I chose the Innovative Learning program in large part because I realized that I needed to grow as an educator in the area of technology in education and teaching 21st century learning skills. I began my teaching career in 1995 when “you’ve got mail” and “surfing the worldwide web” were rather new and exciting phrases. Over the two decades I’ve been teaching, I have managed to maintain basic proficiency in the use of technology, but I’ve never gained a deep passion for incorporating technology into learning. I used technology solely as a tool to replace other tools - computer for paper & pen, online research to replace the library, email to replace notes or phone calls. I even felt a resistance due to concerns about possible detriments of our societal shift of reliance upon technology. I believe that fluent reading with deep comprehension is the most essential foundation of all learning. Acquiring this fluency and comprehension is a complex process requiring memorization, attention span, background knowledge and interaction with the physical world, early verbal language, socialization, many hours actually reading, and critical thinking skills. I’ve seen how increased screen time, online research, immediate availability of facts, information overload, and shortcuts taken by students can be detrimental to many of these processes. On the other hand, I also realized that my ignorance in the area of technology infused teaching and learning is stopping me from exploring its best uses. I hoped to become a more informed educator in the area of the efficacious uses of technology in the classroom. I hoped the Innovative Learning program would help me leverage my use of technology to maximize the benefits of technology while minimizing any possible drawbacks to student learning and critical thinking. At this point in the program, I already feel empowered to explore all the used of technology and innovative learning/teaching. I feel more confident in distinguishing between responsible, effective use of tech tools that are intrinsically part of a learning process and those that are simply overlays to a process and aren’t beneficial in and of themselves. I’ve certainly grown in my comfort level of the use of particular tech tools. Just the fact that I can post a blog (not write it, just post it) in under a couple minutes is a noticeable difference from the beginning of the semester. Before this class, I can count on one hand the amount of times I published to the web. (Don’t laugh!) From dinosaur to… dog(gedness) to… dynamo? One can hope!
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A proposed answer for the task of improving student motivation is the Flipped Classroom model and implementing Challenge Based Learning.
Go ahead, flip your classroom in your head. Imagine asking a student to go learn something on his own. Give him the topic of the desired lesson, give him some video to watch and some reading to do. Tell him to come prepared to class with either some questions or problems (ie math) already answered on the topic, recorded notes, or a written reflection. How many students will do it? Our collective experience as teachers informs us that there will always be students who come to class without having adequately prepared. That isn’t my point, or even a new concern that would arise from a flipped classroom. It’s just a reality to be handled appropriately by a teacher and student as it occurs. In my imagination, as I flip my classroom, I would expect the immediate motivational effect to be minimal, but the long term motivational effect to be significant. Being motivated often requires a student to be able to imagine the future benefits of an action, to be able to visual the outcome, and to be able to connect in advance to a feeling of accomplishment or pride. Why do I do the dishes, clean the kitchen, pack my lunch, and load up my coffee maker before I go to bed, even when I’m tired from a long day and just want to crawl under the covers? Because I have experience with how good it feels in the morning to wake up to a clean kitchen, the smell of coffee, and not having to pack a lunch in a hurry before heading out the door. At night, even if I don’t have any immediate benefits in front of me (why not wait, after all?), I can visualize the feeling the next morning. And I have enough experience to know that the evenings I chose NOT to do the work, I regretted it the next morning. Motivation! After a few weeks or, for some, a few months of either regret or satisfaction, students’ motivation will likely increase. One of the goals of flipping a classroom is to provide class time that allows the students and teacher the time to engage in more productive “application” of the concept or lesson. This could be troubleshooting issues a student encountered while frontloading the lesson. As Ramsey Musallam said, student curiosity and those questions they bring us are our best friends. Go ahead and embrace the mess! Another more engaging way to use class time is working collaboratively with other students on a project, hands-on activities and experiments, or presentations. From the flipped classroom model, presumably, this use of class time is more enjoyable, effective for learning, and therefore, more motivating. Challenge Based Learning (CBL) is a collaborative experience involving students, teachers, community members, and sometimes parents. It is akin to PBL (project based learning or problem based learning, depending on your era). Students, usually in teams, learn about real world issues, create an essential question, frame a challenge in which they propose solutions to these problems, form an action plan, execute it, and publish their results. Some of the reported additional benefits from a 6 school pilot CBL were as follows:
In investigating flipped classrooms, I see ideas that I can use to improve our model of it. Our students primarily use district-adopted textbooks in their work. We also create mini-projects based on curriculum. This is a rather one dimensional way to learn. We could incorporate more teacher created video lessons and digital collaboration that could enrich study from home during the week, either meant to give the opportunity for feedback to the teacher or for students to collaborate with one another. I started following links from April Tucker’’s site and found several YouTube videos from Jon Bergmann, Aaron Sams (Edutopia), and Katie Gimbar that I felt had useful tips. CBL might be more challenging to implement for a large, long-term project, but, as was stated in a couple of the guides for CBL, an individual teacher or class can actually accomplish a CBL module in as short as a few weeks. I can most easily imagine working a CBL opportunity into my Social Studies framework. One of the connecting ideas to CBL that especially spoke to me was it’s natural inclusion of what was called Personalized Learning and its four key aspects. These 4 descriptors capture what we often call “voice and choice”, and it is very important to my students. As I'm reading the descriptions of the different kinds of data analysis, I am realizing that I don't have a good grasp of the different kinds of analyses. I haven't taken a math course since high school (embarrassing to admit) and never had a statistics class. I know that I will perform two different quantitative analyses and one qualitative analysis. It's possible that there will be more than than. From my understanding of having triangulated data, a study is stronger with both categories of data (mixed method).
The tool I found most understandable and helpful was socsciestatistics.com. I think I will first create two basic, Excel tables to tables. The first table will record each student's weekly minutes read and take an overall average. The second table will be each student's beginning RI score and ending RI score and calculate the increase from pretest to posttest. Each amount will be entered as an interval/ratio into a OneWay ANOVA calculator. I could also try a TwoWay ANOVA if I also enter attitude toward reading as another variable. (I think. ) Another possible calculator is the T Test. I also came up with the possibility of using Pearson's R Calculator or Pearson Correlation Coefficient calculator. I can't tell which of these four to use ( or all). I think that the choice of which test to run will become more clear to me after I finish collecting my data and begin organizing it, constructing tables, and piecing it all together. That's all I got, folks! THE SUMMATIVE TAKE-AWAYS
Dan Pink: The puzzle of motivation There is a mismatch between what science knows and businesses practice. Experiments shows that rewards as motivation only work when the task is mechanical, simple, and not requiring cognitive skills or creativity. Typical “If-Then”rewards focus thinking to a single-minded frame, whereas solving problems needs expansive, creative, out-of-the-box thinking. Intrinsic motivation may have better results. This kind of motivation works with three principals: autonomy, mastery, and purpose. An example of autonomous work is Google’s 20% time, where employees work on any project they want. Historically this “free play” time produces about 50% of Google’s new products. Another example of autonomy in work is the ROWE workplace - results only work environment. John Seely Brown - The Culture of Learning in a World of Constant Flux In a world in constant flux, learning will need to amplify curiosity so that we can keep up and create. Understanding is socially constructed, so learning is done effectively in group study. This can be done virtually. Dusty and his cohort of aerial surfers demonstrates that perhaps what is needed is a deep questing disposition. Studying the MMOG World of Warcraft shows that this complex game is a joint collective agency. In both these examples, competitors or gamers are willing to fail, fail, fail in order to hone a craft so they can ultimately master a skill and succeed. In both examples, the task is considered fun all the while learning. Play is, in fact, a key aspect of learning and also of creating or changing a culture. Man is a thinker in three ways: homosapien (man as knower), homofaber (man as maker), and homoludens (man as player). When we utilize all three forms of learning and thinking, we are entering into an activity of deep tinkering. All of these qualities combined can create a new culture of learning for the 21st century. Howard Gardner: Five Minds for the Future All thought, generally speaking, has commonalities, but every academic discipline (history, science, math, arts) has its own mental forms, or required ways of thinking. The five minds can be broken into two categories: cognitive and social.
In the world of education creativity is as important as literacy. Creativity requires the ability to risk being wrong. If you aren’t prepared to make a mistake, you won’t ever come up with anything new. We naturally possess creativity as children and seem to be educated out of it. We are taught NOT to make mistakes. Our entire 19th century education system is designed to meet the needs of the industrial revolution. In design it is a protracted process of getting to the university level. It values a hierarchy of subject material with math and language at the top and the arts at the bottom. It does not necessarily honor what we now know about intelligence - that intelligence is diverse, dynamic, and distinct. This system is not working for the 21st century and will not serve us well for the future. THE COMMENTARY Most of these video presentations were eight to ten years ago. They all emphasize how technology and innovation is driving knowledge and skills to grow exponentially and that what we teach today may be obsolete within years. Given this fact, it is heartening to see that these video presentations themselves are still relevant. I say it is heartening because the thinking around education seems to have evolved to guiding principles that will be able to steer us through the unpredictability of the technology age. NVUSD’s 4C’s goals of 21st century learning: critical thinking, creativity, communication, collaboration,and a fifth goal often mentioned in our reading on 21st century learning, global citizenship, are mentioned in all of the videos. Gardner’s five minds list is almost a direct reiteration of these goals, although it is probably more accurate to say that Gardner is partly responsible for the existence of the 4 C’s learning goals. John Seely Brown emphasizes collaborative learning and playing, or creativity. Dan Pink and Sir Ken Robinson also emphasize the need to exercise creative thinking in order to address the needs for the future. What I find so fascinating about these “new” goals for education is that none of them is actually particularly new. All of these qualities, either singly or collectively, have existed in humanity for centuries or even millenniums. It is actually because humans have the ability to be creative, think critically, communicate, and collaborate that we are where we are today - in the midst of an age of discovery, invention, and flux. The Renaissance had much of the same characteristics as this period in time and the Industrial Revolution itself was a result of increases in ingenuity in business. Humans have always been inventing, problem solving, and creating in order to help ourselves. It’s almost as if we are seeing the need to re-emphasize these human qualities for this next phase in history because our education system (at least in the U.S.) has devalued them in an educational system that was designed by the universities and the US Labor Department to fit the needs of the Industrial Revolution. There is one learning goal for a 21st education that I feel should be considered. It is hinted at in Gardner’s Respectful and Ethical Minds, in Seely Brown’s notion of a deep questing disposition, and when Sir Robinson bemoans that the arts are at the bottom of the hierarchy of education worldwide. I’ll come at it from the content of Louis R. Mobley’s philosophy for his IBM executive training philosophy that is outlined in the Forbes article “Can Creativity Be Taught?” The fifth principle comes from Mobley’s discovery “that creativity is highly correlated with self-knowledge. It is impossible to overcome biases if we don’t know they are there, and Mobley’s school was designed to be one big mirror.” Acquiring self-knowledge should be a learning goal. By self-knowledge I do not mean naval-gazing, being self-centered, or figuring out what I want in life. I mean something closer to what Gardner mentioned when he spoke of having an abstract view of yourself in connection to your context - your family, your school, your community, your country, your world. To this should be added, I believe, being connected to your historical context as a member of humanity. We should remember that we can’t experiment, innovate, create, nor play our own history as the human race but we certainly shouldn’t ignore it. We would be prudent to study it, understand it, connect to it, communicate it - all so that we can glean the best from human achievement and avoid the colossal mistakes made. If you want to do away with your own biases, study humanity’s worst transgressions to know what we are capable of perpetrating. With Sir Ken, I wish for a return on an emphasis of studying the humanities and arts so that we do not lose understanding of a rich history of philosophy, political science, literature, music, art, and drama. Within these academic disciplines is a whole history of thought, experience, perspective, and expression that can aid us on a quest for self-knowledge and help us form ethical minds. Another 21st century learning model buzz word or catch phrase that I ponder and observe is the call to prepare our students for the “global economy”. If our 19th century educational model failed when the economy for which it was designed began to change (the Industrial Age), does that mean that we are currently making a similar mistake by trying to design an educational system to meet THIS present and predicted economy and it, too, will fail when this economy changes? Is education about creating producers and consumers for an economy? I throw out the consideration that economic ends are certainly pragmatic and necessary, but education should be about creating thinking people who have studied and have at least tried to understand the nature of the universe and the nature of humankind so that they will always be prepared to handle whatever either (the universe or humankind) throws at them. |
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December 2017
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