Time flies, and now it is the twelfth week. But this time, we used a different approach of learning, which was by using the communication app, Whatsapp. Dr Mas Nida guided us throughout the session by giving us orders when she wanted our response. In the beginning of the session, she told us that this class was related to Dale’s Cone of Experience. Below here, were the descriptions she shared with us which described a sea creature.
Dr Mas Nida also reminded us to never refer to any source to guess how a narwhal looks like. Right after that, we were asked to draw the narwhal based on the descriptions mentioned in the slides above. I was really startled because I have never knew how a narwhal looks like. Moreover, I never knew that such animal do exist. Relying totally on the descriptions, I drew my version of narwhal. But, to my surprise, the real narwhal does not look close to what I expected. Below here, I would show the comparison of my version of narwhal against the real look of a narwhal.
From this activity alone, I could observed that different people have different interpretation on things. Just from this drawing, I noticed that all of my classmates drew differently from one another because they have different understanding based on the text given about the narwhals.
After a few minutes of all of my classmates shared their drawings of narwhals, Dr Mas Nida shared a video footage of narwhals. Honestly, after watching the whole video, my perception about narwhals has changed a bit, compared to the perceptions I had when I was reading the slides about narwhals in the beginning of the session. At first, I thought narwhals were just some imaginary animals but turned out that they really exist. Besides that, I thought they would somehow look similar to sea lions but they are not, they are in the same family with whales and dolphins. I also thought they can actually brought themselves out of the water like sea lions, but they can not. Next, I also have never imagined that narwhals can be that huge, but their weight can almost reach 2 tonnes and their body could reach almost 16 feet long! It was very fascinating to be able to gain new knowledge that day!
After doing this activity with Dr Mas Nida, I realised how this activity just proved the relevancy of Dale’s Cone of Experience. I was also curious to know how Dale’s Cone of Experience are applied in and planned by my teachers and lectures before coming to class to teach their students. With text and motion pictures being at the top of the cone for having a higher degree of abstraction, having them alone in any learning process could not produce the result that teachers expect from their students. Students will have no idea of the main concept about the topic they learn if only texts are used in the classroom. Other non-cognitive elements like pictures, videos, or infographic can help them understand better. In my opinion, I think there are other ways which I can do to concretize one’s understanding of narwhals. For example, I can bring them to a field trip to an aquarium exhibition like Aquaria KLCC. There, people can learn about different species of sea creatures. Besides that, I can also ask that person to do a presentation or exhibition on the life of narwhals. Using this method, while they are explaining to other people about the life of narwhals, they are actually training their brain to memorize all the information about narwhals naturally.
Thus, to make sure my future learners understands the input of the my lessons, I have to make sure that I apply the Dale’s Cone of Experience in the lesson. If not, students are going to have a hard time if I randomly choose the activity for their learning, neglecting the degree of abstraction each activity holds. I could also learn from what my teachers and lecturers did in their classrooms. They will always try to build the foundation of understanding in their students by exposing the instructional media according to their degree of abstraction.
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