Enabling quality conversations: Building reflective mature age business graduates through the use of a facilitative instructional model

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Research and Development in Higher Education Vol. 25: Quality Conversations

July, 2002, 794 pages
Published by
Tony Herrington
ISBN
0 908557 54 X
Abstract 

The ultimate goal of education is to enable the development of informed, reflective and articulate graduates. However, the more heterogenous the student group, the more challenging the building of good learning opportunities. Mature age graduate business students provide a good example of the challenges which can face tertiary educators. These students require special guidance during as they seek to upgrade their qualifications and professional expertise. Their backgrounds tend to be very diverse and extensive, resulting in diverse opinions and depth of understanding of topics. This prior knowledge can be particularly influential when it matches their course of study, where formal qualifications in their current work field are being obtained. For the instructor, this knowledge can be both useful and a barrier to learning. Conversely, some students will enter their course of study without relevant prior skills. The challenge for the tertiary educator is to therefore create learning and experiential opportunities to both review current perspectives, and to build new learning bases. This paper explores one means of building a common experiential base across students, and then describes a range of additional learning strategies which enable strong competency building in such students. .

Keywords: reflective learning; instructional methods; graduate students