Exploring Learning Objectives and Teaching in Groups (WW#4)

This week our readings focused on many teaching strategies that can be utilized to improve cognitive and learning abilities among our students. There were lots of great points and ideas to keep in mind when developing a lesson plan and creating classroom activities. I especially liked the article by Katy Groseta and Brian Myers from the university of Florida and their discussion about working in groups. Often times in high school teachers would put you into groups last minute and everyone ended up hating the activity because of poor planning and organization. After reading the article it is more clear to me the importance of group learning and most importantly the preparation that needs to go into implementing a group activity. I believe group work can be an extremely useful and beneficial to students' cognitive learning growth; however, I this can only be accomplished with appropriate preparation by the teacher.

 When planning my activities for my lessons or workshops I often put myself in the students' shoes. I ask myself, "how would I like this experience if I were in this situation?" I also  try to think of the diverse learners that I may have. Then I ask myself if my lesson would be effective for all different types of learners. When thinking about this topic my mind immediately goes back to our discussion in class about interest approaches. Interest approaches are another opportunity to engage those diverse learners in your classroom. My favorite thing about interest approaches is that there are unlimited creative activities you can use to build a great interest approach. It's a prime opportunity to be creative with your lesson and absolutely necessary in order to grasp your students' attention. I believe these aspects are important if we are to be effective teachers.

Another important aspect is developing effective learning objectives. I loved what M. Susie Whittington had said about objectives in her article, "Writing Objectives in Secondary Agricultural Courses that Challenges Students to Think." She states "When teachers fail to provide objectives at the beginning of class, students have not received the important pre-directional mind set that is necessary for learning." I will admit that I wasn't always the brightest crayon in the box as a student in high school. I needed to see the importance in what I was learning and I needed to see how it was all fitting together in order for me to be motivated to learn. As many teachers did not do these tasks, it took me longer to understand content and I was delayed in getting engaged in the lesson. This is why writing effective objectives are really important to me. I realize just how important it is that we create  a mind map for our students so that they can easily identify what they are to be learning in each lesson. If I had teachers that went over the classroom objectives for the day, I might have been more on task in school myself. I hope to provide clarity for my students by defining the objectives at the beginning of class everyday.

Bloom's Taxonomy is a great way to determine if we are developing clear objectives for our lessons. We should be keeping in mind what level of cognitive thinking are we helping our students achieve.

I found this really interesting article that links Bloom's Taxonomy and twitter. It mentions some creative ways of incorporating twitter into the classroom according to Bloom's Taxonomy. Check it out: http://www.edudemic.com/22-effective-ways-to-use-twitter-in-the-classroom-2/