Counseling+and+Engineering

Among other factors, there are two major skills used in teaching: counseling, as in the skills necessary to building a relationship, and engineering, as in the ability to reverse engineer what a student is doing in order to guess at a schema as well as the ability to build learning experiences that take into account information delivery, student motivation, student personal development, etc.

Counseling Good relationships are the foundation of teaching.

Engineering Teaching an online course has taught Carolyn about the engineering side of teaching. In an online course, there is information delivery. Using principles of universal design for learning, information is presented in multiple ways so that it becomes more learnable. Secondly there is the sequencing of information. In educational psychology, this means making sure students have an understanding of critical theories and types of child/student development prior to presenting information that relies on these understandings (such as lesson design). At a finer level of design, there is task analysis and connected to task analysis is the notion: what is the least students can know and still do something that is an approximation of the skill we want them to eventually learn.

For example, we taught 12 bar blues in our classroom using plastic electronic piano keyboards ($10 at Family Dollar). Twelve bar blues involves being able to do chord changes between the I, IV, and V chords. The easisest keys to recognize on the piano are the black keys because their pattern is so much more evident to someone who is not familiar with the piano. Therefore, we told the students that the C# was the I, F# was the IV, and G# was the V. We practiced playing the three chords and then we played the 3 chords with the harmonic rhythm for 12 bar blues: I for 4 bars, IV for 2 bars, I for 2 bars, V for 2 bars, 1 for 2 bars. We were then able to perform Big Mama Thornton's You Ain't Nothin' But a Hound Dog and following that, were able to write our own blues songs (in groups).

A full performance of 12 bar blues would involve not just playing a single note for a bassline as we did, but a walking bassline, full chords, and an improvisational melody in the breaks between the verses as well as the response part between the lines of the verse. But with task analysis, I discoveres that we could do a simple bassline using notes that were easily identified (and then we put stickers of different colors on those notes to make that process even easier) and we could perform a much-simplified version of the blues and the students could have the experience of the excitement of performance without the pressure of learning a whole group of skills before being able to do so.

Reverse Engineering Reverse Engineering is a thought process by which an end product is taken apart to figure out how it was created. If we take the end product of a child, "I goed to the store with Mommy," we can reverse engineer it to understand that the child has overgeneralized the past tense -ed construction to an irregular verb. This child therefore understands how to construct a past tense, how to use it in a meaningful way, and has not yet come to understand the use of verbs that have an irregular past tense.

Autodidactism One of our goals is to get students to learn independently. The idea of a one room school house is that we get kids started on something and then they do a substantive amount of learning on their own, individually or in groups.