Week2

February 1, 2010

During the week leading up to this class, I read the require texts and learned a lot of information about child development and their individual styles of learning. As a mother of both a special needs son and a typically developing daughter, I found these readings very pertinent. It was fascinating to be able to compare my own children's development versus those of Piaget's and Vygotsky. I'm convinced in certain areas they both hit it on the head. I especially agree with Vygotsky's theory of social interaction and learning. Our social situations definitely have an impact with our learning. Another area I found interesting was the models of the mind. It is amazing how many different theories researchers have developed on how the child thinks and what is the best way to reach them.

At the beginning of class, Dr. Ambrose spoke about creativity and how it is imperative in successful teaching. He told us of a man named Grubert, who went through Darwin's notebooks. He noticed that Darwin had many sketches with labels on them which indicated he was having trouble understanding his own notes. Therefore he invented a visual metaphor which actually enabled him to leap to higher level of learning. Dr. Ambrose explained, that he used this strategy himself in Graduate School to help him study and understand what was being taught.

Next, we broke into groups and did an activity called Jigsaw with the topic being leadership. Dr. Ambrose handed out two cards randomly that indicated a Home Group (what we know about he topic) and the Expert Group discussing what we learn from our research and reading. In our Home Group, we came up with words that describe what leadership means to us. Next we separated into our Expert Group and read and article about a famous leader, and discuss it later. Lastly, we went back to our Home Group and taught the other members what we had learned. I was really impressed by the entire process and how much we learned in such a short amount of time.

Lastly, we broke up into our project groups that we were emailed late last week. My group is doing our presentation on How to Differentiate Instruction in Mixed - Ability Classrooms.

I am very excited to say that I am learning so much in this class and I'm looking forward to what I'll learn during this week of readings and class next week.