Unit 9 - My Ah ha moment

Personally, I'm lost as to what Unit the last blog was referring to. I know I posted it FOR Unit 8, but the topic seems to be more of what happened DURING Unit 8 instead of about Unit 7.

Oh well. It doesn't matter, I hope.

My last post was about my struggling with the CIV's. I feel like I'm getting a better handle on it. I'm not sure how to provide all the CIV's; what tools, techniques, etc, are best for which CIV, but I get the idea. The website critiques helped with that.

I think this was in Unit 9, but the article on Writing Learning Objectives was really good. I put the information from that document into a spreadsheet I had already created. In this table, I have the Course Name, the learning objectives my client wrote (which are really more goal statements), then I added columns for "Absorb", "Do", "Connect". Now I added three more columns for "Behavior", "Criteria" and "Conditions." I probably need to add columns for the CIV's, but I'm probably going to have to transfer this to a new document and have one document for each class I will be creating for my client. I also created a list in google of the Cognitive Learning Domain and listed all the "action" words for the various processes.

I uploaded this to Google Docs so my client and I can work on this together. He called me Friday to discuss the information I put up there. I was explaining it to him and he said, "There's also a learning theory called Bloom's Taxonomy." I replied that the Cognitive Learning Domain and the Action/Verbs are from Bloom's taxonomy. I told him there was more domains than Cognitive but that in higher education or adult learning, this is the domain that we need to focus on. I spouted on a little bit longer, just trying to explain why his learning objectives weren't going to work. He used words like "Understand" or "Review." He really began to understand what I was saying. I just had to laugh and I told him, "wow, I can't believe I just said all that!" He laughed and told me that he could tell I was learning so much.

What was funny about it to me, is I wasn't trying to sound like I was so smart or trying to use big words, I just finally understood what the learning objectives are and the importance of assessing/testing the right way.

Then I told him, "You do realize we have a lot of work to do." And he agreed.

I'm not saying I have this down pat and I'll probably need a lot of coaching, but it's finally sinking in.