It has been a busy week of completing marks, boxing up my classroom in preparation for the move to the new wing of Kits next September, and beginning to build my Moodle from my UbD goals. There is a clarity and relief with surveying available activity with a clear sense of what understandings and performances that I am intending my students to achieve, and how that will be assessed. It’s like shopping for real estate with full pockets and a precise sense of what you are looking for. It continues to make the process of developing specific activities for this introductory unit quite enjoyable.

I am dealing with my second and third goals this week: gaining an awareness of different approaches to knowledge and learning, and developing 21st Century workplace team-based skills. I familiarized myself with the Constructivist sequencing frameworks that I learned in ETEC 530 last term and decided on the Driver and Oldham model (1986) and elements of the Predict-Observe-Explain model (White & Gunstone, 1992).

My second goal is concerned with students gaining an awareness of their own  epistemology and that expectation that it is most likely different from mine and other class members. Likewise, they need to determine the instructional strategies that have worked best for them in the past while considering new ones, like Constructivism.  I have decided on using the internal questionnaire tool in Moodle as a pre-assessment orientation opener.

There are two questionnaires. In the first, I have modified the language and edited Nott and Wellington’s (1993) epistemological survey and added some of my own questions based on Song, Hannifin and Hill’s (2006) “Reconciling Beliefs and Practices in Teaching and Learning” paper. In the second questionnaire, students focuses on personal learning preferences and what they expect of teachers. The final piece of the orientation is a TEDx Talk on Youtube: The Power of Belief – Mindset and Success. This is an excellent video where Eduardo Briceno differentiates between a fixed and growth mindset.

Students have their first opportunity to share their ideas in the forum: “The Nature of Knowledge and Learning.” Here they can clarify the concepts presented, discuss their own beliefs and learning preferences and challenge those of others. In the process, I am hoping that they will gain some awareness and sensitivity to the variety of ways that their classmates and teachers understand why we “do what we do” in school.

It is Friday, and I am about to begin work on the third goal concerning future workplace skills. I have come across some great resources on Edutopia that use the College Preparatory School in Oakland, California. My plan is to use it as a case-based example of collaborative learning. I will use a survey prediction as an orientation exercise where students rank what they think are the most desired workplace skills as determined by a national survey in the United States. I’ve also got an effective article by Oakley et al. (2003) that outlines group roles like hitchhiker and couch potato that I plan to work into the case study activity.

Next week is first goal: demonstrating how geographic thinking empowers people using ArcGIS Online. It’s going to be a busy weekend.

Nott, M. & Wellington, J. (1993). Your nature of science profile: An activity for science teachers. School Science Review. (75)270:109 – 112.

Oakley, B., Felder, R. M., Brent, R., & Elhajj, I. (2004). Turning student groups into effective teams. Journal of student centered learning, 2(1), 9-34.

Posner, G. J., Strike, K. A., Hewson, P. W., & Gertzog, W. A. (1982). Accommodation of a scientific conception: Toward a theory of conceptual change. Science education, 66(2), 211-227.