A Cycle of Teaching and Learning

This Week's Readings:

How People Learn - Ch. 6

Interesting Points:

• learner centered instruction includes the sensitivity to the cultural practices of students and the effect of those practices on classroom learning - pg. 135
• "Overall, learner-centered environments include teachers who are aware that learners construct their own meanings, beginning with the beliefs, understandings, and cultural practices they bring to the classroom." -pg. 136
• give students the ability to think positively about making sense of their learning, and ask questions when confused -pg.137
• assessment must focus on understanding, not memory -pg. 140
• "Feedback is most valuable when students have the opportunity to use it and revise their thinking as they are working on a unit or project" -pg. 141
• Community centered environments: willingness to participate, willingness to make mistakes, grading practices, and attention from the teacher are all things that vary based on the student's cultural background -pg. 145-146
• learning environments should connect with the broader community including homes, community centers, after-school activities, and business -pg. 147

Formative Assessment and the Design of Instructional Systems - Sadler, 1989

Interesting Points:

• "The indispensable conditions for improvement are that the student comes to hold a concept of quality roughly similar to that held by the teacher, is able to monitor continuously the quality of what is being produced during the act of production itself, and has a repertoire of alternative moves or strategies  from which to draw at any given point." -pg. 121
• feedback and self-monitoring = formative assessment -pg. 122
• teachers can find it hard to make a judgment of quality without comparing and basing it on other students' work -pg. 126
• teachers' conceptions of quality can remain static until changed by "fresh evaluative activity" -pg. 127
• lots of exemplars (key word = lots) are important for students to distinguish high vs. low quality -pg. 128
• "Something ordinary, therefore, is not "remark"-able.  Something out of the ordinary invites attention." This something out of the ordinary could mean a positive or negative comment. -pg. 133
• the learner has to be able to interpret the teacher's feedback -pg.135
• the teacher should be up-to-date on current expertise in order to pass knowledge on to the student -pg. 138
• students can collaborate with peers in learning and assessing each other's work -pg. 140

Thoughts: 

Learning is communal in that students should not only learn from their teachers and peers, but they should also be able to apply and gain knowledge across their entire community, including school and home, and other places they frequent.  Students come from a variety of diverse backgrounds, and so they take previous experiences into the learning environment.  Since students are encouraged to learn from their peers, their unique cultural and educational backgrounds will be shared as well.  Sadler mentions in his article that a teacher's evaluation skills remain static unless confronted with "fresh evaluative activity."  Perhaps with a wider variety of students coming from different cultural, or even simply different family traditions, or learning styles, a teacher can keep his or her "evaluative activity" fresh.  If students learn with understanding, rather than memory, it will be best if the students are allowed to learn drawing from each of their unique perspectives and backgrounds.  When the students incorporate their previous knowledge to their teacher's standards of quality, the students will benefit by learning these standards of quality, and so will achieve something out of the ordinary.  And whether this something out of the ordinary is positive or negative, the students will regardless be able to learn something new through feedback from the teacher and peers.  This feedback will hopefully encourage students to ask questions when confused, and not be afraid to look foolish - for their cultural and educational backgrounds are certainly not "wrong" or "foolish."  In addition, their teacher will be continuously challenged by new evaluative skills needed to address the out-of-the-ordinary.  

To bring this full circle back to Monday's lecture, it strikes me that the definitions and methods of teaching information literacy skills are constantly evolving.  I would like to propose that perhaps this is due to the constant need of librarian professionals to keep up with students' constantly fluctuating educational and cultural backgrounds.  Each student has his or her own unique learning style; teachers must also constantly fluctuate and evolve their teaching methods and evaluation of students' work and progress in learning.  It seems to me that effective teaching and learning is a collaboration between teachers, students, and peers, and so must constantly evolve to keep up with diverse cultural and educational backgrounds, as well as the resulting new evaluative skills and perceived standards of quality.

Finally, in navigating between all this fluctuating teaching and learning, I would also argue that the multiple exposures to teaching and learning styles may better enable students' learning to be synthesized.  While learning more and more from teachers and peers through evolving standards of quality and differing backgrounds, this accumulated knowledge may better serve to open students' minds to new possibilities and experiences in learning, as well as enable students to better connect with teachers and peers as a result of previous exposure to other educational and cultural backgrounds.