Week 13 (?) - Readings

"Engaging Intelligence" was the reading that stuck with me this week. It's interesting to think about the fact that the schools that our society created and continues to use do not provide us with the "products" society desires. This isn't a new concepts, but the idea of "endstates" is a new way to look at it.

The big question, I suppose, is how we can construct our school system to adapt to the "domains of knowledge necessary for the survival" of our culture. We have seen more than once in the last century how quickly those domains can change. Changing our schools to produce citizens who function in the information age seems impossible enough, but how do we design a system that adapts to the next tectonic shift in our culture?

Week 12 (?) - Readings

Bandura writes with a little bit of flair, and I like that. This is all very interesting to me, because the issue of why people do what they do is basically the fundamental human question. I intend to read this over again before class, but at this point I'm not entirely sure if I think Bandura is any closer to an answer than anyone else.

I did like his discussion of self-esteem versus self-efficacy. I think this is an important distinction to make. It seems to me that we spend a lot of time and worry on students' self-esteem. One thing I've noticed is that teachers, being the polite people they are, often shy away from telling a student they are wrong about something. Clearly, there are instances where the "wrong" isn't really possible, but I think students might benefit by an occasional honest "no." Being wrong about something doesn't have to hurt one's self esteem OR their sense of self-efficacy. It may hurt the former, but not if the students is in environment where wrong is not necessarily inferior. It will improve the latter if the student learns the error in their thinking and corrects it.

Motivation Readings

I didn't find Clark and Estes particularly revelatory. Much of it boils down more or less to common sense. One thing that they seem to come back to a few times is the idea that perception is reality when it comes to motivation. Though this is a bit of common sense, too, I think it's something that can often be overlooked.

This comes into play when trying to figure out how to offer accurate assessment without giving the kind of negative feedback that can depress motivation. How do you discuss a student's poor performance without upsetting a student's "basic need for competence?" I suppose you have to somehow maintatin their perception of their abilities while helping them understand what they're doing wrong. This seems like very thin ice on which to tread, especially while simultaneously taking into account the myriad personal and cultural factors that affect motivation.

This is an area where I think technology can help a lot. The secret of video games, going all the way back to pinball, is that they are designed to keep the player on the very edge of his or her competency, which is a concept that is discussed in these readings. Today's video games are masterfully designed to allow each individual player to stay in a situation where they feel challenged, but not in over their head. I generally think that we should decrease the amount of time our kids spend staring at a screen, but computer programs are uniquely suited to taylor an educational experience in such a way as to motivate students by constantly challenging them.

Week 9 Readings

Another week with an absolute ton of new material. I liked Miller's flair, but was most intrigued by the other two readings. I liked Schacter's discussion of the various ways in which memory can fail us. Memory is something that we use constantly and struggle to understand. I like the way Schacter looks at memory failure as a potentially useful part of the way our brains work.

In their discussion of 'element interactivity,' of materials or tasks, VanMerioenboer and Sweller state that "...a large number of interacting elements for one person might be a single element for another more experienced person who has a schema that incorporates the elements." I wonder if this might serve to hinder the assistance a more-expert learner can provide to less-expert peers. If one learner has already developed schema incorporating certain elements of a task, can a less-expert learner acquire those schema by observation? Or would it be a two-ships-passing-in-the-night scenario?

The readings this week also expose some of the flaws of traditional method of learning social studies, especially history and geography. We often expect our students to remember lists of names and facts, but do not require or encourage them to develop the schema necessary for these facts to be remembered. Part of me is of the opinion that we ought to accept that the trivia involved in the tradition learning of history (names, dates, etc.) will be forgotten, and focus on teaching our students schema that will be of use to them in the world they are entering.

Week 7. In-class writing

One thing that this week's readings have in common is that they take daily interactions that are normally conducted without a second thought and peel back the layers of culture and influence behind them to reveal almost infinite complexity.

When I as a teacher am talking to Takashi about his book review, the conversation is one thing to Takashi and quite another to me. My experience of the conversation is influenced by years of training and experience that have led me to see the information I'm offering as useful to Takashi. I'm influenced by my idea of what the relationship between student and teacher should be. I'm influenced by my opinions of Takashi himself - what kind of student he is, what kind of person, where he's from, what I know about his parents and friends, what interests we have in common, etc., ad infinitum. Takashi's experience of this conversation is influenced by his opinion of me, how much he cares about the assignment or class or subject, how he thinks he might be viewed by his friends and family, etc.

Human interaction is not only this complicated in the context of education, of course. Every interaction we have every day is this complex at its most basic level. If we thought about all of these things all the time, our heads would explode. All of us perform the function of sorting through these factors at incredible speed, though some are better at it than others.

I wish I could get the opinions of these authors on how exactly we should teach intercultural understanding/sensitivity/awareness (pick a word.) The ability to communicate across cultures is something that comes naturally to some people, in varying degrees. In order to create the kind of learning environment that Tharp and Gallimore describe or the kind that you might imagine Garcia would desire, all learners (kindergartener through superintendent) must have at least a rudimentary understanding what culture is. They also must possess a high degree of cultural tolerance and be eager to learn about other cultures. How do we make this happen?

The thing that is especially terrifying about all of this is that it is just the tip of the "cultural iceberg." Tharp and Gallimore spend a lot of time talking about all of the different ways people influence each other, and discussion of culture involves similar breakdowns of social and interpersonal influence. But culture is infinitely dynamic and too complex for anyone to sum up or map out. I guess what I'm getting at is that it seems like no amount of training or study can prepare you to look at a classroom full of thirty different cultures and get them all to learn with you.

Week 7 Readings

Really liked these readings. As I've mentioned, I spent a year teaching in Japan. It was basically the opposite of the problems discussed in this week's reading. In my case, the teacher in front of the class (me) was the only one who was not in his cultural element. Naturally, I did what I could to learn about the culture I was immersed in and teach accordingly, but often as not, I designed my classes much as I would have if I had been in a class full of South Dakota kids. I think this often people's natural reaction to cultural difficulty.

I particularly liked the discussion of the "product" of an activity setting on page 13 of Tharp-Gallimore. This isn't something I had really thought about before. We -perhaps especially those of us who belong to the dominant culture - come to red letters written on the tops of tests and papers as the desired "product" of our educational experience. This chapter took a while to get into, but I loved how fierce the authors were. Academic writing is usually characterized by impassivity, but I like it when people get a bit passionate about things.

The thing I'm having trouble with relates to the topic I'm working on for my paper. It seems to me (perhaps a bit conceitedly) that the issue of culture plays a particularly tricky and important role in the teaching of the social studies. I'm planning a unit on evaluating sources of historical information. I've worked in intercultural education ever since I left college, and I had a very hard time wrapping my head around a lot of this stuff. How do I teach my high school students what culture is and how it affects history? It's a big question, but if we are ever going to give our students anything other than the fairy-tale version of American or World History, we have to figure it out.

In-Class: Week 6

bias: a particular tendency or inclination, esp. one that prevents unprejudiced consideration of a question; prejudice. dictionary.com

A bias could, for example, lead one to accept or deny the truth of a claim, not on the basis of the strength of the arguments in support of the claim themselves, but because of the extent of the claim's correspondence with one's own preconceived ideas. This is called confirmation bias. -Wikipedia "bias"

Example: Hillary Clinton and Health Care
Clinton Website: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/feature/healthcareplan/
Medical News Today: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/72229.php
Primary Source - Text of Speech: http://www.hillaryclinton.com/news/speech/view/?id=1789
CNN.com - http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/09/17/health.care/
FOX News "The Dark Side of Hillary's Health Care Plan - http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,297493,00.html
WSJ Health Care Blog (with lots of reader comments) - http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2007/09/20/hillary-clinton-health-care-polarizer/
Market Watch - http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/hillary-clinton-outlines-health-care/story.aspx?guid=%7BB6E9057B-93C8-4BFD-9AEF-A8C9995A4FE7%7D
"Lone Wacko" Blog - http://lonewacko.com/blog/archives/007062.html

Week 6 Readings

Another week with an absolute TON of new information. I enjoyed it though. I was most eager to read about development in late adolescence, but that segment of the reading didn't go nearly as in depth as the others. For example, what strategies exist for dealing with egocentrism in adolescents? How does that egocentrism effect the learning process?

I decided to take notes this week on my Mac, since I used my studet loan money to buy it. Due to stolen Office software issues, I can't access them anymore. So I might get some of this wrong. But one thing that I found interesting was the Zone of Proximal Development. I'd like to learn more about how you assess what a child's Zone is. Also, we learned that the ZPD varies widely in different children. Why is this so?

So, if I'm designing a unit to teach students how to distinguish between and evaluate different sources of information, I will want to design it in such a way as to gradually give them less structure and guidance. It would be nice to see examples of class or unit design that does this sort of thing effectively.

Week 5: In Class Writing

Learning objectives for "Historiography" unit.

Students will be able to identify bias in source material.
Students will be able to articulate the difference between primary and secondary sources.
Students will identify the intended audiences of particular sources.
Students will differentiate between styles of various sources.
Students will know where to find different types of documents. (Photographs, Oral Accounts, Editorials, Video)

NYT Article on Laptops in Being Taken out of Classrooms. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/04/education/04laptop.html?_r=2&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

Week 5: weekly assignment

For some reason, I enjoyed this weeks readings much more than any other's. Among many of the topics discussed, motivation piqued my interest. As in much of our reading, the authors reference studies as examples, and sometimes discuss what those studies concluded, but never in much detail. I suppose it's good to leave me wanting more, but I was tempted to look up some of the studies to learn more about how exactly you guage what students' beliefs about themselves are, etc. I also found it very interesteing that mild anxiety can aid motivation, but it was not discussed in depth.

I ran out of time and was unable to really dig into this, but I'd be interested in discussing the differences between general and meta- cognitive strategies and domain-based strategies. What exactly is a domain-based strategy? I plan to review for a couple of hours before class, and maye that will shed some light on it, but they lost me a little bit there.

I am planning to write my first paper on a basic "historiography" unit for high school students. The main objective is to teach the students (am I supposed to call them "learners" now? :) ) to evaluate the usefulness of source material. This week's reading gives me a few things to focus on. For example, I'm going to need to find a way to asses the extent to which my students already evaluate validity of the information they take in. Do they ever give any though to bias, for example? Also, I will need to find a way for this unit to allow students to focus on an area that interests them and which they see as having validity in their daily life (that's hard to do with history.) I could go on; this was good stuff.

Week #4 In-Class

I want to design a lesson or unit that teaches students of history to distinguish between different types of source materials and assess their merit. What I'm thinking of is sort of a "Historiography for Beginners" geared toward high school students.

I'd like the unit to be almost entirely internet-based and student-driven. I want my students to know where to look for sources and recognize bias in their sources.

I am assuming that most of my students will not go on to study history in any formal manner, and thus teaching them historiography is not my main objective. However, all of my students will have access to the internet and nearly infinite information. Regardless of what career or course of study they will pursue, being able to sort through and assess the value of the vast amount of information available to them will be essential.

That's really all I have so far, but I'm excited about this and would welcome your comments or suggestions.

Week Two: In-Class Journal

I've been doing some thinking about the internet and how it affects the way we need to approach teaching our students. We know that students should leave our classes with a deep factual knowledge of the subject area. This, I suppose, was the reason I spent so much time memorizing lists of various things during my time in school.

Take geography, for example. In order to pass geography, we had to take a series of quizzes and tests in which we would have to fill in blanks (The capital of South Africa is ______.) or start with a blank map of South America and name all of the rivers. Even if the instructor sought to contextualize this knowledge by showing us videos or asking us to do projects or read articles, we were evaluated by filling in blanks.

This, of course, is no way to get someone to learn the rivers of South America. There are some people who memorize those rivers for the test and never forget them, but I doubt that there are many. And it seems more absurd now than ever, since just about anyone in America can have a map of South America and its rivers in front of them at the touch of a button.

So I guess what I'm getting at is this question: To what extent has the easy availability of information reduced the need for memorization? To what extent to students have an automatic "deep factual knowledge," especially regarding subjects like geography and history?

I think this is especially tricky in the social studies. My dad's a history teacher and I am a history major who hopes to teach the social studies someday, so that's the lense through which I'm looking at all of this. I got a 5 on the AP Euro and US History tests, and I feel like I don't remember much of anything factual about any of it. It seems to me that the only way someone retains that kind of factual information is by using all the time. If you don't, it goes away.

Given that, what's the point of trying to get students to learn it in the first place, especially in an age in which any factual information is instantly obtainable? As a history teacher, what would be the harm in abandoning my efforts to ensure that my students can name the U.S. Presidents in order and focusing exclusively on their understanding of key concepts and the organization of their knowledge?

There are a lot of problems with what I just wrote, but I'm running out of time.

The organization of knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval point is an interesting one in this context as well. In my opinion, any social studies class needs to have as one of its primary objectives that students are able to efficiently and judiciously make use of the internet. In a sense, this is how our kids will organize their knowledge. It's as if they had all memorized the rivers of South America, but when they sought to retrieve that information, some of it was correct, some of it was incorrect, some of it was advertising, and some of it was porn. I've wondered a lot about who in our schools today is teaching kids how to use all the information that is available to them, and it seems to me that social studies teachers should be doing a lot of it.

As a side note, this is all very scary. I had an adult class that I taught once a week in Japan. What we did there was entirely up to me, and nobody was evaluating my work. I had never really taught a class of any kind before in my life. To make matters worse, my students brought insanely different levels of English into the class with them. I had to figure out a way to keep them all attentive and entertained while doing the same activities. I had never really pondered the intricacies of how people learn things or been taught anything about effective teaching.

That was really hard, but I figured it out and after a couple of months of trial and error, it went alright. One would assume that educating oneself about how people learn would make one more confident when trying to teach, but I'm not sure that's true after this week. This is scary stuff! I've got to evaluate what knowledge my students are bringing into the classroom and adjust my strategies accordingly. I have to make sure that students are monitoring their learning processes. I've got to adjust my methods for students from different backgrounds. I need to make my students feel like their contributing something to others. The list goes on and on, and only after three chapters. I'm wondering if just throwing me into a classroom and having me figure it out wouldn't be better. That's what they used to do, right?

Weekly Assignment #1

The topic that interested me most this week was the difference between experts and novices. This distinction might be more important than ever in the age of the internet. Students have access to a nearly infinite breadth of knowledge on most subjects. With his easily-available pool of knowledge, teaching students to "segment the perceptual field" is essential.

I was a bit confused about conditionalization vs. contextualization. In chapter two, we learn that experts have highly conditionalized knowledge, which means that they have catalogued the contexts in which certain knowledge can be used. At first, when chapter three told me that having over-contextualized knowledge can prohibit transfer, I saw this as a contradiction. I understand the distinction now, but I think more discussion of these two concepts would be useful.

The "Fish is Fish" segment of chapter one reminded me of my time teaching English in Japan. I can think of no better example of pre-existing knowledge acting as a barrier to learning. This problem presented itself in the actual teaching of the English language, in obvious ways like my students' inability to pronounce the letter "l." It also presented itself endlessly in cultural situations where my students' learned cultural standards (more often my own!) prevented them from understanding the stories I was trying to tell them.

First Post

My name is Brian Shephard. People usually end up calling me Shep. You are welcome to call me whatever you like.

I work at AFS Intercultural Progams, a non-profit high school foreign exchange organization. I worked for 18 months as a volunteer coordinator, assisting volunteers in their efforts to find homes for and support exchange students. I'm working for AFS part time now in a different capacity. It's a great organization.

I'm taking this course as the first step on my way to becoming a high school teacher. I was happy to see that it was my first class; I think I'll find it compelling.

My least favorite subject in school was math. I still haven't quite figured out why. Perhaps this class will shed some light on it. I loved most of my classes and was generally a good student. Those things were not true when it came to math. I could go on and on about this.

I suppose my favorite subject was History. I was biased from the start, as my father is a high school history teacher. I've always enjoyed reading about history, and it was one of my majors in college.

I've never taken any sort of Pysch class before, so I'm excited about this. The other class I'm taking this semester is basic Pysch, so I'll be getting a brainful of the subject this Fall. I'm excited about that; people fascinate me, and I'd like to check what I think I've learned about people over the years against the science. I'm also hoping it will make me better at poker.

What else should you know about me? I spent a year on the JET program as an assistant language teacher in a tiny Japanese town. Since then, I've been working in international exchange on the high school and university level. As a result, culture and how it affects learning are of particular interest to me.

I'm not going to pick a topic yet. But as I mentioned above, culture and cultural education interest me. I'm also eager to think about the way that the information/communications revolution we're living through will change the way students learn and teachers teach. I suppose I'll talk more about this in my journal entry, I suppose.

I guess I would prefer to write the journal electronically. I'm alright with either way though.

Have a nice day.