Category Archives: learning

Finding Community

community, learning

One of the roles I play in almost every project I work on is community builder. My goal is to help educators grab onto the power of the network for their own learning and sharing. It can be a hard sell sometimes: time is short and social networks can be messy. Creating, maintaining and getting the most out of a Twitter feed requires ongoing attention but if you are willing to make time, you will be rewarded.

It’s important to make sure our students know how to find and use community whether it’s Twitter or a discussion forum or a Facebook page. They aren’t going to learn everything in school. They are most certainly going to develop passions as they get older and need to know how to learn about those passions.

I’m a perfect example: I am developing a passion for baking. I always enjoyed baking but it wasn’t an essential part of my life. Recently, I have begun baking on a regular basis and learning more about the science and practice of baking, especially with whole grains. I spent more time deciding what was going into my bread basket and what cake I was baking for Thanksgiving than anything else. Turkey? You’re supposed to serve turkey? Have you tried the cornbread?

Much of the community I have revolves around King Arthur Flour. This is, in my mind, a business that gets community just right. Recipes, blogs, and forums are free and open to all. Certainly, the recipes mention KAF products but almost none of it is required and you can easily find substitutes in your grocery store. And they would like you to follow them and subscribe and all that.

But, the community is offered for free. It is a warm, welcoming place. Not everyone is always happy: they complain about  recipes that didn’t work or meet their expectations. Complaints are always addressed by a KAF moderator sometimes with suggestions but other times just to let them know they’ve been heard.

The true meaning of a professional learning community was defined in this very enthusiastic and heart warming comment left on the recipe for Light Spice Cookies.

I am new to baking. I have been cooking since college, but only started baking about a month ago – so far only cookies, though this weekend I am going to branch out and bake a cake for my husband’s birthday. If it doesn’t turn out, well, there is always ice cream…. 🙂 Anyway, the first batch of cookies I made was a disaster and the 2nd batch only so-so. Then I found your website, and since then… every time I make cookies, people rave and want the recipe and request a few to take home and then their husbands email me asking for some and… I only make the recipes that have 4 or 5 stars and I read all the comments and your tips so I can learn from others and so far that has worked really well for me. As someone who is new to this, access to a community is a huge blessing. Anyway, these particular cookies (light spice) are my Mom’s FAVORITES. She told her best friend she never realized what a great baker her daughter was! My Mom loves these cookies, and so now I make sure she always has enough so she can have one with her afternoon tea. The one modification I made to the recipe – I added a small amount (1/4 teaspoon) of ground cardamom and I add an extra 1/2 teaspoon of both the ginger and the cinnamon.

There are three threads woven together her: She recognizes that the community has helped her grow. She demonstrates her ability to use the community to full advantage by being sure to read all the comments of the four- and five-starred recipes. And, she feels confident in her abilities to share her knowledge with the community by describing how she changed the spices.

Next time someone asks you why they need a professional learning community, point them to this comment.

The Challenges of Choosing to Learn

learning, thinking out loud, thoughtvectors

I committed to the Thoughtvectors in Concept Space course last week and found myself spending every free minute (and even some not-free minutes) having fun learning and exploring. I blogged, I commented on blogs and I spent a lot of time creating an associative trail, all things I would not have done if it weren’t for the course.

Then, the weekend came. If I were a “real” student in the course, I would have spent the weekend completing the syllabus requirements including reading ahead for this week. As Gardner Campbell, one of the course masterminds, points out in his Letter to a learner, this course is intense because it is not easily compartmentalized and requires continuous attention. Just take a look at the syllabus. This is a course that has an intensive assignment every day. It demands more than some quick reading and writing or a few math problems submitted via Blackboard.

But I’m a part-time farmer and this weekend was a little crazier than usual. Saturday mornings are spent at the local farmer’s market ,and this week I was on my own because my husband was going to a poultry workshop. Before he left, he came in with the news that ten baby pigs had been born sometime in the middle of the night, adding to the five that had been born the week before. As I picked mustard greens, I heard loud squeals coming from the pen and found two of them crying because they had gotten out and now couldn’t figure out how to get back into the pen with their siblings.  (Believe me, there is real truth to the “squeal like a pig” simile!) I rescued them and quickly texted a friend to arrange baby sitting services while I was at the market.

Sunday was reserved for my flower garden. It’s about 1200 square feet and desperately needed work: dead heading, weeding, new planting. A labor of love for which I never have enough time. With a week of heat and humidity being forecast, I wanted to spend as much of the beautiful day digging in the dirt.

In between, I worked on my associative trail. I didn’t just want to take a screenshot of my history. I made a collage of browser tabs and had a plan for creating an interactive image map of my graphic organizer. I had ideas for tools but this wasn’t a typical organizer with a central point that branched out but more of a journey. After putting the whole thing into powerpoint, I realized it no longer offered the option to export as a webpage. I have an idea for how I’m going to do it but it needs another hour or two or three of work to get it done.

Which brings me to this blog post. Even with its focus on learning rather than grading, the course is a course and the real students will eventually get a grade, which provides an incentive for them to make the course a priority over other activities. Because I’m not working for a grade, I do not have that incentive. As I mentioned in my post last week, I like the freedom that brings. I can pick and choose what I want to do, pop in and out as I like, spending more time on the assignments that interest me and taking them someplace they weren’t necessarily meant to go while ignoring items that don’t necessarily fuel my imagination. If I don’t comment on ten other blogs, who is going to know or care? No professor is counting, I’m not going to get any gentle reminders, and I can’t be removed from the course. (I suppose they could take away my RSS feed from the course site but I don’t think that’s going to happen.) In fact, the only person who might be disappointed in my performance is me. And that is something of an overwhelming thought.

Am I happy with my work so far? YES! I can’t wait for you to see the trail I created. There are links from my distant and not-so-distant past that weave together personal experiences and areas of interest, all coming from reading and thinking about the Vannevar Bush article from last week and how it connects lots of threads for me.

My biggest challenge is keeping up the original enthusiasm, carving out time and making the course a priority in a way that makes sense for an “open” student. I find myself wondering if this is why the drop out rate for Coursera courses is so high: we think we want to learn something but realize that making a priority for learning is hard when we don’t have to do it.

More On Making Learning Relevant

learning, reading, testing, ,

Sometime after I posted the last entry on the relevance of Algebra, I was paging through a book catalog and it seemed like each page had at least one book that focused on how and why literature mattered. Here are just a few of the titles:

I haven’t ordered any of them. I’ve already read Moby Dick and W.H. Auden and spent a lot of time teaching children Shakespeare. At some point I realized I was trying to turn them into English majors, when what I really wanted to do was help them learn to love reading the way I did. If, eventually, they found Melville and Auden and the Bard, so much the better. But to force it upon them meant it only led to the inevitable question of why they needed to read it in the first place.

It is an interesting side note that the authors of these books are writers who were probably English majors at some point in their lives so perhaps the lesson here is that, if you plan to become a writer, then reading literature is part of the career path.

And then there’s this blog entry from Edutopia just published today: Why Do We Need To Learn This? Allen Mendler offers strategies for answering the question that might diffuse the immediate situation but never gets to the heart of the answer which is that someone, somewhere decided that “this” was important for everyone to know and, as Mendler does point out, it is going to be on a high-stakes test:

Upon hearing the “When will I ever use this?” refrain, a high school teacher I work with tells her students, “I’m not sure because I don’t know what you want to be in your life. But if you give me a list of everything you plan to do and accomplish, I’ll do my best to let you know when we cover something that I think you might use.” When kids say, “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” her response is, “Exactly. You might need it next week, next year or never. But it is going to be on Friday’s test, not because I want to make you miserable, but because at the end of the year, it is going to be on the state test, and if you want to pass, you need to know it.”

So, you have to know it because I’m going to test it and later someone else is going to test it? I think this is probably the worst answer to the question but the most relevant in our high-stakes world and that just makes me sad.

 

A Real Conversation About Education In An Unlikely Spot

Education, learning,

It’s a snow day for the rest of the world so I’m kicking back a bit myself and getting caught up on some online reading. I was checking out Ree Drummond’s website looking for her pot roast recipe when a headline caught my eye: Time To Weigh In on the Relevance of Algebra. Written by Heather Sanders, the piece considers Algebra in the larger context of getting an education. It starts with the age old question of when will I use this, something that the commenters on the post answer in some very practical ways. But it also explores the bigger question of when we are going to use most of what we learn in school. I think back to my days as a high school English teacher struggling to help my students connect with Shakespeare. One solution was to find literature that was easier to read but drew from those same stories.

It seems as though that is the same conclusion that comes from many of the commenters as they describe books that make Algebra more accessible by answering the when will I use it question right up front and then going from there. I think it’s lesson for all of us: it is important to help connect what kids are learning with their lives rather than the test they are going to have to take at the end of the year.

The lesson for me, today, was that there are lots of conversations going on about education and sometimes we find them where we least expected them. Drummond offers lots of resources for homeschoolers as well as that pot roast recipe I was looking for.

A Learning Journey

Education, learning, literacy, programming

Since mid-September, I’ve been working with a local non-profit to provide an after school tutorial/computer program for local kids. We have a group of about 16 ranging from pre-K to 7th grade that comes to us on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Volunteers help with homework and provide a meal before taking the kids home.

My original plan was to work with upper elementary and middle schoolers to teach them to program with Scratch. I’ve done a bit of that with a few middle school girls but haven’t been able to really dig in yet. With the little bit we did do, only one seemed particularly interested. I am wondering if I need to give them more choice including doing something with digital storytelling. My larger goal is to help them see that they can create rather than consume on the computer and maybe programming isn’t the only way to achieve that.

Part of the problem is space. We meet in one big space, and even with a few rolling walls, it’s noisy and a little chaotic. There’s an empty elementary school just behind our building, and we’re hoping to work with the county to get access.

The other issue that became glaringly clear last evening was the depth of the educational needs in the group. My girls had a pile of math homework so they started with that, and I spent some time with two first grade boys working through a language arts worksheet. This is the first time I’ve really sat with some of the youngest kids. These two boys were really struggling. They can sort of decode, but they aren’t really reading or comprehending. They couldn’t read the directions for one of the assignments so they merrily copied the out-of-order words that they were supposed to be putting in sentences. When I wrote the words on cards, they were able to manipulate them into sentences and then copy them onto the paper.

Other activities didn’t even make sense to me…a series of sentences with blanks and a word bank. We used  a process of elimination to finish it, but with no context for the random sentences, it was sometimes hard to figure out which word made a comprehensible sentence. If I hadn’t been there to supervise and advise, I’m sure they would have simply guessed just so that there was something on the line since that had been their strategy on the first few pages. I couldn’t help but wondering how much feedback they got on the packets.

I also wondered how much time they get to hang out with books. I’m already planning to take my pile of children’s books when I go next week and get them reading together. The middle school kids could sit with the younger ones and help them and probably improve their own skills. And then we could use digital storytelling tools to create our own books. It would tie the program pieces together.

I worry that by just focusing on helping them get their homework done, we are missing an opportunity to give them larger experiences that they don’t seem to be getting in school. There must be a balance. I have to remind myself that we have only been doing this for a few weeks. We had some sketchy plans but didn’t really know how many kids would come and what their needs would be.

We are definitely on a learning journey together….