Miriam's+reflection

I decided to write my reflection as soon as I got out of class tonight. Tekleab’s strategy, Declarative Knowledge, was presented through the topic of the rainforest. We talked about many things related to his strategy. One of the things he mentioned is that declarative knowledge is not rote learning. I remembered that in Linguistics we compare rote learning to what parrots do. They simply repeat what they hear and humans do not necessarily learn that way. So that is the trick. Declarative knowledge, to me, taps into meaningful learning. Watsatree presented procedures via Pad Thai making. We watched a video that went step by step in how to make the perfect pad Thai. It looked so delicious. Procedures can be used to show students “How to do stuff” by following a coordinated sequence of events. I was the last one to present. My strategy was Principles. When I think about principles the first thing that comes to mind is science. It would have made so much sense to teach a lesson related to rules, theories, theorems, etc. However, since I earn my living through teaching languages, I decided to teach a grammar topic. In my case, I felt that no matter what we teach there is always a good chance to combine all of the strategies to make our content more appealing. The last thing we did for the night was work on our design. I think it is coming along very nicely. Sometimes I get exhausted from just participating in the design process. Some things look great one week and then after our discussions we change everything because we all come with innovative ideas. Design has a lot to do with thinking outside the box.