Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Reflection #3

It’s that time again. The time when I make like a mirror, and… you see where this pun is going.

Part I. Here are some of the good things I learned this week: I learned about auditory, visual, and kinesthetic learning. I learned about a plethora of teaching methods, notably schema, largely because it’s one of those strange words that when you say it a few times, it doesn’t sound like a real word anymore. And Geoff said schema a lot that day. I learned a few interesting things about Geoff’s teaching past, including the parts about smooth Greg and the terrible restrooms with no stall dividers. I also learned two good acronyms: PEEP (Providing, Enculturating, Ensuring, Practicing), and KCAASE (Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation).

Part II. The part where I will share some more candid feelings about what we learned and discussed, beginning with the learning type inventory. I did this one learning type inventory that I just picked off Google, and it asked me the worst questions! With the help of Paul Skaggs (last semester) and another learning type inventory (this morning), I was feeling pretty confident in my status as a visual learner. Then the type quiz was asking me questions like “would you rather go to a concert, a movie, or an amusement park with your friends?” and I’m sitting there thinking, “I like concerts better than movies. That doesn’t make me an auditory listener. I don’t go to movies or concerts to LEARN. I GO FOR ENTERTAINMENT.” Needless to say, I was unhappy with the results. I don’t consider myself a primarily auditory learner. I don’t know how these tests are made, but there needs to be a separation between learning and recreation.

                Here is something I’d like to say about the moral dimension of teaching. I know that I was rather forward with my disagreement on teaching transmitting moral values. Let the record show that I certainly think teachers should teach morals. I don’t want anybody to think that I think otherwise. I do believe however that morals can be removed from education. Should they? Absolutely not. But it can happen.

                Also, here is something else, and this leads to my action part. The definition we were given in class of pedagogy is “the art and science of teaching”. Now there’s something to think about for a long time. How is teaching an art? How is it a science? In what areas do those two overlap? That’s what I’m going to think about going forward. (Of course, in addition to how I can become a better teacher by using a mixed-method approach to teaching and by understanding the different types of learning in order to ensure that each student is able to receive the material and travel up the KCAASE scale all the way to “evaluation”. But that’s a lifelong development that all educators should strive to undertake throughout their careers.)


                As I sit in my classes, it will be interesting – even fun, perhaps – to see what my professors do to make teaching an art, and what they do that qualifies it as a science. Every teacher is different of course, so the evaluation of each one will be different but as a whole I imagine that my education is fairly homogenous experience – that is, between all my classes and professors, I receive a relatively equal amount of all the different teaching styles. As far as other things to say, I have none. [end of reflection]

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