Interesting Observations in eLearning Reading

I mentioned in a previous post I am reading a book called Understanding by Design by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.

An interesting item that I will quote here is the concept that most teachers think more about the process of teaching when preparing lessons then about the process of learning.

Wiggins states: "Too many teachers focus on the teaching and not the learning. They spend most of their time thinking, first, about what they will do, what material they will use, and what they will ask students to do rather than first considering what the learner will need in order to accomplish the learning goals."

I admit to having been one of "those" teachers, especially with the last course I taught at the local community college. We only had a short period of time in which to provide instruction and cover the material for various computer software applications, which did not leave any time to actually THINK about learning goals, let alone to adopt the course around the learning goals.

Wiggins goes on in this brief intro to discuss the following: "Answering the "why?" and "so what?" questions that older students always ask (or want to), and doing so in concrete terms as the focus of curriculum planning, is thus the essence of understanding by design."

This calls to mind one of the students in the aforementioned course. I have great admiration for this woman because she always wanted to know the "why" and "how come" of what we were learning. It not only challenged me to try to anticipate and address her questions before she even asked, but made me think about the material in a whole different way.

Now that I'm beginning to see the difference, I'm going to continue reading, learning, absorbing and discussing…. An no, I'm still not an expert!