Chapter 10 reading reflection

August 6, 2012 at 1:37 am | Posted in H2 | Leave a comment
Tags: EDU 6170, reflection

Chapter 10 discusses self-directed learning. This style of learning is designed to engage the students and also helps them develop their higher order skills on Bloom’s Taxonomy (p.330). Self-directed learning helps students to deconstruct a problem and then reconstruct it in a way that lets them understand the meaning of that problem. By being able to do this, students will further enhance their reasoning and critical thinking skills. Looking at this on a larger scale, self-directed learning is precisely how people solve problems in the real word. You have to ask yourself “what is this problem really asking for?” You have to be able to break things down to figure out what is relevant and what is not. This isn’t just a tool you should use in the classroom, but rather a life skill to be used all the time.

 

Borich also talks about mental modeling, which is a teaching method that will help students internalize, remember and then be able to apply the same general idea to other problems (332-333). This is usually done by doing a demonstration on a white board. The point here though is not to work through a problem just to get an answer but rather working through a problem and stopping to explain your thinking or reasoning at each step. As the teacher, you are going to break things down without using a lot of academic language. You can also repeat certain steps to emphasize their importance. Every step of the process should be shown and explain why you did what you did. This is something that a lot of math teachers already do, or should be doing. When I can understand each step and why each step needs to be done, I can start to fully understand what those types of problems are looking for. The only drawback to doing this is the time constraint. Going through the whole process takes time, and then having the students work through examples and ask questions takes more time. But I still believe this is a valuable tool for teaching new and difficult content.

 

When students have been exposed to mental modeling for good deal of time, they will start having an internal dialogue with themselves known as inner speech (p.342). In their minds, the students will begin to prompt and ask questions just like their teachers would. This helps guide the learners to remember the processes they already know and apply that knowledge to other problems. I found this part of the chapter very fascinating. As an only child, I already had a pretty active imagination. When I was doing homework and ran into a problem I couldn’t readily solve, I didn’t have anyone that could answer my questions. My parents weren’t exactly math people, so I had to stop and think about what my teacher had said during class that day. Often times I could go through the lesson in my head and something would click, and I could then finish the problem. Now I wonder if this is something all students can do, or does it work better for the math/science kids versus the English/history students? And at what age can students begin having this inner speech?