The learner in me

Dear all,

So many of our thoughts and practical solutions about teaching has revolved around a very important question What ‘kind’ of learners are our students? To the issue of learning styles the need to adapt our teaching styles has been added. And finally, the question: What kind of learners are the teachers themselves? Mahamud Hasan quotes Terry O'Connor in ‘Using learning styles to adapt technology for higher education’ who commented that people rely on personally constructed filters to orient their relationships towards the world. As a result, we are very likely to teach the way we like to learn and expect our students to like things and methods we would like.

I myself, like Hassina, definitely learn best by reading / writing about it, that is, by visualizing and verbalizing and believe that input does not need processing but also outputting in our own way for something to be learnt. So learning by doing, whether it is ‘knowledge’ or ‘skill’ is very productive for me. I know that my students are visual/auditory types – lots of them – as they grew up watching English and listening to it. This week gave me a hint about why I do not seem to do a lot of listening tasks in class: I myself prefer texts, pictures, slides. So I will use this revelation as the basis for change and try to use more audio, whether pre-recorded or recorded in class. Also, the reflective / active learning style dichotomy offered me an answer to why I sometimes find it hard to respond to our discussions in the first half of the week – I start my reading and plan my task, watch my understanding of it grow and take shape before I write it down and post in it concrete terms. I will try out the proposed approach – take notes and summarize more often.

The fact that people are combinations of several learning styles actually helps, as chances are that by how we do something in class at least a part of a student’s individual disposition will be engaged. But awareness on the part of the teacher as well as learners certainly helps and may lead to fewer questions like: Why do we have to do it this way? Technology offers alternatives, in and out of class. One thing that George and my coursemates taught me in the discussion is that ‘technology’ in class is not only a computer. Cell phones, which I have not used so far but am eager to start using, and in close future, convertible PCs, add another dimension to fostering individual differences.

Another point of view we had to consider our students’ involvement from this week was designing assessment rubrics. Defining objectives, then dimensions, then descriptions, of course, which are then shown to students, seems a logical order of events. It is amazing that such an approach is totally ignored in so many educational systems, as Dilip and Hassina’s blogs seem to suggest. What the teacher expects students to do is not the teacher’s exclusive right to know. Also, by creating rubric we as teachers get an idea of what we expect from students. I have developed my rubric for assessing participation on a social network and along with it, for their text/video blog. I am afraid the descriptions are still too long, but am sure that presenting them to the students will be just as useful as task instructions they will get. Best of all, I saw how much I learnt from looking at my peers’ rubrics – I constructed my own rubric by using that knowledge just as much as the original tutorial.

By doing the second stage of my mini-project in class this week, I will try to build on what we started doing last week and expand the existing lane, as well as introduce another one. I think that on the social network there should be a combination of obligatory and optional contributions; activities that will make students ‘go back and forth’ and not just be involved in their own present task; it hope the communication will be even better and have tried very hard to post feedback to their posts. Most importantly, I want to use this network with a clear goal in my mind, but also by being attentive to the way they respond to it and create part of activities based on that. Finally, a teacher has to balance their own expectations against the students’ capabilities and willingness – and styles. (I wonder how making mini-videos and blogs will fit in this picture. Presentation of the task will be very important!)

What the teacher and the learner in me learnt this week from everyone on the course – our moderators, my coursemates, my colleagues at work (who I relied on a lot too this week) and my students (through the network) was very powerful. I can not wait to see how it will materialize this week. Then again, I guess that’s how all of us feel!

Best regards,

Andreja