I struggled with a topic for this posting because I feel very much like a novice and am well aware that I am only scratching the surface information and have not yet moved to the point where I can apply a higher order thinking to the readings. My saving grace is that my ability to acknowledge my ignorance seems, according to Bransford’s chapter in How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, to have the potential to work in my favor, so I’ll try to take heart in that.

Although I imagine that many individuals in the class found the readings in Norton on narration, plot, character development, etc. to be redundant information, I was very grateful that it was required reading. I have not considered these terms much recently and, like the novices discussed in Bransford’s chapter, my “pause time” would have been extended as I searched my memory for those terms and the information associated with them, leaving less time for me to focus on categorizing, or “chunking” information and even less time to begin understanding concepts and making connections between information.

It seems natural to teach information by chunking it, and chunking information seems to be a natural tendency of learners. Watching any child learn his colors demonstrates this. First, he recognizes all of the color words. One week everything will be red. The next week everything will be blue. But, he never points to something to describe the color of it and calls it “three”. “Three” is not chunked with color words.

It seems less instinctive for teachers to teach information by teaching concepts, however, and less instinctive for learners to derive concepts from information. Although in my own education I have had some wonderful teachers who encouraged me to draw conclusions and analyze information, I always thought the goal of my education was for me to learn the content – the capitals of the states, the names of all the presidents, the formula for finding the angle in a triangle-but this is not the knowledge that I apply in my life. In my life it is the concepts of how to learn, how to organize information, how to recognize my ignorance that proves most useful.

All experts start as novices. They all begin by learning the facts. The best teachers I had were not the ones that imparted the most information. They were the ones that taught me that I was capable of grasping more than the surface information, to not give up when I was frustrated and felt like I was never going to “get it” and who didn’t provide me with all the answers, but instead encouraged me to figure things out on my own. Covering content is great, but I don’t think it’s what I want to consider the goal of teaching.