An interesting conversation came up last Thursday with the rest of the InSITE group:
Does the way we as teachers learn bias the way we facilitate students’ learning?
We all agreed that it does. So what can we do about it as teachers to avoid our own metacognitive biases attenuating the learning of our students?
From my perspective, this requires three steps:
- We need to know how students learn.
- We need to know how to facilitate the various ways students learn.
- We need to apportion our teaching capital appropriately so as to maximise the learning outcomes of all students.
I feel that my independent research could be very useful in guiding me down this process. My idea for research is:
How can the way teachers use their capital influence how well a student learns?
What inspired this thought was that, in reality, different teachers facilitate students’ learning differently. In my own experience, the teachers that used their capital efficiently to augment their students’ learning were the most successful ones.
From teaching post-secondary students, I’ve realised that different people use different cognitive and social strategies to help them learn. Some learn more from interacting with others and some learn more from independent research. Some learn more from introspectively thinking about what they’ve learned and some learn more from actively participating in their own learning.
It is very challenging for teachers to meet the learning requirements of all students.
It follows that it’s useful for the field of education to look at how the teacher’s approach towards distributing his/her capital – knowledge, time, energy, body language, etc. – can affect the learning outcome of his/her students.