John Karagiannakis & Gary Syrett - Electrical

John and Gary talked about the approach they have devised for their first year apprentices. This came about as a result of their LearnScope project in 2003, and a Reframing the Future project in 2002.
One problem the Electrical team has faced has been the poor retention of information by students as they progress through the course. The structure of the training package includes multiple 4 year long competencies which are broken up into modules. The course in previous years sometimes had up to 10 hours of assessment tasks for a 40 hour module.
This team wanted to change so they would keep pace, make things better, and improve their teaching practice.

The training has traditionally taken place in a very lock-step manner - which does not equate to the reality of the workplace. As the apprentices progress through their training, they record the types of tasks they perform at work. This is then fed into a profiling system, which reports on the variety of work the apprentice has been exposed to.

Profile of students: The WHY Gneration
a) they question things
b) multitasking is everyday
c) independent
d) need some structure, esp. in early days
e) Sim City Approach to learning - constructed, interrelated, projects, goals....

The aim of this new approach is "assisting students in developing their own learning practices within a learning guides and learning contracts framework". Explicit in this is the desire to foster self directed learning and employability skills also. Assessment is being re-engineered to be more project based and about application of competency, not reams of multiple choice. Students have the option of designing their own projects.

Resources - rather than developing new resource books, the team is developing a pool of resources which includes module books, equipment, library resources, teachers, manuals, etc. Teachers have found this has made it possible to have more students at the one time, as 'you no longer need 28 sets of all the equipment'. Knowledge sessions are still presented by teachers but they are minimised and more likely to be on request.

John & Gary are hoping that the project based approach answers the question of "why are we learning this?"