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The Community Service Link: A
Response to the Ten Principles of Learning |
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The Community Service Link: A
Response to the Ten Principles of Learning |
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© Copyright 1999 by Ruth Overman Fischer (rfischer@gmu.edu). The right to make additional exact copies, including this notice, for personal and classroom use, is hereby granted. All other forms of distribution and copying require permission of the author. |
Section 14: The Principle of Self-Monitoring
Learning involves the ability of individuals to monitor their own learning, to understand how knowledge is acquired, to develop strategies for learning based on discerning their capacities and limitations, and to be aware of their own ways of knowing in approaching new bodies of knowledge and disciplinary frameworks. An Eskimo proverb states that the teacher is the one who is present when learning takes place. Ultimately, our goal as educators should be to help students become their own teachers. To this end, I used learning style inventories and my own adaptation of the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator to get students to consider who they were as learners. In addition, I asked them throughout the semester to reflect on their writing processes as we completed each writing assignment. And, of course, the field notes helped them take control of their learning. Over the course of the four years, I was amazed at how diligently (though not without a bit of grumbling) the majority of the CSL students wrote their field notes--and, in the process, I hope, internalized a habit of mind that will benefit them as life-long learners. Irene noted the importance of a systematic means of processing her experiences: I really did enjoy volunteering at Clara Barton. I think that it would have been a very different experience if we hadn't had to write field notes about our experiences and talk about them in Sociology and English classes. By writing and talking about experiences gives one the opportunity to process their thoughts. Chad relates two different community service experiences: I was involved in a similar [community service] program through my high school but we didn't really learn from our experiences. [In this link] I have been able to make observations of my experiences at Clara Barton and relate them to sociological ideas and issues. I have been able to understand how these ideas relate to reality and not to just the textbook. Over the nine-week period of our service in a third grade classroom, I was able to observe sociological issues such as gender roles, racism, and social status roles. Next Section: "The Principle of Social Interaction and The Principle of Learning Climate" Previous Section: "The Principle of Groundedness" |