Digital Learning Environment Blogs

Get the RSS feed

|

Elizabeth Helfant Archives

Questions, Thinking, More Questions
by Elizabeth Helfant

Questions! It seems like I always have many questions and can always find another one to add. While it is hard to find answers, it is fun to generate the ideas that stem from the questions. I know I spend a lot of time with my Personal Learning Network and that’s the cause of many questions and ultimately of much personal growth and learning. Lately, however, my questions have largely stemmed from three events that bear mentioning because they are examples of the types of learning opportunities that are available. They also provide the background that provoked my exploration of educational theory and curriculum design principles.  Each of these events involved a face to face but also an electronic, virtual space component. This virtual space makes it easy for me to pass the content on to a greater audience and perpetuate the questions.

The Background

Consider a brief summary of events that led to a cycle of questions and thinking.

• A visit by Darren Kuropatwa where he posed the question “How do we know what they know?” Perhaps that could be reframed as “How do we know what they know, understand and can do?” to make it even more interesting. That is an interesting question for my school as we rewrite our entire curriculum and rethink our assessment practices.
• A visit to the Summit School where their head, Michael Ebeling coordinated a professional development day around the question “Preparing Our Students for a Future We Can’t Predict: What Do the Arts and Technology Have to Do with 21st Century Learning and Leading?” The day was arranged around listening to me talk, a video piece by Tony Wagner, a skype conversation with Anthony Chivetta, and a video clip from Sir Ken Robinson. It also included a viewing of Karl Fisch’s Did You Know version 4. This session had my mind swirling around educational theory and questions of shift and change.
  
• Attendance at the University of Springifield Illinois Conference, Curriculum, Politics, and the Student/Teacher of English, which featured a keynote and workshop given by Richard Miller of Rutger’s New Humanities and Writers House program. I attended with 5 other faculty members because we want to know more about college shifts and we have been following Miller’s projects for some time. His presentation did not disappoint and ultimately got my head spinning with tons of thoughts. This event sent my mind in high gear thinking about the opportunities for our English Curriculum and also the factors that push students into a highly motivated state to work.

It bears mentioning that this has also been a period where we sent the Newsweek article, Motivation and Flow- The Teenage Edition , to the Upper School faculty and asked them for examples of where student had achieved a state of flow in our classrooms. While I received many responses,  the vast majority explained projects that had students engages in what many might describe as play. Some of these activities were:

• ColdWar Facebook
• AP US Graphic Novels
• Twittering the Cuban Missile Crisis
• Creating Prezi Presentations for US History and to analyze poems from Whitman and Emerson
• Oral Spanish Assignments using Learnoisty on student cell phones
• A Ning Assignment where world history students had to relate the message of a primary source document to a modern song that delivered a similar message.
• An English class where students had to bring a song to dedicate to one of the Shakespearian characters from the plays they had been studying and the class would guess who the song was dedicated to and why
• The use of Diigo to annotate and scaffold the reading of nonfiction, high interest articles that support the World History curriculum
• The use of wordnic to spontaneously look up words and their uses in news article and with twitter
• The use of a wireless keyboard to allow a single student to create Hyper-Linked class notes that are viewable by the class as they are taken and they collectively add hyperlinks via a chat space to build robust class notes and learn how to manage and research things they don’t know.

In light of those personal learning experiences and the examples of good curriculum that positioned students in a state of flow, I couldn’t help but begin to think through how educational theory needs to be implicitly updated and viewed collectively through a lense of technology.

My Thinking on Curriculum design and the Convergence of Educational Theory

To explain the skillset teachers need to design effective curriculum, we have been using the TPACK model. TPACK provides an excellent framework that wraps around most of our other teaching models. Teachers need to design curriculum to be in the center of the overlapping technology, content and pedagogy knowledge circles. They need to understand that the content they are teaching needs to be updated so that it includes what is truly essential and also gives proper attention to the skills that students need for their future. They need to understand that pedagogy should be updated to take into account all emerging research on learning- updates to best practices and content such as that found in Brain Rules. They need to understand that the technology bubble includes a number of technology skills and a vast number of tools that open up so many opportunities for innovation. Failure to understand the updates will render their interpretation of the model totally inaccurate.

Teachers also need to look at Danielson’s Four Domains of Good Teaching and view them through a lens of technological awareness. As I pointed out when I spoke at Summit, I see those domains loaded with technology and they should try to see it that way too. It is like Chris Lehmann so eloquently says, “Technology should be like Oxygen, ubiquitous, invisible, and necessary.” It doesn’t have to be explicitly referenced to be there. How can you argue that technology is not in Danielson's Domain II when you teach in a 1:1 tablet school? How can you not design instruction that includes technology if you understand the TPACK model? How can you argue that professional development does not necessitate using technology to connect?

The model we use to design curriculum is Wiggins and McTighe’s Understanding by Design. We have to design to live in the TPACK intersection. The first stage of UbD is deciding the essential questions, content and skills that should be taught in the classroom and that means knowing what the contemporary content and skill set is because, while we may not have settled on exactly what it is, it is most certainly NOT what was taught even a couple of years ago. Culture has driven us to a place where the skill set changes continuously and the explosion of information and the increased need to think globally forces us to rethink what the core content around which varied, differentiated experience for students can be designed is. The second stage of UbD is focused on how to assess what students know and educators need to understand that the technology bubble affords us opportunities to really examine “how we know what they know, understand and can do?”  Tools abound for shared collaboration during the learning process and these tools all provide mechanisms for providing timely feedback. UbD points out the assessment should be varied ranging from informal checks for understanding to performance tasks. Technology provides easy ways to conduct informal checks- blogs, google forms, polls. It also offers much towards creating rich performance tasks and communicating the rubrics to students. In fact, a google doc shared with the class can be used to have students and teacher construct a rubric so that everyone is involved in the assessment process. The third stage of UbD is the actual design of the learning unit. The same tools that student can use to collaborate and share work can be used by faculty to collectively design a unit. Wikis and google docs are great tools for this.

As I design the plan I do want to try to achieve flow, so there is yet another theory to consider.

Mihály Csíkszentmihályi proposed the concept of flow, a state in which a person is fully engaged and focused on the task at hand. Flow is attained when the challenge is great enough for the task to be interesting and the skills one possesses are sufficient to rise to the challenge. A graphical explanation is perhaps best.

Csíkszentmihályi’s ideas work great for tasks that people have interest in or some intrinisic motivation driving them to accomplish. Designing projects that put students in the flow requires us to expand on this idea a bit.

When thinking of Csíkszentmihályi’s flow, the line of flow includes a portion that corresponds to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Vygotsky describes the ZPD as "the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers" (Vygotsky, 1978). Vygotsky could loosely be viewed as one of the first to embrace social learning as he believed that you learned best when you were supported by others around you who could help elevate your thinking. I would suggest that the Zone is located in the area labeled as flow in the diagram above.  The zone occurs higher up in the Flow area if schools develop what Carol Dweck has framed as a growth mindset in their students. Students with a growth mindset believe that they have the ability to develop their talent. The growth mindset is fostered by praising effort and acknowledging accomplishment against a challenging task. I would argue that it means investing in documenting and assessing the learning process over assessing the product (and I already told you technology is great for that.) It probably means de-emphasizing grades and moving to assessment that values the mastering of skills. In Dweck’s NAIS article Brainology, she concludes with

"Next time you're tempted to praise your students' intelligence or talent, restrain yourself. Instead, teach them how much fun a challenging task is, how interesting and informative errors are, and how great it is to struggle with something and make progress. Most of all, teach them that by taking on challenges, making mistakes, and putting forth effort, they are making themselves smarter."

By developing a growth mindset, they are better equipped to operate in the zone and achieve flow.

But that is still not enough. The task must be made engaging and relevant to students. They need to engage with it if we want them to find intrinsic motivation.  elevancendsetngage with it if we want them to find intrinsic motivation. zone and achieve flow. ng task. in their students. is theThe mantra of “Rigor, Relevance, and Relationships” has been used for awhile. We have to incorporate that along with challenge. I believe there are opportunities to enhance or create relevance using YouTube videos and nonfiction articles and stories that use the students’ world to frame an activity to make it meaningful to them. Look back through the curricular examples in the first part of this post. Those examples use technologies kids enjoy or frame the activity in non-fiction or creative production. While the challenge axis needs the 3Rs, the skills axis needs the 4 Cs – Communicate, Connect, Create, and Collaborate. The Skills axis also needs to reflect the presence of Habitudes as defined by Angela Maiers.

There is one more thing to consider. As we use technology more invisibly and as we allow it to help us create curriculum that is more innovative, our classrooms are shifting from teacher-oriented to student centered and then to teaching/learning centered (see graphic).  This shift has teachers growing their personal learning networks and turning control over to the students. It has them designing curriculum that allows for student choice/ differentiation and is rich in the 4Cs and the 3Rs. More projects have the instructional technologist, teacher, librarian and student partnering using technology tools that foster collaboration. We are making use of the theory of Connectivism which centers knowledge in connections and expands on Vygotsky’s notions of social learning.

Combining these theories creates the following image:

The only thing new in the image is the idea that if we design well enough, the engaged learning we plan and scaffold for can lift our students to agency, ideally to the point of inspiring student action and service in the community (but that’s another blog post for another day.)

An Example and an Apology

One of the events that stimulated my thinking was attending the session given by Richard Miller. His New Humanities approach, in particular his Writing as a Naturalist Course, is my combined theory in action.  When Miller presents he exudes an understanding of best of the old mixed with best of the new. He offers the Writing as Naturalist English course and also offers a Reading in Slow Motion elective that forces students to read and think and is appropriately devoid of technology.  Some key concepts from his presentation:

• What does it mean to teach in an environment where students have access to all human knowledge? How do we get their attention? Our shared workspace is the globe and the work of the 21^st c. is being done on laptops.
• Creation of this technology is more significant than any change to communication to date- this invention is fundamentally different, more significant-Why? It is instantaneous and it isa  global.
• It is a time of unprecedented opportunity-a chance to rethink things-real challenges but real possibilities with the shared workspace that tech provides-What does it mean to teach Global literature? surely not just a bigger anthology-

Miller in some respects for me boiled all the theory down to the volkswagon fun theory.  If we can’t get them in an intrinsically motivated zone of flow, perhaps we can make them think it’s fun.

And now for the apology. Unfortunately you have to watch the video.

 I know I get verbose and am long-winded but I find the answer to that in Richard Miller’s video. He says in the video that you haven’t learned anything if you start in clarity and write and end in clarity. I write and blog to clarify ideas and assimilate my thoughts. This edtech thing is my passion and I find I get in the zone of flow and it’s the opinions and thoughts of many that elevate my understanding. Thanks for allowing me to share my learning with you and for your contributions to my thinking. One truth for me is that all of us are certainly smarter than just me- I hope we can help our students know this truth!

Images-

TPCK- Tpck.org

Mindset - Nigel Holmes pdf

Flow - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi and http://www.austega.com/education/articles/FlowBase.gif

About Elizabeth

Elizabeth Helfant is the Upper School Coordinator of Instructional Technology at Mary Institute Country Day School, a JK-12 institution embarking on a 1:1 adventure. using Tablet PCs and DyKnow.