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!

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.

 

End of Courses – II

I also came to the end of the MoMA course on Art and Inquiry. I didn’t complete this one – the final assignment was “to take the concepts we have explored each week and create a resource that you can incorporate into your teaching (to share with peers for their responses).” Since I’m not teaching I couldn’t summon interest in the project. In this class, it wasn’t the processes of “inquiry” that interested me, but the exploration of the art. I did get a chance to do that – to view many pieces in the MoMA collection, I perused the MoMA Learning Site, I engaged in some discussion about works of art. So I got out of the course what I wanted from it.

A classroom teacher or parent, I think, would find the course helpful for learning how to engage young people in conversation about all kinds of objects and artifacts (not just works of art). It would help them think about curriculum in more open-ended ways. They’d be able to consider using common everyday objects as jump off points for learning – take a candy bar wrapper – there’s lots of printed information on it about nutrition (what does all of that mean?), about the ingredients in the bar (where they are grown and what are the working conditions like for those growers), about where the bar was manufactured (how is the bar made?) – and there are also lots of questions about the wrapper itself as an object – about the paper, the printing process, the design of the layout, of the oblique messages in the design…

Our world is filled with objects/artifacts – any one of which represents a rich potential for all kinds of learning, provided we adults have an understanding of how to draw children’s attention to what’s around them.

End of Courses – I

Yesterday I managed to finish up the Learning Math Course. I kind of lost interest when the technical problem with the Stanford server wouldn’t allow me to respond to peer responses – that was after the fourth section. I continued working my way through the remaining sections, responding as asked, but I knew I wouldn’t get any feedback from anybody else because my content wasn’t getting through. I suspect, however, I may get a certificate of completion, anyway. We’ll see.

I was struck all the way through by contradiction between the content of the course – to help teachers/parents understand learning (math learning) as an iterative, open process where mistakes are a valued part of learning, where talk is essential for exploring and making sense (all values I was advocating as a literacy educator more than 25 years ago) – and the format of the course which kept telling us about those values and steering us to the “right” responses. rather than allowing us reach those understandings by engaging in the process the instructor was advocating. That’s not easy to accomplish – I certainly struggled with that contradiction myself all the years I was teaching, but it wasn’t clear to me that the instructor here understood the contradiction even existed.

Did I learn anything new? Not much, but I didn’t go into the course to learn math – I wanted to see what theoretical position Jo Boaler would take and how it would play out through the course content and process in a digital environment. I’d love to engage in conversation with her about the difficulty of putting into practice what you’re advocating teachers themselves do. I did write her – but I didn’t receive a reply (not that I expected to).

I partly resolved the contradiction in my own teaching as a literacy educator by asking some questions as we went along:

• What did we just do?
• How did that affect you as a learner?
• What questions does this experience raise for you?
• What do you know/think/understand at this point?
• How does that affect you as a reader and a writer?
• What one thing does it make you reconsider as a teacher?

What I was attempting to foster was a reflective practitioner stance – to enable teachers to both reflect-on-action and reflect-in-action (as the late Donald Schon described). I wanted teachers to learn to make the problematic in their teaching open to inquiry so they could learn from the situation, and from their students, how to teach those students.

Offering a course in a digital world (where you never come face-to-face with your students) presents a whole host of interesting obstacles, particularly when what you want people to develop is an inquiry driven stance. I’m sure it can be done – the tools are becoming more accommodating every day. The challenge is using the various tools in ways that are consistent with your philosophical underpinnings.

Art and Inquiry

I came across this course past Friday and decided to register:

The course syllabus says:

Explore how to integrate works of art into your classroom with inquiry-based teaching methods originally developed for in-gallery museum education.

It was the inquiry-based teaching methods that caught my attention – curious to see how the conversation will unfold. I prefer to call this learner-focused process collaborative investigation – it implies a more open-ended exploration involving students and teachers and anybody else who can contribute to the learning going on. I’m interested in seeing how open the discussion will be in the MoMA course.

Click here if you’re interested in using artifacts (although they’re using art, I’m sure it’s possible to use any artifact at all – a candy wrapper, for example) to build an inquiry-based learning environment.

Meet you there.

Teaching Isn’t Easy

Just came across Why Teaching Is Harder Than It Looks by Denise Hong.
It’s worth reading the whole piece but here is the gist:
Teaching isn’t just “making it fun” for the kids. Teaching isn’t just academic content.

• Teaching is understanding how the human brain processes information and preparing lessons with this understanding in mind.
• Teaching is simultaneously instilling in a child the belief that she can accomplish anything she wants while admonishing her for producing shoddy work.
• Teaching is understanding both the psychology and the physiology behind the changes the adolescent mind goes through.
• Teaching is convincing a defiant teenager that the work he sees no value in does serve a greater purpose in preparing him for the rest of his life.
• Teaching is offering a sympathetic ear while maintaining a stern voice.
• Teaching is being both a role model and a mentor to someone who may have neither at home, and may not be looking for either.
• Teaching is not easy. Teaching is not intuitive. Teaching is not something that anyone can figure out on their own. Education researchers spend lifetimes developing effective new teaching methods.

Teaching takes hard work and constant training.