[Week 10]
This week saw some major progress on our group project. We have finally established the structure of our instruction, much of the content, and are beginning some early stage prototype videos. At this point my principal concern is the development of professional quality in our videos. Because principles of public speaking are not sequential or cummulative in nature, instruction on public speaking does not need to be either! Still, we are creating structure in each video in order to create a consistent format, so that learners know what to expect out of each video. We have access to the software an hardware to make professional quality videos, the next step is learning how to do it! I am planning on taking some more lynda.com training, this time in video production.
Our design decisions have ranged from large scale to small scale, and many of them are fleshed out through a collaborative process where a group member takes a position on a design decision, and another member takes a differing view, and then as a group we debate the merits of both positions. This is certainly part of the learning process, and as a group we are able to overcome the conflicts, mostly by either abandoning initial positions, or finding middle ground.
One design decision we had to flesh out was the structure of feedback. In our project, learners have the option to upload videos of themselves practicing their speaking skills. To help them, other learners would give feedback. We could not decide if those giving feedback should have a detailed framework for giving feedback (in the format of a form) or general guidelines. On the one hand, a detailed framework would ensure that the learners received relevant feedback. On the other, people may feel intimidated if they were to receive such a form of feedback for their initial efforts. After much debate, we resolved the issue by finding a middle ground: learners could indicate whether they want formative of summative style feedback. If they requested formative feedback, those leaving feedback would leave general, and encouraging comments. If they selected summative feedback, those giving feedback would leave detailed feedback with a high level of expectation, and would use a structured feedback form.
While we have not yet designed the guidelines for feedback nor the feedback form, we think this will enable our learners to collaborate and assess each other by encouraging them to scal expectations to learner input.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Saturday, March 2, 2013
[Week 9] Reflection
Reflection is something I have seldom used in my instruction. Aside from a once-per-concert reflection, I never used it. The reflection I used was something like this:
1. What was your favorite part of the concert last night?
2. What do you think went very well?
3. What do you think could have gone better?
4. What did you learn that will help you for the next concert?
I would leave a good deal of space for the students to write, and was often very surprised by their answers. My purpose was to help them remember the experience, and to draw attention to the idea that a concert is, in addition to a performance, a learning experience.
Another tool I considered using was a practice journal. I don't know if it would benefit the students or not, but I imagine that it would, mainly because it creates another pathway to a memory. Like the 'think sheets' used in R541 and Dr. Pisoni's undergrad memory class, it could create one more 'cue' to remember things.
One thing this week's readings point out to me is that the kind of reflection you do must match your pourpose. While that seems rather intuitive, having a pre-established idea of what kind of reflections are best for certain tasks can certainly instructional designers make more intentional decisions.
In the reading, I found the ideas of meta-cofnitive reflections rather interesting. Davis states: "I characterize reflection as “poor” or “unproductive” when it seems unlikely to promote these knowledge integration processes, and as “more productive” when it is more likely to foster knowledge integration processes. For instance, the student who plans for the day’s work and who considers ways in which his or her ideas are or are not well understood is likely to be more successful at knowledge integration than the student who merely forges full-speed ahead without engaging in these metacognitive activities.
knowledge integration processes of linking and distinguishing ideas."
I find this fascinating because I find myself going through a similar process, where suddenly I'm having to think in a meta-cognitive fashion in many respects, and I'm thinking that it will be very productive to direct students to begin thinking about how they engage their intelligence with the world around them.
Reflection is something I have seldom used in my instruction. Aside from a once-per-concert reflection, I never used it. The reflection I used was something like this:
1. What was your favorite part of the concert last night?
2. What do you think went very well?
3. What do you think could have gone better?
4. What did you learn that will help you for the next concert?
I would leave a good deal of space for the students to write, and was often very surprised by their answers. My purpose was to help them remember the experience, and to draw attention to the idea that a concert is, in addition to a performance, a learning experience.
Another tool I considered using was a practice journal. I don't know if it would benefit the students or not, but I imagine that it would, mainly because it creates another pathway to a memory. Like the 'think sheets' used in R541 and Dr. Pisoni's undergrad memory class, it could create one more 'cue' to remember things.
One thing this week's readings point out to me is that the kind of reflection you do must match your pourpose. While that seems rather intuitive, having a pre-established idea of what kind of reflections are best for certain tasks can certainly instructional designers make more intentional decisions.
In the reading, I found the ideas of meta-cofnitive reflections rather interesting. Davis states: "I characterize reflection as “poor” or “unproductive” when it seems unlikely to promote these knowledge integration processes, and as “more productive” when it is more likely to foster knowledge integration processes. For instance, the student who plans for the day’s work and who considers ways in which his or her ideas are or are not well understood is likely to be more successful at knowledge integration than the student who merely forges full-speed ahead without engaging in these metacognitive activities.
In particular, students who, when they reflect, recognize
weaknesses in their current understanding are more apt to engage in the other
knowledge integration processes of linking and distinguishing ideas."
I find this fascinating because I find myself going through a similar process, where suddenly I'm having to think in a meta-cognitive fashion in many respects, and I'm thinking that it will be very productive to direct students to begin thinking about how they engage their intelligence with the world around them.
Friday, February 22, 2013
[Week 8] Scaffolding
Scaffolding is of particular interest to me because it seems, to an extent, to be very similar to my primary method of instruction in the classroom. As an instrumental music teacher, the learner task is exceedingly complex, and requires the connection of physical motor skills to aural processing and identification, which then must both connect to intellectual reasoning. Failure rate of tasks is 100%, no person succeeds on their first attempt. But ultimately, the goal is to fade the highly detailed, direct instruction into scaffolding, and, hopefully, to fade the scaffolding altogether. "My goal," I used to tell my students, "is to make it so that you don't need me."
Looking over the reading, I see that I did not spend much time on meta-cognitive scaffolding, but heavily used the other three. I'm not entirely sure that my instruction would count as scaffolding, since I never set out to make my classroom a place for inquiry based learning. This begs a question - to what extent should scaffolding be different from direct instruction? My initial thought is that the scaffolding seems to be less oriented to success/failure and more toward 'what you don't know'/'what you need to know.'
What do you think? How does scaffolding compare with detailed instruction for physical tasks?
Scaffolding is of particular interest to me because it seems, to an extent, to be very similar to my primary method of instruction in the classroom. As an instrumental music teacher, the learner task is exceedingly complex, and requires the connection of physical motor skills to aural processing and identification, which then must both connect to intellectual reasoning. Failure rate of tasks is 100%, no person succeeds on their first attempt. But ultimately, the goal is to fade the highly detailed, direct instruction into scaffolding, and, hopefully, to fade the scaffolding altogether. "My goal," I used to tell my students, "is to make it so that you don't need me."
Looking over the reading, I see that I did not spend much time on meta-cognitive scaffolding, but heavily used the other three. I'm not entirely sure that my instruction would count as scaffolding, since I never set out to make my classroom a place for inquiry based learning. This begs a question - to what extent should scaffolding be different from direct instruction? My initial thought is that the scaffolding seems to be less oriented to success/failure and more toward 'what you don't know'/'what you need to know.'
What do you think? How does scaffolding compare with detailed instruction for physical tasks?
Monday, February 18, 2013
[Week 7] Continued
After reading more about storytelling as an element of instructional designed, I feel compelled to reflect on something I posted in Chris' blog, which I will repost here:
"There is also a component of storytelling that I find very interesting – good storytellers seldom tell stories that are 100% true. In one way this is negative – how can we trust the story? how can we be sure it is true? In another way, it is positive – it allows the storyteller to convey the truth of the emotional experience. As a simple example: A fisherman lands a big fish. When he tells the story of how big it was, he exaggerates. Why is this? I feel it is because he needs to convey the truth of his experience, which is the extent of his surprise, joy, and excitement at catching the fish. So, when he tells the story, that fish is not 30 inches long and 7.4 pounds. It is "three FEET and 8 WHOLE POUNDS! It nearly snapped the rod in half", the line didn’t just make noise under tension," it was SINGING!"…etc…
In my mind, this is where the power of the story lays – it allows the teller to emphasize the interaction between facts (the world) and meaningful experience. I feel this is why mythical stories persist for so long. Harnessing the power of stories for instruction is not easy, primarily because the learners are, in many ways, living in a different world than the instructors, and so it is hard to know what they will find compelling.
I have also seen and used stories to indoctrinate newcomers to a specific mentality. Teaching people to rock climb, I tend to repeat the way I was taught: Direct instruction, Mnemonics, and stories. Direct instruction is: "Do x in situation y because z." Mnemonics helped encode important ideas (SRENE for the development of solid anchors). Stories, however, served to initiate the learner into the mentality required for survival in high angle environments. Also, they were designed to cultivate a mentality that respects, but is not controlled by fear and danger. There were also hero and blunder stories, many of which had instruction imbedded into them. These stories composed a mythology and historical record of climbers in the Red River Gorge, with main characters starting in about 1968 until the present day.
I think designing stories for instruction is tricky, particularly since authenticity is elusive. Some considerations:
1) Is the story authentic? Real stories are about events that are important in people's lives, or are unusual or interesting for one reason or another.
2) Is it memorable? Story construction, level of detail, irony, fulfillment or denial of expectation, and content can each play a role.
3) How well does it intersect with the learner's experience? Stories that the learner has no ability to relate to do not work well. For example, telling a story about how you were halfway up a climbing route, were" totally pumped, greasing off, and you found out you were out of #1's, 20 foot run out from your last piece, and had to downclimb the crux..." That story has no meaning to someone who is not a specific type of climber. Stories must be relevant.
4) Details matter: if the story content matches well with the learner's experience, then details add an important depth to the story. This is a place where learning happens. Details set up the story for its lesson - Did the hero remember to do x, y, and z? How much time did he spend doing x, y, z. Detail is a place where a concept can be repeated, and made more important.
What would you add?
Friday, February 15, 2013
[Week 7] Storytelling Research
Once upon a time, I used many stories to teach in my band classes. At first, it seemed that I told stories to simply increase student interest. These stories were not very instructional at first. Most were anecdotal, and, while they may have been good for a laugh, or an 'oh really?' moment, they did not seem to add much to class, except for the fact that I enjoyed telling them, and students enjoyed listening. I told them because I remembered how much I enjoyed my teachers' stories, and how much I looked forward to these moments. They seemed to be downtime, a brief break from the work of learning. Then one day, I was teaching a high school group how to develop an internal sense of rhythm, as the students were diligently (and heavily) stomping their feet to help them keep time. The concert: two days away. It was the group's first rehearsal together on a concert stage. The band sounded beautiful except for one thing: the students, as trained, were tapping their feet to keep time. The result was a beautiful, transcripted adagio aria punctuated with the sound of a slow death march, feet drudgingly pounding out the beauty of the melody. To put it in visual terms, it was like a beautiful painting being repetitively stabbed with a pencil.
To help them, it occurred to me to tell them a story I remembered from music history class.
The hero? Jean-Baptise Lully. French composer of incredible renown in his time, he was the leader of an orchestra, back when an orchestra was something of a new thing, and a very, very big deal. His compositions were loved for their rich harmony, and he was widely celebrated. Unfortunately, his demise came from precisely the problem my band was having. "You see" I described to the class, "He used a rather heavy and pointed stick to keep time for his orchestra. I tap my baton on the podium sometimes to help you keep time, but, maybe I should, maybe we should, learn from the fall of this hero. You see, was furiously trying to get his orchestra to stay together, pounding his stick on his podium - which turned out to be a fatal mistake. In a careless move, he stabbed his foot with the stick. His wound? It became infected with gangrene, which killed him." The students, somewhat shocked, needed a little description of how this could be. After a short description, I said "Let's not follow in his footsteps. Feel the rhythm with your body, not with your foot, but in your torso..." This initiated a lesson on how to do exactly that. The resulting lesson went very well.
This served as my first experience of the use of stories to serve a specific instructional purpose.
Reading the Andrews article, and attempting to categorize the various types of stories I have told is a very interesting idea - and it crystallizes for me the usefulness of planning stories ahead of time, and being intentional, rather than 'spur of the moment' in my use of storytelling. While I feel that storytelling best suits environments where success is difficult or important, I also wonder about its applications in other settings. What are your thoughts?
Once upon a time, I used many stories to teach in my band classes. At first, it seemed that I told stories to simply increase student interest. These stories were not very instructional at first. Most were anecdotal, and, while they may have been good for a laugh, or an 'oh really?' moment, they did not seem to add much to class, except for the fact that I enjoyed telling them, and students enjoyed listening. I told them because I remembered how much I enjoyed my teachers' stories, and how much I looked forward to these moments. They seemed to be downtime, a brief break from the work of learning. Then one day, I was teaching a high school group how to develop an internal sense of rhythm, as the students were diligently (and heavily) stomping their feet to help them keep time. The concert: two days away. It was the group's first rehearsal together on a concert stage. The band sounded beautiful except for one thing: the students, as trained, were tapping their feet to keep time. The result was a beautiful, transcripted adagio aria punctuated with the sound of a slow death march, feet drudgingly pounding out the beauty of the melody. To put it in visual terms, it was like a beautiful painting being repetitively stabbed with a pencil.
To help them, it occurred to me to tell them a story I remembered from music history class.
The hero? Jean-Baptise Lully. French composer of incredible renown in his time, he was the leader of an orchestra, back when an orchestra was something of a new thing, and a very, very big deal. His compositions were loved for their rich harmony, and he was widely celebrated. Unfortunately, his demise came from precisely the problem my band was having. "You see" I described to the class, "He used a rather heavy and pointed stick to keep time for his orchestra. I tap my baton on the podium sometimes to help you keep time, but, maybe I should, maybe we should, learn from the fall of this hero. You see, was furiously trying to get his orchestra to stay together, pounding his stick on his podium - which turned out to be a fatal mistake. In a careless move, he stabbed his foot with the stick. His wound? It became infected with gangrene, which killed him." The students, somewhat shocked, needed a little description of how this could be. After a short description, I said "Let's not follow in his footsteps. Feel the rhythm with your body, not with your foot, but in your torso..." This initiated a lesson on how to do exactly that. The resulting lesson went very well.
This served as my first experience of the use of stories to serve a specific instructional purpose.
Reading the Andrews article, and attempting to categorize the various types of stories I have told is a very interesting idea - and it crystallizes for me the usefulness of planning stories ahead of time, and being intentional, rather than 'spur of the moment' in my use of storytelling. While I feel that storytelling best suits environments where success is difficult or important, I also wonder about its applications in other settings. What are your thoughts?
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