In this blog post, I am going to be elaborating on the following questions:
- Share a story about how you overcame a learning challenge. Why was it a challenge? What strategies did you use? Use the language you learned in this unit.
- Share a story about your best learning experience (could be a formal course or something more personal). Why did you enjoy it?
- Based on your reading, would you consider your current instruction style more behaviouralist, cognitivist, or constructivist? Elaborate with your specific mindset and examples.
This past summer, I enrolled in the ‘Personalized Learning Institute’ at UVic. The Institute consisted of 3 separate but related courses that took place over 3 weeks in July. Full time studies (8:30am – 3:20pm, Monday to Friday) and completing one course per week would prove to be challenging, but one of the best learning experiences of my life. I attribute a large portion of my teaching pedagogy to the experiences that came from the Institute.
Week 1 of the Institute was ‘Project Based Learning and Teaching’. Coming into the course, I had a slight idea that we would be learning about how to implement inquiry into our classrooms to give our students a personalized learning experience. The very first day of this course challenged me. Our first assignment was surrounding the questions “How do we ‘Build the Culture’ of Project Based Learning? As a group, we were to discuss something that we were interested in or something that made us feel vulnerable in regards to this, along with questions we had going forward. Our group decided on answering, “How do we ensure inclusion and equity in group participation?” We discussed and researched some answers, then made our presentation in front of the class. We made a PowerPoint slideshow that revealed our findings and relayed that information to the rest of the class. I initially thought that we did really well on the assignment, until we received our feedback from the instructor. From the feedback, it was clear that we had completely misinterpreted what the assignment was supposed to be. The instructor wanted us not to relay the information that we found, but take the class on the learning journey with us. Rather than transferring information from us to the class, we needed to become vulnerable and facilitate a space for the class to come to their own conclusions.
So why was this so hard for my group to grasp? We all admitted that we completed the assignment the way we’ve always completed assignments. We didn’t fully understand that this wasn’t about showing our knowledge and giving that knowledge to the class, it was about helping the class create their own knowledge. As the SmarterEveryDay (2015) video lays out, our group had a rigid way of thinking about presenting information. Even for the rest of the course, once I realized that the goal was to help the class come to their own knowledge and understanding, I struggled and continued back to my old ways. I constantly had to check myself by reflecting on my actions and changing them to reflect the theory I was trying to implement.
When this new learning finally clicked, it all made so much sense. Taking the class on their own learning journey allowed them to follow a more constructivist approach to learning. They were making meaning from their own experiences and collaborating with others to discover different perspectives (Ertmer & Newby, 2013). This way of learning and instructing is something I will take with me into my own classroom because rather than focusing on memorization, like in behaviouralist and cognitivist ways of learning, students are learning from and remembering their own experiences. This way of learning is more meaningful and relevant to their individual lives, and they may be able to take their new knowledge and apply it to other parts of their lives.
References
Ertmer, P. A., & Newby, T. J. (2013). Behaviorism, cognitivism, constructivism: Comparing critical features from an instructional design perspective. Performance Improvement Quarterly, 26(2), 43-71.
SmarterEveryDay. (2015, April 24). The backwards brain bicycle – Smarter every day 133 [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0&t=425s