Social integration Essays

Social integration Essays Social integration Paper Social integration Paper One of the benefits of group work is increased social integration. Social integration has been show to have a significant positive effect on retention. Small groups of peers at the same level of career maturity create a social environment that motivates adult learners to persist. The importance of drawing on the experiences, skills, and values of the learners themselves is an internationally supported tenet of adult education. Groups allow students to draw on these experiences. They will then carry out the checks themselves whilst under supervision from the same instructor. The two lessons are rooted in the Process or Dynamic interaction curriculum model which is the opposite end of the scale from Product. This model of curriculum was advocated by Skillbeck and Walker and pioneered the more hands on approach to learning, without strict guidelines, losing the strict Objectives framework but still keeping the Aims. The students will then return to the classroom for the final session which will take the form of a Summative test on all the days events. The overall layout for this group of lessons was chosen because it gave the best format for learning opportunities for the students. Although in essence we have used all three models of curriculum design in assembling this lesson plan, Process, Product and Spiral. The eventual end product uses all three models to let the students build on information learned in earlier sessions. Research in the field of education by Dr Jerome Bruner has shown that this pattern will give the greatest amount of retention by the student population as a whole. The lesson content can be revisited again and again for the benefit of some of the weaker students whilst strengthening the learning of the stronger students amongst the class. There is defiantly a chain of reasoning or a step-by-step process employed in this lesson framework, each one of the individual pieces of the checklist is important in its own right but we have to explain the reasoning behind the positioning of this particular verification in the overall checklist. All of the paperwork must be shown and the reasoning behind the way in which we check it must be fully explained to all the students on the course. Again following the spiral learning curve the students will learn not only the switch, its location and state, but the reason behind its position in the overall checklist. This has an added bonus of developing independent thinking and promoting comprehension over simple memorization during the lesson. When revisiting the individual parts of the scheme you increase the knowledge of the student. This is in direct opposition to the linear model of teaching where the student learns one part after another in a strict order with no revisiting of previously learned units. In the linear model the first indication to the teacher of any lack of comprehension is a failure at the testing stage. With the use of the spiral approach, the teacher has a constant feedback from the student body of their level of comprehension and retention throughout the lesson stages, and can return to the problem areas to the benefit of an individual or group of students. In our considered (although new to the teaching profession) opinion this is definitely the better approach to the more rounded and complete education of our students. Individual Unit Objectives and Outcomes. During the five individual parts of this lesson plan we move from one side of the curriculum matrix to the other. The first two lessons are given in a strict classroom environment using the Product model. They follow the Aims and Objectives framework and therefore can be measured against quantifiable goals. In the case of both lessons the student must be able to list, correctly, the paperwork checks, the safety procedures and switch locations and position prior to entering the cockpit. This has no room for mistakes by the student; it is a safety issue and must be carried out correctly and with no error. These two lessons use the Cognitive and Affective domains, i. e. the students use the knowledge they have gained to construct and evaluate a foundation for learning. They can also develop the awareness of the reasons behind the structure of the lesson. The other two lessons in the plan follow the Process model and therefore, as such, have only Aims but no laid out objectives; they move more in the Dynamic area of the educational model and are more flexible in both construction and overall framework than the Objective based lessons. We still have Aims and goals, but the building of these lessons allows certain flexibility in the speed of learning for the students. They can be educated at the optimum speed for each individual student. The teacher has the opportunity to observe and assess the students learning. The teacher within the hangar environment has the hands on chance to guide the student along the best path for learning. These two lessons use the psychomotor domain i. e. the students develop Motor or physical skills to enable them to complete the task. Assessment The students are assessed in some form or another constantly throughout the five lessons. Formative assessment is carried out continuously during the four practical lessons by use of Socratic questioning to extract the answers from the students. We also use technical observation to assess the students demonstrative use of information during the hands-on stages of the lessons. Summative assessment is carried out in three stages of the lessons. The first being in the second lesson when the students complete a gapped handout both as a Summative test and as an aide memoir for their own use later on in the day. The second, and by far the largest, use of Summative assessment is during the last session and is a complete test of the five lessons activities, checking the students safety knowledge. This is a twenty question, multiple choice test which has an overall pass mark of 80%. The final use of Summative assessment is when the instructor fills out the area on the students individual portfolio assigned to each lesson. This one paragraph block is designed to allow the instructor to point out areas that require attention and also to comment on positive trends displayed by the student during this lesson. The students can read and comment on this portfolio at any time and as such forms an excellent form of feedback for both instructors and student. Overall strengths of the new lesson as perceived by the authors This group of five lessons was designed to fill a perceived gap in the programme that exists within our workplace. This area of the curriculum was lacking a coherent lesson to enhance the safety knowledge of the students prior to working on the aircraft in the hangar environment. Before the construction of this lesson the students were lectured on the safety devices with power point slides in a classroom and no practical time on the aircraft. They were then expected to confidently carry out the safety checks before entering the aircraft cockpit. It became blatantly obvious to the authors of this assignment that due to the diverse levels of learning abilities and the differences in learning speeds of the students, they were entering the hangar in an unfit state to work safely and confidently on the aircraft. This group of lessons were designed specifically to be, as much as possible in the military environment, student based and ultimately student friendly. The lessons are constructed to take the students through a logical progression, building levels of knowledge and understanding up to a point that they can confidently assess the state of the engineering paperwork and then carry out the checks of the safety devices before entering the cockpit. More to the point the students can do this by using not only the criteria that they have been shown and learned in the lessons but by constructing their own latticework of checkpoints from the retained knowledge. They know the reasons behind the selection of the paperwork chain and the rationale for the safety checklist. They now know the dire implications of missing a safety point on the engineering paperwork and misinterpreting a safety device within that cockpit. The lessons can be checked on the basis of the three curriculum evaluation dimensions; Quality. The lessons are effective and successful in that the students are more confident in their abilities and knowledge when they approach the problems in the hangar. Accessibility. The course is meeting the requirements of the clients or students; They are better equipped for the task and therefore they are safer. Validity. This concerns whether or not the plan of the lessons remains relevant to the occupational context for which it was designed. In the case of this segment of five lessons it will remain relevant for the near future, and given the level of in-house quality assurance that we as military instructors undergo when the need for adjustments and changes to the lesson become necessary they will be carried out to maintain relevance. The new lesson format has produced an altogether more self-assured technician, more confident in his or her abilities with the paperwork and safety devices and therefore a more efficient member of the workforce. Peer assessment from this assignments presentation The peer assessment from the presentation was extremely constructive. Everyone liked the format and content of the new lessons as explained to the group. By far the largest amount of feedback was to do with the inclusion issues that were mentioned in some depth in the presentation. It was mentioned by the class that because of our background in the military and the ethos of teaching that we came to the Cert Ed course with, it was extraordinary that we could produce such a scheme of work. Admittedly two years ago this would have seemed incomprehensible to both of us that we would even consider teaching in this manner let alone freely admit to trying to change the system at our workplace to reflect these new (to us at least) teaching concepts. Of all the positive feedback this was by far the most rewarding. In essence there was no negative feedback other than a personal observation that some computers (amazingly) do not talk to each other, and if they do it may not be in the same language. The presentation was marred by the difference in the perceived animation on our version of PowerPoint and the college version. A minor point but one that can totally un-nerve potential speakers seconds before a crucial and terrifying ordeal in front of their peers.