The articles this week did a good job of tweaking some of our earlier theories of learning. These tweaks, I think, included a shift towards situated knowledge and constructivist ideas overall. While I was reading, I went back through my notes to each of the base theories to see what we had said maybe needed more thought on. So, for this post, I want to highlight some of those areas, and see how these articles address those issues.
In my notes for conceptual change, we discussed the overall procedure for learning (dissatisfaction, fruitfulness, etc) to be very rational. The idea was that no one really does this with every idea, it just isn’t very realistic. The Pintrich article defines this as ‘cold conceptual change’ which is appropriate. They then suggest that instead of this overly rational process for motivation, that motivation is complicated. The factors that relate to motivation need to be examined, but I am having trouble differentiating between two of them. Self-efficacy and control beliefs, to me, seem too similar. They explain the difference is that self-efficacy is a personal belief about oneself, and control beliefs are about environmental factors. To me, it seems like control beliefs affect self-efficacy beliefs, so I am not sure why they are considered their own category. This might not be important to their argument, but it was a question that came up for me.
The Brown article highlighted a problem we talked about regarding teachers. I remember us discussing who would make the best teachers for authentic activities, and this is where the issue emerged. Practitioners that are actively participating in a discipline would have knowledge about the practice, but may not be able to communicate this effectively with grade school students, for example. Likewise, products of practitioners (people who studied the science but never practiced it) may be able to communicate this, but never fully practiced the discipline, so are not fully authentic. This article ‘solves’ this issue by proposing schools be a place for students to “learn to learn.” For example, science class in school should be a place where students learn how to solve scientific problems, not if they can solve them. This is an interesting idea to me, because I think AST also tries to do this, although AST focuses less on the ‘expert’ in the room.
The Driver article included a section that I wanted to talk about. On page 7, Driver discusses something that we have called in other classes as ‘teacher talk moves.’ Saying things like: “How did you do that?” , “What do you mean?” , “Can you give an example?” are all teacher talk moves. There are different categories of these moves that I am still learning when to use, but I think they are very effective in building students’ knowledge. I only choose to highlight it here because it is something I have seen in other classes.
Hi Kevin, what a thoughtful post. I like the conclusions you reached about how the Brown article views teachers. I also felt similar points were evident. I think while Brown sees teachers as experts a bit more than AST, they still offer a lot of the same principles, like with talk moves (as you mentioned). To add, I felt similarly about the role motivation plays in cold conceptual change. I liken it to being a basic model, and throwing motivation into the mix is like changing the advanced settings.
Self- efficacy is about what you believe yourself being capable of, the control beliefs are about something in the environment that you can’t control. For example, a student could think to be capable in chemistry but expect a grade that is not high if he knows (and everybody knows) that his teacher grades on the very low side for some particular reasons. Over time the back pocket questions start coming naturally and you may also create new ones. I discovered that I can’t just apply what I learned but that I am in front of a student and I need to ask what is helpful at that moment.
I appreciate you going back and seeing how questions you had about the theories in your notes are (or are not) addressed by these new pieces. I think you have the essence of the two beliefs – that one is about what you believe yourself to be capable of, and the other is your beliefs about how much control you have over external factors that impact your success. We can talk more about it. One question I have about the Brown piece relates to the fact that she does get us out of the bind of schools not being authentic disciplinary contexts as teachers are not practitioners, but what about the bind of schools being their own place/culture, so what does learning to learn mean in that context?