The Design of Learning Environments

1
The Design of Learning Environments

• Chapter 6
• How People Learn, National Research Council,
  Washington, D.C.. 2000

2
Changes in Educational Goals

• 21st Century goals of education are very
  different from earlier times.
• Consider the goals of schooling in the early
  1800s.
• Writing instruction was largely aimed at giving
  children the capacity to closely imitate very
  simple text forms. Overall, the definition of
  functional literacy changed from being able to
  sign ones name to word decoding to reading for
  new information.

3
Changes in Educational Goals

• In the early 1900s, the challenge of providing
  mass education was seen by many as analogous to
  mass production in factories. Children were
  regarded as raw materials to efficiently
  processed by technical workers to reach the end
  product so that they could be treated somewhat as
  an assembly line.
• Teachers were viewed as workers whose job was to
  carry out directives from their superiors--the
  efficiency experts of schooling.

4
Changes in Educational Goals

• Today, students need to understand the current
  state of their knowledge and to build on it,
  improve it, and make decisions in the face of
  uncertainty. These two notions of knowledge were
  identified by John Dewey (1916) as records of
  previous cultural accomplishments and engagement
  in active processes as represented by the phrase
  to do.

5
Literacy Then and Now

• Recitation Literacy Ability to hold a book and
  reel off memorized portions of basic American
  texts such as opening paragraph of Dec. of Ind.
  (colonists)
• Extraction Literacy Making sense of never seen
  before text.
• Higher LiteracyAll read and write and analyze
  text to highest level.

6
4 Perspectives on Learning Environments

• Learner-Centered Environments
• Knowledge-Centered Environments
• Assessment-Centered Environments
• Community-Centered Environments

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Learner-Centered Environments
Community
Knowledge Centered
Learner Centered
Assessment Centered
Figure 6.1
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Learner-Centered Environments

• Environments that pay careful attention to the
  knowledge, skills attitudes and beliefs that
  learners bring to the educational setting.
• Includes teaching practices that have been called
  culturally responsive, culturally
  appropriate, culturally compatible, and
  culturally relevant. (Ladson-Billings, 1995)
• To promote learning, it is important to focus on
  controlled changes of structure in a fixed
  content or on deliberate transfer of a structure
  from one context to another.

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Learner-Centered Environments

• Learner-centered instruction also includes a
  sensitivity to the cultural practices of students
  and the effect of those practices on classroom
  learning.
• Learner-centered teachers also respect the
  language practices of their students because they
  provide a basis for future learning.
• Overall, learner-centered environments include
  teachers who are aware that learners construct
  their own meanings, beginning with the beliefs,
  understandings, and cultural practices they bring
  to the classroom.

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Knowledge Centered Environments

• Environments thats are solely learner centered
  would not necessarily help students acquire the
  knowledge and skills necessary to function
  effectively in society.
• Environmentalists also focus on the kinds of
  information and activities that help students
  develop an understanding of disciplines.
  (requires a critical examination of existing
  curricula)
• Environments also include an emphasis on
  sense-making--on helping students become
  metacognitive by expecting new information to
  make sense.

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Knowledge Centered Environments

• Attempts to create environments that are
  knowledge centered also raise important questions
  about how to foster an integrated understanding
  of a discipline.

12
Assessment-Centered Environments

• They should provide opportunities for feedback
  and revision and that what is assessed must be
  congruent with ones learning goals.
• Formative assessment involves the use of
  assessment as sources of feedback to improve
  teaching and learning.
• Summative assessment measures what students have
  learned at the end of some set of learning
  activities.

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Formative Assessment

• Students thinking must be made visible.
• Opportunities for feedback should occur
  continuously.
• Effective teachers also teach students how to
  self-assess.
• Self-assessment is an important part of the
  metacognitive approach to instruction.

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Community-Centered Environments

• Classroom, school connected with homes , states
  and the nation.
• At the level of classrooms and schools, learning
  seems to be enhanced by social norms that value
  the search for understanding and allow students
  the freedom to make mistakes in order to learn.
• Classroom norms can also encourage modes of
  participation that may be unfamiliar to some
  students.

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Community-Centered Environments

• The sense of community in classrooms is also
  affected by grading practices, and these can have
  positive or negative effects depending on the
  students.
• Competition among students for teacher attention,
  approval, and grades is a commonly used motivator
  in U.S. schools.
• The sense of community in a school also appears
  to be strongly affected by the adults who work in
  the environment.

16
Television

• Many students spend more time watching tv than
  attending school.
• Parents want their children to learn from
  television, at the same time they are concerned
  about what they are learning from the programs.
• The same program can have different effects
  depending on the environment in which a person is
  watching television.

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The Importance of Alignment

• Alignment is as important for schools as for
  organizations in general.
• Task Analysis is key when aligning goals for
  learning with what is taught, how it is taught,
  and how it is assessed.
• Without alignment, it is difficult to know what
  is being learned.
• Activities within schools must also be aligned
  with the goals and assessment practices of the
  community.