Reflection

A couple of things sparked the writing of this blog post. The first was a colleague's comment about the quality of work being shared using  the Seesaw app. I personally love Seesaw, it is a great home-school communication tool and is very easy to use. It is the latter benefit that can also lead to a negative consequence. It is so easy to use that students can be tempted to share anything and everything without any thought about what or why they are sharing.

There are two problems with this. Firstly parents/whānau can be overwhelmed by the volume of items that are shared. If they are continually receiving items there is a danger they will be less enthusiastic about what they receive and less likely to respond. Therefore one of the benefits of Seesaw, which is that parents/whānau can easily see and like or comment on work, is likely to be lost. Many parents/whānau would find it difficult to be frequently responding to their child's journal entries. One solution to this is to limit the quantity of what is shared. There could be a daily or weekly limit for example or a per subject limit.

Another solution ties in with the second problem which, as mentioned above, is quality of the work being shared. This will involve discussions with students about what they are sharing and about criteria for  sharing. This does not mean taking agency away from learners, they can still make the choices about what they share, but base their choices on criteria such as links to their learning goals or sharing something they consider to be an example of their best work. These two criteria would not need to be both applied to the same piece of work. There could be work being shared, for example, that is an example of progress towards a learning goal.

Part of this solution would be a requirement to reflect on the piece of work. This reflection could, for example, state why they consider it to be an example of their best work, or the how it shows progress towards their goals and what their next steps might be.

This brings me to the other prompt for this post, an article on TeachThought: 20 Types of Learning Journals. This lists 20 different types of reflection learners can be doing. Encouraging students to use some of these on their Seesaw shares would be a great way to increase the quality of their posts and make shared items more meaningful to both the students and those at home.

Ulearnings

This is my reflection on my learning from the Ulearn 2014 conference. In my previous post I talked about my thoughts around the first keynote from Yoram Harpaz. Here are some of the other highlights for me.

Tom Barratt talked about fostering questions and how our reactions to them can either encourage them or close them down. This fits well with the idea of fostering an inquiry disposition. We all know how many questions pre-schoolers ask but by the time they reach upper primary school many of them have stopped. We need to make sure nothing we say or do contributes to this but instead makes questions and wonderings an expected part of what goes on in classrooms. As Tom put it, we need to "encourage students to be resilient questioners of the world."

Yoram Harpaz spoke about how education is always in crisis because we expect to achieve too much. This leads to us always looking for saviours. Teaching thinking was the saviour for a while, currently it is digital technology.  He didn't seem to have a high opinion of digital technology but that is another story. 

He talked about the three elements of thinking:

• thinking skills
• thinking dispositions
• thinking for understanding

To find out more about his thoughts on this read his paper 'Back to Knowledge: The Ironic Path of Teaching Thinking". Just as he believed we must choose one ideology, he believed we had to choose one way to teach thinking and he believed that was by teaching thinking for understanding. Part of his reasoning was that we can only think well in areas we understand therefore teaching for understanding should be the focus which does make sense to me. 

However, even though I agree that teaching for understanding is really important and is one of the main reasons I believe in an inquiry approach to teaching, I still think there is a place for explicit teaching of skills in context. Teaching dispositions is also important, although probably the hardest of the three to develop. In my opinion the skills and dispositions support the development of understanding, just as when we teach reading we teach that meaning is essential but there are skills and strategies that need to be used and we foster the love of reading. 

In my next post I will talk about my thoughts around the breakouts from Lane Clark and Mike Scaddan.

On Procrastination, Driving and Dispositions

I am an expert at procrastination. If I don't want to do something I can find hundreds of perfectly reasonable-sounding excuses for not doing it.

I drive quite large distances as part of my job, and beautiful though the scenery  on the Coromandel Peninsula is, after a while my attention can begin to wander. So often I write blog posts in my head while I drive.  This one was partially composed on the road between Whangamata and Whitianga.

Now those who have checked my blog will now be wondering what happened to all those blog posts. To answer that I need to refer to Yoram Harpaz.  In his article ‘Approaches to teaching thinking: Towards a conceptual mapping of the field’ he talks about good thinking being a combination of Thinking Skills + Thinking Dispositions + Understanding of Knowledge.  

Now when it comes to blogging I have the requisite skills and understanding, I understand the concept of blogging, I know how to blog, I’ve blogged before. What I have lacked is the disposition to blog. Without that, my tendency to procrastinate wins the day and no blog gets written.

Which brings me to inquiry-based learning. In this video Sharon Friesen from the Galilleo Institute talks about Inquiry as a Disposition.

Inquiry as a disposition from EDtalks on Vimeo.

Sharon Friesen talks about inquiry being a disposition cultivated during teaching and learning, rather than a process that 'gets done' by students. She talks about successful inquiry leading to deep understanding, giving examples from her own experiences.

Inquiry isn't a process. While some sort of scaffolding of an inquiry can be very helpful and having a shared understanding around inquiry is essential, we shouldn't be focusing on the process and ignoring the heart of inquiry. We need to foster the disposition to inquire.
As Socrates put it: “Wisdom begins in wonder.”

And hopefully I now have developed a disposition to blog and my posts will be a bit more frequent. Time will tell.

Thinking about thinking

I have been thinking a lot about thinking lately. This has been sparked by three things, the first was attending a seminar by Robert Swartz on critical thinking skills. The second was reading Kieran Egan's book: 'The Educated Mind: Cognitive tools shape our understanding', especially chapter one 'Three old ideas and a new one'. The third and probably most influential was reading an article by Yoram Harpaz 'Approaches to Teaching Thinking: Towards a conceptual mapping of the field'. If you are interested in teaching thinking in your classroom then check out the new Thinking page on my Inquiring Mind site.