STUDY GROUP OUTLINE

1. The workshop in Bangladesh was surrounded by highly political factors, in which the educational decisions about training the participating doctors were made by politicians, rather than by educators or medical personnel. (pgs 167-169) Do you feel decisions about how and what you teach in your program are made by legislators who are far more interested in money-holding voters than in the educational needs of your students? What emotional response do you have to the word "accountability?" Is that the buzz word for funding in your state or community?
2. The author states, "I realized there and then how vital it is to be in a position to select the participants in such a course for optimal replication of skills and knowledge?" (pg 168) Does your adult education program accept any student that enrolls? If not, what are the criteria for admittance? Do you think changing the requirements for admission would enable you to produce better prepared and better educated students? Would limiting enrollment to only those students who are likely to graduate violate the students' right to a quality education?
3. "Our task as educators is to make the learning so accountable, the engagement so meaningful, the immediacy so useful, that this unhealthy attitude [that education is not a priority] will change in time. As long as education ... is not accountable and engaging and immediate, as long as it continues to be ... 'miseducation' such a lack of respect will continue." (pgs 169-170) How is your program... and your classroom ... viewed by the participants of the program? Does your program have a community-wide reputation for effective education ... or is it looked down upon as an example of miseducation?"
4. One of many weaknesses that Ms. Vella had to contend with in her preparation for the workshop was that the doctors "were comfortable talking about the situation as an abstract problem. They stayed, during an educational session with desperately sick patients and then-families, in their heads." (pg 170) Where are you now on this scale with head teacher at one end and heart teacher at the other? Where would you like to be one the scale?
5. Ms. Vella struggled within herself before she finally decided that speeding up the teaching process by lecturing - by banking - was defeating the entire purpose of teaching doctors how to use popular education with their patients. Students - in this chapter, doctors - learn by what they observe and experience. If information is banked in their minds the doctors will attempt to bank it in the minds of their patients. If information is experienced by them they also will help their patients experience it. (pg 172) We teach the way we were taught, Ms. Vella reminds us again and again. Select one method you currently use in your classroom instruction that you feel is very effective: describe how and when you first observed and/or learned about that method. In contrast, select one method you currently use in your classroom instruction that you feel is not effective: how did you learn this method and what have you done in your teaching to try to change this ineffective practice?
6. Have you ever been video-taped teaching a class? Discuss with your supervisor the possibility of video-taping, not just of you as the teacher but showing how you and your students interact with each other. (pg 174)
7. "Today I am convinced that single events such as this course in Bangladesh are somewhat futile. They might make a difference in the approach of one or more doctors. But without organized follow-up and systems for rewarding new learning and revised efforts, the burden on the individual is too great to be sustained. I often say there are three things that make accountable learning happen, and they are important in this order: time, time, and time. Without reinforcement, without a sequence of continued learning activities and a research agenda, without the stimulation of appropriate rewards and motivation, professionals will go back to teaching the way they were taught." (pgs 174-175) Does this statement express your own feelings of frustration about professional development - that professional development is not rewarded by administrators, not noticed by students, and not worth the extra hours you invest in it?

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