Week 5: An Instructor's Role
As a former K-12 educator and a mother of children in middle school currently, the bill currently under consideration by the Indiana Senate committee floats to the top in many conversations about education in general. This bill not only insults the extensive and continuing education of educators in public schools, but it also minimizes their impact on young learners.
Skinner's chapter, "The Science of Learning and the Art of Teaching" puts this into high focus, discussing reinforcement of correct behaviors are necessary for longevity of the learning to stick. Early in education, learners would perform to avoid a negative consequence. Today, it would be difficult to find an elementary classroom without some form of posive reinforcement present. It also discusses how devices can replace the role of a teacher in some circumstances with instant positive feedback (and allowing progression to another problem, however as Mayer discusses in his article, "Should there be 3 strikes rule," pure discovery learning is less complete and leads to lower achievement than guided learning, even hands on learning and discovery, does.
Over the past 50+ years, education and learning theories have been studied, yet the idea of learners discovering learning on a guided path (or constructing learning based on their own experiences and previous knowledge) continues to stand out as a preferred method of learning. The learning happens when the learner makes sense of the material in their own lens and can transfer the knowledge to other problems.
Perhaps some of the reasoning behind the new education bill is based on narrow information about a particular learning style and as a result of the idea that one "new" theory completely superceding the previous. Forshay discusses this in "Is Behavorism Dead?" to which the answer is a resounding NO. Behaviorism is a different way of looking at learning, and isn't too far off in practice than Constructivism in the "what" but veers off from constructivism in the "why." As an educator, I used what worked for my students - which is what would be lost with the new bill - the flexibility to meet students where they are. While many of my teaching methods fell under the Constructivist umbrella (primarily because that is how I prefer to learn - hands on, exploration, active learning), there are some topics that require some direct teaching methods, at least as an introduction. Perhaps we can offer the Senate committee some required reading to explore different learning theories...
Kate,
ReplyDeleteI am really sorry for the late feedback. I missed your post this week.
This week's topic caught my attention a lot. The instructor or teacher's role is one of the important topics when discussing the new education. Some people state that the advancement of technologies will result in the disappearance of teachers in a classroom. It looks like the advent of AI will make this possible, but I still believe that teachers will remain in the classroom in the future. Of course, the role will be different from the current teacher. Teachers can be coach to guide students to study and at the same time learning partners for students.
I agree with you that some topics that require some direct instruction, at least as an introduction. I am more inclined to constructivism than other learning theories because I think learning is the process to construct knowledge by interacting with environment around the learners. You also preferred to create curriculum based on constructivism.
As an educators, what is the most challenging when designing curriculum based on constructivism?
Thank you for sharing your posts.
Best,
Sunmi
Hi, Katie,
ReplyDeleteThank you for underscoring that there is room for many theories/approaches/etc. to coexist in the classroom. I especially appreciated your point that constructivism and behaviorism differ in the "why" but share the "what." It makes me think of our upcoming assignment wherein we can sort terms into a Venn diagram; I suspect we will have many points of overlap on many terms!
I'm sure you really need more reading to do (ha), but someone shared a NY Times article with me recently that was written about a podcast on gamification. The podcast is here if you're interested: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/a-philosophy-of-games-that-is-really-a-philosophy-of-life/id1548604447?i=1000552204773. The author C. Thi Nguyen points out that "[o]ur desires, motivations and behaviors are constantly being shaped and reshaped by incentives and systems that we aren’t even aware of" in a society structured around social media, and I think there are implications for education here too. As we hear more and more buzz around gamification of coursework, I wonder how changing the "why" in terms of our motivations will affect the overall quality of the learning that takes place. I'm straying off point a bit, but I see this as being relative to the discussion on reinforcement and the role of the instructor in the learning process. As usual, there's much to consider with no one right answer or approach.
Take care,
Karri