Learning to Describe, Describing to Understand

“When we conduct descriptive reviews of children in our reflective eminar, these undergraduates often express surprise at how much they thought they knew about their own students, but were perhaps wrong, or they notced how they jumped to characterizations before they sat down and really took the time to describe what they saw of a particular student in various situations.  A common framing question for our child studies are variations of ‘How can I make a better connection with this student?’  After presenters have detailed what they know about the interests of students, what this child finds fascinating are frustrating, with whom they may work well, and when they tend to find trouble, student teachers return to seminar to report ‘updates’ on how the child is doing in class and in various relationships” (Knoester, 151).

Reflection: This passage reminds me the teaching experience in my early years of teaching.  I planned a series of class activities and assignments that I thought my students would be interested in and had fun doing them.  But I realized that my plan did not work well when I carried it out in class.  So ideal is different from the real.  Observation plays an important role of testing out our acknowledgement and at the same time recieving feedback.  What we observed, which we can call field notes, always give us unpredictable answer and enlightenment.

As for teachers, teaching and learning is not a one way process.  It is a two-way process.  Observation is the bridge connecting these two actions.  When teacher is teaching academic knowledge to students, he or she is learning if his or her teaching strategy works and how well the students adapt to the method he or she uses through observing students’ reaction to his or her teaching.  According to the observation, teacher learns to adjust the teaching method and approaches and make the teaching more easy to be understood by the students.  I think this is what “Learning to Describe (Teach), Describing (Teaching) to Understand” means.