(static) - Roger, 4807, approaching runway seven, bravo. (rock music) - The Air Force has announced the creation of a new information operations technical training school. (whoosh) - So in our business of national security, where our job is to fight, fight, win, you'd better be masters at this game of innovation. - The Air Force base and military training has an updated curriculum with a new focus on readiness and lethality. - This is the Developing Mach-21 Airmen podcast. - Hey, everybody, welcome into Developing Mach-21 Airmen, and thanks for the subscribe, stream, or download, however you might be listening in today or consume your pods. We certainly appreciate it, if you get a chance, to throw us some stars, even possibly a review our way if you have some time. We certainly would appreciate that as well. My name is Dan Hawkins from the Air Education and Training Command Public Affairs Office and your host for this professional development podcast dedicated to bringing in total force, big A airmen, insight, tips, tricks, and lessons learned from the recruiting, training, and education field. Great show today for episode number 12 of the pod, and we're talking to Dr. Kristen Lewis from the 381st Training Group out at Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. And while she was here in San Antonio at Joint Base San Antonio Randolph attending a learning consortium conference a few months ago, she gave a wonderful presentation on student-centered instruction in communities of practice. So we figured we'd have her on the pod to share this philosophy which is meant to maximize the learning potential of students by focusing in on the needs of individual students. Dr. Lewis talks about the research behind the student-centered instruction method, how it represents a paradigm shift in the fact that instructors don't control learning and how she was able to implement it locally at the 381st last year after the second Air Force commander allowed faculty development to be handled locally as opposed to being more standardized at the math level. One of the things that General Kwast has spoken about many times is thawing out the frozen middle. Once Dr. Lewis had a bit more control of the faculty development, she ran with it. She didn't have that middle ground of someone not at Vandenberg telling them how to structure their faculty development. So they were able to tailor it to something that worked for them at the 381st training group. Dr. Lewis also discusses the importance of and the components that make up the communities of practice and why they're a good fit for Air Force training. She goes in-depth on the thought that we learn at the boundaries of our understanding. So that's a pretty interesting conversation as well. Dr. Lewis also talks to how she wins over the skeptics of the philosophy who think it can't be done in their particular training environment partly with the ask to those skeptics to try one small thing because they have really nothing to lose. Episode number 12 of Developing Mach-21 Airmen starts right now. (whoosh) So Dr. Lewis, just tell us a little bit about yourself. - I am an instructional systems specialist. I right now work as the training development element chief for Vandenberg faculty development. I am a learning professional. I believe my entire life I've been involved in some kind of teaching and learning situation. My first job was as a swimming teacher, and I had groups of five five to seven-year-olds, non-swimmers, and we had to sit on the deck right before we got in the water and we had to have an agreement that I was going to keep them from drowning, keep them safe, and they were going to do what I said. So that really put the hook in me to want to continue in education. I worked as a teacher's aide in high school. After high school, I went in the Air Force. I was a firefighter for four years and then got out, got married, moved out to Vandenberg Air Force Base, California with my husband, who's a retired missile maintainer. Went back to school as soon as we got to Vandenberg and studied math, accounting, became an accountant, decided that was boring, and went back to school again and became a multiple subjects teacher. But I really centered on teaching biology and algebra for most of my career. I have my master's in curriculum, my master's in educational leadership, and towards the later part of my career, I went back to the University of California, Santa Barbara, and got my Ph.D in teaching and learning science. I decided to retire from teaching in 2010. I was really overwhelmed and frustrated with the public education system in California, but I believe it's this way everywhere. I had started a charter high school for socioeconomically disadvantaged students. The local school district decided that we did not need our grant funding, so the teachers were paying for everything. It just became frustrating. So I closed the charter and retired and applied for civil service and got my job as a course manager in 2010. I started in space training. I moved to faculty development from there. I spent 15 months as a resource adviser because of my accounting background, and now I'm back leading the curriculum development for faculty development. - Yeah, and it's really interesting to me because you've had a little bit of variety in your background, but that's always a good thing. Diversity in thought and opinion and just seeing things that might help shape your overall objective. You're in town this week at a learning consortium here at AETC headquarters, but you gave a presentation on student-centered instructions in communities of practice, so could you kind of talk to what student-centered instruction is? - Student-centered instruction is simply a different relationship in the classroom or online, whatever your delivery platform is between and among instructors and students and students and students. So it's more of a facilitator role where the instructor is facilitating the students attaining their own learning goals within the constructs of the standards of your course, the objectives of your course, whatever that is. So in a student-centered instruction circumstance, you really are taking the responsibility for learning off of the shoulders of the instructor and placing that responsibility on the student and giving them the opportunities to fulfill that responsibility. If you think about it, you cannot force anybody to learn anyway, so I really think that's a myth that you can make people learn something. I don't care how long you stand and lecture at them. We choose to learn or not to learn. So this is just acknowledging that that is the truth and accepting it, embracing it, and creating a learning environment, designing curriculum that will empower students to attain their own learning goals. - And it's interesting because that's one of the things General Kwast has talked about. He's talked about giving control of learning over to the airmen and let them control it via the Air Force. So it's interesting that the instructor has to acknowledge that they don't control that learning and that the airman does, but how do they reconcile that from an instructor perspective and start to move towards this approach? - When an instructor who adopts this methodology starts to see their students learning, achieving far more than they were under the opposite circumstance which is instructor-centered, that is motivation to continue along these lines. And when an instructor comes to realize that this is easy, this is not difficult to do, it does require collaboration among instructors and designers, curriculum designers, to make sure that the active-learning strategies you're applying in your training context are student-centered. But you have to look at each training context. It's very important that you don't force something on instructors that they don't feel is possible in their training context. They have to be a part of the decision-making on what and how things are taught. You have to honor those instructors as subject matter experts. When they see their, I don't care who the instructor is. When every instructor wants their students to be successful, and when you see that happen right in front of your eyes, when you try something simple and it works and you see it happen, you're sold. - A lot of the principles around student-centered really talked about engaged, rigorous learning, so motivated, empowered, responsible learning, so all those things seem to be part of this approach. Can you kind of give an example of, to a layman, what a student-centered method looks like? - Okay, I'll give two simple strategies that anybody listening to this can take out and do right now today. One is a KWL, and you can do this in the classroom. You can do it online. You can set it up in a class that doesn't have an instructor, that has someone that just checks in every now and then. KWL stands for what I know, what I want to know, and what I learned. So to start a class, let's say, I do this in my online course, Course Writer. So on the discussion board, I ask my students what do you know and want to know about the subject we're getting ready to study? They interact with me on the discussion board, so it gives the instructor an idea of what the students, where they're coming from, what they know, you can dispel any misconceptions, and it establishes that dialogue between the instructor and the student. Then you do your teaching, and then at the end of the course or the end of the unit, you say, okay, now, everybody, tell me what you learned. So then you can see, okay, did I cover all the bases? Did the students meet their own goals, their own learning goals? Do we need something more? Where do we go with this? So it's a way of letting your students, the students in front of you, the students you're working with right now, not just the general population, but it's a way that you can tailor what you teach to the people you're working with right now. Another strategy that can be used throughout any lesson, again, either ... This one probably wouldn't work online unless you did it on a discussion board. It's called Think, Pair, Share. I did this at the seminar yesterday and it really went off very well with the skeptics to student-centered learning. It's where you take a challenging question or problem, a controversial one works really well, and you tell the students, turn to the person next to you and discuss this for, say, three minutes. You can have them take notes if you wanted to. Then when three minutes is up, and the instructor should walk around and listen and interject and be a part of the discussion, when the three minutes is up, just gently go around the room and say finish your thought, finish your thought, finish your thought, and like magic they come back together and they quiet down. Then ask, does anybody want to share some really interesting revelations that you came up with in your discussion? There are always many, many very interesting comments that add a great deal to your conversation. - So when I think about that, it leads me to think that in the end, using that sort of approach, it seems like the students would have a better chance of getting to a more deeper understanding of the subject matter instead of teaching maybe just that basic knowledge level. You're going to that next level, that deeper understanding. - Yes, I think that's absolutely true. It also gives the students in the room who have a lot of prior knowledge, background in the subject, an opportunity to teach others so the students become teachers also. Peer to peer teaching is a big part of student-centered instruction. They can take it as far as they can take it. It's wonderful, and if you do this frequently, if you allow your students to engage in discussion about hard things, controversial things, they learn to respect and understand and value the ideas of others. They start to work together and to incorporate those ideas into their own work over time. It's powerful. - So what does that student-centered instruction have to do with the communities of practice? How's that ... You described it as a marriage, so what is that marriage between those two? - The community of practice gives you a venue, a platform, for applying student-centered strategies. It is a strategy in itself. So you're putting your students or, in the case of the student-centered instruction community of practice, SCICOP, instructors working together, in the classroom or online, students are working together toward a common goal that they establish within the confines of your course standards and objectives. They are speaking the same language, using the same tools, using the same equipment, moving the same direction, helping each other as a team. So it really is a little bundle of student-centered practice if you think about it that way. They're practicing job-like skills. Communities of practice is theory that comes out of industry. The first study to be done on communities of practice was done in the insurance industry, a little small office in England. The researchers studied how do people work together and when they don't or little things are going wrong, how does that hurt the efficiency and the effectiveness of what it is they're doing? This is what they found is that people have to be talking the same talk, using the same tools, same equipment, and working together as a team. We can take advantage of this in Air Force training because I think it's a perfect marriage, because we're training people for jobs. So why not put them in job-like teams? In the course I teach online, I put them in teams called communities of instructional systems practice. I base their ... I base who I put together by a learning style preferences inventory I give. I give them all a learning style preferences inventory before the course, and I put them with people who are very different than themselves so that when they design and develop curriculum together as a team, they have every possible perspective represented in that curriculum that they're tasked with creating. Since I started doing this in Technical Writer, which is taught in the classroom, students individually create curriculum, a unit of instruction, a measurement. In Course Writer online, they do this as a team. The work that they produce is phenomenal. It goes beyond my wildest expectations. So I've created this wiki. We're using Blackboard right now. I think we might switch to Canvas in the future, but as long as I have a wiki where I can store the students' study guides that they produce because they set the bar really high. The next class after always comes in and they look at those and they say, oh my goodness, this is really something. Is this what you're looking for? I just tell them, I'm looking for you to create the best curriculum you possibly can as a team. That's just one example or another example. So and that's what we do on the job. As an instructional systems specialist, we are tasked with working together with instructors, with course designers, with training managers, to design and develop curriculum that meets the needs of these various career fields. So I am giving these students in Course Writer an opportunity to do what they do on the job, to do that. And we do it from diverse locations. So I might be in one location, a training manager might be somewhere else, but we still have to collaborate. So that's what the community of practice offers. It's a way to do what we do on the job, but in the training context, to practice, to fail, to learn from that failure, to have feedback from our peers. It's just a very powerful teaching and learning tool. - It's interesting because that community of practice, that ... Again, another thing that General Kwast talks about is not working in that vacuum and being able to have that free flow of ideas and exchange between instructors, but that seems like that's one reason why those communities of practice are a good foot, or excuse me, a good fit for Air Force training, but what are some of the other reasons why it's a good fit? - It's a good fit because it brings conflict up front and helps you to learn from it. We learn at the boundaries of our understanding, so if you are teamed with somebody who is very different from yourself and has very different ideas, then there is going to be a point of conflict between you. That's where the learning happens. So by bringing together these very diverse teams, we are pushing the conflict forward. We are embracing it and valuing it for its learning potential. Teaching people that it's okay to disagree and that it's actually a good thing, because when you disagree, you learn something new about what the other is saying. So that's how I think it's really something more is that meaning making, let me put it that way. A group of different individuals come together and together, they create meaning. They create identity. Who am I in this group? What am I capable of? It's very different when you're really part of a collaborative team like that. - So we talked before the podcast, and you talked a little bit about the course development becoming a little more open last year when it didn't have to be standardized across the commands. It could be done more locally. So tell me what you feel like the impact of that is and how people who are developing courses around the command, whether they be at Columbus or Shepherd or wherever they might be, how this kind of opens the door for them to look at the student-centered approach and also incorporating those communities of practice you talked about. - Before we went localized in faculty development, our courses, our faculty development courses, were all standardized. So each of the faculty development units was responsible for a certain number of courses, and then we all taught the same thing. Standardized instruction is the opposite of student-centered instruction. So lifting that requirement that we have standardized courses has really enabled us to move forward and bring these student-centered practices into Air Force training. Air Force training personnel get their training from us in faculty development, so we've got to model what this looks like in actual practice. So it's very exciting. It's been almost a year since we formally went localized. At Vandenberg, we met with the instructors in the training group. We asked them what were their needs from our faculty development courses. We started with a basic instructor course. We chumped all the information, made all of the appraisals and the progress checks examples of active learning strategies. We took out the speech component. There's only one speech. It's an impromptu, just to get your feet wet. The rest of the performance is actually practice teaching. You are going to deliver a demonstration performance lesson that you will build in your appraisals up to the point. So you don't have this huge wasted time where you're prepping for your presentation. Rather than that, your appraisal will help you write the objectives, and then the next appraisal will help you write your teaching steps, and so that's the way I do that. Then the last performance is a demonstration performance. We're asking the instructors to do something, if possible, that they will do on the job when they're out there training. So we designed a new classroom at Vandenberg so it's changeable so instructors can bring in actual equipment, if they'd like to. We've asked them to collaborate with the trainers that are already out there in the classroom. So they can actually practice doing what they're going to be doing on the job. So we've made it very different. We're very excited. Keesler faculty development is doing some really exciting things. They have reconfigured their classroom as well to where it can be blended, it can be any number of things. So they're doing tons of work in this way. I don't know specifically what Sheppard is doing, but I'm sure they're up to exciting things. They always are. Goodfellow faculty development has asked me to come down and help them to transform their basic instructor course, so I'm excited about that. Lackland is also looking and they're taking our classes and trying to see what we're doing, and they're taking Keesler's classes and trying to see what they're doing. So we've all gone in different directions, but I think the point is we need to be localized. We need to understand what the local instructors who are going to be taking our courses need from us. That's what we need to give them. That's what we're doing. - So what has been that reaction? Obviously, over the course of the last couple years, a lot of change throughout AETC, but changing and breaking these industrial age paradigms in the way that we've always done business, and now we're trying to teach more in the context of the mission is kind of what you discussed there. Again, another paradigm being broken. So what has kind of been that reaction? Obviously change management is something that you have to manage, obviously. - The biggest barrier to student-centered instruction, communities of practice, that I have run across is the old policy, even though it's gone, it's still existent in the people who are still applying it. So for example, the way we evaluate instructors. We need to evolve the way we evaluate instructors to include recognition of these new methods, of these new ways of doing things. The instructors that I work with tell me that they are afraid if an evaluator walks in the room when they're doing this that they will be marked down or they will fail their evaluation because the evaluator is not educated in stu ... in this type of instruction. So we need to first train our evaluators in this, and second, we need to take a look at how we're evaluating. Instead of our evaluation focusing on what the instructor is doing, it needs to be focused on what the students are doing. That's how my evaluations were in my 20 years of public and private school teaching. All my evaluations were based on what the students were doing. Never was it looking at, I mean, unless I did something really horrible, but it was always the students were engaged. The students were doing this. All the students were attending to what was going on. All the students were involved. So it's really a disconnect. The changes we're making are disconnected from the old practices of evaluating what we do. The same goes for design. We have this arduous process that we have to go through that is focused on these superficial things. This course number has to look exactly like this. It has to be in this box. This training plan has to look exactly like this. It has to have this format. I understand the need for getting all this information into a system and standardization so that people who are approving these documents know what they're looking at, but we have lost sight of the forest for the trees. We are focusing in our evaluations on superficial things, even though the policy's no more in existence. It's the people that are doing this. So we need to help the policy makers to write open ended, more flexible guidance. We need to educate our evaluators to this new way of doing things. - So we'll close with an open invitation because you want to invite everyone to become part of the student-centered instruction community of practice. - Yes, sir, I certainly do. I've formed a platform on Millsweet, SCICOP, S-C-I-C-O-P, student-centered instruction community of practice. Anyone who wants to is welcome to join us, and you're also welcome with I'll help you to form communities of practice in your own area, wherever you are. I'm happy to provide coaching assistance, resources, whatever help you need, whatever you ask for. I'm so excited about this stuff. I'm willing to do whatever is needed. My email is kristen.lewis.5, so K-R-I-S-T-E-N dot L-E-W-I-S dot five at us.af.mil. I'll take email. Several people at the presentation yesterday, instructors, came up to me and asked me will you coach me? So I gave them my email. I invited them to join SCICOP. Let's get the conversation moving and see what we can do. Let's make this transformation together. - Well, I certainly appreciate you stopping by today and your passion for education shines through. It was really fun today. - Thank you. (whoosh) - Great conversation with Dr. Lewis and episode number 12 is in the books. I'm going to try to take some time to look up that book she referenced in the conversation, Active Learning, 101 Strategies to Teach Any Subject. I can probably learn a thing or two. Big thank you, of course, to Dr. Lewis for spending time with us here while she was traveling and we certainly appreciate that. As a reminder, you can follow Air Education and Training Command via social media on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram as well as on the web on www.aetc.af.mil. Thanks for checking out the podcast as we dive into the world of recruiting, training, and education for our entire AETC public affairs team. I'm Dan Hawkins. So long, talk to you next time on Developing Mach-21 Airmen. (rock music)