Ch 8 - Bloom's - Partner Mary Beth Baxley

1). How much of a place do discrete facts deserve a spot in the classroom, i.e., how do you draw the line of presenting only discrete facts versus doing activities that require higher order thinking according to Bloom's Taxonomy? (264). [Remembering]

2). In regards to comprehension monitoring, is there a particular way to address students who tend to space out? (255). [Understanding]

Service Learning

                What immediately dawned on me in this prompt for me and this hypothetical situation, is service learning. Oftentimes, we focus too much on high-stakes assessment and not enough on how to apply the knowledge from the classroom in the real world, which is especially important for ESL learners who may find it difficult to develop linguistically (Steinke, 2009). A particular activity that came to mind is procuring some sort of temporary employment for such students. While this may be more often applied to students in low-income areas, I am wanting to focus on the implementation of this in Deaf residential schools. While I haven't had too much involvement in the classroom, from my limited observation of various grade levels, many deaf students do not understand some pragmatic rules we think are simple, such as buying something at a retail store. Usually in the deaf setting, these types of students have a cognitive impairment, as well as deafness, which makes service learning even more important for these students to walk away with some sort of knowledge (Ormrod, 2011, 232). If the teacher/school system can get students employed somewhere, such as Goodwill, these can learn how to interact in the real world. At first, I would imagine students being apprehensive with working the cash register, stocking, or taking donations, but they may eventually see the benefit of going out of their comfort zone and learning how to interact. However, the general obstacles I see would be the language barrier and possible behavioral issues. As far as the language barrier is concerned, students could be instructed that they should write down their thought, or if that is not possible, be especially emotive and that they should try to use their best speech. Consideration of the type of job students will do will depend greatly on their potential ability to communicate with hearing customers. I wouldn't enforce a profoundly deaf student who is a bad lip reader and refuses to use his voice to be the cashier, it's too involved and could require a lot of communication (although if they wanted to I don't think anything should impede their wanting to do so). In terms of behavioral issues, some students may be incapable of working for long shifts, so knowing how to handle that is key. Start slowly, then allow them to work more hours or more intensively. In implementing this service learning activity, I would hope their pragmatic language skills improve so they can use that knowledge when they graduate (Steinke, 2009).

 http://www.servicelearning.org/library/resource/8811

Blog 5 - Behavioral and Cognitive Mastery

            As you may expect, successful mastery from the behaviorist perspective relies on behavior. But how might we actually ensure students are achieving mastery of the target goal. To answer this, I believe creating learning outcomes that are clearly worded is the first and foremost important way to make sure students achieve mastery. As originally conceived by the American College of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, creating learning outcomes from the behavioral perspective should to two things: 1). "focus on the learner" and 2). "specify what the learner should be able to do at the end of a learning activity or at the end of the course."

            In order to accomplish this, phrasing is key. We must clearly indicate the desired behavior through specific verbs. Something vague like knowing is generic, and is not a behavior. Phrases like, "Jonny will not move out of his seat during play time" are very specific and clear when mastery has been reached.

            And so, mastery from a behavioral view of learning is when the learner displays the desired behavior. Nothing more, nothing less. But we must make sure we clearly define the objective in terms of behavior to truly and unequivocally show they have reached that goal.

            However, when it comes to the social cognitive view of learning, reaching expected outcomes is quite different.  Primarily, the focus should be on self-regulated behavior, or a behavior that an individual chooses for themselves (their own standard). (Omrod, 342). This is clearly analogous to students who may want to achieve A's, while others may feel fine with C's. To actually define and pin down mastery, I'm thinking that going over personal goals with students at the beginning of the year (or once every 9 weeks, &c.,) and seeing how they would like to improve could show mastery. [self-evaluation]

            For a more concrete example, we could use the example of an elementary student who requires speech therapy. This student will inevitably have to work on all three self-regulation skills, emotion regulation, self-instruction, and self-monitoring. Why do I think this? 1). For emotion-regulation, the student may feel that they are unable to improve, and therefore alter their train of thought to a negative one, 2). For self-instructions they can think about how they will correctly pronounce a word, to make sure they can get through all the phonemes properly, until it becomes an automatic process, and 3). Self-monitoring can be demonstrated through speech tests that show how well the student is reproducing sounds. By showing them their improvement, they may be more apt to progress (Zimmerman).

While these self-regulation techniques are great, how do they confirm mastery in the cognitive view? I think that the self-evaluation technique can show progress, at least to the student.

Behaviorial View: http://etc.buffalo.edu/eventResources/Curriculum-based%20Methods%20for%20Assessing%20Learning/Curriculum-based%20Methods%20for%20Assessing%20Learning-Outcomes.pdf

Cognitive View (More or less inspired discussion, but used less directly): http://anitacrawley.net/Articles/ZimmermanSocCog.pdf