Week 5: What is the relationship between teaching and learning?Dr. Fredenberg mentioned something in his debrief on this week’s question that really struck a chord. He said, “Research can seem remote and emerging pedagogies can seem extremely far fetched until we try them and see them work.” I often find myself learning an incredible amount about myself, my teaching style, and strengths/weaknesses while I am trying to create learning opportunities. When I reflect on the lesson I often ask myself, who learned more in this lesson my students or me? One relationship between teaching and learning is that we, as educators, are not removed from learning. It is an equal playing ground where the learning is shared between teacher and students. Realizing our role in this inclusive learning environment separates the good teachers from the great.
My teaching philosophy relies heavily on being a guide rather than a teacher. I want my role in the classroom to be a shared responsibility. I am not the only teacher. I am a learner too. I support, encourage, and guide my students towards their learning potential. In our reading, Invent to Learn it says, “Piaget suggests that it is not the role of the teacher to correct the child from the outside, but to create conditions in which the student corrects himself (Martinez, 2013).” This is taking the idea of teaching and transforming it into self-efficacy. The ability to take outside situations and problems, strive through the struggle, and accomplish goals by oneself. The book goes on to say, “Self-reliance results when we relinquish our control and power to our students.” I love this idea and appreciated even more that the book specifies that this does not mean lose control of your role as an educator and let students roam freely. Help when the help is needed, but let students tinker, create, fail, and produce at their pace. My insecurities as a teacher related to this is that I struggle to create a classroom that produces this type of environment. The book suggests these ideas: Be an ethnographer, a documentarian, a studio manager, or a wise leader (Martinez, 2013.). Yet, it is taking the risk to try one of the above that makes this environment happen, but is equally intimidating. The aforementioned relationship between teaching and learning are qualities that make me the type of educator that I am. However, when I really look to summarize the relationship between teaching and learning the words that come to mind is emotional and social support. Positive and healthy relationships are the bridge between teaching and learning. Without it, there is little trust or room to grow and learn. This is further explained in, How to Transcend Traditional Boundaries of Teachers’ Identities. It talks about ethos in our country and how this transcends into individualistic teaching. The values we hold as educators today vs. traditional times has highlighted the importance of research and learning during classroom time (Diniz-Pereira, 2003). Our identity does not control the learning that occurs among our students. It is our students dispositions and our identity that allows us to adapt to our students needs (Hyu-Yong, 2008). Our students identity control the environment and their needs. A teacher’s identity is the ability to create a stable environment that takes the struggle and turns it into learning. To me, this is the relationship between teaching and the potential to learn. Diniz-Periera, Emilio. 2003. How to Transcend Traditional Boundaries of Teachers’ Identities. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED471561.pdf. Hyu-Yong, Park, 2008. “You are confusing!”: Tensions between Teacher’s and Students’ Discourses in the Classroom. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ829005.pdf Martinez, S. & Stager, G. (2013). Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, And Engineering In The Classroom. Torrance, CA: Constructing Modern Knowledge Press. Kindle Edition.
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Week 4The popularity around Maker Space has been growing ever rapidly. This past year I was able to experience a Maker Space session and the conversation didn't stop there. Article, blogs, conversation among coworkers were centered around this movement. However, never once did I ever ask myself, what actually is the importance of Maker Space? It sounded so great from the start that I didn’t take the time to analyze it for myself.
It didn’t take long for my opinion to become validated after reading various articles this week. As put by the article, What’s the Maker Movement and Why Should I Care? She says, “her experiences constantly remind her that children are capable of powerful ideas. One student said the time spent in Maker Space helps us understand what we are capable of (Stager, 2014).” The education in 2017 focuses on how can we get our students to take ownership and accountability of their own education? Maker Space promotes this philosophy with every project or idea (Stager, 2014). With all the microcontrollers and Maker’s Space technology around, I can’t help but feel a little intimidated. I am realizing that if I feel like this then my students will be feeling the same way too. This inspires me to familiarize myself as much as possible so that I can teach my students with confidence. The article, Learning with Arduino and Microcontrollers, only tapped into this a little bit. It helped me see the potential of these technologies such as, “flying through the air in drones, rolling around the floor in giant R2-D2's, even powering a four foot tall LED grid (Patterson, 2016)” Yet, the question still remains-- how can I do this in my classroom? My research continued to reading more about implementing these technologies in the classroom. First and foremost, the environment plays the key role in whether Maker’s Space is a success or not. As quoted by an Edutopia article, “They'll (students) thrive in spaces that perpetually rekindle their desire to make meaningful contributions toward personally relevant issues, ideas, people and interests (West-Pucket, 2013).” Teachers should foster the environment they want their students to emulate. The next important point I found was to make it solely interests-based. Just like any curriculum we put on our students, if they find little interest in the topic, they won’t internalize it. Keeping Maker’s Space choice driven and geared towards what they are interested in will make the learning meaningful. Circling back to the main question, what are the benefits of this pedagogy? Relevance, desire, intrinsic motivation, are all acquired during a Maker’s Space for many students. The benefits, as many educators would see, are that students finally come to school gaining knowledge through their own discovery and creations. Patterson, S. 2016. Learning with Arduino and Microcontrollers. Retrieved from http://www.teachercast.net/2016/03/01/learning-with-arduino-and-microcontrollers/ Stager, G. 2014. What’s the Maker Movement and Why Should I Care? Retrieved from http://www.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3758336 West-Puckett, S. 2013. Remaking Education: Designing Classroom Makerspaces for Transformative Learning. Retrieved from https://www.edutopia.org/blog/classroom-makerspaces-transformative-learning-stephanie-west-puckett Week 3 Reflection Reading other people’s views and ideas on this subject validated a lot of my original thoughts. Sarah talked about her struggles in education and how she sees this in her students. She knows that letting students tinker and be creative allows us, as teachers, to see their thinking and their struggles.
This also led into her, others, and myself talking about the part in the reading that pinpoints science and it’s lack of creativity. The rigid structure of science derails many students from being true scientists. I know in my own education, science felt so “there is only one way,” that I struggled immensely with it. I was scared to fail and not understand, which really affected my ability to just learn. Today, I see science as an exploration and investigation into the unknown-- why would we put barriers and structure on this? Douglas also had great ideas and I enjoyed reading about how he interprets struggle. He related it to education in Japan and their ability to struggle in front of their peers without fear of humiliation. I commented how I created this atmosphere among my 2nd graders this past year and the success I saw from it. I am hoping this inspires others that it is possible to create this climate even if the students have never grown up with it. It is truly about your classroom’s atmosphere and the expectations you make explicit. Week 3: To what extent should we allow students to figure things out for themselves? Before I dig into research articles and blogs answering this question, I look to myself. I am a 23 year old teacher who is pursuing her Master’s-- a lifelong learner some would say. Somewhere, somehow, along the way a teacher or two gave me the tools (or told me?) to learn. My education was rote and traditional. I remember a lot of teacher instruction and some self-taught/discovery based learning. Both have evidently helped me become the successful learner that I am today. I struggled immensely in school and I know that I would have failed miserably had I experienced teachers who made ME figure out every single problem. Instead, I had guidance, and sometimes more direct instruction. I think the key to my experience was that I had teachers who, “met me where I was and brought me to where I needed to be (Strauss, 2015).” Balance is important and discerning is even better. The extent to which we let students struggle should be a case by case measurement. Assuming all students have grit-- perseverance and self-control-- and can flourish when struggling is a huge misconception. The article, “What is the value of letting students struggle?” talks about how socioeconomic, ethnic, and racial barriers make the idea of struggling in school an absolute losing battle. Instead, we need to find a balance of guidance and self-discovery dependent on each individual student. There is no formula. I see in my students and in myself that the greatest learning happens when we are able to overcome an underlying belief that we do not know the answer. However, this happens with balance. As teachers, it is our job to, “find the right level of struggle or challenge— a level that is both constructive and instructive (Seeley, 2009).” As adults, there is no written manual for learning, developing, creating, or exploring. We practice and fail in order to learn and succeed. Yet, in some schools we pretend to teach children that science isn’t about exploring and designing must follow a rigid step-by-step process (invent to learn). The chapter we read this week had some thoughtful points that made me reevaluate how much I let my students design with confidence and little structure. I definitely stray on the the more “rigid” side, but see the beneficial aspects of letting them design-- think, make, and improve. Seeley, C. 2009. Constructive Struggling. Retrieved from http://www.mathsolutions.com/documents/9781935099031_message17.pdf Strauss, V. 2015. What is the value of letting students struggle in class? Teachers answer. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/04/21/what-is-the-value-of-letting-students-struggle-in-class-teachers-answer/?utm_term=.f5056355d6fd Growth Mindset: “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset (Popova).”
Tinkering: “The passion for stretching yourself and sticking to it, even (or especially) when it’s not going well, is the hallmark of the growth mindset (invent to learn).” Hard Play These three concepts share a common idea that we are capable of learning through relevant and meaningful approaches. When we play, make, experiment, fail, and try again, our learning becomes more purposeful. In the text, Invent to Learn, they quote another study that shows, “people who make things value their creations, even flawed creations, more than the same things created perfectly by experts (--).” These three concepts also contrast the idea that teachers should follow and deliver a textbook guided, one-size fits all, curriculum. Invent to learn summarized this idea by noting that this method benefits the teachers and administration rather than the individual student. Embracing play- tinkering and hard play- to promote a growth mindset creates learners and explorers. “The message is clear in many classrooms that there is only one way to approach learning. It’s taken on face value that learning is analytical, math is logical, art is creative, and so on. Contemplation is time wasted and there is only one way to solve a problem (invent to learn).” The importance of these three goes beyond just a new educational mindset. It is a societal shift in what success looks like, how to work hard, knowing how to push your limits, and embracing the can’t and failures. When we put this on our students, we begin to see the teachers teaching less, and the students learning more (Shwarts, 2013). Shwarts, K. 2013. Why Kids Need to Tinker to Learn. Retrieved from https://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/07/11/gary-stager-tinkering-project-based-learning-sylvias-mini-maker-show/ If I am understanding this question correctly, this week we are looking at if the constructionism philosophy improves the theory of education or not?
In my personal experience, constructionism as a philosophy of education opens many doors for learners. When an educator embraces constructivism, “The learner constructs knowledge inside their head based on experience.” If that definition holds true in the classroom, then there should always be new ideas introduced. In the text, Invent to Learn he states that, “Piaget reminds teachers not to present students with pre-organized vocabulary/concepts, but rather provide students with a learning environment grounded in action.” As educators we can change and shift the curriculum to meet the needs of each individual student yet, “each student still constructs his or her own unique meaning through his or her own cognitive processes. In other words, as educators we have great control over what we teach, but far less control over what students learn (Brooks, 1999).” The end of the chapter summarizes the idea of constructionism today perfectly. Present day allows us to fully embrace constructionism fully unlike the philosophers Piaget or Montessori. Their great idea to promote creation and building weren’t always doable with the lack of technology. Today, we are capable of teaching math, science, and the arts with quality technological tools. We should be changing our education system to meet these new tools with all the potential they contain. Brooks, M. and Brooks J.G. 1999. The Courage to be Constructivist. Retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/nov99/vol57/num03/The-Courage-to-Be-Constructivist.aspx |