November 8: Ways of Learning

Biggs And Collis Structure of Learned Outcomes: This looks and feels just like Bloom's taxonomy. How is it different? Very familiar, I'm comfortable with this one.

Costa and Callick: Critical Friend. This is fraught with peril. This does not describe a friendship, it describes maybe mentorship or just being a wiser and not-very-nice older sister. Anyone who has the ability to criticise you but who you can't give back a taste of their own medicine isn't a friend. Friendship must go both ways or it is disingenuous. I don't like this one, or trust the intentions of the authors. At best it is what I do at work--I am friendly and not in a position to grade the students, but I have helpful feedback and can be playful and silly with the students. I hope that they can grow to trust me. But I am not their friend.

Whitmore's Grow Model: we engaged with this to an extent at the beginning of class, and it is something I have to encounter periodically in professional appraisals and development. The idea of motivating a staff member to set clear, specific, measurable and time-bound goals is at the core of annual appraisal. The idea of finding or creating the willpower to achieve the objectives she has set is where it all falls down.

Caine and Caine: Brain-Based Learning. I'm not sure how I engage with this one. The author appears to indicate that he doesn't either. I guess at its core is a reminder that learners have brains too, and they're probably a lot like yours and need to be stimulated in the right way in order to not only learn, but retain, and have a drive to learn. Ask questions. Pose a challenging but not overwhelming learning environment. Allow the learner to have some autonomy in how and what they learn, if possible.

Gardner: Multiple Intelligences. This seems silly. It lacks substance, either because Gardner's thinking lacked substance or because Bob Bates didn't take it particularly seriously. It doesn't help people learn what they signed up to learn, certainly, and doesn't appear to have a whole lot of use in the classroom if ultimately you have specific concepts and skills you wish to teach to everyone. Yes we can appreciate that everyone has their aptitudes and range of interests, but how can we tune each intelligence toward learning the thing that needs to be learnt?  ("The answers to questions of this nature are not easy." HA!)

Montessori: The Absorbent Mind. I can take a lot of the advice to heart: people thrive where there is order and everything has its place. Facilitate learning rather than dictate teaching. I think the workshop is a much saner place now that we have a tool room. Everything has its place--it may not be the most specific place, but it is much more specific than it used to be, and the space makes more sense. Things don't get lost as easily. I also appreciate my permission to encourage students to make mistakes and learn from them. It's difficult for the students to appreciate just how beautiful a feeling that can be.

Bruner: Discovery learning. Ask students what they want to learn. Help them learn it. Figure out if they understand it. Ask them what they want to learn tomorrow. Great for drop-ins. Not great if the students don't actually want to learn what you are tasked with teaching them, but never mind.

Vygotsky: Zone of Proximal Development. Break the concept down into smaller chunks, and allow the learners to feed them to themselves, or get students who other students pick things up from easily to help feed it to them. Makes concepts sound a lot like soup.