Page 75 - Foundations of Learning, 4th Edition (Revised)

Step Action Jennifer’s Notes
3 Estimate time
involved The actual article is quite long and will take me about an hour, though I
4 Read critically probably will skim some parts. For now, I am just using the methodology
on these three paragraphs, so this should take me about 10 minutes.
5 Assess and
reread Most of the vocabulary is okay, but I probably should check out the definition
of “facilitator,” since this is a key work in this passage. I also am not too
6 Synthesize sure what “locus of control” means.
information
Who is the audience for this article? It seems to be written with other teachers
in mind or at least those interested in teaching. It does seem to assume I
already know some things about educational philosophy. From the title of
the journal, it is clearly academic writing. I will have to watch for jargon.
For example, I see phrases like “collaborative learning” and “facilitative
learning.”

On first read, this is an interesting passage. I can see how medical students
would be better served from getting ill-defined problems to work with. My
father is a doctor and he often told me that he learned the facts in med school,
but lacked many of the skills he needed to solve real problems. There was
too much emphasis on knowing the facts. I’ll have to ask him if he would
have benefited from working on more ill-defined problems. And this idea
of a teacher serving as a facilitator! I’ll need to observe our instructor to see
how she puts these ideas into action.

What makes a problem ill-defined?

I think I did pretty well in my first reading to get the main points. I looked
up the word “locus” and it means the place where something is situated, so
that would mean that the place of control would not be with the teacher/
facilitator, but with the class? With the student? Groups? I wonder how that
works…I also Googled “locus of control” and found this interesting site
that talked about internal versus external locus of control. Here, someone
who has an external locus of control sees their lives controlled by external
factors such as fate and someone with an internal locus of control seeing
their future more affected by their own actions. I’ve already seen in class
that we are encouraged to think more for ourselves and take responsibility
for our own learning.

I’ve chosen “observing” as one of the skills I want to improve in this course.
In my development of this skill, I will observe how my instructor facilitates
the class, especially in how she helps us do some of these activities.

Just from these few paragraphs, I have a better idea now why we have been
and will be doing so many activities. I will spend some time in each activity
observing our group and how our instructor interacts with our group. I also
will be more aware of the kinds of problems we are given. Are they ill-
defined? So far, they’ve been more exploratory than ill-defined. Let’s see
what the next two chapters present, since they’re more related to solving
problems.

Chapter 3 — Reading Methodology 69