Colby Holt's Blog

With the goal of teaching the mechanics of a golf swing to beginners as well as more advanced golfers, direct learning plays an instrumental role in shaping the learning experience. Using direct learning, which is a learning method which emphasizes structured, systematic, and explicit teaching practices, you can implement many activities to help assist the lessons. In this blog post I aim to give an overview of direct learning, and emphasize how direct learning is a great method to teaching the mechanics of a golf swing. 

Direct instruction is a teacher directed teaching method in which the instructor generally stands in front of the classroom or teaching space and presents well thought out information to students. This is done through clear explanations and explicit information to maximize the teaching time available. An example of this teaching style is university courses such as engineering which have a high quantity of information to relay to students in a short period of time. This “lecturing” provides clear learning objectives to students for expectations and goals to be set.

In terms of our chosen topic of teaching the mechanics of a golf swing, this direct instruction may have a slightly different form but the same general concept. There will be “lecturing” prior to hands-on learning which will allow the students to take the information presented to them and use it in a practical way. Teaching a golf swing must be a systematic approach as you don’t want to teach the mechanics of the club face before teaching the students how to position their feet. The structured approach from the direct instruction is great in making sure that steps in learning are followed correctly and that the basics are taught in the correct sequence. With the use of visual aids and instructor demonstrations, direct instruction can also allow visual learners to observe the correct way to swing and enable them to replicate as they have been shown. 

Teaching a golf swing is a very complicated thing with many intricacies (I feel this firsthand, golf is hard), and many learning methods should be used for the best outcome. Direct learning along with the other forms should be used collectively for the best outcome.

Through the videos by Derek Muller and Destin Sandlin, I was intrigued by the concept of credibility bias and how it has impacted me throughout my education. In regard to credibility bias, I believe that students learning sciences are naturally curious and though I agree with the notion that when students are learning a new subject they often subconsciously agree with their own thesis and ideas, understanding that this must come from a position of wanting to learn, rather than being told to learn is vital. This is an important part of schooling that I have struggled with in my education journey and pertains to this idea that we agree with our own misconceptions rather than understand what we are being taught. 

As somebody who did well in high school and entered into the field of engineering, I was always “told I needed to learn a subject” rather than choose to learn a topic on my own that I am directly interested in. I can acknowledge the level of understanding that is required to merely pass a course rather than fully wrap your head around the topic and coherently understand the material. This “drive” to learn comes from your own desire to understand a topic, not the necessity of understanding a topic.

In Derek Mullers video, he spoke to the downfall of online teaching within Khan Academy and how it promotes users to agree with their own misconceptions and pre-constructed ideas rather than understand the material being presented to them. Granted that the configuration of how information is displayed can certainly affect the learning process, I think that the learners own desire to understand the information far outweighs this. The attitude that the learner has towards a topic is significant to the amount of effort and focus that is invested. I believe that creating an atmosphere that increases this learning “attitude”, and reinforcing the reasoning for young learners to understand a topic is just as significant if not more, than the order that the information is provided. This also involves the teaching methodology mentioned in chapter 11 of the Foundations of learning and Instructional Design Technology reading, in which each student learns in a different way as a behaviorist, cognitivist, or a constructivist. Personally, as a constructivist, Khan Academy limits my form of learning as it does not promote hands on learning and collaboration in its teaching style but rather a cognitivist style where repetition and mental engagement are most significant. In my experience with post-secondary education, I have performed significantly better in classes that I am directly interested in than rather than classes that I am only taking because they are required. Learning is an attitude just as much as it is a science, and if you do not have the desire to learn you will not put in the effort to do so.