Schoolcraft Educational Ideas

Ideas from Classroom Practice and Neuroscience for Education

Schoolcraft Educational Ideas

Learning Styles – If it works, don’t pitch it.

August 30, 2011 · No Comments · Uncategorized

Many brain scientists and educators of educators – those in the research business – can often be seen cringing when someone says, “I’m an auditory (or visual or kinesthetic) learner.” The implication here, especially to a researcher, is that this person therefore believes that they cannot learn in another style. A great deal of time is then spent by the researchers trying to debunk the idea that teachers should not teach using Learning Styles models. Psychologist Dan Willingham at the University of Virginia suggests that teachers should not try to tailor their instruction to individual students because our brains learn in very similar ways. Doug Rohrer at the University of South Florida found no evidence to support any of the learning style theories and cautions teachers against using them.

I, however, was a teacher for over 20 years and saw some pretty amazing things happen in my classroom through the use of Learning Styles Models (Dunn and Dunn and also Four-Mat). The first amazing transformation was in my own thinking about learning and the evidence was in the grades and faces of my students. Willingham suggests using variety to get the kids’ attention which is exactly what the learning styles models did for me. They gave me a tool to help me think about a variety of ways to teach, keeping it interesting for all students. They helped to cue me into the body language of my students more accurately and, most importantly, they helped the students listen to their own bodies to begin recognition of their own learning patterns. For instance, not all students can take notes and learn new material at the same time. (I wonder if studies on working memory might provide substance to this claim.) Many students find that munching on raisans or sippping on water helps them to stay focused and therefore learn more readily. I have watched grades of bright students jump from Cs to As on tests just by adding the provision of intake during high anxiety testing situations. (I wonder if studies on math anxiety might provide substance to this anecdotal information.)

The note of importance is that although carefully crafted research by well-intending psychologists has not supported the idea of learning styles, it has also not provided evidence that the use of this tool hurts children. Furthermore, many teachers have witnessed some amazing results in their own classrooms, both by students and in their own teaching, the gives merit to the use of learning styles. If it works, don’t pitch it.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2011/08/29/139973743/think-youre-an-auditory-or-visual-learner-scientists-say-its-unlikely?sc=tw&cc=share

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What can we do without brain parts?

February 19, 2011 · 3 Comments · Uncategorized

   What does our brain do without a cerebellum? At what time in our development are pathways developed that give us access to balance and emotion? Just how important are the different parts of our brains and does it matter at what point we lose them? We are learning so much about our bodies right now because of technology and just like all new learners, we have so much more to learn. Rather than saying that “language is here” and “math is there”, we now speak in terms of circuits that span different regions of the brain to accomplish a minutely singular task but there are parts that are central and can cause disfunction of a process when lesioned.

   It amazes me that we can function normally with only a half brain if a hemisphere is removed early enough in life. This is a link that provides a glimpse into the life of a boy, Chase, without a cerebellum or pons. He progresses at what they call “Chase Pace” but is learning to navigate and to balance without what we thought was the center for equilibrium. Obviously those neurons are firing at lightening speed in places that can compensate for his missing parts.

   What does that tell us as teachers? I celebrate all teachers, but especially those who work with very young children. They are responsible for activating neural pathways that could be lost in pruning. Of course, this does not mean that the child will not learn if they are pruned but the child has to find a work-around, similar to Chase. It is imperative that we advocate for all of our children, regardless of ability, by providing stimulating activities and probing questions. Get those synapses flowing!

http://www.aolnews.com/2011/02/12/chase-britton-boy-without-a-cerebellum-baffles-doctors/

Note:

   Neuroscience is a new field and educational neuroscience is even newer.  I feel very fortunate to be one of only 300 graduates worldwide whose task it is to connect research and education through Mind, Brain and Education.

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Technology and wise choices in education

July 17, 2010 · 2 Comments · Mathematics teaching

Nicholas Carr recently wrote a book called The Shallows and an article called “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.  Are you tempted to immediately do a search for these without reading further? This temptation is partially what Carr is lamenting, the constant surface learning that inhibits growth of deeper thoughts. A teacher has to help the student find balance between broad surface knowledge and a deep understanding of a few ideas because problem solving and living is a combination of the two. Whether or not to use technology is the wrong  question for a teacher to ask but rather when and how.

I am currently working on a bit of research that involves the use of a SmartBoard in Headstart classrooms, using a computer rather than a board game to foster mathematical understanding. This use of technology may allow students to play a game that is more customized to their own needs both cognitively and physically but will the interaction with a computer hinder some skill found in use of the board game?

The Great Race boardgame, developed by Ramani and Seigler, has been shown to produce growth in four areas of numerical understanding for preschoolers after just one hour of play, this is remarkable! The growth is both conceptual (magnitude on a number line) and skill (matching number symbols with spoken words). I have played this board game with 4 and 5 year olds and find it to be a challenge for them to wait their turns, put the game piece on the right spot, keep from knocking over other tokens, spin the spinner, remember the number of moves even if the spinner moves from the number spun, hold in working memory the number of moves to make while trying to say number words, … It is complex.

As a computer game, the same four measures of numerical understanding will be tested but there are features that should make it more manageable in a teaching situation. I played this version with 4 and 5 year olds also and found that knowing when it was their turns was more evident, they could wiggle without knocking over tokens, the spinner didn’t randomly move, there was always a way to look at the number to move reducing working memory load, and they got to push buttons. This was less complex.

My guess is that the computer game will produce the same desired growth in mathematical understanding and will be more manageable for the teacher, but what have we lost? We still have social interactions and are practicing sharing and wait time. We are not refining fine motor skills, not using tactile sensitivity, and not seeing what uncontrolled wiggling can do to the environment. These are important pieces of knowledge that I would want to include elsewhere in the lesson and perhaps later incorporate in use of the board game. But if my goal is to focus on mathematical understanding then wiggling becomes a secondary concern for the moment.

This “what does it afford and what is lost”  is the type of rigorous questioning that the teacher needs to ask – not whether or not to use technology but how and why do we use it. The rest is for the academics to argue.

http://chronicle.com/article/Is-Technology-Making-Your/66128/

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Play games for a good academic beginning

May 3, 2010 · No Comments · Uncategorized

How can we help our babies get a good foothold on academic achievement? Play games! Games such as Simon Says and board games such as The Great Race or Chutes and Ladders may very well give them the extra boost that they need. How simple is that?

Some very good developmental and neurological research is showing that self-regulation is one key and it is trainable through activities such as Head-to-Toes developed by Megan McClelland, associate professore of human development and family sciences at OSU. Visit  http://www.physorg.com/news191592325.html for more about McClelland and her work. It seems likely to me that playing Simon Says would develop the same self-regulation skills, perhaps waiting for the candy in the Easter Bunny basket and opening the presents under the tree do exactly the same thing. The important concept here is that the ability to SELF-regulate is necessary in this life.

Self-regulation often includes spaces in time which I will use as a segue to board games such as The Great Race used in the research of Robert Siegler, professor of cognitive psychology at Carnegie Melon. Siegler and others have shown  that playing board games that introduce number lines to preschool children can improve their achievement scores in mathematics well after they enter formal schooling. Chutes and Ladders comes close to the same concept but the number line is not strictly left to right which changes the value of the game. What is needed is a linear path that shows increases in number from left to right with common increments. This is the basis of measurement, is in alignment with our flow of reading, and it supports many of our higher skills such as addition of positive and negative numbers and of repeated addition or multiplication. Stanislas Deheane, cognitive neuroscientist and author of Number Sense, tells us that we begin to process large numbers logarithmically rather than linearly. Think of a number line with 0 at one end and one-million (1,000,000) at the other. Where would you place 10,000?  Adults tend to put the value much further from 0 than it should be because we naturally think logarithmically, in powers of 10 but we also need the ability to think linearly as we problem solve using positive and negative real numbers. Siegler’s game was designed to help formalize this linear thinking for use during formal schooling.

At the age of 58 I still struggle with self-regulation. It would be a lot more fun to play than to write my final exam or to grade those student papers, but the ability to monitor my own actions and make myself keep a timeline (flexible as it is) is exactly what has helped me succeed emotionally, academically, and financially in this society. 

Each time I think about my thinking during problem solving I find myself developing pictures in my head (narrative and visual image is also important) and among those pictures are number lines. Obviously, they are critical in the development of mathematical understanding.

So, I think I’ll go play Simon Says with my grandchildren and save the writing of the final exam until later tonight. I do this consciously and with self-regulation because it still fits within my timeline.

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Hunting for knowledge

December 15, 2009 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized

It seems I have been in school my entire life. Well, at least most of my life which is more than the entire life of most of my classmates. I estimate that I have been teacher and/or student  for 48 years  – nearly a half century- and it seems I would have learned something by now, doesn’t it? Yet I continue with this lifelong quest for finding the unknown.

The latest boggle came when I wrote what I thought was a brilliant response to one of my international classmates about Bauerlein’s argument that “knowledge deficits” are cropping up due to the prolific use of new media.

For me, the knowledge deficit came in the form of not understanding the symbols from Ying-Sin’s written language; the buttons on the bottom of her page were like scribbles. I tried thinking logically about the size of the buttons, relating them to buttons on other blogs that I respond to. I reasoned about which to push and gave it a try -without saving my crafted words into a different document. One push of the button and….gone! Gone forever into nothingness.

I tried again; this time not quite so brilliantly and not quite so long, but still an attempt.  I’d push one of the other two buttons this time and be alright. Wrong. The new button once again erased my words.

I tried it a third time (still not saving my precious word into a safe domain – what does that say???), pushed the third button and saw my words under hers.  Voila! I had it!  But the joy was short lived when Ying-Sin informed me that the response was not there. Where did it go?

Ying-Sin had talked about the ways that people HUNT for knowledge. I like that word and now want to know where my critter of a message went. I don’t know how to hunt for it, but I’m told that all things sent into cyberspace remain in cyberspace. They must be hiding with those socks that I stuck in the dryer.

I recently found a stack of papers that I had written in the 70s when my brother was in the military. Vietnam was still raging and we all saw scary changes in our loved ones as they returned home. At our family gathering, my brother brought letters that he had written and recieved during those tumultuous times. Those writings are precious and well preserved. I’m glad I didn’t push a button and lose them.

Today we write our letters in email, post our most intimate thoughts and picutres online, and expect electrical currents and air waves to preserve them. As we change in our new media world, we need a backup system, a place to preserve that which is most precious. It can’t be on a 3.25 in floppy like my pictures, or on a hard drive that crashes. Paper burns, gets wet and moldy.

I guess the solution is to just keep making new memories and hunting for new knowledge.

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Mechanical music.

November 11, 2009 · 4 Comments · Uncategorized

It appears that farming and engineering have a lot in common – music.  Farming and music?  Yes, many farm kids find themselves banging around on all of those wonderful metal, plastic and wooden “things” laying around the barn.  Perhaps it is because I wanted to see my old farm instruments in a glorious state that I almost believed an email that proclaimed that the Robert M Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa had created muscial instruments from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft, Iowa.  Watching the video (that supposedly took 13,029 hours of set-up) was amazing. Too amazing. So I decided to validate the information before posting on my blog.  It was a fake, just as many things are fake on the internet. But many people do not validate thus creating a great deal of misinformation.

We have been discussing literacies in the new media class. One of the most important things that we can teach our students in this information rich society is how to differentiate fake from real while surfing the web. We used to know that the old man story-teller down at the general store was filled with exageration but anyone can post online and we can’t tell the story-tellers from the newsbreakers.

Or are those the same?  

Anyway, this is a great piece of ART and an example of some fantastic work with new media.  It is definately worth a look.  extraordinaire_instrument_de_musique

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Symbolic methods of expression

October 29, 2009 · 2 Comments · Uncategorized

David Rose, a professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education and director of CAST, told us that the “recognition network” in the cortex does not respond to regularities, it generates them. Things such as color are constructed in our brains through the integration of 1) perceptual, 2) linguistic, 3) symbolic and 4( cognitive experiences. These four elements became three with lingistic and symbolic experiences being combined. I would like to see these two teased apart.

Symbolism is sometimes viewed as the highest form of language so in that respect, they can be integrated. But symbols stand in the place of something as a language of their own and may be processed much differently. I want to be able to better understand those differences.

Take a look at some different symbolic methods of expression.

Fun! The Mechanism of Agrin\’s Function in Interneuronal Synaptogenisis

Scientifically informative that includes a discussion of mirror neurons and the need for a common language between the processes needed for action: The Poetican

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Reading adventures through Universal Design for Learning

October 26, 2009 · 1 Comment · Uncategorized

CAST (cast.org) developed a framework for designing instruction that is accessible to all learners. Their goal is to honor learning differences and present alternative modes of representation for teachers to use in their classrooms. Their main focus is through the use of technology. By utilizing technology such as eye tracking, they have discovered ways to help students with ADHD and dyslexia as well as second language learners and hearing or visually impaired students.

For an adventure in reading, visit http://udleditions.cast.org/INTRO,call_of_the_wild.html where you can journey with a dog named Buck in his adventures along the Pacific seaboard. Jack London’s Call of the Wild takes on a whole new life when students are allowed to zoom in on Buck’s location through Google maps in each chapter.  Different levels of support and questioning are provided in many different forms. This is a definite site for exploration. Play with the buttons here as you read an excellent book.

It would be interesting to see if CAST’s UDL books satisfy the three types of navigational styles presented by Palincsar and Ladewski in Literacy and the Learning Sciences. It surely has enough draw for the knowledge seekers through links that allow exploration of specific topics. There is an abundance of available features for those who just like to punch buttons and see how it works but I’m not certain that the apathetic hypertext users could remain apathetic.  And that, my educator friends, is a good thing.

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Is Scratching better constructed or mediated?

October 16, 2009 · 2 Comments · Mathematics teaching, Uncategorized

     Scratch can provide a fun pasttime for creative play (see previous post) in a globally shared environment, but what does it provide educationally? What literacies does it enhance? Several fellow students have registered dismay about their experiences with Scratch.  Is this a product of creative perturbation leading to self discovery or is it just plain perturbation? And if it is not providing the gains that we desire, how can we better utilize it to advance educational goals?

     LOGO, a computer program designed by Papert in 1980, was intended to help chldren acquire broadly useful skills such as dividing problems into their main components, identifying logical flaws in one’s thinking, and generating well-thought-out plans. I used LOGO in my mathematics classroom to develop a more intuitive view of algorithmic thinking and geometric relationships.

     Under the direction of Grayson Wheatley from Purdue University, our entire mathematics department (10 men and 3 women) designed the  Mathematics and Applied Problem Solving (MAPS) program in 1984 which I continued to use, in part, for twenty years. Wheatley trained us in what we called “constructivism” methodologies and discourse patterns and we transformed our teaching as a department. Some of the modules required constructed products and others just had constructed knowledge. LOGO required that we provide minimal beginning instruction, well-designed guiding tasks, and open-ended final projects that led the students into our stated goals.

     According to Robert S. Siegler from Carnegie Mellon, LOGO proved insufficient to meet Papert’s original goals when it was learned in standard ways – whatever that was (ours was anything but ’standard’ in that day and age.) Mediated instruction, he said, proved to be quite successful according to several studies. In mediated instruction, LEGO was taught with 

  •  teachers demonstrating to students how to use commands and concepts and
  • providing them with feedback on their attempts to use them,
  • explicitly noting when particular commands and programs illustrate general programming concepts
  •  and drawing explicit analogies between reasong and problems in other contexts. 

Students taught in this manner learned how to debug processes outside of the context of LOGO.

My students were our “lowest level” as it was called back then; they had a lot in life to debug. Success in the program was as dependent upon patience and persistence as much as anything else, but some of their projects became quite intricate art projects – when students managed to make it to class. 

The point here is that what we saw in the 1980s as constructivist seems to have been renamed as mediated over the years with constructivist being redefined somehow and the term constructionist joining the crew just to make it hard for those of us that struggle with names anyhow. Radical constructivism seems to me to be an entire ‘hands off’ approach once the task has been posed. Call it what you will, I would like to see what a little mediated instruction with Scratch could do. Could we make it more educationally sound by teaching toward specific goals and providing more teacher feedback? Does this counter the intended use of the product? Could the hands-off be reserved for home play with mediated in the classroom?

As makers of text in this new media, we can get lost in all of the trappings. We must be able to interpret what we are given before we can create our own signs as Kress calls them. The teacher is both a mapmaker to help students find those interpretations and a mentor to help  use the tools to construct the signs. Whether  constructionism with a product, constructivism with no product, or mediated with teacher guidance in the midst of constructing, our play with Scratch must advance our literacies or it has no usefulness within the classroom.

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How do you convey what is inside?

October 8, 2009 · 5 Comments · Uncategorized

Learning is tied. It is tied to experience. It is tied to emotion. It is tied to biology. It is tied to language.

How we measure learning is tied to conventional views of what is normal or expected in the surrounding community. Occassionally, learning is tied to self growth and understanding but this is all-too-often minimalized in our formal education where it is all about the norm. The mode of communication is tied to how others assess our learning; and language affects their perspectives.

Today as I surfed aimlessly, I found two very divergent modes of communication that shed light on learning. It is sombering to think that in a world where we try so hard to understand others, we can get it so wrong because our langauge, our mode of communication, has disallowed true assessment. Thankfully, new media is allowing us to listen to others in ways we earlier could not have imagined.

Thoughts are scattered for me at this point, so I reach to my cyberworld friends to help with insights as I formulate my own notions of communication as we try to convey what is inside.

Please view In My Language YouTube and

http://voiceThread.com  WCHS online art exhibit .

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