What have you learned about designing opportunities for educating students whether they be young learners, young adults, more mature students? How has (or will) your professional role changed through this experience in the course and the other courses you have taken? Do you see yourself differently in what you can offer as a zookeeper?
Before I enrolled in this course, I rarely thought twice about how a teacher teaches. When I did think about it, however, I would often wonder how a teacher decides what and how to actually get the educational message to the students. I now understand that it can and should be a difficult process. Maybe difficult is not the correct wording there and I should have used "thought out" instead. My guess would be that many teachers, our zoo's educational director is one of them, just use the same lesson plans year after year with no thought to how the rest of the world is changing. Creating valuable, truly educational experiences have to be created with a lot of thought to all types of learners and learning speeds. It is not a one fits all process, although I believe that many teachers still teach in this manner. What they need to understand is that some students learn better by reading while others learn better by doing. One of the better ways to design an learning opportunity is to come up with an authentic activity that relates to their lives, in some way. An activity in which they need to learn by doing instead of by just listening is more effective. They also need to understand that the best way to understand what they have learned is not necessarily by true/false or multiple choice testing. Students need to have to opportunity to express what they know and how they went about learning what they learned. Educators can do this through the use of an entire system of assessments.
My professional ambitions have definitely changed over the course of this semester. I now an considering becoming a school or zoo educator. I never used to think of teaching as a profession....actually I felt that it would be a scary and kind of boring position. However, I now know that it must truly be what you make of it. Those teachers who teach the same lesson plans year after year must not enjoy the position as much as a great teacher who really plans out unique educational learning opportunities. Learning along with the students in a more democratic classroom would be much more interesting to me than teaching with a dictator approach. My current responsibility is to share the knowledge I have gained in all of my educational classes. Most of the ideas I have brought with me though this process, are ones that are not understood by many educators I have come in contact with. I will do my best to help these individuals to incorporate these ideas into their teaching.
After reading these questions I realized that, although I might not ever have a normal classroom, I can still use the principles that I have learned over the past few months. Even if I don't have a classroom, at all, and decide to remain a zoo keeper instead of an official educator, I can use the different ideas I have taken away from this class. I will now consider different learning styles when creating a new exhibit and it's educational materials. The common way for educational material to be displayed is with a lot of English text. I can see now that more photos or even hands-on displays could be a wonderful addition to the educational message. Also, zoo's in an area with a large ethnic population should really concentrate on educating in different languages. Being a zoo educator, there are so many more opportunities to teach students of all levels and abilities. There are hundreds of schools that bus in students for the education programs. These students come from all different educational, economical and ethical backgrounds. All of these must be taken into consideration when planning educational activities for these students.
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I can really relate to your thoughts about teaching. In my previous career as a Health Physicist I did not associate any aspect of education with my job. I laughed at how naive I was!!! I was an adjunct professor in the X-Ray tech school, responsible for all radiation safety workshops in the hospital and specifically did workshops to educate floor nurses about quality care of radiotherapy patients. All this and I still couldn't see that I was an educator.
ReplyDeleteIt wasn't until I had children of my own, stayed at home, and became active in the schools as a parent that I realized, I was in fact, an educator not just a scientist. It really made me think deeply about my education as a health physicist and how differently that might have looked if there had been an education and community awareness aspect in my coursework.
While I was working on my dissertation and looking into teaching conceptions of university faculty, it was clear from the literature that the majority of professors do not have any curriculum design experience. That makes sense because if you get a PhD in Mathematics, you have all the knowledge of mathematics and produce new knowledge of Math, but you don't necessarily learn how to teach the material.
I agree with you that this model of curriculum design can be used in any profession by anyone who is responsible for teaching. I often think how much better my workshops regarding radiation safety would have been more valuable if I had used a systematic and thoughtful approach....a design...in my planning.
Pre-service teaching does not teach this. Can you believe that? Depending on the year, we have 30-60 veteran teachers who struggle with this concept of being a designer. Yes, they learned out to do lesson plans, but they do not learn how to design units of instructions. These units are necessary to tie lessons together.
The notion of educating...teaching for structure and processes AND how to transfer that knowledge into realistic applications...is far from training. Unfortunately in most professions the focus is on the 'training' aspect....building a skill. When that is looked at differently, as 'educating,' a whole new perspective is gained. There's more than building a skill, but knowing the processes, the structures, the literature, the discourse of that discipline. Of course skill building is a necessity, but when provided opportunities to use those skills in authentic situations, learners of any age are more than "trained."
Dr. Norton shares a great statement made by the psychologist, Jerome Bruner. "If you want to know the difference between training and education, put the word 'sex' in front of it. Then ask yourself, 'Do I want children to be trained in sex, or educated about sex?'
I think that you really should investigate the possibility of teaching. You are starting with a good foundation with real life experience. The kinds of things you have learned through these EDIT courses are things that teachers only get to do after they've had some experience in the classroom. I guess there are far more pressing things that are taught in pre-service and not enough time for more exploration into curriculum design. I often wonder why teachers aren't taught these kinds of things from the start.