Page 103 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

The difficulty in the past has been that the body of knowledge educators introduced to students was overwhelming, and unfortunately, textbooks encouraged this Just-In-Case acquisition of knowledge. The important pedagogical shift here is us allowing the learner to find the knowledge as it is required. With the learner taking increasing ownership of this process they fully begin to develop the necessary dispositions (via the competencies) as they work their way through the Learning Process.
This conceptual understanding connects knowledge, ideas and concepts to form conceptual frameworks. Questioning and interrogating our knowledge is an essential construction process for building our understanding. Although this seems fundamental to learning, too often not enough time is spent by educators to actively scaffold this process. Questions have a power of their own when it comes to interrogating knowledge and turning that into understanding as the quote below implies.
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To provide some clarity surrounding the Learning Process we will work through an example of how we can solve a problem by applying the Learning process. The context for this problem will more than likely be familiar to most educators.
Our Learning Process example: (Stage 1: building knowledge)
You have booked a holiday after a tough year at work but before leaving home you are curious to know where the first hotel you are staying in is located and what it looks like. Knowing the address of the hotel will also allow you to get a taxi to the exact location. This knowledge is very specific to where you will be holidaying.
In this notion of the Learning Process we define knowledge as information that we either learn through active or passive research, by making use of our senses. Facts are highly contextual. It is very cold in Iceland in the winter if you are standing outside on a glacier without thermal protection and there is no artificial heat source nearby. However, knowledge is very contextual because you could be very hot in Iceland if you happened to be sitting in a sauna while there. To find the where the hotel in Toledo (Spain) is located our educator- explorer decides to locate it using Google Maps. Knowing where in Spain Toledo is will be helpful but it is knowledge as it is only useful for locating this specific hotel.
128 Toyin Tofade, Jamie Elsner, & Stuart T. Haines; (2013); American Journal of Pharmaceutical Education. 2013 Sep 12; ‘Best Practice Strategies for Effective Use of Questions as a Teaching Tool’ retrieved from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3776909/
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Questions have long been used as a teaching tool by teachers and preceptors to assess
students’ knowledge, promote comprehension, and stimulate critical thinking.128
Toyin Tofade