Reflections: Educational Psychology Problem-based Learning

1.  How has the problem-based learning experience changed:

•      the way you learn?

•       the way you solve problems?

•       your understanding of what makes group learning effective?

 During the course of my professional career, I have had experiences similar to the problem-based learning experience, where we looked at problems and attempted to reach suitable solutions, thereby gaining new knowledge of the issue at hand. However, those experiences were steeped in real world context. While I do not think that this experience has changed the way I learn, I think that the experience does help in making the theories of educational psychology more understandable and relevant. It demonstrated how these theories can be applied in the real world context and how they act as a guide to understand and decipher problems one may encounter in the classroom or school. Sadly, this is not a perfect world, and theories remain as just that, theories. With all good intentions, theory-based solutions offer possible, yet unrealistic ways of how problems can be solved. However, in reality, these solutions are not practical, and their executions near to impossible.

While there was much scaffolding on the PBL Google site, the instructions and required tasks were too detailed, and as a result, created confusion as to the requirements and expectations. Templates were helpful as a guide, but the deliverables expected were repetitive, as they required similar information to be presented in different formats. Objectives of the problem-based learning experience were not clear, and continued to be unclear for much of the process.

I think that group learning is effective, but only if every member plays their part to contribute and share. Each member is a part of a bigger whole, and if everyone meets the deliverables, individually and as a group, each person will benefit tremendously from group learning. It is also vital that each member becomes familiar, if not experts, with the topic they are responsible for researching on, so that everyone can benefit from sharing when the group convenes, and learning becomes more effective and meaningful.

2.  How has the Problem-based learning experience nurtured your competencies as a beginning teacher?

This experience makes me aware that as a beginning teacher, I need to be sensitive to a child’s personal, social and cognitive development, and that these are affected by the child’s family and social background and interactions. Every child wants to learn, and if he or she behaves in a certain way that I do not find acceptable, I should not jump to assumptions but instead understand that his behaviour could be a result of his physical and social environments. I also realise that every kind of interaction that a child has has a potential to affect his or her sense of learning, even my words and actions or interactions with the child’s parents.

3. After having engaged with the content of Educational Psychology, what is your present belief about how students learn best?

I find the theories of Educational Psychology very interesting, and find that they can act as guidelines for me to understand my students’ learning and behaviours. However, they remain as just that, guidelines. Every student learns differently and come from different backgrounds with different family, social and physical influences. Students can learn best when a teacher takes into account all these differences and makes attempts to engage them meaningfully and purposefully.

Reflections: Language Teaching Approaches

a) describe a teaching practice/approach/technique you strongly believe in and give reasons why;

b) describe a teaching practice/approach/technique you do not believe in and and give reasons why;
c) the problems /issues / challenges that you observed in a language classroom

a) I would consider the multimodal approach of language teaching as one that I strongly believe in. In today's world, everyone, especially the youth, are faced with a multitude of different forms of communicative genres, be it audio, visual or in print. The Internet especially has become such an entrenched part of the youth's lives that one can almost say they cannot live without it. They are a connected age, bombarded by endless sources of information at the click of their fingertips. Rather than be passive receivers of these information, they need to be able to decipher and analyze the information they see, to make meaning out of it. And learning the structure, form and function of the English language is not enough. I believe that in the language class, students need to be exposed to a variety of materials that require them to elicit their audio, visual, reading and writing capabilities. And through this multimodal approach, and in particular the Language Arts approach where mass media like film is used, we as teachers will be able to link theory and its applications in real life, to make learning meaningful and real for students.

b) I do not believe in the community language learning and natural approaches. Both of these approaches have a focus on group work and participative activities. While I do agree that such activities may be a good way to encourage participation and learning amongst peers, their effects are limited. This is because some students of the class may not have English as their first language, and therefore struggle with it. This in turn may affect their contribution during the activities. Even if the teacher facilitates, the question is how the conversation will evolve once the teacher leaves the group to attend to other groups. Also, I see lacking a multimodal approach that equips the students with the tools to make meaning out of communicative mediums in the real world.

c) The key issue I see is the students' view that there is no need to learn English, as it is something they already know. As the Singapore curriculum takes a functional approach, students find it boring and fail to see the relevance of it to real life. The teacher's role then is to bridge this gap. And very often, especially for students in Secondary 3 and 4, their focus in on scoring, and they end up asking for 'formulas', a template for say situational writing, to help them in their exams. Therein lies another challenge - how to make a language class interesting so they realize what they are learning now are skills they can use in the real world. At the same time they need to realize that unlike subjects like Math, there is no set formula. Only reading and exposing themselves to a multitude of mediums will help them increase their repertoire of language. In this respect, I would be interested to see how the Language Arts approach can be utilized.