The other day, I talked briefly about teaching the intangible skills of problem solving and juggling many bits of information at once. Today, I’d like to talk about the art of teaching research skills.
I don’t actually remember how I learned to conduct basic research. From an early age, I was asking difficult questions, and the response quickly became, “Go look it up.” By the time I got to middle school, I was a master of cross-referencing a card catalog to get exactly what I wanted. By the time I got to high school, the Reader’s Guide was my best friend. I even got terribly excited when the new edition came out.
Recently, I was asked to teach a study skills student who was working on a packet on using the internet to conduct research. The student in question is quite internet-proficient. There really wasn’t much to teach. We hopped on the search engine, I gave her a term to look up, and then I realized what the best lesson was.
She scrolled down the page and grabbed the first wikipedia entry she found, and I just about screamed. A number of our students think Wikipedia is an authoritative source and rely solely on it when doing research for their papers. I had to explain to her that Wikipedia is not an authoritative source, and should only be used in conjunction with other reliable sources. This led to a rather interesting discussion of what constitutes a reliable source online. We looked at several pages and analyzed them for reliability. It was a very interesting exercise.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility at 8:20 AM EDT
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The things we know best are the things we haven’t been taught.
-Marquis de Vauvenargues
The Marquis obviously realized that much of what we learn is learned informally!
I’ve read so much lately on the learning that takes place in games. I remember playing on Atari and Coleco as a child, and then my grandmother gave me a Nintendo when they were the new console in town. The controllers were simple. Most games didn’t require much beyond simple strategy and timing to beat.
These days, games require an incredible level of hand-eye coordination to go along with those strategy and timing issues. Not only that, but many of the RPGs include a storyline you have to follow closely to make sure you can solve problems on higher levels.
There is much thought on the educational value of these experiences, having to multi-task, to solve problems on your feet. They’re intangible lessons that really can’t just be taught, and have to be picked up through constructed experiences. (Have I ever mentioned I’d love to work on the educational side of games?) Where better than to pick them up than the constructed experience of a game?
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Experiential Learning at 8:10 AM EDT
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I am currently a math tutor. I love my job because I get to help children find that they actually can do math.
Part of what we try to teach these students in the center is how to identify situations where math skills are needed, and then to recognize which tools in their math arsenal will help them solve the problem.
I am also a huge fan of pencil puzzle games like this one. I was attempting this one, and quickly realized it’s essentially a variant of the Magic Square. The moment I recognized the problem, it took virtually nothing to solve it. It almost took away a bit of the thrill of solving the puzzle.
While it is a good idea to teach children to think like this, to work to recognize quickly so they can solve and move on, I almost wonder if it takes out some of the fun of exploring the problem. By arming students with the ability to resolve a problem quickly, are we robbing them of the opportunity to explore the problem and perhaps find another, cleaner way to approach the problem?
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 7:45 AM EDT
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As a formally trained teacher who prefers to work in informal settings, I honestly can’t wrap my mind around the fact that there are actually people who think you don’t have to be a good teacher to teach outside a formal classroom. I just can’t!
If you can explain things to other people, that’s great. Please teach people around you what you know! If you know a lot, but can’t put together a coherent thought, then leave the teching to someone else. Nothing creates a bad learning situation more quickly than a teacher who cannot figure out how to explain what they are teaching to their student.
I hope to have instructional materials available online in the near future, and I can only hope I won’t be one of these people.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility, e-learning at 7:36 AM EDT
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This cartoon was pretty funny in light of my explorations into constructivism and connectivism last week. The mother decides to replace pre-made foods with foods that must be prepared, and then facepalms when her children don’t have the slightest clue what to do with the new products.
One would think she would gently encourage them to read the directions, but that appears to have been too challenging for her.
I think there is this misconception that constructivism works much the same way, that we expect a learner to look at a similar, yet different situation and figure out on their own how to cope with it without any teacher interference. This simply isn’t true. In discovery learning, I find that students will take whatever problem solving skills they have learned and attempt to apply it to the new situation to determine what they need to do. If the student does not have the requisite problem solving skills, then I like to explore with the student, modelling problem solving techniques while engaging that ever-powerful prior knowledge.
I will admit, though, that if I think a child has a sufficient background to tackle a problem on their own ,then I will do what the mother failed to do here: tell the child to read the directions. If they’re still stumped at that point, then I’ll step in and help.
There are some concepts that cannot be taught this way, and that’s okay. But there are concepts that can be taught this way, and are almost always more interesting to learn this way because it allows for the possibility for a new and acceptable method for doing something to be discovered.
Posted by Rebecca as Responsibility, Experiential Learning at 7:38 AM EDT
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When it first occurred to me that I wanted to reflect on last week’s teaching, it never actually occurred to me that I’d run into a series of interconnected skills that would essentially become the teaching theme for the week.
It started when I was asked to teach a student how to create equivalent ratios. She was learning to simplify fractions in preparation for learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide fractions. I love teaching equivalent ratios, so it seemed like a fairly simple task. I should have known better. This poor student was never taught factoring or the rules for divisibility. Step one was to print off a copy of my rules of divisibility card for her. Step two was to teach her how to factor.
Part of the problem here was that earlier in the evening, she had been working on lowest common multiples, and as such had a very difficult time separating multiples from factors. This led to a definition session, because we weren’t going to get anywhere if she couldn’t keep the two straight.
- Factor: a number that can be multiplied by another number to equal the target number (at the elementary level, a factor will nearly always be smaller than the target number unless fractions and decimals are involved)
- Multiple: the result of multiplying the target number by another number (at the elementary level, a multiple will nearly always be larger than the target number unless fractions or decimals are involved)
We finally got the two concepts straight in her mind, and then I whipped out the rules of divisibility. She wasn’t too sure at first, but after using it on a couple of two-digit numbers, she was hooked.
Rules of divisibility
- 2: The ones digit is 2, 4, 6, 8, or 0.
- 3: Add the digits in the number together. If the resulting number is divisible by 3, then the original number is divisible by 3.
- 4: If the last two digits in the number are divisible by 4, then the original number is divisible by 4.
- 5: The ones digit is 5 or 0.
- 6: If the number is divisible by both 2 and 3, then it is divisible by 6.
- 9: Add the digits in the number together. If the resulting number is divisible by 9, then the original number is divisible by 9.
- 10: The ones digit is 0.
There is a recently published complicated method for determining divisibility by 7, but I choose not to confuse my students with that. Also, do not fall into the trap of thinking that any number divisible by 2 and 4 must be divisible by 8. If you find your self wondering about that one, just factor out the number 12. It’s divisible by both 2 and 4, but not 8.
Once I had her on the right path, I went on with my evening (only to discover another student in need of a rules of divisibility card) and my week. Then, I was confronted with a student who understood that fractions could be simplified, but really had no idea how to do it.
Super Becca to the rescue! I sat him down and taught him how to create equivalent ratios, watched him misapply his earlier learnings some more, retaught him and made him do more practice, and watched him stumble through to the right answers! I was very proud of him, and he can now add fractions with unlike denominators like a pro!
I think this is just one more sign that i really need to write those Pocket Becca math books the kids have been asking me to write…
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 8:18 AM EDT
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It occurs to me, in reading over all of this material and thinking about my own place in the teaching realm, that somehow constructivism and connectivism have become intermingled. I was sifting through my del.icio.us the other day, and realized that all of my connectivism and constructivism saves have been filed under “connectivism”.
It made me wonder: are the two really so closely related?
Constructivism, which I support because of its usefulness in informal learning, focuses on what knowledge the learner brings in with them, and then uses that to help them acquire more knowledge through a series of techniques including “scaffolding” (building on what the learner already knows), questioning, and exploration. The idea here is that the learner is creating their own meaning as they work through new topics, hence they are constructing new knowledge.
Connectivism, on the other hand, is more about making connections in learning. It seems to draw on the learner’s experiences as they intereact with the world around them, bringing their own order to what they are learning. (I may be misunderstanding this as I am still trying to understand exactly what connectivism is.) It incorporates the diverse background of the learner to allow them to assimilate information from diverse topics to create what have been called “information nodes”. It’s definitely more of a self-centric organization.
It occurs to me I have a lot more studying to do on connectivism, but it’s interesting to see how similar, and yet different the two are.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning, Teaching methods at 8:14 AM EDT
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I spent much of the past weekend on vacation. Apparently, my defiinition of being on vacation means doing a ton of reading. My Bloglines account had become this holding tank filled with articles, white papers, and books on constructivism, so one of my goals for myself was to clear out as many of them as i could. I’m still working on the books, but it was a fairly interesting read that reminded me of why I teach how I teach.
Because of my rather extensive background in teaching in informal settings, I figured out fairly quickly that I was probably a constructivist at my core. When you’re in a position to teach people with no opportunity to really know their academic background, it just seems the easiest way to go (in my own opinion). As a museum educator, I had very little time to ascertain where my audience was and tailor my presentations and workshops to that level of knowledge. I had to depend on them coming in with a certain level of knowledge and try to build on that.em
In my current job, it’s really not much different. I have a little bit more time, and I’m working with individuals on a one-to-one basis, so i can more accurately pinpoint a level of prior knowledge quickly and work from there.
Part of what bothers me about what I read, though, is this strange notion that someone who teaches from a constructivist background must just leave the students to their own devices. The miscoceived notion is that you figure out what they know, throw something new at them with no explanation, and hope they learn the right lesson from it. That might be somewhat true in the development of static museum exhibits, but generally, teaching from a constructivist perspective, again in my own opinion, is more than that.
For me, the process begins with ascertaining that level of knowledge and then introducing the new topic briefly. For those situations where i want the students to explore the concept for a bit before we talk about it, I allow them time to work through an experiment. It’s usually directly related to what I want them to learn. After everyone has had a chance to experiemnt with the concept, I like to bring everyone back together to discuss what everyone found, to see if a pattern can be found, and go from there. I’ve never once thrown a new concept at students and expected them to figure it out on the own.
Perhaps this makes me a part-time constructivist. I don’t know. I do think there’s something to be said for guided discovery, though. Through a controlled experiment and directing questions, partnered with discussion, there is so much a child can understand on their own, and I do feel that gives them a sense of ownership over what they’ve learned.
I used this technique successfully as a museum educator. I use it successfully with the students I currently teach. I think it’s really all about how you construct the constructivist lesson.
Some of the weekend’s reading:
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 7:54 AM EDT
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