Readings: Week 5

I feel like a broken record saying this, but this week's readings again left me grasping for more practical details to fill in what sounded like very reasonable, well thought-out theories about how people learn.

I particularly felt this way about Wiggins and McTighe's article.  The idea that teaching for understanding and transfer should be the focus of education is not a radical concept after the other readings and discussion from this class, and it's certainly a noble concept. The first thing that bothered me, though, was that the authors seemed to discuss this as the purpose of high school specifically. I know there are differences at different levels, but I would think that these would be laudable goals for teaching at any level. In particular, if you start implementing these methods in high school and your students don't really have experience with this type of learning for understanding and transfer before that level-- which would surely be the case for most schools in this country-- students are going to be confused and unclear about what's going on, because this type of teaching is so different from everything they've dealt with before.

The thing that really got me about this article, though, was the proposed "meaningful sequence" for teaching about measures of central tendency. It was a lovely plan for how to teach this concept in a way that promotes real understanding, and would probably work quite well in doing so provided the teacher really understood how to implement it. But... it just kept going on and on! The whole sequence had 12 steps, many of which were quite involved and would obviously take quite a bit of time. Now, I've never been a teacher, but the normal class period for high schools is 50 minutes, I believe. I can't ever imagine being able to accomplish everything this plan laid out in that amount of time with a group of 15-25 fifteen-year-olds. The science example discussed following the math one seemed more reasonable, but still like a lot to pack into 50 minutes when you want to get real understanding out of it. Like I said, I've never been a teacher; maybe I'm way off base here. But this really bothered me when it came to the applicability of that article.

This week's chapter of How People Learn was, as usual, a lot to take in. One big thought that crossed my mind as I read about all the ways transfer is important and how to encourage learning for transfer was the issue we talked about last week: assessment. How do you assess transfer of knowledge? Obviously, the article notes various ways that this is done, generally summatively, by asking students to solve some "real-world" problem that requires knowledge they have but have learned in a different context. But this still is a formulaic, plotted situation. The real test of transfer of knowledge is going to be when students have to get into the real world and solve real problems that depend on the knowledge they've gained through education. In those situations, the factors and context involved are almost always going to be more complicated than anything you deal with in school, as are the conditions under which you work. The chapter got at this to some degree, noting that in the "real world" collaboration and using tools are much more common and important. As an educator, you're never going to be able to actually see if the students you teach really effectively transfer those skills to the real world; you can only hope to emulate "real-world" conditions as best as possible.

I was glad that the chapter acknowledged that you have to be able to strike a balance between higher-level, abstract conceptualizations of concepts and actual "real-world" examples and problem solving when teaching; too much of one or the other isn't going to be effective. I think that's probably the hardest part of teaching for transfer, though; how do you strike this balance effectively, especially when your students have wildly different backgrounds and quite possibly wildly different futures?