Above is the narrated video that I created talking about an ePortfolio that I found. Because I am an elementary education major, I chose to analyze a Teaching Portfolio. Completing this assignment was very helpful for me because now I have a better idea about what my future ePortfolio should look like. I also enjoyed reading and learning about all the credentials that this specific teacher has, and in looking ahead towards my future, I think it would benefit me to also have similar professional experiences for my teaching career.

The first article goes in-depth about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, “a motivational theory” that displays human needs in a hierarchical model. Maslow created this model with the original five-tier structure comprised from bottom to top with the following needs: physiological needs, safety needs, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization. There is also an emphasis on the difference between deficiency needs versus growth needs. According to Maslow, the first four needs on the pyramid are deficiency needs (physiological, safety, and love and belonging), and the last two (esteem and self-actualization) are growth needs. When this hierarchy was first created, it was believed to have a sequential nature to it, meaning that once an individual met the needs in a certain tier, they could move up the pyramid. However, this has changed overtime, and now it is much more common for someone to experience needing multiple needs from different tiers at a time. This means that a certain behavior or time in life is multi-motivated (needing more than one basic need). Maslow’s point about our first and foremost need, physical survival, still remains consistent in today’s society. 

In the 1970s, three more categories were added to Maslow’s hierarchy to include cognitive needs, aesthetic needs, and later transcendence needs. These additions to the pyramid fall under growth needs meaning that they stem from a desire for one to grow as a person. Cognitive needs include the pursuit for knowledge and sharpening one’s mental skills, aesthetic needs include the growth of one’s appreciation and search for beauty and balance in their life, and transcendence needs go beyond the personal self. On the original five-tiered hierarchy, transcendence actually comes after self-actualization because such needs are searching for values that transcend above and beyond an individual’s original thoughts of themselves.

After reading this article, it really made me evaluate my own life and what needs I experience. Personally, I believe that I’m constantly trying to meet my love and belonging needs and esteem needs in social situations. However, when I’m alone, I try and focus on my self-actualization needs, like taking care of my physical and/or mental health. I think it is important for people to learn about this hierarchy so that they can better understand how to become the best possible version of themselves. An important point to remember is that life isn’t always a linear progression. This hierarchy of needs cannot be achieved overnight because personal growth takes a lifetime. 

The second article was Bloom’s Taxonomy of Learning Domains. The three overarching domains include cognitive, affective, and psychomotor domains. The cognitive domain originally included the following: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. However, this domain was later revised by one of Bloom’s students and are now as follows: creating, evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and remembering. The revised sections in this domain reflect a more active form of thinking in that they are no longer nouns, but verbs. Additionally, the taxonomy categorizes all knowledge as factual, conceptual, and procedural. However, this was not very helpful in understanding how to describe more complex knowledge inquiries. Krathwohl and Anderson revised the original version and created The Cognitive Dimension. They added another category of describing knowledge, metacognitive, and combined all four of these categories with the six cognitive dimensions to create the matrix. However, the most recent matrix includes five more “artifacts”: facts, concepts, processes, procedures, and principles. On the matrix, these new concepts are listed under the knowledge categories and come before metacognitive when describing cognitive thought. Bloom’s taxonomy is specifically helpful for educators and other academic professionals, because it allows for the discussion of how learning is being exchanged and processed among students. It can also be used as an effective assessment tool. The goal is to build up the lower-level cognitive skills in students first, remembering and understanding, so that some of the higher-level cognitive skills, applying analyzing and evaluating, can become more like second nature. 

I found this article very helpful as an aspiring educator to show how the taxonomy has changed overtime. I think it is super important that we understand how and why we think the way we do because not only will it optimize our learning experiences, but it will also heighten our academic skills for our future endeavors. I also found this article super helpful when it went in depth about all the examples of each cognitive dimension. It really showed how complex and adaptable our brain is to stimuli in the classroom and the outside world in general.

The next article also discusses Bloom’s Taxonomy, but it goes more in depth about the digital taxonomy map that was created off of Bloom’s original model. The following are key terms that are used in the model from lower to higher-order thinking levels: remembering, understanding, applying, evaluating, and creating. Among these categories, this model gives specific examples of what each level looks like. For example, under remembering, there is listing, naming, and bullet pointing. At this point in the learning stage, these written methods are used to simply memorize material. Understanding includes summarizing, inferring, and blog journaling, so instead of wrote memorization of material, more individual thought needs to be used at this stage. Applying includes carrying out and sharing of information so the learner must have a firm grasp on the content in order to explain it in their own words. The higher-order thinking skills come in the last three terms, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. I like the visual that this digital model provides because you can physically see how complex and structured the learning process is. It also emphasizes how important it is to spend more time on more difficult content, because simply remembering information does not equal complete comprehension. Again, this taxonomy is helpful for educators in order to assess their students’ academic progress.

The last article on learning theories discusses Backward Design and how teachers can switch their perspective on lesson planning. The premise of this article describes how having the end in mind before teaching can be a more helpful and effective way of teaching. There are three key stages in this type of teaching process: Stage 1 — What is worthy and requiring of understanding?, Stage 2 — What is evidence of understanding?, and Stage 3 — What learning experiences and teaching promote understanding, interest, and excellence?. Each of these stages can be broken down and described in detail. It is important for educators to identify their desired results of a lesson prior to teaching it so that they have a sense of purpose and direction in their teaching. It is also helpful for students to keep the end result in mind so that they feel more prepared for what is to come. 

The next stage, determining acceptable evidence of mastery, looks different for every teacher and the specific material they are trying to cover. This can include basic checks for understanding, listening in on student dialogue, giving formal quizzes and tests, or assigning and grading larger projects. It is also important to note that this stage needs to be conducted more than once prior to the end of the unit. If there are no checks for understanding sprinkled throughout a unit, a teacher has no way of knowing whether or not their students are 100% on board with what is going on. The article goes further in depth about the different assessment types based on what a teacher is trying to test:“enduring” understanding, important things to know and do, and other concepts worth being familiar with. Lastly, once the framework of what needs to be accomplished and how it will be assessed is layed out, the teacher can dive into the third stage of actually planning the instruction of their curriculum. This can include different types of activities the teacher creates, what materials will be needed, and the overall design of their lesson plans.

According to the article, each of these stages has specific considerations, like national standards, time, and the specific classroom environment that is created between the teacher and their students. Overall, I think that the Backward Design construction of an academic curriculum is a more effective way to approach teaching, because it allows educators to really think about what is meaningful and important for their students to understand prior to the actual teaching begins. 

I enjoyed reading about these learning theories for this module because as an elementary education major, I would love to optimize my future students’ experience in the classroom. I also think that learning how people learn is a better way to approach education than to simply teach for the sake of meeting state and federal curriculum requirements. 

Thanks for reading!

To begin this semester’s conversation about important technological advancements in today’s society, it is important to circle back to some of the thinkers who kick started the industry and influential people who are continuing to explain their ideas today.

Gordon Moore, Intel co-founder and popular American engineer, began his career in Silicon Valley after earning his Ph. D. in chemistry and physics from Caltech. Moore worked feverishly in his field, coming up with the latest and greatest in silicon chip manufacturing. As advancements in technology continued to be made, Moore coined a theory to predict chip improvements in a two-year cadence. This theory is now referred to as Moore’s Law, and it has been predicting silicon chip improvements for the past 47 years.

Ray Kurzweil created a very similar theory to Moore’s Law that further explains the rapid growth of computer chip processing; it’s called The Law of Accelerating Returns. Kurzweil is best known for his invention of the text-to-voice computer speaking software, speech recognition technology, and other music synthesizing machines. He is also very well known for accurately predicting technological advancements. The Law of Accelerating Returns supports his famously accurate technological predictions, explaining the advancements of technology through the process of biological evolution. Kurzweil believes that the exponential growth of new computing software overtime is a result of generational improvement in the minds’ and bodies’ of the human race. The repurposing and build-up of ideas over generations explains why technology continues to get smarter and smarter.

Buckminster Fuller is another important and influential inventor who never gave up on any ideas that had the potential to better society. Having spent much of his career trying to improve the quality of life with innovations in the technology and architecture industries, Fuller is known for coining the term “Spaceship Earth”, inventing the blimp-shaped Dymaxion car, and his lattice shell geodesic domes. Although many of his inventions never picked up full steam in common society, Fuller’s lack of popularity never discouraged him. Lastly, he created the Knowledge Doubling Curve, his theory that the process of learning and obtaining new information was never ending. Fuller believed that any setbacks or failures that people experienced only improved human innovation for the future, ultimately doubling the amount of expertise people gained overtime.

Finally, Peter Thiel is another influential public thinker and innovator in the technology world. He is most famous for co-creating PayPal, but he is also a major investor and an important board member of Facebook. However, unlike the theorists and inventors I discussed above, Thiel’s theory surrounding the rapid growth of technological innovation criticizes the impact these advancements are making on society. While Thiel understands the benefits that technology can bring, his “The End of the Future” theory says that due to all of the attention and investments backing the tech industry, other important fields are being neglected. Health, medicine, transportation, and energy are just a few that Thiel feels are being left behind for the benefit of improving technology. His concern for where the future of technology is going, namely about artificial intelligence, is very bothersome to think about if other industries are not on the same page.

All of these intelligent thinkers and innovators share the passion for wanting to know how technology can grow and positively impact our society. However, their theories vary on what the path of technological innovation looks like. Moore’s Law and Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns are similar in that they both explain the doubling of technological innovation, but Kurzweil attributes this doubling to generational improvement of human knowledge. Fuller’s theory of the never ending human capacity to learn builds off of Kurzweil’s ideas in that a person’s intellectual capabilities are limitless and are improving generationally. This would also mean that technological innovation is limitless. Thiel’s theory criticizes this point because while he understands that technology benefits society, he believes that the industry is drawing away from other important fields.

After reading about and analyzing these theories, Fuller’s Knowledge Doubling Curve struck me as the most interesting theory because of its claim about the human potential. It is very humbling to learn that Fuller never gave up on himself nor his inventions, and I think this makes him an inspiration for any entrepreneur trying to pave their own way. I also think it’s interesting how this theory clashes with Thiel’s ideas because to me, it sounds like Thiel wants innovation of technologies to halt while other industries try and “catch up”.

Thank you so much for reading!