Friday, October 14, 2016

High Impact Thinking

This week's entry comes from Laura Schultz, fifth grade teacher at Hamilton Southeastern Intermediate and Junior High School.  You've all heard the saying, "It's like riding a bike...."

Laura takes another look at what that might mean for us and for our students.

Enjoy!

From Laura Schultz...

Failure and Growth:  A Recursive Connection

In my fifth grade classroom, we lightheartedly call ourselves “The Best Failures” in the school! 
These learners know that to be a “great failure” means that with help, success is just around the corner.   They can articulate this to anyone who should warrant an explanation for such a seemingly ludicrous comment because they consider themselves collaborative learners and understand that the impetus for true learning is derived out of mishaps, blunders, miscalculations and, well…failures. 


One metaphor we use for this is “riding a backward bicycle.”  Learning to ride a bike is a rite of passage that occurs in steps and is much like the learning process itself.  Beginning bike riders come to know that the most intense learning is born from the bumps, bruises, and scrapes that occur during the failure-to -launch stages. Deep understanding requires high impact thinking on the part of the learner.

Backwards Brain Bicycles and Metacognition

Last school year, Dr. Loane introduced us to a video from the Smarter Every Day series that highlighted the stages the vlog’s host and narrator, Destin Sandlin, went through while relearning how to ride a bicycle that had been “tricked out” to operate in an opposite fashion than what he had trained his brain to do from the beginning as a bicycle rider. 
This screenshot is from the YouTube video.
What if it's not like riding a bike?


This entertaining video emphasizes all of the stages Destin experienced while relearning this process. Throughout, he graciously accepts his failures as opportunities to be successful.  The reflective nature of the video itself highlights for the viewers the necessary application and transfer of skills required to conquer his personal learning outcome. 

When deciding to discover what my learners understood about their own “thinking about thinking” reading strategies, the bicycle video immediately came blasting into my brain. So, they watched it.  Needless to say they were enthralled.  They couldn’t wait to share their own stories of failures and successes about learning how to ride a bike!  The video and the subsequent enthusiasm for failing turned out to be a great segue into the reading experiment that was about to follow.
Watch the video at:
Backward Bike


Zones: Confidence, Learning and Panic

Dr. Michael McDowell, the keynote speaker at a recent Indiana Middle Level Education Association conference, likened learning to a three-ringed target where each of the rings is a zone. The very middle of the target is a confidence zone, the middle ring is the learning zone, and the outermost ring in the panic or chaos zone. 
Which zone are you in most of the time?

Obviously, the confidence zone is the easiest place to live, but living there is impossible without passing through all of the other zones, often more than once. After many discussions about what type of learning occurred in each of the zones for our backwards bicycle rider, my students watched the video once more labeling the zone that Dustin was in and the reasons why he fell into any one particular zone while on his journey to reach his learning outcome. 

I wondered aloud if the learners in front of me could speak to the zone they were actually in during the reading process. Would they panic?  Would they fall off the metaphorical bike?  Or, would they confidently ride off into the sunset?   

Most took this as a challenge, and so our work began.

Data and Kidblog

Paired learners went to work listening to one another read an article I purposefully assigned that was at their frustration levels. The readers read while thinking aloud about the metacognition they were using during the reading process itself.  The listeners used a tally mark system to count the number of times they heard the reader comment about a learning strategy they consciously used to make meaning. 


Once they finished, they switched reader and listener roles, and the data was returned to the appropriate reader and analyzed for metacognition. The results drove a further discussion about what zones they felt they were in regarding the use of reading strategies during this process. 

What amazing comments ensued from the learners! 

They spoke about being in a panic zone, falling off a bike, and needing help. Students blogged their ideas as an assessment for all to read.  In this way, they learned from many more of their peers, and not just from the one they were originally paired with.    

A few comments from the blogging site Kidblog have been copied below.  I’m hopeful that many more comments and conversations cycle around our Humanities class regarding problem solving when traveling from one zone to the next.


A Follow Up: The Learning Pit

I encourage everyone to visit James Nottingham’s (founder of Challenging Learning) website.  There you will see a video that likens learning to landing in a pit.  The premise is that learning involves being stuck in the pit, feeling confused, and experiencing failures. 


The only way to climb out of a pit is through challenge and collaboration.  


At HIJH, we seek to challenge, collaborate, and together experience growth for all stakeholders in the learning process.




Respond to Laura at lschultz@hse.k12.in.us
We hope your week is spent sometimes in the Comfort Zone, but often in the Learning Zone.  If you get into the Panic Zone, check out the ideas on the right side of the Learning Pit!

Your HSE Teaching and Learning Team
  • Jan Combs, Assistant Superintendent of Teaching and Learning
  • Stephanie Loane, Director of Elementary Education
  • Tom Bell, Director of Special Education
  • Jeff Harrison, Director of Educational Technology
  • Phil Lederach, Director of Secondary Education


No comments:

Post a Comment