My Developmental Stages In LearningTheories

Stage Two - 1955 to 1966 - Prelude to My Life as a College Professor

In this session, I want to deal with some differences between being a traditional college professor who uses the lecture method and being a professor like Dr. Margaret Carroll (and me) who use the Student-centered Learning method.

Because we are dealing with the thoughts and feelings of our students we want to make the best use of the interactions between ourselves and our students and in the interactions of each of our students with the other students.

The most obvious activities noted by visitors to a Student-centered Learning class are that the professor is not lecturing and that the students are talking without asking for permission from the professor. So, let’s look at asking questions and communicative interaction.

Questioning Strategies

We use questions more than statements in our communication with our students.  There are a lot of good sources on questioning available in books and computers. Here are two good ones.

Key Questioning Strategies - Department of Education used in our schools.  Benjamin Bloom in the 1940s developed his  Bloom’s Taxonomy that  classifies cognitive skills into six progressively complex levels, Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create so that you can use it to ask questions at different levels.

Flanders’ Interaction Analysis 

Coach talk			Categories
	Indirect Influence		1. Accept feeling
			2.Praises or encourages
			3. Accept ideas
			4. Asks questions
	Direct Influence		5. Lectures
			6. Gives directions
			7. Criticizes
Athlete talk			8. Athlete’s response
			9. Athletes’s talk Initiation
			10.Silence or confusion

Transactional Analysis (TA) was developed by psychiatrist Eric Berne in the 1950s. It is a psychological theory and therapy method that identifies three modes of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It examines how people exchange messages, helping to improve communication and relationships.

Ned. A. Flanders developed a system of interaction analysis to study what is happening in a classroom when a coach or teacher teaches.  She is doing something such as silently accepting a student’s idea or actively showing how a  2-1-2 zone defense works on her clipboard. It was discovered that #10 “Silence or confusion” was very often the expert teacher giving her students time to think about the answer #8. It is now called “Wait Time” and has taken its place in our communications.

Player-centered Coaching - Student-centered Learning on the Soccer pitch

It became clear to my colleague and me (coach and former coach) that compared to the traditional classroom teacher, the Coach is using learner-based educational methodology; players move about and talk to other players.

A Related Episode

Torah Student to his Rabbi:  Rabbi Hershel, why do rabbis answer questions with a question? Rabbi Hershel to his Torah Student:   And so, what’s wrong with asking a question?