I especially enjoyed reading Lang’s chapters about students as both learners and people this week. At the learner’s chapter, he brings up a term: mental models, which is similar to the encode sub-process during the information-processing model. The learning process shares some commonalities with the information-processing model, where learners will experience both assimilation and accommodation. Lang says students are capable of “cramming the new information into their common-sense” (Lang, 2009, p. 159).
According to Mezirow, there are two types of learning: transformative learning and assimilative learning. The former one emphasizes on blending the new information into the existed one and the latter one refers to “tearing down the current structures or models” and to rebuild a new system (Lang, 2009, p. 161). For me, I am like the transformative learners. I like to connect the new knowledge with the old knowledge I have learned. This will help me better absorb the new knowledge. The question at here is how does the instructor change his teaching models to fit with the student’s learning models? How does the instructor learn about his students with different learning models?
Perry’s theory identified that there are three stages involved with intellectual development in college, which are: dualism, relativism, and commitment. Dualism is the stage where students prefer absolute knowledge without challenging instructors. Relativism is the stage where students start to question the professors and finally try to please the professors. Commitment is the last stage where students hold a religious faith. I find these three stages quite interesting. I am not sure if I have moved into the final stage when I was an undergraduate, but I couldn’t help to agree with Perry’s opinion that I was trying my best to meet with the professor’s requirement to earn a good grade almost every semester. Is this kind of sad to see that all the students are trying to “please” the professors to earn high grades? How to make sure that students will not only meet the requirements but also maintain their own personality and their own strength? Lang suggests the instructors to be as compassionate and effective, but how to?
While reading the chapter of students as people, I was also reflecting on my own short teaching experiences. I feel that Lang’s suggestion for the instructors is to be both hard and soft. He asks the new teachers to not only have empathy to the students but also to maintain a distance from them. I somehow feel bad when giving a zero credit to a student who did not show up on the speech day. I perceive her as a good student because she earned the highest score on the first exam and she did well on the other assignments. I wanted to give her at least an outline score to her speech so that her total points won’t fall behind to the others; however, the requirements on the syllabus made me to be the bad person to take all her credits away. I also comforted her that there were still many other assignments coming up to help fill the gap; however, I know exactly well that it is very hard for her to gain a high grade even if she does other assignments well. Does this sound hypocritical? How do you reduce the bad feelings like this?
Davis talked a lot about how to respond to a changing student body at part II of the book. I really like her suggestion of learning some certain terminologies. We could discuss about some common terminologies we use at class. Davis also suggested about don’t try to “protect” any group of students. In our COMM110 class, I know that there are some rules that are benefited to the international students, such as, allow using electronic translators during a test; allow having extra five minutes to finish the test; and so on. Will these rules considered to be as “protections”?
Davis listed a lot of strategies to help students learn at chapter 29. She suggested of letting students practice the metacognitive skills, to monitor their own understanding. She also introduced several learning models, among which, VARK model and thinking style model appeal to me the most. I would like to see how we are going to implement the VARK model on Thursday’s class. Davis has also mentioned about the intrinsic rewards of learning, which we discussed in our second class. Maybe it’s good time to review the extrinsic rewards and the intrinsic rewards.
No comments:
Post a Comment