Week 5 Reading Reflection

What exactly are we transferring?

I found "Put Understanding First" to be an extremely interesting article and I started to wonder why the obvious is seemingly unknown to the public school system in the United States.  Why can't a student's education help him attain his own goals for college or career readiness?  Why can't teachers focus on what students need to know for a job instead of what they need to know for standardized tests.  In the process of trying to create and assess effective schools, our public education system has deviated so far from preparing students for what they need to know in life.

Wiggins and McTighe's analogy of comparing student learners to athletes or performers is apt.  If I think of students as performers or athletes then the three instructional practices start to make more sense.  DIrect instruction is necessary, but it should come chunked into accessible pieces.   A director would not explain all the dialogue, songs, blocking, and choreography for a musical intending to have a performance at the end of four weeks without even having a run-through of the show.  Just as a coach would not lecture her basketball players on the finer points of dribbling, setting a pick, passing, and shooting in a classroom setting with the goal of playing a game before the players have even set foot on the court.  I know these examples cannot be exactly compared to how subject content learning is transferred by students in order to take a final exam, but the three instructional practices outlined by Wiggins and McTighe can be applied to every scenario.  

Understanding that the application of direct instruction, facilitation, and coaching should not be linear, but cyclical helps me to understand how teaching in the classroom can be more effective.  As the article states, the very first thing kids usually ask is, "Why do we need to know this?", if the teacher engages her students in an activity that reveals examples of the need for content learning, then students will quickly understand the relevance of what is being taught in class.  This will increase engagement and understanding.  Increased rigor (appropriately introduced by the teacher) can follow as students begin to transfer content knowledge more and more easily.  In this manner, students will make meaning in chunks as they acquire the knowledge needed in order to complete the next task or assignment.  Students can then develop an understanding that what they have been learning is all part of a bigger picture- where their new knowledge needs to be applied in order to succeed on their own.

Chapter 3 of "How People Learn" gave me a better idea of how the transfer of student knowledge can be more effective.  It is the transfer of knowledge that we measure in order to assess our students, but students need time to process the information given to them across multiple contexts through purposeful learning.  Motivation is the key to a student's desire to learn.  As WIggins and McTighe pointed out in their "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" vignette, the history teacher does a horrible job of motivating his students as he merely asks them to regurgitate facts back to the class.  Yes, the students were being asked to share knowledge, but it is only when students create new thoughts, ideas, and meanings of their own that they become excited enough to stand up and share with the rest of the class.

In my student teaching experience, I have been trying to motivate my students to learn, by encouraging them to share their thoughts, but the piece I am just starting to realize that I am missing is making sure that my students understand how what I am teaching them will be useful to them- at home and in the classroom.  Beyond that, I need to share with the classroom teachers the content knowledge I am teaching to my students so that the teachers can integrate student skills learned in the Media Center into classroom learning.  Again and again, I hear teachers complain that they don't like to use computers in class because the students don't know how to use a program, or how to log on to their servers, or how to save and print a document- but what I am not always sharing with the teachers is how I am teaching students this knowledge,  If teachers let students share this new knowledge, the students will see that their learning is relevant and is making a contribution to classroom activities.  The transfer of student knowledge from one setting to another (Media Center to classroom) through the application of skills learned in the Media Center to create products based on classroom content knowledge can excite and motivate students.  The more time students have to develop these skills, the more competent and confident they will become in transferring previous knowledge to new contexts. 

This transfer of knowledge based on previous learning is the goal of SI 502.  Students learn the Python programming language in 502 because it is what many other programming languages are based on.  Yes, we were heavily drilled in "while True" and "if/then" statements, but it was in hopes that we would be able to transfer the knowledge we had built in Python to work with other programming languages more easily.  That would be perfect if I remembered anything I had learned (which is most likely a result of not having mastered it), but...maybe if it all had been set to music...?  I know theater was Dr. Chuck's first love.  Maybe we can co-write, "If/then, while True" the musical?  

Nope, then I would just have memorized it and not actually understood it.