Student Engagement |
| What gets students engaged in a topic? It is a constant question that many educational consultants get from teachers. The answer is both simple and complex at the same time! In some ways it is two questions - "how do I get the students interested and engaged in what we are covering" and "how do I keep them engaged" According to neuroscience what causes engagement is novelty. Something out of the ordinary. Something .. novel that the brain hasn't seen before or rarely experiences. Novelty electrifies attention. Why? Our brains are designed to constantly constantly scan for danger because its prime mission is to keep the body healthy and safe. The limbic system within the brain is the oldest part of the brain and it controls memory, emotions, smell and hunger. It also controls the flight or fight function of the brain. You can consider the limbic system is the foundation of our operating system. So if you can create something that grabs the attention of the brain it will engage your students. Emotion is also a key factor in engagement and learning. If you can connect through to what matters for students and they can connect to the rest of their knowledge (in their day to day life). If you are not concretely connecting to what the students know or are too abstract then this is where students become disengaged. This is where domains such as mathematics really struggles. One of the strengths I created for myself when teaching engineering at university was to ensure that the students realised that all the mathematics had a practical and real world application and derivation mostly in their day to day life. Interestingly enough ... what embeds knowledge is rituals. The ritualising of actions, or repetition, will create the deeper neural connections. Sports organisations are brilliant at this. In Australia the Auskick program (associated with the Australian Football League and funded by the National Australia Bank) does a remarkable job of engaging kids and doing the rote drills (rituals) to embed the learning. You can see how successful it is by the skills development of the game at both junior and senior levels. Senior AFL players are much like Formula One drivers in their ability to react and interpret the game. We can ritualise activities and templates and role modelling as teachers. Use graphic organisers in your classes consistently and ritually. Model the behaviour you want to achieve. If we do the thinking about how we are going to develop skills in our students then there will be a range of approaches you can use. Key to all of this is to ensure that students are connected to the context of the learning. If it is something that is not connected to what matters for them then their brains will automatically tune out. My question to you as a reader of my blog is ... how are you creating novelty and rituals in the class? I coach teachers on how they can do this in my Practical Inquiry Based Learning Workshops (http://www.intuyuconsulting.com.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3&Itemid=9). As a final piece to this blog, Charles Leadbeater, quite a world reknown speaker about creativity and innovation, presented the following talk at a TED conference earlier this year from research that he did into Innovation in Education around the world. He not only found that enormous innovation is occuring in the slums around the world but many of the principles that we talk about around Inquiry Based Learning (espeically about engagement). Enjoy the presentation! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X-8TA4RBog |
| July 19th, 2010 @ 10:23PM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
Safety, Connection, Learning and Inquiry |
| I just returned from running workshops in Queensland, Australia and the group of teachers and I had a fantastic discussion around safety, connection and learning. Let me tune you in to how we got into it by reproducing a bit of the morning of the Advanced Inquiry Workshop. Our brain is designed to to ensure the safety and survival of our bodies. So it is always scanning to ensure that the body is safe. Given that survival and safety is paramount for the brain … the learning environment must be safe. But .. are our learning enviroments safe for the brain? Fear is the foremost inhibitor to learning and growth. The brain, however, cannot distinguish between fear of failure /getting things wrong / making a mistake in a peer environment vs fear of dying or suffering injury. Research has shown that the physiologically they produce the same body reaction. This is understandable because the environment that we exist in has evolved from the dangers of survival out in the wild to the dangers of survival in the modern world. What this points to is that we must go beyond looking at physical saefty issues like bullying or many of the overt factors that create an unsafe environment for learning. We need to also look at the systemic structures that the brain will interpret as a danger or survival issues. One of the unfortunate byproducts of a content focussed traditional school environment is that we have created an environment of wrong / right, good / bad … a breeding ground for fear. Students over time adapt by unconsciously becoming passive learners as a way of mitigating this fear as they haven’t yet learnt the skills to mitigate the fear using their pre-frontal cortex or reasoning part of their brain to reframe their perception. By the time we become adults many of us have not developed the capacity to mitigate the emotions and feelings that fear drive up – notice how public speaking is still feared more than death! When I shared that with the teachers that I had a face to face example of the passivity that our education system breeds with a large group of first year pre-service teachers only last week … they began to share about their experiences of students from year 8 onwards and how they developed themselves to overcome the fear suppressor with the students. Social networking research indicates that unless the individual has very strong self-confidence and wherewithal to go against group behaviour (the fear of speaking up and being wrong or humiliated) they will be passive and go along with the beliefs of the groups they are in. A simple example of this is how we can be chameleon like when we are in different groups of people. Fitting into a group is a survival technique that is fundamental to design of the brain in most species. So a learning environment must be safe and develop the self-confidence of the child to question, to challenge, to develop their own place in the world. Young people must learn how to fail and learn from those experiences without fear of consequences for failing (e.g embarrassment, teasing, bullying, etc). How do we create this? Well the very best teachers practice it all the time. They know that they must be connected on a deep level with the students. They actively build a safe environment. They share their lives and create mutual respect. They honour their word. They consistently role model behaviour and relate to the students as their learning partners. They create environments where it is Ok to fail and make mistakes. They sometimes ask the students for feedback so they can improve their ability to deliver lessons that are more inspiring or have the students learn better. Even more than this … why inquiry learning is becoming a more spoken about learning approach is that it is not about right or wrong, good or bad … but it allows students to discover and voice opinions and try different things out in an environment of discovery. You might realise my point by this time. Unless we move from a content focussed paradigm which is all about passing the test, getting things right, etc .. we will not be preparing students for a world that is profoundly changing. If we want our students to be self-confident, risk-taking thought provokers who adapt to an ever changing social and technological environment then we need to shift OUR paradigm of education. The leap isn’t large … but it is becoming more and more urgent. |
| June 1st, 2010 @ 12:32AM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
Formative Rubrics – a great approach to developing skills |
 Rubric (noun): “perscribed guide for conduct or action”One of the most significant challenges that teachers are experiencing at the moment in the Australian education system is shifting the paradigm of how they approach delivering education. Most schools suffer the schizophrenia of knowing that the development of essential skills and capacities is as critical as content knowledge but being driven by the need to deliver content knowledge via NAPLAN testing at Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 and the exams for year 11 and 12. A number of schools are now teaching to the tests with the aim of raising their test scores and thus being seen as schools that are performing. The problem with this is that it is a destructive approach to developing young people being prepared for the 21st century. Students do not predictably come out of such a system as active learners with a curiosity and drive to want to continually learn. In fact what we are witnessing is students becoming more and more passive and failing to adpat to a world that is changing very quickly (and will continue to do so for generations to come). One approach that I have started to use with teachers as a way of systemising the progression of skill development throughout the years of schooling is to design formative rubrics appropriate to the cohort of students. These rubrics would be student centred and in the language of the age group. Most rubrics that I have seen in schools have been assessment rubrics. These rubrics are designed so that the students are clear about the level and quality of work required to achieve particular marks. Whilst this rubric is important for the students to deliver material that the teacher can assess it is a poor vehicle for developing the skills of the students. Much like the assessment (or summative) rubric gives a guide to the student as to what to provide to achieve the best marks, the formative rubric is an explicit guide to how a student can adapt or modify their behaviour or skills to perform and act at a higher level. In the workshops I run with schools I have the teachers articulate not only the skills they would love their students to have but also to explore and articulate what would demonstrate a student having those skills at differing levels. Part of this process is moving the teachers from “teacher speak” to age appropriate language. What teachers discover is that it requires a very thoughtful process to “unpack’ the skill and to then design practices, templates, modelling and short classroom activities to develop the skills. What many teachers and schools become aware of in this process is the necessity to develop a bank of formative rubrics for each year level within the school. Another way of saying this is … if you aren’t explicitly defining the skill development progression then you are living in hope (and the skill development is all teacher dependent … not systemised). One of the side benefits of having formative rubrics such as these is that teachers now have a tool with which they can discuss with both students and parents that will allow for REAL partnership in developing student capacities. I’d really love to hear back from you about this process and what you see is possible? |
| May 9th, 2010 @ 9:59PM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
Thinking Differently - developing new ideas |
 “It’s the things people know … that ain’t so”,Howard Armstrong, Inventor of FM Radio What is it that allows people to come up with ideas outside the box? When I ask teachers what do they see are the skills required for the 21st century some of their answers include lateral thinking, risk-taking, problem solving, etc. So teachers are also interested in creating thinking that is “outside the box”. Gregory Berns, in his latest book “Iconoclast”, addresses the world of people who create breakout ideas and distinguishes where they come from, how the brain often works against us and what we can do to seize the day. Our brain is a physical organ that consumes energy and performs feats of astounding complexity. The brain has a fixed energy budget (around 40 watts) and it can’t demand more power when it needs to do something more powerful thus it has evolved to do what it does as efficiently as possible. In its essence our brain is designed to: * make what is conscious … unconscious * take shortcuts all in order to ensure that its energy usage remains within its budget. Inside of these two principles we discover humanity’s greatness … and its constraint. The greatness comes in the brain’s ability to adapt … its constraint comes in the shortcuts it takes to ensure that it remains within its energy budget. I have two children and currently my 6 year old, Chiara, is learning to read. She began with looking at the pictures and interpreting what was happening on the page to tell the story. Bit by bit Chiara started to associate the words on the page with the pictures on the page. As she developed her sense of what the meanings behind the squiggles on the page meant I began to notice that she had created a bank of words in her head. Sometimes that bank of words were the actual words on the page and she reproduced them because it seemed right. Sometimes the word on the page had similar letters to ones that she knew but it was a different word … and my wife and I corrected her. Bit by bit she is training her brain to recognise the words and attribute meaning to them from the context she is reading them in. Bit by bit the brain is making unconscious what is conscious. Through repetition and correction Chiara is developing her reading skills. It was the same when you and I learnt to walk. It was the same when I learnt how to throw a discus during my years of competing in track and field athletics. It is the same in everything that we learn. We learn a skill or knowledge such that we can refer to it automatically and unconciously. So that we don’t have to THINK! But the problem with this is that the brain takes short cuts in developing our concepts of the world. Kanizsa’s triangle appears to indicate that there are 2 triangles in the centre. One that is “white” and one that is bound by the vertices in 3 corners. But … that is your brain making a shortcut. What is actually on the page is 3 pacman type symbols and 3 angles. Notice how difficult it is to just see those 6 figures without associating the two “triangles” with the figure. Our brains take shortcuts all the time. It interprets the world and creates feelings, emotions, contexts, and ideas from its shortcuts. Paraphrasing Berns … when confronted with information streaming from the eyes the brain will interpret this information in the quickest and most efficient way possible (time is energy). The longer the brain spends performing some calculation, the more energy it consumes. This means it must draw on both past experience and any other source of info (such as what other people say) to make sense of what it is seeing. This is why having inquiries and having the students question their ideas and contexts is so important. In a world that is changing exponentially (many of your current students will be going into jobs and careers that have not been invented yet) the individual who does not challenge their ideas and beliefs will be left behind. If you want to develop new ideas and have students who think “outside the box” it will only occur in an environment that allows for that. Given what I wrote earlier, we must also have explicit teaching and rituals to embed knowledge and processes. However, the challenege I throw down to you today, and for the future, is How are you creating an environment where your students challenge their own thinking? If you are interested in joining a group of teachers developing 21st century skills register at http://twentyfirstclearning.ning.com/ Next: Developing formative rubrics |
| May 4th, 2010 @ 2:33AM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
Leadership and Learning: Part 1 |
 It is interesting when you start reading out of your field how many interesting ideas one discovers that are applicable to education.Ken Blanchard is one of the world leading experts on management and leadership. He is the author of a series of books called the “One Minute Manager”. He, and his team, have sold millions of books and empowered managers and leaders in a range of industries worldwide in simple and effective approaches to developing leadership and managing their organisations. In “Leadership and the One Minute Manager” I discovered an interesting table (see Figure 1 below) where the One Minute Manager discusses “Situational Leadership”. The principal behind the approach reminded me greatly of how inquiry–learning, project-based learning can be designed to empower and develop skills in young people. It actually reflects the essence of what Bertram Bruce from the University of Illinois pointed out about the stages that teachers must go through to develop skills in leading inquiry learning (Figure 2). The table outlines the relationship between four developmental levels and the four leadership styles that a manager / leader would use with the person in that developmental level. 1. Directing – for people who lack competence but are enthusiastic and committed. They need direction and frequent feedback to get them started. 2. Coaching – for people who have some competence but lack commitment. They need direction and feedback because they are relatively inexperienced. They also need support and praise to build their self-esteem, and involvement in decision making to restore their commitment. 3. Supporting – for people who have competence but lack confidence or motivation. They don’t need much direction because of their skills, but support is necessary to bolster their confidence and motivation. 4. Delegating – for people who have both competence and commitment. They are able and willing to work on a project by themselves with little supervision or support. Click here for more (http://blog.intuyuconsulting.com.au/) |
| February 28th, 2010 @ 11:57PM | 0 Comments | Post a Comment |
