Dunnington Reflection 3

Deb Dunnington

Multimodal Learning

Chapter 4 (pages 73-92)

Reflection #3

When I first began reading chapter 4, I was sitting at the table thinking, “Really, Really?” The chapter started off with a vignette about a student who is walking home from school and pulls out her Smartphone and begins narrating notes about her science project using the voice recorder feature. While in a perfect world this might be an awesome resource for education, we have to remember that we don’t live in a perfect world.

Our discussion touched on this idea a bit, and on the fact that in order to make the book universal for everyone, the author needed to write it as if we do live in a world where every student has a Smartphone with a data plan so that we can become familiar with the ideas and adapt them to our circumstances and the resources our students do have. Another technique Bean introduced in this chapter was the ISDAT strategy which means “slowing down to carefully consider and evaluate various sites in a search” (86). During our discussion we all agreed that kids often times take the fastest way of completing something or click on the first website on the Google search just because it’s at the top. We decided that it is important for kids to slow down and carefully consider things. We didn’t necessarily like the worksheet the text provided but we thought it would be wise to create something that we felt would work with our particular classes.

For our discussion protocol we used the 4 As. All of us seemed to really enjoy this technique and think that it can be a valuable discussion tool in the classroom. In our group, the majority of us chose at least one or two of the same parts of our chapter for one or two of our As, but it created a good discussion for our group. My concern with teenagers is that if that happened in their discussion group they might take the easy way out and just agree or say I had the same one. Before using this protocol I would give this some thought so that the discussion would stay rolling.

Our group discussed today that one of the major takeaways from the reading and the class as a whole is that we need to consciously show our students our thinking process. This is not something that is limited to the classroom either, but to life in general. We can’t expect people to read our minds and know what we are thinking when we tell them something, but if we consciously tell them our thought process than it creates a model for them to follow.

This hasn’t been on of my favorite professional books, but I do think it has value, although I am having to stretch my thought processes to find that value. Today while reading about the slow down and think carefully strategy, I realized that is a strategy I have to use with this book. The strategies and techniques are not going to fit in my practice with minor adaptations. I am going to have to slow down and consider their value and then devise ways I can take mini-parts of them or the idea of them and fit them into my practice.