Lessons Learned

I mentioned in our first SOS podcast that the brain with all of its neurons and synaptic activity is nature’s most wonderful network. As new information is embedded into our long term memories, our brains work to connect the new ideas with other ones previously learned. The more connections branching out in multiple directions from each of our ideas, the more apt we are to remember and actively engage these newly seeded ideas. As the ideas are used and connected to, the more they sprout tree-like roots and branches to other ideas. We “water, fertilize and send sunshine” to our ideas by filling our learning environment with rich stimuli coming at us through as many senses as possible. 

The “brain popping”, as Mike Lambert says, really takes off when we start making lateral thinking connections where our ideas and memories are applied to new situations. We then have to reconfigure our thinking and come up with new ideas often in a problem-solving manner highly engaging to our brains. This is when very powerful learning takes place as we move into the creative realm of Bloom’s Taxonomy. To engage our own brain in making connections, take a moment to think of a person, place, event, food, smell, sight, etc. Then let your mind pick up the connections to other ideas that it is sending impulses to in reaction to your thoughts. The connections are very real as the networked ideas flood your mind.

So how do we bring in additional stimulation to our classrooms to further the expand the amount of “roots” and “branches” of the ideas in our students’ minds? One way is to use cooperative learning techniques. It is a mainstay and well-researched instructional strategy proven to increase learning. The obvious interpersonal and group dynamic skills of working together are powerful. But it is the sharing of ideas, hearing different viewpoints, and building off each other’s thoughts to clarify understanding and create new thinking that is the most dynamic.

Many learning theories start the process of learning by building in an “engagement” first phase. Bernice McCarthy’s 4MAT has the “Quadrant One” focus of making internal connections to previous learning to make meaning in the new learning experiences. Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman’s Pathways Learning Model “Phase 1″ of the Pathways Learning Model is for “activating and engaging”. They really hit the mark about the importance of making connections in the book Pathways to Understanding.

“Our current knowledge about learning informs us that we must support students in making connections; connections between what they know and what they are learning, between what they are learning and the opportunity for application in a variety of contexts; and between the relevance of their newly gained understandings and their own lives.” (p. 10)

Thus, the networking and development of learning environments and communities to make connections clearly improves the learning process in our students’ minds. Now on to shifting…

By using social networking and generative Web tools like wikis, blogs, netcasts, video conferencing, etc, we expand the cooperative learning opportunities for our students.  We definitely increase the variety and richness of the stimulation when we connect our students to other children and adults around the world. Our students move laterally with their thoughts into the classrooms of students across the world. What they sometimes find is that they need to reevaluate their ideas when they hear different perspectives. What seemed pretty simple is often more complex thus needing problem-solving that often works best when done in collaboration. Accepted analogies of understanding applied to new cultures and experiences often don’t hold up. Cause and effect thinking is expanded with complexity of additional and varying viewpoints and information.

This digital expansion of our students’ personal learning networks highly correlates to the growth of our students’ very networked minds. An excellent example of this idea of making connections to increase learning by using Web 2.0 tools is the Flat Classroom Project.  Vicki Davis and Julie Lindsay have run this project for a couple years. We will be interviewing Julie for our SOS Podcast on “How does making connections affect learning?”.

“Put the Essential Questions up on the wall, display, wherever students can see them” we are told by McTigue and Wiggins. In other words, put the EQs in the students’ mind from day 1 of the unit. One way to do this is to use a digital mind mapping tool like Inspiration, Cmap, Mindmeister and/or Bubbl with a built in template of the EQs. The students then expand the diagram with their ideas and understanding as the unit progresses.

If the students use Inspiration, the teacher will need access to their network storage to formatively assess understanding. One could also ask the students to blog periodically to describe what they are adding to their mind maps. The teacher needs the account sign on information to access the online mind maps if those tools are used.

The completed mind maps can be used as the common assessment and/or as a talking point for students working in groups to share ideas as they prepare for an upcoming assessment. The sharing is powerful as the students build on each other’s understandings. One could also have them post to their blogs or possibly use an online forum to have the discussion take place after school hours.

For more on concept/mind mapping, check out the Teacher Toolkit section on Inspiration and the Teaching Tool area that has 3 resource links for concept mapping.

Many factors come into play to support an individual and/or school’s shift to Learning 2.0. The institutional shift is obviously much more complex. In either case, the shift starts by knowing where you want to go with your shift. My previous post and the discussion on the Shifting Our Schools podcast offers a few ideas on why to shift. Jeff and my arguments hopefully make sense for most teachers. While we spoke and wrote about the value of Information Literacy and Communication skills, we also focused on learning outcomes that place students at the higher end of Bloom’s Taxonomy in their learning. It isn’t about the technology, it is about the learning.

Many schools have mission statements and student learning outcomes that might not fit the world our students are heading out into. I would suggest that it is time for school communities to review their documents. With an eye on the ever changing nature of modern life and work, it makes sense to see how our school learning goals might need to be adapted for 21st century life and work skill sets. These discussions guide where the shift will take the school.

Using the UbD model, we can then work backwards to re-design how we teach and how our schools function so that we can really say students are learning according to the mission statements and student learning outcomes.  We all know that lots of time goes into wordsmithing the mission and learning outcome documents but we often forget to put in the time to construct the action plans to connect the goals to the classrooms. We also often leave the reflection and assessment of our efforts out of the picture as well so good leadership and accountability need to be applied to the review and follow up processes.

This brings me to the second of many hopeful solid, meaningful actions that need to take place to help individuals and schools make the shift. Thomas Hoerr wrote an article entitled “What Is Instructional Leadership?” in the Dec/Jan 2008 issue of Educational Leadership. (You can access the article yourself.) In it he points to the importance of administrators being the instructional leaders for their buildings. Hoerr writes that we all hear this phrase again and again but that it clearly makes so much sense. While our very busy principals are not always the top dogs of pedagogy and curriculum in their buildings when compared to many of their teachers, they still can be the instructional leader for their schools.

Hoerr shares that principals as leaders can facilitate “collegiality” among teachers which supports good communication, reflection, coaching, and learning from one another. Many of us use are more familiar with the term “learning community” as the basis for professional development and building a culture of learning for everyone in a school.

A second part of being the instructional leader is participating in and facilitating the reflection that takes place when teachers review their instruction and assessments.  Hoerr uses the following questions to start the discussion, to get teachers thinking and learning about their efforts in the classroom.

• How did this lesson address the needs of your three strongest and three weakest students?
• What would you do differently the next time you teach this lesson? Why?
• How will you know your students know?
• How will you create an assessment tool that would help you teach these concepts?

(Educational Leadership December/January 2008, page 85)

OK, so there you have it. The first plank laid out that will eventually be connected to many more as I hope to build the boat that will sail us to the promised land of a shifted school.   We start with the end in mind as Dr. Covey would remind us. We update our school learning goals to fit the times. And we take non-educational items off our principals plates so they can provide the vision and leadership to build learning communities within their schools while using the power of questions to guide us to be better teachers.

Jeff Utecht and I will be starting our “Shift Our Schools” podcast this week. Our bi-monthly discussion involving guests, blog posts and other assorted topics will focus on a guiding question each show. Our hope for the netcast is to further the discussion among educators (especially those in Asia) about moving their instruction, assessment, communication efforts, professional development, etc. towards a second generation of the way we teach and manage our schools. We call this version of learning and schools “learning 2.0″ and “school 2.0″.

My focus for the podcast will be to interest teachers and administrators to listen to the podcast and to add to the discussion. As an instructional technologist, my work has always centered around working with teachers one to one and in small groups to design instruction, create content and assessments that bring about real understanding for our students. While Jeff has a world following of many already “shifted”educators, I am hoping that the two of us will be able to provide information that reaches both the shifted and those wondering what “shifting” is all about. As I remind teachers, it isn’t about the technology. It is about the way we facilitate the learning starting with the sound, best practices the teachers are already using. The technology and innovative instructional strategies just help us do a better job.

A big part of the task in education is to prepare our students to be citizens who have the skills to participate, contribute to and work in our society.  So just looking at the “work” portion of this outcome, let’s assess what employers want as far as skills for their current and future employees so that they will be ready to do their jobs effectively. The answer to this one doesn’t call on anyone’s best guess or judgement. A consortium of American companies came together to compile a list of the skills they want us in the education field to teach to our students.

These “21st century skills” are well-documented and discussed on the Web. Here are some links to provide more information.

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills
What is 21st Century Learning?

Following the Understanding by Design (UbD) model for curriculum development, we start with the end in mind which are these 21st century skills as we go about designing our instruction, developing content and creating assessments.

Let’s look at some of these 21st century student learning results:

• being creative and innovative
• to think critically and problem solve
• to be a good communicator
• to collaborate, work effectively with teams

Yikes! Handing out worksheets, reading from textbooks and direct instruction (try telling students to be creative, be innovative and work well with others) won’t get us very far in helping our students develop, practice and use these skills in real world situations. So how are we going to change our schools (which in many cases are focused backwards on early 20th century job skills) to reach these new outcomes?

We shift. We come up with a whole new way to approach learning that connects learners (students, educators, parents/adults) to a networked world community where individuals have more control over their learning. This shift to the new learning is being called “learning 2.0″. Much of what defines it has been around for a long time (e.g., John Dewey) and their are plenty of educators, writers, innovators who have been writing and blogging about it for some time. One of my favorite articles written on the topic is by Thomas Carroll entitled If We Didn’t Have The Schools We Have Today, Would We Create The Schools We Have Today? 

You can find additional resources at our del.icio.us SOS podcast site that gets into a further description of Learning 2.0.

What are some reasons to make the shift?

1)  We agree that learning and true understanding comes from reflection, discussion with others, sharing and building ideas together forming networks of shared intelligence. Our brains are natural networks connecting our constructed learning so that we not only remember but have information from which to create new ideas. Learning 2.0 starts with good teaching practice that doesn’t depend upon technology use. We make the learning much richer when we offer new ways to reflect, discuss, share and create by using technology and information literacy skills to expand our learning communities.

2)  So many schools already say they are doing it. So how can we argue with them? Here are just a few examples from around Asia.

•  HKIS Academic SLRs that mirror the 21st century skills
•  TAS TIE job ad saying it is a school that “integrates technology and information literacy across the grades…” and a mission statement saying it is “an innovative 21st century learning community”.
•  WAB shares that is wants the following characteristics in its new hires: “skilled in IT”, “experience in and knowledge of inquiry based learning”, “flexible and adaptable” among many other requested characteristics.

3)  When comparing the technology rich and connected world of our students outside of school to what goes on inside school, we see quite a difference. Take a few moments to ask your students how they communicate and learn outside of the classroom. Web 2.0 is Life 2.0 for our students. Relevancy is pretty powerful! Various technologies and communication networks have transformed the fields of medicine, engineering, real estate, banking, etc. Why do we put up so many barriers to this transformation coming to our schools?

4) For schools that are not tied to the No Child Left Behind knowledge-based assessments and are working towards higher level concepts in the form of Essential Questions, we need to ask how they are doing in reaching those understandings. Are these schools willing to try some new instructional strategies and assessment techniques to reach their goals? If the schools work with their instructional technologists and library media specialist to pilot some new approaches and then review the student assessments, they will find that Learning 2.0 technology tools do enhance student learning.

5) Learning 2.0 means going deeper into the concepts and skills that support them. We hear so much of American style curriculum being so wide in what it tries to cover. This leads to a quickening of our teaching pace which often means more direct instruction and less facilitation of learning that pushes students to use higher level thinking (as opposed to pour it in knowledge/facts). Few teachers will argue with having to cover less but with more depth so that their students really learn.

6) Art Costa’s Habits of Mind connect nicely to 21st century skills.  The 16th habit that we  “remain open to continuous learning” which I would adapt to also say “while continually learning how to learn” hits a homeroom on why we need to shift to Learning 2.0 in our schools.  With so many new fields of work and study being constantly created, we as educators cannot teach all the specific skills needed for these future skill sets. What we can do is teach our students how to be learners. Learning 2.0 instructional strategies that empower students and adults to learn together naturally empower members of our learning communities to desire the skills that make their self-learning possible.

The list of reasons to shift goes on and on in the educational blogosphere…it seems to me that the question should really be “why not shift?” I would be interested to hear someone try and take the opposite view. I think a strong argument against shifting would not be about what it means for student learning. It would be about the tendency in our schools to not properly pilot initiatives and then not build a systematic program for change that gives teachers time and support to really learn and practice their craft.

For a nice explanation of Learning 2.0 that demonstrates how a learning community can be formed using online tools (i.e., blog and reader comments), check out Sheryl Nusbaum-Beach’s post on the topic.

I listened to a Wes Fryer and Karen Montgomery’s podcast last week where they spoke about creating online vodcasts as tutorials for solving math problems which are called Mathcasts. They spoke with Tim Falhberg the originator of Mathcasts. As VoiceThread is probably the easiest way to post a vodcast, they felt that it was the way to get started. What intrigues me is that these online tutorials put students into the role of teacher working to design the vodcast and produce it for an audience of fellow students. We know what that means for quality learning on the scale of effective learning (i.e., Lecture> Reading> Audio-Visual> Demonstration> Discussion> to the most effective Practice by Doing).  With a public audience, we also know it pushes students to do a better job in completing and publishing their work.

Here are links to resources to help you learn more about Mathcasts:

Introduction to Mathcasts home page
What a Mathcast looks like
A Directory of Mathcasts by grade level
How to get started

Patty O’Flynn shared how she is using Mathcasts with HS students. Check out her blog on mathcasts.

The Mathcasts I looked at centered around pen and number drawing on the screen with voiceovers. Looking to expand on this especially with one’s more lateral thinking students, think about challenging students to find other ways to use visuals to teach the skill or concept. I can see story telling students illustrating their voiceover using cartoon characters dealing with situations that involve the use of math. It might be a reach but for older students, the TV show “Numb3rs” is a big hit that uses math to solve mysteries. They might find themselves as actors in their own Mathcast drama! It is all about making connections and application to new situations to really reach profound understanding with total student engagement.