Ah Bruner. There's a reverend in my town with this last name so I often see his face when I think of this theory. I'm struggling with this one. Perhaps I'm not understanding it all too well but, well let me compare it to a carburetor. The first couple of theories seemed much like a carburetor, they described what learning was and how to do it and offered useful advice/counsel on how to become a much more effective teacher. These latest theories seem to just change one minor part and claim to have a totally different machine. If someone were to show me a carburetor and then change the location of one screw, it would still be a carburetor and I would not feel the need to dissect and re-learn about carburetors all over again. I wonder how many of these theories are just minor modifications, almost not worth calling a theory. I love the idea of hands on experiential learning, but haven't we discussed this multiple times already? Surely I'm missing something, please help me clear this up.
M
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Wow, I hope you don't fail for saying that! I am just kidding, of course. Yes, the theories all run into each other and overlap. So much so that I cannot remember one from the other.
ReplyDeleteEach theory has to stick with me in some way. Case-based learning struck a chord because I taught Spanish for a long time and I always knew that giving kids a particular situation in which to learn the language was far more effective than learning phrases in and of themselves.
Bruner didn't make much sense to me until I read what other classmates wrote in their lesson plans. They may be wrong about how they interpreted the theory but I like what they came up with because it finally makes sense. I learned, be it right or wrong, that: kids should be at the center of the learning activities, they should have plenty of opportunities to talk , think, discover, and such, and that the teacher should act as a facilitator.
I don't think this is different from the other theories, except that maybe another theorist didn't focus so much on a particular role of the teacher or the student. So, in terms of the carburetor, it may be the same but it might have a better fit. SInce we're technically still in shop class we have to keep looking, but try not to sweat it. :)
well, the big thing with bruner is that you have a few main ideas. Spiral curriculum is different - the idea that you have students learn about an idea first when they are young and then revisit it in more depth or from a different perspective later. Then with discovery learning there is an emphasis on the creation of cognitive conflict among students. So the cognitive conflict is kind of a scaffold to push students to learn more. And then the modes of representation are different from otehr theorists. We'll talk more about the differences next week.
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