Readings: Week 4

This week's readings were all about learning environments and assessment. I have to say I'm feeling a little overwhelmed and discouraged after taking everything in that I found in these readings. They seem to be a reminder of how much work there is to do in the educational world.
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The chapter of How People Learn laid out structures for learning environments that seem eminently reasonable and offered good, solid advice on the sort of classrooms and other settings that are necessary for real learning. As with the early chapter we read, I was struck sometimes as wanting more information on how to actually make these things happen in the real world. The book promises that further chapters address this, though, so that's not a completely fair criticism. I have to say that the biggest challenge to implementing this sort of learning environment-- one that is learner-, knowledge-, assessment-, and community-centered-- is simply that it's not what people are used to. I constantly thought back to my own educational experience and the many ways in which it did not mirror the model proscribed by the chapter. Of course, I also realized the many ways it did mirror this model, so that's positive at least! Many of the sorts of structures necessary for learning described here, though, are things that potential learners, and significantly at some levels their parents, just won't know how to deal with. "Learning the landscape" may indeed be the appropriate metaphor for knowledge-centered instruction, but students and parents are used to the "rutted path" that focuses much more on memorization and retaining knowledge as opposed to building skills. Similarly, formative assessment, despite its immense usefulness and success in producing real learners, runs so counter to how our whole educational culture works, at least in this country, that really implementing a strong culture of it seems nothing short of a gargantuan task. I'd really like to read a study on how to implement the techniques discussed in this article in a way that really gets buy-in from learner communities, which would seem to be important when "community-centered"-ness is one of the goals.

Similarly, the article on formative assessment made me realize how little I've received true formative assessment in my own experience with formal education, yet at the same time how useful it was and how much I valued it when I received it. Most of the points in the article are really good, yet again I can't help but realize how counter to our educational culture this idea is. Particularly, I thought about how, as someone who's always been quite a good student, grades have been pretty much the be-all and end-all for my evaluation of my own academic ability. I always say that even though I think my study habits aren't very good, and even though I often am strongly critical of my own work before I turn it in for a grade, as long as I continue to get good grades I don't have any motivation to change. Obviously, the extent to which I care about the quality of my work when I initially do it and the time I spend trying to improve it show that I definitely have some of the self-monitoring skills that formative assessment tries to teach, but it's still the summative assessment that always "really"  matters.

I know none of this mentions libraries and how we apply all this as librarians, but clearly there are connections that I just haven't thought out clearly enough yet to articulate. :)