Ali’s teaching demonstration was amazing. I brought back a lot of memories from college. I was a biology and math tutor in college and this is what first gave me the teaching bug. I loved being able to sit with a peer one on one and work through problems and help them understand the material. Ali was so great at this. Sometimes students just need that one on one question to prompt their understanding. I find myself so often ask my husband or a co-worker for help with some problem and by relating the problem to them I unintentionally work through it on my own. I think students just need an outlet to voice the material sometimes. Ali’s technique was so good in that is allowed the student to formulate her own opinions about the poem without fear of being wrong. Ali did such a good job putting her at ease. I miss those days of peer tutoring and the feeling I would get when I could “see” the light bulb come on for a student.
Erica’s lecture on e-learning really allowed me to see how involved structuring an e-learning module can be. I spoke with her some after class to find out more about the program she uses to create the modules. I would love to create some e-learning activities for the blood bank training program, but the time involved is daunting. I had always kind of viewed e-learning as a short cut around actual instruction. You don’t have to pay someone to come teach the class, just have the student do the learning module. One thing I would have liked to know more about though is the evaluation piece to e-learning. Most of the e-learning modules I have used had very limited post module evaluations. The evaluations did not accurately reflect how well the student learned the material. I see some research in my future….
We have talked about Bloom’s taxonomy in almost every class I have taken so far in this program. I have understood it before now but the way Wendy presented it really brought it home for me. I find myself using the verbs sheet when creating learning objectives now and structuring learning tasks around these verbs. The activity we used in class really tied the concept together for me. Using the verbs to structure learning objectives not only taught me the concept, it was also a great example of an active learning activity!
For my ID I plan to plan something I can use in the future. My department does clinical rotations for the Clinical Laboratory Sciences students every fall. The students are in the lab for rotation for 8 hours every day for three weeks then they rotate to a different lab and we get three new students. This happens for the entire fall semester. I am doing my ID on the first day of their rotation through blood bank, their orientation day. I plan to do an ID for every day of their rotation through the lab so that if I am ever out (when I get the job) someone can just pick up the binder and flip to whatever day and know what to do with the students. Again this seems so right to me now, especially after being the current Ed Coordinators backup and never knowing what is going on when she it out.
For my Teaching Demo I will be teaching the class about the ABO blood groups. It will be lecture with some interactive stuff thrown in.
In every adult education class I have taken, I constantly think about how I can apply what I have learned to my job, actually to the job I hope to have someday. On the flip side of this, everyday that I have to work as the backup ed coordinator I am constantly filing what I see in my “what not to do” file. This week I have filled up the how not to do assessments portion of that file. I don’t think the training portion of our program is horrible but it doesn’t have any kind of learning objectives so the trainee is kind of left hanging when it comes to knowing what they should be focusing on. The assessment that follows the training is horrendous. There are questions on the assessment that deal with information the trainee might not have seen since Med Tech school and really has no need to remember because the theoretical information is easily accessible in our technical manual. Seeing all of this actually really made me understand the importance of having learning objectives and structuring learning tasks around those objectives. I guess sometimes seeing how not to do something is more powerful than learning the correct way.
Well, yesterday was probably one of the worst days in recent history. When I arrived at work on Wednesday, I was informed that the Education Coordinator was out sick and would be out for the next few days. I am her backup, which I am starting to hate. The Education Coordinator is the job that I eventually want in my organization. From a previous post and from a post I am going to write after this one you may know that I don’t have much love for the woman in the position currently. Neither does anyone else but do you know how hard it is to actually have grounds to fire someone nowadays, espeically at an organization like VCU. I know this is going to sound really, really unprofessional but my boss actually told me to look for jobs and leave the posting lying around so she could find them. I know he was kidding and he can do that because he is a freind of mine, but it is really frustrating. It is really becoming an animosity thing here at work. All of my co-workers tell me constatnly how great I would be at the position and hearing that is really nice and confidence boosting, but after 6 months of hearing it I am a frustrated mess. So back to my day….. about mid morning I got a call from my husband telling me that his hours were just cut at work. No more 40 hours, now just 32. He is only going to be working Monday thru Thursday. Money wise we will be ok, at least for the immediate future, but it is scary. I can’t stand to even turn on the TV anymore because all I hear is bailout and unemployment and forclosure. It is depressing and for a while it didn’t touch me, but after the news I got I felt like the world was crashing down on me. So again back to my day…Our newest employee was scheduled to take her technical training test on Thursday and I was asked to do her review yesterday and make up her pratical. The review was no problem as she had checklists and study questions but the practical was ridiculous. There was a stack of paper telling me what kinds of sample to make up but half of the samples were not on the key and some I had no idea of what she was being tested on. It was the biggest mess I have ever laid my hands on. I ended having to stay two extra hours just to get it set up. On top of that the written portion of the test was not printed out. When I went to print it out there were multiple versions saved. When the correct was located and printed out I realized there was a whole case study section for which I had no cases and could not locate them anywhere. This was one of the most frustrating experiences in recent history. All of this on top of the fact that this is the fourth exam I have proctored for her in the past 8 months. The others were CLS student exams and they went more smoothly but there was even frustrating parts to those. Ok I think I am done ranting, but I am going to kinda continue in my next post.
I have wanted to write in my blog sooo many times about things but unfortunately when I would think about those things I wasn’t near a computer. So I have taken to carrying around a little notepad in my planner where I jot down my thoughts. So here is my first transcribed blog post, probably one of many that will be posted tonight.
I was thinking during class the other night about how we construct knowledge. We were talking a lot about the baggage that learners have. Some learners have a concept cemented in their minds so much that even when faced with the alternate and true explanation, they have a hard time discarded their original construct. This got me thinking about the opposite situation, when learners don’t have enough experience to understand the concept. For example, a student in a biology class is learning about DNA for the first time and the teacher describes its structure as a spiral staircase. The student has never seen a spiral staircase before and has no idea what one looks like so he lacks the experience to make the mental connection. Both of these situation require the instructor to be aware of their learner’s backgrounds and needs.
On a kind of related side note, Professor Wendy’s “bobbed wire” story really cracked me up. It reminded me of a few silly mispronounciations of my family. 1) My Dad for years thought the song by Credence Clearwater Revival “Bad Moon on the Rise” was “Bathroom on the Right” and he also thought the song “My Eyes Adore You” was “Mice in Georgia.” 2) I thought the song by Filter “Hey Man Nice Shot” was “He-Man Nation” and was singing it in the car with my husband and he proceeded to laugh so hard he cried. 3) My husband is notorious for say words phonetically before he really thinks about them, for example we were riding along and he called the speedometer a Speed-o-meter. Really. and he pronounced omnipotent as Omni-potent. I still give him a hard time about these. haha. But these don’t really bother me even though I am a stickler for pronouncing things correctly, the one thing that does bother me is people who don’t pronounce my daughter’s name correctly. Her name is Jolee, pronounced like Angelina Jolie, not as two separate words Jo Lee. AHHHH It drives me crazy! Anyway, I ramble.
I am soooo behind on my blog posts and I am soooo sorry. These past few weeks have been some of the craziest of recent. First of all, work has been crazy, but home life has been crazier. I have some medical problems that might be related to my c-section that have really brought me down this semester. My dad travels about 6 months of the year and is currently in Ireland. Whenever my dad is away my mom needs a little more attention from me which I don’t mind, but sometimes it exhausts me. Case in point and also a funny, if not disturbing story, last Friday my mom calls me at work crying. Now, if you don’t know, my mom keeps my child during the day, so the first thing I thought of was the baby. The girls I work with said all the color drained out of my face as soon as I answered the phone. I said hello and mom was crying and I said what’s wrong and I must have sounded terrified because she immediately cried “the baby’s ok.” I then said ”What’s Wrong?!?!” I had to get her to calm down and take a deep breath before she could tell me. She was taking my dog and her two dogs to the groomers, so that morning she got my 9 month old in her car seat and three dogs loaded into the car and off she went. (I offered to go into work late so she wouldn’t have to do this). As she was making the turn from Turner Rd onto Midlothian Turnpike the rear passenger door flew open and out fell one of my mom’s dogs, Marley, a miniature Schnauzer. Mom looked in her side view mirror and saw Marley sitting in the middle of the road, frozen to the spot. She pulled into the gas station, dashed out into the road and grabbed the dog. Then she proceeded to call me at work and scare the living daylights out of me. This, folks, is just a sampling of what the last few weeks have been like and whenever I try to get something done I think it’s like dancing underwater.
We talked a lot this week about the similarities between how we teach adults and how we teach children. I loved the point Wendy made that, hey, it’s not all that different. From where I sit I don’t see a lot of differences at all. We talked about the special situations that adults may have in the classroom like vision problems, hearing problems, health problems, family problems and that all these problems have to be taken into account when we teach adults. Don’t most of the same issues have to be addressed when teaching children? An elementary school teacher can have a wide assortment of students in his or her classroom, some could wear glasses, some could be physically handicapped, some could be ADD, some could have other learning disorders, some could have family problems, etc etc. I guess the point I am trying to make is that we are learning how to be effective teachers of human beings, reagardless of age, because even though we may come to the table with a unique set of problems, age really doesn’t make it any different. Some would say that the experiences that adults bring to the classroom influences their learning, but children also bring experiences and pre-conceived notions to the classrooms and it all effects how we teach and how they learn.
Sorry guys! I guess I clicked Save last week instead of publish and this blog post has just been hanging out unpublished. Oh well, here it is!
As I was reading the interpretations of the Philosophy of Adult Education Inventory it said that if you were not clearly dominate in one or two categories to clarifying your beliefs and values, looking for contradictions. So I paused, went back through the questions and thought about my answers a little and I came to this conclusion, my answers were situation dependent. I am more than just one kind of teacher. I may teach one way when helping my niece understand something, I teach differently when training new employees and I may teach yet still another way when I helping a fellow employee figure something out on the computer. Taking each inventory question in just one of these contexts I feel I would be clearly dominant in one or two these philosophies, but I didn’t think of just one context when taking the inventory. As each questions was read, I thought of a situation in which it would apply.
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