The End of the Beginning

Time flew like a tornado! All of a sudden, we’re already at the ending and that awkward nostalgia starts to creep in. I still remember my first ever personal online blog for EDS  103. Now I’m down to my last, well at least for this course. I never thought that God will allow me to fulfill two of my biggest dreams through Professional Teaching Certification Program (PTC) – to become a TEACHER and a WRITER. It’s like I hit two birds with one stone. I guess that’s really how generous and faithful He is to our dreams.

I truly had a lot of Aha! moments in this community as evident on my previous posts. I think I need to count how many times I had those eureka moments and I wish I could capture how I looked like whenever I tremble upon something new that caused my jaw to drop. In every rigid training, there’s always a warm-up exercise. For EDS 103, our thought exercise was “What is learning?”.  I viewed learning as acquiring knowledge through experience. After the course is through, it turned out and I agreed that true learning is not solely obtained through experience. We acquire our knowledge, skill or behavior by simply responding with environmental stimuli (behaviorism), through observation / models (social learning) or through mental processing. We are active construction workers of our knowledge too.

At the start of the course, I remember I also came up with my own superficial and systemic learning. This is the result of being a Plant Pathologist, I tend to relate all new information to what I took up in college (we have these so called superficial fungi and  systemic mode of action of pesticides). Aha! This is partly cognitive constructivism because I have tried to understand a new information based on an existing schema.

I also recall that I considered an information “learned” even if lasted for a short time. As the course concluded, I was awakened by the fact that true learning brings change, it endures time and it is a consequence of experience. Information which are forgotten are just surface learning. From now on, I will try to engage myself and my students in deep learning using our HOTS (high order thinking skills). Thanks to the practical teaching tips!

My kids learned that their screen time has limit because of the classical and operant conditioning I employed. The reason why my kids keep on doing better and better everyday is explained by the law of effect and the power of self-efficacy.  I dislike wet sink because I acquired my father’s behavior through observational learning (my father is a dry sink lover!). Say no to heavily texted teaching aids!

I can go on and on discussing how various learning theories have and will improve/d my life and the lives of people around me especially my kids and my future students but it will take me another semester perhaps. One thing is sure though, I AM MORE THAN THANKFUL for every assimilated and accommodated knowledge. I decided to take PTC to acquire a license to teach never expecting that it will actually grant me a license to learn… to TRULY learn.

This is just the end of the “first” beginning. I am excited to the next phase of this journey for I am armored with enough scaffolds to rock and roll through PTC. Thank you Teacher Malou and my co-EDS 103-ers!

FINAL NOTE:

Have I said THANK YOU Teacher Malou? 🙂