The readings this week were really interesting. At times I felt like they brought a lot of clarity to some things I did not really even realize I wasn’t fully grappling with and at other times they just muddied the waters even more. I appreciated that Hammer and Manz (2019) recognized that understanding knowledge and learning is not easy. They eluded to it being “dizzy business” and related it to the Dashiell Hammet quote that learning is “a matter of catching as many of those foggy glimpses as you can and fitting them together the best you can.” This is how I feel as I read these articles and have our discussions in class. I feel like I am closer to understanding the learning theories and understanding how people learn than I was prior to this experience but there are some moments when I cannot for the best of me piece together the “foggy glimpses.” The series of articles we read this week were recent articles debating the ideas of hands-on, minds-on, inquiry, discrepant events, prior knowledge, power, etc. The authors were trying to understand these ideas better themselves and figure out better ways to explain them to people outside of the field. A few weeks ago when we read a set of articles like this it felt a lot like a heated debate. This set felt more like a discussion post we do in class. Furtak and Penuel (2018) were the first responders and they provided some answers to how we can talk in everyday discussions about practice turn and common terms that people throw out like hands-on. Then Osborne (2019), Parson (2019), Hammer and Manz (2019), and Larkin (2019) come in and comment how they agree and disagree with the original post and the other commentators. I thought it was interesting that it seemed the commenters each came from a different learning theory camp (e.g. Osborne seemed pretty cognitive, Parson was critical, Hammer and Manz seemed more situated I think). Because of these different perspectives on learning, we were able to see a lot of different takes on the same ideas so this will be interesting for us to unpack in class.
The other article we read was the evidence crisis piece. At first, I was a little concerned because I felt like I had bought into this inquiry/exploration-based instruction and now this article is telling me it is not supported by all the evidence. The evidence they want to include is from studies that control for other factors by isolating inquiry/exploration as the only factor that was changed. These studies show that explicit instruction is more effective than inquiry. This is in contrast to the program-based studies that show inquiry and exploration as more effective than explicit instruction. I feel like this makes sense though because one of the factors the studies want to control for is professional development. Inquiry/exploration-based instruction is not easy for a teacher to lead and I would imagine is the most successful when the teacher knows how to properly scaffold the students’ exploration. Therefore, if the study controls for the teacher being taught how to lead an inquiry-based class then it would make sense that the class would not be successful. However, the article states that the controlled studies are historically thrown out because they are too simplistic which is exactly what I just did so I think that maybe means I am part of the problem that Zhang et al. are describing. I am super interested to see what others have to say about this article.