Charu's Reading Notes #7

I mostly enjoyed this week’s Davis discussion on diverse students. For the class discussion, I would like class to discuss on diverse students, models of intellectual and ethical development and the mental models.

In today’s world, I think diversity is a very big issue, as many people from around the world are coming together in one or the other way. Davis mentions about the diversity in classes at a great extent and highlights some of the very important things for the instructor to be aware of in order to avoid any bias or racism. She suggested some points as in what an instructor can do to prevent certain errors or to decrease the discomfort levels in the various students (p.62-63). Some of them like assigning them group work would help them to open up and reduce the nervousness in them, or giving students personal attention whenever there is an opportunity, which I think would also motivate student to discuss the problems and difficulties they might be facing. One more suggestion that I really like as a diverse student is that handing out “cafeteria menu” of assignments, in which students choose which assignment they want to do from a given list of assignments whether it is a difficult one or the easier one and also the date on when they want to submit the assignments (p.91). This I believe might boost the energy level of the students, but it would increase the workload of the teacher or the instructor a lot more than usual, different assignments at different time. As being an instructor for the first time, I had difficulties dividing time between my own schoolwork and the classes that I teach. If possible, I would like to hear other people comments/experiences on the concept of handling out “cafeteria menu.”

Another topic that seemed interesting to me was Lang’s discussion on Perry’s models of intellectual and ethical development (p. 165-170). Perry’s three stages mentioned in the text were: dualism, relativism, and commitment.  The first stage dualism is where “students believes in absolute truth, which exists somewhere out in the world, and which their professors have somehow gained access to (Lang, p.166). At the relativism stage, students realize the value of learning procedures and criteria for judging some viewpoints as better or worse. I would like to listen to other people comments/experiences on these intellectual stages. Does anyone in the class, have primarily focused on looking at the students transition from one stage to another? And how to help student transition from one stage to another?

I also like Lang discussion about mental models (p.156). According to Piaget, two primary parts of the learning process are: assimilation and accommodation. Assimilation focuses “taking on new information and slot[ing] it into pre-existing mental framework whereas accommodation is where “the child encounters new information that requires her to take changes to the current mental models (Lang, p.157). One of my teaching goals was to incorporate different learning styles of students in the class. My question to the class is in regard to these mental models, how do we incorporate this in our lesson plan. How much should we emphasize on identifying these learning models?