| I am a college professor in Ontario. As I worked through my Saint Francis Xavier Master of Adult Education degree program, I witnessed each of my teaching classrooms evolve into learning communities in which I play the role of a learning facilitator and my students work together collaboratively, helping each other achieve their personalized learning objectives. In this thesis, I examine the evolutionary growth of myself and my students in the learning communities we have created together. My rationale for focusing on a collaborative, experiential, self-directed learning model, and for including my own growth in this exploration, is three-fold. First, education experts highlight that these types of learning lead to higher levels of thought than does individual, teacher-centred learning. For example, Johnson, Johnson, and Smith (1991) and Gokhale (1995) identifies that collaborative learning fosters the development of critical thinking, problem solving, and creativity skills. Rogers (1969) acknowledges that learning will occur when students participate in the learning process, when they have control over its nature and direction, and self-evaluation is the principal method of assessing progress or success and, Knowles (1975) recommends that every act of teaching should have built into it some provision for helping the learner become more self-directing. Second, as a business manager for 20 years, I have learned that if employees want to be successful, they must learn to set goals, take initiative, and work as partners in their employment ventures. Lastly, my consulting experiences have taught me that the majority of people require my assistance as a catalyst and as a guide to help them identify and overcome the challenges they faced.I selected case study as my research method because I wanted to gain an understanding of how student learning evolved, through the stages of my learning and the transformations in my courses. My research involved 17 students from four different sections. Student interviews were used to collect data from November 2002 to April 2006. My research evolved through three stages: (a) Instructor-Centred Teaching, (b) Student-Centred Learning, and (c) Learner-Centred Learning. I moved from being a traditional lecturer to being the creator of a learning environment that engages students in self-directed learning tasks facilitated in a collaborative, experiential manner. My vision through these three stages was to create a learning environment in which students: (1) define their personal learning objectives, (2) work together in a collaborative learning community to help each other achieve their desired learning outcomes, and (3) apply their knowledge and skill in a business setting. I played the role of a learning facilitator challenging-students and helping them overcome the obstacles they ran into. |
