I finally fixed it!

In a previous post I embedded a Youtube video called Did You Know. It broke the page. The border surrounding the post stopped and words bled all over the rest of page. I kept fiddling with the embed code and discovered that there was extra parameter code at the beginning of the script that must have confused Wordpress. It took a lot of trial and error debugging, but voile! No extra code. No more broken boxes. Yea, it works, now!

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Is Tabula Rasa a Myth?

When I was in college learning about how to teach, I learned about the Tabula Rasa.  John Locke believed that baby’s brains were born with a “blank slate” to be written on by its experiences.  Do childen really start out as a blank slate?

Are they blank?

Are they the sum of their experiences?

Or are student brains more complex than that?

Do students come to our classrooms as blank slates ready to have us write our knowledge onto them?

I say no.

Students have already had life experiences before they come to us.  They already have background knowledge they gained from those experiences.  They already have conceptions and misconceptions of the world.  We just need to assess which concepts are true and which ones missed the point.  Then we need to give more experiences that would prove the misconception incorrect.  Does that make us Mythbusters?  Like the myth of the Tabula Rasa?

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Connecting Background Knowledge

I’m know I am probably behind the educational research, but I’m really beginning to see how significant to learning background knowledge is. From what little I’ve read of him, I think some of Robert Marzano’s books include the importance of background knowledge.

I teach reading a lot in my 3rd grade classroom, and I view learning as very closely related to reading. Think of reading as a conversation between the reader and the author in which together they construct the meaning out of the text.

1. Readers only remember what they can connect to prior knowledge and experiences.
2. The memory can only pull up the things that are connected to something else.
3. For example, if a student is reading about a barnyard, the child will only recall what they connect to what they already know. They will not recall what the barnyard looks like unless they have previously experienced one. However, the student most likely will remember the dog in the barnyard from the book because they most likely have seen a dog before. The more background experiences they bring to the book, the more they will remember from the book.

Learning is much the same way.

1. The more experiences with the content you give a student or the more he or she already has, the more connections they will make.
2. The more connections they make, the more likely they are to recall the information the background knowledge is connected to.

So, activating background knowledge is crucial to good learning. Did I connect to your background knowledge? What experiences have you had in which you connected the students’ background knowledge, and the lesson seemed to come alive?

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K12 Online Conference

 If you attend no other education conferences this year, you should attend this one.  The k-12 Online conference is a completely online conference (you can attend it at home in your pajamas) that focuses innovative ways to use web 2.0 tools and technologies used to improve learning.  The preconference keynote today is again delivered by the excellent David Warlick.  The conference will officially run for two weeks, October 15-19 and October 22-26.  It’s better live, because you can interact, but if you miss it, you can still enjoy the podcasts recorded  by the presenters and conveners.   You definately don’t want to miss this.

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What would you say to your Board of Education?

David Warlick, in his sbe_comments blog post, asked for input into include in his standard presentation to a school board. He issued this challenge.

“What would you say to a group of school board members, in the interest of promoting progressive schools — and you have only that 10 second elevator ride?”

I don’t think I can keep it to 10 seconds, but he goes.

I used to teach my 3rd grade class the parts of a plant, the life cycle of a plant, and how bees and flowers interact with worksheets and a textbooks. This year every student grew flowers in our classroom. We predicted what we though would happen. We observed and measured our plants everyday. We used scientific tools like magnifying glasses and forceps to help us produce plants. We graphed our measurements and drew pictures of our plants in our science journals. We took pictures of them with digital cameras and recorded student reflections with a digital recorder. We observed (dead) bees and pollinated flowers with them. We will watch the flowers turn into seed pods, and then we will harvest seeds just like the ones we started with.

The kids love the project, because they are doing science, not just reading it. They are much more fully engaged than they could ever be reading the chapter and doing the worksheet. They know flowers inside and out in much more detail than I could have dreamed for 3rd graders. This paradoxically simple (growing flowers), yet very complex experience (examining them in scientific detail) immersed the students so completely that they will probably remember it for the rest of their lives, not just until the end of 3rd grade.

My conclusion is this:

Project based learning encourages higher-level learning by exponentially increasing the complexity of learning. The more complex the learning, the more connections students create with the content. The more connections they have, the more likely they are to remembered the information later, maybe even for a life time. Technology is a tool that amplifies learning like a microphone amplifies sound. However, it’s not about the technology tools. It’s about what you do with the tools to encourage a deep kind of learning.

I couldn’t keep it to 10 seconds, Dave, but it is difficult to reduce a significant experience to a sound byte. However, if you want to convince someone, tell a story.

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