Teddy’s Reading Log 02.07.2010

Posted by on February 7, 2010 
Filed under Reading logs

Teddy’s Reading Log 02.07.2010

For class session 02.09.2010

My first impression of this article was that it was going to be somewhat a silly document talking about another teaching experience by a professor who had no idea or cared how students learn. Instead, it was just the opposite in theme. I was totally enthralled as I continued reading the article to find that the teacher was quite intelligent and aware of something I’ve known since elementary school. Students are often provided a learning experience where they are simply expected to regurgitate what was taught and provide the same answers on a test. For years, this has been considered an appropriate and acceptable outcome. No deep learning was required whereas the students were required to master and manipulate information beyond what was taught in the sterile classroom setting. In the article from the New Horizons for Learning website, entitled The New Conversations About Learning Insights From Neuroscience and Anthropology, Cognitive Science and Workplace Studies, Marchese (2010) states “What students were good at –and I played right into this—was feeding back correct answers; they had mastered the arts of short-term memory and recall. He continues to discuss the design of college classes that merely produce what he terms as surface learning instead of what is most dearly desired by college teachers, deep learning.

Immediately, I was propelled back to an experience that haunted me for years. It was during a graduate class in the 1990’s that I requested help from a prominent professor on a class assignment. He refused to assist me or any other commercial music student. It became obvious to me that we would all fail if something was not done to correct the situation. The professor taught using language understood by his white non-commercial students and ignored his students of color. In doing so, his students of color were alienated, moved to the back of the classroom and eventually failed or dropped the class. I approached the instructor to make him aware of this injustice and he blew a fuse. I too failed the class that semester! In the meanwhile, his preferred students simply duplicated the given assignments without any deep understanding of the data. I had warned the teacher that this was the case and it would appear in the Part 1 section of the course that was being taught out of sequence during the Spring Semester. The teacher went mad the next semester when his prize students had little or no recall of what he taught the prior semester. It was then that he assisted all of his students!

One moment of deep understanding could have led to a semester or year of success for the students and the teacher. Because the instructor did not consider what did students know, how did they learn it, how should the teacher approach students with new data, what communications are needed to promote retention and what pedagogical course adjustments are necessary, students had limited learning success or failed the prior semester. Like the graduate class experience, the neuroscience experiment using rats, I find to be conclusive. The objective of this test was to provide indicators of how the brain works. Shouldn’t teachers seek to learn how each particular group of their students think, learn and find deeper meaning. Of course, more opportunities to learn in varied environments will produce subjects exhibiting advanced skill sets. Therefore, I agree with the findings of this test and its outcomes suggesting levels of competence induced by situational learning. Similar to Brown, Collins and Duguid (1989), I believe that memorization and rote learning are second to being part of the learning experience and the most important aspects and benefits awaits our mastery of a particular situation and its attributes needing resolution over time.

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One Response to “Teddy’s Reading Log 02.07.2010”

  • Darren Cambridge on February 16th, 2010 1:22 pm    

    I’m sure we all have similar horror stories in our educational histories. I’m sorry you had to go through that. It sounds awful. For me, these kinds of experience point to the importance of reform of the faculty roles and rewards structure and the professional development system. This professor either didn’t know what to value about his students’ learning or had other priorities that caused him to focus on the least time consuming approach to teaching, which is one-size-fits all content delivery in the service of surface learning. One of the hopes of the SoTL movement is that we can begin to shift the rewards structure so that it embraces, if not demands, SoTL as scholarship. Also implicit is the idea that, by doing such scholarship, we become better teachers.

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