Posted By Christina M on October 24, 2009

Actually, educational psychology. We just finished the class today, so I’m two classes down. One more this semester, and then December off; after that, three more semesters till student teaching.

I haven’t had much time lately to talk about what I’ve been learning, but I must say it’s fascinating stuff. We went through the large 16 chapter text in three weekends (three hours Friday, 6 hours Saturday) so it really has been rather a whirlwind. I guess being too busy to blog is a natural side effect of this unusual method of learning. We each taught (with a team) two chapters, so naturally we learned those chapters better than the others; that was the shortcoming of this course. That, and of course the extremely limited timeframe for learning so much material. Now that we’ve had our final and the stress is off, I can finally relax and contemplate what we’ve absorbed.

Something struck me as quite fascinating today. We learned about three domains of cognitive, psychomotor, and affective. The cognitive is what is sound like: the domain of knowledge and intellectual skills. The psychomotor is the domain of physical abilitites and skills, and the affective is the domain of attitudes and values. It occurred to me as I reflected on these three domains that society frequently confuses the affective and cognitive domains, thinking that our attitudes and values are a sign of strong or weak intellectual skills. Really, that makes no more sense than labeling a child as smart or stupid based on how well he or she jumps rope.

I think one of the most important things we can do when dealing with diverse children is to acknowledge that their values and attitudes are a deep part of who they are, and not just a reflection of their knowledge, intelligence, or education.

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