While reading this week's readings about ethics in librarianship, I thought back a lot to the class we had on ethics in SI 580, the introductory archives class, with David Wallace. I remember that as one of the most interesting lecture and discussion sessions that we had in that class, because it raised some big issues but made them very real. The biggest thing I remember Dr. Wallace emphasizing was that ethical decision-making is very much dependent on context-- on the situation, the people involved, your work setting, and above all your own personal values. And he said that everyone has to make their own decisions-- that what one person decides is ethically proper in a situation or is comfortable doing will not be the same for everyone else, and that should be respected.
This approach seemed a really sensible way to talk about professional ethics to me, and one that was much more sophisticated and realistic than a lot of what you see out there. Essentially, I think this approach is pretty much what the "virtue ethics" Lenker is advocating is. I definitely agree with Lenker that ethical decision-making can never just be a set of rules to follow or something hopelessly reductive-- it takes a lot of thought and a lot of consideration of various factors, and isn't going to be easy. I was especially glad that Lenker emphasized that your own personal values are as much of part of this decision-making as consideration of other people involved or the values of your institution, because often when we talk about "ethics" in professional contexts I think people forget that we're talking about people with their own moral principles, not automatons who can just blindly follow outside "rules." I thought it was good that in presenting his hypothetical scenario, Lenker gave a very human identity to his hypothetical librarian Clark, and gave information about "Clark" that has nothing to do with librarianship but would certainly be relevant to his own ethical decision-making process.
As for the ALA code of ethics, I was also reminded of what Dr. Wallace said when we talked about the SAA code of ethics (which is much longer and more complicated than its ALA equivalent), which at that time included at least one provision he strongly disagreed with. (I believe he mentioned the next semester that one particular provision he strongly objected to had since been removed.) Basically, he said that this may say a lot of nice things, but it's not as though it's some sort of binding rule. Yes, when you join the organization you may agree to uphold it, but you're not going to get kicked out or even penalized in any way for not doing so-- and how do you even measure "not upholding the code of ethics" in a situation like this? With this in mind, I pondered the fact that the ALA code was probably the product of great thought and deliberation by some committee, that it's undoubtedly gone through lots and lots of revisions over the years, and that most librarians still probably don't think about it that much. It's simply a tool in the process of ethical decision-making process Lenker described, but far from the only one or even the most important one.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Class in Review: Week 7
The book clubs were, as promised, definitely a nice break from our regular class session. It was very interesting to see the variety of different ways that different groups implemented the book club, especially given the variety of readings we had.
One thing I realized, both from leading my own book club and participating in the others, is that leading discussion really is tough. Some groups took a lot more proactive approach to really trying to get people to share ideas and helping the conversation along. Some groups really just let things go where they would and didn’t seem to mind. I’m not sure that either format is really “better.” It just depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If you really want people to have some intellectual discussion about a particular reading, you’re going to guide the conversation more along those lines. On the other hand, if the goal is just to make sure everyone has a good time while talking about what they read, the conversation is going to be more free-wheeling.
A couple of other observations: one is that one of the toughest things in group discussion is getting everyone to really participate. There are always going to be some people who are more comfortable talking in this type of format (I’m usually one of them), and some people who aren’t. Even when the people who enjoy talking have good ideas, and in our group they usually did, it’s hard to say, “No, we don’t want to hear from you. We want somebody else to talk now.” Especially when no one else wants to talk. This didn’t happen per se in our group’s discussions, but some people definitely were more active participants than others. That’s all right, but you still want to have a balance, and getting there can be tough.
Last thought: I kept feeling at first during our book club group like things were getting derailed, or the discussion was going off on wild tangents, and we were “losing control.” At some point, though, I realized that people really were discussing interesting questions related to our reading, and things that we wanted to talk about, even if it wasn’t going the way I’d envisioned. One of the toughest things, I realized, about leading this type of discussion is you have to be willing to “lose control” to some degree and just let things go as they may!
Sunday, March 4, 2012
Readings: Week 7
Since only some of the people in my blogging cohort are in my book club group, it's a little confusing to talk about readings that some but not all of the folks reading this have read themselves, so this will be pretty general. My book club partner and I are presenting an article from the Chronicle of Higher Ed, but everybody else in my group picked selections of fiction, which is less my reading preferences, especially the sort of metaphorical works-- comics and fairy tales, that we're reading. So my thoughts don't come as easily, since I'm so unfamiliar with these sort of reading materials. So these are just going to be some initial thoughts; with some further conversation in the group I'm sure I'll have more to say.
First, the short story by Neil Gaiman. Most of our readings provide a lot of commentary on gender and gender relations. This story plays with the way gender is traditionally represented in fairy tales (like the other one we read), but the implications are sort of interesting in a lot of unexpected ways.
Next, were four web comics, which had a lot of commentary on gender, art, death, fear, and capitalism. (Think there's anything to discuss there?) I'm not sure what I think of them, but my initial thought is that they present a lot of things in pretty simplistic ways. But I'm open to discussion about the implications of the points the artist is trying to make.
The next reading was the black-and-white comic by a French artist. This one's chock full of commentary on gender and gender relations (and inter-gender relations). The first thing I wondered after reading it was whether the artist was male or female, and how that does or doesn't affect the message. I don't know. I'm also interested in seeing what people's impressions will be of what the societal pressures and constructs underlying the topics discussed are.
The last reading we did was the fairy tale of Donkeyskin. This is not a tale with which I had been familiar before, and I was amused by all the thoughts it triggered. As a history person, I was especially interested in the social and cultural circumstances that led to the origins of lots of the stuff it discussed, and this led me to thinking about similar things for other more well-known fairy tales, including those that are and aren't similar to this one. The annotations provided a lot of really interesting commentary on the recurring theme of gender and gender relations, so it'll be interesting to see where the conversation goes from those topics.
Overall takeaway: I don't have a lot of strong viewpoints on my own when it comes to these readings, though I have a lot of hazy thoughts. But I'm sure I'll have more distinct things to say if I'm in a group and I have other people's opinions to feed off of. So it's a good thing we're doing book clubs for these!
First, the short story by Neil Gaiman. Most of our readings provide a lot of commentary on gender and gender relations. This story plays with the way gender is traditionally represented in fairy tales (like the other one we read), but the implications are sort of interesting in a lot of unexpected ways.
Next, were four web comics, which had a lot of commentary on gender, art, death, fear, and capitalism. (Think there's anything to discuss there?) I'm not sure what I think of them, but my initial thought is that they present a lot of things in pretty simplistic ways. But I'm open to discussion about the implications of the points the artist is trying to make.
The next reading was the black-and-white comic by a French artist. This one's chock full of commentary on gender and gender relations (and inter-gender relations). The first thing I wondered after reading it was whether the artist was male or female, and how that does or doesn't affect the message. I don't know. I'm also interested in seeing what people's impressions will be of what the societal pressures and constructs underlying the topics discussed are.
The last reading we did was the fairy tale of Donkeyskin. This is not a tale with which I had been familiar before, and I was amused by all the thoughts it triggered. As a history person, I was especially interested in the social and cultural circumstances that led to the origins of lots of the stuff it discussed, and this led me to thinking about similar things for other more well-known fairy tales, including those that are and aren't similar to this one. The annotations provided a lot of really interesting commentary on the recurring theme of gender and gender relations, so it'll be interesting to see where the conversation goes from those topics.
Overall takeaway: I don't have a lot of strong viewpoints on my own when it comes to these readings, though I have a lot of hazy thoughts. But I'm sure I'll have more distinct things to say if I'm in a group and I have other people's opinions to feed off of. So it's a good thing we're doing book clubs for these!
Thursday, March 1, 2012
Class in Review: Week 6
So in my reflection on the readings I focused more on the Socratic seminars, but in class the more interesting discussion seemed to center around book clubs. I found our discussions about perceptions (or stereotypes) of book clubs and typical demographics of book clubs really interesting. In thinking about this more over the course of the week, I had some more general reflections on books and the future of books and reading.
I keep wondering about the future of book clubs in a world in which books are increasingly being seen by a lot of people as unnecessary and not useful as sources of information. But as we all know, books themselves aren't going anywhere, even if their physical forms are changing. One thing that I realized is that the nature of books has in a way narrowed-- fifty years ago, books were the best source for many different types of information. Today, a lot of that information is found online, or in databases, or in much more readily available sources. Even a lot of fiction or more literary non-fiction can be read online in forms that aren't like e-books. So what remains for books? Essentially, we've come (back?) to a point where books are in a way more a source of enjoyment and pleasure than they are a source of "information" in the sense of factual knowledge about the world. This is true, generally speaking, whether we're talking about fiction or non-fiction. I would think that really, this would be good for book clubs! People see books and reading as an activity that's reserved mostly for pleasurable parts of our lives and free time, not as something that has to be consulted in the course of serious work-- there are plenty of other sources for that. So book clubs that just focus on reading for the fun of it really have a new opportunity to market themselves, right? Maybe. I feel like a lot of other people have probably said this all before more eloquently than I. But I'm enjoying thinking about this stuff as someone who's primarily been thinking about archives and preservation in my time at SI.
In the comments my last post, my fellow archivist Naomi wondered if book clubs could be an effective outreach tool for archives, and I thought I'd address that here to see if anybody else had any thoughts. I agree that a lot of regular lecture attendees would attend a book club-like discussion of materials. I also thought about whether featuring discussion of works written using research done at an archives could yield interesting results; it also might be a case of being able to get some input from authors, with whom you already have a relationship thanks to their research. The tricky thing would be finding a work that would really engage people, and not just an academic tome. And even then, it might or might not work. The biggest challenge to something like this is the biggest challenge to any outreach for archives, though; most archives don't have nearly the staffing, funding, or focus on outreach that libraries do, and most archivists are so busy that they don't really have time to think about new outreach activities, especially something as elaborate as a book discussion. But it would be an interesting avenue to explore. Any thoughts?
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Readings: Week 6
I have to say book clubs are one of those things I've never thought about much, because they're largely the domain of public libraries, which are outside my area of interest. So it was nice to read a couple articles on where book clubs are at these days and how they've changed. Nothing in Dempsey's or Hoffert's articles really surprised me; I'd fully expect that today's libraries are the source of the latest and greatest innovation in the book club world. It particularly struck me personally that public libraries are using book clubs geared toward young childless adults as an attempt to draw in patrons who don't interact much with them, because that's a demographic that includes me. As someone who doesn't do much recreational reading, especially not of fiction, but would like to do more, a book club geared toward things I'm interested in would probably be quite a good way to draw me into a public library.
What really intrigued me, though, were the Socratic seminar articles. I was really interested to see what exactly these articles said a Socratic seminar was and how to do them, because my standing impression of "Socratic" was just "learning by asking questions," which isn't very helpful in terms of actual implementation. What I kept thinking in reading Tredway's article, though, was, "This is just using fancy language to describe good group discussion!" The classes I have enjoyed the most as undergraduate and a graduate student are those that are based heavily on intentional, focused, well-facilitated group discussion that analyzes a text everyone in the group has read beforehand. As a history major/English minor, I just really loved being in classes like this and felt like I always learned so much more than I did from lectures or other activities. To me, this "Socratic seminar" method wasn't any new or crazy idea, then, it was just an explication of how to do good group discussion, which I thought was a pretty basic educational tool. But the ubiquity of such a teaching method is probably something that's been skewed by my liberal-arts background.
Metzger's article threw me for a bit of a loop. I mean, she does a really job laying out how she implemented this teaching method and made it really successful her context. I appreciated how she showed the ways it could be used to teach the specific learning objectives related to reading comprehension that she wanted to get across. But... I kept thinking it all sounded a little too good to be true. I've never taught high school freshman, so I guess I really can't judge, but I felt like I've been in groups of undergraduates who would not show anything near the results that Metzger describes her class showing after two months of using this approach.
I think the solution here is that Metzger is probably a really, really good teacher, and she (obviously, who would?) doesn't give herself enough credit for how much of a role she played a role in making this a successful teaching practice. At one point, she even makes it sound easy, implying that once you get started, the students will just take over and the learning will happen. But clearly this isn't what she was doing at all. You can see throughout the whole article how Metzger was guiding the process, checking to see what students were learning, making adjustments when things didn't go well, and overall being very aware of how things were going. (She videotaped the first class period and re-watched it so she could see what she was doing well! How many teachers would do that? Clearly she really cared about making this work.) We've all been in classes where group discussion just didn't work and just didn't go well. My contention is that this usually happens because the teacher doesn't really know how to facilitate discussion, which includes doing all the things, on both a micro- and macro-level, that Metzger did here. In general, there probably needs to be more emphasis on the really important role the teacher plays in making Socratic seminars work as a teaching tool.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the high school where Metzger taught as noted at the end of the article. It's in suburban Boston and is consistently ranked as one of the best public high schools in the state of Massachusetts. (It's also the alma mater of Michael Dukakis, Conan O'Brien, and Mike Wallace. Thank you, Wikipedia.) It's obviously the sort of place where students are used to high standards and high-quality critical thinking. In a different school, with different students and different expectations, this teaching method would probably be considerably more complicated to implement. I'd be curious to see how implementing this would go for someone who teaching in a rather different environment.
The other overall observation I have is that Socratic seminars are really conducive to the type of learning that's about building really complex skills that can transfer to lots of other environments. It's really not as helpful when the focus is on covering as much content as possible, because that's what students are going to be tested on. Unfortunately, this might be the biggest hindrance to wider implementation in today's public-school settings.
ETA: Not saying anything here about the Prensky article because I assume the whole point is to have a rather detailed discussion of it in class.
What really intrigued me, though, were the Socratic seminar articles. I was really interested to see what exactly these articles said a Socratic seminar was and how to do them, because my standing impression of "Socratic" was just "learning by asking questions," which isn't very helpful in terms of actual implementation. What I kept thinking in reading Tredway's article, though, was, "This is just using fancy language to describe good group discussion!" The classes I have enjoyed the most as undergraduate and a graduate student are those that are based heavily on intentional, focused, well-facilitated group discussion that analyzes a text everyone in the group has read beforehand. As a history major/English minor, I just really loved being in classes like this and felt like I always learned so much more than I did from lectures or other activities. To me, this "Socratic seminar" method wasn't any new or crazy idea, then, it was just an explication of how to do good group discussion, which I thought was a pretty basic educational tool. But the ubiquity of such a teaching method is probably something that's been skewed by my liberal-arts background.
Metzger's article threw me for a bit of a loop. I mean, she does a really job laying out how she implemented this teaching method and made it really successful her context. I appreciated how she showed the ways it could be used to teach the specific learning objectives related to reading comprehension that she wanted to get across. But... I kept thinking it all sounded a little too good to be true. I've never taught high school freshman, so I guess I really can't judge, but I felt like I've been in groups of undergraduates who would not show anything near the results that Metzger describes her class showing after two months of using this approach.
I think the solution here is that Metzger is probably a really, really good teacher, and she (obviously, who would?) doesn't give herself enough credit for how much of a role she played a role in making this a successful teaching practice. At one point, she even makes it sound easy, implying that once you get started, the students will just take over and the learning will happen. But clearly this isn't what she was doing at all. You can see throughout the whole article how Metzger was guiding the process, checking to see what students were learning, making adjustments when things didn't go well, and overall being very aware of how things were going. (She videotaped the first class period and re-watched it so she could see what she was doing well! How many teachers would do that? Clearly she really cared about making this work.) We've all been in classes where group discussion just didn't work and just didn't go well. My contention is that this usually happens because the teacher doesn't really know how to facilitate discussion, which includes doing all the things, on both a micro- and macro-level, that Metzger did here. In general, there probably needs to be more emphasis on the really important role the teacher plays in making Socratic seminars work as a teaching tool.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the high school where Metzger taught as noted at the end of the article. It's in suburban Boston and is consistently ranked as one of the best public high schools in the state of Massachusetts. (It's also the alma mater of Michael Dukakis, Conan O'Brien, and Mike Wallace. Thank you, Wikipedia.) It's obviously the sort of place where students are used to high standards and high-quality critical thinking. In a different school, with different students and different expectations, this teaching method would probably be considerably more complicated to implement. I'd be curious to see how implementing this would go for someone who teaching in a rather different environment.
The other overall observation I have is that Socratic seminars are really conducive to the type of learning that's about building really complex skills that can transfer to lots of other environments. It's really not as helpful when the focus is on covering as much content as possible, because that's what students are going to be tested on. Unfortunately, this might be the biggest hindrance to wider implementation in today's public-school settings.
ETA: Not saying anything here about the Prensky article because I assume the whole point is to have a rather detailed discussion of it in class.
Class in Review: Week 5
Gaming and blogs, oh my oh my!
That's pretty much my reaction to last week's class. I know we talked about transfer in there somewhere, but everything I remember was our discussion of gaming and blogs. And on both issues, I'm really not sure "what I think" at all.
When it comes to gaming, I'm just really skeptical at the whole paradigm that suggests people will be more motivated to do things that encourage learning or solve problems if we turn everything into a game, or cast real-world situations in the form of games. In formal educational settings, attempts at "gamifying" probably still usually come across as "Oh, they're trying to turn this into a 'game' so that it's 'fun' to learn. But this is nothing like [insert favorite video game here]." I suppose the issue of motivation is really what gets to me. We talked about how educators don't understand why students don't display skills in the classroom or in their academic work that they clearly display when gaming. My answer is that it's simply because they're in the classroom/doing academic work and they know it. That alone is a motivation-killer. I don't really know how to deal with this, but to me it's the biggest hurdle to getting "gaming" approaches to work in formal educational settings. I don't know about other gaming that aims to solve "real-world" problems; this is probably a little more complicated.
And oh, the blogs. One of the things I really wanted to learn in this class was how to do a professional blog and not come off as narcissistic or obsessed with your own ideas. I read a lot of blogs, some more regularly than others, and I always find them illuminating. But I'm not the kind of person who feels the need to broadcast my ideas about particular topics to the Internet at large, because I think it gives off the attitude that I'm a super-special snowflake who everyone should listen to. This is the same reason I don't post Facebook statuses or links very much (though I spend hours on Facebook every day); why would so many people be interested in mundane things I have to say?
But at the same time I know that in our profession and many others, blogs have come to play a vital and important role in professional discourse. And I know that when you're blogging as part of your job, the potential for the impression of narcissism is going to go down quite a bit. Nevertheless, given all this the part of our discussion on blogs I found most interesting was the discussion at the end of class on blogging culture and "blogging superstars" and such. That's exactly the kind of behavior that annoys me and turns me off of some blogs. I have no desire to be involved in petty professional drama that arises from who's "famous" on the Internet, though I guess some of that is inevitable these days.
But the thing that I learned from looking at so many professional blogs (and I looked at several others from the list than the ones I'd been following, though not in as much depth) was that the most significant thing a blog post can do is try to be part of a larger conversation. The best professional blog posts were those that took something personal and tied it in to larger trends, and then asked questions that generated further thought. The best bloggers don't just throw out random ideas and "here's what I'm doing" sort of moments-- they think about how to connect things to the larger context of the profession and really want to get feedback and provide more in return. Whether that actually happens is another question, because not all the blogs I looked at had a lot of comments, though that's not a great measure of how widely they were read. Overall, I guess the point is that blogs should be part of a larger conversation, not voices that dominate a conversation. Given the ubiquity and power of the Internet, though, this can be a tough line to walk sometimes, and it's something I think bloggers should keep in mind.
(Hope I haven't said anything that's offended all the blog-lovers out there! I like blogs too, I promise!)
That's pretty much my reaction to last week's class. I know we talked about transfer in there somewhere, but everything I remember was our discussion of gaming and blogs. And on both issues, I'm really not sure "what I think" at all.
When it comes to gaming, I'm just really skeptical at the whole paradigm that suggests people will be more motivated to do things that encourage learning or solve problems if we turn everything into a game, or cast real-world situations in the form of games. In formal educational settings, attempts at "gamifying" probably still usually come across as "Oh, they're trying to turn this into a 'game' so that it's 'fun' to learn. But this is nothing like [insert favorite video game here]." I suppose the issue of motivation is really what gets to me. We talked about how educators don't understand why students don't display skills in the classroom or in their academic work that they clearly display when gaming. My answer is that it's simply because they're in the classroom/doing academic work and they know it. That alone is a motivation-killer. I don't really know how to deal with this, but to me it's the biggest hurdle to getting "gaming" approaches to work in formal educational settings. I don't know about other gaming that aims to solve "real-world" problems; this is probably a little more complicated.
And oh, the blogs. One of the things I really wanted to learn in this class was how to do a professional blog and not come off as narcissistic or obsessed with your own ideas. I read a lot of blogs, some more regularly than others, and I always find them illuminating. But I'm not the kind of person who feels the need to broadcast my ideas about particular topics to the Internet at large, because I think it gives off the attitude that I'm a super-special snowflake who everyone should listen to. This is the same reason I don't post Facebook statuses or links very much (though I spend hours on Facebook every day); why would so many people be interested in mundane things I have to say?
But at the same time I know that in our profession and many others, blogs have come to play a vital and important role in professional discourse. And I know that when you're blogging as part of your job, the potential for the impression of narcissism is going to go down quite a bit. Nevertheless, given all this the part of our discussion on blogs I found most interesting was the discussion at the end of class on blogging culture and "blogging superstars" and such. That's exactly the kind of behavior that annoys me and turns me off of some blogs. I have no desire to be involved in petty professional drama that arises from who's "famous" on the Internet, though I guess some of that is inevitable these days.
But the thing that I learned from looking at so many professional blogs (and I looked at several others from the list than the ones I'd been following, though not in as much depth) was that the most significant thing a blog post can do is try to be part of a larger conversation. The best professional blog posts were those that took something personal and tied it in to larger trends, and then asked questions that generated further thought. The best bloggers don't just throw out random ideas and "here's what I'm doing" sort of moments-- they think about how to connect things to the larger context of the profession and really want to get feedback and provide more in return. Whether that actually happens is another question, because not all the blogs I looked at had a lot of comments, though that's not a great measure of how widely they were read. Overall, I guess the point is that blogs should be part of a larger conversation, not voices that dominate a conversation. Given the ubiquity and power of the Internet, though, this can be a tough line to walk sometimes, and it's something I think bloggers should keep in mind.
(Hope I haven't said anything that's offended all the blog-lovers out there! I like blogs too, I promise!)
Sunday, February 12, 2012
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?
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?
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