Expert Blind Spot-Teachers Forget What It Is Like To Be A New Learner?

Summary:

According to the presenters, there are four traps teachers may fall into.

1- Misalignment- teaching one thing and assessing for something completely different. An example would be an English teacher has lessons on the parts of speech and he lectures to the class describing each and lets students write down definitions of the terms and have students do some tasks identifying parts of speech in sentences. However, when assessing the exam is writing sentences using the parts of speech properly.

What was not taught is how to use the parts of speech in sentences. The why (definitions were provided, but his is insufficient permit learning to occur.

To avoid this trap the presenters suggest three actions:

1. Clarify the differences

As a result, they make assumptions as to what students will understand . As a result, a teacher may leave out necessary information, not provide adequate tome to do an activity and skip some steps.

I term this the experts curse. We teach as if the student should know this, because the teacher knows it so well. The authors, state that instructors need to assess: what students know, do not know, and need to know to move forward.

One method mentioned is deconstruction of tasks into components. For example, to write a good essay what are the base bones elements of the essay. In addition, they suggest teachers assess students first to see what the students know and do not know from the very first day. Providing sub-skills practice and integrating through practice an instructor can reduce this blindness.

For the essay mentioned above: A decomposed essay consists of words, sentences and paragraphs.

The elements of a sentence are_____, The elements of a paragraph are_______. The combining of the elements creates an essay. Essays have parts, too: thesis, paragraphs have topic sentences, cohesion, coherence and other terms need to be broken into basic