Reflection on Learning & Practice
Donald Schon’s The Reflective Practitioner was required reading for me in the English Education Program at NYU. It helped ground me after my high-flying flights of theory—and helped me think about what I do in a classroom and what is happening for my students. I kept a regular log of the activities of each class and my thoughts about how things were going: what went well, what didn’t, things to change, or things to try again. All the preceptors (our official title) met regularly to talk about practice, to think through the curriculum, and to share ideas about workshop procedures. It was an amazingly rich and unique experience for me as a student and instructor. What does that have to do with now, with TOUT 2740?
I think some of my criticism of the theories in the textbook comes out of my time at NYU, reading theory and qualitative & quantitative research—seeing they often are only tangentially related to what’s happening on the ground, in the classroom. Theory was something I read, thought about, and used to help me form my perspective, but not necessarily to guide day-to-day activities because those were always changing based on where my students were in their understanding. Knowing why I was doing something a particular way and not another way was good, but I also needed to not exclude possibilities just because they sat outside my theoretical perspective: for some class or some student, those possibilities might be the ones needed.
So, one thing I have learned, or re-learned, is that a narrow theoretical perspective on something as complicated as how our minds perceive and process information, is not enough to think about, and it is not enough to form hard and fast rules about how to construct online presentations and course materials. At the end of each chapter, the textbook authors always talk about what they do not know about their principles, but they never question their theory, what might be outside it, and how those things might affect their principles. So I have come to embrace the power of doubting this semester, and I feel better able to ask questions about why things are done one way and not another, and to see that advice may come from unsound theories but still be good and or useable advice.
In addition to the monocular theory, one of the other things I worry about is the conflation of learning in different contexts and learning for different reasons/ends. I understand that on-the-job training is a big part of online learning and a big part of the research that has been done to date, but it is not the only kind of learning going on online—and this bears remembering and highlighting. I start to feel uneasy with concepts of learning “efficiency” and overloaded “channels” as though our brains are computers with input and output ports which should all be tweaked and tuned for maximum usage; and I feel particularly uneasy with the use of business metaphors for constructing courses and learning: “leveraging,” “return on investment,” “promote”—these are all terms from the world of commerce, and as metaphors for learning and teaching, they set up some unsavory aspects I am not comfortable with in a liberal arts or higher education setting. Not everything is a skill or a nugget of knowledge that can be tested, objectified, or monetized—not everything is transferable, and this is especially so in the world of liberal studies where learning to reason, to think, to stick with ideas and explore them, to investigate systems and concepts, and to refashion your thinking into something you can share with others, are not straightforward or measurable in the same ways that some online job skills or STEM subjects may be. Learning can be anything but efficient—we need to remember that and help students remember it, so they are not frustrated when things don’t work the first time or even the second, when it takes repeating and multiple failures before something sticks or becomes a part of us—becomes truly deep learning.
Which is where I will wrap things up: with frustration and sticking with things. When I was putting the Jing screencast together, I realized my usual level of frustration and anxiety about learning a new technology was quite a bit less than at the beginning of the course when we were learning Google slides. I was thinking maybe it is just a kind of de-sensitivity that comes from repeatedly doing something you are uncomfortable with (like building up mental callouses); and, that may be part of it, but I also realized I can repeatedly fail and re-try, that these technologies or tools are forgiving in that way: I really can just delete and start again (I lost count of the re-tries on Jing). This may seem like an obvious thing, but it wasn’t to me—I have been harboring a fear of the complexities of re-doing something, of not understanding and messing something up in a permanent way, or of having to jerry rig something which isn’t quite right. But, most of these technologies we have learned in this class really do allow you to wipe the slate clean indefinitely until you get the hang of something—and that is an amazing thing!
I think some of my criticism of the theories in the textbook comes out of my time at NYU, reading theory and qualitative & quantitative research—seeing they often are only tangentially related to what’s happening on the ground, in the classroom. Theory was something I read, thought about, and used to help me form my perspective, but not necessarily to guide day-to-day activities because those were always changing based on where my students were in their understanding. Knowing why I was doing something a particular way and not another way was good, but I also needed to not exclude possibilities just because they sat outside my theoretical perspective: for some class or some student, those possibilities might be the ones needed.
So, one thing I have learned, or re-learned, is that a narrow theoretical perspective on something as complicated as how our minds perceive and process information, is not enough to think about, and it is not enough to form hard and fast rules about how to construct online presentations and course materials. At the end of each chapter, the textbook authors always talk about what they do not know about their principles, but they never question their theory, what might be outside it, and how those things might affect their principles. So I have come to embrace the power of doubting this semester, and I feel better able to ask questions about why things are done one way and not another, and to see that advice may come from unsound theories but still be good and or useable advice.
In addition to the monocular theory, one of the other things I worry about is the conflation of learning in different contexts and learning for different reasons/ends. I understand that on-the-job training is a big part of online learning and a big part of the research that has been done to date, but it is not the only kind of learning going on online—and this bears remembering and highlighting. I start to feel uneasy with concepts of learning “efficiency” and overloaded “channels” as though our brains are computers with input and output ports which should all be tweaked and tuned for maximum usage; and I feel particularly uneasy with the use of business metaphors for constructing courses and learning: “leveraging,” “return on investment,” “promote”—these are all terms from the world of commerce, and as metaphors for learning and teaching, they set up some unsavory aspects I am not comfortable with in a liberal arts or higher education setting. Not everything is a skill or a nugget of knowledge that can be tested, objectified, or monetized—not everything is transferable, and this is especially so in the world of liberal studies where learning to reason, to think, to stick with ideas and explore them, to investigate systems and concepts, and to refashion your thinking into something you can share with others, are not straightforward or measurable in the same ways that some online job skills or STEM subjects may be. Learning can be anything but efficient—we need to remember that and help students remember it, so they are not frustrated when things don’t work the first time or even the second, when it takes repeating and multiple failures before something sticks or becomes a part of us—becomes truly deep learning.
Which is where I will wrap things up: with frustration and sticking with things. When I was putting the Jing screencast together, I realized my usual level of frustration and anxiety about learning a new technology was quite a bit less than at the beginning of the course when we were learning Google slides. I was thinking maybe it is just a kind of de-sensitivity that comes from repeatedly doing something you are uncomfortable with (like building up mental callouses); and, that may be part of it, but I also realized I can repeatedly fail and re-try, that these technologies or tools are forgiving in that way: I really can just delete and start again (I lost count of the re-tries on Jing). This may seem like an obvious thing, but it wasn’t to me—I have been harboring a fear of the complexities of re-doing something, of not understanding and messing something up in a permanent way, or of having to jerry rig something which isn’t quite right. But, most of these technologies we have learned in this class really do allow you to wipe the slate clean indefinitely until you get the hang of something—and that is an amazing thing!