The Ultimate Education Reform: Messy Learning & Problem Solving

Have you ever gone to the doctor with a rather vague problem? The kind of problem that has no obvious solution? “Doctor, my elbow hurts.” “Doctor, I have a runny nose.” “Doctor, look at this rash.” From that ambiguity, we expect our physicians to narrow down something that could have a thousand origins to the one specific cause, then make it all better with one specific treatment. We tell the mechanic: “My car is making a funny noise, can you fix it?” A quarterback asks: “What’s the best play to run, coach?” We might ask a decorator: “I need help redoing this room. We might ask friends: “What do you think is the best car for me to buy?” Some of our ambiguous problems are mundane: “What toothpaste should I use?” From our first activity in the morning until the last thing we do before we visit dreamland each night, we are constantly engaged in a series of problems to solve — some easy, some hard. So what’s this got to do with school? I love ill-structured problems. In pursuit of the messy answer

Dispelling some misunderstandings about PBL I spend a good chunk of time on Twitter, often participating in or lurking on a Twitter chat. I have seen project based learning — PBL — a topic of discussion, but at the same time, I see a lot of claims about PBL that are just not true. What bothers me about these claims is not that they are wrong but that these misconceptions lead to further problems when implementing PBL. “I do projects all the time.” “I don’t have time to do a PBL project and all the scaffolding needed and lessons.” “I have to focus on standardized test prep and don’t have time for PBL.” “Students will copy each other’s products.” Obviously, there are many more concerns and misunderstanding teachers may still have about PBL. Andrew Miller serves on the national faculty for the Buck Institute for Education and ASCD.

Related Pearltrees Crowdsourcing Information in the Classroom I was facilitating a workshop and one of the participants said Daniel Pink’s Drive was the most powerful and influential book she has read this year. I immediately ordered it on Amazon, and I’m thrilled I did! Pink explores human motivation and makes the argument that “for 21st century work, we need to upgrade to autonomy, mastery and purpose” (218). The economy is rapidly changing and jobs are more heuristic - demanding that employees learn, discover, understand, and solve problems on their own. As I reflect the current state of education, I wonder if this generation, which is being labeled the “lost generation,” is developing the skills needed to excel in a country that no longer needs factory workers, but rather innovative thinkers. I wanted to experiment with an idea I had while reading Pink’s book. Crowdsourcing Information Instead of Lecturing In a continual effort to circumvent the traditional lecture model, I decided to try crowdsourcing information about Shakespearean sonnets.

How to Foster Collaboration and Team Spirit Teaching Strategies Flickr: woodleywonderworks By Thom Markham Once they get to the working world, most students, in almost any job, will collaborate as a member of a team. And every student needs to be prepared for that environment — partly for employment opportunity, but mainly because the deeply embedded mental model of learning and creating as an individual process is obsolete. But collaboration doesn’t necessarily come naturally to students. Second, import and adapt the high-performance principles common in the work world to teams in the classroom. Examine individual strengths within collaborative context. Thom Markham is a psychologist, school redesign consultant, and the author of the Project Based Learning Design and Coaching Guide: Expert tools for inquiry and innovation for K-12 educators. Related Explore: collaboration

Constructivism (social or not!) Giving Good Praise to Girls: What Messages Stick How to praise kids: It’s a hot topic for many parents and educators. A lot of the conversation around it has stemmed from studies by Carol Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford who has been researching this specific topic for many years. “My research shows that praise for intelligence or ability backfires,” said Dweck, who co-authored a seminal research paper on the effects of praise on motivation and performance. “What we’ve shown is that when you praise someone, say, ‘You’re smart at this,’ the next time they struggle, they think they’re not. It’s really about praising the process they engage in, not how smart they are or how good they are at it, but taking on difficulty, trying many different strategies, sticking to it and achieving over time.” But what some might not know is that this paradox is strongest for girls. “Of all the subjects on earth, people think math is the most fixed,” Dweck said. [RELATED READING: Girls and Math: Busting the Stereotype] Katrina Schwartz

What Project-Based Learning Is — and What It Isn’t Screenshot/High Tech High The term “project-based learning” gets tossed around a lot in discussions about how to connect students to what they’re learning. Teachers might add projects meant to illustrate what students have learned, but may not realize what they’re doing is actually called “project-oriented learning.” And it’s quite different from project-based learning, according to eighth grade Humanities teacher Azul Terronez. Terronez, who teaches at High Tech Middle, a public charter school in San Diego, Calif says that when an educator teaches a unit of study, then assigns a project, that is not project-based learning because the discovery didn’t arise from the project itself. “If you inspire them to care about it and draw parallels with their world, then they care and remember.” For Terronez, the goal is to always connect classroom learning to its applications in the outside world. When Terronez assigns a writing project, it’s rarely just for a grade. Related

Cognitive 5 Ways Students Can Create Audio Slideshows Somewhere between a PowerPoint presentation and a full-fledged video is the audio slideshow. Creating audio slideshows can be a good way to add meaning to slides that otherwise might not mean much without a presenter. Here are some ways that students can create audio slideshows. Narrable is a neat service for creating short narrated slideshows. To create an audio slideshow on Narrable start by uploading some pictures that you either want to talk about or have music played behind. After the pictures are uploaded you can record a narration for each picture through your computer's microphone or by calling into your Narrable's access phone number. UtellStory is a service for creating and sharing audio slideshows. Present.me is a handy service for recording video and or audio to accompany your slides. In my mind one of the original audio slideshow tools is Animoto.

What You Need to Be an Innovative Educator Innovation isn't a matter of will. Like most things worth creating, critical ingredients pre-exist the product. In the case of innovation in education, many of those necessary ingredients are simpler and more accessible than they might seem -- which is, of course, good news to an industry already up to its nostrils in oh my gosh for the kids we must have this for the kids yesterday for the kids admonishments. Whether you're innovating a curriculum, an app, a social media platform for learning, an existing instructional strategy, or something else entirely, innovation in education is a significant catalyst for change in education. If our data is correct, you're probably a teacher. And if you're a teacher, you're probably interested in innovation in the classroom, so let's start there -- with project-based learning, for example. Project-based learning is an example of innovation, but probably not the way you'd expect. PBL promotes innovation in education by making room for it. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

This is an example of Bruner's notion of "problem finding"-- encourage learners to discover problems, and that will give them the opportunity to solve the problems. by tomparmelee Apr 24