The book Making Learning Whole by David Perkins is developed teaching examples centered on a metaphor of playing a baseball game. Perkins feels that education is damaged when teachers break down knowledge into individual facts. When teachers teach only bits and pieces of knowledge at a time, students only get bits and pieces and not the overall picture. This hampers the students overall learning potential. I feel that his analysis about learning about realistic activities and getting students to engage in each aspect of learning will allow the student to acquire more meaningful connections in learning. I do feel that when a student sees the relevance in what is being taught, they will be able to make meaningful connections and also progress both critical knowledge and also have more success at attacking the challenging parts. Perkins Theory of learning by playing the whole game is a fun way to conceptualize teaching while shaping the minds of our students. While using baseline experiences, teachers can challenge current thinking to entice their students. Giving students the end concept as a main focus, while putting all the pieces together, helps students engage in critical thinking aspects of learning. Showing how this impact their life, or how they can apply the information to their life will give the students a more accurate understanding of content.
Perkins talked about visions of meaningful education cover three basic outlines: enlightenment, empowerment, and responsibility. I feel that this statement is a powerful statement that covers the basic thought process in lesson planning. How can I enlighten my students? How can this lesson empower them to make connections? I must acknowledge my responsibility and role of making su...
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...ores, teachers fall in to teaching fact mode so that their students might meet the average. Perkins sees trends in education: what he calls “elementitis” which he describes as learning mechanisms of a subject without ever putting the pieces together. All through this book the goals are to teach for understanding. Knowledge can be useful to solve other problems rather just useless facts. Advancing a student’s knowledge range of understanding goes beyond the facts given; it is developing insight into many important concepts so that they can make connections to form the bigger picture or the whole game. Students will achieve higher goals when they see why the facts are important, how this relates to their life and are able to connect those facts to form greater knowledge.
Works Cited
Perkins, David. (2009). Making learning whole. San Fransico, Calf.: Wiley imprint.
Introduction Baseball Saved Us was written by Ken Mochizuki, a novelist, journalist and an actor. He is a native of Seattle, Washington located in the United States. After the war between the United States and Japan during World War II, is parents were forced to move to a Minidoka internment camp located in Idaho. He got his inspiration to write Baseball Saved Us when he read a magazine article about an Issei (a first generation Japanese American) man who established a baseball diamond and formed a league within the camps. Dom Lee, the Illustrator of the book, is a native of Seoul, South Korea.
What is more important to education? The content or the how the content is taught? Many policy makers today believe that the former is far more crucial to the development of our youth. With high-stakes testing and an entire industry of textbooks and test making, the current system places empirical results over all else. Unfortunately, this approach only helps with the lower levels on the depths of knowledge (DOK) and Bloom’s Taxonomy charts. It only helps with basic recall of facts and knowledge. A second area of concern with this type of teaching is that only instills one point of view in the pupils. This is also problematic for diverse classrooms with students from various backgrounds. Would an approach that reinforces critical thinking and higher levels of DOK be more appropriate? A technique that incorporates the diversity of the classroom and life experiences of those students can be explained by Christopher Emdin and Django Paris who are two advocates of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy or Reality Pedagogy.
Any school curriculum should aim at enabling children to be able to think in broader terms, motivate them to want to be more knowledgeable and above all, allow them to come up with new approaches to problem solving. However, more too often teachers tend to limit the students to only the known facts in text books, something which prompts them to remain in their comfort zones. Additionally, the purpose of any formal education is not only to gain formal knowledge but also to gain social knowledge. Different teachers will have different approaches to achieve this. Despite the approach used, in the end of the day, they are expected to have involved and impacted positively on the different characters of children in their classrooms that is, the shy,
...simply reuses the same approach and methodology each year, his class is likely to become boring and ineffective. In order to properly educate students, a teacher must always be looking for ways to improve his course—methods of making the knowledge seem more interesting and relevant to students. Originality and innovation not only maintain students’ attention, but also help keep teachers interested. Any subject matter will seem boring if an instructor teaches it the same way for twenty years. In order to maximize the effectiveness of their teaching, educators constantly must be in search of new methods of presenting content. Complacency, after all, is the first step on the road to ineffective instruction. Teachers, like their students, must always remain motivated by the desire to improve. Without this desire, the process of education becomes stagnant and empty.
Teacher knowledge has always been the basis to an effective learning experience. Without a knowledgeable teacher, students are not able to receive a quality educational experience. This pillar encompasses the influence teachers have on student learning and achievement, possession of research based knowledge, and effective teaching practices. I thrive to be educated and knowledgeable on the information presented to my students. By having a variety of teaching techniques that work and I use often in my classroom, I am able to mold my instruction around student needs and provide efficient and
I believe that teaching and learning is both a science and an art, which requires the implementation of already determined rules. I see learning as the result of internal forces within the person student. I know that children differ in the way they learn and grow but I also know that all children can learn. Students’ increased understanding of their own experience is a legitimate form of knowledge. I will present my students with opportunities to develop the ability to meet personal knowledge.
Teachers continually learn about ways people learn – the processes of learning and how individuals learn best. They learn about their students and individuals, and learn with as well as from their students when they seek knowledge together. (Principles of effective learning and teaching, 1994). Through continually discovering new and exciting ways to help mould a constructivist classroom, the students will be able to achieve their outcomes with great ease and learn to enjoy education.
John Dunlosky’s (2013) article, Strengthening the Student Toolbox, gives study strategies that may be beneficial for teachers to give to their students. Dunlosky found that the strategy, self-explanation, to be beneficial. If a student was to use self-explanation, then he or she would try to explain how new information connects with prior information, that he or she already has acquired (Dunlosky, 2013). This strategy allows a student to connect new information with prior knowledge and this connection will allow the student to remember the information better.
After viewing the topic on learning to learn by Barbara Oakley. As well as considering the hand out on Ten Rules of Bad Studying and doing the quiz on “how good are you at teaching the art of learning?” These are then my impressions.
In order to understand and gain knowledge, learning theories stress the importance of creating a relationship between all pieces of information, the learner, and the environment. It is the responsibility of both the teacher and the learner to link the appropriate information together. If students can develop a relationship for the "underlying reasons for ‘how’ and ‘why’ to use specific procedures, they will be able to store this information as part of their knowledge network," and develop links with other pieces of information (Gersten and Baker, 1998, p.24). On the contrary, if learners learn facts of information that are isolated from a meaningful context, their understanding is often incomplete and meaningless. As a result of these linked relationships between individuals and environments, knowledge is the prevailing outcome. In summary, "knowledge is situated, being in part a product of the activity, context, and culture in which it is developed and used (Brown, Collins, and Duguid, 1989, p.32).
When teachers expect students to see through their eyes, students do not absorb the majority of the information. Expecting the student to fully understand the subject
In this course I experienced an important change in my beliefs about teaching; I came to understand that there are many different theories and methods that can be tailored to suit the teacher and the needs of the student. The readings, especially those from Lyons, G., Ford, M., & Arthur-Kelly, M. (2011), Groundwater-Smith, S., Ewing, R., & Le Cornu, R. (2007), and Whitton, D., Barker, K., Nosworthy, M., Sinclair, C., Nanlohy, P. (2010), have helped me to understand this in particular. In composing my essay about teaching methods and other themes, my learning was solidified, my knowledge deepened by my research and my writing skills honed.
As educators we wish to have the students gain knowledge, through our efforts, and continue to expand their minds using the basics we have taught them. In an era when so many outside interests often cloud the minds of our impressionable youth, we often wonder how we can accomplish this task.
Learning initially begins with one's attitude toward themselves, others, and the world we live in. It is our attitudes that play a major role in shaping our experiences, which in turn affects the way in which we learn. We must first be able to interpret the world using information we already know, in order to understand something entirely new. As a teacher, I could only hope that I can provide children with a positive educational experience, one that will broaden the scope in which they view themselves, others, and the world on a larger scale. Children already acquire a desire to learn, however, it is up to us to sti...
The second step in developing an engaging lesson is to focus on the instructional strategies used to help the students understand the material. It is at this point, the teacher decides what activities they will use to help address the “big ideas” or the “essential questions”.