The more I learn about sense making and learning, the more I learn about myself and the more I think of how all this impacts my students. Coming to this country and being part of the education system was really difficult for me. My mom reminds me that I would always have F's on everything, except for P.E and Singing, on those classes I always had the best grades possible. Learning a new language on top of learning the content was confusing. when I think of those years, I see myself in complete darkness. I didn't come to grip with my studies until the end of middle school and still it took a lot of hard work to learn how to be a student. Until I was able to see the light to now, I still work hard to learn all I can to be a better professional and competent in my career.
John Keller mentions 4 factors that motivates adult learners: Attention, Relevance, Confidence, and Satisfaction, I strongly agree with him because I am living it, this is the cycle that I go through everyday. I feel successful in my learning today because everything I am learning has a purpose or direction. I want to meet my students where they currently stand and help them leap over that gap, I want to bring excitement into their learning, to make them grow and feel successful because when they learn, I learn too. No longer I am the subject matter expert that lectured from the front of the class , now I am the facilitator of an environment that welcomes curiosity. I have shifted my thinking of "How can I make them understand me?" to "I need to understand them first".
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Eager to learn something new, and find the theme of this week's topic, I dove into Brenda Dervin's article, From the Mind's Eye of the User: The Sense-Making Qualitative-Quantitative Medthodology, and a few pages later I found myself going in circles, trying to make sense of what I was reading. I continued marking the text and writing the gist on the side margins of the little information I was understanding. I understood, that sense-making is a methodology used to focus on human behaviors and to better help them and meet their needs. As I was reading, I kept connecting this methodology to sellers and consumers? This connection could have been due to the fact that I spent my weekend watching a Breaking Bad marathon with my husband? But then I got into thinking of me, the teacher as the seller, and my students as the consumers. They come to me with questions, and I try to close that gap by communication and offering tools that will make their situation a more pleasant one and one in which they will receive what they need.
After a while my light bulb turned on and I decided to click on the link of resources to understand sense-making. The video talked about Darvin's article and explained some of the key elements using graphics and bullet points. Through the video I was able to better understand the sense-making triangle and see the situation gap more clearer. How when we "the helper" ask questions, we tend to start from our world, and not from theirs, thus making it harder for them to close that situation gap. As I was trying to understand the different kinds of sense-making interviews and how through these different surveys: satisfaction survey, image survey, help chain survey, and message/Q survey, we can discover the barriers, questions of confusion, and the strategies the person used to arrive to an answer, I couldn't stop thinking about "Apple" products and their service and how every time I called with a troubleshooting question or anytime I went into the genius bar, I always felt like my needs were met. Again, it was all about sense-making and putting themselves in the shoes of the consumer or the actor instead of the observer as Darvin puts it. I think there is a connection with the surveys and collecting qualitative data, but I wish to understand that a little deeper. I hope that with my cohort and our discussions, I will be able to make more connections with what I read and saw in the video. I feel that Darvin's readings of the concept of sense-making is very hard to understand. I feel that presenting a situation or scenario first, kind of like the one Darvin explained in the video about not understanding the computer sales rep would serve as a little bridge and help students make smother connections as they read. In the end, I think its all going to come together and we will be able to understand that sense-making is just making sense of what one cannot see, |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
May 2018
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