301 – Assigment 4.2

Assignment 4.2

Jason Everett

The Personal Development Journal

I enjoyed reading Dr. Beyers message in the announcements forum on Blackboard and how it relates to our class so far.

Strength – Describe the strongest learning experience(s) you had thus far and why it/they were important to you.

My strongest learning experience from this exchange with Dr. Beyers was more about process than content. Although the content is ultimately what you are trying to get across, with out the process, it won’t stick.

Improvement – Reflect on how you could improve your learning in the future.

In the past, I have taking the “dump truck” approach to teaching. Take a ton of information and just unload on my participants and hope some of it stays with them. I can see now the importance of having a structured process for learning. Stages they go through and what the golden egg is in terms of the CBAM process.

Insight – What new discoveries/understanding did you get in the learning process? How will you apply it to what you are doing in your daily professional or personal life?

I liked the three points he shared from Dr. Brookfield: Students will either 1) reject new information, 2) accept new information, or 3) blend what they have learned with previous knowledge.

As I reflected on those three points I wrote Dr. Beyers the following:

… I would be interested to hear your thoughts or resources you have on critical thinking. I feel we focus so much on content (especially in K12) that we don’t have time to teach critical thinking. I would even go a step further and say we don’t spend enough time in the creative thinking realm. I work a little with Information Literacy as it pertains to the Internet and searching. The more I work with teachers and students, the more I realize how much content there is but the skills to wade through it all are not there. And in a global society, what may be an incorrect assumption or assessment of the situation to our culture, may be perfectly normal or acceptable in another. …

As far as using this in my daily professional life I plan to apply these processes to the planning of sustained training programs rather than one shot professional development opportunities.  I would like to take my professional mission to “help others learn and share 21st century skills” and provide a framework for teachers to build their skills and knowledge.