Practical Access Podcast

S:2 E:18: How do we know when our students or children learn something?

June 30, 2020 Season 2 Episode 18
Practical Access Podcast
S:2 E:18: How do we know when our students or children learn something?
Show Notes Transcript

Drs. Rebecca Hines and Lisa Dieker, UCF faculty, share their thoughts on how to ensure learning is occurring.  The practical ideas shared provide ways to assess and frame learning to ensure positive outcomes for learners with disabilities.  The ideas shared are simple and meant to be used on a daily basis to both frame learning targets and outcomes. We look forward to receiving your questions on Twitter @accesspratical

Rebecca Hines:

Welcome to practical access. I'm Lisa Dieker. And I'm Rebecca Hines. And Lisa, our last episode, we were going to talk about a couple of questions. And we ended up talking about bullying a topic that we were both interested in. So I'm never really sure what we're going to get. And so listeners, let's see, Lisa, what's today's topic?

Lisa Dieker:

Well, it's so interesting. I will start with this one. I, I am going to make you go first. Because I again, I have thoughts about how to answer it. And, and I think we were just talking about, you know, you don't really like our answers, we apologize. We're just giving you our best practical advice that we have at this moment. But it's how do you know when your child or your kid has

Rebecca Hines:

Well, I'll tell you that it's interesting. That's something you know, that I, I tried to tell pre service teachers, that as teachers, you should be able to identify what you think a child has learned when they leave your room on any given day? Like, I don't understand why we don't really pair it down that simply sometimes, like what do you want them to be able to do when they

Lisa Dieker:

teenager? Oh,

Rebecca Hines:

yeah, you might not even get the full response. So I do think that, you know, part of that is on the teachers of You know what, specifically literally, it's there. If a student's asked that one day, what is the answer? Now as a as a when one of my nephew's was young, he was in kindergarten, he came home and I asked him that question. I said, Graham, what did you learn today? And he thing you remember, you know, the word learned? Kids even become? So I don't know. Just indoctrinated to the school system. They think learning is something super formal on a test too. So it's like, no, what's one thing that you remember, because remembering is learning. It's getting kids to understand that and having very specific conversations, it all starts and ends to me with, with

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and I'm going to go with maybe a sports analogy or thinking about as parents, you know, anytime your child's involved in anything from riding a bike to walking to swimming, you know, if you start with a floaty, you really didn't learn to swim yet. You just learned that you can get in the water with a floaty, but you learn something about water and you learn a little bit many times. I think we either stop short for kids with disabilities, and we don't get them to mastery, or mastery is not our goal. We'll just let them do it with an adult forever, well, then that means forever, either A we're paying for an adult, B, they're tethered to adult, or see they're never independent. And you know, I'll take one last example. We both have a very good friend who, you

Rebecca Hines:

I think that that focus on mastery really is is the key and repetition. You know, if you look at the information processing model, and how people learn, repetition is the key to embedding information into your long term memory. So a lot of us can hold on to something in our short term memory long enough to pass a test. But as your to your point, unless it's there permanently. that had the two core pieces of content information. And I built this cumulative PowerPoint presentation that I would run streaming in my class just on the loop. So that every day when students were coming in, that it was just flipping through the slides of all the things we've learned so far this year. And when there's that kind of movement, when you know that eye is drawn to that that's a

Lisa Dieker:

So I'm going to kind of wrap my thoughts up here is, I think the other thing to know when somebody has learned something is when it's fun, and engaging, you know, if you're picking up every history book every day to read, because you just can't get enough somehow that became something that was fun and engaging. And I think sometimes, as parents or as teachers, we think because it's

Rebecca Hines:

And you you mentioned the science of learning. I think when people hear fun and engaging they some set automatically, like dismiss that. And that's counterintuitive because there is lots of research now that we know more about the brain that when your brain is flooded with with these types of experiences you you can encode that information differently. You have more pleasant

Lisa Dieker:

Well, thank you for joining us for this question on how do you know when someone learned something and please send us more questions on Twitter @accesspractical