The videos and chapter one from Ambrose 2010 were very enlightening for me in many ways. Although I knew the importance of recognizing and acknowledging students’ prior knowledge, I was less aware of how it can affect current and new learning. When I thought about students’ prior learning, I often thought about the formal education they had as well as their lived experiences. I knew as a teacher that it would be important for me to acknowledge the learning students had achieved and to embrace previous experiences as well. The connection I wasn’t making however was how prior learning could interfere with, limit, or enhance new material being taught. This information was new for me and insightful.
As I read the Ambrose chapter, I caught myself nodding and agreeing with the frustration other educators have encountered when trying to deliver new content and concepts and feeling like no matter what I say, it just doesn’t seem to get through to some students. I have had moments when I return to the Faculty office at my campus and express how difficult it is to reach the students, or I often ask others for tips, ideas, and support to help me “get through” to students. Sometimes this frustration can lead Faculty to assume that students are not trying hard enough or are not prepared for the class. Although this could possibly be true, it was new learning for me to consider how previous learning might be the true culprit preventing students from integrating new knowledge rather than a behavior issue. The “mismatch between the knowledge students have and the knowledge their instructor expects and needs them to have” (Ambrose, 2010, p.12) seems to be a key issue—this was an especially enlightening point for me. I expect students coming into my class to have a specific foundation of knowledge and I have not been fully aware of how the connections may not be there or may be blocked in some way. For example, how students may have learned certain information that may be inaccurate and can lead to distorting new material that we are trying to teach. This may be a problem further compounded by an adult learner’s lifetime of learning information that could be flawed or inaccurate in several ways. If we consider how diverse learning is across our lifespan, we must acknowledge how much we have been taught or told that could be wrong or very different than that of another. Again, the impact of prior learning can be very complex and expressed in varying ways.
This information does help teachers to be aware of the hindrance prior learning may have to developing new learning. Although prior learning can be positive in many ways, it can still pose a challenge for teachers to determine where the learning issue/block is stemming from—are students coming to our classes with a foundation that is not solid enough to build upon or is the issue that students’ prior learning is intruding on their ability to comprehend new information? Figuring this out can be a real struggle for educators who often have a tight timeline and need to dive into class content as soon as possible in order to achieve the learning outcomes required of the course curriculum within the number of hours available.
The other challenge it poses for teachers is how to determine what students are experiencing unless they communicate it with us in some way. In my experience, many students do not say very much in class and it can be hard to identify if they were struggling or not, especially in a larger class where having the time to connect individually with students is next to impossible. This makes it hard to understand what students already know when they come into our classes. I wonder how many of my students didn’t understand a concept and simply decided to not ask questions or communicate their struggle? In being reflective in my practice, I strive to always stop and see if material is making sense or if students have questions; however, that may not be enough.
After reading the chapter, I took away some new tips to help gage how students are doing and whether or not they are truly “getting it”. Some of the new tips that made a lot of sense to me include doing earlier assessment to determine what knowledge students have or are lacking. This could be done with a beginning quiz, discussion, clicker system assessment, etc. I could then help fill in the gaps by customizing the content to match where the students are. But again, I do wonder how practical this is when all students come in at different levels of knowledge and understanding. If a class of 20 students are at varying levels, I worry how challenging it will be to align the content to match their individual knowledge base.
The idea of finding where a student`s beginning point is, is reminiscent of Vygotsky`s theory of scaffolding which is essentially the same idea of building on a base of knowledge. I guess the trick is to identify where the last layer of scaffolding left off in order to know where to begin. Additionally Ambrose`s chapter suggests that “students must connect new knowledge to previous knowledge in order to learn” (Ambrose, 2010, p. 15). When I think about knowledge being like marbles deposited into a jar (banking concept of learning), I actually visualize magnets rather than marbles. Magnets connect to other magnets and build a mass, in much the same way as schemata are developed in the brain-- the brain makes synaptic connections attaching information to other related synapses and neurons to build a network of knowledge (connectomes). The idea of connecting learning with what students already know will certainly benefit my classroom practice as long as I can figure out what they actually do know and how their knowledge has been shaped by culture, perception, and experience. In essence, it may take additional work and thinking on a teachers part in order to figure out ways to tap into that learning and build upon it. The effort though can certainly help decrease the frustration we feel when students are not getting it and will be worth the effort. To apply some of the principles and neuroscience learned thus far, it will require us as teachers to engage in trial and error to find what works well for us and our students. After all, this is for us as it is for our students—adapting and integrating new learning with prior learning in order to build and retain a broader knowledge base.
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