6/20 Class: Bea Pohl & Tree Girolamo

Bea Pohl and Tree Girolamo

SUMMARY

Perceptive bias/selective attention means focusing on what is anticipated.  Memory and viewing/reading are very dependent upon schemata and directions. 

Confirmation bias refers to arriving to an anticipated answer.  A teacher who knows students have ASD may tend to attribute challenging behaviors to their disability.

Our minds organize schemata and concepts by class (general grouping), property (distinctive features) and examples.  This helps us turn chaos into cosmos.  I searched “chaos,” and found this character.

We should use authentic learning activities to provide students with (cultural) contexts for building concepts.  If teaching about the diversity of NYC, you might go to Chinatown.  We accept information as prior knowledge, reject it, modify it, or create a new concept.  Are concepts and schemata interchangeable?

In the classroom, be clear with directions, keep an open mind, teach with a context so information is meaningful, and use graphic organizers to help students turn chaos into cosmos. Like Joan Myers said, good teaching is good teaching -- a strategy, such as visual organization, is good for students with disabilities, as well as for typically developing peers.

KNOWLEDGE CONSTRUCTION

“Knowledge Construction” how we interpret information and construct it creates critical

thinking in our students. Basically our brains work like a computer, we receive data and input and we

send output. And just like a computer who is programed, we can only construct from what is entered

into our brain. If information is sketchy or missing, so will our final output. As the saying “goes garbage

in, garbage out.”

This is why techniques like schema, scripting, providing opportunities for experimentation,

getting expert perspectives, collaborating with peers and scaffolding is so important to teaching. Our

students can only learn effectively when we give them detailed information. Promoting classroom

dialogue creates a collaborative environment for students to talk to one another when working on

complex tasks or topics. Like the old saying, “two heads are better than one.”