Happy Saturday everyone! This week we took a look at how learning occurs, more specifically where and the results, although not surprising, were very interesting to engage in. The very first article I read felt like it was looking at me and say “Jeff, this is just for you”.

When reading through the articles, Arc of life of learning; A new culture of learning (Thomas & Seely-Brown)  pp. 17-38, I found myself relating to most of the case studies on a personal level. I help run a scratch club for middle school students to experience programming outside of the school time. During this club, I present projects for students to get involved in and we simulate very similarly to how the scratch website that Sam was a part of. My students design projects and then “team” with other students to share, modify, and experiment with each others code. Although this setting is still in a classroom, I feel it is a little less formal as students are the ones pushing each other, rather than me. I am primarily there to get access to the computers and to guide students. I see this as a way to motivate students to want to take my programming courses at the high school when they jump from the middle school to the high school. Sam’s story of how he learns reminds me a little of how my programming courses are set-up. My students have their own sense of “community” just we are in a formal classroom. Students take full advantage of my room, moving desks, sitting everywhere, in which they team up. Now each of them works towards the same objectives (for now, that will change during the 2nd half of 2nd semester), but often what happens is that one students can figure out the next challenging project and the rest of them in the group will ask for the student to explain some of the logic. A big emphasis I have been trying to teach is to not give the answer, but find ways to point people into the correct logical reasoning. I often wonder how I can extend this course so that students have supports out of the classroom. I have been using google in which students can chat with each other, but perhaps finding a strong open forum type setting might be more appropriate. This will be something that I can think about as I approach the independent study portion of the course.

Although I do teach about game design, I personally believe that my students learn, unlike Douglas Thomas. I find it funny that the person responsible for building that community couldn’t recognize the learning that was occurring. Although this leads to a valuable point that perhaps the best learning should be done without the teacher. Perhaps the best classroom is not a classroom, but a place where the learner can embrace opportunities that they care about. Perhaps during classroom time, we should be using it to motivate the learner to go home and learn more. We should equip them with the skills to be able to learn more, while providing the motivation to have them want to learn more as well. Similar to last week…this sounds amazing, but how can we do this in a public education setting where you must grade on specific content and the achievement of the student? This currently feels like another situation where grades are ruining opportunities for students to truly thrive and learn. It almost feels like there should be a grade tied to achievement, but then an academic responsibility grade that ties into the learner embracing learning, but then again, do we really need to tie learning to a grade? Do we really teach students to learn by dangling that letter grade of a carrot in front of them?

The last part of the article that made me smile was the whole “google the error” type logic. This is something that my students embrace in class at times. I personally prefer if they can read the error and make sense of what it means, but I encourage using your resources and google is a resource. I have noticed that students don’t usually google the same error more than 2 times, because after that they either #1 don’t make the error again or #2 have learned how to fix that specific error. Programming is such a unique topic to teach, because if the program doesn’t run the way you want it to, you know you made a mistake. It is self-regulating, self-checking, and students get sucked into the logical reasoning puzzles that they encounter. A final thought on this article is that they are wrapped around a general idea of coding or software that uses code. These types of settings are very unique from other courses and I wonder how I can work this into a math course or for that matter any other course. Has anyone had an experience with teaching or being in a course where more learning was facilitated by the student rather than the teacher pushing them?

The second article, Connectivism (Siemens), did not really strike anything with me. It felt like it was a lot of things already looked at summarized together. I think I would have gotten more out of the article if diigo was able to be utilized because I think we as a class have a lot to offer and share and during that article it would have been great to read other thoughts rather than thoughts we have discussed for the most part already. In general, the article supports the idea of Connectivism, where students get connected to topics and websites that allow them to get deeply engaged with. At one point the article mentions how the demographics of teaching are changing and how now days we need to have lessons revolve around a student-focused setup. Student-focused doesn’t mean the teacher isn’t involved, but rather the teacher avoids being in the spotlight for to long and instead embraces the idea that students can put things together by putting their heads together and forming connections that way. What struck a chord with me is how there are claims that education has fallen behind the times. In many ways I can see that because (not to be stereotypical, but this is my experience at my school) majority of our veteran teachers believe good teaching exists by strong delivery of content to students and letting them practice it. Part of being a younger teacher in the building means that I get to sit in on veteran teachers’ classes. I have yet to sit in an experience teacher’s class and see a class that doesn’t involve a 20 minute lecture. When it comes to technology, most teachers use computers for word editors or website searches and yet we have so many other options out there that we don’t dare tap into. Perhaps in the coming years some of the more technology, student-focused teachers will provide trainings on how to shape the classroom to fit closer to the times. I do want to put it out there that by no means is there disrespect for a teacher driven-lesson, I do feel there are times that this is still appropriate and I think it is important as well because the students need to see multiple ways of teaching so they can begin to teach themselves how to learn in different ways. Schools need to prepare students to learn from a multitude of ways and need to prepare students for the real world, not everything will revolve around them and they may need to follow directions and ideas that their boss tells them.

To Summarize:

The texts we read this week continue to support the idea that the best learning occurs without the teacher. A teacher merely opens the door to where the students can walk through and dive as deep into as they want in the material. To create a new learning environment you need a community. I feel there is much else except a willingness to learn and share. So the role of the teacher in this is that the teacher needs to provide doors to a community and perhaps at first require collaboration in the hopes that the learners will see how beneficial it is, afterwards the teacher can just let things roll on their own, direct the class to new ideas, and sit back and observe. Through those observations the teacher can then provide more materials to direct students in ways that interest them or challenge their current thoughts.

A lot of the whole idea of how learning is built by a community resonates with me strongly because that is why I try to do in my programming courses. I keep an open environment to allow the students to naturally team and embrace what they are learning. I am struggling with three ideas though.

Thought 1) How do I do this in a geometry course? Programming was so natural to do that I did this type of setup without trying my first year teaching the course. Geometry is still in a formal setting and I would love to branch out. I have always felt my teaching style was less about me and more about them, I keep notes down to about 10 minutes and have most of the class time for students to take what they saw in notes, practice and then see if they can draw the connection of what the notes will be for the next day, that way when I am teaching in front of the room, most students have already figured out what it is we are going to do. Still, I don’t have a community and I definitely don’t have a class of students trying to learn more about geometry at home through an online community.

Thought 2) How can we tie this into a course when we have so clearly learned that tying everything to a grade results in ruining the type of motivation to learn, which then discourages the students to dive deeper into the content? I really don’t have much more than a question for this thought, can anyone provide some ideas? My student mentality is that if it isn’t for a grade then why bother (one of the reasons why homework has become an issue because we don’t grade homework).

Thought 3) Really not a debate, but what about students living in the 20th century trying to learn in a 21st century classroom? How can students take the learning home and embrace a wonderful online community with no computers or devices to stay connected? Yes they have a library or other locations to use them, but what if they don’t have transportation to and from on a regular basis? If I create this huge social media type course, how can you hold students accountable that literally can’t do anything at home? Even if we had a 1:1 initiative (hopefully in the coming year or two), we can’t promise the students will have internet access at home.

    Good teaching reaches to all students…how can we show good teaching if not every student can be involved in the same opportunities?

Note: This is not related to the course but I have grown to value my groups opinion. How do you feel about homework and grading, should it be completion or for accuracy, or don’t do it at all? Has this impacted learning at all? This is something my colleagues are debating about as we talk about the grading policy, I really see a little of each sides, but which one is best for students? Does it change for the subject you teach? What about for students who are economically disadvantaged and spend their days kid sitting and don’t have time for homework? Any insights anyone can provide would be appreciate, I am a little tired of hearing the same things over and over again from the same people.