Due to family emergencies and natural disasters, I am in the awkward position of submitting the reflections for two modules on the same night. “He hasn’t learned anything since the last post,” you would correctly point out, “so this post is rather pointless,” you would incorrectly conclude. While on the last post I chose to focus on my classroom as it stands now, on this one I would like to expand my thoughts to classrooms in which I may find myself in the future.
While it is true that I see the cognitivist approach most useful in my current employment, that is because I feel that learners need to have basic mental schema in place before going on to construct higher-level knowledge. With that said, some subjects are by nature higher-level. For example, a physics class is an example of a class closely related to my current teaching experience that would benefit more from a constructivist approach. Assuming students have preexisting mental schema for math operations and theories, they could rely on that knowledge to see how it relates to real-world situations using basic physics theories. In physics, it is easy to design basic experiments to that students can use to make predictions, analyze the results, and find possible sources of error between theoretical and observed solutions. In fact, there are many that students could design many on their own, increasing their investment and the level of their activity in the construction of the knowledge. That is much harder to do if the basic mathematical vocabulary is not already present.
I do hope to teach a wider variety of subjects one day, and learning how different theories can apply, and imaging lesson plans for different related subjects helps to find where those theories could work and where they wouldn’t. At some point, I will try to do a literature review to see which of my theories based on readings and experience are born out in the research.
Garin Savage: EDTECH Learning Log 