Theory to Practice Week 2: Learning Theories

Today was a more comfortable environment as GNA made her teaching style and expectations for us as learners and active participants clear last week. Introductions were re-made and personal anecdotes shared in an effort to get to know our colleagues better. This is important as we will be collaborating throughout our time together at UCONN and will work better together as we know each other better and know where people come from and what they can bring to the table.

An agenda was written on the board so to make our class time organization clear, but was not managed to the minute so anyone felt slighted for not being able to contribute to class discussion. All thoughts were taken into consideration, but when no thoughts were offered, GNA "cold called" on students to keep the discussion going and to avoid any one person becoming stagnant.

We watched videos that displayed different teaching style and then think-pair-share'ed about the videos and what they reflected on how students learn and how competency is determined for that particular classroom. This allowed for us to personally identify our own thoughts, then discuss with a partner to determine the bigger ideas, and then share with the group to see the diversity of thought and recognize the overall themes. As we teach students to think critically, it is useful to take specific ideas and observations and transform them into the "bigger picture" to better understand how all learned things are interconnected and related. For instance, we did the think-pair-share process for two videos and then once the bigger picture was established, we could compare the two videos in a more cohesive way. They were different on so many levels, but once we get out of the "ingredients" zone and into the entire result, the videos become more comparable and a basis for class discussion and dissection.

We remade our concept map in order to compare our conceptualization of learning last week and this week. Understood that our time constraints do not allow for this, I felt this would have had more impact if there was more time in between doing the maps. We remembered a lot that we did the previous week and even thought the organization of the map changed slightly, we only delved slightly deeper into the waters of learning. There may have been more of a clear difference if there was more time in between creating the two maps.

We talked about how we develop as humans over time and what the types of development are using a visual that most people are familiar with: a carnival game. Using a familiar schemata enabled the students to conceptualize the terms more efficiently.

The culture of the class did seem to improve as we knew more of what is expected of us as colleagues from GNA. Less interruptions and side conversations helped keep the class on track. Maintaining a consistent classroom "management" allowed for maximum time usage.

Allowing time at the end for work on our blogs independently lets us reflect on the day and what we have learned and what we will "take home."

Statement: If the teacher makes expectations clear and models moral behavior, then the class will feel more comfortable and become students of a higher moral character over time because they will want to meet those expectations and will have learned morals through observation, repetition/procedure, and moral appraisal.