I was once advised to consider pursuing a Montessori teaching certificate because of my fascination with informal education. Montessori believes that children can learn effectively through play, which can be carefully crafted into an informal learning experience without ever being transparent.
Case in point, last Friday I accompanied a friend to his department’s picnic. We spent the afternoon at a beach in Ballard walking and playing and eating and chatting. It was a very relaxing afternoon.
At one point, I grabbed an ice cream treat and went to sit on the swings. A mother and her little girl (who couldn’t have been any older than four) came up and took over the swing beside me. The little girl plopped down on the swing while her mother asked her how many pushes she wanted. The girl thought for a moment before asking first for fifteen, and then settling for thirteen. Her mother pushed her, counting each push out loud.
I couldn’t help but smile as I watched them. Without being obvious, the mother was instilling number sense in her daughter. They had somewhere to practice counting that didn’t feel stale or rote, and the little girl was having a great time.
If you have the opportuinity to play with little ones, look for ways to incorporate a little bit of learning or practice into your play time! They’ll benefit from it!
Posted by Rebecca as Experiential Learning, Learning methods, Games at 7:46 AM EDT
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When I was a museum educator, I spent part of my time working with traveling trunks. If you are unfamiliar with the term, traveling trunks are educational units produced by a museum, usually to partner with on-site workshops and exhibits, to bring learning experiences to a classroom. They can either be brought and administered by a member of the museum’s educational staff, or they can be checked out by teachers to incorporate into their teaching.
The more successful trunks usually cover one topic and include a teaching guide, books, and artifacts. In essence, it’s bringing a part of the museum into your classroom if your class can’t go visit the museum itself.I’ve developed very few of these (one of them in roughly an hour during my oral comps), but I always enjoyed it. It’s fun to think about how to convey concepts on limited resources.
Last week, I was trying to sort out the damage done by Bloglines’ most recent database hiccup (my account still isn’t recovered nearly three weeks later), and discovered one of the blogs no longer feeding to my Bloglines account had this story on the story sack.
I was quite excited! Someone has taken the museum traveling trunk, and made it family-sized! It’s great! I think families, babysitters, and camp counselors should definitely look into this practice and take it to heart. It’s a great way to create learning moments and energize kids about learning!
Posted by Rebecca as Uncategorized at 8:29 AM EDT
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I’m in the process of trying to determine how transferable a number of my skills are between museum education and instructional design (only to find I may actually be more interested in educational technology…aren’t labels fun?) Somewhere in my research a couple of weeks ago, I came across this handbook (PDF) that was billed as being great for teachers, writers, and instructional designers. I thought to myself, ‘Hey, I’m two of those and interested in becoming the third!’ so I started reading.
It relies heavily on incorporating Bloom’s taxonomy into instructional design, but overall I really liked it and will likely be referring to it with some frequency while working on my math book series. There is a wealth of good information, useful examples at various points, and really laid out to demonstrate the high points of the book through its presentation.
I’d highly recommend it for those who work on developing indtructional materials.
Posted by Rebecca as Experiential Learning, Teaching methods at 8:21 AM EDT
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We have some delightfully challenging students at work who sometimes need us to work through a few tricks to figure out what works best for them.
Some of them just need a little extra attention to get them by. Those are fairly easy to work with. Some have been told they’re stupid so many times that they believe it. That’s when we start doing little things to build up the confidence.
Occasionally, we get ones who are completely tough nuts to crack. I’m finding a pattern with them, though. I’m finding more of these obstinate anti-learners are more likely to engage in their work if I make it either a choice or an “us” task. When I give the student a choice, he feels he has some control over his learning, making it easier to accept. When I ask the student to complete a task by asking him to help me complete it, then he feels he’s doing me a favor by being helpful.
Either way, it’s amazing how often and how well both methods work with these more stubborn students.
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 8:13 AM EDT
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I’ve been a lifelong self-directed learner since I was a small child. I think I learned the basics of doing research when I was in first grade, and by middle school was helping my classmates do research for class projects. My teachers often encouraged my outside learning becasue it kept me out of their hair, and kept me from becoming bored with my school work.
As a result, I learned all sorts of interesting things, many of which still serve me from time to time. This isn’t to say I haven’t kept up this habit, because I have, and through it developed profesisonal skills and interests as well as met some very interesting people.
I recently started reading Self-direction in Adult Learning, an out-of-print book released online by its authors. It’s really a bit dry for my taste, but full of interesting information nonetheless.One section I found particularly interesting was the ten myths of self-learning:
- Self-directedness is an all or nothing concept
- Self-direction implies learning in isolation
- Self-direction is just another adult education fad
- Self-direction is not worth the time required to make it work
- Self-directed learning activities are limited primarily to reading and writing
- Facilitating self-direction is an easy way out for teachers
- Self-directed learning is limited primarily to those settings where freedom and democracy prevail
- Self-direction in learning is limited primarily to white, middle-class adults
- Self-directed learning will erode the quality of institutional programs
- Self-directed learning is the best approach for adults
Perhaps it is because I grew up constantly engaged in my own research projects, and because I don’t think twice about finding the appropriate resources when I want to learn something now, but I have to agree there a lot of strange misconceptions about self-directed learning. Their notes really illustrate the fallcy in each myth, but from my own experience, I can tell my learning has not been isolated at all times, it hasn’t been a fad, and it has been well worth any time devoted to any subject I’ve learned.
The book is worth at least skimming, if for no other reason than to read this section and some of the later chapters.
Posted by Rebecca as Components of Learning at 8:09 AM EDT
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I often work with writing students at work, and they provide some of my more interesting teaching moments. The most popular, of course, is the Dead Bunny incident, which is now inspiring a book (possibly books, depending how things go). The new one was quite fun. A student had a two-sentence paragraph consisting of no support whatsoever! Let’s look at why this is a problem using the example I used with the student.
Consider the following paragraph:
PBJ is evil. The end.
What do we know after reading this paragraph? Well, we know that the author doesn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Do we know why? No. Is this a good paragraph? Not really.
But what if we add a couple of supporting details:
PBJ is evil. When I was a little kid, my babysitter only fed us PBJ. My little brother would get the jelly all over him and stain his clothes. The end.
Now we know a little bit more about why the author doesn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Is it enough to support the author’s argument that peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are evil. Maybe. It’s definitely a start.
Let’s try it again:
PBJ is evil. My brother can’t eat a PBJ sandwich without getting the jelly all over him, and I have to clean it up. Then, he begs me for another one. He follows me around the house crying until I agree to make him another sandwich, which he gets all over himself again. The end.
Here, we have the position of the author, and three reasons why he doesn’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, complete with transition words. The conclusion still needs help, but now that the author has supported his position, a conclusion is fairly easy to fix.
Being able to state a position and then support it with plausible, concrete details will get you through essays as well as open-ended responses, both short and long, on any test you might find yourself faced with, so it’s a great skill to practice and have ready at the drop of a hat!
Posted by Rebecca as Reflective teaching at 7:52 AM EDT
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This article sounds a lot like my ultimate goals for RebeccaThomasDesigns.com. I haven’t explored the site map concept for this site, but the structure of this site kind of supports the navigation by desired section idea.
Structuring by guides (or subject matter) is a great way to help visitors focus exactly on the information they are searching for. If you structure it right, they they are free to consider other areas of the site as well, but they can completely ignore them if they don’t fit with the visitor needs.
Posted by Rebecca as Information Architecture at 7:41 AM EDT
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My teaching is marked by a combination of questions and peer teaching moments. I like to make my students responsible for their own learning, and I feel that the best way to encourage this is to help them draw on what they know and have learned. This develops their confidence level, and it can help those around them. I’ve often found that when my explanations aren’t working, another student can present it in a new manner that helps the confused student understand. It also benefits me because it adds a new way to present information to my arsenal.
Because I often teach using these two methods, most people don’t notice when I actually don’t know the answer to a question. They think I’m just creating a peer teaching moment, making me look utterly brilliant. When I get caught, I tend not to lose face because I’m fairly quick to admit I didn’t know. I look even more brilliant at that point for acknowledging my own weakness and being resourceful enough to not leave the inquirer hanging.
It occurs to me I do much the same thing in my leadership style.
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 8:15 AM EDT
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As a teacher, I’ve developed the ability to tell whether or not I need to step up or step down explanations I’m giving according to the student’s level of understanding. It’s just part of the tool kit any good teacher needs to get a concept across to a student.
We are taught as teachers to break our lessons down to their simplest point and go from there. If the student understands what we define as a simple component, then we move up to a more complicated explanation. If they don’t, then we look for ways to simplify, to break the information down ever farther to help the student understand.
Simple information is easier to digest, and so we strive for it.
Thinking over my own experiences as a student, I realize that I had teachers who didn’t always understand that. They saw each teaching moment as a chunk of limited time where they had to share everything they knew or thought would be useful on a given topic, and disregarded the most important part of the teaching moment: the actual learning on the part of the student. Had they stopped and considered the two-way nature of teaching, perhaps their classes would have been more useful.
You never want to simplify so far that you’re insulting the student, but you never want to be so complicated that the student can only succeed by having a lot of prior knowledge on the topic.
Inspired by this post on Lifehacker
Posted by Rebecca as Teaching methods at 7:56 AM EDT
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