Reflections & Learning in ETEC565A

The more I ponder what my Moodle production will contain, the more I am determined to see how I can make it applicable to the adult learner – specifically the teachers (and why not administrators too?) in our system.  We need to reformulate how we do PD for our teachers, as well all know that the “sit and git” model doesn’t work with adults any more than it works with our students.  Without a meaningful way of incorporating the learning into an authentic experience, and following up with sharing how it’s all working with others, we are spending a lot of money what I believe is little impact.

I am hoping I can create a structure for teachers to participate in a self-paced, independent learning environment but at the same time incorporate some accountability and requirement for sharing the learning with others…Am I asking too much?

I found an interesting resource, on Google of course, about Adult Learning Theory (who knew it would be different from our students?)  The author of the site proposes that there are 4 stages of Adult Learning:

1. Unconscious Incompetence (you don’t know that you don’t know something), to

2. Conscious Incompetence (you are now aware that you are incompetent at something), to

3. Conscious Competence (you develop a skill in that area but have to think about it),to the finalstage

4.Unconscious Competence (you are good at it and it now comes naturally).

Now I would be the last person to suggest incompetence in our teachers (here comes the union grievance if I did!).  They really are all well-trained, hard working, well-intentioned people that I am proud to work with…but we all have new things to learn and we all need to do some self-reflection as to where we are.  So often I see surveys from teachers who insist they do this or that strategy in their classrooms, but when I visit their rooms I can see that they don’t always grasp the concept – hence, they might not know what they don’t know…I hesitate to call that incompetence, but perhaps I could call it ” learning-in-progress”.

So my Moodle may be something I can use to provide a source of learning – for now, on a single topic for the purpose of this assignment, but then moving forward to a broader framework for adult learning..moving us all to the final stage of ‘unconscious competence” ( another nasty term!)

This rambling is a result of my thoughts on the upcoming proposal that I need to formulate…the ruminations continue.

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