Reflection on Term 1

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Personal Issues

On the personal side, the first term was tough, for lots of reasons:

In summary, I was going through a phase where I was changing just about everything in my life, having been through a period that in itself was hard at times. And there were times when I thought that mabye doing this MSc was just a step too far and I should have not been so quick to take it up while also trying to get myself back into the swing of things.

But on the other hand, doing this was part of my 'grand plan' of changing my direction in life, which was kicked off, really, by my going off to Ethiopia in September 2003. If I wasn't doing this, I would have been looking for something else, some other new challenge to take up. So that was it - this MSc was my new challenge.

The C-Word

For me, a main theme running through the first term was the 'C word' of learning theory - constructionism. Whilst the actual theory was new to me, the ideas behind it weren't new when I saw how it connected to my own ways of 'learning by doing' and that I had endeavoured to do this, when I had the time and the energy, in my teaching in Ethiopia before this. So I sum up constructionism as 'learning by doing'. Or, as Seymour Papert, its orginator, puts it:

"Better learning will not come from finding better ways for the teacher to instruct but from giving the learner better opportunities to construct."

This was really the kind of learning experience I aspired (and do currently aspire to) for my students. It's also the way I have learned to do lots of things, such as making web pages and learning a new language.

Though I have to admit that while I would like to give my students this type of experience all the time, it isn't always that way - due to my inexperience, lack of time to prepare and perhaps (in Ethiopia at least) a lack of resources such as internet access for students to find things out for themselves. When teaching something like web development, I think it is easier than other, less practical, subjects to let students do things for themselves. But what's not so easy is to figure out where to draw the line between spoon-feeding them the steps to do something (e.g. how to make a web page in DreamWeaver) and giving them the general ideas and letting them build on those and work at their own pace (e.g. show some of the possible commands in DreamWeaver and allow the learner to explore different ways of doing things).

One of the challenges I was faced with in Ethiopia was language - teaching through English to students for whom English was a second or even third language. Moreover, their ability in English varied over a wide range. One way I addressed this, in teaching the theory part of a course on relational databases, was by giving them worksheets that had some of the information I wanted them to learn during the class. The information was presented in the form of diagrams and statements. To help them get something out of the class, even if they couldn't understand everything that went on (because of the language issue), I wanted them to complete parts of the worksheet as the topics came up in class. If I had had more time, maybe I could have made it more 'constructionist' by having more interactive lab sessions. As it was, I had a class of about 80 and a lot of material to cover.

I also believe that, in the 'real world' of teaching and learning in institutions, teachers are often under pressure to cover a syllabus and to ensure that all students reach a minimum level rather than being able to focus on ensuring that all students achieve their potential. There's pressure on time and on resources.

Learning Theories

The learning theories part of the course helped me to think (and, I suppose, reflect) on how I had been teaching over the previous two years. It helped me to put what I did into some kind of theoretical framework. Before this, I was aware of the concept of learning styles (visual, audio, kinaesthetic) and of Gardner's ideas of multiple intelligences (linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical etc) but had not studied them to any depth. However I feel they had informed my teaching style to a certain extent. What I was gaining during this term was going back to being a student myself (I was going to say a learner here, but I'm always learning - I'm not always being, officially at least, a student) and feeling what it was like to be in a situation where my learning was, hopefully, leading to something quite specific.

We didn't cover these learning styles but, as mentioned above, we covered alot of learning theories to put things in context (behaviourism, cognitivism, constructivism, constructionism). For me, Kolb's cycle of learning made a lot of sense - it's almost so obvious as to be funny that someone has got the credit for coming up with the theory. It basically says that you do something, you look at how it works and think about what went wrong or what could be made better, then you do it again. I guess that's everything from building a sand castle to building a rocket to go to the moon!

Gagne's Conditions of Learning theories also made a lot of sense to me. In particular, his nine Events of Instruction struck me straight away as being things that I often do in my teaching, based on some teaching training I got about lesson planning, before I went to Ethiopia (where I was really thrown in at the deep end having not taught before). The events, from gaining students' attention and giving them objectives for the lesson, through to assessing the learning and enhancing retention were all things I could recognize as at least being things I want to do even if I don't always do them.

The middle events, such as recall of prior learning and guiding the learning, are things I almost always do when teaching.

Reflection

The idea of making reflection a core part of what I do was new to me, particularly the notion of making reflection deep and meaningful. Normally, I run a (figurative) mile from such things....I dislike 'touchy-feely' sessions where someone encourages me to recall my most meaningful learning experience or an event that really affected my life. Nevertheless, i could see the potential benefits to reflecting in this course and after Tim introduced the concept in class, I started keeping a reflection diary. I tried to write into it each weekend after classes, not always succeeding. It was forcing me to think more about what I was doing on the course and about the assignments I was doing - to try to work out what I was learning through doing them.

I also tried to reflect and think more critically about my own teaching and its effect on the learners in my class. I was teaching web technologies (XHTML, CSS, JavaScript) in lab-based sessions. Similarly to what I'd observed before, in Ethiopia, students move at very different paces when learning how to build web pages. The programming/coding aspect makes sense more quickly to those who think logically. Tools like DreamWeaver help students to visualise what they're doing. I try to mix my ways of teaching so that different learning styles are accommodated and also so that students can really 'learn by doing'. I believe that in something like web page design, students need to be given the freedom to just 'try things out', to explore the editor they're using and figure out their own ways of doing things. This will enable them to learn new techniques and technologies in future. In a typical class, I would try to show how something looks on screen (what they are trying to achieve in the class), show the code behind it, step through how to do it, let the students try it for themselves.

 

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