Week 2 T2P

My sentence: Teachers have to be engaged in the students' conversations ("participant observation") to see where they are coming from and how they may be struggling with the material.

If...then: If teachers are paying close attention to student group work, and prompting them in discussion, then they will understand any issues the students are struggling with and have a better idea of how to help them grow in learning, individually and collectively.

Week 2 T2P:

Today we learned about some of the older theories of learning from Piaget and Vygotsky. They share many similarities, such as an emphasis on stages of development and building off prior cognitive growth (scaffolding). However, to me Piaget's stages seem more individualistic and isolated than Vygotsky's. Vygotsky understood that cognitive development cannot take place in isolation. It is impossible to separate social factors (such as family or culture) from learning. In addition, learning takes place cooperatively in a social context, with peers teaching and learning from each other. That is why I feel it is important for student to interact with many different kinds of people and be exposed to many different ideas--it's hard to learn when all of your already-held beliefs are simply reinforced!

I enjoyed doing the stations activity today because it provided us an opportunity to critically reflect on Piaget and Vygotsky's theories, to "put them on trial," so to speak. I was able to think of what aspects of the theories I agreed with, as well as the aspects that I would dispute or would need to find out more information about (since I am totally new to educational psychology!) I was also able to be challenged by my wonderful INTEL members, such as when we had a really interesting debate on how Vygotsky would respond to the Erik scenario from earlier in class. I liked how we were able to take the activities we did today and connect them in creative ways. I was also able to think of the Erik situation in a way I wasn't expecting and hadn't thought of before.

One aspect of class I thought didn't work as well was the cold calling, which personally I am not a huge fan of. I feel like it tends to put students on the spot and somewhat inhibits organic discussion (because they may not be able to contribute to the conversation based off where their ideas were going). I prefer talking to a partner first or reflecting on paper. But I do think it's interesting to experience various teaching techniques so I can see how they work and decide for myself whether or not I would use them in a classroom. Today I also appreciated, once again, the challenges of lesson planning (especially interdisciplinary lesson planning) and time constraints. It's something that I in particular have to work on since I tend to be somewhat of a perfectionist!

Putting theories into practice (praxis) remains the challenge--today I learned more about the theories and I'm also beginning to question how I feel about them...a very good start!