Chapter 3 Reflection
3 Ideas of Learning:
1st: Immediately in the first pages of the text section, I found myself asking the question that the book was asking: what knowledge is worth knowing? I was surprised to see the math problem that an 1896 eighth grader was required to do. I can’t imagine many of the students from that time period had a use for that knowledge in very many settings, yet it was required to know. I can assure you that extremely few of my school’s students could perform such a function. I also found it interesting that the manner in which we conduct elementary and high school was basically created in 1892, according to the text on page 39. Is it time to have another committee see if we should change some elements of education today? Quite probably, though I suspect most people would balk at any major changed.
2nd: On page 42, the authors note that behaviorist educators “promotes learning a fixed set of skills in a fixed order”. I found myself disagreeing with their use of the example when it comes to sorting, though I understand the point they’re trying to make. They say behaviorists believe that learning is an accumulation of bits of knowledge, which is what I’m familiar with. I may be reading too much into it, but it appears the authors don’t have much belief in the effectiveness of this system. However, there must be some basic elemental knowledge that is going to be learned through repetition, at least as a building block stage.
3rd: As for constructivists, I guess I would fall into their definition based on the way I teach. The one problem that I saw early on in the reading was that if the student has a learning disability, there will need to at least initially be some manner of adjusting their thought process. If the student doesn’t have the proper tools, there will not be proper construction and, as a result, a flawed answer. On the other side, we have a teacher that is utilizing a new math series in the high school. It is centered around the students developing the answers based on group work and input. The teacher has reported that it’s too early to develop any conclusions just yet, but the students have really been struggling thus far. But it’s easy to see that students gain a better understanding if they have to search out the correct answers.
2 New Ideas for Tech Integration:
1st: I have used web quests in the past for a variety of subjects and topics, but after reading the chapter, it might be a good idea to have some of my students, in small groups, develop a web quest for their peers. This would probably have to be done at a higher grade level, but because the students would have to conduct the research on the topic to make a relevant web quest, they would likely gain a greater knowledge of the topic at hand.
2nd: after reading what students needed to know in the late 1800s for eighth grade, I think that, as a history teacher, it might be a neat project to have the students research a project to see how much has changed in the past 100 years. Students could be broken into small groups and research a different subject – math, science, history – and report back to the class with a Power Point giving some example problems. Students could also create a document with the questions and give the “test” to the remaining students, just to see if they could pass the eighth grade in 1896.
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