Thoughts while reading the first chapter of “A
Handbook of Reflective and Experiential Learning Theory and Practice” by
Jennifer A. Moon.
I just finished reading the first chapter. It was a very intimate
experience reading about learning, particularly where it mentions how dyslexic
people can display an “output of their learning”. I was originally going to
talk about adult ballet students because I hadn’t started reading the book yet.
However, since I’ve started to read the book, I think I will take the
opportunity to talk about what I have just read, and what I was going to write
about as a weekly topic without any influence from external sources. My reading
of the first chapter has made me think more, so I must include them together as
one entry.
Adult Ballet Students, and Chapter 1
of the Book
Adult ballet students: how do you motivate them do to the movement
properly when they don't want to do the movement properly because they don't
like their muscles to ache? or something seems impossible to them, when really,
they could just put in more effort. How do you motivate them to listen, and to
not just copy other students? If they
all copy each other, then nobody does anything properly, and they then expect
the teacher to demonstrate the combination and they will copy the teacher, but
this will not accomplish any learning, or development. So, how as teachers do
we fix this problem?”
These are all questions that I have formed as a result of self-reflection
leading to “internal learning” that I just read about, that comes from
“external learning” as my “field trips” into the ballet studio daily. Now I have
even more questions that I need to ask myself as a teacher of these students:
“what are they learning?”, “how are they learning?” “what internal and external
learning are they doing themselves?”, and “what internal and external learning
am I getting as a result of their learning process?”
Did anyone else feel the same after reading this chapter? And what other
“reflections”, and “internal/external” learning are you aware of now that that
you know this terminology?
Please comment below and discuss!
I haven't read the chapter, but I had a thought on the copying thing. It seems to me that at a beginner level, most of what they're doing *is* copying the teacher. You can tell them till you're blue in the face that turnout actually makes things easier and it's far easier to use the right muscles to do an exercise than the wrong ones, but they won't get it until they feel it in their own bodies, at least in my experience, and that takes time and experience and practice.
ReplyDeleteI'd say that internal learning takes time. If your beginner students are copying you, that's what they should be doing! The rest will come, or at least it has with my students. Mine don't seem to understand the whys until I hammer it in for a long, long time.
That is Interesting, I just finished reading the second chapter of the book, and it relates to several studies, where students that participated in the studies end up getting separated into several groups of different types of learners. I see the same of my own students. The studies are on different focus groups than those of my students but there are definitely different types of learning involved.
ReplyDeleteI don't demonstrate when I dance, I only mark the movement because N. Tarasov says in his book (I am paraphrasing) that a teacher should only have demonstrate to the very beginning students, and even then the bet teacher should only need to use words.
What I was getting at from the demonstration, is that I feel that there is a certain pre-requisite to how much a student can learn, and this is up to the student themselves. Some students actually don't want to learn, they just would like the "placebo" idea of learning, they really just want to copy, and feel like they are dancing, because they are copying, but they actually aren't interested in learning. However the ones that do want to learn are really enjoying, and soaking up everything I have to teach!