Putting It All Together

Now that we are getting toward the end of the semester, we have to think, how does all of this information we learned go together?

Amazingly, it all fits perfectly.

Take Bruner's Structure of Knowledge.

How would one tie together the different levels of his pyramid with other learning theories.

Meta-Cognition -- Re-Constructionism -- Social-Cognitive Theory.
Generalizations -- Existentialism-Humanism -- Multiple Intelligences/Brain Research Theory.
Concepts -- Progressivism -- Constructivist/Cognitive Theory.
Facts -- Perennialism/Essentialism -- Behaviorist Theory.

Before I continue with making connections, I must write the definitions for strategies, models, and methods.

Strategies are direct or indirect forms of instruction.

Direct instruction involves the teacher lecturing to students. This type of instruction can be done in the beginning of a unit when the teacher wants the students to learn basic information. It is also the easiest form of instruction to plan.

For indirect instruction, the role of the teacher changes. In this type of instruction, the teacher becomes more of a facilitator. The students actively participate through interactive, experiential, or independent ways.

Models are the broadest level of instructional practice and are philosophical.

There are four types of models; personal (develop self-esteem), Social Interaction (develop social skills), Information Processing (finding, organizing, processing information), and Behavioral (develop basic skills/knowledge).

Methods are the most specific ways of reaching goals.

There are hundreds of methods.

Now back to putting all of this information together.

One example of connecting Bruner's Structure of Knowledge, Bloom's Taxonomy, and strategies, models, and methods is this:

Meta-Cognition -- Creative Thinking/Evaluation/Synthesis -- Personal/Independent Study/Experiential.

It's been a lot to take in this semester, but it's all finally starting to come together.

Review Time

Well, it's that time of the semester. Time to start looking back at previous weeks topics and reviewing.

We have covered a lot of material this semester and thanks to Jessica and her micro-teaching, I was able to review a good amount of our class topics.

What I liked about the review was that we weren't just fed all of the information all over again.

Instead, we were forced to THINK.

Given a couple of minutes, we had to make a list of all the concepts, skills, experiences, and theories learned during the course.

At first, I had a hard time. I could not think of a lot of the material we had previously covered. Eventually, it started to come back to me.

Under concepts I wrote content analysis, task analysis, aims, goals and objectives, learning standards, and the pedagogical system.

For skills I had creating a wiki, writing objectives, Webspiration, creating graphic organizers, and blogging.

Experiences included fieldwork, micro-teaching, group presentations, and designing a unit plan.

Finally, for theories, I wrote Bloom's Taxonomy, Gardner's Multiple Intelligences, and Cognitive Theory.

After making my own list and then listening to others share theirs, it was amazing to see how much we really went over so far this semester.