“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work; you don’t give up.”
Anne Lamott
I think I’ve found my new favourite quote. A yummy, quotable quote that I can pull out any time. The key point of this one is “try to do the right thing”. Oh and the work bit. What are we doing as teachers if not trying to do the right thing? The right thing for each child, at that moment. I’m intrigued by the notion that we could be doing things with children to support their learning and it’s best practice and evidence-based and formative and engaging but possibly not what that child needs at that moment. I know we can’t know every moment, for every child, that we say and do is the right thing so I appreciate the quote.
Thanks again to the inquisitive and life-long learning folk at Child Care Exchange Magazine. I really enjoyed their daily email today about some of the writings of Lilian Katz from Intellectual Emergencies: Some Reflections on Mothering and Teaching. I was struck by a comment she made about this frequently used comment: “We don’t do that at this school.” and “Why should a teacher say to a child who just grabbed a stapler from another one, ‘We don’t do that in this class!’ when the child just did it?” I remember the teacher on my first teaching practice using this strategy and I have on occasion used it myself. But of course it doesn’t make sense! We are also denying and devaluing the child’s experience or the strategies they have used to of cope or deal with an experience.
She comments that this creates a “phony classroom culture”. What really struck me was her comment this “fails to involve children in making good sense of their experience and environment.” She also talked about a teacher who had used a cardboard tiger and when she got annoyed with the children she would say “the tigers getting grumpy with you”. Ms. Katz asked why the children were asked to respond to the feelings of a tiger and not the feelings of their teacher. I tried this this morning (feeling like a cardboard teacher with my cold!). Some boys were having a chat while I was talking about were going to do in the library and I said “I feel really bad when you talk over me, when I’m talking to the whole class. Did you realise that?” I got a pair of saucer eyes and “Nope!”. He stopped talking, bless him.
In the middle of writing this blog I had the opportunity to practice a conversation with a child to help the child make more sense of their experience and their environment. I kept that phrase as the running framework for what I wanted to say, with care and intention. During this child’s break time this child had a fight with a “friend”. How could I help her see how her behaviour was aggravating the problem? How could I help to use more positive strategies to communicate with someone? How could I help her be more aware that righteous ideas of “getting back at someone” to cause them pain was unhealthy and wouldn’t help her in the long run?
These ideas sit comfortably with Wilson McCaskill’s theories of relationship building, building empathy and the language of strong and weak choices (through game playing). I’m especially interested in the language of “What is the little voice in your head saying? What is it telling you to do?”. I think this strategy of helping children to be in touch with their inner-voice helps them to act with more empathy. If they can be more in touch and understand their inner-voice then they can develop their ability to imagine what someone else’s inner voice would be saying, someone else’s internal experience, which is the basis for developing empathy.
So what are these ways of interacting with children doing? Enabling them to be more empathic, aware and humane in their relationships with other people and the world. The teachers job is to be intentional with language choices and to be aware of thing we say that may not be helpful in developing relationships and empathy. I even think that some things we say are “developing relationships” actually aren’t. If our goal is to develop empathy and the children’s ability to make good sense of the world then this needs to be the basis of our relationship building.
Thanks for being with me on this journey. Please comment and add to this conversation in your own way with your own thoughts!
5. I also set up a Feedburner feed to get visitor stats on my site.
6. Watch all the TED speeches I’ve been meaning to watch for ages.
7. Sign up to Slideshare (another way of sharing, this time PowerPoint and Word)
8. Actually, I think my brain just said no…
Something to think about…we need to recognise these new ways of learning, be able to recognise new key competencies, to value them and make them an everyday part of our children’s lives IN the classroom. This doesn’t take away from the magic of childhood or their connection to the environment or their ability to empathise in social situations…it does all of these things in a different forum. It’s a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing and interacting with the world. What do you think?
I’ve made a goal to share one new thing from the web every day with my homegroup class and my project group (which is also taking part in Tournament of the Minds so we’re really focusing on thinking outside of the box).
My goal has emerged out of my own journeys around the internet: through my RSS feeds and through those sites to new sites or links, or links to projects, Youtube and other collating sites (and on and on until I need a walk in the bush or a bike ride!)
I started off the term with the “Did you know?” (or here) clip which generated a lot of dicsussion and also provided a context for scaffolding deeper thinking, questioning and reflection skills. One child decided to use the format to create his own “Did you know?” using PowerPoint, which so far, looks pretty professional (I wonder how long it took him to create the spinning question marks, pretty cool!) All I said was “Y’know, that’s easily done on PowerPoint…”
I couldn’t help but share the post-it note animation. It was greatly appreciated and also promoted much laughter and discussion about turning the simple into the awesome!
And from the hearty and colourful Gangsta Bride via Studio Jelly (from my own personal RSS feeds, althought with me, learning is learning and I don’t separate my feeds anymore!) I’ve found an incredible use of Youtube and creativity where a piece of music has been created from many sources. An example of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. (A collaborative music and spoken word project by Darren Solomon and Youtube users). Imagine supporting children to create something like this? Wow.
I post-script each sharing time with “Just a little something to think about…” and off they go…my goal is to provide them with as many examples of creative people doing creative things as possible.
So last one…I promise…remember before the internet when most local neighbourhood communication was done throught the humble flyer? Well, designer Cardon Webb has hijacked some fairly standard examples of the local flyer and created “aesthetically upgraded versions” like these…
So the US hasn’t ratified this convention? Well, Kyoto was a toughie but the Rights of Children? Go here to lend your voice to the campaign for the USA to sign the Convention. The second Bush administration stated in 2001 that “The Convention on the Rights of the Child may be a positive tool for promoting child welfare for those countries that have adopted it. But we believe the text goes too far when it asserts entitlements based on economic, social and cultural rights. … The human rights-based approach … poses significant problems as used in this text.”
During the Walden University Presidential Youth Debate (thanks Wikipedia) in the run-up to the last US elections, Barack Obama stated that it was “embarrasing” to be in the company of Somalia and that he would review the convention (as well as others). Let’s see if he follows through.
I spent some time with my second class exploring and discussing the UN Convention on the Rigths of the Child. I started out by simply putting it up on the wall. First, it was just another piece of writing on the wall, then the interest, then a few started looking a little closer, then one child started to question. After that, they referred to it constantly and it became a reference tool for discussion in our classroom. I highly recommend including the document in the culture of your classroom or learning community.
Have courage on this journey and bear with me. It may take a while, many links and your own tangents to get to the “point” of this post!
Through my daily journey on the internet I have found The David Report which “covers the intersection of design, culture and business life with a creative and humanistic approach. We write about the latest and most interesting news, ideas and concepts concerning art, design, architecture, music, travel and fashion with a holistic and culturally connected mindset.” This website is very interesting in its self and is an example of the kind of multi-topic, synthesis, opinion, collaborative website that children could make (at any level).
I checked out The David Report’s blog which led me to notice their Del.ici.ous sidebar (I have one on my own blog, I wonder if you can do the same on Edublogs?). An interesting article caught my eye Innovation” is Dead : “Transformation” as The Key Concept for 2009 (from BusinessWeek). I thought our Principal would love this, so I emailed that off to him (although if he had a Del.ici.ous account which was shared in the school community, he could sign up to mine and click on the link that I could have saved to Del.ici.ous rather than email).
This article made some interesting comments about the possible differences between innovation and “transformation”, (Don’t forget to read the comments, they’re half the fun. Also, how do they make their tag-cloud move? That’s cool. If children love the exploding bubbles on bubbl.us then they’d defintely appeciate a moving tag-cloud) and that innovation has been flogged to death and has been overtaken by this mythical idea of transformation.
The author Bruce Nussbaum comments “”Transformation” accepts the notion that we are in a post-consumer society, defined by two groups of economic players: manufacturers and consumers. “Transformation” deals with a new Creativity Society, in which we are all both producers and consumers of value. Look around and you can see Gen Y in particular creating practically from birth, mashing music, designing Facebook or MySpace pages, doing videos and podcasts—creating value.” In an education setting this is about the learner being an active participant (or is it THE active participant); but wait, it gets better…
Something popped up in the comments from Patrick McGowan. He referenced some interesting blokes called “Deleuze and Guattari“ who apparently “had it right in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’:”, in which they state, “the tribe must become nomadic, rhizomatic to survive/thrive. Which, if I understand it correctly, means that there is no longer just one expert, but a multitude of voices contributing to the knowledge base”.
By now I’m getting pretty excited, but not any closer to my magical moment of understanding. The author makes the comment that although social-contstructivist and connectivist theories “are centered on the process of negotiation as a learning process”, but this isn’t “enough” for online learning.
He states “A rhizomatic plant has no center and no defined boundary; rather, it is made up of a number of semi-independent nodes, each of which is capable of growing and spreading on its own, bounded only by the limits of its habitat (Cormier 2008). In the rhizomatic view, knowledge can only be negotiated, and the contextual, collaborative learning experience shared by constructivist and connectivist pedagogies is a social as well as a personal knowledge-creation process with mutable goals and constantly negotiated premises. The rhizome metaphor, which represents a critical leap in coping with the loss of a canon against which to compare, judge, and value knowledge, may be particularly apt as a model for disciplines on the bleeding edge where the canon is fluid and knowledge is a moving target.”
If this is the emerging experience of children as learners and active participants in our society then pardon me, but what the hell am I DOING in the “classroom”??? I am currently contemplating the idea that learning has “mutable goals” and “constantly
I believe that in a lot of education setting there is a lot of TALK and not alot of CHANGE because we as *teachers* are still coming into the learning experiences as boss, to be “in control” (in a learning/knowledge sense) and still have traditional ideas about “outcomes” and “possible learning experiences”. I asked “my” children what they were passionate about learning in the holidays and several of them said “MSN” as their number one learning goal!
We might have to say that we don’t know what those learning experiences actually are, what they look like or even what learning experiences are acutally going on most of the time without out us even understanding them as learning experiences!
Ok, I’m in contemplation about these ideas and will most definitely be coming back to this discussion. I’d be glad if anyone else would like to join me! Hopefully, this post will “encourage migrations into new conceptual territories resulting from unpredictable juxtapositions”. (Love it!) Right after I’ve finished reading the post-modern treatise ” A Thousand Plateaus”…ooh! And set-up an experimental Ning so we can create one for our 5/6 community, very cool!
Apologies for the lack of pictures and moving parts. I promise the next post will be A.shorter, B. easier to read and C.multimedia. Peace out.
Best thing about the best PDs? Meeting expert teachers with a driving, fiery, passion for children’s learning and engagement. Meet Charles Lovitt.
Charles Lovitt, a many years experienced teacher is obsessed with best practice in maths and what works. When Charles talks about what works he’s talking about happy, healthy, cheerful and productive. Charles is the mastermind and driving-force behind Maths300.
An unfortunately drab name for a rich resource. Maths300’s goal is to travel the country and find the best of the best of maths lessons, experiences and investigations; document them and share them. Many of them “old favourites” that have been taken to stratospherically awesome levels of problem solving and investigation. Little bit scared of that? If you want to really support your children’s maths learning, be prepared to get your maths feet wet.
So far my children and I have enjoyed Dice Footy, Multo and Chocolate Cake. As a signed-on Maths300 school we have access to all lesson plans, notes and investigation notes as well as some very effective software. These are two examples from Radioactivity, which is available to non-members to trial.
What resonated? That every word, movement, task, comment, question and breath we use is meaningful as teachers. Charles’ asks: Are you effective? Are you raising student achievement and engagement? No? Why not? And what are you going to do about it?
I had an interesting session using bubble.us the other day. Being a huge Inspiration fan (but not having it available) I was very happy to find such a neat online tool. It’s essentially a brainstorming/mindmapping tool and the possibilities are endless.
I’m keen to use it to plan photography or documentary making. Each bubble can be used for a particular shot or scene. It gives the children a visual tool that they can also add detail too.
I used it to brainstorm the “image” my group wanted for our 5/6 Newsletter. Being a new user I wasn’t sure how to create a separate brainstorm on the same page so our design ideas had to go in the same bubble! The children especially liked it when a deleted bubble ‘exploded’! Very cool. Here is an example I put together quickly. (Thanks Anne for the random idea!) I used the ‘embed html code’ tool in the bubbl.us menu.
Bubbl.us is a free online tool that a user needs to register for. Currently, it cold only be used as a teacher modelling tool or by children with supervision. I wonder how other schools manage use of online tools that need usernames and passwords? I know of a school that has used Scraplog for the children to document their learning. The children all had their own username and password, no personal information was entered (of course) and the online scrapbooks were only available to the classroom community or invited users.
I believe a school must have a specific policy with regards to using these kinds of online tools, but again, the possibilities are endless. Children could collaborate on projects, invite people to share their mindmapping and blog their mindmaps.
Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.
Richard Feynman
My intention is to comprehend as much as I can. Then ask questions, flip it over, change my perspective and give things another go. How do I comprehend things now? Am I still asking the same questions? Am I still complaining about the same things? Do I do things DIFFERENTLY? No wonder we need the holidays so much. I get really tired doing this all the time. New term, new questions, new glasses to try on. Which ones will they be? Will I have moments of comprehension or continue to struggle with my practice of teaching? (What is practice?). And at the end of the day, does this process raise children’s achievement and enable their learning and support them in becoming caring human beings. The answer should always be yes.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=aacad9c8-e2a9-4a0f-96b5-96f802e0226f)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=d3d2248b-33f6-438a-b158-5e3508ff1eb7)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=de2a630c-a1b2-4022-b583-b5e4f7078399)
