindset to your students. If you try to force authentic learning into a standard course bristling with structure– thick with rigid due dates, lectures, readings, and traditional assessments– you doom your efforts to failure. And if your students try to work through authentic learning assignments in a passive manner– if they expect rigid due dates, lectures, readings, and traditional assessments, and if they expect you to provide all of the content, detailed direction, and tightly-woven structure– you doom them to failure. Hence, the two core goals of the course are preparing yourself and preparing your students for a different kind of learning. Creating that kind of awareness won’t make all of the bumps and potholes disappear from the road ahead, but anticipated jolts won’t be as disorienting. Awareness will contain moments of panic.

Despite these words of caution, there is reason to persist. When authentic learning works, it is extraordinarily impactful. Students who have good experiences have very good experiences. They are likely to count you as a mentor of heroic stature for years to come. That feels great!

Before we go much farther, we ought to answer a simple question: what is authentic learning?