This week marks the end of my ETEC 533 journey. I went into the course hoping I would find alternatives and resources for teaching math and science to upper elementary students that would improve my practice. Technology makes a regular appearance in my class and by and large I know my students are exposed to more than most, but I also know there are probably better ways of carrying this out. Actually, there are times when I knew there had to be, especially in the areas of math and science.
Although intense and daunting at times, I have relished the activities and readings I`ve been exposed to in the last three months. This course made me think. It made me analyze, no I think scrutinize would be a better descriptor, my own practice like I never have before. There have been great resources along the way that I have collected and will share with students, but the greatest growth and learning has come from the pedagogical approaches that I have been introduced to and my investigation around how these currently fit with my practice and how they can be interwoven into my future teaching.
I came looking for resources and activities. I am leaving with a stronger sense of pedagogy and who I want to be as a teacher. It’s the latter that will affect the most change and afford more opportunities to use technology, be it new or established resources, to create more authentic and engaging learning opportunities.
From a student’s perspective, I want each of them to be able to:
- be engaged in their learning
- develop useful knowledge they can access in future contexts
- experience authenticity within a learning environment
- have opportunities to make their thinking visible and see the thinking of others as well
- socially construct knowledge and build collective understanding
- share and learn from different perspectives
- participate in generative rather than passive activities
- aggregate data and information to see the strength in collective and collaborative learning
- revise, modify, and apply feedback to continue to refine their understanding and conceptualization
As a teacher, I am more aware of how I can make all of the above happen and how to use technology to enhance the learning experience, demonstrate phenomena that students do not have access to, and carve new paths for understanding concepts individually and collectively. Through this course I have learned the value of:
- abductive reasoning
- mental models
- information visualization
- embracing coupling: informatic participation through technology overlapping in the same space normal as traditional classroom participation
- pedagogically developed social practices to enrich virtual and ‘real’ learning communities
- networked communities and networked learning
- inquiry-based learning through the T-GEM and Learning for Use frameworks and how this fits into my practice
- How People Learn and how the principles of a knowledge, learner, assessment, and community-centered classroom can become cornerstones in the development and sustainability of a culture of learning in my classroom.
Creating the learning environment I want for my students starts with the pedagogical foundation I choose to lay. Pedagogy is never too far from most teachers’ thoughts. But until now, I didn’t fully realize I wasn’t tapping into my own theotetical base as much as I needed to. It’s one thing to understand and contemplate pedagogy in general. It’s another to understand and contemplate it as it applies to your personal practice. This requires a depth of reflection and analysis that prompts you to assess if your ideology matches your actions. Hopefully, they are one in the same. If not, like me, you have some work to do.
For a more detailed synthesis of my learning in ETEC 533, please visit the e-Folio Analysis page.
image: “The real problem is not adding technology to the current organization of the classroom, but changing the culture of teaching and learning” by langwitches released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license
The most prevalent obstacle that impedes inquiry-based learning in educational settings is the instructor’s understanding of inquiry and pedagogical approaches as well as the ability to implement these successfully. This was shared through the expressed frustrations of the Jasper Series designers when teachers did not seem to recognize the value in exposing students to analog problems that were conceived for the purpose of improving transfer and abstraction of concepts and strategies, opting instead for adventures that introduced the need to use different skills overlooking the opportunity to increase adaptive expertise (Hatano, 1984). Within the WISE environment, customizing the platform for successful inquiry-based learning requires a level of competence that designers cannot necessarily assume teachers possess. The inquiry map alone, which directs students through the process, can present a significant challenge in that even Linn, Clark & Slotta (2003) caution that its level of detail affects student engagement. The prescriptive nature of WISE projects provide students with the necessary information to proceed independently, but also provide opportunities for teachers to misinterpret the structure of the investigation. Manipulating the available scaffolding steps along with the limited opportunities for socially constructing knowledge embedded within WISE provide a potential recipe for reinforcing the transmission model, albeit with animations and the technological affordances of accessing past progress. While the Jasper Series was founded on stronger pedagogical principles that provide valuable insight into TELEs and continue to describe essential qualities of powerful and effective learning environments, both it and WISE promote more of a packaged approach to inquiry that does not require teachers to explicitly understand the theory and pedagogy behind them before integrating them. As potent as they could be in bringing inquiry-based learning to the classroom, they could also be used to further entrench traditional instructional approaches that reinforce inert knowledge. It cannot be assumed that teachers possess the aptitude to integrate these TELEs. Just as students require explicit instruction to develop inquiry skills, teachers need to be “explicitly taught about interactions among pedagogy, content, technology, and learners” to develop their Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge, or TPCK. This conceptualization is critical.