Category Archives: learning

Gardening Wisdom

adult learning, creativity, learning, thinking out loud

I spent most of Memorial Day Weekend in my flower garden. The cool wet spring has kept me from tilling and seeding so three days of sunshine and reasonable temperatures were a truly wonderful gift even though my stiff muscles might not be so grateful. I weeded, tilled, and readjusted. As I worked, I found myself thinking of all the things we learn from gardening including problem solving skills like creativity and critical thinking. And two huge lessons for me: the power of patience and long range planning.*

For now, I’ll start with just one lesson: Learning is never over. My main objective is to learn how to create a healthy, pleasing-to-look-at garden. That means each plant needs its optimal conditions as much as possible so it can thrive. They will be at their most beautiful and productive which in itself makes the garden look better.

However, there is also a design element. Some flowers are short, some tall, some bushy, some skinny. Some are planted for their foliage; others are planted for their showy blossoms. Plus, my garden is rectangular with a “front” side. However, you can also see the “back” side from the road so I’ve tried to create a two-edged garden. It all makes a difference in what goes where.

That’s why, even though it’s well into the season, I’m still moving things around. For both reasons: it’s a new garden so I’m stilllearning what the sun will be like in the summer. A shady spot a few months ago now gets almost full sun all day, something I didn’t consider last fall. A few shrubs have grown so they are now providing small oases of  shade in an otherwise fairly sunny garden. Plus, flowers are

There’s an element of awareness here that I think also plays into the notion of critical thinking. Sometimes, I just stand and look, thinking about what is happening in the bed. What’s blooming? What’s done? What should be blooming but isn’t? When did it rain last? What can I still being added. We came into several large clumps of hostas so expansion was needed. They make a great border but now the grasses that were forming the border would be hidden. So, out they came.

put in that spot that opened up when I moved the astibles? I may seem immobile in terms of gardening but my mind is cranking through a checklist of items to be considered.

There is an art and science to gardening that challenges the critical and creative thinker. I know many schools host gardens and I think it’s a great place to put these skills into practice. It’s a science lesson but it can be so much more…

*And, selfishly, I was looking for an excuse to post some pictures of my garden. The irises were gorgeous this year, if I do say so myself.

Hacking the Farm

creativity, learning

Tim Stahmer’s post about how to learn creativity and critical thinking prompted me to finally get this post written. It’s been drafting itself in my brain for the past few weeks but I just haven’t had enough quiet time to write. You see, I live on a farm and spring is a busy time of year. While my husband is the farmer-in-chief, I have daily chores that include feeding pigs, chickens, and bees along with collecting and processing eggs. It’s also flower gardening time, and I’m busy with a 1200-square-foot plot along the road that seems to sprout weeds overnight. And our most recent experiment* has been successful so now we have six baby chicks that hatched in the incubator yesterday. Plus, I haven’t given up any of my “real work” but at least I work from home so I can sit on the front porch with my laptop.

As I work around the farm, I think a lot about what I am learning. It mostly involves being creative and applying critical thinking to solve problems. We can’t afford to buy a lot of new stuff. So, my chicken coop is part of the old smokehouse, and the pigs live in an outbuilding on the property. We battled snakes in the hen house so eventually used part of a roll of house wrap to line the inside. The roosts are made of pieces of a former plant stand and the nesting boxes are stacking crates that I found for $1 at a discount store. As for the pigs, they drink fresh water from an old cooler rescued from the barn. I’ve had to experiment with tying it off to keep them from tipping it over. (Pigs really like rooting stuff up and I think tipping the cooler was a bit of a game for them.)

Certain tools lend themselves to hacking. Mason jars, for instance, are wonders: we found boxes and boxes of them around the farm. We drink from them. We feed the bees with them. We store all manner of seeds and food in them. Sometimes, I even use them for their “real” purpose and make jam and can vegetables.

There are plenty of books and website on farming and we use them as reference guides to see how others are hacking their farms. Thank goodness there is no written test…but there are plenty of tests. It took several tries to keep the snake out, and we lost chickens because of my failures. I had thirsty pigs a few mornings when they tipped the cooler.

And the new hives are just one big test: my bees are busy building comb all over the place and my local beekeeper friend is coming over to help me get them under control. We have one hive that appears to be thriving while we wonder if the second one will survive as there is very little activity. Beekeepers will tell you that if you ask 100 beekeepers the same question, you will get 100 different answers. There are guidelines but hives are alive and bees are independent so you have to solve your unique problems in unique ways.

As Tim points out and I experience every day, creativity and critical thinking are learned by doing. As I solve problems, I create a toolbox of solutions that can be applied in other areas as well. Kids need the same kind of authentic problems to solve so they can begin equipping their own toolboxes.

*We have two roosters and we wondered if we were getting some fertilized eggs. So we randomly put 12 in the incubator about three weeks ago. The answer is yes.

It’s the Learning I Care About

adult learning, Education, learning

We should try to bring back the joy of learning because you want to learn, not because someone is going to give you a grade at the end of the semester. Simon Schocken[1]

We’re just three weeks away from the end of the semester and the emails have started to arrive from concerned students asking about how I weight various elements of the course, how they will be graded, etc. etc. I have been providing them ongoing feedback throughout the semester, but I have not assigned a letter grade to any of their work. I follow Alfie Kohn in this practice and share this quote with them on my assessment page:

When I was teaching high school, I did a lot of things I now regret.  But one policy that still seems sensible to me was saying to students on the first day of class that, while I was compelled to give them a grade at the end of the term, I could not in good conscience ever put a letter or number on anything they did during the term – and I would not do so.  I would, however, write a comment – or, better, sit down and talk with them – as often as possible to give them feedback.

I do use a rubric for self-assessment. It came via Dr. Jon Becker who borrowed it from Dr. Gary Stager.

  1. I did not participate
  2. I phoned-it in
  3. I impressed my colleagues
  4. I impressed my friends and neighbors
  5. I impressed my family
  6. I impressed Karen Richardson
  7. I impressed myself

I use it as part of a mid-term and end-of-semester self assessment. The students often find it difficult to reverse the way they think about courses in terms of who they should be impressing. For many, they have never taken the time to consider if they were impressed because they were so busy trying to impress their teacher. And, they are much harder on themselves than I would ever be. (As an aside, I am pretty easily impressed: most of my students are working professionals with families and other responsibilities. Many times, my course is the first fully online experience they’ve had, Plus, it immerses them in an ed tech experience as we use technology to learn and share, something that frightens many of them. Finally, because my course puts much of the burden on their shoulders, it can be more challenging than the more typical read the book, write a paper course with which they are familiar.)

As usual, they have done wonderful work despite the lack of rubrics and grades. They have felt the freedom to take risks with new technology tools and some have failed or experienced frustration. But, knowing that they aren’t going to get dinged by a bad grade, they have been able to see failure and frustration as part of the learning process.

Yet, with three weeks to go, some of them seem to have forgotten my pledge to them. They go to the syllabus looking for the weightings and the point scores and when they don’t find them, I get an email. I reply, reassuring them I have no intention of changing my approach. The final project is important but it carries no more or less weight than any of the other assignments. I’ll take a holistic view of their work, and if they haven’t had any negative feedback from me, they are doing just fine. I remind them that the goal of the course is not the grade they earn, but the learning they’ve experienced.

I get a lot of positive reviews for the course and the students seem to appreciate my approach to assessment. My simple hope is that they carry this positive experience back to their own classrooms and schools.

[1] http://designmind.frogdesign.com/articles/radical-openness/the-end-of-education-as-we-know-it.html

Learning to Love Learning?

21st Century Skills, learning

From the science goddess, a protest against the notion of “everyone,” something I find frustrating as well. Each person must find her own path to learning and sharing. Maybe you tweet, maybe you blog, maybe you find a Google group, maybe you subscribe to a listserv. Or, and this may sound heretical, maybe you have a face to face group that meets your needs.

What struck me about the twitter post was the notion that we had to learn to love learning. Is that a skill that we have to learn? It seems to me that kids, especially, are learning all the time without thinking about it as something they love or hate. It’s natural. Is it only when we send them to school where the practice of learning becomes something unnatural that we learn to hate learning. So, perhaps we do have to (re)learn how to love learning once we are freed from the bonds of the classroom and formal education.  Dale Stephens, author of Hacking Your Education, makes this point in his guest post for The Innovative Educator blog. Note that the title of his book is Hacking YOUR Education, with the focus on the personal aspect of education.

College Readiness = Adaptive Capacity

21st Century Skills, leadership, learning

Tim Stahmer’s post about schools’ dependence on the Office software package hit a nerve with me. In the past month, I’ve heard at least a few educators refer to being able to use Office as a “college readiness” issue. As a college professor, I found that perspective very surprising. There are lots of ways that kids are not ready for college, but using Word and PowerPoint were certainly not on my list, especially when they mean diverting scarce funds for expensive licenses.

For me, college readiness means being able to pick the right tool for the job. Do you have to do a presentation? You have a range of choices: certainly Powerpoint, but what about Google Presentation, Prezi or Keynote or Animoto? My preference is always towards tools that make it easy to publish and share on the web. Do you have to write a paper? Unless it’s your dissertation with all that special formatting, I would be happy if you just did it in Google and shared it with me so I can access it from anywhere and any device. That way, when I find myself with free time before a meeting or riding the ferry, I can read your work.  I would probably be even happier if you told me you had a blog and wanted to publish it there so you can share your writing with more than just me.

But, I hear the educators asking, how can we teach our students how to use all those tools? To that, I say, don’t teach them specific programs: instead, teach them how to learn. Most people can pick up Prezi in a few minutes using the video tutorials. Google Apps provides extensive help and a quick search yields videos and written tutorials on every possible aspect of these tools.

What should we be teaching our students when it comes to digital tools and technology use? If there is one thing we do know about the future, it will be more of the same: change, change, change. New tools and new devices. The best way to prepare our kids for college and for life is to provide them with lots of opportunities to be self-directed learners. Help them develop their adaptive capacity, the ability to change and learn throughout their lives.

Adaptive capacity is a key leadership trait, according to Warren Bennis and Robert Thomas. I’ve put their book on my reading list but this article will get you started.