Our exercise for this week illuminates how to use both to supercharge your instructional practice!
Activate Our Journey into Ambitious Teaching
Nexus in the City Ó2009
…where Ambitious Learning X Ambitious Teaching = Nexus Academy
Dr. S. Heidi Bach -Professor Emeritus
Palladio International University
Albert Einstein noted, “Problems cannot be solved by using the same level of thinking through which they were created.”
Your Experiential Study of “Metacognition” … a process to develop through the following instructional design:
Educator’s Aim: Metacognition means ‘thinking about thinking’ (Google: Brown, 1987). The exercise below allows entry into the vast store of information internally represented in mind ... our minds, our students’ minds (Google: Faulkner, 2000).
Focus on students’ comprehension of reading material this week. Begin with teaching a class lesson, but restrict your analysis focus to the content performance and process performance of just two students. Add particularly interesting students as you gain a sense of competence and enthusiasm. Never frustrate yourself by making your own pedagogical learning too complex, too soon. Operating in the frustration zone only obstructs learning and leads to discouragement. Discouragement leads to “dropping out” (Google: Margolis & Fisher, 2003). Cultivating discouragement is counterproductive, regardless of a learner’s age!
For your case study, select two students –one who is readily able to complete any particular assignment and one who is particularly challenged with comprehension and process skills. What you learn from exercising in new ways below will develop your capacity to better develop all students later. Therefore, select two with whom you have fluent working relationships. As you exercise your thinking during the week, these students will be expected to individually share their thinking about their own thinking (i.e. metacognition) with you.
Technology: a microphone recording devise with USB connection to download/save/review data.
Preview, prepare as needed, then use the chart below to guide your thinking about these two types of student work samples. The chart helps you apply what you know so far about the nature of the subject matter content/process, the nature of the pedagogy selected (the what, how, and why) to transmit content or processes, and your students’ interpretations of this “nexus.” In other words, what was their experience of the pedagogy used in relation to the knowledge and know-how they actually received through this transmission?
Refer to http://teachersjourneyinourcities.blogspot.com/ for further discussion of Zones of Proximal Learning, introduced conceptually through the work of Lev Vygotsky, Russian Educational Psychologist from the thirties
| A. What is the ‘nature’ of subject matter? How does pedagogy (instructional design/ presentation, and activities) support this nature? (List the types of thinking and behavior required in order to be successful in your assignment.) | B. After a brief introduction to content (and processes), ask each student to verbalize (then write a description) of what s/he understands and how s/he knows that she understands/doesn’t intended learning. | C. To what extent did pedagogy transmit content/ processes effectively for various types of students? What adjustments are needed to reinforce/repair learning according to students’ learning needs? |
| D. From the lists in “C,” note Independent Zone Skills (already in secured place), Instructional Zone Skills (those still in formation and needing outside support/structure), and Frustration Zone Skills (those as yet “out of reach,” thus bringing symptoms of frustration. | E. Instructional Zone Skills must be ‘scaffolded’ for each student now in order to correct inaccuracies, allow sufficient supported practice leading to sufficient practice on the independent level. Frustration Zone Skills must be ‘scaffolded’ with a sequence of instructional lessons (perhaps Units) for each student now in order to reach independent zone target mastery. | F. What forms of pedagogy will work well to achieve target performance/mastery along this sequence of scaffolding? How might we group different types of students at various points along this sequence? |
Apprenticeship-To-Go
As Ray Charles reminds us, “Don’t go backwards. You have already been there.”
Recommended Best-seller
Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. This extraordinary mountain climber and exceptional humanitarian received the AAUW award this year (2009) for his efforts to establish schools in extreme, remote, and rugged circumstances. Starting schools in compromising environments and within unfamiliar cultures (Pakistan, Afghanistan) required grit. Greg encountered the roller coaster of discouragement and persistence, engaged in literal and figural mountain climbing among disparate cultures. Themes addressed: mobilizing community involvement, cultural differences and bridge building, practices of gender socialization, negotiating the balance of power, the power of devotion and perseverance, the power of alliance and support, the power of desire to learn, social dynamics that inculcate self-efficacy in students.
Recommended music for thinking through these exercises with fellow apprentices:
Google “World Music” then select from the subcategories of your choice.
Africa, origins of humankind, offers African Drumming, uses the Djembe creating the master flow –contemporary and folk- African rumba, jazz, Ethiopia, Senegal, Gambia, Ivory coast, Mali, Guinea.
Websites your find helpful during your process:
Music to purchase? Contact:
Putumao World Music 411 Lafayette St, NY, NY 10003 (212-625-1400)
Classical Music:
Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite (1921-1931) “The richness of the land and the rugged optimism of its people has fired my imagination. I was determined to put it to music some day.”
Pop Music:
Dar Williams – When I was a boy
Film for Reflection
The Kite Runner (2007) – Various circumstances contribute to at-risk conditions. Comprised of at-risk circumstances, conditions entail more than type of readiness. Circumstances have long-term and cumulative consequences, whether positive or negative. If society’s ultimate educational goal is preparation of citizens capable of lifelong learning and contributing to the greater well-being, then conditions which shortchange our capacity to set those children at-risk of failure.
Set in Afghanistan, the narrator flees the Taliban as an adult. Through flashback, we witness damage done by class discrimination, loss not only to a boy, a family, a friendship but also to a nation. Most of our at-risk students, from one generation or another, come from other cultural backgrounds. Generational transmissions structure perceptions that affect learning. To what extent does a child’s relocation process influence his perception of self, other, surrounding resources, self-efficacy? What projections and inferences might adults engage that confront or sustain inequities?
Content Websites
Quote in conclusion, by Pascal:
“There is a reason that reason does not know.”
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