Saturday, June 6, 2009
Blog #3
I took another EDP class this spring and we learned quite a bit about Piaget and Vygotsky. I think both of their theories are quite interesting. I have always been interested in the way the human mind works and especially how it learns. It is very important as a future teacher to know how the mind learns since that is going to be your job to help it along!!! I really agree with Vygotsky's theories more. As a teacher, I believe that it is my job to help children along their way and to use things such as scaffolding and guided participation to help students learn things. I really don't think that the human mind has stages where it doesn't know how to do something and then all of a sudden it decides to move up in stages and now you know it! This is what Piaget says and i just don't think that that is the way it really goes. Yes, we do start with little knowledge and move up to learning more, but that is based on many things such as prior knowledge, building on that knowledge, and how well your brain is developed. I think that the way we move from not knowing something to all of a sudden knowing it is to gradually build on knowledge we already have. To do this, we need to expand the zone of proximal development. That is what teachers are for! Yay! I really think that as teachers, we are destined to believe more in Vygotsky's theory, just because of what it means. It means that we actually help our students and they just don't jump to knowing things on their own, as Piaget says.
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The Article, How People Learn is an argument for a classroom reform for the way teachers teach, and how schools function in America. All of this is for the betterment of the student. In the article, it states that teachers should be teaching from an empirical standpoint. Research has been done to show how students learn, and when they learn best. Some teachers are stuck in their old ways, and do not keep up to speed with the latest (empirical data) research. On page four the article stated that,
ReplyDelete“Teachers are the key to change in this model; they are the classroom
practitioners. Many excellent teachers already incorporate the principles in
How People Learn into their practice, either by design or by intuition. But
for those principles to be used systematically, all teachers will need opportunities
to understand the principles, be persuaded of their usefulness, and be
able to enact them in their classrooms.”
Teachers do have a lot of say, and power within the school setting. Many times I think of schools as being very political, which at times yes they can be…but within that hierarchy structure, teachers have a voice and a strong one too.
I really liked how this article tied in to the lecture. I felt like on page one when the article stated,
“Key to expertise is the mastery of
concepts that allow for deep understanding of that information, transforming
it from a set of facts into usable knowledge. The conceptual framework
allows experts to organize information into meaningful patterns and store it
hierarchically in memory to facilitate retrieval for problem solving. And
unlike pure acquisition of factual knowledge, the mastery of concepts facilitates
transfer of learning to new problems.”
It made me think of Vygotsky. Creating useable knowledge and pulling information from their existing knowledge and create a framework of factual understanding particular to the topic being studied. It sounds like zone of proximal development and scaffolding to make a deep understanding.
I have taken an educational Psychology class before where we have learned briefly about these two different theories. However, this lecture was a great refresher and I learned more information about these theories and I could relate them to things I have seen in my internship. For example, in the lecture when Tiffany was talking about Piaget and conservation is when she gave the play doh example when the child may or may not grasp the concept of if the play doh starts out in a ball and you smash it that it is still equal. I have experiences this in my intern class. The teacher showed the students a class of water in a tall and skinny cup and then poured it into a smaller fatter cup and asked which one had more water. Some of the students grasped the concept that it was the same amount of water in each glass and some thought the tall skinny glass had more water.
ReplyDeleteBlog 3
ReplyDeleteAn important point that the article makes is the importance of changing our views that students are an empty vessel waiting to be filled with information dictated by the teacher (15). Instead, educators must recognize that students are likely to have preconceptions and previous experience with the concepts that will be taught in classes, regardless of age and subject matter. Another word commonly used to describe students' individual experiences outside the classroom that relate to what we teach is "schema". We create an understanding of new concepts and information through our own individual schema which is colored by a combination of experiences, identities, community, culture, etc. The unique qualities of our own subjective experiences--our schema--affect how we process information. As the article stresses, "A critical feature of effective teaching is that it elicits form students their existing understanding of the subject matter to be taught and provides opportunities to build on--or challenge--the initial understanding" (11).
In agreement with the research presented in this article, I think that it is important to present the curriculum in a way that meets students where they already have experience and then build on that background knowledge (as long as this background experience is not based on misconceptions). For example, in a general music classroom (at elementary level), students may have more experience with music in the context of cartoons and the radio than South African or Appalachian folk music. Taking this into consideration, I can tailor my lessons to include examples of music they are familiar with and then spiral outward to genres that they are unfamiliar with.