Module 3: Education in WPL
Reflective Diary
This booklet provides an opportunity to reflect upon and respond to the four
sections of this module: Learning theories, Teaching, Learning and Assessment.
The value of keeping a reflective diary is that it provides a record of your
thoughts and ideas. This is useful for consolidating your thoughts about WPL
supervision and also for communicating your role with students and colleagues
in the workplace.
Section 1: Learning theories
a) Consider your prior knowledge: what do you already know about learning
theories?
List any learning theories or theorists that you have heard of. In what context
did you learn about this work?
What do you know about the way that you learn? How would you characterise
yourself as a learner?
Section 2: Teaching
a) If learning is based on prior knowledge, consider how you could provide
learning experiences that expose inconsistencies between students' current
understandings and their new experiences.
Write down your thoughts
b) Malcolm Knowles identified six principles of adult learning:
Consider how you would apply these principles to facilitate student learning in
WPL. Write down your thoughts
c) The best university teachers and WPL supervisors “have generally cobbled
together from their own experiences working with students conceptions of
human learning that are remarkably similar to some ideas that have
emerged in the research and theoretical literature on cognition, motivation,
and human development”.
List specific examples of learning theories that you had realised intuitively and
have now discovered in the literature?
What insights or value do these observations provide to your teaching?
Section 3: Learning
a) Review the characteristics of the four learning styles as they have been
summarised by Kolb.
What does it mean for you as a teacher to have to work with each of these four
kinds of learners?
b) Workplace Learning should allow students: “to learn through direct
implementation of their professional roles in real workplace settings”.
List three specific activities within your workplace where students can apply
their learning.
What insights or value do these activities provide students about your
profession?
c) Learners should be given opportunities to reflect on their practice by
analysis and assessment of their own performance.
How could these opportunities be presented to students in workplace learning.
d) Every profession / occupation/ industry has specific activities, or ‘practices’,
which define it.
List three of the most important activities, or practices, in your profession.
Describe how workplace learning can enable students to understand more
about these practices.
e) As emerging professionals, students gain their understanding of practice in
a variety of formal and informal ways.
From your own background, describe a key learning experience which impacted
strongly upon how you approach professional practice.
List two important features of professional practice that you would you like
students to learn about while on placement.
Section 4: Assessment
a) Trede and Smith (2013) concluded: “Shedding light on their interpretations
and tacit assumptions of assessors is an important contribution to improve
assessments in the workplace.”
Read through the paper Workplace educators’ interpretations of their
assessment practices: a view through a critical practice lens. Consider your own
responses to the interview questions that they proposed.
How would you characterise your own “interpretations and tacit assumptions”
about your assessment practices?
b) In the case of WPL subjects, assessment is often more challenging and
complex than in conventional subjects (Cooper, Orrell, & Bowden 2010).
Identify key factors that create the difference between conventional and WPL
subjects
Consider how those factors influence assessment in your workplace