May 10, 2011
Today I’d like to talk about putting theory into practice. In this case, I want to talk about the practical application of learning theory to what we do to earn a living. I earn my living by teaching. I am by training an educator and by desire a teacher, a writer, and a damn good one at that. And today, I began my transition from my current position as the director of the unit responsible for faculty development at the College to the classroom. The upside of my decision to teach is that I will have the opportunity to put into practice many of the teaching and learning strategies that I have been researching and initiating as part of our commitment to working with faculty on best practices in teaching and learning. I am so excited about the opportunity to test this stuff out for myself. That way, I know what I know about teaching and learning for sure.
I'll start teaching in the fall and I'll keep you updated here as I work through the strategies I want to try. But I also want to talk about how learning works. Nothing lives in a vacuum, including learning. Simply put, for the sake of brevity new knowledge has to make sense to the learner and the way the learner makes sense of the new knowledge is to connect it to knowledge he or she already has. So the first thing I plan to do with my students is work with them to figure out what they already know about writing. But problems arise when the knowledge students have is inaccurate or just plain stupid. Several years ago, for example, when I told my class that conversate was not a word, they all looked at me and told me that of course it was a word because they heard it in their music all the time. My point is, unlearning sometimes takes more time to accomplish than learning new knowledge. Changing a mental model folks is just tough and slow but not impossible.
I'd like to change the mental model at the College about faculty development but to do that I would have to convince those folks at the top that their mental model about how and what faculty at a two year college need to know about teaching and learning to support student completion is flawed. So I've decided that I am going to test my theory. Students don't complete their studies because all too often our teaching strategies suck. We may be content experts, but getting that content to make sense to students means linking it to knowledge they already have. We have to learn how to help our students make the necessary connections, and what I know for sure today is that come September, even if I have to begin with grafitti as a form of composition, my students will make the connections they need to sentences, words, paragraphs and at some point whole pages.
I'd like to change the mental model at the College about faculty development but to do that I would have to convince those folks at the top that their mental model about how and what faculty at a two year college need to know about teaching and learning to support student completion is flawed. So I've decided that I am going to test my theory. Students don't complete their studies because all too often our teaching strategies suck. We may be content experts, but getting that content to make sense to students means linking it to knowledge they already have. We have to learn how to help our students make the necessary connections, and what I know for sure today is that come September, even if I have to begin with grafitti as a form of composition, my students will make the connections they need to sentences, words, paragraphs and at some point whole pages.
