The phases of the design process have certainly clarified the vision of my end product. It’s taken a shape in my head, with room for improvement and the door still wide open for creativity and inspiration. One question still lurks in the back of my mind and I pondered it this week as I mapped my project. Is my project innovative? Does it have the hallmarks of what students will need to meet the demands that the nefariously unpredictable future will make upon them? Am I simply holding onto old pedagogies and perceiving a need that is no longer relevant and dressing it up with fancy tech tools? Will reading ever be obsolete? Is it still necessary for people to be literate with words? In his introduction to the TPACK model (https://youtu.be/eXLdqO0fY3w) Punya Mishra makes a provocative statement. He says that technology has not only changed how we teach (pedagogy), but also what we teach (content). He points out that information no longer comes in a drip, it comes in a deluge. We don’t teach knowledge, per se, of a content area anymore, we teach how to access and filter information. I would add that information and knowledge are not synonymous. Knowledge is constructed and becomes part of a person’s mind. It is usable. It is information put to action by a whole host of other skills, character qualities, and choices. So I asked myself this about reading - is it information? Is reading in danger of becoming obsolete through that lens? No, it certainly provides information. It is the skill and process by which we access information. Certainly reading will change with the times. Already the physically bound book is making its way into the annals of the past. Reading, writing, publishing, storing information - all of it will be digital. Those of us who love the smell and heft of a book will need to visit a museum or make our bookshelves our own museums. Probably reading will become more reliant on what we used to call textual clues - pictures, charts, photos. Now infographics and videos will BE text. It’s a matter of semantics. But I’ll maintain that reading itself will not disappear. I’ll use two of the standards for 21st century learning as a couple reasons why. Reading is intrinsically tied to two of the 21st learning skills - critical thinking and communication. Reading well - fluent enough that you can think about the ideas you read and analyze them, is also part of the filtering of the deluge of information. Reading fluently and with automaticity, a necessity for deep critical thinking, comes partly through reading much and many and with absorption. One of the most painless ways to achieve this fluency is by enjoying reading enough that you choose to do it much and many. A bit of a catch 22. Regardless, reading provides fodder, both process and content, for critical thinking skills. Another 21st century learning skill reliant on reading, in partnership with writing, is communication. Communication, especially if it will be global, crossing time zones and long distance, will need to have a written manifestation. Writing, and therefore reading, is not likely to become obsolete as long as humans strive to communicate. So now I’ve answered satisfactorily for the purpose of this project that reading itself won’t become obsolete. (Whew!) What about the innovative aspect. I got to thinking I should analyze my prototype through both the 4 C’s of 21st century skills, but also through the lens of the ISTE standards for students. In my mindmap, I labelled in purple some of the places I saw traits that demonstrate these standards: empowered learner, creative, communicator, constructing knowledge. And finally, I thought about something George Couros said in his book The Innovator’s Mindset. Couros begins his whole book by defining what innovation is and is not. Innovation is not just something new. It must be something done in a new and better way. Further, he proposes that in the context of education, innovation must also be student centered. That is to say that the needs of the student are considered. He treats the quality of empathy as crucial. Empathy is more than just seeing someone’s need. At its fullest, it is being able to feel almost the same thing as another human because your experiences are so similar. At second best, it is using imagination, sensitivity, and intelligence to try to feel what another experiences. For me, teaching a student to love to read is an empathetic outreach. I’ve spent enough years working with students of all ages to have observed the pain a kid feels when he or she doesn’t enjoy reading. I’ve heard enough people, adults and kids alike, say “I wish I liked to read” to know that the endeavor is worthwhile, perhaps even crucial for the sake of our kids heading into the next century. So back to that Catch 22. How DO you get a kid to enjoy reading so that he will choose to keep doing it, much and many, for the rest of his life? If a student gets to 6th grade and doesn’t like to read, is there a “do over” for her? We can’t erase a child’s negative experiences with reading. We can’t turn the ship overnight. But we can turn it! I can say from experience that I’ve seen reluctant readers go from dreading reading to having their noses buried in books. My prototype will attempt to create one humble model to follow.
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Dearest Cohort 12, I’ve just come from my 1:1 with Brenna and I find myself in that simultaneously exciting and frightening place where ideas are igniting and swirling and some shape is beginning to form around what my final capstone project will look like. So I find myself needing to write a different kind of blog - rather like a brainstorm: a bit more freeform and seeking the insight and suggestions of the group. Why-How Ladder In working through my Why-How ladder, I started by going back to my real passion. It was behind my driving question for my 790 research topic and I keep coming home to it. At the center of my ladder is the provocation: “How might we help students enjoy reading?” WHY might we...? Here, my ladder branches into to 2 answers.
Proceeding through the Ladder gave shape to my passion. Exciting. Victory! Alas, it seemed to broaden the topic and not narrow it! Frightening. Defeat! Enter the 1:1 with Brenna. Her advice...keep it simple. Less is more. If you want a student to enjoy reading for the rest of his life, well, it starts with one encounter. Make the first encounter a positive one, and he is more likely to repeat. And repeat. And repeat. So begin with one experience. Obviously, we can’t get a “do-over” of childhood, but we can build one enjoyable experience with reading. Why not simplify the driving question to focus on one lesson? Provide an experience where a student gets invested in her reading choice in the hopes that she continue to be invested in choosing books of interest and therefore continues reading in general. Use digital tools to help the student take away obstacles and connect to the book and to other readers. So now the provocation, or driving question, becomes “How do we use digital resources to create an initial positive, enjoyable experience for a reader?” Next steps:
Dr. Bobbe Baggio presents a very strong case for the use of effective graphics to promote learning through the visual perceptions She provides many usable and practical tips. A piece of knowledge about brain function that I had heard before that Baggio reiterates is the fact that the brain experiences cognitive overload. Too much is too much = the brain shuts out or dumps excess information. Either it ignores the over stimulation and the information never makes it into short term memory, or the brain puts unused information into cold storage, which makes it the most difficult to retrieve. Visual information, or graphic design inputs, can be just as overwhelming to the eye, and therefore the brain, as a page full of words. As I was perusing various twitter feeds, I ran across an infographic that connects Baggio’s information to Clark’s ideas to some of the digital technology with which Cohort 12 is experimenting to my still vague notion of where I want to take my Driving Question for the next phase. Indulge me while I work it out! https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DDPvi0BXUAAIMsk.jpg Baggio is saying that roughly 80% of the population learns visually. The infographic suggests we need to move beyond that to maximize retention. So add an additional audio layer from our cohort’s experimenting with various screencasting tools that allow for sound overlays. This moves us up to 50% retention. Put those same tools in the hands of the students themselves, and they are saying and doing themselves. Say and Do = 90% retention. Enter Clark’s advice on technical training. A key idea on effective lesson design is to know your desired performance outcome. This is a specific task that the student will be able to do; it is a VERB followed by a MEASURABLE TASK. Say and do. Clark also advises that within the structured lesson design there is supporting information provided with information displays and also a key lesson task that consists of practice exercises. It is also referred to as remember and apply. My previous driving question was to explore the impact of free, voluntary reading (pleasure reading) on reading proficiency in middle school students. The results of my action research showed me that increasing pleasure reading time as a single factor was not as effective as it should have been. One hypothesis as to why my results varied so drastically from the results I found in my literature reviews is that my population has specific qualities and needs. Using the SITE model helps understand these learners. My student population is about 65% special needs or at-risk. Many of them face significant obstacles to reading proficiency. Some have never mastered learning to read, yet they are at the stage in school and life where they need to read to learn. Here the idea of mediacy enters. Mediacy is described by Paul Strassmann as, "the ability of individuals to successfully cope with communications in their civilization." Literacy and mediacy working together can help them succeed. Another significant obstacle for my students are affective (emotional domain) perceptions. Anxiety, depression, frustration from learning difficulties often color their perception of school in general and of learning tasks. In the SITE model, paying attention to these influences would be understanding their sociocultural motives and values. As Baggio notes, positive graphics can be a powerful tool to influence the affective perceptions of students. Enter the SITE model’s technical subcontext. Perhaps digital resources could be used to support their reading. Some examples of text readers and voice to text I found while following a weekly twitterchat ( #engchat, #edhat, #sschat): Chrome Speakit!, Announcify, and Read & Write for Google. Chrome SpeakIt! Announcify Read & Write for Google My concept of my capstone project is evolving to include an audience that is partly students and partly other educators. I am envisioning a resource page for the students that is visually alluring and provides digital reading support resources. Other parts of the capstone pages would be directed at fellow teachers, especially those who have a need to support learning outside of class time. Essentially, it would provide research, suggestions, and resources. My teaching context is that of independent studies. Often I ask how I can assist my students from afar. They are at home, I am at school. I know other teachers at my site struggle with the same question. Likely, many teachers in many teaching contexts would also benefit. Both the student page and the teacher page fill this need.
“How can digital resources be leveraged to support reading success for at-risk & special needs students?” In order to begin formulating my capstone project, I am first in need of understanding WHAT it is and what a final project looks like. Here is what I gather from reading the Capstone Handbook.
I still do not have the full grasp of what a Capstone project LOOKS like. I find myself trying to envision the finished product and I can’t see it in my mind’s eyes. I’m one of those visual learners who wants to see a sample of the finished product before I begin. (Does this remind anyone of our readings these past two weeks in Dervin and Baggio?!) There must be an expectation of the finished product but I am just not understanding it.
Based on my current understanding, I think it is safest to say that my audience will be my fellow colleagues. First, it seems the Capstone project is geared toward this audience. Further, we don’t have access to our student this semester. Finally, it seems the purpose behind the capstone is to create a resource to influence others, namely, educators. As I’m progressing through the innovative learning program, I’m coming to the conclusion that Independent Studies should be leveraging digital technology for its learners to a greater degree. Our program is actually an ideal place to implement so many of the 21st century learning strategies we’ve discussed, especially digitally accessed, self-paced, flipped classrooms. I would want to consider that my audience should include my principal and people in the district in a position to allow my school site to broaden our digital tools and following from that, possibly our curriculum choices. Certain materials do not lend themselves to study from home. For example, one of the current district-adopted math programs does not do a good job of supporting learning from home. It is strongly teacher led. We need a digitally accessible program. This, of course, means someone with decision making power and money spending clout has to buy in and support this change. As an ELA teacher, I am most interested in finding a resource for my students that is accessible digitally that will foster a love for reading and further success in reading. I would ideally like to find a resource that is proven by research to be successful, especially for an at-risk and special needs population. I would like to try it with my students to assess if it could be used at my school site in the future. “We have done better at developing understandings of human rigidities than of human creativities.” (Dervin, 67)
Forgive me while I go “mental” on you! No, not crazy...just metacognitive. I had heard that Brenda Dervin’s From the Mind’s Eye of the User was dense material. Having read the framing question for the blog, I had recalled the course on childhood development I had taken during my credential program and remembered that metacognition is largely the ability to think about one’s thinking. So I began mentally tracking my decisions and preparations. Knowing that the material was a deep read, I decided to print out the chapters because I know I process and retain information better when I underline, highlight, and make notes in the margin. I also decided to watch the YouTube video FIRST so I could get a framework or a summary in advance. I read the article with pen in hand one day intending to re-read it the next day. Last semester we learned from Brain Rules that sleeping on an idea or information helps the brain assimilate it and perform better. I woke up thinking about how I would teach this concept. Of course, my waking thoughts were also tangled with plans for coffee, mowing the lawn, grocery shopping, preparing for summer school, and a friend’s birthday BBQ. As I read, I noticed that I was aware of the level of my own understanding, or sense-making, of the content. I would realize I had not comprehended a sentence and would reread it until it made sense. I found myself trying to recall content I had studied in college in my philosophy courses. Dervin references human nature. “Discontinuity is an assumed constant of nature generally and the human condition specifically.” Dervin also delves into how humans perceive knowledge, or in philosophical terms, reality or truth. “Fundamental to the specific application of sense-making to the study of human use of information and information systems is the way in which information is conceptualized.” I was glad these philosophy courses had provided a context in which to frame her thinking. I recalled the progression, or various schools of thought, on human perception of reality. My memory moved over the basics of Aristotle, Plato, Descartes, and existential phenomenology. Basically, that I have come to understand that while there may be objective truth (or knowledge, for the sake of this article), it is never understood without being processed through a specific individual’s lense and that person’s experience of existence. Along those lines, as I read Dervin’s chapters, I also applied a recent personal experience of knowledge seeking to her ideas. I walked back through the steps I took to “bridge the gap”. I examined how I had defined my gap, or “situation stop”. I pondered how I came up with a strategy to solve my problem. I realized that I had tried to repeat past behaviors to solve my problem, but I had to refine the behavior in order to apply it to this new situation. It was what Dervin describes as being at a specific moment in time-space. Finally, I reviewed the actions I took to arrive at my goal and asked myself if I was satisfied with the process. It was this self-reflection that helped me arrive at how I might approach teaching the concept of sense-making to a high school student. I believe I would begin by actually conducting a micro-moment time-line interview with a brave volunteer for the class to watch. Then I would use the YouTube video I watched as an introduction. Next, hit the content from the chapters. Finally, I would have the students try interviewing each other. In conclusion, how I made sense of this article… Learning is a personal experience. Knowledge MAY exist as an objective truth, but it is never transferred as such. It is constructed by an individual, thus Dervin’s assertion that the study of the human use of information and information systems must be done from the perspective of the actor (person seeking the information) and not the observer. As teachers, understanding this concept is especially important. We must become proficient at helping our students construct knowledge. We need to understand the structures of human thought and behavior, or “rigidities”, and move toward creating knowledge and skill, “human creativities”. |
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December 2017
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