In general, instructional methods in the co-op seminar incorporate a range of practices including traditional lecture, class discussion about an identified topic, simulations, role-play, and faculty sharing of personal experiences ("true stories"). Not surprisingly, given the variation in the backgrounds of instructors and the lack of instructor training, instructional methods vary according to faculty expertise and seminar topic.[14]
In one Level 1 seminar we observed, an entire class was filled with "teacher talk" about a series of articles he had distributed. The instructor stood in the front of a conventional classroom, with students seated in rows facing the instructor, and asked a series of factual questions about newspaper ads related to employment opportunities. By and large, the questions required students to give the literal meaning of the ads, and were close-ended questions that students could answer without any reference to their own jobs. Only one open-ended question was asked--about why the secretarial field is still dominated by women. The instructor distributed a handout about ten ways to keep a job, and another about the ten best and worst jobs within the computer field. He began a video, but it proved to be the wrong one (it was an old Ed Sullivan show); he then reverted to a series of factual questions and answers about medians and means and about the instructions for a project due at the end of the course.[15] In addition to his unengaging didactic format, the instructor missed a number of opportunities to add to the knowledge and understanding of his students. He reinforced career stereotypes--that secretaries are paid poorly, that men are more likely to go into computer fields that pay more--without asking students to think about the economic and social aspects of these stereotypes. He elaborated his own biases, particularly about the difficulty of the Internet; and, in many ways, he failed to connect the content of the class to the work placements of students. Given the interminable lecture-style presentation, the attentiveness of students was quite high: Evidently the content of this course was engaging to students, even if the method of instruction was not.
In other cases, however, we saw instructors taking very different approaches, posing questions that asked students to think critically about employment practices and to evaluate their own work placements. One class, taught by the vice-president of a nearby firm, is organized around a set of 14 "analysis questions" about the accounting system used in the students' work sites. In the class we observed, the instructor led a whole-class discussion about four particular questions that would serve as the basis for future papers; then the class broke into small groups to compare their own internships in the light of the four analysis questions, and then discussed the preliminary results with the class as a whole. In general, students reported a variety of different business practices in their workplaces, and were initially baffled; however, they came to understand why such variation in practice arises, and the instructor (from the business world himself) helped to both explain and justify these variations. The level of student engagement was very high--both because the exercise was intrinsically interesting to students studying accounting and because the students felt some pressure to develop draft answers in class, where they could have the support of their peers and the instructor. While the practice of doing a draft for a future paper with help from others is not widely practiced in standard academic courses, this kind of cooperative approach is much more typical of workplace settings. And, unlike other classes we observed, the practices in students' co-op placements were central to this seminar.
In general, however, the co-op seminars seemed to be dominated by lecture and by "teacher talk," rather than by the kinds of open-ended questions that would get students to reflect about their own work experiences and compare them with the skills and competencies learned in the classroom. In the worst of these cases, instructors missed important opportunities to add to the knowledge and understanding of the students, often by failing to respond appropriately to their questions. Instructors reinforced career stereotypes that secretaries are paid poorly and that men are more likely to go into computer fields that pay more without asking students to think about the economic and social aspects of these stereotypes. These instructors elaborate their own biases--for example, the difficulty of using the Internet or that mothers of young children should not work--and missed opportunities to connect the content of the class to cultural understandings about work or the internship experience such as building potential career ladders based on students' present employment or contrasting formal education and experience as vehicles for skill development. In a couple of particularly frustrating instances, seminar instructors completely missed the contrast in student expectations about education as a means of gaining "insider information" about how to live in American society versus a means to achieve greater earnings. Given the uninspired lecture-style presentations, the attentiveness of students was surprisingly high; evidently the content of the co-op seminars is engaging to students, even if the method of instruction is not.
Even among those instructors who tend to dominate in lecture-style presentation, a crucial difference is the willingness of instructors to respond to student interests and puzzlement--that is, to exploit the opportunities that student initiative presents. One instructor, for example, dominated the classroom with a kind of lecture on self-improvement, the importance of "good attitude," and other aspects of finding a job; however, she was also receptive to student questions, and used them as opportunities to expand students' basic knowledge, to inform them about resources for selecting careers that they otherwise were unaware of, and to bring in current information about job futures and how new careers are taught at LaGuardia.
To be sure, classroom interactions are only one element of the co-op seminars. Most of the co-op seminars involve writing. Examples of writing assignments include explaining the procedures used to convert input data into useful information through both a flowchart and a descriptive narrative; evaluating the effect of a supervisor's leadership style on the student's internship performance; evaluating alternatives for decisions that they made at their internship; and creating an "agency profile" by analyzing the student's workplace in relation to the community it services. These writing exercises reinforce writing abilities, and students are judged on the basis of standard writing techniques as well as content. However, rather than methods of teaching writing, these exercises are best understood as forms of "writing to learn," in which writing is used as a mechanism to get students to clarify their own interpretations, and then to consider alternatives with the help of the instructor. They, therefore, provide some opportunities for student initiative and reflection that classrooms dominated by teacher talk do not.
The range of teaching approaches in the co-op seminar is no different from what we have observed in community colleges generally. Even in what seem to be seminar formats, teacher talk and lecture-style presentations are common. But, however common didactic and teacher-centered instruction is, this approach within the co-op seminar is especially unfortunate in our view. The major purposes of the co-op seminar, as expressed by the college and by most instructors, go far beyond information transfer--the purpose most associated with didactic methods.[16] The crucial purposes, instead, are to allow students to think about their career options, to understand the nature of their work and work in general, to analyze the value of classroom learning on the job, and to explore the large humanistic and social issues surrounding employment--all questions that are intrinsically interpretive, and that cry out for more student-centered, constructivist approaches to teaching in the tradition of meaning-making.[17] This suggests that if schools are to adopt some practice like the co-op seminar as a way of connecting work-based and school-based learning, it is crucial to be self-conscious about the approaches to teaching used, and to institute the training and staff development necessary to develop alternative approaches to seminars.
[15] The pattern of instructors asking close-ended, factual questions--sometimes known as IRE, for inquiry-response-evaluation--is quite common in community colleges; while such a class may appear to have some discussion, in fact it is completely teacher-dominated and fact-centered.
[16] Of course, many individuals would claim that didactic methods are not effective even in information transfer.
[17] For an introduction to the approach of meaning-making, contrasted with the more conventional approach of "skills and drills," see Grubb and Kalman (1994). Approaches in the meaning-making tradition are precisely the methods that the staff development efforts at LaGuardia Community College have promoted, and that are more widely used there than in any other community college we have observed.