Emily Eckman and Dr. Ramona Cutri, Teacher Education

Student learning in the classroom has been researched by educators for many years. Many studies have focused on the most effective method of teaching a subject, course, or specific learning style. Dr. Cutri and her staff were concerned about the student level of learning in the Elementary/Secondary Education 450 course Foundations of Bilingual Education.

This course is an introduction to teaching and working with ESL (English as a Second Language) students. It is the first of six courses required to receive an ESL certification. These six courses are taught through distance education with a video based program and classroom facilitator. This means the course is organized to be taught to pre-educators and educators from all over the country by viewing video segments, doing collaborative group activities, and discussing issues and viewpoints as a class.

Because this is a distance education course classes follow a fairly strict format. The facilitator is there to lead discussions, assign and collect coursework, and shows the video segments. This format makes it difficult for the facilitator to shape the lessons to her teaching style. Video based teaching method is a fairly new teaching style and has not yet been extensively researched.

This research project grew from the concern for student learning in a video based environment. Dr. Cutri wanted to study the course through analyzation of living contradictions. An example of a living contradiction is an instructor who has prepared a lesson expecting students will learn a certain concept when the student may learn something different from the instructor’s intent. As living contradictions were discovered in the course, they were to be explained and resolved to ensure that students received a better education. The general objective was to understand how we could better prepare future teachers to work with ESL students by improving the teacher education courses they take.

The methodology for this project was self-study analysis. I kept a journal answering specific questions concerning what I learned in each class session. Dr. Cutri, the instructor, kept a journal answering the same questions concerning what she desired the class to learn from each class session. At the completion of the course these journals were to be analyzed and cross-analyzed for consistencies and inconsistencies. We would have been looking for points of intersection from the data that would have indicated a consistency in presented information and learned information and important points that may need to be taught differently or taught with more clarity.

This is where the project goal and implementation changed. After completing my journal entries I discovered that only half of the professor’s entries were available to use for data comparison. Because the complete set of entries were not available, the project needed some reshaping and refining. The study then turned to focus on my learning in the course. I reviewed my journal entries looking for events in the course that affected me strongly, and I searched for moments when I felt I had truly learned something that would affect my teaching.

As I went through my class notes, I was surprised to remember most of the information and its impact on my life. This was because I had taken specific and detailed notes to create the journal entries with. I had recorded my reactions to certain comments made in class and on the videos. I found that I really enjoyed the class and felt that I understood many of the issues presented. This course taught me to value other cultures and view all people as children of God with the right to learn despite their ethnic background, language, or culture. In this course I had learned and remembered more than my previous college courses because I had applied myself and sought to understand what was being presented to me.

My focus then turned to studying learning styles. Video based teaching is great for those who are visual and audio learners, but it lacks depth when presented to a kinesthetic learner. The kinesthetic learners benefited from the group activities in class, but their attention was mostly lost when the play button of the VCR was hit. I learn best with visuals and audio presentations, so the class format worked well for me. The class sought to involve kinesthetic learners by giving them chances to actively taking notes during videos and work with groups on activities.

My main conclusions come from reviewing my journals. I realized that I had learned and remembered more information from this course than other courses I had taken. This was because I had taken specific notes that not only included what the teacher and classmates said, but also included my feelings about what they said and how their comments affected me. Most students leave a course remembering how they felt about the subject, teacher, and classmates, but most couldn’t tell you the exact topics they learned and in what order they studied them. By taking notes with my opinions and feelings included I can internally outline the course subjects and topics by the remembering what we discussed and what I thought about it.

Though this project changed from the beginning, it still has had much value in my life. It has changed from a study of how I learn in this specific course to a broader study of how I learn compared to how others learn. It has helped me realize how much we are capable of learning and remembering if we put our mind to it and use the correct study methods. As we take courses seriously we can gain more from them than just the stack of papers and books that are left when we are finished. The course information can be forever placed in our memories and become part of the way we view the world.

From the outset this project may appear to have been a benefit to me alone. It is said that the difference between an educated man and an ignorant man is the way he has used what life has taught him and how he approaches a new situation and solves problems with what he knows. I have learned to value other cultures, to understand the struggles of educating someone in their non-native language, and to appreciate those teachers and educators who spend their lives seeking to make the world a better place. As a teacher I can positively affect students in my classroom by teaching them what valuable principles I have learned through my college experiences. The future classrooms of the world will rise to become leaders, but not without good teachers who have been educated in the ways to best meet the needs and desires of those children.