Program Directory

AEDT 510

Resource Presentation Material:

 

Reflection - how to leverage learning

Three stages of reflection:

• Wander (brainstorming)
• capture(recording)
• share (presenting)

HOw to Leverage Learning:

• Step 1 Individual Reflection (15-20 minutes): Review learning from a meeting or other activity using the agenda, presonal notes and the reflection questions (wander). Record specific insight and action implications in a learning log (capture)
  • unstructured, free-flowing thoughts, writing, & (sometimes) discussion - Student journals, informal journals - Encourage Ss to be disorderly, ambiguous, and creative
  
   
• Step 2 Paired Reflection (15-20 minutes): Take turns reporting the most significant insight and the action implications (share). Record new insight in a learning log (capture).
  • The learning log is a primary tool capturing learning.
  
   
• Step 3 Group Reflection (20 minutes): Report the insight and its action implications - one content-specific and one personal (share). Go around the room until everyone has reported those items. Facilitators conclude the session with their own insight.
  • reformatting others' insights nurtures understanding
  • reporting insights to others opens feedback channels & helps refine the material presented
  • it also influences the audience's learning experience (teaches them)
  
   

Transfer

• near/far transfer - transfer of skill/knowlege
   
• 'Bo Peep' - appraoch to transfer in education - 'Let them alone and they'll come home, wagging their tails behind them.'
   
• Negative transfer - prior learning interferes w/ incoming information.
   
• Evidence against transfer
  • Literacy as carrier of cognitive abilities: Vai - African tribe w/ recently developed written language system - no significant difference in cognitive abilities between literate & illiterate Vai.
  • Computer programming instruction as carrier: research findings mostly negative - hypothesis: students devolop fluency in a particular programming language, not in the logical structures or work processes related to them.
  • Slightly retarded students and basic cognitive skills of memory: it appears that the strategies become 'contextually welded' to the specific circumstances under which they were acquired.
  • Chess masters have reperatoires of 'schemata' - skilled play depends largely on the size of one's repretoire.
  
   
• In sum, skill & knowledge are sometimes more specialized (local) than than they first appear.
   
• hi road/low road theory: (Salomon & Perkins, 1984)
  • lo road transfer reflects the automatic triggering of well-practiced routines in circumstances similar to those in which the routine was learned originally
  • hi raod depends on deliberate, mindful abstraction from one context to another, not neccessarily similar.
     
  • Teaching for Transfer
    • De-contextualize patterns when appropriate to facilitate transfer.
    • Hugging - teaching so as to better meet the resemblance conditions for low road transfer
    • Bridging - instruction mediates, as neccessary, the process of abstraction and connection making to facilitate hi-road transfer.
    • 'problem-based learning' - concepts are presented in the context of class, then of a story that requires Ss to tranfer the concepts in and apply them to problems in the story.
       
    • Take time occasionally to teach students how to transfer learning, how to develop transfer skills, and present them with activities that require transfer from another context.
       
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