What the @#*% Does Writing Have To Do with Fixing Cars?

Teaching communications skills to trades students can be a sales job above all else, especially at the beginning of the semester. I learned a lot from my teaching predecessor, Janie Harr, about how to help students establish those links by interviewing successful professionals in their fields about how they've used writing to find and keep good jobs. So often, these bright, capable hands-on learners have had very little success in traditional classrooms and see themselves as "bad writers." Sometimes just getting them past this stigma of "I suck" and instead into the land of "here's what I'm doing well, here's what I can improve upon" can do wonders.

http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/gedney.KY0180/

Let's face the facts: all of the classes I teach are required in some way, and the majority of my students would not be taking my classes if they weren't required. So motivational theory is highly relevant to my job. I like what Matthew Weller has to say in his LA Business Journal article on General Principles of Motivation, in particular his establishment of a timeline and what we can do to motivate learners at the beginning, middle and end of a learning experience.

Up, Down, All Around

Teaching critical thinking is the most important thing we do. You know the saying: give a person a fish; teach a person to fish. . . We want our students to be able to fish for themselves and get their intellectual essential fatty acids forever.

It's not a bad idea, either, if they also learn to look at the situation from the perspective of the fish. Maybe they'll choose not to eat it then, or maybe they still will, but they'll understand the complexity of the situation and make a well-informed moral decision.

Now that word, "moral". . . I dislike it; it makes me feel squeamish and uncomfortable. I far prefer the word "ethical," so maybe I should just use the word ethical.

Contemplation, Perseverance, Imagination, and Free Will. From the morality play Hickscorner. Reproduced in H.W. Mabie, William Shakespeare (1900).

http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Library/SLT/drama/moralities.html

I agree with a lot of what I read on the Critical Thinking Community website, but I don't agree with this assertion - "We must resuscitate minds that are largely dead when we receive them." Students come to us teeming with ideas and opinions, and it's more a manner of connecting, channeling, challenging and engaging.

To me, critical thinking is about unknowing as much as it is about learning. It's about humility, complexity, and entering the wide world of shared knowledge, shared experience, and shared confusion. The benefit therein is not an easier life, but a rich one with strong ties to community, self, society, and the fish that one eats or chooses not to.

Through the Years

As a strong believer in life-long learning, I found it helpful to consider students' learning needs and styles in terms of their developmental stages. Erik Erikson's theory of eight stages of human development includes three stages that many of my students are in, namely five, six and seven - adolescence, young adulthood, and middle adulthood. I plan on being more mindful of how a student's stage of life can affect his or her intellectual needs and potential.

http://www.zazzle.com/hiker_in_the_mount_aconcagua_valley_in_chile_1915_poster-228197591982579602

Reading about Kohlberg's stages of moral development led me to think about Carol Gilligan's work on women's moral development, which I was first exposed to in college. I agree with Kohlberg's assertion that why an individual makes a certain ethical decision is as significant in some ways as the decision that is made. Moral reasoning and critical thinking skills are vital aspects of being well-educated, and the goal is to challenge and empower students to improve their critical thinking skills so they can make well-informed moral decisions.

Slow Learning

I'm enjoying the opportunity to ponder Accelerated Learning theory and think about how I can incorporate it more into my classroom. I want to try using different colored cups during a writing class when students are composing at their computers. . .  green for "it's going well," yellow for "eh," and red for "come help me!" We could have a lot of fun with this. . . purple for "what's the meaning of life?", blue for "sentence structure's getting me down," and orange to signify "medium to high-level terrorist threat in this corner of the classroom!"

Even though I'm so busy with teaching, I do feel like this Ed Psych class I'm taking adds a nice extra layer to the semester, in the sense that it forces me to reflect on what I'm doing. I incorporated an Accelerated Learning-type activity in Intro to College Writing today without even intending to. . .  It's powerful to experience a synergy between teaching and my own learning.

http://susanwiggs.wordpress.com/2008/04/

Okay, so there's the Slow Food movement and even the Slow Poetry one. . .  thinking of learning as accelerated leads me to thinking of learning as slow, and the potential benefits of Slow Learning. How can learning be clean, fair, responsible, pleasurable and local? That's good learning, just like it's good food.

Just when I was feeling brilliant for coming up with the concept of Slow Learning, I found educator Sam Grumont's blog. He mentions a book by Maryanne Woolf called called Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, which I plan on reading as soon as possible. Quickly, slowly, somewhere in between.

Models of Learning

This week, I examined three models of learning: learning styles, multiple intelligences, and accelerated learning.  (Here's another great site on multiple intelligences theory, with a brief and excellent quiz.)

 I've long been a fan of multiple intelligences theory, and I've found that students respond well to a classroom discussion of it. It's helpful for them to see that there are many forms of intelligence besides the traditionally valued ones, and that not everyone learns best by reading and writing, even though schools have historically been set up to favor this way of learning.

I fess up to my students (as if they haven't already guessed, since I'm their English teacher) that I do learn best by reading and writing, and that I love this stuff - hence, I teach it. We talk about all the forms of intelligence - verbal-linguistic, visual-spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, musical, and mathematical-logical - and how they are all valuable. I have them take the online quiz at the great site I mentioned above. . . They print out their results in a colorful pie chart. I post signs listing the different forms of intelligence and we move around the room to illustrate what our strongest and least used forms are. It's an interesting visual/kinesthetic exercise and generates some good discussion!

I had not heard before of the ninth intelligence that Howard Gardner added to the list - existential intelligence. I'm definitely going to bring this one up to students in the future. I want to know who in the classroom is on a quest to determine the meaning of life. (Aren't we all?)

In my Applied Comm classes, I am typically alone in the verbal-linguistic corner when we go to the sign with our strongest form, with students grouped in visual-spatial and bodily-kinesthetic, and I'm alone in the visual-spatial corner for the "least used" part of the exercise, with many students in verbal-linguistic. They can see how they'd be the ones teaching me in their auto tech, welding, and industrial maintenance program classrooms.

Accelerated learning is a new learning model to me, and I'm glad I got a chance to read about it this week. I'm excited to try some of the suggestions in my classroom. There are a lot of dynamic ideas for how to shake up group activities and incorporate review of course material. These approaches will be especially helpful in Oral/Interpersonal Communication, and I want to find meaningful ways to use them in Intro to College Writing as well.

Applying Learning Theories

Question of the day: Is it possible that I've been applying theories I never even knew existed? I suppose so, or perhaps I knew on a subconscious level, having absorbed the knowledge through years of teaching and physical proximity to teachers who actually took education courses in college and grad school.

I think it's been established, in any case, that I'm a humanist-constructivist-social learning pedagogue. Rather than a hyphenated name, I'd prefer to blend all three, but there's no way to do this gracefully. Huconsoc. Humasociaconst. That one has a certain ring to it. Sort of.

I still have a way to go before I  understand who Gagne, Bruner, Skinner, Bandura, Carroll, Vygotsky, and the rest of them actually were and what they thought. I mean, I get the basics at this point, and maybe that's enough, at least for now.

On a more concrete note, it was helpful to trace the use of a constructivist and social learning approach in a particular unit that I teach, namely listening and interpersonal communication skills in Applied Communication 2. I think that looking at teaching approaches and sequences closely can help me to be more deliberate about what I do, and more effective as a teacher as a result.

Making Connections

This week in my Educational Psychology class, we are analyzing and comparing several learning theories, namely behavioral, humanistic, cognitive, constructivist, and social learning theory. I'm a humanist at heart, but I've learned that to reach my students, I need a range of other approaches besides merely standing on my desk and shouting out "O Captain! My Captain!" (Yes, Dead Poets Society was my favorite film for many years.)

Come to think of it, though, that would probably wake up the after-lunch Applied Comm 1 crowd. . .

I've long known that most of my students have different learning styles than I do, and as a head-frequently-in-clouds poet teaching technical college students who are concrete thinkers and hands-on learners, one of my ongoing challenges is to put myself in my students' shoes and ask, "What's their hook going to be into this material? How can I connect this competency to what they care about, and how can we reach it in a way that fits with how they learn?"

Studying learning theory puts names to ideas I've already been aware of on some level as a practicing teacher, and this is an empowering process. For example, based on my understanding, I use a behaviorist approach through a point system; there's a direct, almost immediate reward or consequence for completing or not completing work. I've learned to "break it down" as a means of reaching loftier goals.

In terms of how studying these theories will influence my teaching now and forevermore, I would like to more deliberately utilize social learning theory in my writing classes. I have found that student success rates are higher when students have a sense of community in a writing class, whether it's in person and online. While I focus greatly on group dynamics and class bonding when teaching Oral and Interpersonal Communication, I plan on being more intentional about creating community in the writing classroom.