Learning to Read in a Constructivist Way: Chapter 11 (part one)

I find the concept of metalinguistic awareness to be a wonderful descriptor of our evolution from non-reader to reader. How aware of we of our own journey from non-reader to reader? I certainly can't remember a time of feeling illiterate. I know that before the age of 5 or 6 that I couldn't read, but I don't remember looking at words and not knowing what they meant. But then again, words aren't part of my memory back then: my metalinguistic awareness level prevented me from encoding such tidbits.

Bruning divides language into two conceptual ideas: language use and language structure. Language use or "pragmatics" describes the social and cultural contexts in which we use it. Pragmatics address the when and why of language: why do we communicate (or need to communicate) and when is it appropriate to use language. Language structure focuses on how and what: how do we structure what we say and how do we say it? Bruning focuses on the structure first, and that's what I want to focus on this post.

Of his discussion of language structures (words, syntax, and discourse), only the latter topic would anyone find any sort of controversy. Words and syntax, although fields with controversy in their own right, are given a general overview. He talks about semantics whose study of meaning is important because we need to know what words children learn and what meaning is assigned to those words: vocabulary. More than likely, they might have already formed meaning of a word from observing and modeling adult use of vocabulary. Take what a kid knows about a word and then obliquely measure a kid's awareness of the phonemes and morphemes surrounding the word, then we might be able to measure their metalinguistic ability. We normally do this by first teaching the alphabet, then convincing them that these written letters translate sounds our mouths make, and finally after we convince them, we start a dreaded process: vocabulary lists and (the next concept of Bruning's language structure) grammar/syntax. We all know how much we loved grammar! :P Actually, we had already learned grammar/syntax: but what we needed to learn was standard grammar and not mom's colloquialisms.

The really fascinating part about the first half of the chapter was the bit of discourse on....discourse. How we arrange our thoughts to best express our ideas. Bruning describes two basic discourse structures: narrative and exposition. Narratives are linear progressions on thought: A happened, then B, then C, and it was cool! Expositional discourse efficiently (well, attempts to) organizes concepts in order to explain complex ideas or situations: this organization is rarely linear like a narrative, but rather it depends upon the importance of conveying information with clarity and/or with a certain logic (doesn't have to be rational logic I suppose). I remember when I had to do some creative writing in the fourth grade: my stories were strict narratives. Unfortunately, I tried to be funny, and I failed completely because the continuous use of "and then" didn't have any the comedic impact. Oh well, and then I....

Crisis Intervention

There are three things I want to address in terms of crisis intervention: 1) My impressions of it 2) An overview of the crisis intervention presentation, and 3) Crisis intervention at the Science Center.

I really looked forward to the "Crisis Intervention" presentation: I would say that I'm not skilled in crisis intervention. My only experience would be to help break up fights at the pub I used to work at. I wouldn't say that I back down from breaking up a fight, it's just that, for some reason, they occur away from me: I'm just not a magnet for trouble! (But then again, as a server, I'm not in the bar area as frequently as the bar staff) And with those bar fights, I would only intervene if and when the bartenders needed help: they're really good at breaking up fights. Due to my experience, I guess my posture would be to leave it up to the experts: the bouncers and bartenders in this case. I also had another impression of crisis intervention that included more personal problems than interpersonal problems. I initially thought about chronic behavior disorders (like eating disorders), drug problems, and deep depression/suicidal tendencies. Since I'm not a licensed teacher/psych major, I'm not sure if I'm right or wrong to include these in the crisis prevention category. I'm fairly certain it is.

However, since the teachers who presented this topic were very well versed in crisis intervention in terms of student outbursts/student conflict, it was very appropriate and informative! Here is what I got out of their presentation: I learned a cool way of handling a hair pulling situation (that was fun!) and it reinforced my former instruction on how to break grips. That would be the "cool" lessons. But what I found really fascinating was the Stress Model of Crisis: it presents the stages of a crisis very well. The concept in the model that shouldn't have surprised me was "baseline behavior." It's one of those common sense concepts that hasn't been conceptualized by or for me (aka "given a name"). A student (or any person) has a natural disposition when doing normal activities under normal situations, but his or her disposition could change in a heart beat due to some sort of "trigger event." Keep in mind, the trigger event may have nothing to do with the underlying problem the person faces, but it's the spark that sets them off. The duty of the teacher is to bring them back down to the baseline: de-escalation that leads to a recovery phase. I thought the group did a great job of explaining this process: especially the de-escalation of a violent out of control student. The advice they gave on maintaining a neutral tone of voice and neutral facial expression was dead on! The I ASSIST mnemonic is very helpful too!

So, what happens at the Science Center in a situation like these teachers find themselves in? Fortunately for me, we get to see the kids on their best day: they're happy to be here and the only behavioral problems are from over exuberance! I do know we are not allowed to touch our visitors unless our safety is at risk: but with this presentation, I have some non-contact strategies to deal with a crisis situation if it does arise here.

Why I love and hate student portfolios

I have a love/hate relationship with portfolios. The workshop on portfolios did a good job of summarizing the positive and negative attributes of portfolios for students. I personally think portfolios maintenance is an important skill for kids to learn in grade school. Here are some positives of portfolios: it allows the child to observe the evolution of their work, it can be a resource to the student in future projects, it allows the parent to view the academic progress of the child, and as I said, it's a good skill to have "in the real world." On the negative side, it does create more work for teachers (this is especially true with teachers of the lower skill and lower grade students), it's hard to grade (if grading is the purpose of it), and not all people are on board (including staff and parents). I think for all students, portfolios are a fantastic thing! I wonder if there are ready made modules for teachers to implement this in their classroom with minimal preparation time?!

But why do I love/hate portfolios? I think they're great, but I misplace my work a lot! And this was especially true of my grade school years: I lost my work all the time! Now, it's all on the computer, but sometimes, I don't know which computer its on! D'oh! I wasn't trained in portfolio maintenance until my senior year in college. I was lucky: I'm a bit of a pack rat, and I saved many of my old papers. But most of all, I don't like the idea of a "graded" portfolio. I think it's something that you do or you don't have. If you're in the latter half, a professor/teacher should guide you into bringing your portfolio up to snuff or better yet, have a peer help you out. Every student should have a different idea of what represents their best work, and I think it's more important that the student "present" their portfolio instead of handing it in and hoping it's adequate. The presentation could be in front of peers, teachers, and/or parents. Of these three groups, I prefer presenting in front of peers because students will form stronger opinions of their work in front their fellow students (although a teacher would need to be present in some way to facilitate this).

As a side note: it also doesn't help that the university only gives you 50 megabytes of space on their server: if I'm going to stay in the IDLT discipline, I think I'll be creating individual files bigger than 50 megabytes! 50 megabytes used to be a lot of space: back in 1993!

The idea of guided participation and my work.

Bruning talks about "guided participation" on page 199 of the text. When I first saw this phrase, I immediately thought about the inquiry based learning that we emphasize at the Science Center. We prefer not to give visitors the answers: we gauge their knowledge by asking certain questions and then evaluate the direction the activity will go afterwards. Even after we've made a quick evaluation, the interaction is still a matter of asking leading questions that provoke the visitor into thinking critically about the exhibit/demonstration in front of them. The terms we use, the length of the question, and possible options within the question (a sort of vocal multiple choice) arise out of the initial and subsequent interaction. Although inquiry dwells in the realm of constructivism, I think Bruner had more in mind when talking about guided participation.

Bruner's guided participation (via Rogoff's work on the subject) encompasses both inquiry based learning, which on the scale of guided participation would be on the formal side of the spectrum, and spontaneous social interactions between adults and children. Our interactions at the Science Center are spontaneous to the learner, but to us, it is not (seeing how we're cognizant of the situation). We have developed strategies to identify these learning opportunities and we take advantage of them as much as possible. The visitors like it (usually: it may come off as condescending if we're attempting to get the adults to learn) and it's very challenging to the gallery staff.

I also asked myself if guided participation includes modeling. Upon reading this section carefully, I firmly believe that guided participation is not modeling. Certainly, there's a spontaneous aspect to modeling, but learning how to do something via modeling is different from learning from guided participation. Social interaction separates guided participation from modeling: when an adult helps a child order food from the menu (using the example in the text), that is fundamentally different from a child observing then mimicking the adult. With the adult guidance, the social interaction allows the adult to do more than correct the child, but to lead the child into critically examining the menu then communicating those food/drink decisions to the waiter. This could save the child considerable embarrassment if the child mimicked the adult, and the child did not understand what "A choice of 2 sides" meant or used a tone of voice inappropriate for a child. (As a server for many years, I really encourage parents to do this!) Don't get me wrong, modeling is critical to learning because it happens by default: it puts more burden on the adult because he or she needs to be "on" at all times. A little slip up can create the wrong impression, and because of this, I think adults need to be more aware of opportunities for guided participation: I think it's a much more effective educational tool!

Thoughts on Chapter 9

Constructivism seems to be a highly controversial educational philosophy: at minimum, its methods are disputed amongst academics from traditional pedagogical backgrounds. For example, in my Instructional Systems Design class, I've found that the professor has a bit of disdain for it. Why is there this antipathy towards it? Two reasons off the top of my head. 1) I suspect that A type personalities need more structure and enumerated/clear goals. I find open ended generative activities are more productive than what ISD'ers want us to do: match a verb (from written objectives) to a specific generative activity. In addition, A types are not social beings, and constructivism's emphasis on social interaction as learning tool may make them feel uncomfortable. This could manifest itself at the instructor and/or learner levels. 2) For other teachers/professors, it may be a lack of time and resources to genuinely create a constructivist lesson(s). And related to my second point, teachers/professors may not know enough about constructivism to implement it.

I think this quote on page 195 summarizes the constructivist approach very well: "The aim of teaching, from a constructivist perspective, is not so much to transmit information as to encourage knowledge formation and metacognitive processes for judging, organizing, and acquiring new information" (Bruning, 195) Preach on brother! I really think that to survive in the 21st Century, a student needs to learn how to "judge, organize, and acquire new information" instead of learning "X" as if it were some magic quantity that labels him or her "proficient." Certainly there are skills that do have measured proficiency, but these are base skills that require automaticity (reading, writing, and math, for example). Once a decent level of automaticity is accomplished, the student will need to learn metacognitive skills and cognitive strategies so that information gathering and integration become automatic, too. And with constructivism's emphasis on the social aspect of learning, the learner acquires a certain automaticity in social interactions. I mentioned A types before: this kind of learning, although uncomfortable for them, could help broaden their social horizon and make awkward interactions normal.

I'm a Lego Mindstorm Center Expert!

On page 175, Bruner lists sever characteristics of expert performance. Expertise/An expert ...

1. is domain specific.

2. is able to organize information efficiently.

3. is faster than novices at processing meaningful information because they search and represent problems more efficiently.

4. entails thoughts and actions that are highly automatized.

5. represents problems differently from novices (experts look at the underlying structure)

6. spends more time than novices analyzing the problem at the beginning of the problem-solving process.

7. are better monitors in most situations within their domain of expertise.

According to these seven characteristics, I'm a Lego Mindstorm Center expert! Keep in mind, I am not a Lego Mindstorms expert (although I would say that I am almost proficient) because it's a very complicated system, and I haven't spent that much time building and programming Lego robots. However, what I do is provide kids an introductory experience into Lego Mindstorms that utilizes partially assembled robots and a robot programming interface that's simple and intuitive. My expertise lies in troubleshooting the problems that arise from learner misunderstandings/motivation, robot wear-n-tear, computer errors, and a host of other obscure things that might go wrong in a session. Let's go trough the steps...1) I know a lot about teaching kids to program a Lego robot with the Lego Center's program/tools. 2) I can break down the task/problem at hand into digestible pieces. 3) I can solve 98% of the problems in my venue in a matter of seconds 4) I can remember a kids program with only a cursory glance (this happens a lot: a computer will need to be rebooted, and I usually have to reconstruct the program for them to save time). 5) I can assess a kid's comprehension (or lack of) by looking at their body language and what program commands (or lack of) he or she is giving the robot. 6) If I do come across a problem that I can't solve quickly, I am able to a) redirect the kids/have alternative strategies so that learning still happens b) come to a solution eventually. 7) With just a cursory glance, I can tell if a program will do well or not, and whether a robot is functioning properly (sometimes I have to slow myself down with the latter because the kids don't always understand why I just picked up their robot and fiddled with it). Lastly, all of these things are very automatic to me!
I guess I could also talk about how I'm a Day of Defeat computer game expert (I'm currently ranked 30th out of 17,000 players: I actually worked my way up to 9th ranked at one point), but that would be overkill! BUT, my ability to play the game does reflect the chapter's section on deliberate practice. Although I shouldn't go any further because I might give the impression that I practice my computer game more than I should! ;)

Observations on Chapter 8

Dewey rocks! Ok, I'm not sucking up to Dr. Theodore, but I think it's amazing that his view on problem solving, something that's been around 80-90 years, is still the basis of the "modern model" as put forth by the text. In fact, I like Dewey's model better than the one in the text! Why? Well, as an employee of the Science Center, I like how the text describes Dewey's problem solving model using scientific methodology terms.

"Identifying a problem is one of the most difficult and challenging aspects of problem solving because it requires creativity and persistence yet a willingness to ponder a problem for a long period of time without committing to a solution too early in the process." (Bruner, 164) I think the important, well at least the most provocative, word is "creativity." I've always known that solving a problem might require creativity, but it never occurred to me that you would need it to just identify it (academically, they are too often identified for you)! I have to wonder though if one could become too creative and create a problem. In terms of "importance," I really think persistence is key to problem solving, and combined with the last chapter, it really reinforces the idea that intelligence is mainly a matter of persistence.

I also base this on my experience at the Science Center: it surprises me how quickly kids give up on a problem. For example, we have a "hamster wheel" where the kids have to figure out how to get a very large, heavy wheel moving. It's mainly a matter of figuring out where to place your feet/weight to get it to go. You can tell by where the kid's eyes go and how the parents' distance from the wheel to see how persistent the kid will be. The further the parent is away and the more the kid looks forward/down at the wheel the odds of success go up. If they cannot figure it out, then they'll either reflect/pause, and/or they'll ask me for help. The ones that give up easily, usually have a parent telling them how to do it, and/or they look at you or the parent without putting much effort into solving the problem. To be fair to these kids who might not have built the appropriate schema (low self-efficacy for hamster wheels), I, according to the text, guide them along the process without giving them the answer. Although, since there's a line to try out the wheel, I sometimes need to tell them outright how to do it, but I make sure I represent the problem, tell them why the strategy worked so well as they power the wheel, ask them if there could be a better technique, and invite them to come back again to try something different!

Stages of Reflective Judgement

Reflective judgment is “one's ability to analyze critically multiple facets of a problem, reach an informed conclusion, and justify one's response as systematically as possible.” (Bruning, 148) Man, that quotes packs quite a punch when combined with the assertion by researchers Kitchener and King that this ability is measurable! If I were qualified to assess this ability, could I go up to my friend and say, “Yea, sorry dude, but you're level of reflective judgment is only a 1.1, and listening to you lowers my own reflective judgment score!” (But then again, do I lower my own score by saying such a thing!? This meta thinking can really bake your noodle!)

Ok, what the heck am I talking about? According the Kitchener and King, reflective judgment is a measurable attribute based on three criterion: certainty, process by which we acquire knowledge, and type of evidence. A person who thinks that knowledge is absolute, unchangeable, and doesn't scrutinize new information would score lower (this is referred to as “stage 1”) whereas some who thinks that knowledge is relative, constructed, and scrutinizes evidence would score higher (a level 6 or 7). In th middle, you would have someone who thinks knowledge is “uncertain” and “idiosyncratic:” someone in the middle is a bit wishy-washy about knowledge. Here, why don't I just list them from page 149.

1. Knowledge is unchanging, absolute, and accessible

2. Knowledge is certain but may not be accessible to everyone

3. Knowledge is certain, though it may be accessible to anyone

4. Knowledge is uncertain and idiosyncratic

5. Knowledge is uncertain, though contextually interpretable

6. Knowledge is relative yet justifiable on the basis of rational arguments

7. Knowledge is relative, though some interpretations have greater truth.

As I read this section of the chapter, I found myself saying, “Ooo, I think Person X is a stage 2 person!” or “I think Person Y is a stage 5!” I base this from my observations and reflection on past conversations with them. Of course, I turned it on myself, and I would say that I'm around a 5.5 to 6.5. Why? Is my ego that big? It might be..but it's all relative! (See! I do think knowledge is relative! Ha!) I can tell you that I have progressed through some of the earlier stages, but then again, are these stages contextual in of themselves?

Let me give an example of the former: I used to be very religious! Although I feel it was an important part of my development, I no longer am. My outlook on life was very stage 1-3 (I would say on the 2-3 side) because I believed the only relevant information for making choices in my life stemmed from the writings in the Bible. By the way, I don't equate all religious people as being “stuck” in stages 1-3, as I've known religious people to be in the latter stages. But I was stuck. When I was an upperclassman and came into contact with more diverse crowds, and exposed myself to new ideas, that I started to come out of my shell. It was not until my second year of grad school that I really embraced a stage 4 through 6 outlook: I guess all of those discussions about how an author supported their arguments by considering his or her sources really raised my consciousness.

However, are there certain things in my reflective judgment ability that are contextual (i.e. Lower?). For example, I really do have a habit of believing people in authority in certain situations/contexts that I'm unfamiliar with. When I listen to classroom teachers in class, I soak it up because I do not have their experiences! I'm wondering if I take what they say and not processing it enough to evaluate/read between the lines of what they're trying to convey. It's a thought that's worth pondering....

Chapter 7 and my beliefs about Intelligence

As I started to read chapter 7, I asked myself what I thought intelligence meant. If I were to write this properly, I would have stopped reading and wrote this post write away. But seeing how I read the chapter several weeks ago, that wasn't going to happen. Now I have to write about my beliefs on intelligence post-chapter and I hope it doesn't shade this post too much.

So, what are my beliefs on intelligence? I guess it would start with an evaluation of my own intelligence. I've never had a proper intelligence test...or at least, I don't recall taking one nor do I recall any "score" given. But then again, I'm assuming that IQ is a measure of intelligence. I've definitely done well academically and scored decently on entrance exams. I have always thought of myself as "smart" although I do recognize, that sometimes, I don't have as much common sense as others: I would definitely say that I'm "book smart." And sometimes, I struggle to find words to express myself.
How do I recognize that others are intelligent? Someone who can "think on their feet" and can recite facts/figures off the top of their head impresses me: someone who can do both is especially intelligent in my book. Improvisational speaking ability is another attribute of intelligence. Although, I know some people who aren't very eloquent yet are very intelligent: the book smart crowd. One thing that I've recently concluded as a sign of intelligence is empathatic capacity. My guess: I think intelligence entails a combination of attributes I possess and that I wish I possessed.

The chapter's beginning discusses the difference between the implicit belief of changeable or static intelligence. Does the belief that intelligence is static or changeable affect academic performance? The assertion put forth by the text correlates a belief in changeable intelligence to higher academic achievement. Belief in static intelligence indicates a belief in "performance goals learning" and this leads to a student who measures success by academic performance (or lack of) to learning: although, just because one has done well in a class, is only a superficial indication that learning occurred! I tend to agree with this, and to be honest, I think I've fallen on the performance goal side of the spectrum, but reading this chapter provoked me to re-evaluate this.