Week 12 Reading Reflection

I really found the reading this week to be very interesting. I think one thing that I will take away from this is the need to reflect on what teaching methods I am using and how effective they really are. For example, being that I work with students with autism, they do not do well with a lot of external stimulus. They are very visual learners, relying a lot on pictures and visual representation of nearly everything. That being said, if I were to create a training module to teach them something on the computer I would definitely leave out any background music and limit the auditory instruction to a minimum, making sure the visuals are clear and precise. If it is done properly there will be less information for them to process and they will be able to focus on the important pieces of information.
Another thing that I can take away from this reading to the professional field is to remember to consider the prior knowledge of students when designing a lesson. This was something that was drilled into our heads in my undergraduate classes, always be sure to assess prior knowledge at the beginning of a lesson, but I think that sometimes I tend to forget this and plow forward with whatever I was going to teach. It can make a big difference on what information I want to teach, whether or not they have something to connect the new information to and what style to present the information to. If they have some prior knowledge of a subject it will be easier for them to process this new information and I can go a little deeper with the lesson, rather than building new information so that they can connect it to something in the future.
While this chapter was a little complex, it was very interesting and valuable information, something I can keep in mind for the future.