16. If you fall in love with it, you’ll become an expert.
Donna Powers, Grade 1/2,Vermont
Hinweis der Redaktion
Good afternoon. How many of you are absolutely in love with your teaching profession? Good to see. :-) Clearly passion and emotion influence our cognitive abilities - in both debilitating and enriching ways.
You have known that for a long time
John Dewey Knew it
Maria Montessori knew it
Seymour Papert - the father of educational computing - knew it We, this panel, has known it too. Yet, it is still not written into our curriculum policy documents in any way that has grandly transformed our educational system.
Bhutan, on the other hand, has an interesting measure for their national system. In addition to the GDP, they have the GNH - Gross National Happiness index.
We know that bad emotions and emotional upheaval impair cognitive function. This IS well documented and it is reflected in our policies.
Now cognitive science and neuroscience research are providing evidence of what you’ve known all along -- passion and emotion impact cognitive function
Jonah Lehrer says it. And Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio - two of the pioneers of neuroscience make compelling cases for it. Damasio “has discovered that the emotions are essential to the decision-making process since they are the engine of the limbic system -- our emotional brain which is connected to learning and motivation. Emotions are needed to make simple decisions such as how to dress or what to wear and how to execute complex activities such as the making of critical judgments.” S tudents must also know this information Strongly developed metacognitive skills include an understanding of how their minds work - of how passion influences learning.
And..that involves ‘student agency’ It does not mean tossing out the curriculum as it stands It means providing a ‘curriculum landscape’ for students to traverse in their own ways - more natural, yet innovative ways
Information Communications and Technologies provide awesome affordances! these enable and support student agency and co-construction of knowledge they provide a passionate engagement with multimodal representations of knowledge - both individual & collaborative We must support & encourage kids to ‘fall in love with learning’
Brenda and I developed this chart to scaffold teachers in planning for PBL in their classrooms. PBL is a human-made construct so we wanted to honour teacher agency by helping them think about their own implementations. PBL is not one way or the highway! ;-) These are some of the continua we considered.
My work in 'visible thinking' started in the mid 80s as I was looking at kids 'taking charge, not only of their own learning, but also the learning of their classmates'.It started with examining the differences between - novice/expert learners. You can see some of the differences here. To support their movement from novice to expert learners I developed an online collaborative and scaffolded journal writing system The first version was called thinking land and was developed with HyperCard!Kia engaged in PBL were to write their plans, thoughts, ahas, frustrations, questions etc. in their journal page and others were expected to comment and engage in discussion about it.Alas, they needed scaffolding- scaffolding - in the form of sentence startersPlanning, reflecting, comment/discussion starters- elaboration triggersI later developed this in FileMaker pro then in 2000 made a commercial version with LCSI - called Journal Zone More recently i've done it with wikis, blogs, Diigo
I think it's important to NAME your classroom. This dawned on me AFTER I'd done it. http://theconstructionzone.wordpress.com/the-construction-zone/the-construction-zone-in-practice/ - describe The Construction Zone = constructionism, ZPD, Flow (Csikzentmihalyi)- classroom - a place where thinking and co-construction is highly valued- loved posting these construction signs all over the place- Naming the environment - Trung Le, The Third Teacher
Tell twitter story. Donna Powers, Grade 1/2,Vermont took this idea and made an activity for her grade ones and twos: I will fall in love with: “ land animals. I will read about animals. I will write about animals. - Aaron “ nature because it’s my favorite thing in the world. I will read books about nature. - Harrison and, I’m skyping or google hanging out in their class next week so that the kiddoes can share theirs in person with me. So, in closing, if you are challenged with your workplace, find what makes you passionate and engage in “Hard Fun” as Seymour Papert would say.
