Scholarship of Teaching and Learning

I enjoyed reading the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. I felt that many ideas portrayed in this article are ideas that I have learned at MSU, but also concepts that I am practicing in the classroom. My school promotes a model of collaboration and team work. Every team within the building meets on a daily and weekly basis to share resources, ideas, results, adjustments and feedback. Authors Bender and Gray of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, would agree that such models allows us to be the best we can be in the classroom.

Another concept discussed in this article that I practice is formative assessment. Bender and Gray point out, "We must use what we learn about their learning as data that justify or require us to change our practices...". I am in the habit of informally assessing my students so that I can know what to teach next and who to teach what. Formative assessment ties into Educational Technology because I have discovered in this process that sometimes all students need is a new tool to master the objective--and sometimes that is a technology related tool.

What I found most intriguing in this article was pointing out different teaching styles and how they influence learning. The article points out, "We have begun to understand how teaching styles influence learning and about gender and cultural differences and their direct relationship to learning." I have had the privalege of being trained in gender specific learning at the Gurian Institute in Denver, CO. I am teaching an all girls class this fall. I was so enlightened at this conference to learn all the differences between how girls and boys learn differently. I am excited that my school is making such huge strides and taking action on what the research of teaching reveals.

When thinking about goal oriented learning, I am proud to say that again my school promotes lesson designing with goal oriented learning in mind. At the beginning of the last year, my teammates and I designed a unit plan keeping our end objectives in mind. So, we started the unit plan by creating the summative assessment. This ensured that each lesson had a place and purpose towards mastering the summative assessment. Goal oriented learning is a great way to keep the lessons on track, but it can also be difficult to design summative assessments before designing the lessons that help teach the material on the summative assessment.