I was reminded today that I once drafted a set of learning goals for writing and speaking at the undergraduate level for a project headed up by our office of advisement and orientation. While these goals implicitly inform the curricular support and development work of the institute, they have not been codified beyond the document I created in 2006 (before I learned about Bloom’s taxonomy). These goals have not seen the light of day beyond their very limited original context. With that, I thought I’d post them for discussion. Take a look and let us know if you find these useful and/or whether you’d recommend revisions. Here we go:
By the end of their undergraduate experience students should be able to:
- comfortably pose pertinent questions to faculty both in and out of class
- demonstrate proficiency in a number of everyday written genres (email, letter, etc.)
- demonstrate sensitivity to audience in oral and written communication – write and speak in a manner appropriate to audience – articulate similarities and differences in addressing different audiences (email to peer vs. email to faculty, conversation with parent vs. conversation with prospective employer)
- demonstrate awareness that all communication is purposeful – each individual communication is meant to accomplish a particular goal or set of goals – sensitivity to purpose
- grasp rhetorical purpose of own written work (what is this paper, email, memo, etc. meant to accomplish? What do I need it to do? What should it accomplish?)
- articulate how they might go about accomplishing purpose of given communication (in order to accomplish X in my email to my professor, I need to make clear that Y and establish Z before making the argument that A)
- work responsibly and productively as a member of a group – to communicate appropriately with all group members
- comfortably speak before an audience – impromptu and prepared presentations
- articulate own understanding of how they can become better communicators (what do I need to work on to become a better writer/speaker?)
Discuss.
Coincidentally, my team is working on a draft of learning goals for the freshman English program, so I was very interested to read this (and to learn a bit more on educational psychology). I am not able to offer any insightful comments at the moment but they are all necessary skills the students should graduate with. It does seem that they could be organized into main goals and their subgoals. Some seem to have comprehension (or listening or audience) in mind, some of them production (writing and speaking), some universal. Some have to do with oral communication, some written, some universal…I will think about it.
Nice to be back commenting on cac.ophony!