Ideas

I shared one of these ideas with Kelly today and she reminded me that I don't have any time. Remembering that Joshua is less than one year old, it is possible that I will have time later. So here are the ideas- a curriculum thing with Derek. I should get together all the advice he has offered me and put a post here. The green house thing, hydrogen, methane and microturbines - can get Shane and Paul into this one. The online art project for traveling art - with Kelly and Damian Cumner? I will get time one day.

The Start of a New Beginning

Isn't it funny that at 42 years of age I would have so many new beginnings. Next week will the start of my practum that will lead (I hope) to a new career. This is the place I intend to post my development into a teacher.
Of the many things I have learned while putting what I have learned into practice is the art of letting go. The most important part of letting go is to make sure that the learning environment has been well established first, then letting go is easy. If you have been too busy to set the right environment, then letting go is hard. This reminds me of an article by Perkins (Perkins, D., & Blythe, T. (1994). Putting understanding up front. Educational Leadership, 51(5), 4-7.) about teaching for understanding. Will have to try and remember that for the next four weeks.
This idea specifically relates to two days of teaching this week. On Wednesday I did not plan too much for the lessons, I was going to explain the exercises in the book, and then have the students do the exercises. This didn't work so well and there was rebellion in the ranks, understandably so. On Friday, another hands on experience was planned and this worked quite well, but maybe not as I had hoped. But the students did learn something about what I was asking them to investigate and they were able to experiment a bit. Opneing their minds will take some time. However, I did not dicate the flow of the lesson too much and the students were able to learn something.
A good day for letting go.

Hands On Activities for Young Learners

For most of the time, I teach English to students who do not speak English as a first language. Often these students are young children. There seems to be a lot of pressure in Taiwan for students to learn. So the curriculum is structured so that students are expected to learn a great deal of language fairly uncontextually.
This orientation is significantly different to the western approach to teaching, for language and all other subjects. A hands on approach or an inquiry based approach is prefered for young learners. I am advocating a similar approach for Taiwanese students, especially younger students. Obvioulsy the way this occurs would depend upon the context, and I will use two recent examples (or non-examples) to illustrate this point.
The first comes from a kindergarten class I teach 8 hours a week (2 hours X 4 days) teaching children about 4-5 years old. They can understand a lot of spoken English, but they are much more engaged in hands on activities. A good example happened last week while we were cutting leaves our of paper to make a fishing game. Not only were students learning a lot of English by watching the process and following that process, but also I could check their understanding of what was required by looking at their actions. They could also learn more, or check their understanding, by watching what their classmates were doing. One student who has not previously demonstrated a high level of understanding of English, astounded me when she cut out a shape and showed it to me. I said, "That's very good, but it doesn't look like a leaf." She said, "It's a rectangle." BTW, I would not have made such a comment except that I learned by doing my course in teaching art that one must really look at children's efforts and comment upon what one sees.
The second example comes from a class of second year English learners who have a low level of English proficiency. This week was I taught another science lesson, quite eager to advance what we have been doing after two great hands on lessons. They had really engaged in the topic with these activities. This week's attempt was to do more abstract stuff, looking at videos, pictures and books about typhoons (the subject of our lesson) and try to generate some talk about the topic. This did not work so well and I will have to go back to a more hands on approach to teach science.
These two examples reiterate to me what I have already known, practical, contextual learning works best for elementary learners.

Darwin and 4 year old twins

I have been watching a 1978 mini-series called "The Voyage of Charles Darwin" which has been really interesting. I have always been interested in biographies, but this is especially interesting because it goes through the process of making a scientific discovery. It relates directly to my studies and guiding students through the questioning and enquiry stages that lead to scientific understanding. It is interesting that Darwin was supposed to enter the clergy after his voyage on the Beagle. It is also interesting that he should have made observations regarding the formation of mountains, as my understanding is that continental drift theory was established in the 60's. It reminded me about the context of his discovery and the state of science in the mid 1800's. If science can progress that far from then till now, there must be still so much we do not know. It makes me what to be a scientist.

Another thing I have found interesting is my work with a set of four-year-old twins, a boy and a girl. They both like to draw, so I have incorporated drawing into our lessons. I do not dictate the subject of their drawings, and they always seem to draw similar things. The boy likes to draw houses and airplanes and rockets. The girl draws suns, many of them, although she is sometimes influenced by her brother and will draw something concrete, along the lines of whatever he is drawing. The thing that strikes me most is that she always draws her suns with many colors. I know that the light of the sun is made of many colors, but I cannot see that. How does she know? Maybe she doesn't "know", but it is strange.

I must be insane

Here I am, four days away from having to hand in the last assignment of my masters course, with the assignment hopeless unfinished, and I’m writing here. WTF. However, what I am learning is stimulating thinking that needs to go down before I can write the other stuff, and Kelly is watching TV.

The following train of thought has been realigned so it can be comprehensible. Let’s skip back a few years to the dawn of life. On the horizon of my thinking for the past couple of weeks has been this thought regarding chaos moving towards self organizing complexity. Or, why do beings move from simplicity to complexity. I’m guessing it has to do with a concept from economy, the competition for finite resources. More complex beings are able to acquire resources to the detriment of simple beings. I’m no evolutionary biologist, so I will not make a detailed list of life’s achievements, but I am thinking that life grew in complexity and at one time reached the age of the dinosaurs, large and well adapted creatures with small brains. However when conditions changed, they could not, which brings the development of intelligence into the evolutionary fray. As Tomasello (1999) notes, homo sapiens develop an adaptation that allows them to bypass the biological transmission of learning to a cultural transmission through language, which speeds up evolution to the extent that it can now be measure in historical time, rather than evolutionary time. A necessary part of this equation is that humans have a desire to derive meaning, to seek understanding, to solve problems. It is this urge that drives the language acquisition process, when adult or peers, try to communicate with babies, they attempt to understand, and in the process acquire language. It can account for other aspects of life. I will now show how this relates to education.

I have been studying a bit of instructional design theory and most theorist agree that learning is enhanced when students are given problems and the teacher assists them in working through the problems to the solution which is the goal of the learning environment that the teacher has envisaged. This requires an epistemological change in the conventional view of education as the transmission of knowledge, to one where students construct knowledge. This process is also evident in story telling, where the protagonist is given some problem and must solve the problem. It can also be seen in many of the arts. I wonder how it relates to spirituality, where one tries to see how each of life’s circumstances is an opportunity to learn. Is religion then a way to focus our attention to what needs to be learned, or does it support that leaning, or negate it?

So for the assignment, maybe I can change the focus of the learning activity. Instead of reading one book, and trying to study that in depth (although, that could be the focus of later excursions into literacy, for bigger literacy events) students could be reading smaller real-life literacy events, extracting the information from that to solve some problem. This could be done (for the beginning levels) for two reasons, one, that the students should be involved in real-life problem solving, two, because emergent literacy should be about the diversity of literacy events that they see around them, and that is how they can use “real” transformed literacy to develop literacy skills, that they can then transfere to the classical, canonical texts that constitute the back to basic approach. Third, the approach to use classical literacy events should combine text and images, however, this may increase cognitive load too much.

So in the end it did help with the assignment, though it is more massed than a paper napkin that fell into the moshpit of a Ramones concert. Will need to fix it for the assignment, and maybe here one day.

Tomasello, M. (1999). The cultural origins of human cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Just Sharpening My Pencil

Having a few too many thoughts to have them in my head, especially with one assignment to go.

I have read just a little bit by Tomasello and need to do some more. I wonder were ICT will lead us. If, as Tomasello says, the speed of human evolution is now measured in historical time, rather than evolutionary time because we have developed speech which allows us to communicate and we use this to communicate cultural knowledge which speeds up evolution. Then with the advent of ICT we have learned how to communicate many different ideas from many different people quickly and we can learn many things quickly. Is there any fear that we will evolove in a particular way (to do with knowledge, creativity) but not in other ways (don't know what that would be, I'm thinking physically, morally, practically) and the problems that might cause?

I'm also trying to work out where sprituality come into this? I've just been writing about how our urge to understand the communication intentions of others drives us to acquire language, assuming, as I do, that we are not built with Chomsky's Universal Grammar. We are obviously built with an urge to listen and understand and then to talk. In short, for our species to evolve we must learn, which is something most other animals do not do. I when I move to (in ever decreasing frequency) spiritual thought, I always think about what it is I need to learn by being in this situation. Something to go on with there.

Also, I was doing work regarding developing an online game to improve language acquisition and I was writing about how learners can choose different preferences, then I remember reading 'somewhere' that learners engage with the program more if they are part of the program, then as one of the preferences I noted avatar. Then it hit me like a freight train. I was trying to develop something like a book on a screen, which is how I learn literacy. But it doesn't need to be like that. So I remember reading 'somewhere' about education in one of those life simulation games (can't remember the name of it, SecondLife, maybe) then I think about I topic I found for my kids MMORPG and so I did some quick research (and I hope none of my lectures/professors read this), which in times of stress means 'Google Scholar' and found this article, "From Digital Game-Based Learning (McGraw-Hill, 2001) by Marc Prensky Chapter 1 The Digital Game-Based Learning Revolution" (I got the PDF online, I'm sure you can too) and I saw I could make an online game like the MMORPG and develop something along the lines of Prensky's first case study. I thought about havomg the learners be agents who are given some background info first and then must read the book, that has the clues, to solve the problem. Then I thought about a few more senerios, a cat burgalar, thuggy type theives, and then another one of those things hit me. I could try to get the big image makers, I don't know their names, but I'm thinking transformers, Ironman, Disney stuff maybe, and seeing if they would like to move into the gaming education thing. They probably already do, but a well designed (pedagogically I mean) game would earn in credence with mums and dads, and if they are letting their kids play educational games, then it's great exposure/branding for their product. A was just reading Carla C. E. Fisher's post and I guess the field of fiction would be cool. That relates to my last assignment too, but way more enhanced than I suggested.

I'm my teaching in Taiwan, I have always found games useful in teaching, because if you want kids to do the most mind-numbingly boring things, as dedicated by boring textbooks, in classes they take after school, they are going to hate it. But if you ask them to do the same things so that they can play a game (as simple as throwing the dice), they love it, they practice a skill, and if they don't know what to do, the other kids in their team try to help, and they try to learn, because they don't want the other kids giving them a hard time because they cannot play the game.

Improving education - one lesson at a time - Mini Sagas

I am teaching high school students writing. I try to facilitate learning rather than prescribe activities, but it has some difficulties. I think the problems persist for many reasons and I do not judge them for treating my classes as an interlude. However, I think I would be doing them an injustice by not exerting a little pressure. We do a lot of collaborative writing and there are three girls who work well together. One girl is not very good at English, but she is writing very good stories. Tonight, the story they wrote together needed some work. When I gave it back, they tore it up. I wasn't angry, but I said I was disappointed because I thought they wanted to improve. I hope that making the class less bound by rules and tasks that need to be complete, I can help open up the class and the students imagination and allow them to develop some intrinsic motivation to improve. I must show that I am interested, but I cannot let them 'get away' with less than an improvement in their work.