Category Archives: learning

The Challenges of Choosing to Learn

I committed to the Thoughtvectors in Concept Space course last week and found myself spending every free minute (and even some not-free minutes) having fun learning and exploring. I blogged, I commented on blogs and I spent a lot of time creating an associative trail, all things I would not have done if it weren’t for the course.

Then, the weekend came. If I were a “real” student in the course, I would have spent the weekend completing the syllabus requirements including reading ahead for this week. As Gardner Campbell, one of the course masterminds, points out in his Letter to a learner, this course is intense because it is not easily compartmentalized and requires continuous attention. Just take a look at the syllabus. This is a course that has an intensive assignment every day. It demands more than some quick reading and writing or a few math problems submitted via Blackboard.

But I’m a part-time farmer and this weekend was a little crazier than usual. Saturday mornings are spent at the local farmer’s market ,and this week I was on my own because my husband was going to a poultry workshop. Before he left, he came in with the news that ten baby pigs had been born sometime in the middle of the night, adding to the five that had been born the week before. As I picked mustard greens, I heard loud squeals coming from the pen and found two of them crying because they had gotten out and now couldn’t figure out how to get back into the pen with their siblings.  (Believe me, there is real truth to the “squeal like a pig” simile!) I rescued them and quickly texted a friend to arrange baby sitting services while I was at the market.

Sunday was reserved for my flower garden. It’s about 1200 square feet and desperately needed work: dead heading, weeding, new planting. A labor of love for which I never have enough time. With a week of heat and humidity being forecast, I wanted to spend as much of the beautiful day digging in the dirt.

In between, I worked on my associative trail. I didn’t just want to take a screenshot of my history. I made a collage of browser tabs and had a plan for creating an interactive image map of my graphic organizer. I had ideas for tools but this wasn’t a typical organizer with a central point that branched out but more of a journey. After putting the whole thing into powerpoint, I realized it no longer offered the option to export as a webpage. I have an idea for how I’m going to do it but it needs another hour or two or three of work to get it done.

Which brings me to this blog post. Even with its focus on learning rather than grading, the course is a course and the real students will eventually get a grade, which provides an incentive for them to make the course a priority over other activities. Because I’m not working for a grade, I do not have that incentive. As I mentioned in my post last week, I like the freedom that brings. I can pick and choose what I want to do, pop in and out as I like, spending more time on the assignments that interest me and taking them someplace they weren’t necessarily meant to go while ignoring items that don’t necessarily fuel my imagination. If I don’t comment on ten other blogs, who is going to know or care? No professor is counting, I’m not going to get any gentle reminders, and I can’t be removed from the course. (I suppose they could take away my RSS feed from the course site but I don’t think that’s going to happen.) In fact, the only person who might be disappointed in my performance is me. And that is something of an overwhelming thought.

Am I happy with my work so far? YES! I can’t wait for you to see the trail I created. There are links from my distant and not-so-distant past that weave together personal experiences and areas of interest, all coming from reading and thinking about the Vannevar Bush article from last week and how it connects lots of threads for me.

My biggest challenge is keeping up the original enthusiasm, carving out time and making the course a priority in a way that makes sense for an “open” student. I find myself wondering if this is why the drop out rate for Coursera courses is so high: we think we want to learn something but realize that making a priority for learning is hard when we don’t have to do it.

More On Making Learning Relevant

Sometime after I posted the last entry on the relevance of Algebra, I was paging through a book catalog and it seemed like each page had at least one book that focused on how and why literature mattered. Here are just a few of the titles:

I haven’t ordered any of them. I’ve already read Moby Dick and W.H. Auden and spent a lot of time teaching children Shakespeare. At some point I realized I was trying to turn them into English majors, when what I really wanted to do was help them learn to love reading the way I did. If, eventually, they found Melville and Auden and the Bard, so much the better. But to force it upon them meant it only led to the inevitable question of why they needed to read it in the first place.

It is an interesting side note that the authors of these books are writers who were probably English majors at some point in their lives so perhaps the lesson here is that, if you plan to become a writer, then reading literature is part of the career path.

And then there’s this blog entry from Edutopia just published today: Why Do We Need To Learn This? Allen Mendler offers strategies for answering the question that might diffuse the immediate situation but never gets to the heart of the answer which is that someone, somewhere decided that “this” was important for everyone to know and, as Mendler does point out, it is going to be on a high-stakes test:

Upon hearing the “When will I ever use this?” refrain, a high school teacher I work with tells her students, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what you want to be in your life. But if you give me a list of everything you plan to do and accomplish, I’ll do my best to let you know when we cover something that I think you might use.” When kids say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” her response is, “Exactly. You might need it next week, next year or never. But it is going to be on Friday’s test, not because I want to make you miserable, but because at the end of the year, it is going to be on the state test, and if you want to pass, you need to know it.”

So, you have to know it because I’m going to test it and later someone else is going to test it? I think this is probably the worst answer to the question but the most relevant in our high-stakes world and that just makes me sad.

 

A Real Conversation About Education In An Unlikely Spot

It’s a snow day for the rest of the world so I’m kicking back a bit myself and getting caught up on some online reading. I was checking out Ree Drummond’s website looking for her pot roast recipe when a headline caught my eye: Time To Weigh In on the Relevance of Algebra. Written by Heather Sanders, the piece considers Algebra in the larger context of getting an education. It starts with the age old question of when will I use this, something that the commenters on the post answer in some very practical ways. But it also explores the bigger question of when we are going to use most of what we learn in school. I think back to my days as a high school English teacher struggling to help my students connect with Shakespeare. One solution was to find literature that was easier to read but drew from those same stories.

It seems as though that is the same conclusion that comes from many of the commenters as they describe books that make Algebra more accessible by answering the when will I use it question right up front and then going from there. I think it’s lesson for all of us: it is important to help connect what kids are learning with their lives rather than the test they are going to have to take at the end of the year.

The lesson for me, today, was that there are lots of conversations going on about education and sometimes we find them where we least expected them. Drummond offers lots of resources for homeschoolers as well as that pot roast recipe I was looking for.

A Learning Journey

Since mid-September, I’ve been working with a local non-profit to provide an after school tutorial/computer program for local kids. We have a group of about 16 ranging from pre-K to 7th grade that comes to us on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Volunteers help with homework and provide a meal before taking the kids home.

My original plan was to work with upper elementary and middle schoolers to teach them to program with Scratch. I’ve done a bit of that with a few middle school girls but haven’t been able to really dig in yet. With the little bit we did do, only one seemed particularly interested. I am wondering if I need to give them more choice including doing something with digital storytelling. My larger goal is to help them see that they can create rather than consume on the computer and maybe programming isn’t the only way to achieve that.

Part of the problem is space. We meet in one big space, and even with a few rolling walls, it’s noisy and a little chaotic. There’s an empty elementary school just behind our building, and we’re hoping to work with the county to get access.

The other issue that became glaringly clear last evening was the depth of the educational needs in the group. My girls had a pile of math homework so they started with that, and I spent some time with two first grade boys working through a language arts worksheet. This is the first time I’ve really sat with some of the youngest kids. These two boys were really struggling. They can sort of decode, but they aren’t really reading or comprehending. They couldn’t read the directions for one of the assignments so they merrily copied the out-of-order words that they were supposed to be putting in sentences. When I wrote the words on cards, they were able to manipulate them into sentences and then copy them onto the paper.

Other activities didn’t even make sense to me…a series of sentences with blanks and a word bank. We used  a process of elimination to finish it, but with no context for the random sentences, it was sometimes hard to figure out which word made a comprehensible sentence. If I hadn’t been there to supervise and advise, I’m sure they would have simply guessed just so that there was something on the line since that had been their strategy on the first few pages. I couldn’t help but wondering how much feedback they got on the packets.

I also wondered how much time they get to hang out with books. I’m already planning to take my pile of children’s books when I go next week and get them reading together. The middle school kids could sit with the younger ones and help them and probably improve their own skills. And then we could use digital storytelling tools to create our own books. It would tie the program pieces together.

I worry that by just focusing on helping them get their homework done, we are missing an opportunity to give them larger experiences that they don’t seem to be getting in school. There must be a balance. I have to remind myself that we have only been doing this for a few weeks. We had some sketchy plans but didn’t really know how many kids would come and what their needs would be.

We are definitely on a learning journey together….

 

 

Gardening Wisdom

I spent most of Memorial Day Weekend in my flower garden. The cool wet spring has kept me from tilling and seeding so three days of sunshine and reasonable temperatures were a truly wonderful gift even though my stiff muscles might not be so grateful. I weeded, tilled, and readjusted. As I worked, I found myself thinking of all the things we learn from gardening including problem solving skills like creativity and critical thinking. And two huge lessons for me: the power of patience and long range planning.*

For now, I’ll start with just one lesson: Learning is never over. My main objective is to learn how to create a healthy, pleasing-to-look-at garden. That means each plant needs its optimal conditions as much as possible so it can thrive. They will be at their most beautiful and productive which in itself makes the garden look better.

However, there is also a design element. Some flowers are short, some tall, some bushy, some skinny. Some are planted for their foliage; others are planted for their showy blossoms. Plus, my garden is rectangular with a “front” side. However, you can also see the “back” side from the road so I’ve tried to create a two-edged garden. It all makes a difference in what goes where.

That’s why, even though it’s well into the season, I’m still moving things around. For both reasons: it’s a new garden so I’m stilllearning what the sun will be like in the summer. A shady spot a few months ago now gets almost full sun all day, something I didn’t consider last fall. A few shrubs have grown so they are now providing small oases of  shade in an otherwise fairly sunny garden. Plus, flowers are

There’s an element of awareness here that I think also plays into the notion of critical thinking. Sometimes, I just stand and look, thinking about what is happening in the bed. What’s blooming? What’s done? What should be blooming but isn’t? When did it rain last? What can I still being added. We came into several large clumps of hostas so expansion was needed. They make a great border but now the grasses that were forming the border would be hidden. So, out they came.

put in that spot that opened up when I moved the astibles? I may seem immobile in terms of gardening but my mind is cranking through a checklist of items to be considered.

There is an art and science to gardening that challenges the critical and creative thinker. I know many schools host gardens and I think it’s a great place to put these skills into practice. It’s a science lesson but it can be so much more…

*And, selfishly, I was looking for an excuse to post some pictures of my garden. The irises were gorgeous this year, if I do say so myself.

Hacking the Farm

Tim Stahmer’s post about how to learn creativity and critical thinking prompted me to finally get this post written. It’s been drafting itself in my brain for the past few weeks but I just haven’t had enough quiet time to write. You see, I live on a farm and spring is a busy time of year. While my husband is the farmer-in-chief, I have daily chores that include feeding pigs, chickens, and bees along with collecting and processing eggs. It’s also flower gardening time, and I’m busy with a 1200-square-foot plot along the road that seems to sprout weeds overnight. And our most recent experiment* has been successful so now we have six baby chicks that hatched in the incubator yesterday. Plus, I haven’t given up any of my “real work” but at least I work from home so I can sit on the front porch with my laptop.

As I work around the farm, I think a lot about what I am learning. It mostly involves being creative and applying critical thinking to solve problems. We can’t afford to buy a lot of new stuff. So, my chicken coop is part of the old smokehouse, and the pigs live in an outbuilding on the property. We battled snakes in the hen house so eventually used part of a roll of house wrap to line the inside. The roosts are made of pieces of a former plant stand and the nesting boxes are stacking crates that I found for $1 at a discount store. As for the pigs, they drink fresh water from an old cooler rescued from the barn. I’ve had to experiment with tying it off to keep them from tipping it over. (Pigs really like rooting stuff up and I think tipping the cooler was a bit of a game for them.)

Certain tools lend themselves to hacking. Mason jars, for instance, are wonders: we found boxes and boxes of them around the farm. We drink from them. We feed the bees with them. We store all manner of seeds and food in them. Sometimes, I even use them for their “real” purpose and make jam and can vegetables.

There are plenty of books and website on farming and we use them as reference guides to see how others are hacking their farms. Thank goodness there is no written test…but there are plenty of tests. It took several tries to keep the snake out, and we lost chickens because of my failures. I had thirsty pigs a few mornings when they tipped the cooler.

And the new hives are just one big test: my bees are busy building comb all over the place and my local beekeeper friend is coming over to help me get them under control. We have one hive that appears to be thriving while we wonder if the second one will survive as there is very little activity. Beekeepers will tell you that if you ask 100 beekeepers the same question, you will get 100 different answers. There are guidelines but hives are alive and bees are independent so you have to solve your unique problems in unique ways.

As Tim points out and I experience every day, creativity and critical thinking are learned by doing. As I solve problems, I create a toolbox of solutions that can be applied in other areas as well. Kids need the same kind of authentic problems to solve so they can begin equipping their own toolboxes.

*We have two roosters and we wondered if we were getting some fertilized eggs. So we randomly put 12 in the incubator about three weeks ago. The answer is yes.

It’s the Learning I Care About

We should try to bring back the joy of learning because you want to learn, not because someone is going to give you a grade at the end of the semester. Simon Schocken[1]

We’re just three weeks away from the end of the semester and the emails have started to arrive from concerned students asking about how I weight various elements of the course, how they will be graded, etc. etc. I have been providing them ongoing feedback throughout the semester, but I have not assigned a letter grade to any of their work. I follow Alfie Kohn in this practice and share this quote with them on my assessment page:

When I was teaching high school, I did a lot of things I now regret.  But one policy that still seems sensible to me was saying to students on the first day of class that, while I was compelled to give them a grade at the end of the term, I could not in good conscience ever put a letter or number on anything they did during the term – and I would not do so.  I would, however, write a comment – or, better, sit down and talk with them – as often as possible to give them feedback.

I do use a rubric for self-assessment. It came via Dr. Jon Becker who borrowed it from Dr. Gary Stager.

  1. I did not participate
  2. I phoned-it in
  3. I impressed my colleagues
  4. I impressed my friends and neighbors
  5. I impressed my family
  6. I impressed Karen Richardson
  7. I impressed myself

I use it as part of a mid-term and end-of-semester self assessment. The students often find it difficult to reverse the way they think about courses in terms of who they should be impressing. For many, they have never taken the time to consider if they were impressed because they were so busy trying to impress their teacher. And, they are much harder on themselves than I would ever be. (As an aside, I am pretty easily impressed: most of my students are working professionals with families and other responsibilities. Many times, my course is the first fully online experience they’ve had, Plus, it immerses them in an ed tech experience as we use technology to learn and share, something that frightens many of them. Finally, because my course puts much of the burden on their shoulders, it can be more challenging than the more typical read the book, write a paper course with which they are familiar.)

As usual, they have done wonderful work despite the lack of rubrics and grades. They have felt the freedom to take risks with new technology tools and some have failed or experienced frustration. But, knowing that they aren’t going to get dinged by a bad grade, they have been able to see failure and frustration as part of the learning process.

Yet, with three weeks to go, some of them seem to have forgotten my pledge to them. They go to the syllabus looking for the weightings and the point scores and when they don’t find them, I get an email. I reply, reassuring them I have no intention of changing my approach. The final project is important but it carries no more or less weight than any of the other assignments. I’ll take a holistic view of their work, and if they haven’t had any negative feedback from me, they are doing just fine. I remind them that the goal of the course is not the grade they earn, but the learning they’ve experienced.

I get a lot of positive reviews for the course and the students seem to appreciate my approach to assessment. My simple hope is that they carry this positive experience back to their own classrooms and schools.

[1] http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/radical-openness/the-end-of-education-as-we-know-it.html

Learning to Love Learning?

From the science goddess, a protest against the notion of “everyone,” something I find frustrating as well. Each person must find her own path to learning and sharing. Maybe you tweet, maybe you blog, maybe you find a Google group, maybe you subscribe to a listserv. Or, and this may sound heretical, maybe you have a face to face group that meets your needs.

What struck me about the twitter post was the notion that we had to learn to love learning. Is that a skill that we have to learn? It seems to me that kids, especially, are learning all the time without thinking about it as something they love or hate. It’s natural. Is it only when we send them to school where the practice of learning becomes something unnatural that we learn to hate learning. So, perhaps we do have to (re)learn how to love learning once we are freed from the bonds of the classroom and formal education.  Dale Stephens, author of Hacking Your Education, makes this point in his guest post for The Innovative Educator blog. Note that the title of his book is Hacking YOUR Education, with the focus on the personal aspect of education.

College Readiness = Adaptive Capacity

Tim Stahmer’s post about schools’ dependence on the Office software package hit a nerve with me. In the past month, I’ve heard at least a few educators refer to being able to use Office as a “college readiness” issue. As a college professor, I found that perspective very surprising. There are lots of ways that kids are not ready for college, but using Word and PowerPoint were certainly not on my list, especially when they mean diverting scarce funds for expensive licenses.

For me, college readiness means being able to pick the right tool for the job. Do you have to do a presentation? You have a range of choices: certainly Powerpoint, but what about Google Presentation, Prezi or Keynote or Animoto? My preference is always towards tools that make it easy to publish and share on the web. Do you have to write a paper? Unless it’s your dissertation with all that special formatting, I would be happy if you just did it in Google and shared it with me so I can access it from anywhere and any device. That way, when I find myself with free time before a meeting or riding the ferry, I can read your work.  I would probably be even happier if you told me you had a blog and wanted to publish it there so you can share your writing with more than just me.

But, I hear the educators asking, how can we teach our students how to use all those tools? To that, I say, don’t teach them specific programs: instead, teach them how to learn. Most people can pick up Prezi in a few minutes using the video tutorials. Google Apps provides extensive help and a quick search yields videos and written tutorials on every possible aspect of these tools.

What should we be teaching our students when it comes to digital tools and technology use? If there is one thing we do know about the future, it will be more of the same: change, change, change. New tools and new devices. The best way to prepare our kids for college and for life is to provide them with lots of opportunities to be self-directed learners. Help them develop their adaptive capacity, the ability to change and learn throughout their lives.

Adaptive capacity is a key leadership trait, according to Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas. I’ve put their book on my reading list but this article will get you started.

 

The Learning Isn’t Over Until…

I have been learning non-stop for the past two weeks. First Educon 2.5 and then VirtualVA2013. Lots of conversations, glimpses into innovative classrooms, and connections with other thoughtful educators. I’ve been reflecting on the experiences but haven’t had time to put fingers to keyboard. Here are the big themes that have stood out in my personal reflections…I’ll expand on them in future posts but for now, I’ll start with the bulleted list:

  • Schooling vs Learning…but also Jobs vs Work: This distinction rose out of a conversation about how happy kids and teachers were on snow days. I pointed out that lots of grown ups were also excited to miss a day of work.  There seems to be some parallel between the two worlds: schooling and jobs both imply structure while learning and work seem to imply objectives and goals. The consensus seems to be that we have put too much emphasis on developing structures that are keeping people from enjoying learning or work and really accomplishing worthwhile goals. But can we ditch the structure completely? I was particularly intrigued with an idea I’ve encountered before: that we need to talk about the whole system including the physical spaces where we learn and work. Hacking education goes way beyond a new curriculum or even a new pedagogy.
  • Doing More Than Just Showing Up: In the midst of all this learning, I’ve been reading Seth Godin and he has had a couple blog posts that add meaning experiences I’ve had, especially at Educon. Beyond Showing Up and Watching Is Not Doing address the idea of being more involved in our lives and our learning. Educon is the perfect example: you get out of Educon what you put in. There are conversation leaders who help provide some structure but you are expected to participate by offering your ideas, sharing your resources and tweeting your heart out. We had an “open mic” session during VirtualVA2013 that mimicked a bit of Educon and gave us a chance to talk about some of the big themes that had come out of the week’s sessions. Our opening and closing sessions were more about conversation than slides and the presenters willingly engaged with the attendees.
  • Entrepreneurs vs. Entrepreneurial Spirit: The panels at Educon talked a lot about how we can help kids become entrepreneurs. I just finished reading Yong Zhao’s book World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students as part of an ISTE SIGAdmin book group so I was particularly interested in the intersection of the book with the conversations. Someone made the distinction between the people (entrepreneurs) and their dispositions (entrepreneurial spirit) that made a lot of sense to me. And there’s a lot more here to explore…why entrepreneurs and schooling don’t seem to mix and if schools can produce entrepreneurs at all.

I am also aware that there is a lot of overlap between these three themes…it’s part of the problem I’ve had this week trying to sort out the various strands of conversations. I think it can be simplified a bit: the ultimate goal is to provide learning experiences (spaces?) for our students that challenge and engage them in meaningful ways and help them develop into thoughtful, active citizens.