Week 5

Wow, so some concepts are beginning to click as I realized that many of the themes we have been learning about reoccur.  Ideas are connecting and the light bulb has turned on. J

Readings

Wiggins & McTighe’s “Put Understanding First”

This article talks about high school curriculum and the difficulty students have about trying to apply their knowledge into various problems.  The authors state that the goal of high school is not to teach students content but to prepare them for the real-world.  To do that the high school curriculum must accomplish three things:

1.       Acquire important information and skills

2.       Make meaning of that content

3.       Effectively transfer their learning to new situations both within school and beyond

These ideas of transfer, meaning, and acquisition make up the majority of the ideas in this article.  You must have these happen to be a successful learner.  Teachers need to improve their methods by incorporating the teaching methods that provide direct instruction, facilitation, and coaching.  Unfortunately, high schools teachers and/or the curriculum fail to teach in the manner needed, which causes students to not be able to achieve these goals. 

I must agree with this article.  My favorite teachers were the ones I learned from the most because they use different teaching techniques.  It seemed like it was mostly my AP teachers that went above and beyond basic lecturing.  In fact, one of my history teachers made us participate in Socratic seminars, like the article mentions, throughout the semester facilitate our learning of the material. At the time I hated them because I do not like to speak in class, but they proved extremely informative.  I also notice that Kristen also uses different methods of teaching to help with our learning.

Chapter 3 “Learning and Transfer”

The idea of transfer continues with this chapter. Certain kinds of learning experiences lead to transfer.  These are the main characteristics of learning and transfer (53):

·         Initial learning is necessary for transfer

·         Knowledge that is overly contextualized can reduce transfer

·         Transfer is best viewed as an active, dynamic process rather than a passive end-product of a particular set of learning experiences

·         All new learning involves transfer based on previous learning

Other key points from the chapter about transfer and learning are that there is a difference between understanding and memorizing, the amount of time to learn affects transferability, the content in which one learns affects it, and all new learning involves transfer.  Of course these readings wouldn’t be complete is they did have the word “meta” somewhere in it.  This week the textbook discusses the metacognitive approach.  This approach assists students to learn about themselves as learners.

Like Wiggins & McTighe’s, the textbook also agrees that “Transfer from school to everyday environments is the ultimate purpose of school-based learning” (78).  After all what is school for? Most of us won’t spend the rest of lives in a school setting (even though somedays it feels like it); therefore, we need these transfer skills to help us be successful in the real-world.   I completely agree we the readings for this week, however, I'm kind of tired of all the "meta" words. My spellcheck doesn like them all either!

Class

Last class we dicussed summative evaluation questions,  split into groups, classified sets of questions, constructed models based on our classifications then walked around looking how other groups divided the questions. We watched a video with Dr. McGonigal: gaming can make a better world. This is what she discussed:

·         We need to play more games and games are powerfuld

·         We are not as good in real life as we are in game world—we are our best selves in game world

·         Playing games build trust between people

·         Give people the power to achieve epic wins

We did a workshop survey assessment based on Dr. McGonigal's presentation and we formative assessment strategies.

All in all, not a bad night.