COUC 747 Week 1 DB Blog 1: Educational Semantics Example

Discussion Board Blog 1: Thread and Two Responses

COUC 747 Instruction in Counselor Education, Discussion Board Blog 1, Educational Semantics (thread and two responses)

Thread by [Student Name]

The blog prompt and the colleagues' posts are composites standing in for the course's own discussion board; the textbooks and published works are real; the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for COUC 747.

Thread

During the first week I co-taught a master's counseling skills course, a student raised her hand and asked, "Is this a lecture class or a workshop?" I fumbled the answer, saying something about both, and watched her write nothing down. The question was really about what kind of teaching she should expect and what kind of learner she was supposed to be. This blog argues that the words counselor educators use for teaching carry those expectations, and that choosing them carefully is part of designing a course.

Four terms come up constantly. Pedagogy, from Greek words for leading a child, has become the general word for the art of teaching, but its roots suggest a teacher who decides what the learner needs. Andragogy is the term Knowles popularized for helping adults learn. Knowles et al. (2015) describe six assumptions behind it. Grown learners commit effort once they see what a lesson is for; they think of themselves as running their own lives; their accumulated experience is raw material for the class; their readiness rises when a role, such as a first job as a counselor, demands new skill; they organize learning around problems more than subjects; and the strongest pull on them is internal, such as self-esteem or a sense of calling. Instruction is narrower, the planned delivery of content and practice toward stated objectives. Formation is the oldest term, used in religious and professional education for shaping a person's character and identity over time.

Freire adds a warning that applies to all four. His critique of what he calls banking education, in which teachers deposit information in passive students, frames Pedagogy of the Oppressed from its opening pages (Freire, 2000). A course can use andragogical language and still bank, for instance by inviting students to share experience and then grading them only on recall of the instructor's slides.

I believe counselor education is best described as formation, because we are shaping not only what students know but who they become in the room with a client. Skills, ethics and self-awareness cannot simply be deposited; they grow through practice, feedback and reflection over several years. Yet the profession has rarely examined its own teaching vocabulary. Barrio Minton et al. (2014) analyzed 230 peer-reviewed articles on teaching and learning published in American Counseling Association journals between 2001 and 2010, examining their focus, pedagogical foundations and methods, and their review raised questions about how often counselor educators ground teaching in explicit learning theory. McKeachie and Svinicki (2014) likewise encourage new faculty to think about how students learn before choosing techniques.

Colleagues: which word best describes your own teaching, and has your answer changed since you started the program?

Response to Rachel

Rachel, you argued that andragogy is the only fitting word for doctoral and master's education, since all of our students are adults. I agree that age makes the term attractive, but I wonder whether Knowles's assumptions always describe graduate students in counseling. Knowles et al. (2015) present andragogy as a set of assumptions to be tested against each situation, not a fixed rule, and they note that adults may become dependent learners in unfamiliar territory. A first-semester master's student who has never sat with a client may want, and need, a good deal of direction, and may feel abandoned rather than respected if the instructor simply asks what the class would like to learn.

That is where the research on guided instruction is relevant. Kirschner et al. (2006) argue that minimally guided approaches are less effective for novices because they overload working memory, and that the advantage of guidance recedes only when learners have enough prior knowledge to guide themselves. A skills course may need to begin with clear modeling and structured practice before it moves toward the self-direction andragogy assumes.

Perhaps the most honest description is a progression: more instruction early, more andragogy later. Would you design the first and last weeks of a skills course differently with that in mind? I suspect I would move from demonstration and scripted role-play early to student-designed practice sessions by the end.

Response to Samuel

Samuel, you wrote that the preface to Vella's book made you want to replace the word teaching with dialogue altogether. I was struck by the same pages. Vella (2002) describes adult learning as a conversation in which the teacher designs the setting, the tasks and the questions, and learners are respected as decision makers who bring their own experience. The word dialogue makes the learner a partner rather than an audience, and it changes what an instructor listens for during class.

Still, I would keep both words. Dialogue describes the relationship; teaching describes the responsibility. Vella herself insists on careful design, including assessing learners' needs before a course begins, which suggests that dialogue is something a teacher prepares for rather than a replacement for teaching. Freire (2000) makes a similar point when he describes the teacher as also a learner, without suggesting that the teacher stops teaching.

In counselor education, the parallel with counseling is hard to miss. A counselor does not stop being responsible for the session because the client leads the conversation. How do you think a syllabus would look if it described each class meeting as a dialogue with a design? I can imagine each session listing the questions learners will answer rather than the topics the instructor will cover.

References

Barrio Minton, C. A., Wachter Morris, C. A., & Yaites, L. D. (2014). Pedagogy in counselor education: A 10-year content analysis of journals. Counselor Education and Supervision, 53(3), 162-177. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.1556-6978.2014.00055.x

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.; 30th anniversary ed.). Continuum. (Original work published 1970)

Kirschner, P. A., Sweller, J., & Clark, R. E. (2006). Why minimal guidance during instruction does not work: An analysis of the failure of constructivist, discovery, problem-based, experiential, and inquiry-based teaching. Educational Psychologist, 41(2), 75-86. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep4102_1

Knowles, M. S., Holton, E. F., III, & Swanson, R. A. (2015). The adult learner: The definitive classic in adult education and human resource development (8th ed.). Routledge.

McKeachie, W. J., & Svinicki, M. (2014). McKeachie's teaching tips: Strategies, research, and theory for college and university teachers (14th ed.). Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Vella, J. (2002). Learning to listen, learning to teach: The power of dialogue in educating adults (Rev. ed.). Jossey-Bass.