Part One:  Knowledge Introduction

I have to confess that I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I first read Meg's invitation to join the book discussion on Small Teaching. I have way too many irons in the fire and various projects that never seem to get finished. My life feels like the manic bipolar who developed attention deficit disorder. One of my basic strategies to take survive the insanity in my life is to learn new things and challenge myself to grow as an instructor and as a person. I was curious why Meg would select this book for the class-time to throw another iron in the fire!

Reading the introduction to the first section of the book hit me right between the eyes. I confess that as an educator, I am guilty of stepping over "knowledge" to move onto the "real learning domains" in Bloom's taxonomy. Too often I lose sight that I am teaching students new to the human service field and dismiss how much knowledge I have accrued through my years as a practicing clinician before I started teaching full time. Instead of valuing knowledge, I have dismissed it as simplistic, thinking, "Everyone knows that". I loved the quote by Daniel Willingham, "You can't think creatively about information unless you have knowledge in your head to think about".  Lang goes on to build upon the idea, "When we learn new facts, we are building up mental structures that enable us to process and organize the next set of new facts more effectively. Knowledge is foundational: we won't have the structures in place to do deep thinking if we haven't spent the time mastering a body of knowledge related to that thinking (p.15)" I am hooked and engaged and curious to see what this iron in the fire creates.