Siobhan Curious is asking what learning looks like at her blog. She teaches college English and I enjoy her blog and recommend it to my readers.
This particular article also has an interesting set of assignments for reading personal narratives. That’s not something I can teach at my college right now, but perhaps you can.
What does learning look like?
My developmental students are remembering what their headings should look like, that papers should be double spaced, that font size should be twelve. They are remembering they need a title, remembering not to use right justification, remembering to not just repeat the question but to answer it. To me that looks like it is learning.
But what if it’s not? My sophomore students had an out-of-class essay to write. In that essay all the problems mentioned above (and some others my developmental students have never practiced) showed up. My sophomores, who have had two freshman comp classes and have taken other college courses, didn’t learn how to write a paper for English.
So, I’m going to ask the question from a very different angle. What does learning look like? When is what it looks like really learning?
Thank you for the link, Dr. Davis! In answer to your question, I think sometimes learning looks…circular. We think we have “taught” something, we think they have “learned” it, but sometimes it’s only the fourth or tenth or hundredth time they do something that it really sinks in. Sometimes we can only plant the seeds…