What are your mental processes for figuring out Dervin's article? What was your meta-cognitive process? How did you make sense of it? What is she trying to teach? How would you assign this article to a high schooler? I, like many others, had a difficult time reading this article by Brenda Dervin, titled "The Mind's Eye of the User". I found myself having to reread sentences to make sense of what she is saying. I had to take detailed notes for clarity. I also found it unfortunate that I didn't understand her point of the article until I was almost finished reading it. However, with all that being said, I did find some interesting take-aways. For example, I connected to "sense created at a specific moment in time - space by one or more humans. Information is not seen as something that exists apart from human behavioral activity" (pg. 63). This connected me to my thoughts about relationships and human interactions. I know that I connect information to my experience. I learn more from interacting with others, talking with others and/or observing others. Secondly, I also appreciated the suggestion of flipping the script. Dervin states, "...that human use of information and information systems needs to be studied from the perspective of the actor, not from the perspective of the observer" (pg. 64). If we look at teaching our lessons through the eyes of our students, we will design lessons that are relevant to them. Thusly, they are motivated to learn and will do so. Lastly, I related to the "gap" assumption. Reality can change at any given moment. A gap is created. "However, since much of human life is inherently unpredictable, much of human behavior involves creating new responses" (Dervin, pg. 67) If I were to design a lesson for high school students, using Brenda Dervin's article, I would front load the article with some of the jargon she uses. I would also explain that this is a challenging article to read, especially online. So, I would have printed copies ready for them to annotate. I would advise them to have out their phone for google definitions, a highlighter and a pencil for annotating their article. I would have them read the article over a given amount of days. Then I would plan to have them peer review and discuss what they read. I would form groups and jigsaw the Exemplars. Each group would do a mini presentation as their overall project.
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What are you passionate about in your teaching practice?
I am passionate about community and relationship building in my teaching practices. I am a firm belief that we are motivated by pleasing others. If we, teachers, create strong relationships with our students, we will find many successes in our teaching practices. First, you get to know your kids well. You learn about their needs, desires, learning obstacles, and ways they learn. You develop a sense of belonging for them in the classroom. All of this creates a positive learning environment that is tailored for the student. Secondly, once you have created this positive learning environment and developed a strong sense of belonging, kids are more motivated to learn because they want to please you. If you can get them motivated, you can get them to listen and learn. I also just love getting to know my students. We are a family for a year, and we have touched each other's lives for a lifetime. Take a moment to try and make sense of how you might use what you've explored in your next round of designing action research for your driving question.
This week I continued reading chapters 4, 5 and 6 from Clark's "Development Technical Training". In addition, I read the SITE model. I found both of these texts informational and applicable to my driving question. I am constantly modifying and reevaluating my driving questions because they are general and need to be fine tuned. My driving questions are "Why are we (or students) so compelled to be online? What makes us so addicted to it that most people check their phone before going to the bathroom in the morning? Also, why do men and women desire different types of media?" I have a friend who has an 11 year old son. He is addicted to gaming. I often think of Landon while reading our texts because he and my daughter, Brooklynn, are the same age and are very different. Brooklynn is social, active and an outdoorsy girl. Landon has fallen trap to the online gaming world. It has taken over his life, especially his "in person" life. Right now, in this current situation with the COVID pandemic, I can see the social benefits of online gaming, but he has always been a gamer. Why? I believe I have found some answers within the SITE Model. The Sociocultural Subcontext states, "The people in your life influence the social and cultural context of the learner" (page 5). Would this imply that gaming online is fulfilling his social needs? Does the competition element of the games motivate him? I know the gaming world has done their homework and their research. Have they designed a system to fulfill our "needs" and meet our "goals"? And if so, does this mean that Landon values his online relationships, as he does his in person relationships? I will further investigate my questions by interviewing Landon and others like him. If kids need to belong, I want to know if the online activities connect his goals and drive his motivation? I truly believe that social media, the internet, gaming and all other online platforms have been so well designed to meet our individual needs. They are tailored for us. According to the SITE Model, the learner or "user" is in the middle of the model. The designers know the learners and what empowers them to design a program specific to their needs, which in turn accomplishes their goals. I did, however, find it interesting that Clark reported "Static visuals are more successful than animation visuals" (Ch. 6, pg. 10). She continues to say, "animations present so much information rapidly that learners experience mental overload" (ch. 6, pg. 10). I always assumed that part of the online attraction was the overstimulation of the lights, movements and audio components. Kids seem to learn and remember online strategies. After being forced to be online with Distant Learning, I have found many programs and applications useful for our learners. In fact, even after we return to the classroom, I plan to use several of these applications in the classroom. Programs like EdPuzzle, Google programs, and Quill have benefitted our students and their motivation to learn. They have been designed to motivate the learner and in return the learner invests his/her time to learning. I have started small and simple, and I am monitoring my students' performance productivity. I will continue to slowly add programs to their Google Classroom, but I hope we will be back in person soon. I truly value and miss the in person, interpersonal relationships. This is technically my first post. I entered the program later than most others so I have been quite busy trying to catch up. I have spent the past week and a half reading chapters from Baggio's, "The Visual Connection", Dervin's, "The Mind's Eye of the User, Clark's, "Developing Technical Training", and other materials relevant to our class. While I was in the process of finding a "note-taking" strategy that works for me, I tried mindmeister.com. I thought the program would be user friendly and similar to a mind-map that I use for brainstorming ideas with my 3rd grade students. Unfortunately, I did not find it user friendly, nor visually friendly for me. Instead, I started over. I went back to my comfort zone of using a 3 column note-taking strategy that I taught my former AVID students. I was able to create the doc in Google Docs, color code it, use bullets and numerical organizing strategies, and boldface the main ideas and concepts. Visually and spatially, this strategy works better for me.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EciqXBFpRGVVmTbT7mC2j9XdeklXnlxsy6zr8hscFRI/edit In the following paragraphs I am going to summarize my thoughts of each of the three texts we read this week. Baggio: The Visual Connection I really enjoyed reading the first few chapters from this book. I found it easy to read and engaging because I have a lot of interest in Psychology (my bachelor's degree), especially when it comes to behaviors. As a teacher, I have a lot of interest in Constructivism. Constructivism is where the "learner creates knowledge by integrating prior knowledge with current content" (pg. 4). Baggio goes on to explain NAPs (Neuro-Associative Pathways) as the "hooks" to "what is familiar to us. They are the roads in the brain that have been traveled before, making it easier to go down them again" (pg. 40). This really connects with me because I can see the connections to prior knowledge happening each day in several of my students as they learn new material. For other students, it is like they are seeing something new. They are surprised and have a difficult time understanding the new material. Baggio states, "It is difficult to learn a new thing if there is no prior knowledge with which to associate it" (pg. 42). He goes on to say that Constructivism is a newer theory. The internet is changing the lives and roles of teachers. Instead of being an expert at the subject material, the teacher has now become the "facilitator" of an "environment that supports constructions of knowledge" (pg. 7). He continues on to discuss visuals. This touched home with me because I am a visual learner. In fact, I always struggled with Math because I could not "see" it. I did not understand the logic behind "there is one way or the highway" that my teachers use to say. Keeping my personal struggles in mind, I have adapted my lessons to create a visual mindset for my mathematicians. I like solving equations in multiple ways to reach all the different ways their minds can "see" the problem. Visuals are influenced by feelings and help us make connections. Visuals also impact your working memory. This allows for transference and recall to happen. If you cannot recall information, then it was never put into your memory to begin with. I believe the visuals in math helped me understand each problem (especially word problems) and I have designed my lessons with visuals to do just that with my students...help them visualize the math so it can become prior knowledge for future grade levels. Trilogy of the Mind According to Baggio, there are three domains of thinking : Affective (how you feel - feelings, personality, ego, beauty, emotions, esthetics, caring, mood, and motivation), Conative (how you naturally do what you do - acting, performing, talents, willing, goodness, ethics, doing and behaving), and Cognitive (how you think - knowing, skills, thought, thinking, reason, solve problems, imagine and conscious). While keeping all three domains in focus, I am honing in on the affective domain. I believe our feelings weigh more than the other two domains. All of our experiences that become memories have feelings attached to them. I believe our feelings create the memory. Therefore, my negative feelings towards math impaired me until I was an adult. Finally, when I had to teach an 8th grade algebra class, I understood math. I can remember the experience of being nervous (I was subbing at the time). The weekend before I started the job, I had to confine myself into my office so I could teach myself by using the teacher's manual. That following Monday I was prepared to teach 8th graders! Since this positive experience, I have loved math ever since. I had a new understanding of math and I use visuals to help me understand. Clark: Developing Technical Training Ruth Clark discusses utilizing training to not cause waste. She simplifies it to say that ineffective training equals loss of productivity. Due to the fact that I am not a business major, nor do I live and work in the business place, I internalized these chapters we read to be relevant to my students as the "trainees" and I am the "trainer". I can see the cycle of the 4 major ingredients: 1. the information of the training 2. the performance outcomes 3. the instructional methods and 4. instructional media, in my classroom based around curriculum. We introduce a lesson and provide all of the information. We state their performance outcomes - what they will learn and know. We use different instructional methods, depending on the subject material and we sometimes use instructional media to deliver the material (more often now that we are doing Distant Learning). Lastly, we assess their knowledge. I appreciate what she is saying about waste. It is true that you cannot reach all learners the same way. As Baggio mentions in his chapters, we all have different perceptions and prior knowledge. Therefore, some students will need to review and/or be retaught the lesson. However, that is considered waste in the eyes of Clark. So how do we reach all students, all of the time? Perhaps the answer is in our classroom management - small groups or centers so you can direct teaching to be more specific to the needs of the individuals, instead of the needs of the whole. Clark discusses 4 phases of a typical Instructional Systems Designs: 1. Analysis and Design (includes Needs Assessment, Task Analysis, Learning Objectives and Assessment) 2. Development (includes Development and Tryout/Revision) 3. Evaluation and 4. Implementation. To better prepare your technical lessons, one should include the following 4 sections: 1. an introduction 2. supporting information 3. key lesson task and 4. summary. Lastly, Clark goes on to mention the use of bullet points and charts to make the design more user friendly. I couldn't agree with this organization style more because as I mentioned in my introduction paragraph, I had a difficult time using Mindmeister.com and fell back on my old "three column" note-taking strategies. I prefer to organize my notes in chunks of information. I appreciate using bold faced heading and labels. I use spacing between chapters or headings to help keep my eyes aligned to the information. Dervin: The Mind's Eye of the User I have to be honest and state that I had more difficulties reading this text. I did not find it easy to read. In fact, like many of my colleagues, I had to reread sentences and paragraphs to make sense of it. Therefor, I find it interesting that this article is about sense-making. Dervin says, "Sense-making is a set of meta-theoretical assumptions and prepositions about the nature of information, the nature of human use of information and the nature of human communication" (pg. 61). It is individualistic. All three pieces of literature discuss how learning is individual based on needs, prior knowledge, behaviors, visuals and gaps. Dervin goes on to discuss discontinuity as the break in physical continuity or sequence in time. Reality can change and is "potentially discontinuous from time to time and space to space" (pg. 63). I believe these create the gaps in the education that I see within some of my students. If gaps are created then there is no prior knowledge to pull from when someone is learning something new. Baggio would say there are no past "roads" of which the knowledge traveled to memory. I think it is important that Dervin included to flip the script of sense-making. If the teacher can flip the script and teach from the "actors" perspective and not the "observers" perspective then we may be able to reach more students intellectually. Through Dervin's interviewing process (1. Information Needs, 2. Satisfactions, and 3. Images) , we can gain insightful information as to how and why student's learn they way they do. Again, this is an individual process. We all have different experiences and perceptions which change the way we learn and what we already have in our memory. Even though this text was difficult for me to read and process, I found the exemplars helpful. I really appreciated the Timeline of the pregnant teen. It visually formatted the text so I could understand the process. As a learner, I appreciate "steps". They are direct and to the point. |
AuthorMy name is Kimberlee Nelson. I am a mother of two and a 3rd grade teacher at Irene M. Snow Elementary School, in Napa. Archives
December 2020
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