Mind Blowing Education

Piaget - how well you know me

2010-03-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

I've been reading a lot of Piaget in the last couple weeks and I don't really enjoy it, gotta be honest. I like his observations of his children, but when he starts analyzing it I kind of lose it. Anyway, I've been reading about the development of object concept and permanence and it's really cute to think about kids thinking that things cease to exist when they are covered up with something. He told a cute (but kind of mean) story of his son who was extremely attached to his bottle. So one day Piaget had the bottle and the kid could see it and was getting whimpery. So Piaget puts his arm in front of the bottle so the kid can't see it. The kid stops whimpering. Piaget moves his arm away from the bottle and the kid starts whimpering again. Piaget does it a couple times until the kid gets fed up and starts screaming with anger! Mean trick to play on a kid!

So after I read the book, I was doing other homework and eating delicious dark chocolate covered pomegranate seeds. Yummy! After awhile I knew I should stop eating them, but I couldn't stop as long as they were in front of me so I put them behind my external hard drive, only an arms length away from my chair. I was hoping that by putting them out of my sight, I would forget about them! And it worked, miraculously. I completely forgot that they were there until this morning when I was the corner of the package sticking out. Thanks Piaget!

Good Quotes

2009-11-23T13:55:00.000-08:00

I've been catching up on my reading and coming across many great quotes, I thought I'd share them. Forgive me if I don't cite them all APA style.

...the teacher is one who acquires authority through a compact of trust in which the teacher seeks to extend the powers of the learner and promises to abridge them only transiently and to the end of extending them.
- David Hawkins, What it Means to Teach

They thoroughly understand the havoc created by substituting impressive-sounding words for clear statements of what you are talking about.

I need time for my confusion.

Exploring ideas can only be to the good, even if it takes time. Wrong ideas, moreover, can only be productive. Any wrong idea that is corrected provides far more depth than if one never had a wrong idea to begin with.

-Eleanor Duckworth, The Having of Wonderful Ideas

I especially like that last one taken in context of eternal, spiritual learning. Wrong ideas can be painful but they can only lead us to a deeper understanding of life.

Dalai Lama

2009-10-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

Here are some of my notes and observations from the conference I attended with the Dalai Lama last week.

The first thing I noticed was how reverent everyone was when he walked in the room. Everyone stood up and waited silently for him to walk to his seat. It struck me because that is the same kind of respect that we give to our prophet when he enters the room. The Dalai Lama greeted the audience and the other panel members with bows.
He gave a short speech about how self-centeredness and selfishness create distress in our lives. The remedy for this is compassion and empathy. Self-confidence and peace come from being compassionately minded. He was emphatic when speaking about inner beauty. He said that too many people were concerned with what's on the outside, but it's not that, it's inner beauty. He also talked about how so often we separate the world into we and they. He said that there is no they, it's all we. We are all connected. (I loved watching him wave his hands around to add emphasis and his accent, though hard to understand sometimes, was fun to listen to and adds character to what I remember him saying. inna beauty, inna beauty :)

In another session he said that peace is not the absence of violence, but comes with an effort to have compassion. He told a story about meeting with someone, possibly in jail but I wasn't clear on that. The Dalai Lama asked the guy if he was in danger and he said yes, in danger of losing compassion for the Chinese. This as an illustration of the importance of having compassion for everyone. It was one of the best examples of loving your enemy I'd heard.

He said that by nature, women are more caring of offspring and they have more capacity for compassion. Therefore women should take a bigger role in advocating for compassion.

Some funny quotes/ rephrases-
The school system was not created by God so it's not a fixed thing.
Even those who don't have religion need to educated about the inner peace that leads to happiness.
Giving and receiving affection is human nature. If you kiss a diamond ring or money, there is no opportunity to receive affection back.
Brains are the same all over the world, so we can use the same tools (implying training the mind for meditation and compassion)

Funny story. I don't remember how it started, but he told us about a time when he was younger. There was a parrot who was fed by a certain monk every day. The parrot would hear his footsteps and perk up. After he was fed, the monk would pet the parrot and the parrot showed appreciation and reciprocation. They had a friendship that the Dalai Lama was jealous of. He wanted also to have the parrot reciprocate to him! (Here he paused, remarking that this had been a selfish wish) He fed the parrot nuts several times, but the parrot never reciprocated, never showed any appreciation. One day the Dalai Lama lost his temper and he took a stick and destroyed the relationship. He didn't say any more than that so I don't know what he did, but I guess it doesn't really matter.

There was a question about how much training someone would need to have before they can teach meditation or compassion to others. The Dalai Lama's answer was that a teacher needs to embody what he or she teaches.

I loved listening to him. He radiates peace and compassion. He was funny and insightful. I'm so glad that I got to attend this conference.

Websites

2009-09-16T10:55:00.001-07:00

An interesting video explaining mirror neurons and their implications in how we interact.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/3204/01.html

An optical illusion cache. Talk about crazy!

http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

Eliminate one or two answers and make your best guess

2009-09-14T13:27:00.000-07:00

During the discussion last week in my Globalized Learning class, we talked about silent connections. They are the synaptic connections that we've made but have forgotten about or can't access. We talked about learning and forgetting languages as well as testing practices. I wanted to talk about multiple choice tests. I loved those tests all the way up through college because, unless there was a e) none of the above, the correct answer had to be on the list. When I studied for multiple choice tests, I never studied to the point where I could tell you the correct answer off the top of my head. I studied so that the words and definitions would be familiar enough that when the correct answer was presented to me, I would be able to pick it out fairly easily. Sometimes I couldn't tell you why it was the right answer, only that it looked right. I knew the right answer was somewhere in my head somewhere, I just had to re-establish that connection. Essay questions required a completely different style of study!

I know I'm kind of an assessment kick right now, but it's amazing how many multiple choice tests determine our academic fates. The SAT, ACT, GRE, etc. Wouldn't it be more telling to get rid of the multiple choice and have analogies be fill in the blank? Imagine this: apple: orange as hands : ________ with maybe a description of how it relates. It would certainly tell more about the student than their ability to pick, A, B, C, or D.

The Having of Wonderful Ideas

2009-09-14T11:34:00.001-07:00

I'm sorry that I haven't posted in 2 weeks. What with the 3-day weekend, during which I went sky-diving, and a large pre-assessment that I procrastinated, I haven't been stress-free enough to write anything. But now.....

I'm taking a class called "The Having of Wonderful Ideas" taught by none other than the world renowned Eleanor Duckworth. I know that I read an article or two by her during my undergrad at BYU, but I couldn't tell you what they were about. I always thought that Duckworth. E, was a man. Imagine my surprise :) If you've never heard of her, perhaps you've heard of one of her teachers, the one and only, Jean Piaget? She did graduate work with him in Europe somewhere. Why is it that when we learn about significant philosophical developments, it always seemed to happen hundreds of years ago when in reality, Piaget was still directing a center in Geneva until 1980?

From what I've understood in the one class we've had so far, the idea for her class is make thinking an important part of education and learning. While that sounds absolutely to go without saying, what I found in my two short years teaching and 12 years of schooling is that for the majority of the time, thinking isn't crucial to learning. Instead, more often we value knowing, which actually takes less effort. The Having of Wonderful Ideas gets rid of prescriptive curriculum and the idea of the teacher as "the one through whom all knowledge must pass." It advocates for listening to students think and being truly interested in what they have to say, their ideas and interpretations.

As most of the articles have acknowledged, slowing down the pace of a class long enough to allow for deep exploration and experimentation of any one topic is not possible in the standards-tethered, assessment-driven, time-crunch, OMG - what about AYP school environment. It's easy to mock from a distance, but I remember what it was like to have that pressure. End of level testing is on everyone's mind from the time the kids step through the door. Curriculum is planned around it. Class pacing is set to try to finish before the test, which rarely happens. I felt a lot of frustration from many teachers, but especially the science department, that there just wasn't enough time to get all of that information crammed down these poor kids' throats.

So, back to thinking and ideas. I don't remember many experiences in school where I was asked to think. I liked questions that asked for specific information that I could easily find in the text. My nemesis was the "critical thinking" question. It was always labeled too, so I knew when I was being asked something without an obvious answer. By 5th grade, my thinking was something along the lines of, "Who cares what I think about why Bobby ran away from home? How can I know the answer to that? I'm not Bobby!" All I really wanted was for someone else to tell me the right answer so that I could know. I was good at knowing. What I wasn't good at was making the effort to think! Not until my 12th grade AP Literature teacher laughed and said "Come on guys, think!" I heard that several times in each 53 minute class period. "What? You want me to think? Ok, here goes" and I'd mentally hunker down and start thinking. It took a lot of time to think. We talked about the book we were reading and were asked to look deeper and listen to insights of our classmates. Our class was very discussion based and thus fairly non-typical, to the dismay of our principal. He came to observe several times a year for several years. After 3 years of 100% pass rate on the AP Lit exam, he finally left our teacher alone.

To be a good writer, you have to be able to come up with your own ideas. The AP Literature exam tested us on our ability to analyze poems and stories and to come up with good ideas about what they mean. Is it so impossible to do that for other subjects as well?

I know this is really long but I just wanted to share the quote that sparked this post. In the essay I, Thou, It by David Hawkins in the book The Informed Vision, he writes," What we can say, I think, and what we clearly ought to provide for, is that the child should learn how to internalize the function which the adult has been providing. So in a sense, you become educated when you become your own teacher." I like the sound of that!

And thus it begins

2009-09-01T15:19:00.000-07:00

Class starts tomorrow but I've done the reading so I feel somewhat prepared. Over the past week, I've been oriented to more than just the expectations of my program, but to an entirely new system of order.
In the book Ender's Game, Ender commands what becomes the most successful military unit at his school. His group is so successful in part because he orients them differently than the other units. The main difference that I remember, without actually going back to check, is that he made each sub-commander autonomous over his or her own smaller group. There was not a centralized game plan but a chance for each group to fight and adapt to changing circumstances. It was a break from tradition and worked well for them.

BYU has a very centralized organization. There is one website to which all of the departments are connected. All of the classes are listed in one place. The schedule for the whole university is planned at least 1 year in advance, probably more. There is one centralized place for ID's, information and in general, the whole campus is more or less connected.

Harvard is pretty much the opposite of that. I feel like I've been thrown into Ender's army. The first shock for me was to discover how segmented the campus is. Granted that it's in the middle of a city but there are major streets, shops and restaurants placed between buildings. The school of education is 3 blocks or so from Harvard Yard, what I originally thought was "Harvard". I wandered through the law school, dorms and various museums before finding a map that showed me where I had gone astray.

Perhaps the greatest indicator of the disjointed feeling here is exemplified in the website, which is extremely frustrating to use. Not only does each school have it's own webpage, many of the departments within a school have their own pages, not connected to the school page. Links to essential places are difficult, if not impossible to find. The only way to find a page for certain is to click on the link that some helpful employee sent out in an email 2 months ago. The link invariably takes you to a login page that will never remember your information so it has to be typed in every time, nor will it automatically log you in to the website in general. After logging in to a page for financial information, I'll be asked to login on the exact same screen to enter another page, like the one for gym memberships. Needless to say, the repetition has helped me quickly memorize my ID number, but is also becoming a real pain in the neck!

My advisor told me that Harvard is not a place for people who need a program with each step outlined clearly. The word he used to describe it was "smorgasbord". This is a place where people who know what they want have to reach out and grab it! In kindergarten I was taught that grabbing wasn't nice, but I guess I'll have to let that one go for now. I intend to "grab" as much information as I can.

A great resource that I've found so far is called Usable Knowledge. According to the website, it is a place for connecting research and practice for leaders in education. It has a ton of relevant research and articles by top scientists. The address is http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/ or you can google Usable Knowledge.
I recommend the Learning and Development or Teaching and Curriculum tabs as very pertinent. The article on Social Perspective Taking is very interesting, especially for anyone dealing with adolescents with emotional or social difficulties.

New Endeavor

2009-08-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

Being new to this whole blogging thing, I'm not sure where to begin. The purpose of this blog is to fulfill a commitment to a friend and to give myself a chance to reflect on what I learn in my classes. I'm in the Mind, Brain and Education masters program at Harvard. It's only 2 semesters long, which hardly seems like enough time to really master anything, but I'll take what I can get. What little I've read so far has been so incredible, mind blowing even.

My aim this year is to understand differences in our brains and look for ways to strengthen the capacity of our brains to learn. I plan to use this blog to share ideas and resources that I find that might be useful to a classroom teacher. As I am a special education teacher, with a whole 2 years under my belt, I will probably focus more on techniques for struggling students. I hope that this blog will be useful to others beyond myself. . Since I'm not teaching this year, I welcome all questions and feedback. I want to know what you think will be applicable and effective for your students.

So, here we go.