A few times in my recent history I listened to Douglas Thomas say “learning is natural and effortless everywhere except school.” Each time I hear this I stop in my tracks. It’s a painful notion to acknowledge as truth. I want to believe that during my time in my classroom, I sparked curiosity and passion in my students everyday and guided them to learn, discover, question, test, and question again. Was my classroom missing these moments entirely? No. Have they been happening as often as needed and should be demanded by students? No again.
Thomas and Brown (2011, p. 19) assert that students need and deserve “unlimited access to resources to learn about anything” but they also need a “bound and structured environment that allows for unlimited agency to build and experiment.” A classmate, Alyssa Bergstedt, recently made the analogy to her toddler and holiday decor. The toddler watched with curiosity as ornaments adorned the tree and then the testable questions began whirling. “What if I pull the branch, what if I hit the ornament, what if I stick the lights in my mouth?” The baby gate went up and then the toddler began the quest to test all those what if’s in the presence of the new constraint/obstacle. The clever toddler managed to learn how to move the baby gate and get back to testing within ten minutes. That’s learning in action. We all do it all the time. School is the place where specific subjects and contents are dictated and prescribed. How do we as educators, make learning at school something all students want to do everyday? How can we shift from “what do I have to learn?” to “what do I get to learn?” or even “I’m choosing to learn about X to solve Y right now. Can I use my resources to connect with others so we can learn together?”
A New Culture of Learning focuses on learning. The old, and in many ways, current, culture of learning focuses on teaching. As the world changes around us, learners have to change right along with it. Then, as the learners change, the world changes. Learners are engaged with the world and not only are they responding to it, they are molding it. We can’t simply say to young learners “this is how the world works” and then expect them to be future members of an adult society 40 years from now with frozen in time information. We need to “stop thinking of learning as an isolated process of information absorption and start thinking of it as a cultural and societal process of engaging with the constantly changing world around us” (Thomas and Brown, 2011, p. 47).
Challenge
I look at my career past and think of all the things I’d do differently now and then I wonder, are there countless rooms of other teachers out there also wanting to do things differently? When Dr. Tony Bates discussed building effective learning environments, he pointed out that knowledge is dynamic as are the learners. Just like a plant has to do the growing once it is planted in a garden, a student has to do the learning once they are in the right environment. Maybe there are scores of teachers out there clamoring to change their job title to facilitator instead of teacher. My challenge is to find them. If I can find and encourage teachers to jump into the battlefield (battle to get kids interested vs. battle with administrative expectations) and they have success (students are buzzing about the fun they are having coupled with great learning), the change will become contagious. If the teachers/facilitators can verbalize why they are focusing on imagination and changing their classroom culture with easy to follow reasoning, others will become curious and more willing to engage in conversations about their own learning philosophies. I’ve seen how seizing the right moment and being armed with sound reasons can make a staunch critic at least take pause and listen (see my post about a grades conversation with a mom friend).
I am planning to propose to my district that I be offered the opportunity to help our high school IPET students learn about blended learning. Students in the IPET program have chosen an education pathway, so I am beginning with students who have some interest or passion in pursuing education as a career. The IPET students will need to be free to play with and experiment with different tech tools to use in their field experiences. Our biggest constraint will be the district blocks on some technology resources/settings and programs/sites. Many teachers/facilitators in our district try all kinds of solutions in spite of our limitations. Much like a stubborn toddler or teenager, the mentality becomes...You say I can’t do this...Oh yeah? Watch me figure out a way. I’m confident this is what the IPET students will do too. But, they’ll need the freedom to imagine, play, and experiment before they try to implement some of the resources with their own students.
However, even before the IPET students begin to plan blended activities, they will need to understand why they are being asked to take a big step back and look at learning as a whole. Instead of focussing on a specific topic, look at the vertical alignment. What are students learning before they get to their current grade and what will they learn later? How do all the pieces fit together and how do they fit in with other contents? How can the learning happen in an imaginative environment that allows students to follow their passions? When IPET students begin to look at the bigger picture, they will be able to support their own students’ learning in the structured environment of school with a wide variety of resources and tools. The IPET students can also start to challenge the idea that “easy” as an adjective is “bad.” The process of learning should be easy. The content may be challenging, but the process to work through the challenge should be easy. Students who know how to collaborate with others who are both physically and virtually present, how to access resources, how to design “what if” tests, have the freedom to try, fail and try again, can learn even the most challenging content. Doing a lot of work and spending time to learn doesn’t mean the learning was hard, it means the content was challenging and needed some extra attention.
Impact
Thomas and Brown (2011, p. 74) define explicit knowledge that is the basis of our current model of education as the “content that is easily identified, articulated, transferred and testable.” But, we often know more than we can tell, something referred to as tacit knowledge. As educators begin to embrace tacit knowledge, they also have to acknowledge that “in the digital world, we learn by doing, watching and experiencing” (p. 76). Anyone who has ever tried something knowing exactly what the outcome will be because they were explicitly told, but did it anyway, is engaging in an “experiential process as well as a cognitive one” (p. 77). “Different people, when presented with exactly the same information in exactly the same way, will learn different things” (p. 79). Instead of looking at the differences as the “wrong” answer, let’s follow those differences and see where they take us. Why did we come up with different conclusions? What more do we need to find out? How do we do it? Focus on figuring out what we don’t know yet. As we ask questions that lead to more questions with such regularity, it may become so familiar that we can consider it second nature. Shifting from answering questions to asking them draws on all the experiences of the students in our classrooms and their “stockpile of tacit knowledge that comes” with them (p. 85).
Buy In
One of my favorite stories from A New Culture of Learning was about a National Geographic Society study from 2006 that found that 63% of 18-24 year-old Americans could not find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. When a similar group of students were provided a computer and asked to find Iraq, 100% of them were able to complete the task, but then kept learning. They asked about identifying the whole country vs. identifying regions. They wanted to know what type of map they should look for. Looking for “Iraq on a map” (p. 93) had a variety of meanings. In 2006, it wasn’t that only 63% of those surveyed could find Iraq, it was that the remaining 37% didn’t have the right tools. They were more than capable of learning. This story illustrates the importance of reframing knowledge. “In the new information economy, expertise is less about having a stockpile of information or facts at one’s disposal and increasingly about the knowing how to find and evaluate information on a given topic” (p. 93).
Another eye opener on illustrating the importance of collaboration was the story of the amateur and professional astronomers compiling “a meaningful set of data to interpret an event” (p. 61). In February of 1987 “solitary professionals at their telescopes” (p. 61) shifted to a “worldwide web of professionals and amateurs” (p. 61) as they discovered Supernova 1987A.
In 1999, Pyra Labs created the weblog software that would eventually be known as Blogger. Now anyone, not just professionals, amateurs or hobbyists could connect, but literally anyone about any common interest as long as they had access to a web enabled device. Story after story is recounted in A New Culture of Learning that tells of people who learned “more than facts, figures and data” when “they shared their interests, developed their passions and engaged in a play of imagination” (p. 31). When the collective is employed, all participants are considered as equals, but when someone emerges with expertise on a specific subject, they may take a temporary role as a mentor, helping to guide learning.
My Perspective
Thomas and Brown shared a tale of Chris Avenir, the Ryerson University student, who only 10 years ago, organized a virtual study group on Facebook (p. 69). Avenir recognized value in the collective, engaging with peers, trying to solve lots of different types of problems and learning from each other in a face to face setting, so he expanded that concept and went online. Unfortunately, his university felt he crossed a line and charged him with academic misconduct. At first glance this story was appalling. The face to face study group was scaled up and moved online so now it was a breach of academic integrity? Thankfully, the case was eventually adjudicated.
Allen owns a computer coding business in California but never took a computer programming class (pp. 25-26). How on Earth was he able to do this? He tinkered, tested and made lots of mistakes. He “Googled” the error, joined discussion boards, read blog posts, etc… Did he learn computer programming overnight? Of course not. However, the repeated failures ultimately lead to success. This is the kind of learning I want to see in all learning environments. “At the explicit level, solutions succeed or fail. But at the tacit level, players gain information about the item at hand regardless of success or failure” (p. 115). Learning from failure is still learning. When we allow students to treat problems like a puzzle and use answers to create more and better questions, we are preparing students to solve future problems.
I will admit I have some fears about the nuances of specific digital tools, the overwhelming quantity of resources and the distracting and/or inappropriate content that can be found online. However, there are some books I wouldn’t encourage my children to read right now, but I don’t ban all books from their shelves. There are channels on TV we don’t watch, that doesn’t mean I’ve tossed all our TV’s out the window. In that same vein, I can be open to some digital tools while also helping learners use what is available appropriately. The world is changing rapidly and educators must be equipped to evolve right alongside the world. 70 years after the first color TV signal was sent in 1929, 68% of homes had a color TV. The internet only took 10 years to achieve similar levels of home access. There is no denying the rate of change and educators have to be willing to keep pace.
References
Bergstedt, A. (2018, Nov. 23). Re: New culture of learning: Collaborative discussion [Online forum comment]. Retrieved from https://luonline.blackboard.com/webapps/discussionboard/do/message?action=list_messages&course_id=_137638_1&nav=discussion_board_entry&conf_id=_155045_1&forum_id=_206098_1&message_id=_6683609_1
ChangSchool. (2015, Dec. 14). Dr. Tony Bates on building effective learning environments [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3xD_sLNGurA&feature=youtu.be
TEDx Talks. (2012, Sept, 12). A new culture of learning, Douglas Thomas at TEDxUFM [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lM80GXlyX0U&feature=youtu.be
Thomas, D. and Brown, J. S. (2011). A new culture of learning: Cultivating the imagination for a world of constant change. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace.
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