Week 5 - Theory to Practice Response

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DrGarcia said...

Jeff,

You've packed quite a bit of conceptual knowledge into this little post. I'm going to challenge some of the inferences (causal relationships) you've made however. For example, that students who feel "emotionally safe" will less likely feel "learned helplessness." One way to make your T2P hypothesis more believable is by incorporating a concrete example. What type of specific pedagogical practices could you incorporate in your learning environment to mitigate students' feeling learned helplessness? How would you know if they are suffering from learned helplessness? Activities, interpersonal interactions, assessments? Participant observation? Its definitely time to take your conceptual knowledge to the next level and incorporate some concrete ideas. Keep pressing.

Revised T2P:
If a teacher provides a learning environment that is emotionally safe and meets the basic needs of their students, then those students will be able to work at a higher cognitive level and will be intrinsically motivated to accomplish their tasks well because they will have a more positive attitude towards learning. According to Maslow, by having these basic needs met the students will be able to focus more clearly on learning and not become distracted by things such as hunger or sleep. Also, according to Kolencik, students that have a more positive attitude are willing to work harder. These are students who feel emotionally safe in expressing their thoughts and ideas without the threat of judgment or ridicule. These students are also less likely to feel a "learned helplessness" and will attempt a problem even if there is a chance of getting it wrong. The negative effect of learned helplessness can be seen in Kolencik’s case study of the student Michael. In this study, Michael does not want to do any work because he feels that he is doomed to failure and whenever he does get something correct, he makes an excuse for it being lucky “guess.”

As an educator I want to try and prevent any of my students from feeling discouraged about their work. To do this, I will incorporate ideas from Ryan and Deci’s Self Determination Theory about autonomy, competence, relatedness. I want my students to feel the free to work out problems and assignments in ways that best suit their learning styles and not be afraid of answering something incorrectly. On the occasions that this happens, I will press the student to explain their reasoning behind the answer and help them to reason through the content to find the correct solution. By doing this, I hope to foster feelings of competence on the part of the student so that way they always feel motivated to give their work their very best effort. I want to be able to establish a relationship with each of my students so that way they feel comfortable in coming to me and saying “I don’t understand this” instead of shutting themselves off from a subject that they might actually love.