Remember Robin Williams, the teacher in the movie Dead Poets' Society. How he inspired, entertained, provoked, challenged and won the respect of his students? Was it simply what he had to say, or was there something about the way he moved about, the gestures he used to illustrate ideas or make a point, the facial expressions or the tone of his voice?
If your response is yes, then you will probably have noticed that being a great facilitator of learning is no different to being a Kung Fu master, a jumbo jet pilot or a brilliant opera singer. You practice ‘the moves” so what you say AND do becomes an automatic, fluent and brilliant performance .
As part of my work, I help teachers learn how to use collaborative technologies in their classrooms. They learn how to make the shift from their role as lecturers or instructors to facilitators, a shift from telling to asking, from listening to conversing. We practice "the moves", not only what to say, but what gestures to use with each verbal instruction to quickly help the group work together like a "thinking orchestra". We learn to become facilitators by working with a group of fellow learners, helping each other to improve our performances. Each of us offers subtle reminders of what to say, what buttons to press and mouse clicks to use, and helpful insights into the best sequence for the activity. Each successive performance becomes more brilliant than the one before.
It works this way. Each of us has set of the frontal lobes, which are much larger in humans than in other animals. On the left hand side, just above the left ear, is Broca's area where we orchestrate motor and speech activity. We sequence what we do and say, so we don't stutter, trip, stumble, stall the car, crash the plane nor play shambolic violin concertos. It is here we have "mirror neurons", the empathy center of the brain. These clever neurons fire off when we watch someone do something AND when we perform the action ourselves. They are the same neurons that are activated when children engage in collective play, where they imitate or play at being mothers and fathers, cops and robbers or doctors and nurses and as Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed, perform as if they were “a head taller”.
It's almost as good as performing the actions ourselves. Great athletes practice in a similar way. They imagine winning the marathon, skiing faster than ever before, jumping higher than anyone thought possible. By the time we complete 6-7 individual dress rehearsals of the same performance, we can generally rely on Broca's area to automatically orchestrate/sequence an extraordinarily complex array of activities, below conscious awareness. It's' our personal automatic pilot.
So here's a way of practicing a new role:
1. Watch/imagine a person performing in your desired role (or remember their performance)? What did they do or say?
2. Thinking about a new role that you wish to perform, describe in detail the “language game” for that role (words, phrases, concepts, theoretical relationships/connections between concepts)?
3. Thinking about a new role that you wish to perform, describe in detail the “gestural language game” for that role (movement, gestures, demeanor, stance, actions)?
4. Describe a situation in which you will perform your new role. What will you say and do?
5. Working in pairs, perform your new role for a buddy. The other person makes notes about the performance and identifies the types of errors that the person makes (Think about previously learned speech/gestural routines, inner speech to guide your activity, the ideal speech/gesture).
6. What did we learn from this activity?
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
The growing army of unemployables
As the world of work becomes more complex and automated there are fewer opportunities to engage in productive employment for people with low levels of literacy.
Some people are not just unemployed, but unemployable. One is six children in the United Kingdom leave school unable to read, write or use mathematics properly. Other OECD countries are in the same boat...
We can help give our kids a great start if we focus on their ability to use language to expand their cognitive powers. If we read our children books, talk about the big issues of the day, explore ideas and play games. But positively.
As the eminent psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed almost a century ago, language plays a pivotal role in our learning and development. We use "inner speech" to learn new skills with the aid of tools, language as conversation to influence or negotiate with others, the symbols of "written speech", signs, psychological methods such as problem solving or relating processes and physical tools which can be as simple as a pen/pencil or as complex as a computer.
A US study by Hart and Risley in 1995 found that by age three, the children of professional parents had a vocabulary of 1000 words and an average IQ of 117, whereas the children whose parents survived on welfare had a vocabulary of 525 words and an average IQ of 79. They also found that by age three the children of professionals had participated in 400,000 positive interactions and 80,000 negative ones. Welfare children were exposed to the opposite treatment; 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. One leads to success in life, the other to a life of deprivation and in some instances crime.
If these young children then go to school, and are expected to sit quietly through 10 to 12 years of lessons dominated by teacher talk and algorithmic learning, then the opportunities to develop rich cognitive capabilities via dynamic language exchanges are reduced even further.
What can we do about it? Here's a workshop method to start over:
1. What gets in the way of 21st Century young people becoming the best they can possibly be?
2. What new roles can parents/schools/child care centers play in the development of young children so they have numerous opportunities to develop the language skills to become capable participants in a "knowledge Age" world?
3. Design a learning activity which will help young people expand their language and relating skills so they can take greater control over their own brain development.
4. Develop a design for a school, classroom, home learning experience or community activity that helps young people develop language skills, and engage in many more positive interactions to overcome earlier developmental shortcomings.
Hart, B. & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brooks.
Some people are not just unemployed, but unemployable. One is six children in the United Kingdom leave school unable to read, write or use mathematics properly. Other OECD countries are in the same boat...
We can help give our kids a great start if we focus on their ability to use language to expand their cognitive powers. If we read our children books, talk about the big issues of the day, explore ideas and play games. But positively.
As the eminent psychologist Lev Vygotsky showed almost a century ago, language plays a pivotal role in our learning and development. We use "inner speech" to learn new skills with the aid of tools, language as conversation to influence or negotiate with others, the symbols of "written speech", signs, psychological methods such as problem solving or relating processes and physical tools which can be as simple as a pen/pencil or as complex as a computer.
A US study by Hart and Risley in 1995 found that by age three, the children of professional parents had a vocabulary of 1000 words and an average IQ of 117, whereas the children whose parents survived on welfare had a vocabulary of 525 words and an average IQ of 79. They also found that by age three the children of professionals had participated in 400,000 positive interactions and 80,000 negative ones. Welfare children were exposed to the opposite treatment; 75,000 encouragements and 200,000 discouragements. One leads to success in life, the other to a life of deprivation and in some instances crime.
If these young children then go to school, and are expected to sit quietly through 10 to 12 years of lessons dominated by teacher talk and algorithmic learning, then the opportunities to develop rich cognitive capabilities via dynamic language exchanges are reduced even further.
What can we do about it? Here's a workshop method to start over:
1. What gets in the way of 21st Century young people becoming the best they can possibly be?
2. What new roles can parents/schools/child care centers play in the development of young children so they have numerous opportunities to develop the language skills to become capable participants in a "knowledge Age" world?
3. Design a learning activity which will help young people expand their language and relating skills so they can take greater control over their own brain development.
4. Develop a design for a school, classroom, home learning experience or community activity that helps young people develop language skills, and engage in many more positive interactions to overcome earlier developmental shortcomings.
Hart, B. & Risley, T. R. (1995). Meaningful Differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Baltimore: Paul H. Brooks.
Saturday, June 13, 2009
Learners as knowledge creators
A new generation of Web 2.0 tools is now making it possible for people to directly engage in the process of collective knowledge creation.
Web 2.0 tools give us the power to participate/interact/co-create/converse with others anytime/anywhere in the world. We can be both the designers/creators and user/consumers of each others' creative content, to make/view movies, write/tell/read stories, illustrate/develop ideas, find and organize stuff or just do things. Think social networking sites, wikis, blogs, team learning/meeting systems, short message services such as twitter, bookmarking...and more.
But instead of using these tools in the classroom we teachers perform a traditional role of “knowledge tellers”. We have come to believe that what we know is universally important, even though we also know that this knowledge may be out-of-date by the time our students reach adulthood.
We are discovering that this current generation of "interactive kids" is very quickly bored by the sounds of our voices. We become “behavior controllers” to prevent them interrupting or disrupting our classrooms. We block the use of the very same language/gesture tools that would otherwise help young people develop their brains for a successful life. We ask them to sit still and say little or nothing for most of the next 12 years of their lives, except when we say they can.
Yet what most of us really want is to create learning environments, where relating, and thinking skills, particularly dialogue and dialectical discourse, help our young people develop their brains, ready for an increasingly complex 21st century world.
Question: What could we do, starting today, to help learners design and facilitate their own learning activities/"edutainments" and so become active knowledge creators?
Web 2.0 tools give us the power to participate/interact/co-create/converse with others anytime/anywhere in the world. We can be both the designers/creators and user/consumers of each others' creative content, to make/view movies, write/tell/read stories, illustrate/develop ideas, find and organize stuff or just do things. Think social networking sites, wikis, blogs, team learning/meeting systems, short message services such as twitter, bookmarking...and more.
But instead of using these tools in the classroom we teachers perform a traditional role of “knowledge tellers”. We have come to believe that what we know is universally important, even though we also know that this knowledge may be out-of-date by the time our students reach adulthood.
We are discovering that this current generation of "interactive kids" is very quickly bored by the sounds of our voices. We become “behavior controllers” to prevent them interrupting or disrupting our classrooms. We block the use of the very same language/gesture tools that would otherwise help young people develop their brains for a successful life. We ask them to sit still and say little or nothing for most of the next 12 years of their lives, except when we say they can.
Yet what most of us really want is to create learning environments, where relating, and thinking skills, particularly dialogue and dialectical discourse, help our young people develop their brains, ready for an increasingly complex 21st century world.
Question: What could we do, starting today, to help learners design and facilitate their own learning activities/"edutainments" and so become active knowledge creators?
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