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Going through Kolb's cycle felt like I was gently pushed through a familiar world toward a new Idea. It did not feel like I was intentionally synthesizing a new Idea even though that is what happened. I think that a similar process sometimes happens to me spontaneously. In such cases I get highly compelled to find the answer to a question or make something myself. This activity exemplified perception, comprehension, executive functions, and expression/communication. I think that in order to grade such an activity one would need to further employ expression/communication. I think that a reflection activity like this one would probably be effective. Another Idea might be to have the students find/ create a new object based on the completed process. For example, students might go through kolb’s cycle and at the end find a piece of literature that deals with their research question. This might also incorporate physical action depending on what new material is procured.

I would also like to make a note on the reading:

One of the things I thought was particularly notable from the reading was that place is defined as “Any Locality Imbued with Meaning” and that this does not exclude fictional places. For me this immediately brings to mind Carl Segan’s “ship of the imagination”, a completely fictional place designed as a tool to move the learners perspective between different places of interest. In general the original cosmos is a pretty interesting example of a learning tool based on PBE. This also reminded me of a tool that one of my favorite youtubers (https://www.youtube.com/user/CGPGrey ) used that he calls “ the forest of all knowledge”. This is a place that condenses an even more abstract concept into a spatial representation. Perhaps one could use something like this to anchor the abstract concepts of calculus into a more spatial organization. I am growing somewhat fond of “the sea of mathematics” where each concept is an island.

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I want students to be able to build connections with both their instructors and their peer groups.

by the end of their interaction with the class I am teaching/assisting I want students to...

*have a collaborative relationship with their peers inwhich students feel that they can ask for assistance without ridicule or prejudice.

*be able to comunicate with instructors and others in positions of relative authority for the purposes of improving their own learning.

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I want students to improve their ability to solve problems.

By the end of their interaction with the class I am teaching/assisting I want students to be able to...

*synthisise general strategies for solving new problems

*ask questions and perform research for the purpose of solving those problems.

Students should also have knowledge of various core tools for the purpose of solving problems specific to this class.

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students learn best when they can have open dialogue with their peers and instructors.

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Today we discussed instructional design with an example of a specific case and demonstrated IRATs and TRATs. The use of IRATs and TRATs was enlightening because it showed to me how easily they can be implemented and how well they can indicate specific areas where students might be struggling. I also liked the point wagering system implemented in this test because it can show more information than just “student knows/does not know this concept” . I think this might be a good tool for Calc I because I often see multiple students making the same mistake on a problem and it is usually a conceptual one. Using an IRAT and a TRAT could help to isolate the misconceptions at the source of these errors. Merill’s first principles are interesting because they would honestly seem quite obvious except that they are often ignored. I have had several classes that, like the example, did not showcase complete problems but only some part of a problem or even just the associated equations. I think I could also work on applying the 2nd principle (activation) I often jump ahead to trying to show students how to solve a problem when it might be better to start by asking questions that might help prepare a student for the problem.

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The material we discussed helped to inform my Learning/Teaching philosophy by revealing better ways of planning lessons and evaluating student learning. I have had struggles with this in the past when planning lessons because I focused too much on covering material and not on what I actually wanted my students to take away. I don’t think this was terribly damaging since I have only planned lessons for SI which is more like a review session than a lesson in the truest sense. But I believe that backwards design is still useful in this context. Because it would help me to find more specific goals for the students as opposed to goals for what I should cover.

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I don’t think that the things we discussed today severely alter my teaching philosophy. I do, however, like the Idea of a double entry journal. I don’t have much control over the reading assignments in calc I (where this would be the most applicable)  but I do run SI for Calc I and I think that some variant of this might be a good review strategy. I found it interesting to see just how strong the evidence is that active learning is effective.

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In class and in the pre-party we examined the neuroscience related to active learning. One of the concepts that relates to what I already had was that of recycling. Recycling is essentially the way we use unexpected areas of the brain when performing learned tasks. It is also notable that people use different areas of the brain for the same tasks depending on their background. For instance people who learned to read in adulthood use more unique parts of their brains when reading than those who learned as children. This relates to my philosophy because different individuals not only think about the same problems differently but actually utilize different parts of their brain. To promote diversity in the classroom it is absolutely vital that we acknowledge the uniqueness of how each person thinks.

One of the things that I thought was interesting from the reading was the roles of cortisol and BDNF in learning and the ways that the environment of a classroom can cause the expression of these chemicals. This information suggests to me that I should try to keep the classroom from being a stressful environment to avoid adding to the increased cortisol that students experience from the stress of other classes. It is apparent that promoting (or at least allowing) movement in class would be useful for the effect of increased BDNF production. However, the exercise that can be accomplished in a 50 minute class period while still making progress toward learning objectives is probably not sufficient to achieve a noticeable learning benefit from exercise. This is why I prefer the Idea of allowing movement rather than forcing movement.

I believe that the most important takeaway from this lesson Isn’t necessarily the ways that I can incorporate this neuroscience into teaching but rather that students should be made aware of this information. I have been told that exercise is “good for your brain” before but I always assumed that this was some inexplicable effect of an increase in general health before this reading. And I was also under the impression that it wasn’t that strong of an effect either. I was also aware that chronic stress was generally unhealthy, but I didn’t realize how much of a direct detriment to learning it could be. I honestly wish I had been given this material much earlier. I think that learning about this science directly would be far more helpful to students than any strategies I can implement in the classroom.

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In the pre-party and in class I learned that I have a tendency to jump into conversations too often. As an LA this could easily become disruptive to the learning experiences of those I am trying to assist. In class it was mentioned that part of the problem with someone  jumping in too often might be that they are unsure if they will remember the comment they wanted to share by the next time they would get a chance to share it. In order to mitigate this tendency in myself I am starting to write notes on what points I want to add so that I know I will remember them and I can bring them up any time I get an opportunity.

Considerations for diversity, equity, and inclusion are always a lot more subtle than I think before going into a discussion like this one. One of the things that surprised me is the idea of choosing groups for students. For me this initially seemed like it would create a less comfortable environment for students since allowing them to choose groups would let them form groups with people that they already know they can work with. But on the second examination it is clear that this will create even more of a sense of othering for students that don’t already know people in their class. Even a random choice of groups will force students to engage with those that they might otherwise have ignored. This also fits with the idea of growth mindset because even if a student is less comfortable in a random group compared to the one that they would have picked, this discomfort promotes interaction with new people which is almost always beneficial.

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In class we used the snowball exercise to review information from the syllabus. We continued with a matching exercise on active learning modalities and discussed the ones we liked the most. We then finished by reviewing each other's teaching philosophies.

Going into the discussion on active learning modalities, I favored discussions dialogue and problem based learning (PBL). While there were many other modalities from the list that I did consider beneficial, I considered case studies to be one of the ones that I would avoid. This is because I have not had good experiences with case studies in the past as a learner. I am usually fine working with concepts in abstract and I prefer to apply the concepts I learn to solve a problem on my own whenever possible. So case studies where we merely examine a problem that was solved by someone else always seemed like busy work to me. (This prejudice was probably partly due to the way these activities were presented to me in highschool) Upon further discussion it was brought to my attention that this attitude was not necessarily universal. These case studies can show students the real world utility behind concepts that might otherwise appear completely superfluous. It is now clear to me that this would be psychologically beneficial to students that are concerned with the utility of the information they are being required to learn. I am still unsure if I will be able to incorporate case studies into Calc I but I do believe it would be helpful to find examples of calculus that are immediately useful for students.

When reviewing the teaching philosophies of others I realized that I had focused on the individuality of students in my initial philosophy, but the collaboration between students is a potentially more important part of learning. While as an LA I don’t have complete control of the structure of the classroom I am still a part of it. I need to pay attention to the interactions between students and ensure that they are collaborating in an inclusive and productive way. This should be part of my teaching philosophy as well.

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I believe very strongly that people can understand the same concept in completely different ways and that this should be utilized in teaching. Math is often portrayed as a non-personal subject where there is a correct procedure that leads to a single correct answer. I have had teachers describe the goal of their classes as “giving students a toolbox for solving problems”. But in my (admittedly limited) experience as both a student and a peer mentor I have found that the same tools don’t work for every student. Thus, I believe it is my responsibility to provide students with as many different perspectives on problems so that they can find the ones that work for them.  Going back to the toolbox analogy I believe my teaching philosophy would be closer to running  a hardware store where students can choose the tools that they find to be the most useful and add those to their personal toolbox.