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.
5 Comments
Jamie Lutz
10/4/2020 08:19:10 pm
I liked your three-column note-talking format as a way to compare these three different readings. As I was trying to figure out how I wanted to organize my thoughts, I looked at your document & it really helped me to figure out how I wanted to complete that part of the ICARE. I used a variation on your 3-column note taking in my own comparison document. Thank you for the idea & getting me jump-started on that assignment.
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Betsy Whitt
10/6/2020 05:57:24 pm
Hi Kimberlee- It's so great to have you in our class. I think I actually got more our of reading your paragraph notes than reading the typical notes style. I especailly apprecaited your focus on prior knowledge in the Baggio notes. The sentence about "prior knowledge being like a road our brain wants to travel again" is such a good visual and I think I missed it when I read it the first time. You did a nice job of connecting back to prior knowledge again with the Clark ideas. Excellent! Betsy Whitt
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Amy Bardwell
10/6/2020 07:09:05 pm
I so agree with all of your thoughts! And, starting a few weeks into this program; I can assure your thoughts are so in lined with what we have been discussing. I love your take away from the reading; we all have different perceptions and prior knowledge. Especially for AVID students! I personally never taught AVID students, but my Mom was one of the first teachers in middle school to help teach the program. She would always would discuss how our idea is totally different than another learner accessing the same learning platform. I am so happy you are part of our Cohort! Yeah!
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Abie
10/6/2020 08:38:52 pm
Spot on with your assessment of Dervin, and I really like how in depth you go with your notes and what they made you think. Its quite different from everyone else's style! Also you're assessment of Baggio's work has made me excited to receive it in a couple of days!
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Janine Burt
10/7/2020 03:11:25 pm
HI Kimberlee, I'm glad you joined our group. I look forward to learning with you! I appreciated your comments about the Dervin article. That first reading was a lot to tackle. For me, it confirmed that I have a definite need to understand the "why" behind the research. I had a difficult time holding back my "so what?" natural response. Or my tendency to feel that a researcher is doing a lot of stating the obvious. But I agree when the exemplars were shared, it was easier to see how to apply what we were reading and how it connected to the bigger picture of this course.
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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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