Education Revolution

I agree that the education system needs a revolution. The needs of this century cannot be met with a school system designed in the past. The problems of today are not the linear problems of an assembly line, at least to our more modernized part of the world. I have heard these statements in many of the courses that I have taken in education. The belief and passion is there but the real world application is very different.  We have to deal with many different socio economic issues and legal mandates that are out of the control of educators.

I believe there are a lot of people that are not happy with what they do but that is a symptom more of the real world than the educational system. I assume there are people that would like to do what they have a passion for but economically they would not be able to afford it. Many people will go to college to get a piece of paper that will allow them to make a good living.

I do like this idea of personalized curriculum but again I do not believe it would be economically possible to be able to do that. The responsibility would have to go down to community, at a smaller scale.

The idea of the linearity of educations really caught my attention. It is an issue that I have seen get worse in my short eight year teaching career. Parents put their children on waiting list to get into certain school because they believe this is the best option to get into college. The list for this school seems to get longer every year. I have a joke with my wife that if we want to get our kid into the school we will have to sign up when she is three months pregnant. The pressure the students are under to do the best to get into that class that will give them the advantage over their peers is sad to see. I hate to see a 3^rd grader throwing up in the morning right before they will take the state exam. 

Robinson, K. (Performer). (2010). Sir ken robinson: Bring on the learning revolution! . [Web Video]. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=r9LelXa3U_I

Brainstorm on Google educator tools

The school district the instruction will take place will be Sharyland ISD. I will do a lesson and implement it with my own students. I will pass on the idea and lesson to other 6^th grade social study teachers in the district. Most of this group is very receptive to new ideas and will jump on an opportunity to use new tools to teach the “forgotten” subject. The technology department is always very helpful and I could always ask if they would like the lesson as a presentation on a professional development day, if it turns out to be good of course. I am currently working with the department for my practicum course for another project and may not want to push to many projects.

I think I want to use Google Earth and Google docs. I already use this tool because of the subject matter that I teach. This will allow the students to use the tool and be able to create a product. I would like to use the tour feature and allow the students to create their own tour. At this point we have covered four of the seven continents and I would use the tool to reinforce concepts we have learned. For example, they can give a tour of several country given specific criteria like different forms of government or landforms. The Google docs can be used for the planning, brainstorming and writing of the scripts they will need for their tour. I considered other tools but most of them are blocked. These two tools are not blocked by our firewalls and it fits in to the subject I currently teach.   

For the scope of the lesson, I believe that Declarative knowledge instruction and/or Instruction leading to Concept learning might be the best to use. First, the tour would require them to know specific names and location of places. So they might need to find the country and capital for several places. They may need to explain, for example, why in Egypt the majority of the population is along the Nile River. These would require them to make connections that would apply to other parts of the world just the same. 

Instructional Design Readings

Ch. 8 Problem Solving

Problem solving is the ability to use many or all of the concepts to solve a “domain-specific” problem (Smith & Ragan, 1999). The use of problem solving itself should allow the learner to work on a problem that will also teach them how to deal with similar situation in the future. There is no specific answer to a problem and the thoughtful and educated use of trial and error is encouraged.  The learner will have to know all the concepts and be able to identify each use in the problem (Smith & Ragan, 1999).

Ch. 9 Declarative Knowledge Instruction

Declarative knowledge refers to the content a person knows and is usually thought to be learned by memorization (Smith & Ragan, 1999). This knowledge is separated into three categories: labels and names, facts and list, and organized discourse (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Organized discourse involves knowing the meaning of words or concept in the context of its use. The former two categories are concrete and only require the linking of one piece of information to another one. Any new knowledge that is acquired needs to be meaningful and goes through a process to create, add or change a person’s schema (Smith & Ragan, 1999). 

Ch. 10 Instruction leading to Concept Learning

Concepts are broken down into concrete and abstract. A concrete concept can thought using the five senses while an abstract concept cannot (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  However, many concrete concepts can have abstract meanings given the learners age and education.  A learner is said to have learned a concept when they are able to see patterns and making generalizations that can apply to other concepts (Smith & Ragan, 1999). There are two strategies that can be used are inquiry and expository.  The inquiry approach gives the learner examples and non-examples and discovers the concepts and they work (Smith & Ragan, 1999). The expository approach follows the examples from inquiry but the learner is encourage to give their own examples after the criteria has been set for the concept (Smith & Ragan, 1999). 

Ch. 11 Instruction Leading to Principle Learning

The principles look at the correlation of multiple concepts (Smith & Ragan, 1999). The relationships between the concepts are expressed in a cause and effect manner. The understanding of these relationships normally help a learner predict future scenarios because the principles are broken down into different variables (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Because of their cause and effect relationship, principle learning will be seen in science, mathematics, statistics or similar courses. The same inquiry and expository approaches can be used to help learners with principle learning. The examples and non-examples can be used to help learners discover the different relationships between the concepts (Smith & Ragan, 1999). 

Ch. 12 Leading to Learning Procedures

Procedure learning involves doing things in a specific series of steps.  The steps can be very simple but more complex concepts will require more steps or sub-steps given certain conditions (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Learners can use these steps to quickly solve complex problems but may not actually understand the reasons or concepts on why the steps work. The learning of a procedure will allow a learner to apply the steps to a problem they have not seen before (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  The learner will be faced with decision or operation steps, the former requiring the learner to make a choice and the latter to follow a series of prescribed steps (Smith & Ragan, 1999).

Ch. 13 Cognitive Strategy Instruction

Cognitive strategies are used by learner to monitor their cognitive processes (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  They are used to learn knowledge and skill and are often discovered by good students but not by poorer ones (Smith & Ragan, 1999). In the poorer student’s case, directly teaching learning strategies may be needed. Cognitive domain strategies help learners choose what information is important, tie information to prior knowledge and self-monitoring (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Affective domain strategies help with motivation and time management (Smith & Ragan, 1999). The goal of these strategies is to help students develop their metacognition so they can have the ability to monitor and evaluate their learning (Smith & Ragan, 1999). 

Ch. 14 Attitude Change, Motivation and Interest

The chapter deals with how to change attitude and motivation through instruction. Most of this will tie back to the affective domain of cognitive strategy. An attitude will include both the knowing how to do something and choosing to do it (Smith & Ragan, 1999). There is a misconception that the attitude and motivation cannot be helped. The book discusses the three components of attitude learning consist of cognitive component, behavioral, and affective component. Conditions that would help are demonstrations, practice and reinforcement of the desired behavior (Smith & Ragan, 1999). 

Ch. 15 Psychomotor Skill Learning

Psychomotor includes any act that requires your body to do a series of steps to complete a task. This can include learning how to type or learning a new software program menu. Psychomotor skills are broken down into two categories:  discrete and continuous skills. Discrete skill has a set number of sets, for example, the presses on a computer program to be able to print a report (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Continuous skills have to be done constantly to complete the task correctly.  For psychomotor learning, major steps need to be establish and subroutines (Smith & Ragan, 1999). Assessment of the skills will usually have to be observational in nature.

Ch. 16 Designing Delivery and Management Strategies

Usually the way the instruction will be delivered should be made after the instructional analysis (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  The research shows that no medium has an advantage when it comes to instruction over another. The instructional designer would have to decide which medium provides the best benefits for the learning goal and the target audience (Smith & Ragan, 1999). For example, if the target audience will perceive any learning done through the computer to be harder because they lack computer skills, then a different medium might be chosen.  The important key for the ID is to keep the limited cognitive processing power of the brain in mind (Smith & Ragan, 1999). It would be easily to overwhelm one of the processes. 

Ch. 17 Macro Strategies: Integration of Types of learning

Macro strategies deal with the creation of curriculum or whole units of instruction instead of focusing on just one topic (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  Curriculum design makes the decision about scope organization and the sequence of content (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  The text explains five structures: world-related, inquiry, utilization, learning, and concept related structures. These models do a good job of keeping specific information under similar concepts (Smith & Ragan, 1999).  However, they do not consider learning types and ID often use the elaboration model to help with this disadvantage (Smith & Ragan, 1999). The elaboration model organizes curriculum based on three outcomes: concepts, principles and procedures (Smith & Ragan, 1999).

Smith, P., & Ragan, T. (1999). Instructional Design. New York: Johgn Wiley & Sons, Inc.