#6 Bransford et als’ “How people learn" mini hands-on ch3

Bransford et als’ “How people learn: mind, brain, experience and school” is an enlightening book for anyone caring about, and wanting to be the best part of this education industry.
I reflected some of my own practices on chap 3 by using one of the courses (Race, Ethnicity and Diversity studies) that I developed and teach (both online and f2f).
This course, mainly had a very intense reading, writing and reflecting component.
As they states that one of the important goals for schooling is to prepare students with the capacity of being adept and adaptive for new problems and settings. The index of transferring ability is a benchmark for successful teaching or an indicator for instructional improvement (Bransford, Brown and Cocking, 1999).

So the key question in this chapter is “How well do the students’ learning transfer to new problems and situations?” Here is a simple draft helping me recall (impressionistically, about 3 years ago) the piloting teaching in a brand new course in that semester to check on myself retrospectively. (It is never be exciting or is so extravaganza as GoNorth!!!) And most importantly, this chapter helps me to do a very tiny hands on project. Thank Bransford at als and you! I should have retrieved students’ work for a better and concrete analysis. Hopefully in the future, I have chance to do so in an academic way.

As I said, the following is a very plain and rough memory to assist me tracking on the key points in this chapter:

1. Initial learning (prior knowledge and experience): a day one survey plus Making a Safe and Trustful Learning Community Activity to understand online learners' initial knowledge and experience. From this very important step, you remembered and recognized each individual vividly from their description, photos, video postings, anticipation, energy, initial personality understanding, prior knowledge and life, family and working experience.

2. Time spending on learning: explicitly explained the expectation of efforts in the syllabus and online documents (time spending per week to engage with contents, peers, and facilitators...etc).

3. Opportunity to use knowledge to create products and benefits for others as a motivating factor: one of the projects was that students engaged in community service by designing an activity (using any software) relating to course themes (race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation/identity, and disability issues) that indicated learners’ learned knowledge applying to a cause that promoted a common good.

4. Active learning: “Engage” or perish! – the major online interactive components keep everyone busy in a meaningful way (hopefully - expected!) : synchronous and asynchronous sharing, discussion, critiquing, ppt, videos and movies comments and appreciations on forums.

5. Frequent feedback: among peers, guests, and facilitator. Prompt feedback from me was announced (Within 24-48 hours. Live-meeting were encouraged by appointment. These were two of the most effective principles to a successful online class.)

6. Learning Context (single vs. multiple): online environment and real life settings (at home, workplace and communities were integrated into weekly reflection).

7. Contrast cases: learners provided comparisons and contrast from real life examples and go through Bloom’s taxonomy process and made into showcase to post.

8. Abstract representation: learners used learned terminology or created their symbolic terms to describe the phenomena they observed in the weekly structured, semi-structured and threaded discussion and writing.

9. Cultural practices that support learners' prior knowledge: It derived from individual learner’s uniqueness (their family- SES, upbringing, experiences, race, gender, disability…etc. to weave into writing, reflection and discussion in a safe and trustful environment, since this course was dealing with real life issues and problems. So everyone was situated in authentic and contextualized conditions. Everyone had all kinds of stories to tell and listen in addition to the books’ episodes).

10. Transfer between school and everyday life: writing reflection, reporting daily experiences and doing projects that tie to what they learned from school to the daily life, family, workplace, and community settings were routine jobs for the course.

11. Metacognitive- students learned about themselves by reflecting on how they learned and observed how peers learned by self assessment, mutual critiquing and mutual grading, as well as suggested if they taught how they would organize a better teaching and learning environments (content, pedagogy, technology…etc.)

As you read – uneventful! I could not believe that what I did mentioned above, was nothing particularly exciting – from today’s standard!!! Well, as least I was Deweyianly learning by doing and transferring via this chapter!!!