Post-Class Sept. 8th: Teaching Style

After Tuesday's class, I started to think more about why we were connecting a poem with theoretical marketing concepts. During the reading of the poem I kept trying to ask myself what was this referring to, and why are we reading this. Then it clicked, I was not suppose to be referring to every blessed detail in the poem, I needed to look at the entire picture and relate it to our concepts.

Personally, I have always been a visual and kinesthetic type of learner. I actually attended a technical high school, where I studied Business Technology for three years. This type of school allowed me to utilize and highlight my type of learning styles. Since I attended this school all four years I became accustomed to the type of teaching based off my style of learning.  During my first semester here at Western New England, I felt as though the transition from secondary education to post-secondary education was a slight struggle. Since I  was more familiar with a facilitator type of teaching style, reverting back to an authority and lecture styles was a struggle. Then towards my second semester of my sophomore year I started to notice the professors were becoming more engaged again. It started to be more about connecting concepts and terms rather than lecturing. My marketing professors were starting to shy away from test taking and focus more on participating.

This poem and the connection it had with the concepts and theories we were learning made me feel like I could engage my visual learning skills. I remember back the first day of Principles of Marketing Dr. Elam asked us all to raise our hands if we agreed that marketing was just advertising, and I want to say 95% of the class raised their hands. We came soon to found out that advertising was just a tiny pixel of a bigger picture. By learning how many different things can be taught within in this major, I thought presenting this poem was a great idea. Having a great deal of concepts and theories stringing from Buyer Behavior and Promotional Strategy, it is important for us to be able to engage that knowledge and build upon each other.

The story behind the Elephant and The Four Blind Men was to really show that many people process and learn things differently. Sometimes we need to stop talking, start listening, and collaborate to see the bigger picture. Professor Spotts did a great job by allowing us to display our thought through discussion and illustration. We were all confused by the article because we were reading into to much detail, when we should have been focused on the article as one.

By collaborating with our partners we were able to come up with a visual picture that helped describe the terminology and concepts in the article. Natasha and I were able to feed off  each others thoughts, and come up with our own vision. Once we shared our visual image with the class, the article that was once difficult for us to read the night before became the same image in all of our minds. As soon as we looked at things from a different perspective and from a bigger picture we were able to all come up with the same concept, I think this type of learning will help the class be successful in not only this class but in our future endeavors.