Deirdre Bonnycastle

Occupational training programs are their own kettle of fish because there is a large amount of absolutely essential memorized content and skills that must be learned to a point of automaticity.

There is also an apprenticeship component where you work in real or simulated situations with an expert in order to learn to think like an expert. This is where emergent learning makes an appearance.

Diagnostic Reasoning requires taking the patient symptoms, matching this to what you know about body systems and coming up with a couple of predictions about what is wrong. Clinical Reasoning takes the predictions, and refines the diagnosis through patient history, physical examination and tests, then determines treatment. Compare, contrast, research, analyse, identify systemic problems, juggle multiple factors are important strategies that must be developed in medicine.

You learn to do this by seeing a wide range of patients over time but you also need a constant feedback system from patients, nurses, preceptors and self reflection. This is where training programs often fail their students. Poor feedback loops demoralize on one hand because of their severity and allow negative behaviour to continue on the other extreme. So formative assessment is a critical element. Summative assessment in occupational training is usually done externally and is a client safety step that confirms this person is qualified to practice.

So you have the prescriptive classrooms, emergent clinical experiences and the chaos of the unsupervised experience, all existing  and clamoring for more time.

As long as we think of assessment as standardized testing on factual knowledge, emergent learning will fail the test. I see this issue regularly in medicine where we need a fine balance between anatomical knowledge and diagnostic reasoning yet continue to use MCQ's as our testing tool.

I agree with Peter, narrow objectives can only be assessed using highly specific tests and leave no room for moments of illumination. So was the objective for my granddaughter "to cast on 50 stitches" or was it "when faced with a new situation to create a way to participate in the process."

I've been looking at portfolios and the rubrics used to assess them lately. I always ask for a bonus area for students who demonstrate learning something new or unexpected.

I was working full time as a teacher when I homeschooled my daughter.

In the evening we would go over what she was going to work on and what resources she would use, then I left her to it. One time I came home and she had wired the house with a rudimentry alarm system because she was interested in learning about electricity, another time she did an exstensive pictoral representation about the history of rascism. Sometimes she was just mundanely working on a computerized math course. She wrote and directed two Fringe plays, created a video that won national awards and worked as a stage manager for a professional company during this time something she would not have done otherwise.

I didn't monitor her closely because I was more interested in her pursuing what interested her so she could regain the love of learning I saw her loosing in the reqular school. Luckily she is a deeply curious person so I didn't worry about lack of initiative. I just worried about getting the resources she needed.

My daughter is severely dyslexic/dysgraphic with an above average IQ. The schools imposed reading requirement was a nightmare of humiliation. For example in Grade 7, the class was reading the Hobbit and the teacher wanted to remove her because she "couldn't read it". I knew she would love the story, so I finally convinced the teacher to let her access it thru books on tape. She loved the book.

I pulled her out of school that year and home schooled her until Grade Eleven and she blossomed. She learned to make movies and would arrange performances with the neighbourhood kids, she learned to thoroughly research what interested her and developed a love of science.

Today as a young adult she has a successful photography business and reads regularly even if she is still slower than the norm.

I never doubted that she would be a reader because she grew up surrounded by books and was a story teller from a young age. She taught me to question the purpose of curriculum and our assumptions about learning.

That reminds me that Cognitive Dissonnance can be a useful tool in teaching. It creates those moments when you become fully present. Sorry the site has new owners and the images were lost in the transfer.I build it into courses thru stories and images.