Abstract
This proposal examines the possibility of using Lego Serious Play (LSP) as an aid to enhancing career development training programmes. To this end, the proposal evaluates and examines the means through which the Taiwanese educational system can be enhanced and enriched by this. The paper identifies that the best way of doing this is to utilise a case study to examine two scenarios to identify the importance and criticality of using LSP to promote teaching and learning experience in career development. This will include the examination of a case where career development is taught in Taiwan using traditional generally accepted methods. This is complemented by the study of a case where LSP is used to enhance this. This will give room for the creation of a gap analysis process where the benefits of LSP can be deduced and utilised a process of improving and enhancing the learning experience and process. The study will use case analysis of a single student and an evaluation of career development programme effectiveness before, during and after the utilisation of LSP as an aid.
Introduction
This section of the proposal will present an introduction into the concept of Lego Serious Play and connect it to the broader aspects of the paper. “The LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® Method is a facilitated meeting, communication and problem-solving process in which participants are led through a series of questions, probing deeper and deeper into the subject.”. This is the introductory line of Lego Serious Play (LSP) on the official website of Lego. The system offers participants to discussions and lectures 3D Lego models and products that promotes group interactions and encourages people to appreciate the facilitator’s questions by applying some specific aspects of Lego. This promotes group dynamics, interactivity, knowledge sharing and enhances the problem solving skills and decision making competencies of members.
Lego Serious Play has been known to enhance training programmes and enrich the experiences of the members. The purpose of this proposal is to create tools for career development of college students in Taiwan. This proposal will present a literature review and propose a methodology for the study of the most effective and efficient ways of applying LSP to the development of the abovementioned population.
Research Motives
In the past, higher education was passive and individualised in outlook. This is because learners had to sit in lecture rooms and only receive instructions from their lecturers and professors without asking questions or saying anything back. They only took instructions and were tested on an individual level without any effort to test the practical abilities of students. Everything was centred on the teacher who was the main focus of every student.
In the 21st Century though, the focus and emphasis of higher education has changed significantly. It is based on active interaction between learners and instructors. There is a group orientation to higher education and everything is based on pan-participation based on a focus on the students rather than the instructor only.
The fundamental motive of the proposed study is to identify the best way Lego Serious Play can be utilised effectively to improve the new pointers of education in the 21st Century viz Active Learning, Group Learning and Participation. This will help to identify the best way of integrating an important tool into modern higher education in order boost the quality of education each individual got in Taiwan.
The study will add up to knowledge about existing teaching methods in Taiwanese university. It will also provide the impetus for the enhancement of educational standards and show the limitations in the existing system which are mainly inspired by methods that were known in the past.
Research Question
The aim of the research is to deduce an efficient and effective method of utilising Lego Serious Play as a tool for the career development of college students in Taiwan. In order to attain this end, the following objectives will be sought:
A critical analysis of the potential for the utilisation of Lego Serious Play in higher education in Taiwan;
An evaluation of the comparative strengths and weaknesses of the existing methods of teaching for career development in colleges in Taiwan;
An assessment of the benefits of Lego Serious Play to the existing tuition of career development in colleges in Taiwan;
A presentation of a series of recommendations for the utilisation of LSP in career development for Taiwanese college students.
Literature Review & Background
This section of the proposal will critique and analyse important ideas, concepts and definitions that will form the core theoretical framework for the research. It will include the review of secondary sources and an assessment of different concepts in the absolute and relativist sense. This will span across the areas of career development, active learning and participation in learning.
Career Development
Education has the end of preparing young people for careers, entrepreneurial and leadership roles in society. Thus, higher education is classified by some authorities as academic knowledge and professional competency. These two concepts are important and give an educator the opportunity to develop students. Thus, metrics are set up and defined for the level and grasp of these key concepts and ideas.
Most institutions of higher learning are criticised for lacking the ability to develop the professional competency of their students in the career development process. Thus, a lot of important tools and techniques have been preferred to enhance and improve the learning and teaching of these important aspects of career development.
It is also observed that in many instances, education is delivered through the exchange of theoretical material and this culminates in the presentation of information and the maintenance of specialised career centre to provide extra information and guidance to student on career development. This is criticised for being too far removed from the essence of education and keeps university student very distant from the realities of their future professions and careers. Therefore, it can be said that more must be done to promote the development of careers as a part of optimising the value people get form their degrees and qualifications.
There are complex developmental needs for every country and this is often premised on the vision of the government of the country and the philosophy of the society. Therefore, in order to figure out what the features of efficient and effective education for higher institutions in a given country, there is the need to identify the goals and objectives of education in the country and what the country seeks to gain from its labour force. This provides a basis for the definition of measures and standards that can be used to assess how well higher education is meeting the career development needs of the people.
This helps to assess the real value of a given approach to developing careers in a particular nation. The process helps to formulate the right approach for guiding career aspirants and also for improving and enhancing their abilities and competencies.
Active Learning
The precursor for participation and learning in order to promote participation and modern forms and standards of education can be seen in the concept of active learning which gained prominence over the past few decades. Active learning is an approach to learning whereby the learner is encouraged to ask questions – it is based on the inversion of education where the teacher was the only one doing the talking whilst the students did the listening and obeyed instructions.
Active learning has therefore evolved to refer to a wide array of learning and teaching techniques in which the participation and interaction of the student becomes an essential part of the teaching and learning process. This includes a series of activities that the student need to participate in to provide a series of processes and activities that are measured and evaluated in the entire process.
In the most basic form, active learning involves the instructor presenting a hypothesis, a question or an issue and then the different perspectives of the students are taken in order to get the instructor to sort them out and present a final synthesis. This is viewed in many contexts as brainstorming where the different participants are asked to present their views and recommendations and then the best is selected. However, in most classroom settings, the teacher synthesizes and presents his superior knowledge to identify what is correct and most appropriate from a set of possible actions and processes.
There are also class discussion and other student-teacher interactions that are used to present the views and ideas of students in order to get them to form independent views. The essence of active learning is viewed by some authorities as a prerequisite to promote independent thinking and diversity amongst students in a given classroom. This is steeped in the self-determination learning theory where the learner is allowed to present his own perspective and create a unique and distinct set of conclusions based on his own perception, interpretation and worldview.
Active learning also involve allowing students to act and do activities that are evaluated and/or graded for the presentation of a final mark or grade. This includes experimentation, active processes and procedures that are relevant to the careers of these students and learners.
Interactivity and Participation in Professional Development
The nature of professions is that they involve various competencies that are practical in outlook. A person will have to be able to deal with these practical matters in a convincing manner in order to merit a professional qualification.
“Interactivity and active participation induces interest to learners”. This is because there is an inner appeal and essence that every student and participant is opened to. This comes up where there are pointers and activities that bring out this deep desire and yearning. Interaction between learner and instructor helps to promote focus and this enables the learner to appreciate the content of the course that is taught to him or her. This improves participation and helps to enhance results.
Another view of interactivity is that it induces the following elements in the learning process of institutions of higher learning:
Participation
Collaboration and the
Collectivisation of the process
This means that there is more bonding between the members of the course. This helps to teach things like team and group dynamics which are the most important and essential elements and aspects of the actual world of practice. These important pointers also promotes a stronger visual impression on the learners and enhance the best of their interest in the teaching and learning process.
Interactions are also viewed as important elements of creating academic communities which are niches and spheres similar to the real work environment. Therefore, interactions can be seen as pointers where tools and other important symbols can be employed to create the best kind of learning experience for learners to appreciate the kind of teaching and evaluation process that is utilised. This also creates distributed learning which is a more flexible process through which learners are able to reduce and enhance their learning and teaching process in order to improve their abilities to learn, memorise and apply important information they learn and encounter in their studies.
Where there is interaction, a supervisor or instructor only oversees and encourages learners to appreciate and enhance their learning process by demonstrating what their views on things are. This creates a learning process whereby information goes up and down, rather than in a one-way setting and process.
The essence of interactivity is to create three main things that are important to help learners to get practical experience and these are:
Collect
Relate &
Create.
The process allows learners to gather information and use the information to something that is practical. This information provides a set of guidance and instructions that the learners must apply and through the application, they relate to the course content. Once there is a process whereby the learners relate to the information, they are encouraged to create something with their skills and demonstrate their competency by solving a real-life problem which the instructor must evaluate. This promotes creativity and prepares the learners for the real work environment ahead of them. This also enhances the experience and ensure that application is much more likely to yield better results.
Interactivity promotes self-directed learning and processes which aid in improving and promoting practical results that the learners will bring into the world. This means productivity and enhancement in performance is an essential part of interactivity in research.
Research Method and Procedure
This research will be done through a single case study involving one individual. There will be an experiment that will involve a single individual who will be studied before, during and after a study project involving a Lego Serious Play project in a career development class or process. This will culminate in a primary research that will involve the study of various aspects of the contributions that are made by Lego Serious Play to the development of individuals’ learning abilities and competencies over a period of time. In order to do this, the research will be divided in to 3 phases.
Phase 1: This will be an assessment of the picture of career development of the research participant or candidate based on the utilisation of traditional career development methods and processes in Taiwanese universities. This will include the utilisation of metrics to assess the career competency requirements of the individual per the generally accepted professional standards and ethics. This will be graduated and used to measure the competency of the research subject or participant.
Phase 2: A review of the utilisation of Lego Serious Play will be conducted. This will be done by examining and reviewing a recreated classroom setting where career development techniques are taught with the aid of LSP tools and techniques. This phase will review the main additions that LSP will make to students’ career development processes. This will include the assessment of the main pointers and the main areas of enhanced and improved teaching and learning methods or systems.
Phase 3: At this point, the results of the respondent or participant in the study after the use of Lego Serious Play will be evaluated. This will be done in two parts. In the first part, career development standards and metrics similar to what was used in Phase 1. This will culminate in the identification of scores for each pointer and the comparison of these different scores in relation to the respondent. The second part will include the critique of the findings within the context of the key pointers identified in Phase 2. How did they contribute to the existing results? Are the meaningful, can they be generalised? These are the things that this phase will be interested in. This will lead to major findings that explains the important pointers and aspects of LSP and how it enhances and improves results.
Sampling & Data Collection
The respondent will be chosen from a popular Taiwanese university. This individual will have to be in a course that has potential for application in various sectors and programmes. Preferably, a person who has a background in the sciences or something that has corporate application like Marketing, Accounting or Law. This will be evaluated from the measures and expectations of the professional body responsible for regulating the career.
Hence, the study will be focused on the use of a scale for the evaluation of the learning environment on the following basis:
Participation
Collaboration
Collectivisation and
Technical Enrichment
These four aspects will be observed in the case study of the two learning environments – one with Lego Serious Play and another without Lego Serious Play.
The competency of the student will be examined on the basis of the ability of the two career development programmes (without LSP and with LSP) to meet three things that enriches them career-wise:
Collect information
Relate to the information and
Create things with the information
This will form the basis for the assessment of the respondents. This will help to evaluate the worth of the two methods – the most popular methods of teaching career development and the introduction of LSP to the teaching of career development.
Interpretation of Findings
The findings will be evaluated in an absolute sense to judge what each of the career development programmes seek to achieve. They will be further compared across each other and a critical review will be done in order to draw conclusions on what LSP could add to the experience and how this experience can be enriched.
Expected Results
The research will seek to objectively and independently check the concepts of professional and career development. This will culminate in the use of various tools and techniques to assess and evaluate the different approaches and methods that are used for the examination of information and data. They will be compared and from it, there will be the opportunity to tell what is missing in the current career development processes and the difference LSP makes to them. This will lead to the presentation of a set of recommendations that will improve and enhance the status quo. Ultimately, the process will show how LSP can come in to improve and enhance the current system of teaching and learning in Taiwan.
References
Allen, J., Inenaga, Y., Van der Velden, R. & Yoshimoto, K., 2014. Competencies, Higher Education and Career in Japan and the Netherlands. 2nd ed. London: Springer.
Anderson, T., 2015. The Theory and Practice of Online Learning. 3rd ed. Athabasca, AB: Athabasca University Press.
Greenhaus, J. H. & Callanan, G. A., 2011. Encyclopedia of Career Development. London: SAGE.
Kats, Y., 2013. Learning Management Systems and Instructional Design. New York: IGI Group.
Keefe, J. W. & Jenkins, J. M., 2013. Personalized instruction: the key to student achievement. 4th ed. Lanham MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Keengwe, J., 2013. Promoting Active Learning through the Flipped Classroom Model. New York: IGI Publishing.
Lambropoulos, N., 2013. User-Centered Design of Online Learning Communities. New York: IGI Publishing.
Lego, 2015. The Method. [Online] Available at: http://www.lego.com/en-us/seriousplay/the-method[Accessed 21 January 2016].
Levine, L. & Munsch, J., 2012. Child Development: An Active Learning Approach. London: SAGE.
Oblinger, D. & Oblinger, J. L., 2014. Educating the Net Generation. 3rd ed. Louiseville, CO: EDUCAUSE.
O'Malley, C., 2011. Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. London: Springer.
Palacios, L. & Evans, C., 2011. The Effect of Interactivity in e-Learning Systems. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars' Publishing.
Pan, Z. et al., 2014. Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment. London: Springer.
Simmie, G. M. & Lang, M., 2011. What’s Worth Aiming for in Educational Innovation and Change. Berlin: Waxmann.
Stewart, M., 2014. Encyclopedia of Developing Regional Communities with Information. 2nd ed. New York: IGI Publishing.
