My Adult Learning Style and A Tech Tool to Support It

Guiding Question: According to the ATLAS test, what is your learning strategy? Explain why you agree or disagree with the results of the assessment. With this week’s reading assignment in mind, identify a type of learning technology you think may work well for students who share your particular learning strategy and explain why the technology would be useful.

I went to take the ATLAS test to see what style of learner I am. I will admit right up front that I am very skeptical of the pre-supposition that using only two questions I can be grouped into a learning style. However, in the interest of good discussion for our class, I took the survey and was categorized as an Engager, Subgroup 2. Here is the information provided by the survey about my group and sub-group:

Description: Passionate learners who love to learn, learn with feeling, and learn best when actively engaged in a meaningful manner. Subgroup 1 likes to use human resources while Subgroup 2 favors reflecting upon the results of the learning and planning for the best way to learn.

Characteristics: Must have an internal sense of the importance of the learning to them personally before getting involved in the learning. Once confident of the value of the learning, likes to maintain a focus on the material to be learned. Operates out of the Affective Domain related to learning.

Instructor: Provide an atmosphere that creates a relationship between the learner, the task, and the teacher. Focus on learning rather than evaluation and encourage personal exploration for learning. Group work also helps to create a positive environment.

There are some pieces of this which resonate strongly with me and how I see myself as an instructor and learner; however, there are also somethings which seem to be a bit shallow to me (meaning that it seems that some of this is just ambiguous enough that I may have some confirmation bias kicking in).

First, I am passionate about learning and I do learn with feeling. I am definitely learning best when I engage in a meaningful manner. However, is this particular to my group of learners? Doesn’t everyone learn best when they are engaged in a meaningful manner? I would agree that I fall more in line with reflective practice, rather than “using human resources.” I definitely do need an internal sense of the importance of the material. But again, is that special to engagers? Maybe I’m being closed-minded, but that’s one of the pillars of my philosophy of teaching. I do tend to teach (and learn) in the affective domain regularly, which dovetails nicely with my reflective style of learning. The instructor strategies (I’m assuming these are how to “reach” my group of learners) speak right into who I am as an instructor. I encourage students to focus on learning rather than evaluation and definitely want students to engage in personal exploration. I LOVE group work in my classes and engage students in it regularly.

As an engager, I think blogging would be a great tool for students in this category. Maybe that’s why I love the “weekly reflection journal” I am in the habit of using each week in most of my classes. Blogging provides students a place to engage in the practice of reflection and I recommend prompting them each week (or some other time interval, e.g. bi-monthly, quarterly, etc.). The questions I usually use for students during their reflections follow:

1. Which significant idea or concept most engaged you this week? Why do you think that particular piece of our studies resonated with you so strongly? Please provide specific evidence of reading or classroom discussions to support your assertions.
2. How will that idea impact your life/learning/experiences/interactions with others from this point forward?
3. What did you do this week that enhanced or assisted your learning the most this week and why did it do so?
4. What did you do this week that inhibited your learning this week and why did it do so?
5. What significant questions remain about the concepts or ideas you have learned this week?

The expectation is the student would write a few paragraphs to address those questions. While this is best done as a two-way conversation, there is tremendous value in thinking about big ideas, what worked and what did not, and how you have been changed or impacted, even if no one comments or responds. Am I wrong? Does this only work for me?

In thinking about the ATLAS Survey, it is either really on point and does a great job of telling you who you are as a learner or it is just ambiguous enough to fit me. I will admit that I did go and look at the other adult learning styles. One is navigator and the other is problem-solver. I tend to think the survey results are a bit ambiguous enough to fit many people because I found several instances which fit me in the other two style, specifically organization of the material into meaningful patterns in the navigator and rely heavily on all the strategies in the area of critical thinking and gives examples of personal experience in the problem-solving style. I believe I shall remain a skeptic. The best piece of credibility I found was that the original researchers on this project were/are from Oklahoma State University (*said laughingly and not in too much seriousness*).

Stepping Up to the Challenge of Education and the Road Ahead - Dr. Mark Milliron

There was a point in time when education broke the cycle of poverty. That's not necessarily true in a day and age when only 50% of students who start college are able to finish.

We must think about the journey for students. How do we structure learning environments? How do we instill a sense of purpose in students? How do we help them to inventory their desires and wants and get that sense of purpose sooner rather than later? Note - the modal learner of today is from the late 20s to the early 50s with a mean of about 37. The traditional students are not going away, but they are no longer the modal learners.

Look into the Virginia Education Wizard and check out what it does. It's not useful outside the state, but the idea is awesome. Why is full-time status the default? Why do students have to talk to someone to make an exception to attend half-time? Why do students feel like they are filing for welfare or at the DMV? Students need to get on purpose from day 1. It doesn't mean they have to pick a major, it means that they need to understand the importance of knowing where they want to go.

We need to dispel the myth of edutainment. We must get them to understand that they must work hard in order to succeed. WGU Texas calls it the Texas two-step. Read the book Mindset. Shift from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset. You don't already know everything you need to know. You are here to learn and that's intended to be hard. If it wasn't hard, it wouldn't be worth doing.

There's a big difference between the kids who are scaffolded throughout their life for college. Contrasted with the students who have NO ONE in their life who understands the higher education journey. Check out Practical Magic for reading. Students need to leave our classrooms better prepared for the next part of the journey. Persistence and tenacity are two very important pieces. However, this must be combined with a purpose and strategies for success.

There are 3 academic mindsets. Social, academic perseverance, and learning strategies. However, many think you have to choose one. But research shows that you must have a combination of all three to be successful. With everything we do, we should ask the question: Does this expand students' learning? That and the data behind it should frame every decision we make. How do we leverage technology to make a connection with students?

How do we build the right infrastructure, to get the right data, to the right people, in the right way? The consumer world is decades ahead of us in using data. Within 2 hours of you losing your credit card, a man in India will call you to see if you have lost your card. This is triggered by your spending habits and quick, closed-loop feedback. Let's apply that to learning.

Prepare, Discover, Analyze, Share

I had the opportunity to share an online pedagogy training with our faculty at SNU. We did a little discussion of ADA and how can offer equal opportunities for learning to our students with disabilities. We also talked about our online template. We use Moodle as our LMS and when I begin working with a professor to develop a course, I set up a new course for them from a template. While we hope that instructors can make a course their own, we do want to have some similarity between all of our courses. If students know exactly where to look for resources (assignment lists, etc.), we reduce their cognitive load and free them to learn content, instead of trying to learn where components of a course can be found. Our online courses are only 6 weeks long, so they have a small window in which to learn where resources within the course are located.

Our main focus of the training, however, was the PDAS model. While we do not expect every course to have each of these four components in every single week of a course, we do hope to balance these strategies throughout their courses.

Prepare is the part of a course in which students are "instructed" on the concepts or information to be learned. Usually, this would look like students reading from texts, watching videos, reading journal articles or websites, or some kind of similar activity. The key to this component is that professors tell students where to get the information. This is instructor-centered learning. As a side note, I personally think this should be minimalized in a course. I'm a constructivist and I think students learn best when they have to go find information.

Discover is the antithesis of the previous strategy. In discover, students construct their own knowledge. They are tasked with finding the information on their own. They have to go and "do" something. This particular strategy could take many forms, e.g. experiment (science), argumentative essay (english), find patterns of behavior in a culture (social studies), etc. The bottom line is that students begin to find their own knowledge and evaluate that knowledge for parts of it they find relevant.

It is hard to talk about either of the first two without bringing in the third component: Analyze. This is the part of the learning process in which students actually do something with the information they have learned in the first two steps. After all, if you learn something and do not do something with that knowledge, what's the point? In analyze, students might compare and contrast two stories they have read. They could read a piece of literature and create a modern version of the work (video?). They might analyze a piece of literature through the cultural lens through which it was written (literature and social studies connection). I have always enjoyed looking at the historical context of science and thinking about why advances where made. There might even be a fine arts connection to be had here in this step (pointillism and atomic theory?)

Finally, students need to Share. How can you have any kind of class without some kind of buy-in to a social theory of learning? Students need to interact with others. This becomes even more important when you consider that by simply taking an online class, they area at a disadvantage in the social aspect of learning. This means that we, as designers/instructors, must be purposeful in creating opportunities for students to share their knowledge with others. This accomplishes two things: the "sharer" learns more by being forced to communicate their learning, either in writing or in the spoken word. The "sharee" learns more by being exposed to other's worldview, perspective, and ideas of what is important within a particular knowledge domain.

This model of learning is not new to most of you, I would imagine. You probably have components of this in your classes, whether online or face-to-face. I'm learning this as I begin to deepen my understanding of classroom models and learning theories: In education, as in Physics, there is not yet a Grand Unified Theory. No single learning theory works for every single learner. We must use components from many different theories to enable students to be successful in our domain.

As teachers, we must be able to offer students opportunities to learn, based on their particular learning style. There may be learning theories that work better for differently structured domains or even from one "class" in a school to another, i.e. this year's sophomores, juniors, seniors, etc. This idea is why every teacher should be a learner (yes, SNU School of ED, I also think we need to be lifelong-learners). I didn't really understand this when I was in school. When I finished my undergraduate work, I thought, "I've arrived." However, continuing my learning beyond that has shown me just how much I don't know. That, I believe, is where true learning begins.

my name is jody and I am a constructionist

In chapter 1 of the book “Situating Constructionism,” (Papert & Harel, 1991), the authors drove my thoughts to students and what kind of instruction they were receiving in our classroom. I began to wonder, “Were my students programmers of their own education or were they programmees of my idea of what their education should be?” For that matter, which one should they be? While I would love to say they started at a point and began to drive their own instruction based on what they learned, I will admit there was a significant component of each semester in which I was the “driver of the train” and all of my students were on simply passengers. Isaac Newton once said, “I was like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” My hope is to become the kind of teacher who will allow every student to find the smoothest shells and prettiest pebbles. (I purposely rearranged the quote to include alliteration; clearly he was not a writer!)

Papert & Harel (1991) allude to an experiment (done by Harel) which gives “statistically hard evidence that constructionist activity—which integrates math with art and design and where the children make the software—enhances the effectiveness of instruction given by a teacher in the same topic.” This gives me a bit of heartburn because I do not know what factors they gauge the “effectiveness of instruction.” The context would indicate student’s engagement as the primary factor. However, can we allow that to be the only factor? Is that even what the author meant? Maybe I am just grasping at straws, but I really need a bit more information.

One of my favorite quotes of the chapter:

“The presence of computers begins to go beyond first impact when it alters the nature of the learning process; for example, if it shifts the balance between transfer of knowledge to students (whether via book, teacher, or tutorial program is essentially irrelevant) and the production of knowledge by students.” Papert & Harel (1991) (emphasis added)

Now they are simply pandering to me. This is the one of my core beliefs about education reform. Teachers have to begin to move from a class of knowledge transfer to knowledge production;  an effective means to do that is through the integration of technology. Wikis are a great example of this kind of reform. iBooks Author will also allow students to publish their artifacts for a much broader audience; one that is beyond the four walls of their classroom. I appreciate that Papert & Harel mentioned computational thinking as a mindset. I wrote a blog post about computational thinking in another class. It is encouraging when reformists make the same kinds of connections to other disciplines, since they expect students to do the same.

The most significant piece of the discussion of Logo and “microworlds” (Sawyer, et. al) was the fact that it was born of one idea, from one person. He saw a radical new way for students to learn and built it into an entire movement in education.

These “learning places” are not quite autonomous, but I get the impression they really are virtual locations/ communities where students can drive their own learning, find their own relevance, create mashups of different subjects, and create thoughts and ideas which previously did not exist. Students walk away from “school” (I don’t think they ever really stop learning if we are doing it right) with an artifact, a picture of what they have learned, something far more valuable than a grade, to show others the kind of thinking he or she is capable of doing.

This artifact component of constructionist learning really resonates within my framework of education. If I see a student’s grades, I can certainly make an inference about the kind of success they might be able to have in a class. However, if that same student brings me a computer simulation they have written, or a kinetic sculpture they have created to show a mathematical principle, or some other original creation, I am able to make my own assessment of their learning and skills. If I see on their transcript that they have all A’s, what does that really mean? In an era of grade inflation, when many students (and parents) expect that he or she will have A’s in every class, what do student’s grades really imply? If we truly want to evaluate a student, we need to see that the student is capable of producing at a certain level. We would like to know that he or she can master, or have already mastered, a specific skill. The student needs to show he or she can make connections between other subjects (this one is near and dear to my heart). I imagine you can see that I am a proponent of some kind of portfolio for students. A place for students to “put” these artifacts, which show what they have learned over time. How can a student’s learning/growth truly be measured if there is not some baseline with which it can be compared? While I do not have the answer to the “where & how” question of portfolios, I do know if my own kids were not let high school early college, I would create a portfolio and start putting their student work on it. Likely, it would be a wiki and the student would have edit rights.

Last year I got to witness the U.K. version of Project-Based-Learning (PBL). I had a day to observe at OldMacher Academy in Aberdeen, Scotland. I attended a science class with some 6th or 7th grade U.S. equivalent students. They were working within a PBL context and their driving question was something like “How can we send a person to another planet?” Honestly, I had a bit of issue with the question, simply because it was one that had already been answered. However, I suspect it was appropriate for this age group. Their driving question had many different areas in which they needed to learn content: Newtonian mechanics, planetary astronomy, chemistry, ethics (we can go, but should we?), human biology, relationships, and the list could go on and on. In reality, I have no doubt a driving question such as this one could take an entire year for students to answer. Even then, there would still be “meat left on the bone”. It has such a far-reaching context, I’m not sure it could even be answered in a single school year.

While I was observing the students at OldMacher, I saw 7th graders (or 8th) engaged in the learning process, asking questions, and making discoveries that were relevant to the topic at hand. I did not observe students who were bored or misbehaving. I do not mean to imply that PBL makes teaching/learning all roses, stars, and unicorns. The teacher was was working even harder than the students. She had no time to visit with me because she was busy asking her own guiding questions and giving gentle nudges, in context, as needed.

No doubt, I had an effect on the class as well. After all, the observer effect is one of the basic tenets in physics. As you observe an object, you change it’s state, simply by observing it. It is entirely possible students were on their behavior because I was in the room. Nevertheless, students, by all appearances, were learning and doing so with some independence and self-direction.

My point in all of this can really be summed up in one sentence: If the Constructionist candidate were running for the Office of Education Reform, I would vote for him or her. Not only would I vote for the candidate, I would knock on doors to campaign for this person. I would tell my friends about the merits of this view of education (I kind of already do this). I would volunteer to work in the campaign. I would do whatever I could to get the Constructionist candidate elected. After the reading last week and this week, I find that I am not a constructivist; instead, I need to register to vote as a constructionist.

constructivism or instructivism?

Who Am I as A Teacher?
When I was teaching physics, I used both the instructivist and constructivist models in my classroom. I did (and still do in my current classes) a significant amount of lecture and guided questioning; however, we also spent (spend) a significant amount of time with students doing their own independent, student-directed learning.Instructivist - When students were learning fundamental principles, there was lecture. However, I was not the only person in the room doing the talking. During lectures, I asked guiding questions, students would answer in small groups and then share their ideas. Usually, the questions drew on personal experience and were designed to expose misconceptions about the guiding principles. This is often referred to as cognitive disequilibrium (although some call it cognitive disequilibration) espoused by Piaget (see equilibration), which clearly falls under the constructivist paradigm. So, even though I was using lecture/guided thought, am I an instructivist?

Constructivist - Once students began to master those foundational principles of physics, one day a week, I turned students loose with a computer and my own version of a problem based learning project. They knew the components that were to be included in their artifact, but they were able to do everything else, from picking a topic to designing an experiment/demonstration. This kind of explicit instruction is clearly instructivist in nature.

I use my examples (the links) above to show that in practice, at least for me, the line between constructivism and instructivism is quite blurry. Everything I can think of that I have done/currently do in my classes have components of each theory.

In every class I teach, I start the semester/year with two of my favorite Nature of Science activities: The Checks Lab and The Polar Bear Game. In both activities, students come to understand some of the components of science, i.e. evidence, inference, interpretation, etc. One of the the key concepts I focus on is that we all bring a different viewpoint to the “game of science.” We look at the evidence in different ways. Our experiences change the way we view the world, clearly a constructivist viewpoint. However, I guide students to that realization through questioning, which is instructivist.

Who Am I as A Learner?
When I was a Master’s student, many of my peers were very uncomfortable when the explicit guidelines were not given for a particular project/artifact. They wanted to know exactly what was expected. I found that I learned best when I was not limited by the written expectations of a project. So that indicates to me that I am a constructivist learner, or at least I can function in the role of one. Often, I felt as though I was running a bit “rough-shod” through assignments. Without clear guidance, I felt uncertain as to what I should be doing. However, when I look back on what I learned and how I was influenced by that experience, I feel that my learning was enriched because of the lack of guidance. While I do not have any evidence to support a qualitative claim as to which type of learning/instruction is best, I have my own anecdotal evidence to show what works for me.

So Which Theory is Best?
I hate to be a fence-sitter, but I really think the answer to the question of “Which cognitive theory is best?” is “It depends!” Students of today need to learn some foundational principles of a discipline, but they also need to be able to have enough freedom to explore the ideas and concepts with which they most closely associate relevancy. I have found that with some guidance (instructivist), students can find that relevance in any topic of a discipline (constructivist). That said, the teacher must be receptive enough to his or her students to be able to know when instructivism is needed and flexible enough to give students what I like to call “learning room.”

In the hotly debated Kirschner, Sweller, and Clark (2006) article, the authors use a constructivist model to make their point. I find it ironic (not just coincidental) that the authors use their own experiences to influence their knowledge base. They came up with a question, designed an experiment and/or used other’s experiments, and interpreted the results to make a claim. They even cite their own research as evidence in favor of their claims (Sweller is referenced no less than 21 times). Does anyone else see the irony there? I do not mean to imply that this is poor practice, but when you are trying to make a point and your practice supports the opposing viewpoint, it is, to say the least, amusing.

While not explicitly stated, I supposed the mention of “novice learner” by both Downes and Kirschner, et al  indicates that everyone can agree that activities in learning need to be age-appropriate. For instance, it would not be appropriate to turn lower-elementary aged students loose on the Internet, although Dr. Sugata Mitra would likely disagree. However, if I take some high school students to a play ground with a curved slide and a merry-go-round and ask them to determine some of the basic principles of rotational motion, they might actually be able to “discover” some of them.

No doubt this debate may never be settled. It could be a bit like quantum mechanics. One of the basic concepts is that one cannot know both the position and speed of a given particle, if you know one, you change the other. This is known as the Uncertainty Principle (Heisenberg, 1927).
It is also entirely possible that we may never know whether constructivism is more correct than instructivism; or whether it is the other way around. Another idea in quantum mechanics that a particle can be in two places at once as shown in The Double Slit Experiment (Young, 1803). It may be that constructivism and instructivism are both right and wrong (depending on the circumstance). This is the more likely scenario.