Mother Raccoon Teaching

Just watched this video of a mother raccoon teaching baby to climb – it has lots to say about how we might think about learning and teaching ourselves! Watch it!

Expectations!

I’m opening my mail today. I’ve got this letter from the Alzheimer Society.

 

I turn it over to open it and I’m stumped! No flap to tear open! I’m having difficulty performing a familiar task!

 

I turn the envelope back over and see the flap – on the WRONG side! A very clever demonstration of how we all operate with expectations most of the time and are confused when we encounter something that doesn’t mesh with our expectations! 

As far as I know I’m not showing any Alzheimer’s symptoms – I’m still functioning cognitively as well as I ought to be at 70. But for a moment I was confused. Just a brief moment when I felt what Alzheimer’s patients must feel for much of their day. 

What a clever idea I thought.

I wonder how many other people receiving this letter had a similar reaction? 

P.S. This evening when I was sharing my experience with a friend I SAW the question on the “front” (the address window side of the envelope): “Is it Alzheimer’s Disease?” – referring to my confusion about how to open the envelope – Brilliant!

25 Ways To Ask Your Kids “So How Was School Today?”

In my work as a member of the program development team with Scouts Canada we’ve reached a point where we’re now rolling out the new program — The Canadian Path — and one of the 4 elements is a component of Plan-Do-Review. We know Scouters are likely to say, “we do review” but we know that isn’t the case. Review is more than just asking “How did you like what we did?” “Did it go OK?” 

We’re been developing lists of age appropriate questions to help the adults engage the youth in real discussion about the activities they undertake to help them realize what they’ve learned and as a launch pad for planning new experiences. It’s complicated.

Recently one of the program development team shared with us a news article that applies directly to what we’re trying to have happen in Scouting: 25 Ways To Ask Your Kids “So How Was School Today?” The point isn’t to ask “How was school today?” but to ask reflective questions that allows  a child to think about the day from a different perspective. We’ll probably share the article with Scouters because it will help broaden their repertoire of review questions and turn Review into a learning activity for both adults and kids.

Update on Calvin

I met with Calvin and Leanne last week – our second visit. I was curious to see what had happened with his reading over the summer so I offered him a book he hadn’t seen (The Little Fish That Got Away by Bernadine Cook and Crockett Johnson). It’s a predictable book and I wanted to see how Calvin did with it. We started with a shared reading, but I quickly dropped out letting Calvin read on his own. He used the pictures to help himself predict words he didn’t recognize, he used his general knowledge to help him fill in text where he wasn’t sure what particular words were — all of his predictions were semantically appropriate (bucket instead of basket, for example). 

Half way through the book Calvin started to tire — the book was a bit longer than he was used to but with some encouragement he finished the story – predicting the ending before we got to it!

I sent the book home with him to read again if he wanted to. I was thinking he probably wouldn’t actually pick it up, but I was wrong. Leanne wrote me later that day: “Calvin came home and read the book for his father and sister.” He doesn’t need to read it again – he may, but he’s got from that book what I was hoping he would — a strengthening of his sense of being an independent reader.

What I want to work on during the fall is spelling — to help him sort out the correspondences between sounds (how they feel in his mouth/articulation) and the graphemes that represent them. I’ve started him on consonant clusters in simple 4-5 letter words focusing on lax (short) vowels; I’m seeing him again in a month — it’ll be interesting to see whether Leanne has been successful in helping him consolidate that information.

 

Calvin’s Story – Learning To Read

(Image from Huffington Post)

Learning to read and write can’t be taught!

They’re learned in the same way learning to riding a bicycle is learned – by trial and error, by figuring it out yourself in a supported environment.

Learning To Ride

No parent puts a child on a two-wheeler and walks away, they hang on to the seat and walk/run beside the child. They install training-wheels which get adjusted as the child becomes more proficient, until suddenly one day, the child is riding. There are other adjustments you can make to a bicycle to make it easier to learn to ride, but you can’t teach balance, steering, peddling, braking, accelerating, or turning as independent skills — they have to be learned in concert.

Riding a two-wheeler is a complicated task which each rider has to figure out for him/her self :”Riding a bicycle involves continuous use of all the human’s primary sensory capabilities, visual, vestibular [balance] and proprioceptive [the awareness of one’s body and limb positioning]….  The latter involves sensors in the arms providing information about steering inputs.”

It’s amazing anybody actually masters bike riding, and yet billions of people do.

Learning To Read

I got a call yesterday from a friend – I’ve got a “Calvin” story for you!” she tells me.

Last week Calvin (a six year-old) confronted his teacher about his reading: “Test me,” he said to her, “I’m better than that” (referring to the reading level she currently has him slotted into). She politely puts him off, “It’s OK Calvin, you’re doing fine”. “No, test me!” he insists. She still can’t see the point of this and tries to get away. “Test me,” Calvin persists, until she finally sits down with him and has him read for her, and to her astonishment she discovers he’s at least two levels more proficient than she realized.

She calls his mother afterward, to say it’s amazing, and she asks what’s happened?

Leanne, Calvin’s mother, says she’s just accessed some resources in the community that have helped her discover how to support Calvin — “he’s pretty much done this on his own”, she says, “with a little support from me.”

The “community resources” — that’s me!

Calvin, Leanne and I met about a month ago. Leanne and I had arranged a visit with Calvin and me, they had come by my house and I had spent some time conversing with Calvin, reading with him, writing with him, to find out what he could do independently and what he could manage with support.

A week before their visit, my friend had called me to ask if I’d be willing to talk to Leanne about Calvin’s reading difficulties.  When I spoke with Leanne I learned she was worried about Calvin’s reading, his avoiding just about all literacy tasks, and as first grade was drawing to a close she didn’t think we was doing very well. She’d been told he had a learning disability; she’d had him to one of the local literacy places for assessment and tutoring — it wasn’t helping him much, and she was frustrated the staff wouldn’t discuss Calvin’s situation with her in any real depth; they weren’t offering her strategies to help him at home.

I was certainly willing to meet Leanne and Calvin. We made an appointment for the following Monday.

We sat ourselves at my dining room table. Calvin was cooperative, he knew how to write his name, his phone number, knew where he lived and his birthday. He’s left-handed so his writing (I mean putting marks on paper, not cursive) was immature and he was orienting the paper as if he were right-handed — obviously nobody had shown him how to position the paper for a left-hander. He was OK with arithmetic for a 6 year-old. And then we began to read together.

I was sitting on Calvin’s right (he’s left-handed, remember); Leanne was across the table from us. I was interested in finding out precisely what strategies Calvin had at his disposal, how he managed text independently, how he did with support.

I’d asked Leanne to bring some books Calvin could read independently. He arrived with one of the early reading books he was bringing home from school (I can’t remember the title). As he read to me I could see his range of strategies were limited — when I asked him what he did when he came to something he didn’t know, he told me he “sounded it out” — except it was clear he didn’t know what to do with that strategy. “Do you ever do anything else?” “Not really.” “Do you ever just skip it and keep on reading?” “No,” he said. That’s a typical conversation with a struggling reader. Furthermore he’d been discouraged from using information in the illustrations (which in this particular book weren’t terrifically informative), and he was reading too slowly for the flow of language to help him along.

When we finished his book, I hauled out a predictable book: “I Was Walking Down The Road.” (Sarah Barchas and Jack Kent). We started reading it together, me taking the lead with him pointing, then Calvin read each page on his own (with help if he needed it). I wanted to see if I could turn him into a fluent reader with the predictability of the text, the support of the illustrations, the flow of the language. Didn’t take too many pages before he was having a run at the page on his own (with my support if he hesitated). We finished the book and he then read it again this time pretty much on his own.

The point of the exercise was to see what sort of support would allow him to experience being a fluent reader, and to demonstrate a variety of ways of being supportive for Leanne. She’s sharp, she understood what I was doing. After Calvin and I finished reading, Leanne and I discussed predictable books and supported reading. Then I asked her and Calvin to go home, make a list of all the books he could already read on his own, then to go through his collection and choose some books they would work on, adding titles as he was able to read new stories by himself. I assured Calvin that when he’d listed between 50 – 75 books he’d be able to read anything he wanted to.

I also suggested Leanne read much more advanced books to him at bedtime, with Calvin pointing as she read so he could watch the text and experience the connection between what was written and what he was hearing.

That’s pretty much all I did. And in a month Calvin improved two levels by working with his mom. I was simply thrilled for him on two counts: first he was confident enough to approach his teacher and be persistent when she wouldn’t take him seriously! And second, that he’d actually improved two levels!

I haven’t seen him since then, although I hope to have him visit again — I’d like to work on his fine motor skills/handwriting, spelling, story writing; again my point would be to help Leanne understand how to support him and what to watch for.

Calvin didn’t need intensive remedial teaching — he needed to experience reading in a supported context. He’s obviously begun making sense of reading for himself in a very short time.

Reading is a complex activity — our brains have to use visual cues which our eyes take in from the marks on the page, and coordinate that input with what we know about orthographic patterns, syntactic structures, as well as what general knowledge we have stored about the world, and that all has to happen quickly so short term memory can hold the information as it flows through.

Reading is first and foremost a meaning making activity. It’s a mistake to fragment the process into “skills” and expect someone to get the hang of what’s going on. About half of all children figure out reading for themselves (a surprising number before any formal schooling) and they are largely oblivious to the formal instruction they might receive — they don’t need it because they have figured out reading more or less on their own. It’s those who haven’t figured it out before getting to school who often run into trouble — what instruction calls “reading” just makes the whole process very difficult.

It’s not that what are called the “skills” of reading are irrelevant — knowing something about letter/sound correspondences (phonics) provides clues that narrow down the possibilities of what that next word might be, but a heavy emphasis on this particular cuing system bogs the entire process down, making it so slow that short term memory loses all the other information that supports meaning making.

Remember, learning to read is like learning to ride a bike — the learner has to figure out how to coordinate a complex array of clues fast enough for meaning to carry them forward. Nobody can “teach” that. Learners have to figure that out for themselves and that takes confidence. Each learner has to believe he or she can do this successfully.  When they start doubting their ability to make it all work, that’s when they back away from the task.

Nobody likes feeling a failure. Which is why reading compelling stories to children, having them read simpler texts along with us, allowing them to fill in aspects of meaning will take them farther, faster. Providing this kind of support allows insecure learners to experience themselves as fluent readers. Not all children are as determined as Calvin was, but helping them feel more in control of their learning can take them a very long way on the road to becoming confident, capable readers.

Another link to overprotecting children

Can playgrounds be too safe? asks Michael Enright.

This is an era that force-feeds parents on the foolish idea that children have to be protected from all risk, all dangers, at all costs.”

In Canada everybody is so fearful of allowing children to take risks that we restrict (actually impede) normal physical activity.

Enright reports on a school in Aukland New Zealand that threw out the “safety” rules for the school playground and discovered many benefits for the children in relatively unhampered play.

On Mentoring Young Adults

The 180th Pacific Coast Scout Rover Group has developed a detailed mentoring process for the youth in the group. Written by Clarice Fu, the series gives a clear description of how the mentoring process works in this Crew. The process is all about developing leadership, organization skills, and better learning strategies for the youth in the group. If you’re interested in how the process works, you might check out the link above and read Clarice’s report of how they set up their mentorship program.

The reason I post this is because much of what is discussed relates to a relationship between adults and the youth they work with – not a teacher relationship (of a traditional classroom) but of a trusted adult who “leads from behind” – helping young people figure out how something can be done, supporting them through whatever experiences they are engaged in, and taking them through a review process that allows them to identify what they can now do and what they still need to learn.

The Overprotected Kid

I came across an article by Hanna Rosin posted in The Atlantic recently.

Involved as I am in rebuilding the Scouts Canada program the issues raised in the article resonated for me. As the article headline says:

A preoccupation with safety has stripped childhood of independence, risk taking, and discovery—without making it safer. A new kind of playground points to a better solution.

Our challenge with the new Scouts Canada program – The Canadian Path – is not programming for youth, but persuading adults (Scouters) to engage the youth in the planning and doing of all activities/adventures. It’s proving extremely difficult for many of the more experienced Scouters to let go – to take the kind of role described in the article for the adults at “the Land”:

The park is staffed by professionally trained “playworkers,” who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. Claire Griffiths, the manager of the Land, describes her job as “loitering with intent.” Although the playworkers almost never stop the kids from what they’re doing, before the playground had even opened they’d filled binders with “risk benefits assessments” for nearly every activity. (In the two years since it opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee.)

Read the article – it raises a ton of interesting questions for those of us developing learning programs for young people.

Creative Problem Solving: A Reflection

Our final assignment for the course Creative Problem Solving: a reflection on our experience:

1. Creativity techniques – I’ve used all of those offered in the course for many years – I taught people how to mind-map, brainstorm, free-writing, how to use webbing, W5 questions, look for examples… I learned a long time ago that just opening my mind and letting ideas out can be trusted. The latest instance was a recent writing task  – I had to come up with a bunch of surveys for people involved in the Canadian Path (Scouts Canada’s new, revised program) pilot program. For several weeks I let the ideas roll around in my brain (not actually putting anything on paper, although I know my brain was working unconsciously on the problem), but I couldn’t actually sit down and produce the surveys until the planning team had an online meeting one evening and with an audience the barriers disappeared and the survey questions came flowing out (fortunately, a couple of the others on the call took notes so I could return to the surveys and extend and edit them! In this case, instead of “freewriting” I was “freetalking”). With the quilting I do, I regularly spend time online looking for ideas – I collect photos from which I generate ideas – I never replicate a quilt I’ve seen, but am able to improvise around an idea. Really, my life is a continuous search for solutions to problems – little problems: how to replace a sock heel without having to reknit the whole foot; bigger problems: how to convince Scouts Canada’s leadership that this program revitalization ought to be driving all other decision-making they’re engaged in (about transportation policy, risk management, volunteer recruitment and training) – they aren’t there yet but they have to get there and I have to find ways to help them understand the problem.
2. Choose one DSD to do-over – truthfully while the DSD challenges were “fun” to think about and execute, they were just exercises I did for the sake of the course – I wouldn’t bother to do any of them over. I thought people were far ranging in their interpretation of each task and it was clear they were having fun executing them but nothing really motivated me to redo any of the DSD exercises. They were interesting to think about – certainly caused conversation with people when I did them in public. But since a lot of what I do daily seems to involve innovative problem solving these DSDs were just exercises for me.
3. Creativity Engine: that was a disaster – I stopped doing it quite quickly since it was obvious that the more I tried it, the worse I got. The fact that it was timed froze my brain – not that couldn’t think of unusual uses for the objects I was shown when I had time to think about it, but in the timed context I came up with less and less. Probably a factor of my aging brain – I am aware that it takes me longer to process than it used to, but I still innovate and make new connections when I’m not under pressure.
4. Where Good Idea Come From by Steven Johnson was interesting from start to finish. I downloaded the book from Kobo about three weeks before the course began and read through it. It was well written, organized in an interesting fashion – I liked the way he used historical examples of “creativity” (most in science, which I thought was interesting), to illustrate his main ideas: the adjacent possible, the characteristics of liquid networks, the slow hunch, serendipity, the role of error, exaptation, and platforms to show that creativity is dependent on a host of conditions to bloom which, when present, support the generation of unusual ideas that open windows on new possibilities. While Johnson doesn’t discuss the arts much (if at all) the arguments apply to people engaged in the whole gamut of creative endeavours.
5. My reason for taking the course was to see how a topic like “creative problem solving” might influence the online learning situation. I’d just worked about half-way through a course on Strategies in the Virtual Classroom that was dreadful – completely prescriptive, no room for the learners to interpret tasks in open ways or be involved in setting the criteria for their learning; the whole experienced annoyed me. I stayed with it because I’m currently involved as a member of the program rollout team in a humungous online learning situation with Scouts Canada as the Program Team attempts to help Scouters understand the experiences with/for youth have to have youth input into the planning – that’s a HUGE leap right now given that for the past 60 years Scouting has been predominantly adult-led and as a consequence enrollment has fallen sharply in the last decade. Any “training” we provide has to have learner input if we want the adult volunteers to reciprocate with the youth!

Did Creative Problem Solving offer me any useful insights into the problem of student-led engagement in online learning – some. The tasks were interesting, and being able to respond to other people’s interpretation of these tasks in a couple of different ways was useful. Each of the DSDs required me to make sense for myself of something that was minimally defined. I wasn’t bound by any particular way of interpreting the tasks. The part that wasn’t helpful were the rubrics for evaluating other students’ input. While the categories for considering each project were reasonable, the criteria within each weren’t broad enough to allow me to discriminate among the presentations; I wanted to be able to choose among many more options within each category.  As a result I found myself selecting “2” for most of the categories most of the time, unless the DSD represented minimal effort and then I was forced to choose “0” which wasn’t always a good choice. I could have written more in the comments text box, but having given maximum scores for the categories I didn’t feel it worth the effort to do an in-depth analysis of those presentations I was responding to.

As I participated as a learner in the course, I really was watching the “teaching” – trying to understand the goals of the instructors as well as the impact the challenges had on the learners. I was thinking about how the context limited what learners were able to do as I explored this online learning environment. While the discussion forums provided an opening for me to express my responses and thoughts, it’s not a vehicle that supports real conversation – which is one of the elements Steven Johnson pointed out was essential for creativity. I think we’re still some distance from being able to replicate the face-to-face learning situation in an online world. The tools aren’t there for large groups to allow vibrant small group interactions. Attempting group tasks in this formal situation bears little resemblance to the online meetings I’ve been having for months with people in this Scouts Canada project – we spend an hour or two at least once a week working through an agenda, brainstorming ideas, problem solving, planning experiences for our adult volunteers, discussing new materials. We are totally engaged as our personal learning unfolds. There was an artificiality to my engagement in “Creating Problem Solving”.

Challenge #6: Give Something Different

This week’s assignment is to “give something different”: “this should be something you have never done before, or an act of giving to someone you never have given anything before.” OK so what do I do here? Truth is, I give gifts of my time in many different ways to all kinds of people. Ultimately, all anyone has to give is time – purchases represent time spent earning in order to be able to buy something. I try mostly to make or do things for people without receiving payment in return – so for example, I gift my time to an elderly neighbour weekly when I take her grocery shopping, or I gift my time when I prepare food for a friend. I knit daily – I find it relaxing and it turns what would otherwise be wasted time in front of the TV into productive time – at the end of 25 hours I have created a pair of socks! I give these socks away – as gifts – because nobody is willing to pay me what they’re worth! The yarn costs $20 before I’ve knit a stitch – I spend 25 hours knitting the socks – I refuse to work for less than $1 an hour so I ask $45 for a pair of my knit socks. Since very few people are willing to pay me that, I give away the socks I make.

I have two piles of socks on my dresser – the new ones just finished but not yet given away:

and a pile of used socks – socks I’ve had in my drawer but need to give away because I’ve got too many pairs at the moment and had to make room for the more recent ones I decided to keep: As you can see, they are still in very good shape. Two pairs of these will go to a neighbour who is happy to receive them, and two pairs to a friend also delighted to have new-to-them wool socks.

So I decided for this Do Something Different – to give one of the new pair of socks to someone I really don’t know but see regularly: the bank teller I often deal with. She’s always cheerful and we have a chance to kibbitz when I go into the bank. Why use the automatic teller – no more convenient and a lot less social! No, I make a point of having a visit with one of the tellers, but I always try to get a moment with Tamara if I can. So I chose a pair of socks from the “new” pile: I thought she’d like the soft colours. I wrapped them in sparkly tissue paper and put them in a gift bag: Added a note: that said: This may look like a pair of socks but it’s really a gift of my time (it took 25 hours for me to knit them). They’re a small thank you to you for always being cheerful. I took them to the bank this afternoon and gave them to her – she was delighted to receive them: I didn’t explain why I was giving her a pair of socks/a gift of my time – that would have demeaned the giving – I did manage to get a photo without explaining why I wanted it. But the point of the giving, from her perspective, had to be just an unexpected act of thoughtfulness. I know she’ll comment the next time I see her about how comfortable they are. They really are wonderful to wear – no seams on the toes to rub. She said as I was leaving: “That’s just made my day!”