Trees and Woodchips

It is very hard for a grandmother to refrain from talking about those grandbabies, but you have to admit, toddlers really do say the cutest things.  Our 2 year old Liam has been providing constant narration of his own life for at least 6 months.   (Liam is pretty fluent in toddler French as well as English, thanks to my sister, his babysitter.)  He is constantly repeating and rehearsing what he hears, so we get to observe what is going on as far as his thinking is concerned.  And a healthy, nurtured toddler is a learning machine. Often, Liam’s seemingly logical, but erroneous conclusions are pretty funny.

Liam is fascinated with wood chips.  They are all over “his” park and he loves to move his hands through them, pile them up, flatten the piles and then re-pile them, and of course, to his mother’s chagrin, throw them around.  We were having some trees cut down last week, and on Friday, they left a tree half done.  So over the weekend, we had a 40 foot, 2 foot diameter pine tree trunk with no branches left on it.  (It was actually pretty cool looking, and some daring artist might have seen the makings of a totem pole or something.)  Anyway, I was explaining to Liam that the “worker guys” were going to come back soon and turn the trunk into wood chips.  Liam immediately wanted to share this new knowledge with his aunt. “Auntie Emily, come here.  You see that big stick?  It’s made out of wood chips.”

I am pretty sure Liam thought we could reassemble wood chips into a 40 ft. living tree, but maybe he just got his syntax, not his thinking, wrong. 

As I have been thinking about designing instruction both in this course and in my concurrent course, EDU623, I have been hearing all about the parts of instruction.  Some of the pieces are lecture, literature, discussion, questions, collaborative activities, media, assessment, objectives, practice, modeling, feedback, and correction, etc.  Most of these are frequently used tools in my kit as a seasoned K-12 teacher.  But you can’t just put the parts together and make something that is alive, the way a good lesson is.  A good lesson can grow something that reproduces.  It can help make the learner into a competent practitioner or even a teacher/trainer of others. 

Precious few of my lessons have been “memorable”.  Far more have been something like wood chips tossed around a park. I want to have effective lessons and the things I am learning this summer are helping me to understand instruction and lesson design on a deeper, more synthesized level.  For example, I am studying Robert Gagne’s Nine Events for learning from our EDU623 text.  (Gagne, Wagner, Golas, & Keller, 2005) 

Gagne says the nine pieces to a good lesson are: 

Gain Attention

Inform Learner of Objective

Stimulate Recall of Prerequisites

Present Stimulus Material

Provide Learning Guidance

Elicit Performance

Provide Feedback

Assess Performance

Enhance Retention and Transfer.

When these pieces are done well within a meaningful lesson or course structure, a lesson can come to life and even cause growth.

I don’t necessarily want my students to remember much about me, though I want them to remember having a sense that I cared about them, and did my job well.   I do want my students to remember what I taught them.  Sometimes when I run into one of my hundreds of former third grade students, I ask them, “Quick, 6 X 7.”  If they answer 42, I say, “I taught you that.”  More than the stuff I teach them, though, I want my students to be able to use mathematical thinking, follow steps, and plan their work, and to understand data that is presented to them in future courses and materials a little better because of my teaching. And I want the pieces of my courses to come together, to come alive, and cause true growth in my students.

Gagne, R., Wagner, W., Golas, K., & Keller, J. (2005). Principles of Instructional Design 5th Edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage Learning.

Do you ever feel like you need more "margin" in your life?

So everything was going just swimmingly on day 3 of EDU523, until my laptop wireless internet card malfunctioned. Thankfully, Dr. Bailey let me borrow her computer for a couple hours, so I was able to try my hand at taking and editing a photo of myself.  I used the dropper tool to fix my messy hair, and edited out the coat rack behind me in the photo.  Turns out, I don’t really need my hair brush, not for online photos anyway. 

I’d like to be able to edit out the clutter that has been running rampant in my house, yard, and personal inner peace this week.  Just too many things are happening at once. But they are “all good”.  Last night I had my house filled with my family, who came to visit our niece.  Meadow is stopping over at our house for a couple of days on her way from her home in Alaska to visit her mother in Sweden.  Meadow is quite a colorful character, and her name totally fits her: refreshing, Bohemian, anachronistic hippie. She lifted her bluesy, beautiful voice and shared some of her original songs with us.

I have been thinking about the 70/20/10 ratio, particularly about the issues that I am hearing my colleagues mention about students with reading and writing weaknesses.  I wonder in what proportion we learn these  skills from the three sources:  from experience, or from interaction with others, and from formal education. Obviously, the rudiments of language we learn orally from parents.  And the basics of literacy we usually learn from primary grade teachers.  But how did most of my peers learn to speak and write really well? 

How did I?  My parents both spoke good English, with only occasional slang.  Interestingly, although my father spoke French (Canadian) before he spoke English, his grammar and vocabulary were better than Mom’s.  Mom completed nursing school, so she had the better “formal” education.  Dad earned his associate's degree in business through correspondence courses.  Mom was an avid reader of non fiction and was a champion speller.  Dad did crossword puzzles.  I think he worked his entire life on increasing his English vocabulary as well as improving himself in many other areas.

My middle school English teacher gave me a good start in diagramming sentences and increased my understanding  of the structure of sentences.  But it was my amazing honors English teacher in high school, Mrs. Margaret Josephs, who had the greatest impact in my ability to communicate with my writing. 

She helped us to take our stories and essays and hone them until they were worthy to read aloud in class. It was wonderful when she would choose one of our pieces to read aloud with her melodious voice and inflections.  She made our intense efforts seem worthwhile. 

I read a devotional blog daily, and the contents of today’s post had to do with asking questions, and the impact that questions have on the hearer.  In summary, the idea is that questions have much more power than the answers.  They leave us vulnerable and humbled, and can help us to learn.  http://www.fischtank.com/   I am seeing that Bonnie and Jane, among other colleagues in EDU523 are both wonderful questioners, and better questioning technique is something I need to use more.  A good question can brings us deeper into the mind of another.  Questions can draw us closer.  Or, on the contrary, difficult questions in a strained relationship can separate us further. 

Have you seen that questions, even those left unanswered, can cause reverberations within ourselves that echo into the future?

 

My First Ever Blog Post

So this is my first ever blog post.  I am pretty excited about it, although I think I’m pretty late in the game.  It’s 2011.  After all, I’m pretty sure Elmo already has his own blog.   I wanted to think of a clever title, but nothing has struck me as yet.  I’ll keep you posted... Wait, that’s IT!

I have followed a couple of blogs for a few years, the first of which was written by our younger daughter who chronicled some of her experiences in medical school.  emilymedstudent.blogspot.org    As Emily got further into the program, her articles became fewer and farther between, but I remain her biggest fan.  (Emily graduated in 2010 and is now a second year emergency resident in Syracuse, NY.)

Day one of EDU 523 was a good one.  It was really nice to be part of a group of adults in a face to face class.   There were so many college and graduate level instructors there that I felt kind of like I had snuck into a faculty meeting.   
After having taken 4 or 5 online courses, it was interesting to hear the instructors talk about the teaching side of an online course. Ironically, the only course I will not be taking online at Post University is this course on Designing and Delivering Online Instruction.   Some of the concerns they expressed were that they were afraid students sometimes had a “surrogate” student take tests for them.  None of my courses have had tests associated with them.  I wish they did.  I much prefer taking quizzes and tests over writing papers and designing projects.  Really.  The instructors also talked about other kinds of plagiarism and I found out the university has some technological ways of detecting such things. There was some discussion about students trying to sneak late assignments onto a discussion board. 

It was such a natural extension of my Post University experience to begin to learn about an “instructor’s” perspective on Blackboard.  We got to play around in a “sandbox,” which really meant we got to begin to experiment with designing little pieces of an online course.  In keeping with the metaphor, we could “dig” in.  I needed to “sift” through some of the parts that didn’t seem to apply to the unit that was already beginning to “form” in my mind.   I could see that many of my colleagues were being exposed to Blackboard for the first time and that they were a bit more overwhelmed than I.

I am also enrolled in the course on Instructional design, so the ADDIE model of instructional design is very fresh in my mind.  The acronym refers to a linear progression of the following steps in design:  model of instruction Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement, and Evaluate. It is quite serendipitous to be taking these courses together.  Although I have taught K-12 for 17 years, I am finding many gaps in my own understanding of designing instruction.  And I also find that even the very basic things bear repeating.  It is often in the basics of instruction where we fail our students.  The following link contains much more information about instructional design and I would encourage you to turn to page 3 of the booklet and see the relationship that is suggested in one iteration of the ADDIE model. The evaluation step is sort of the hub of the wheel and there is the implication of revision in between each step.   http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED477517.pdf. (Gustafson, 2002)   I find that frequent revision of instructional design is necessary in this profession.  While we don’t want to keep reinventing the wheel, we do want to make meaningful improvements and adaptations for the changes in the road our students are on.

Gustafson, K. a. (2002). Survey of Instructional Development Models. . Syracuse, NY: ERIC Clearinghouse.

 It is so easy to see things from our own perspectives and forget WHO we are designing and planning for.  For example, the online portion of Post University courses usually contain planned redundancy in order to help the students find several ways to get to the information they need.

I liked hearing how much the Post instructors emphasized keeping in mind the needs of the students.