Welcome! This is the Final Reading Journal for Knowing & Learning

Here you will find the assignments, reflections, and prompts for the course. Here I gave personal reflection on our weekly discussions, answered the reading questions and analysis on what it means to learn and what methods are effective, and reviewed videos provided through mostly Ted Talks and educational scholars. Thanks for reading and enjoy!

W08 Reading Assignments

• What's the one thing that everyone needs to know about learning?

Not only does everyone learn differently, but the environment in which they learn greatly impacts how they think for the rest of their lives. It's important now more than ever to change our ways as teachers to assist students in developing the skills of learning, rather than just drilling concepts and formulas. Learning is unique, but can effectively be brought to every student with enough effort.

• How do Dr. Dweck's ideas relate to everything that we've investigated so far? What big connection is there to be made?

The study from Dweck proved that students want to discover things. Our investigations point towards the fact that not only is it effective, but beneficial in the long run for students to develop these skills early on. Making errors and providing feedback is an important step to the learning process, and we must do our best to facilitate this.

• How do these ideas relate to the perspectives on STEM learning (e.g., conceptual change, models & modeling, social cognitive, situated learning)?

The ideas relate to our previously learned perspectives, especially social cognitive learning. Students can capitalize on other students' mistakes to better their own thinking process. And at the same time, the students making the mistake then learn from it and do better next time. The whole situated learning process is best for this type of learning, as it accepts methods of all types to provide students with the best materials.

• How do the examples in this video illustrate a growth mindset?

The growth mindset is exemplified by the various success stories and how each of those people got to that point. They didn't get a head start over their peers, they growed slowly over time; developing the skills necessary to grow faster and more efficiently. You do that by making mistakes and correcting them, knowing how to adjust in the future.

• How do we translate this into straight-forward, applicable policies and practices for STEM?

STEM is a subject best learned through your own understanding at your own pace. Success isn't measured by how much people like you, or how much you make, it's how many personal goals you have accomplished. It's how well you can look back and see your growth. And that applies to STEM year by year, with each new growing science field you learn about new things that build upon your old things and you grow and become more successful. 

W04 Discussion for Dan Meyer

• What does this video mean to you?

It's honestly quite a shame that so many educators have this misconception or give in to giving students shortcuts that lead to misunderstanding. There is a problem when the kids aren't retaining information as well as they should, and they're not being challenged to become thinkers. The video definitely shined light on ways I can improve my curriculum by introducing mass media to get students interested.

W03 Discussion for Harvard Students

• In the responses of these students, what struck you as interesting or important?

I was shocked at how incorrect they were about the reason for the season, and the lunar phases. These common misconceptions are fascinating, that somehow even wrong information is presented outside the classroom and is affecting the student's ability to think of reasons why certain things happen on their own.

• In each of the cases, how might what the students say make (at least) some sense?

Well, in the case of the seasons, the earth does move in an elliptical orbit, so it is closer and farther from the sun at different parts of the sun, so that is an interesting thought. For the moon's phases, it is very complicated in terms of 3D geometry why the moon would appear the way it is, and not being exposed to the big picture is not a good start to understanding how it works. 

• Why, for example, would they say that seasons are caused by the closeness to the sun?

They probably heard from somewhere that the earth moves in an elliptical orbit, from media or TV, but do not hear about the tilt of the earth as much. It also doesn't help that they probably, at that time, would not have had much exposure to southern hemisphere nations, who experience the opposite season.

• Where might the students have acquired the idea about the clouds and the phases of the moon?

The clouds and phases were probably uniquely made misconceptions about the phase because they had no prior knowledge of it to begin with. It's hard to understand why it would appear different shapes unless one understood the motion of the satellites

• What does it mean to know and/or learn?

To know something is to be able to apply a thinking practice to build upon that knowledge in a different way. To learn is to develop skills to think as a process, rather than rely on remembering.

• What does it mean to be a competent mathematics or science student?

You are able to use what you learn in the classroom and apply it to problems you have never seen before. For example solving a linear equation to find the percentage on an item, or using the understanding of acceleration and gravity to predict motion as you play catch in the yard.

• What does learning mean? How is learning different from or similar to understanding?

Learning is only a process to get to understanding. Learning requires a student to develop skills and think in a way that will lead them to the same correct answers in the future. By learning the proper skills, understanding material becomes much easier.

• How can you get at what students are thinking? How can you assess knowing and learning?

.Taking small assessments and hosting discussions are a great way to understand where misconceptions come from, who has them, and how you can remedy it.

W03 Reflection for Leo Lionni's Fish

• From your history and personal experiences, what does it mean to think mathematically/scientifically?

Thinking mathematically or scientifically does not necessarily mean you apply super difficult techniques to every day life as you are solving a problem. It means that you have the drive to discover things on your own, that everything has a meaning and a process, and the puzzle is finding out how that process works. Thinking scientifically, for me, means hearing one thing and not just thinking "yeah that seems right" but artfully understanding why it is right. If a problem is presented to me I want to understand it, it bothers me if I don't. And it's that drive that keeps me going as a STEM educator.

• What lessons might we draw from the Fish is Fish story in relation to human learning?

The learning process is reflected in Fish is Fish because of how they interact. The fish at first has a misconception that the tadpole was a fish like him and he did not understand why one day the frog was swimming with him, but the other he had legs. The frog seemed to have more knowledge, especially after exploring the world and seeing different types of animals. In the end the frog wants to explain the best he can what those things were to the fish, but the fish can simply not imagine anything other than fish because it's all he's ever known. It's very similar to the allegory of the cave, where men who have never known sunlight before will not know what to do if they were to escape the cave.

W02 Psychological Perspectives Table

W02 Reflection for Allison Glopnik

• Having viewed the video with Dr. Alison Gopnik, what ideas do you have about how her work with babies and play relates to your interests in teaching and learning STEM?

It's quite strange to see a study about babies. It's amazing how much we can learn from using the same techniques we use on older students, but applied in simpler ways for toddlers. It goes to show how important it is that we capitalize on all of the things that makes students so receptive to material. Learning how we learn and what makes it effective is the secret to being a successful teacher, and of course we can learn a lot from learning from Gopnik's work with babies.

W01 Reflection for Dr. Cabera

First up, the preliminary question before we get to Dr. Cabrera:

• From your history and personal experiences, before you view the video below, how would you define thinking?

Thinking is a unique process to every person. It involves using the tools available to you to decipher and solve problems right in front of you, hopefully in a way that builds upon itself.

• What is your reaction to Dr. Cabera's ideas about thinking skills and teaching thinking skills?

I mostly agree with what Dr. Cabrera defined as thinking. He mostly put it in his own words without conflicting my core belief of what it means to think. I found it surprising, however, when he brought up the "global effect" of our education system that does not prepare kids for life. It's apparent that critical analysis is lacking in our education system, and hopefully using proper techniques to build upon the process of thinking will remedy this problem.

• How do your experiences with formal schooling compare with his description?

I relate deeply to this theory of what is happening in education today. I have felt sometimes that I am unprepared to think or study correctly in order to get good grades in college. And unfortunately, it's a problem of how I was allowed for so many years to get away with taking shortcuts in math or not being as problem-solving with word problems because I found patterns before I found the methods. 

• What implications can you envision if we were to apply his ideas broadly to formal schooling?

Thinking skills need to be applied more broadly in our schools. The current system of teaching for tests or formal instruction with no discovery is not working long term, and it's hurting our overall understanding of math and science.

W07 Reflection for UDL

• How do these principles and practices relate to what you've learned from reading How People Learn?

The methods we learned from "How People Learn" are reflected in UDL because they all are student-oriented. They focus on making sure that students know that there are multiple ways of getting to a solution correctly. That there is no one way of thinking, and the process of discovering is more important than test taking.

• How do these principles and practices resonate with the perspectives on STEM learning (e.g., conceptual change, models & modeling, social cognitive, situated learning)? 

STEM learning is all about discovery on the student's end. The teacher's role is to introduce the tools necessary for students to figure out on their own, and that's what resonates with the UDL methods. Social cognitive learning is important in this case, and is what I would personally prefer, because if students work in groups they are exposed to direct conflicts to how they think. Being challenged like that is an important step to building the foundation of the lessons.

W07 Reflection on Dan Pink

• What are we trying to accomplish with STEM education and how can we apply the ideas from Daniel Pink's talk on motivation?

Rewards are a great way to get students engaged and interested in the subjects at hand, however they should not be the primary motivator to do those tasks. As mentioned by Pink, such experiments have proved that monetary rewards actually stunts creative thinking as your mind is focused on the rewards and not the process. With this, we know that what we are trying to accomplish with STEM education is to engage the students in the learning themselves, not the rewards at the end.

• How might we apply his elements of a new business operating system to STEM education?

Pink's proposed Business operating system can be applied to STEM education because offering students rewards is a common practice that apparently does not facilitate learning. His business model focuses on the individual's contribution to the company without need for routine office scenarios like meetings and bonuses. It improves creativity and productivity in the same way that stressing it in a classroom would.

W06 Common Core Reflection

After watching the videos, I'm still not sure how I want to feel about Common Core teaching. I hear a lot about people who hate the practice of teaching common core, that it's ineffective in teaching kids how to think and become problem solvers, but I think that most of those issues are related to other things such as overall funding and teaching styles of the teachers. There is a huge generation gap forming right now between how teaching was done before and how teaching will be in the future, and establishing things like Next Level Science Standards will be important going forward in my classroom.

From the content of these videos, what can you infer about the following?

• What constitutes the essential elements of mathematical and scientific thinking?

The essential parts of mathematical and science teaching are knowledge, content, and progression. All of which go into great PBI lessons, computer model assistance, and discovery. They are the core for building the fundamentals of science and the progression to higher learning.

• How are external representations related to the elements of mathematical and scientific thinking?

External representations include: computer softwares, PBI lessons, and constructive field trips. They all build up knowledge across the student's own pace, while having them discover on their own the fundamentals that make science and math so consistent.

• What defines the role for external representations in the knowing and learning of STEM?

The role of external representations is to construct and affirm the student's understanding as it relates to the course material and standards. The standards are set in place only to make sure the essential concepts are included in these external representations, and making such lessons effective is one of the hardest puzzles of teaching. I will for sure be using a lot of external reference tools for my students to discover concepts and science on their own.

W06 Reflection for Ron Ritchhart

Ritchhart explains the nature of curiosity in the student and how you effectively create a culture of thinking. Getting kids to think in an efficient way is the most important part of being a teacher; you have to understand that the knowledge learned is less important than the whole learning environment left for the students to build on. You need to find ways to teach your students in a way that makes them great thinkers, not ways that they can study and get good grades on tests. In that regard, my definition of "The culture of thinking" in my area of STEM is the ability to visualize math problems before you even begin to solve them. Since my area is mostly physics and math, the most important part to understanding higher level coursework is to build the foundation first, and that's something I will definitely stress to my students to develop.

W05 Reading Promts

We were given materials to read:

• How Students Learn, Mathematics: Chapter 13; Science: Chapter 13.
• Any additional resources in the module that are labeled as 'Reading:'

And How Students Learn, Mathematics: Chapter 13; Science: Chapter 13 was a great way to reflect what I saw in the previous Ted Talks, and put it into words (quite unlike the core of the lesson). 

• How does this perspective (e.g., conceptual change, situated learning, etc.) recognize, view and describe this element of a STEM learning environment (i.e. learner-centered, knowledge-centered, assessment-centered, community)?

Perspective recognizes this element of STEM learning environments, as this method of learning math without words is effective in both learning problem solving in a learner-centered community. Students are not expected to follow directions perfectly without words, but what is most important is they see the consequences of doing certain things, and what makes other patterns correct.

• For each of these elements, what inferences can you make about the kinds of classroom activities that would be deemed appropriate?

Classroom activities that would be appropriate are ones that require the teacher to not lecture the student on what to do. This is a learner-centered method of teaching math, where the gaining of knowledge is more or less not restricted by certain rules, but instead are discovered.

• For each of these elements, what inferences can you make about the nature of the classroom discourse that would be deemed appropriate?

Classroom discourse would be appropriate when students are using models and modeling to reflect what they learn in class. Classroom environments should be equal parts teacher-student interaction and peer-to-peer interaction where students learn on their own why certain mathematical concepts work they way they do.

• For each of these elements, what inferences can you make about the classroom use of technology that would be deemed appropriate?

Obviously as seen from the Ted Talks, the use of technology is very important to these methods. Fortunately, countless resources have been made available online for students to use and aid them in discovering these principals.Students will have to be provided internet access and devices that will access these programs, and then be monitored by the teacher while they do their discovery activities.

W05 Ted Talk with Conrad Wolfram

So Wolfram's talk was very similar in context to the previous with Peterson. Teaching students math with computer aided software and visual aides is a more effective groundwork than teaching them with lectures and words. For students to see what happens right in front of their eyes, why it happens, and how they can fix it, they can easily determine the correct order and operations needed to solve math problems without the need for words. Developing and using these computer softwares will become increasingly important as new research is brought out supporting it, and I will probably use them as much as I can in my classroom.

W05 TED Talk with Mathew Peterson

I agree with Peterson's message that visual aides and lessons are the most important part of a mathematics course. Words are a crutch to the learning process in math, everything can be expressed in terms of shapes, equations, and software programs. The whole concept of word problems is more of a hybrid lesson plan to teach critical thinking and language comprehension, but it does not help kids understand math. I believe if I approach my class in a similar way, expressing math in terms of shapes and numbers instead of using word problems and logics.

W07 Discussion for Wednesday and Sunday

MTV Thinking guides the students into a particular method of learning they can drill into their minds without the need of a teacher's assistance. What I love about the KWL, TPE, SWE methods is their step-by-step process that the teacher and the student go through together on the same level of knowledge. This benefits the student more than just simple PBI or traditional learning lectures, as the student builds the foundation they will explore themselves, rather than be told what to know. The texbook had a lot of good section I will be using in my classroom.

W06 Discussion for Wednesday and Sunday

I learned a lot from looking at other people's journal's and realized that mine were missing some critical details. I'll be working on filling in all the details I missed up until now, hopefully a non-chronological format will be okay for the journal. I played the role of critical friend for two people and basically said how they inspired me to do more on my journal. I love peer review projects, as it gives me more of an idea of what I need to do to better my projects in the future.

W05 Discussion for Sunday

My elbow was certainly flawed, as it did not have a dedicated joint, or elastic properties of muscle fibers. It was simply a taught string across two objects. To redeem this, I used a plastic chip clip, which resembles an elbow joint, and combined the two segments of the arm to it with tape. The apparatus was free to move and was much more accurate as according to the given videos.

Week 05 discussion

The brainstorming session was fun. I knew making it was going to be simple, but finding the parts around was the hardest part. I decided to use trash I had already thrown away, that way I wasn't harming any useful materials. The elbow worked perfectly, bent back and forth and connected at the joint. There are tons of models of elbows and since it's very important to both the body and to robotics, knowing how they work is pretty cool.

Thoughts on why each post was made today
I had initially wrote down my journal thoughts in a Word Doc, and was not aware it had to be a website (my fault for not checking the rubric.) I just copied my thoughts from each day into a new post on the forum.

I also was checking cpalms for another class assignment, and came across the resources tab. There are a ton of science experiments, math lessons, and power points to aid the classroom learning if I ever need inspiration for my lessons. That link can be found Here (which I bookmarked of course)

W04 Reading and discussion for Wednesday and Sunday
Unfortunately I made a mistake and didn't initially post my response for "Wednesday" by Wednesday. I hope that's okay. Either way, the whole concept here about misconceptions is very important to know as a teacher. Students will come in with a wide variety of information they think is acceptable for a classroom, and that's okay. It's my job as a teacher to have them find out on their own why what they believe to be true is actually not a valid explanation for whatever phenomenon in question. I especially liked the examples given in the article, and how each type of misconception can be easily conveyed through a hypothetical scenario. The article has a lot of these tables and extraneous graphics to explain this, which is very helpful to understand the best way to combat misconceptions in the classroom.

W03 Sunday Discussion:
Obviously I'd gone through this before in the checkup post. I almost wanted to post the same thing I did in the previous assignment, but I realized there were things I changed and accomplished so I typed it out again to add those changes.

W03: Reading and Wednesday Discussion:
The reading from Sternberg introduced important vocabulary I'll need to use in the remainder of this course and the UF Teach program. Table 1 on page 275 is especially important, as it differentiates the areas of learning and how to best use each teaching method. My favorite method of teaching mentioned was Analytical, as I see it as a perfect balance between forming your own opinions to gain understanding, and teaching traditionally to cure misconceptions.

The Wednesday discussion was basically a summary of the article for me. I tried to relate it to how I would use each of analytical, creative, and practical teaching techniques in a classroom setting, but most of my information obviously would come from the article. I'm glad that we have these resources that are backed by years of research, because had I not seen this I would have been teaching in "my own" way, which may not be a bad thing, but definitely not as efficient as this.

W02 Discussion for Sunday
After reading the whole article, it was hard to find exactly one phrase that stood out to me. Mostly I just skimmed paragraphs through to find a topic sentence, word, and phrase or data point that stood out as important, and analyzed it to how it can be utilized as a teacher. I like how the discussions are clearly mapped out for what students have to do, rather than vague or essay-based.

W02: Reading and Wednesday Discussion
The Driscoll article was great to learn the history of the discipline of teaching. It seems so obvious how each method is a failure or inefficient, but it was those failures that led us to our knowledge of how people learn. The article suggests that learning is a cycle, where all information is built off of something you learned in the past. As a future teacher, I'll have to make note of that: building knowledge off what the students already know, that way the information is more relevant and accessible.

The first discussion for Wednesday was very straight forward. Everyone presented the same information for the process of finding the circumference of the earth, since we all had equal access to resources. My reply was mostly that of awe of how they did it so accurately in the past.

W01 Discussion: The Circumference of the Earth Problem
I read the two given readings "Do Learners Really Know Best" and "Interviewing in Mathematics Education Research." The first reinforced something I noticed about how children today interact and learn; how they become so engrossed in technology that information passes through them without them realizing it. It will prove a challenge to balance traditional teaching skills and project based instruction with this preferred method of learning of this new generation.

As for the discussion, it was fun to figure out the process behind the ancient Greek's calculation of the circumference of the Earth. I had heard the story many times before, I even did a report on Eratosthenes when I was in middle school, so this post was pretty easy.

Week 1 Discussion: Introduction
After taking so many online classes, this is to be expected for the first discussion post. It makes sure that us students know how to use the discussion forum through Canvas and to become a little more comfortable sharing our thoughts in the future. I like reading through some of the posts to learn more about my peers who may be in some of my other classes, but I never really have time to go through all of them.