From the get go, Will Richardson grabs readers by the face in the first sentence of the book, “here’s the thesis of the book in tweet-ready form: The world has changed. Knowledge is everywhere. Teachers must become master learners instead of master knowers” (5). I think this is a very good description of the shift in education (and tweet-ready form?! Oh Richardson…). Teachers are no longer the vessel for information, they are the facilitator. I don’t believe I became aware of my learning until college. Considering I began schooling at 4 (Preschool counts right?) and entered college at 17, there was a lot of absent minded learning happening. I have toured some “progressive” schools in the area and my first thought is always, Can I redo elementary school and attend a school like this?
Richardson addresses 5 antiquated assumptions about education and refutes all of them with either research or pure logic. The one assumption I would like to reflect on is the third, “An education needs to be organized, standardized, and controlled by an institution.” Richardson boldly claims that schools began putting students into separate subjects, content specific classes, and standardized assessments because it was easy to monitor, not because it was in students’ best interest. I see the standards getting a lot of flack from both non-educators and educators alike. Now there is no denying the phrase “Common Core” has a negative stigma attached to it. The mere utterance of it will elicit a variety of responses. I think teachers view the standards as these constraining shackles that suck the wind from your sails. I prefer to look at them like clouds. Students will soar in different directions because not everyone flies with the same wings. Some are faster, some are slower, some are too scared to take flight. As teachers, you guide the students through each cloud, but they are not enclosures. You can fly through a cloud to get where you’re going. There may be obstacles. Some clouds look scarier than others and you may have to adapt to pass through. It is all about your planning. Make the standards work for you, don’t work for the standards. One question popped up while I was reading the first third of the book and I would love to hear different perspectives on it. Why are only public schools under scrutiny? I agree with Richardson when he states education needs to be fluid to keep up with technological advances but why just primary and secondary education? Colleges still have classes where professors stand in front of a gallery of 200 students and lecture for 2 hours. They have majors that are subject specific and according to Richardson, “In a recent Gallup poll, only 11 percent of business leaders strongly agreed that graduates have the necessary skills and competencies to succeed in the workplace” (8). If high schools are evolving to meet the changing job market, wouldn’t 4 years spent in an equally antiquated educational model spurn the progress being made?
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Chapter Seven:
QUOTE: "Play provides the opportunity to leap, experiment, fail, and continue to play with different outcomes—in other words to riddle one’s way through a mystery. That leap is more than simply a means to cross the chasm between what you know and what you want to achieve" (Kindle Loc 1385). Play took over this chapter. I like the idea that play takes away the negative connotation so unrightfully attached to learning. It begins to be a chore for students. QUESTION: What if we replaced the word 'learn' with 'play?' CONNECTION: This chapter made me think of my little sister and her Minecraft obsession. She is in 5th grade and plays that game non stop. In this game, she is using all three dimensions of learning: knowing, making, and playing. She is playing a game, watching YouTube tutorials, and talking to her best friend Mason while they battle it out together. She learns from her mistakes but the greatest part of it is that she is not scared of failure. It is so cool to watch her...just not for too long, otherwise I'm pulled into a long conversation about Ender-things and I can feel my eyes glazing over now! EPIPHANY: This chapter made me think of scientists. They are the first profession I think of that "plays." They find an idea, seek out answers, and tinker with the process. I do not think this process is unique to science, however. In writing, we play and tinker all the time. I can honestly say that the 5 paragraph essay format needs tinkering. Students should feel free to "play" with their writing. If the main goal of their writing is to get a certain message across, then by all means, play away! I want my students to find the best way to get their message across. Chapter Eight: QUOTE: "The richness of experience and social agency produced by hanging out and the sense of embodiment and personal agency created by messing around, combined with the sense of making, produces what we think is the ultimate goal of indwelling: learning" (Kindle Loc 1469). This book is titled, A New Culture of Learning, so it seems appropriate that all these stages come together to form the ultimate goal: learning! QUESTION: How can I utilize these stages in my classroom? CONNECTION: This chapter talked about the new form of agency developed during "Messing Around." This website serves as my way of messing around. I have plans for this website. I want it to immortalize all my favorite parts about teaching and literature! I have not published all my 'messes' but stay tuned! EPIPHANY: I think I finally get why we are reading this book. I agreed with all the points brought up in the beginning of this book but I was waiting for this to get to a solution. These are what our badges are called! I know get it! At first, we were "hanging out"--Just getting our feet wet in the whole digital world. As we move forward this semester, I am excited to see it all culminate in the "geeking out" badge. Chapter Nine: QUOTE: "Only when we care about experimentation, play, and questions more than efficiency, outcomes, and answers do we have a space that is truly open to the imagination. And where imaginations play, learning happens" (Kindle Loc 1688). Yes, I know this is these are the last sentences of the book but they encapsulate what this whole book is getting at. More play, more imagination, more learning. We as budding educators need to use the boundless resources around us and inspire our students. I feel like I just walked out of a inspirational seminar and now I'm pumped! QUESTION: Are multi player games able to be integrated into my future classroom? CONNECTION: “Imagine an environment where evaluation is based on after-action reviews not to determine rewards but to continually enhance performance” (Kindle Loc 1495). This is my dream classroom! I always feel so bad grading papers because I have to put a number on all their hard work when all I really want to do is see them improve. I know that I am operating under the constraints of my teaching set up right now, but my future classroom (fingers crossed) will be less "reward" based and more focused on enhancing my students' abilities. EPIPHANY: Confession time...I totally made fun of my cousins for playing World of Warcraft. Who know it was so intricate? I'm pretty sure I saw a movie trailer for this game too. I guess I owe them an apology. Chapter Four: QUOTE: "People learn through their interaction and participation with one another in fluid relationships that are the result of shared interests and opportunity" (Kindle Loc 579). These relationships are later referred to as "collectives" which are fluid groups of people with similar interest who build knowledge through their interactions. QUESTION: Near the end of the chapter the book warns against formulating learning objectives for the collectives, "Any effort to define or direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative about them" (Kindle Loc 645). If that is true, then how can teachers utilize or even use collectives? CONNECTION: The connection to collectives and blogging made a lot of sense to me. I personally follow a few blogs and learn a great deal from them. It is not just reading someone's personal thoughts about various topics, but a community that builds meaning through interaction. Take a look at the Tone It Up community. This is a collective of women who interact virtually to lead a healthy and happy life. EPIPHANY: This chapter talked about the change in how we "disseminate information." In order for us to build knowledge we have to interact with it. People might not understand why someone uses Twitter, but you don't really get it until you actually do it. Not only to you build understand but you add your own thumbprint to the entire collective. Chapter Five: QUOTE: "There is no public influencing of private minds. Yet learning happens all the time. And because there is no targeted goal or learning objective, the site can be used and shaped in ways that meet the needs of the collective... Identity and agency within the space are both fluid, but they are defined by how the personal meshes with the collective" (Kindle Loc 706). It all comes back to this idea of a collective. Our understanding of the world around us is changing. The way we learn is ever-changing. I guess having the right collective for what you need is very important. QUESTION: Are learning objectives harming learning? CONNECTION: I had a connection to the section about group projects. I hated them in school. There was always one person who ditched their duties and the rest of the group had to make up their work for the sake of the project. There is no real way for teachers to grade that sort of experience because they are not some omniscient educator. Since grades are individual, there was no way to grade the group effort. EPIPHANY: One thing that caught me off guard was the section about private versus public. The book says, "perhaps the fact that the boundary between the two is becoming so permeable indicates a need for a new way to think about the differences between them" (Kindle Loc 661). I constantly struggle with the public nature of social media. Is my life still meaningful if I share everything out in the "public?" Are there things I need to keep "private?" Just like the change in learning, there is a change of public and private. Honestly, it now depends on the collective. Chapter Six: QUOTE: “Students learn best when they are able to follow their passion and operate within the constraints of a bounded environment” (Kindle Loc 1042). I think what this chapter is trying to say is that learning has moved on from the static knowledge of the past and on to the inquiry based education of the future. Not to say that inquiry based learning is new. It actually has been saved for college and even post college. Why not earlier? School should be fostering imagination not regurgitating facts. QUESTION: Do state standards suppress this idea of inquiry based learning? CONNECTION: One connection I made with Ch. 6 came during the example of appealing to student interest. Using basketball to frame a physics problem does not get basketball players to buy into physics. The right question, however, will. “What if, for example, questions were more important than answers? What if the key to learning were not the application of techniques but their invention? What if students were asking questions about things that really mattered to them? (Kindle Loc 1089). This reminded me of a TED talk by Dan Meyers (check it out here!) he thought Math needed to fix the way they ask questions. EPIPHANY: I could never really comprehend why I liked Socratic Seminars so much in English classes until I read this chapter. I'm not sure why exactly it clicked but I now can actually put into words why I think these collaborative discussions are better than a multiple choice quiz. In my opinion, I would rather spend more time getting to the life lessons in novels rather than make sure my students know specific plot points. I feel like asking big questions and having students relate the novel to their lives make the books more impactful. Check out some of my favorite blogs/collectives:
CONNECTION: During Sam's Story, Sam mentioned how the interest was in the comments from the forum rather than the game itself. "His friends are most interested in 'what my comments were and who commented on me'" (Kindle Loc 127). This instantly made me think of Instagram (and other social networking platforms), There is this strong desire to get as many "likes" on your pictures or "retweets," etc. I know people who have deleted their posts because they did not get enough likes within 15 minutes of posting (crazy right?). EPIPHANY: Douglas Thomas section about teaching "Massively Multiplayer Online Games and the University of Southern California" was very eye opening. The fact that he wrote his class off as a failure just because the students only wanted to talk about the game seemed like something most teachers can relate to. Plot twist! They all read the heavy theoretical reading and could apply it to their work! Every teacher's dream! I appreciate Thomas ability to reconsider the "proof" that his experiment worked. Flexibility is so crucial in teaching.
The widespread availability of technology has fundamentally changed the way we learn about the world. We no longer need to solely learn about the world around us, but rather engage with it.
QUESTION: The text suggests that the new culture of learning has us embrace the uncomfortability with not knowing something. How could I create lessons that embodied this change? CONNECTION: I connected with the dismissal of standardization. I have a really hard time accepting that our students' knowledge should be assessed on the same scale. My credential program preaches equity so I feel like standardization is the dragon we must slay to really achieve equity in our schools. EPIPHANY: This chapter was short and sweet so I felt like I didn't have a true "epiphany" but you could say it made me "hmmm...." The chapter talks about switching our sense of culture. The authors would rather move toward a culture you would encounter in a science experiment that is able to grow and flourish on its own. It is an interesting idea to ponder (hmmmm....). Chapter Three: QUOTE: "the belief that most of what we know will remain relatively unchanged for a long enough period of time to be worth the effort of transferring it" (Kindle Loc 406). The "belief" refers to this idea that what we are teaching was once valuable but is no longer viable. There are less and less "unchanging" lessons that we need to teach. QUESTION: How can I incorporate play into my English classroom? CONNECTION: One of this chapter's examples came from one of my FAVORITE childhood books....Harry Potter! I could completely relate to the engagement of the story. I actually grew up with the characters. I was relatively the same age as Harry and the gang when the books came out. As I was changing, so were my favorite characters. I think it would be really cool to teach a series in a classroom. I do not think I have been in any English class that read more than one book in a series. I think that would be something really cool. EPIPHANY: Like the last chapter, I did not have a true epiphany. However, the comparison of Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica really surprised me. I grew up being told Wikipedia was not reliable. I usually ignored my teachers and still used it as a starting point. I like the idea of a collaborative encyclopedia. I think it would be cool to create a "class-pedia" where my students added helpful information about the different books we read (everything cited of course). Stay tuned for the next installment! Thomas, D., & 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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