Learning journey ending or just beginning

3

28/11/2015 by Anne-Maarit

Just in a few days I will be graduating from Haaga-Helia. This is a reflection on the one and half years of Vocational Teacher studies. Frankly I must say, I would have not believed how much I can learn and how much the business background I have, effects on how I teach and think and act.

The best part of learning I have obtained has been through studying and working at the same time during this fall at HAMK as well as completing my teaching practice last spring at Laurea Hyvinkää. The discussions with my colleagues as well as the students have been very fruitful for me to understand what is really relevant and what isn’t.

Teacher identity

In the beginning of my studies I had a big confusement on what is my identity as a teacher and how should I work as a teacher. My knowledge and understanding of teaching and being a teacher relied on my school and university time experiences as well as how I saw my mother work as a teacher. Well the world has changed since then quite a lot and I am happy to become a teacher now and not 20 years ago.

 

Due to the puzzled feeling, it took me many months before I started to understand why we were taught the way we were, why the assignments were as they were and most of all, what can I do as a teacher and how can I utilize my strengths and knowledge to the best of my ability. At the moment I am working even harder to figure out what is the best way to teach in the surrounding and context I am teaching.

Pedagogy 

I was astonished how difficult and huge area of expertise pedagogy, learning and teaching is. And how much new methods there are to test and try out from. This still amazes me daily. No matter how much I read, learn, test, try out, analyze, adapt, etc., there is always something I should or could do better. I am glad our teachers at Vocational Teacher Education have encouraged us to test and find now ways to teach, so probably this thinking will carry my forward years to come. The basic studies of pedagogy were very useful and I think I got out of the entire studies much more this way than those who had completed them years ago.

Business mindset

At the moment I feel at times like a novice but at times as a professional.  It depends on the issue I am reflecting on. I some things like teaching methods and running courses I am a bit lost still at times and see that my thinking is too simplified. But at times I feel that I am totally in a different world than my colleagues as I am thinking about the company’s profitability and resource efficiency relating to the learning results. I know this is because of my business background and business mindset, and in school environment I feel that it creates a personal struggle of on who’s side am I on. I need to see that my work is profitable, logical, efficient, even measurable, but I need to know also that the way I am doing things is making sense for the company as well. This is not profound to most teachers.

Development spirit

During the autumn as I have been working in HAMK as a lecturer, it has become clear to me that the management appreciates my business mindset, my capability to see business opportunities and my straightforward talk about resources, the efficiency of teaching, ways of saving money as well as the willingness to test new learning methods.

My business mindset has lead to the situation that currently I am in a working committee trying to figure out how to optimize resources of adult AMK  education at HAMK from 2016 forward. I have taken part in a project relating to Flipped Learning in YAMK. I have been asked to answer surveys, be interviewed for this and that and have run an extra course for students taking part in Slush.

I love to do development work, but at times I wonder, does the school environment have capabilities to execute the changes it should, to keep up with the surrounding world. I have been glad that the management has given my knowledge and experience credit even though I am a novice as a teacher. Let’s see what our working committee can achieve.

 Developing, creating and resourcing

My development work for my studies contained a plan on how to use more project based learning in HAMK instead of lectures to offer more meaningful learning for the students, offer them more individual guidance, get better learning results, teach them real working life skills, integrate language learning into the studies and as well as reduce the resource needed for teaching. I came up with my development project idea  during my teaching practice at Laurea P2P, where all the studies are done with projects. I got curious from the business point of view ,how different the skills are, that the students obtain during their studies when they are doing real projects for real companies instead of doing imaginary school tasks or listening on lectures.

I wrote a paper on the socialization of students to working life comparing lectures and project learning to summarize the benefits of project learning. Even I had a hunch how it would end up, I was still surprised how much more the students can get from a real life project compared to lectures. I have now also told to my students that I can assure them, that when they have done real projects, it will be easier for them to get a job that by just sitting in class and listening.

During doing my project I tried to figure out also how to save in the resources, but in real life it seems, it is quite hard to reach the savings. I have tried in various ways and so far it seems that if I reduce work from planning, I end up doing more in evaluation or in guidance, if I cut from evaluation, I need to do more work in guidance and counseling. If I cut from guidance and counseling/teaching, the learning results are not as good. There were some real saving possibilities I could find, but they relate to the system and the teacher roles and those I cannot do anything about.

I am glad that I have been offered the possibility to test different ways of teaching and nobody has come to criticize or comment “you can’t do like that”. It just seems that I need to work further and test more and also discuss even more with my colleagues on how to solve especially the adult teaching resourcing issue at hand.

Conclusion

As a conclusion I would say that my journey as a teacher student has been very rewarding as well as productive. I still think that my expertise is of value to my students. During this journey it has come to my surprise that also my organization values my knowhow and previous work experience. Unexpectedly my business and development mindset has been very useful for me as a teacher in the current surrounding and probably in the future as well.

I have enjoyed extremely the attitude of my teachers at Haaga-Helia, their innovativeness, willingness to encourage and push forward. Thank you both Irmeli Pietilä and David Maufferet – you complete each other well! I enjoyed my time with you and both of you can offer great guidance to new teachers with real examples and modern ideas.

I am happy I took up this path, I have learned a great deal as a person as well as professionally. Though it seems that actually this is not the end of my learning journey, but just the beginning.

-Anne-Maarit-