Part 3. Considerations of Practice

I suggested earlier that Learning Strategists are, in a broad sense, teachers, and in this varied work, they find themselves in various modes of teaching – teaching individual students in private offices, teaching groups of students in classrooms, teaching with other teachers in disciplinary contexts, and teaching ourselves by assessing the impact of our work (which is its own distinct category treated separately). While the concerns and topics of interest remain generally the same in all these modes (student success in study and learning), there are important distinctions, of delivery, style, purpose, method. The learning strategist, as a designer of effective learning experiences, attends to different constraints and opportunities imposed by each mode. In other words, they do different things according to the mode. 

I’m fortunate enough to work with an exceptional team of about twenty practitioners at the Centre for Learning Strategy Support at the University of Toronto and some of the material in the following sections, sensibly enough, is influenced by their thoughts and insights, people who are actively engaged in the work.  Some of them are veterans at this and have a store of experience and history that shape their ideas. Others are relatively new to this practice and bring crucial beginners’ intuitions to the practice. Both perspectives are equally important. Their insights and thinking help illuminate what learning strategy work is in practice – what it looks like, what function it fills in the lives of students, its nature, its value.  To elicit that insight, I asked them to organize into “Teams” corresponding to four crude categories of learning strategy work I mentioned above: 1) supporting students one-on-one; 2) supporting students in groups; 3) embedding learning strategies in classroom curricula; 4) assessing our impact. Each team agreed to come together a few times to discuss some of what’s important to them as practitioners related to their Team’s theme. What do they do? What principles guide them? To what practices do they adhere? What wisdom have they accrued?  And each Team then facilitated a discussion with the rest of the staff on their topic.  These discussions, some of the notes that emerged from them, and my observations of their exceptional work over the years have made their way into my thinking and writing here. 

I hope I am able to capture some of their wisdom and insight through the prism of my synthesis and  writing but I acknowledge it’s a complicated, sensitive thing to gather collective wisdom while not over-burdening people, not creating any expectation to contribute, honouring and acknowledging others’ contributions as their intellectual property, their personal and professional histories, and their ideas. I have tried to do my best to weave this together in a way that threads those needles, but know that it may be imperfect, and while I also know that simply naming them here is insufficient, it’s important to do so.   

I thank: Yaseen Ali, Julia Andrews, Rahul Bhat, Alex Bowie, Carol Ducharme, Andrea Graham, Ellyn Kerr, Meghan Litteljohn, Vyshali Murukaiyah, Heather Nelson, Nicolas Nicola, Kathleen Ogden, Liam O’Leary, Milena Pandy-Szekeres, Cristina Peter, Benjamin Pottruff, Elizabeth Shaha, Victoria Sheldon, Eugenia Tsao , Jonathan Vandor, Ayeshika Wickremasinghe, Emily Workman, Taif Zuhair,