Is there a tool or format that helps faculty organize effective instruction?
Page 7: What is the STAR Legacy Cycle?
The STAR Legacy model is actually an inquiry cycle that was designed with the basic principles of the HPL framework embedded in it. It helps instructors create lessons, and it facilitates the creation of a balanced learning environment. Click on the movie that follows to hear John Bransford describe STAR Legacy (time: 2:10).
Transcript: John Bransford, PhD
Well, this STAR Legacy Module was developed at Vanderbilt in collaboration with Dan Schwartz and Sean Brophy and Xiaodong Lin and myself. And what we tried to do is create a framework that would facilitate learning, that really meshed with a lot of teachers’ intuitions about what would help them teach more effectively and was consistent with the research literature on how people learn. So, in a nutshell, what we do is we start with a Challenge that you can see in front of you, and that’s usually some kind of vignette, hopefully that grabs people’s interest and that they can see very quickly is relevant to them or not. That vignette always ends in a Challenge where then you ask people to write down in some way their Initial Thoughts, their initial thinking about the Challenge. So you want them to capture their preconceptions about it.
Once they do that, then this really sets them up for a much more interesting experience of listening to Perspectives and Resources, because even if a perspective says something that you recognize as being true but you didn’t think about it in your Initial Thoughts, it still gives you this insight like, “Oh boy, I didn’t think about that.” So you get a lot of “ah-hah” experiences by listening to a number of different experts’ ideas about a Challenge. After Perspectives and Resources, we really want people to kind of be able to test their mettle through Assessment, and self-assessment for adult learners is a really good way to do this. And they can see if they’ve really captured the essential parts or not and you look at the double arrow here: If they haven’t, then they can go back and re-look at some resources to just make sure they’ve really got the points. And then finally we do a Wrap Up, which is a summary for them of kind of what were the initial points here, and then they get to write down their later thoughts as well. And one nice thing about that is then they can compare them to their initial thoughts and get a sense of how much they’ve learned. And then we looking at the modules can also see if there’s a module and there wasn’t much change from Initial Thoughts to the Wrap Up, we know that we haven’t done a good job, and so we can undergo continuous improvement on it.
