Reflection of class on Jan. 11^th

  Before I came to America, I had studied for educational technology for almost five years from university and I spent much more time on theories learning than practice because there was not so many opportunities for me to do that.

  So today’s class and assignments just like a trigger for my prior learning experience and I get a new overview about those significant theories proposed by different educators like Gagne, Bloom and Dewey from behaviorism and cognitivism to constructivism.

  As you know, the instructional system design is one of the vital parts of educational technology and Gagne contributed to it a lot for his classifying of learning and nine events of instruction. Although his classifying of learning is not concrete enough as Bloom’s classifying, I really appreciate his deeper and comprehensive thinking about the whole process of learning. To be honest, it’s impossible to implement his theory into real teaching completely because there is too much work for teachers to do in terms of his theory, but I think teachers can get some useful inspiration from that to help them perform better in teaching.

  In China, many teachers don’t know what the major objective of class is and how to define and divide it into sub-objectives logically to make it easier for students to learn, so sometimes they just begin the class after reviewing prior contents without any introduction of class objectives. It’s a big problem in Chinese education I think because students cannot make sense about the concrete objects so that they don’t know how to achieve it correctly and think deeper. And it’s also the major reason that they don’t know how to get valuable feedback from students and use it to evaluate their own class clearly for further refining. If they can learn more about Bloom’s theory about classifying of objectives, they won’t feel confused about that anymore.

  Finally, I want to talk about Dewey’s theory about education. And I think I have experienced exactly about how his experienced learning theory influenced American education significantly according to the visit to Greeville High School and teaching video I have evaluated.

  Many educators proposed that American students perform more active and creative in learning than Chinese students because American students usually learn from doing but Chinese students learn from listening. As we all know, practice is the sole criterion for testing truth and new ideas often come from practice. But you know it’s too difficult to prompt learning from doing in China because there is less educational resource for each student than America so lesson-lecture class is the worthiest way for teachers to teach so many students in imitated class time.

  Fortunately, Chinese educational department has realized this problem and tried to begin makerspace learning like America in different schools from primary to senior students around China. I believe there will be a better future for Chinese education and students.