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Linyi Wang's avatar

Thoughts about decoration:

In the past, I always eliminated all decorations in my physical and virtual classrooms. However, this article mentioned what Godwin et al. (2022) found out: "There is evidence that classroom visual environments can be used successfully to improve a sense of belonging".

Does it mean that I should include decorations to build students' sense of belonging? If the answer is yes, I may need knowledge and skills from community building.

Thoughts about reading skill development:

I have always embraced a traditional classroom in terms of reading skill development. Based on my personal feeling and teaching/tutoring experience, reading requires a higher level of concentration compared to many other learning activities, and minimizing distractions would be obviously beneficial.

Meanwhile, reading deals with more abstract information. With the development of modern technologies such as VR, does reading skill development become easier or harder? When we learn to read and interact with abstract information, do we need background knowledge in the form of concrete information? In other words, do we go from concrete to abstract, or from abstract to concrete? If the answer is both ways, which one comes first?

And finally, thank you so much again for providing the microlessons in CTL1620! They were a great help to strengthen my learning! Even today, I can retell and apply most of the topics in this course without looking at any materials. This is an example to demonstrate the extent good teaching can facilitate skill building and knowledge retention!

References

Godwin, K. E., Leroux, A. J., Scupelli, P., & Fisher, A. V. (2022). Classroom Design and Children’s Attention Allocation: Beyond the Laboratory and into the Classroom. Mind, Brain, and Education, 16(3), 239–251. https://doi.org/10.1111/mbe.12319

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