Text 1. Character: A Sense of Right and Wrong.

Text 1. Character: A Sense of Right and Wrong.

(from Self-Help Psychological Magazine, by LuAnn Pierce, 1998)

(1) A good way to learn these things about yourself is by following a structured program, such as a twelve-step program. In twelve-step programs members are encouraged to "take a searching and fearless moral inventory " of themselves, then make amends "whenever to do so would not harm others." You have to really want to make changes in your life to do this.

(2) It takes becoming so distressed with your old way of life that you are willing to go through the agony of dredging up old hurts, asking forgiveness and granting forgiveness for every wrong deed you can remember. The agony and pain of your old ways has to be worse than that associated with making these internal changes. It is hard, but it works if you really put your heart and soul into it and take the necessary time needed to work the program. Most changes like these require that we become willing to face our greatest fears and become willing to accept whatever comes our way by removing our pre-conceived ideas, limitations and expectations.

(3) Twelve-step programs are not the only ones who have a blueprint for making these changes. Other examples are usually found in literature or in work by cognitive therapists. Other obvious catalysts for change include church or other religious or spiritual programs that emphasize pro-social behavior and positive values.

(4) How do you relearn right from wrong, good from bad? The concept of right and wrong, good and bad starts out being pretty clear and becomes less obvious as we get older. Indeed, many things are not black and white, right or wrong. In fact most things are not. However, we base most of our decisions and actions on our sense of right and wrong.

(5) If your internal guide, also known as your conscience, is fully developed you are presented with choices to make that are based on your ability to follow your inner guide. You may choose to do things that you know are not right for several reasons. It may seem that most of these choices are made because of selfishness, greed, lust, simplicity or convenience. However, as mentioned previously about our underlying needs, we have unconscious needs that drive our choices and actions. For example people unconsciously need to be capable and successful at something, to feel cared for and belong to a group, to have power and control, etc.

(6) Can you change your value system as an adult? Sometimes it is easier to make these changes by changing your behavior first, triggering a psychological change. This is known as “acting as if in therapeutic terms ”. According to this theory, we imagine ourselves as we wish to be and begin to implement changes in our life to reflect those traits we wish to incorporate. If you are limited in your point of reference, identify someone who has the qualities you wish to adopt and mimic those qualities. As you begin to act as if you already possess those traits, they become a reality. Now, you try it!

Text 2. Children Remember More From Television thanReading

(from Self Help and Psychology Magazine by Juliette H. Walma van der Molen, Ph.D., & Tom H.A. van der Voort, Ph.D. The American Psychological Association, 1998)

(1) While some parents might view the frequent use of films and videos in their children's classrooms as a sign of laziness on the part of teachers, a new study published in the American Psychological Association's (APA) Journal of Educational Psychology suggests otherwise: such teaching materials may help children - unlike adults - remember more of what they are taught.

(2) Psychologists Juliette H. Walma van der Molen, Ph.D.. and Tom H.A. van der Voort. Ph.D., of the Center for Child and Media Studies at Leiden University in The Netherlands wanted to see if the results of previous studies comparing the recall of television and print news information in educated adults would apply to children as well. All the earlier studies (except one, which found no difference) found that adults remembered more of what they read than what they saw on television, possibly because adults take advantage of the freedom to re-read printed material that they don't usually have with television.

(3) To do this, the researchers designed a study in which 152 fourth- and sixth-grade children (between ages 10 and 12) were presented with five children's news stones, either in their original televised form or in a verbatim printed version. Some of the children were told they would be tested on what they read or saw (to simulate the school setting) and others were not told that they would be tested (to simulate watching or reading at home). The television version of the five stories lasted 11 minutes and was viewed once; the children reading the printed versions could take as long as they needed to read them.

(4) Across the board, children who watched the television news reports recalled more of what they viewed than the children who read the printed versions. Also, the children who watched the televised version recalled more items of information that were presented both verbally and visually than they did those that were presented only verbally, without accompanying pictures. In other words, the television items were particularly effective (compared with the printed versions) when the children received the news via two channels: the spoken commentary and the television pictures conveying more or less the same information.

(5) "The results of this study," the researchers conclude, "are 'good news' for children, because in the home situation they rely primarily on the medium that can serve them most effectively. For instructional settings, the study suggests that television news that is adapted to children's level of understanding and that effectively uses television's ability to convey news both verbally and visually may be an effective aid to the teacher."

Text 4. How Pagan Are We?

(from Self-Help Psychological Magazine, by Joanna Poppink, 1999)

(1) Maybe the floats in our Christmas parades are our tribute to the Feast of Fools, born of the ribbon festooned carts of Lord Misrule's boisterous subjects celebrating the revolution of the earth. Today many children want to stay up and wait for Santa on Christmas. They want to hide and spy as he lays gifts under the tree. Many such children receive a warning from their parents. "If you see Santa he will leave you coal in your stocking and disappear." I thought this was commonly said to encourage bedtime so parents could have calm before the Christmas morning tumult. But it may be connected to deeper traditions of solstice reversals.

(2) Animals were also affected by the overturning of nature. During this upside-down time, animals could speak. On Christmas Eve the cattle spoke and kneeled to honor the Christ child. However, for a human to hear them or attempt to hear them was dangerous and could be fatal. This may be part of the excited secrecy at Christmas. Adults and children keep secrets from each other about who is giving what to whom. People whisper secrets and wrap presents behind closed doors. It becomes deliciously dangerous to listen. There is so much mystery in the season, in the rituals then and now.

(3) The children loving spirits of Berchta and Hulda may well be influencing for our hearts as we celebrate our children at Christmas. And the warning, "You must be a good boy or girl if you want Santa to bring you gifts," may have some connection to Berchta. After all she would not be pleased with people who don't wash their hands or behind their ears or keep their things somewhat tidy. Yet, with all her power, it is she who cradles the neglected child, bringing protection and soothing to his fears. Could this be akin to the soothing so many children receive from writing letters to Santa with their heartfelt requests?

(4) Christmas presents, cloaked in mystery and kept secret till Christmas day, may be our version of the fertility vigil. The gifts are like seeds and ova germinating in the dark and which will soon emerge in the light of the sun. And our jolly Santa is the gift bringer. He jingles with bells which frighten away all evil. He travels through wild winter storms to find each of us, as his many forerunners have in the past.

(5) The myths, history and folklore show us that natural cyclical events grip us in our modern December traditions as they have in the past. We seem to acknowledge the forces of creation in our souls, our behavior, our emotions, our genetic code and our imagination. Perhaps we will always live out ancient and new rituals devised to honor these events whether they fit our currently accepted religious and philosophic beliefs or not. There may be more than a touch of pagan in us all.

Individual Professionals

(3) A final target for teaching are practitioners themselves as they engage in ongoing professional development. In order for professionals to remain abreast of trends in a particular discipline, they must be proactive in managing their own continuing professional development. This is particularly important given the limited life span of knowledge within many human service disciplines old knowledge, skills, and attitudes are continually displaced by the wealth of new information on ways to improve professional practice.

(4) It is evident that frequently when practitioners engage in informal teaching interventions, the teaching relationship is based on an implicit understanding rather than an explicit agreement or contract between the parties. The need for such an arrangement occurs when the practitioner believes a target learner would be reluctant to assume the role of student or learner. Or the practitioner might conclude that the targeted learner or learners will resist the content of what is to be learned if it is taught in an explicit fashion. Examples of this kind ofimplicit teaching may be found in the relationship between parents and their children. In these situations teaching may need to be very subtle, because the child's awareness of the parent as a teacher can be repugnant particularly to adolescents!

(5) There are important ethical issues raised by implicit teaching and the right of people to be consciously aware of all that is taking place within the context of their relationship with a helping professional. These ethical concerns will be explored in Chapter Nine, but at this point it will suffice to note that professionals in the human services need to be constantly alert to the potential for domination and for violation ofpeople's right to self-determination. This is particularly important when a practitioner engages in implicit teaching with a client.

Patient Education

(2)Patient or client education has for a long time been a concern of the medical professions in general and of nursing in particular. It has been defined by Squyres (1980) as "planned combinations of learning activities designed to assist people who are having or who have had experience with illness or disease in making changes in their behavior [that are] conducive to health".

(3)Much of the early work in this field was concerned with ways to ensure that patients would comply with directives given by helpingprofessionals. In time, however, studies of patient noncompliance contributed to an appreciation of how individual people construct theirunderstanding of wellness, and how this process might be used to help them achieve and maintain the level of wellness their doctors prescribed. A person's "health belief model" (Becker, 1974), or wellness paradigm, came to be recognized as a key variable in determining patient compliance or noncompliance with a professionally recommended health regime. There is a great deal of useful information on this subject in the general patient-education literature. In particular, Becker's health belief model serves as a reminder of the need to be alert to demographic and psychosocial variables that can enhance or impede learning in spe­cific circumstances.

Health Promotion

(4)The field of health promotion developed in part from earlier work in patient education and family life education, but it has expanded to include a concern with healthy public policy and disease prevention. The elusive nature of the concept of health promotion is reflected in the following statement from Health and Welfare Canada (1989): "[Health Promotion] is something quite original, which is not health care, or health education, or health administration, or public health, although all these form part of its lineage. Health Promotion is more than the sum of its parts".

(5)A key milestone in the health promotion movement was the publication of Achieving Health for All: A Framework for Health Promotion by the Canadian government. This document in essence shifted the focus from individual lifestyles to the influence of the environment on health. Its plan for action focused on self-care, mutual aid, and the creation of healthy environments. The first two of these domains rely heavily on teaching and learning processes.

Positivism

(3)Positivism refers to a logical, scientific approach to inquiry, in which hypotheses are tested and conclusions are reached that is irrefutable and can be independently verified. The type of professional knowledge that characterizes the tip of the metaphoric iceberg is most frequently characterized by positivist inquiry.

The basic assumptions that underlie a positivist approach to teaching are that learning needs can be closely determined, learning objectives can be sharply framed, and teaching is always a rational and sequential process. Positivism embraces what Joyce and Weil call a"family" of related theories, including behavior modification and mastery learning.

(4)In positivist teaching the focus of control is primarily the teacher. Teaching is tightly structured, and learning outcomes are stated inbehavioral terms. This type of approach is often characteristic of training programs in business and industry, and it may also be found in the human services in the training of paraprofessionals. As a practice strategy, a more positivist approach may be used by those with abackground in behavioral psychology and in situations in which learning outcomes can be closely specified. Some of the key figures who favorthis type of approach to teaching include Robert Mager, who has written extensively about the form and function of learning objectives, and Robert Gagne, who has influenced the design of numerous training programs. In Chapter One, learning was described as a process of meaning making, involving the active construction of meaning by the learner.

(5)This perspective on the learning process is known as constructivism, it offers a practical way for human service professionals to understand situations that appear to require some kind of teaching intervention. Constructivism proposes that each individual creates or constructs the reality he or she experiences. Mezirow takes a similar approach; he speaks of mediating constructions, or meaning perspectives. He describes them this way: "Meaning perspective refers to the structure of cultural and psychological assumptions within which our past experience assimilates and transforms new experience... They guide the way in which we experience, feel, judge and act upon our situation.... By defining our expectations, it also selectively orders what we learn and how we learn".

Text 17. Stages of Learning

(from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1)Another approach that may help practitioners think about effective teaching is to understand that learners pass through identifiable stages as they learn, becoming increasingly strategic in their thinking. Commonly referred to as levels of cognitive development, these stages can serve as a guide to the way that teaching is calibrated to ensure that it both reaches and stretches the learner.

William Perry is the person who has been most frequently identified with this area of study. In his work on ways of knowing, Perry suggests that students advance through a series of evolving meaning perspectives, or positions, in the course of their intellectual development. He sets out an elaborate scheme of different levels of intellectual development, which can be reduced into three basic categories: dualism, multiplicity, and contextual relativism.

(2)Perry says that at the first level, dualism, learners tend to frame their experience in terms of polar positions: good/bad, right/wrong,us/them. At this level, learners tend to rely on the opinions of authorities to give them "the truth." Over the course of time, however, many learners abandon this dualistic position, as they come to understand that there are multiple perspectives on the nature of truth and goodness. What is most puzzling for learners at this stage of their cognitive development is that these various perspectives often seem to contradict one another. This recognition of the existence of competing authorities necessarily undermines the learner's faith in any single viewpoint, and it may lead the learner to believe that all answers are equally true. But Perry believes that as the learner continues to evolve intellectually, he or she will eventually come to a position of contextual relativism. That is, learners will arrive at the understanding that truth is relative, shaped by a given context and by the particular perspective of the knower or meaning maker.

(3)Stimulated and challenged by Perry's conclusions, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule wrote their own groundbreaking response, derived from their direct experiences with women as knowers. These authors found that Perry's ideas failed to resonate with their own learning experiences as women. They concluded that this was due to the fact that Perry's original study mostly drew on the experiences of a group of privileged male undergraduates at Harvard. In their book, Women's Ways of Knowing, they articulate an alternative model of cognitive development, based on the intellectual journey experienced by women.

(4)There are some parallels between the work of Perry and the con­clusions reached in Women's Ways of Knowing. Belenky and her col­leagues outlined four main stages in their own process of cognitive development: received knowing, subjective knowing, procedural knowing, and connected knowing. Each of these stages in turn embraces several related subcategories. In simple terms, their model suggests that women learners proceed from a state of silence, in which they receive knowledge through the voices of others, toward a state of subjective knowing, in which they begin to listen to their own inner voice and to validate a separate sense of self. In the last two stages, women are seen as having developed their capacity for procedural knowing (after developing skills in systematic analysis and thinking procedures) and then, in turn, their capacity for connected knowing, which enables them to establish contact with the knowledge of others. Finally, these various voices become integrated into what Belenky and her colleagues describe as "constructed knowledge." They describe this as the recognition that "all knowledge is constructed and the knower is an intimate part of the known". In effect, their discussion takes us full circle, back to the earlier exploration of constructivism.

(5)The implication of these theories of cognitive development on teaching in the helping professions is that they underscore the need to individualize teaching methods. That is, it is important to pay close attention to the cognitive position of individual learners in selecting the material to be taught and deciding on the manner in which it should be presented. The aim is to introduce ideas that are understandable and that, given the current cognitive position of the learner, also promote continuing intellectual development.

Text 18. Styles of Learning

(from Teaching in Practice, by Andy Farquharson, 1995)

(1)Another important way in which learners differ from one another is in their individual ways of conducting learning. Learning style has been defined as "the individual's characteristic ways of processing information, [of] feeling and behaving in certain situations ". There is considerable interest in the concept of learning styles, and there are a number of different conceptions of how individuals differ in this regard. These conceptions of learning styles range from the now somewhat questionable distinction between right- and left-brain learning all the way to highly structured models like the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator. Many of these newer learning style inventories promise a high degree of precision in measuring individual styles.

(2)Demands of the learning task. A group of child protection workers with learning styles that tended to rely heavily on concrete experience and active experimentation experienced difficulties in learning a new statistical program. This piece of software required close attention to data and comprehension of some fairly sophisticated theoretical con­structs. The staff trainer who was helping them to learn this material recognized that she would need to provide support and strategies for data collection and theory building.

(3)There is a good deal of ongoing research in the area of learning and teaching styles. Practitioners can expect that new findings will help them to be more precise in taking account of individual differences as they plan future teaching interventions. At present, however, there is only an imperfect and often contradictory understanding of learning styles.Cranton's advice is that teachers can simply accept that people learn differently and try to respond flexibly to their diversity.

Respect and Partnership

(4)It has been noted that as people mature they have an increasing need to gain and sustain a measure of control over themselves and their social environment. In their learning environments, people wish to be treated with respect, to be valued as having some existing level of competence, and to be recognized as wanting to have some degree of input into what happens to them. To the extent that people experience these conditions of respect and partnership, they are more likely to be collaborators in the learning process. In contrast, if learners experience the learning process as overly demanding or excessively directed by others, their motivation to learn will be correspondingly reduced.

Some examples of the consequences of failing to honor these principles of respect and partnership are reflected in the followingteaching situation:

Miss Jones, a home economist raised in a large urban center, told res­idents in the remote, rural community where she was employed that their nutrition practices were inadequate. She decided that she would teach them alternative methods. Not surprisingly, the classes were sparsely attended. (There was even some graffiti about Miss Jones in the washroom of a local tavern: "Miss Jones eats... French fries!")

Text 1. Character: A Sense of Right and Wrong.

(from Self-Help Psychological Magazine, by LuAnn Pierce, 1998)

(1) A good way to learn these things about yourself is by following a structured program, such as a twelve-step program. In twelve-step programs members are encouraged to "take a searching and fearless moral inventory " of themselves, then make amends "whenever to do so would not harm others." You have to really want to make changes in your life to do this.

(2) It takes becoming so distressed with your old way of life that you are willing to go through the agony of dredging up old hurts, asking forgiveness and granting forgiveness for every wrong deed you can remember. The agony and pain of your old ways has to be worse than that associated with making these internal changes. It is hard, but it works if you really put your heart and soul into it and take the necessary time needed to work the program. Most changes like these require that we become willing to face our greatest fears and become willing to accept whatever comes our way by removing our pre-conceived ideas, limitations and expectations.

(3) Twelve-step programs are not the only ones who have a blueprint for making these changes. Other examples are usually found in literature or in work by cognitive therapists. Other obvious catalysts for change include church or other religious or spiritual programs that emphasize pro-social behavior and positive values.

(4) How do you relearn right from wrong, good from bad? The concept of right and wrong, good and bad starts out being pretty clear and becomes less obvious as we get older. Indeed, many things are not black and white, right or wrong. In fact most things are not. However, we base most of our decisions and actions on our sense of right and wrong.

(5) If your internal guide, also known as your conscience, is fully developed you are presented with choices to make that are based on your ability to follow your inner guide. You may choose to do things that you know are not right for several reasons. It may seem that most of these choices are made because of selfishness, greed, lust, simplicity or convenience. However, as mentioned previously about our underlying needs, we have unconscious needs that drive our choices and actions. For example people unconsciously need to be capable and successful at something, to feel cared for and belong to a group, to have power and control, etc.

(6) Can you change your value system as an adult? Sometimes it is easier to make these changes by changing your behavior first, triggering a psychological change. This is known as “acting as if in therapeutic terms ”. According to this theory, we imagine ourselves as we wish to be and begin to implement changes in our life to reflect those traits we wish to incorporate. If you are limited in your point of reference, identify someone who has the qualities you wish to adopt and mimic those qualities. As you begin to act as if you already possess those traits, they become a reality. Now, you try it!