ED 430 Curriculum and Instruction Spring 2019

Olga Khazan details the history of “learning styles” and boldly claims them to be myths for The Atlantic in 2018. The history of learning styles starts in New Zealand with Neil Fleming who observed 9000 classrooms and zeroed in on how students like to be presented information. Fleming then developed the VARK (Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic) questionnaire to determine someone’s learning style. While Fleming wasn’t the first to come up with this theory, VARK is widely popular. Khazan attributes the popularity of the VARK questionnaire to the “self-esteem movement”/everyone is special/Mr. Rogers era. Anyone who’s been in school at this point has completed some form of this questionnaire and have referenced their learning style with some sense of pride. Whether that’s pride in understanding how you like to be presented or that an educator is using your preferred learning style and as a result you felt like you are learning. Khazan attempts to debunk the “myth of learning styles...

I continue to draw connections between this course and courses I've previously taken here at UIC as part of this program, which is fun. This week as I read both the Khazan and Bruner pieces, I thought a lot about an educational psychology class I'd taken in my first semester, especially as I revisited Bruner's discussion of Piaget and the ideas about activating students' schema to engage and increase curiosity, and to help give students a context for new information. In educational psychology, curiosity is a huge driver of intrinsic motivation, which is important to the learning process. Something stuck out to me, then, when Bruner wrote that "[w]here grades are used as a substitute for the reward of understanding, it may well be that learning will cease as soon as grades are no longer given--at graduation" (pg. 51). Since grades are the epitome of extrinsic motivation, is there a way for us to ensure (or at least promote) lifelong learning while in primary ...

       The topic of this week is Learning Theories as Frameworks for Teaching.        In  The Process of Education: Chapter 3 Readiness for Learning , Brunner have examined three general ideas of the nature of  curriculum, that is, intellectual development of children, the act of learning, and the notion of the “spiral curriculum”. 1)      Intellectual development. According to Piaget and others, the author divided the intellectual development of child into three stages roughly, including  preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and operational stage. I think it is important for a teacher to take the characteristics of the children’s feature into consideration. For example, I have watched a video about the Piagetian tasks of conversation of number, length, liquid and mass on one child age in 5 to 6 before. I still remember the experiment of stick, even the child saw two same sticks lin...

      For this week there two readings. The first one is The Process of Education and the other is The Myth of “Learning Styles”. For the first reading’s chapter three Readiness for Learning, Bruner began with a hypothesis that any subject can be taught effectively in some intellectually honest form to any child at any stage of development. He examined three general ideas, the process of intellectual development in children, the act of learning, and the notion of the spiral curriculum.       For the first idea, the process of intellectual development in children, it refers to a person's growing ability to learn in relation to the world around him or her. Intellectual development is characterized by several stages. As a child grows, intellectual development continues whether it's evident or not. It's important to foster intellectual development all throughout life.       So, in our daily life we may find that our children often focus on only...

After finish reading the article, the “learning style” theory interests me a lot, the article reveals this worthless theory step by step, now let’s get into it. Neil Fleming suggested that people have different “learning styles”, based on his overwatch of teachers and students’ behavior over 9,000 classes, and then he developed the VARK questionnaire to determine someone’s “learning style”, VARK stands for Visual, Auditory, Reading, and Kinesthetic, each one represent a learning type. This theory then got a lot of supports. However, people are not just one certain kind of learner or another, an example is given in this article. Husmann and her colleagues had hundreds of students to take the VARK questionnaire, the questionnaire determined what kind of learner each student suppose to be and each of them was given an ideal studying strategy which could best suit their learning style. However, the result turned out that those who tailored their studying strategy to suit their learnin...

The theme of this week's discussion is Foundations of Instructional Design The first article UNDERSTANDING BY DESIGN® FRAMEWORK mainly talk about the UbD framework. which offers a planning process and structure to guide curriculum, assessment, and instruction. Its two key ideas are contained in the title: 1) focus on teaching and assessing for understanding and learning transfer, and 2) design curriculum “backward” from those ends. In this article ,the author points out that the UbD framework is based on seven key tenets: 1. Learning is enhanced when teachers think purposefully about curricular planning.2. The UbD framework helps focus curriculum and teaching on the development and deepening of student understanding and transfer of learning.3. Understanding is revealed when students autonomously make sense of and transfer their learning through authentic performance. 4. Effective curriculum is planned backward from long-term, desired results through a three-stage design proces...

This week's readings were especially fun because they started to move from the theoretical into the practical, and specifically, with the Rosenshine (2012), they started to move into the classroom. And I could talk about pedagogy all day long. The two articles worked especially well for the questions I started asking myself about my own institution. Wiggins and McTighe's explanation (2011) of the Understanding By Design framework explains that UBD stresses the idea of designing for the transfer of learning . I find this particularly relevant because I work in higher education, and the teaching here--even the freshman and sophomore level courses offered at my two-year community college--is so different from the teaching in the secondary education classroom. Instructors at my college expect that students come in knowing how to be self-directed learners (I literally just had a conversation with a psychology instructor who told me about a student complaining they're just ...