Dear Dr. Gordon Nixon,
I wish to begin by expressing my gratitude at your enthusiasm towards listening to students. It is a fine mark of humility and wisdom. As I exit SAIT's Carpentry apprenticeship program, I leave these thoughts:
There are more than a few fantastic instructors in the program. Special commendations go to Randy Jones, Stacy Jessamine, and Dan Weinerte. I didn't even get to be in a class with Stacy or Dan, other than a few shop classes, but their enthusiasm, knowledge and assistance were plainly evident. This extended outside of shop class, and beyond just the students in their classes too. Randy, though the newest instructor (that I am aware of) seemed to possess the greatest ability to understand the students' perspectives. He used this to tailor his effective teaching methods, and also to focus on areas of learning that were emphasized by the course. An example of an effective practice was to have weekly shop quizzes. He would emphasize points during shop, and sure enough, come Friday you needed to remember them. When being exposed to so many new things all at once, it is easy for students to be overwhelmed. These quizzes helped to keep knowledge from slipping away. He had very good communication and demonstration skills, making sure the class understood how and what they were doing. He used the whiteboard every day, writing down the day's objectives and steps, keeping large projects broken down into manageable tasks. Then after everyone started working he would wander around, watching students, offering suggestions or tips, asking questions and answering them. He was the most prolific lecture provider, going above and beyond to ensure students understood the course material; helpfully suggesting which things to study thoroughly and which things only needed a basic grasp of the concept. I really appreciated this since first year in particular had the greatest module load with the greatest amount of small details to remember. I appreciated each of my subsequent instructors, Garry Gierke, Ron Bolokski, and Albert Goodeve as well. I didn't take these good instructors for granted, as there were other instructors who seemed to regard students as inconveniences, or insufferable for their lack of experience, and were intimidating to seek help from.
If I might offer some constructive criticism, it would fall upon the TLM system. Bluntly, SAIT as an educational institution, should be ashamed of the disgraceful quality it tolerates for a program they sell to other schools. To begin with, the english composition skills used to write some of the questions are very poor. This could be solved if the questions were screened by editors first, but apparently they are not. Does SAIT offer any english classes? Perhaps they could use the TLM questions as coursework for students. Otherwise someone should be hired immediately to begin bringing the system up to at least the Grade 9 level that apprenticeship students are expected to possess before entering the program.
It is not just the poor spelling, grammar, and incoherence present in questions that is a problem. The calibre of the questions is disappointing. The transition from writing SAIT post-tests to writing provincial exams can be jarring. I would describe the great majority of SAIT questions as short. What is the name of a tool with a wooden handle and a metal top? Is it a hammer, a truck, a circular saw, or a trowel? Now suppose, I was unfamiliar with hammers. Great, now I will remember that a hammer has a wooden handle and a metal top. What is it used for? When wouldn't I want to use it? If a peculiar problem arose, should I use my hammer or another tool? The module may have had 3 pages written on the subject, but I will see only this question, or the same question, slightly reworded. To contrast, here is a Red Seal practice exam question: On an intersecting roof, what happens to the design length of the given rafters if the minor span is increased?
I'll save you the four options because you may not be a carpenter and may not appreciate them, but the reason this is a more challenging question is because this specific point wasn't even covered in a module and it certainly wasn't approached in the TLM. The concept behind it was covered in the module, but perhaps all that the TLM was concerned about was copying a graphic image from the module and asking students to correctly identify which rafter was which. Many of the SAIT final exams tried to include some complex questions such as this, but the TLM does not adequately prepare students for them. It must start including complex questions if it is to teach students to think independently, and extend basic facts or concepts into practice.
The TLM question bank isn't big enough. Students complete one post test per module. Post tests are an average of 4 pages long and include about 20 questions. Students then have the option of completing 3 more re-tests for practice. In these retests, about 4 in 5 questions are duplicates of questions already seen. The student had to succeed in the first post-test with a minimum score of 80% in order to move forward and be able to write a retest. If they were already able to achieve this success, why are they wasting paper printing off the same questions again and again? Many of them are not. They know that a great majority of the questions are repeated and don't even bother to attempt them. When they do attempt them, it is very difficult to stay mentally engaged, because if you already know the answer, you just skim through questions mindlessly. I stop contemplating the subject material; I'm just feeding the computer the answers it needs. Having more questions available, allows broader practice, which results in better learning.
In all four years of my attendance, I found question after question with important errors in them. I would go and point them out to instructors who were shocked because the questions were often old and no one had asked them about it before. Why? Because the students trust the TLM, and assume that they themselves are at fault, or they just don't care. Well that's fine for the students who understand and don't care - they haven't lost anything - but the students who just accepted the mistakes and moved on have learned lies. In addition to questions that were plainly wrong, there were questions that listed valid choices within the four options but marked them wrong. Sometimes this is done on purpose to emphasize a best answer as opposed to a satisfactory one. That's fine. However, I ran into many questions that had these kinds of mistakes included because of an unfamiliarity with the course content! I would hope that a lot of these errors could be traced back to an old version of a module (modules also contain mistakes). Even if they are a result of module updating, someone needs to keep abreast of module revisions and update TLM questions accordingly. Currently, it is left up to students to notice these mistakes and bring them to the attention of instructors. Instructors are very busy with other tasks and don't get around to fixing questions very quickly. Students are also very busy and generally don't sacrifice their own learning time to have questions revised, especially since they are so accustomed to seeing errors or poorly worded questions. This is sad, because it is the students who are the ones who have a good perspective on whether a question was 'good' or 'bad' (whether it was fair, helpful, and clear).
Some questions just aren't fair. For post-tests, that's fine. They become a learning opportunity. But for exams they become a problem. Instructors don't always realize that the questions aren't fair because they have seen all of the course. Instructors should have background experience to augment their understanding of the content. Instructors have had the very useful learning step of teaching the content. Finally, and most detrimentally, instructors are familiar with the question itself and associate it with the answer that leads to a check mark by the computer. Students don't have these advantages. It is an awful thing to penalize students' grades because they didn't know something that they weren't taught. That's not to say that the exams are extremely difficult and riddled with unfair questions. Some, in fact, could be passed by any twelve-year-old. It's not a bad thing for lots of students to score well if they really know the course content. It is a bad thing if the system has to fully rely on multiple choice testing, complete with questions rigged with (at least) two give-away impossibilities to push students through. Instead of engineering the exams to pass the students, how about addressing the root issue of inadequate teaching?
I would recommend that someone (if not a team) is hired to repair, expand & develop, and manage the question banks full time. Students would be informed, aware and welcomed to bring errors to attention. Please let me know how you intend to address this problem.
I thoroughly appreciated every minute of shop time. Practical, hands-on learning is very valuable, and often leaves a much greater impression than words on a page. If I could suggest anything it would be to increase shop time. If the TLM was improved, I believe students wouldn't need as much help dealing with TLM questions. This could free up instructors' time to spend longer periods in shop. The course content that is covered in shop is always the best understood. Unfortunately, much of the core content isn't afforded time for shop learning. Figuring out a way of expanding shop learning would be of monumental significance in the education of students. I succeeded well in school, often top of my class. Yet I look at the Red Seal list of skills that I am expected to be competent in, yes even able to accomplish unsupervised and I am dismayed. There is a valuable module called Job Coaching that I was privileged to read (even though all the TLM questions made a mockery of its importance). It simplified the learning process down to an instructor showing, then telling a student what and how to do a task. Then having the student do the task (showing the instructor) and then getting the chance to tell the instructor whether they had any difficulties or ask any questions. This is actually a great learning model. It's too bad that it isn't always used by instructors in shop. It could be. It is also the reason learning in shop is so valuable over the TLM. When are students given the chance to respond to TLM questions? Who is watching students flounder their way through questions guessed at, able to offer tips or constructive criticism?
Even field trips (which were rumoured once or twice but never occurred) would be helpful in giving students a visual memory to associate with a complex learning subject that they have no experience with. While the apprenticeship program is designed to have students learn skills from their employers (and checked neatly off in their blue book), carpentry has become a trade full of niches. For my ideal education, I would need to quit my job every 3 months to go learn a different aspect of carpentry. Residential cribbing, framing, stairs, cabinets, finishing, roofing, siding, ceilings, sidewalks. Then commercial concrete work and the myriad of different tasks you could be assigned (and then left on). Yes after six years of residential framing, I'm a little bit bored, and will go seek new experiences elsewhere, but it's not even close to realistic to expect students to gain experience in all or even most areas of carpentry on the job site. Learning in school is therefore critical, and isn't treated as such.
I will be embarrassed to seek work and be expected to possess the skills associated with my trade that I don't have. I'm sure that I will receive high 90s yet again in my course work at SAIT and even on my provincial and red seal examination, and it will all be very hollow since they obviously aren't very effective in revealing the success of the course's stated purpose.
That's big picture gloom, and hey, maybe you are spectacularly innovative, influential, and surrounded with more such talented people, who will all improve that scene.
Coming back to easier suggestions to fulfill, what if shop time was increased, and students actually got to practice individual skills a little bit more, before throwing them into larger projects. The confidence would be wonderful, and the possessed longevity of the skill lengthened. We receive printed shop books that hint at such ideas, but they were never used, with the exception of the sawhorse book (although that could have been an accident because the instructor was a substitute that week). Maybe we could even see and work with concrete since it's given hefty weighting as far as course content goes. HA! Hefty weighting! Sorry, I was just worried that you were tired. Thanks again for caring enough to ask. I wanted to oblige.
