Reflection 2

This course started off with a discussion on the major, enduring debate of nature versus nurture—of which I would argue has been the impetus behind further development in the study of child and adolescent development and cognitive processes relevant to how students learn. Class discussion about this common debate highlights to all of us who are preparing to be effective educators the importance of believing that the classroom is a large source of nurture in children’s lives. As a teacher, the view that intelligence is plastic—having the potential to decrease and increase due to stimuli—is a compassionate one that makes for a teacher willing and capable of stimulating student potential. Moreover, it is with this optimistic mindset that teachers can sincerely acquire teaching strategies that would drive academic success.

Teaching students so they successfully learn requires an understanding of how their minds work and how it develops through different stages of childhood. That we then studied biological development in children and development of their cognitive skills was an appropriate segue into exploring effective teaching skills. While I had prior understanding that the younger a child, the less items they can retain in their short-term memory span at any given time, reading the Pressley and McCormick (2007) discussion on the short-term memory limitations which are strongly constrained by biological development really drove home the point that as a teacher I must always be conscious of creating lessons that challenge kids but not overwhelm them to the point of becoming discouraged. Since younger children have slower information-processing speeds and use more of their short-term capacity demand on information-processing than adults, the importance of aiding and facilitating their learning with strategies that reduce the capacity demand of learning material goes a long way in keeping them interested in learning (Pressley and McCormick, p. 81).

Further exploration of helpful strategies teachers can use to specifically work around this limitation in younger children highlights three broadly applicable teaching methods for teaching a fact-heavy subject such as biology. Considering them as a three-point strategy rather than several a la carte techniques, the plan of assessing the capacity demand of a learning goal, dividing up a complex of concepts into simpler parts to conquer and coaching students toward completion by providing a supportive learning environment and learning aids (e.g., worksheets, writing prompts, mnemonic devices, etc.) reduces the short-term memory capacity demands of students and encourages further learning. Since learning of biology naturally progresses from details that explain the broader concept, I would routinely use at the beginning of class a major learning aid called an advance organizer in the form of a PowerPoint presentation in order to give the students 1) a conceptual preview of what they would be learning about in that day’s lesson and 2) an organizer for which students can "label, store, and package ideas" for a broader understanding (Borich, p. 298). The goals of this advance organizer guide students toward conceptualization, connections-building, of many biological concepts and help them further build their semantic-network for biological knowledge.  

This guided discovery approach is one of three ways of teaching Pressley and McCormick (2007) describe in the lengthy discussion we have been continuing on the mode of teaching called Constructivism—which is composed of three different degrees to which teachers allow for student-led discovery, or learning, in education. The direct explanation approach, the discovery approach, and the guided discovery approach to constructivist teaching are respectively rooted in the exogenous-constructivist, endogenous-constructivist, and dialectical constructivist approaches to teaching. The latter three correspondingly derive their philosophy from even earlier forms of Constructivism teaching approaches named cultural transmission constructivism, romantic constructivism, and progressivism (constructivism).

Constructivism was entirely new knowledge for me when I approached it in the text. I enjoyed analyzing the different types and considering their applicability to a teaching style I have been trying to develop (theoretically, at least). Ultimately, I find the third approach of guided discovery—or dialectical constructivism or progressivism—the most appealing because students realizing conceptual relationships mostly by their own effort end up having the most durable understanding and that is every teacher’s greatest wish. Moreover, like Nathanael from class suggests, letting students construct their own semantic-network of ideas facilitates deeper understanding and prodding them along when they are extremely lost will ensure that there will be time left to explore everything that needs to be explored. Given my teaching style preference, I would use many collaborative learning activities such as competitive question-and-answer team-based games, the guided discovery learning tool of a science lab, and online interactive learning modules to encourage distributed learning (i.e., distributed cognition) among my students.

References

Borich, G.D. (2014). Effective Teaching Methods: research-based practice (8^th ed.). New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.

Pressley, M., & McCormick, C. B. (2007). Child and Adolescent Development for Educators. New York, NY: Guilford Press.