Strategic Reading - Wilhelm

While reading Wilhelm’s Strategic Reading, the first thing that came to mind was how close I am to being in the situations he describes.  I want to be very prepared from a planning perspective like how Nate was, but at the same time I need to be able to answer all the tough questions about my own theories of learning.  In math, especially, the students are going to need to know why they are doing what they are doing and how it is going to help them.  We talked about this during a few classes of SED 406 and I have seen it enough firsthand to agree that giving a reason for learning helps motivate the students.  Wilhelm follows this up by asking the reader to rank situations based on the effectiveness of the teaching.  I found this to be quite challenging and I changed my answers around a few times before I settled on a list.  In the end I decided on the scenario of Tom’s piano performance having the most effective teaching and learning.  The teacher progresses Tom from a state where he is dependent on his teacher for help to a state where he can play the piece perfectly on his own.  The teacher guides Tom to success.  I ranked Maria, Arlene, and Jude as the next highest in that order.  I think that coming away from a class learning a skill or lesson beyond the content is sometimes more important than remember all the facts you learn in a course.  Frank and Peter rank fifth and sixth.  Frank can recite facts but did not learn anything since he can’t apply it to improve his golf score.  Peter did not teach his kids anything about not playing in the street, all he did was make them be afraid of getting hit.

            One point that stood out to me was something we talked a fair amount about in FNED 546 with Dr. Brell.  Teaching is a profession but most of the control lies in the hands of people who are not teachers.  I agree when Wilhelm says how we need to clearly state our theory of learning so that not just anyone thinks they could be a teacher and we can transition into a more defined profession.

            I also enjoyed the discussion of scaffolding and Vygotsky’s theories on teaching.  I think it is important to constantly challenge students to keep them engaged and actively learning.  So helping them constantly go a bit beyond their comfort zone, or as Wilhelm describes it, their Zone of Actual Development, and perform tasks in their Zone of Proximal Development seems like it would be greatly beneficial.  If the student is always working on tasks they can do by themselves without help, then the teacher has not taught them to do anything new.  The student just shows what they were already capable of doing.  The two sided model is beginning to be the model I most agree with rather than a model of teacher or student centered learning.  We began discussing the different models in SED 406 as well, and that’s when I first thought that guided practice would be more effective than all the lectures I sat through in high school and this reading has only further solidified my belief.

            The second chapter of the reading reminded me of what I saw in high school.  Everyone read the Spark Notes for the assigned book because we didn’t really understand the story.  I think being in a class like Wilhelm’s, when he uses all the outside examples of irony in comics, poems, and stories, would have been an excellent experience.  That kind of practice not only makes the learning relevant to the students, but helps them understand how irony works in every story, not just in one.  When reading this I immediately thought of using a website like The Onion as preparation to read a story like A Modest Proposal.  The class could first read an article they could all easily relate to like this one http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-facebook-notifications-alert-users-when-they-n,37795/

and then discuss what the article is really trying to say about us as a society and what everyone can take away from reading it.  Dissecting where the satire lies in a situation everyone already knows about, will make it easier to see it in a foreign situation when they read A Modest Proposal.

            Overall, I liked the ideas in the second Chapter, but I am stuck trying to figure out how they can apply to the subject of math.  I can use many of the techniques Wilhelm describes, like giving the students a clear reason of why they are learning something and I can challenge them to go beyond what they are used to doing in math and figure out something new, but how can you create a meaningful discussion and inquiry in an algebra class?  There are a few different ways to do an algebra problem, but each way is going to lead you to the same answer.  It is not like a story, where every person can take away something different and equally valid.  We could talk about the mistakes you could make to not get an answer of 5, but at the end of the day if someone is not getting 5 as their answer then they are doing something wrong.  I’m hoping that there are more concrete examples of how to inspire math students as we move forward.