Thinking About my Thinking: Life After CEP 811

 

Spirit and Consciousness of Man by Robert Fludd

With this blog posting, I finish my work in CEP 811: Adapting Innovative Technology in Education. This class has been one of the most challenging education courses I have taken. The prominent role that maker education has played in this class was a challenge for me. As a social studies educator, I struggled to find the relevancy of many of the activities in this course, especially the maker projects to my content area. Toward the end of the course, I began to see the light. Much of the research and new ideas around maker education were fundamentally about creative thinking and creative problem solving which, in my estimation, are universal across the spectrum of disciplines and content areas. Creativity is essential in all academic enterprises and is now the most highly prized commodity spoken of in terms of human capital and where education needs to take students.

I now have new schemas, which have changed how I view student empowerment, learning spaces, and assessment. Empowering students means giving them choice, at least to some degree, within what type of task they perform in their learning process. Technology is the gateway to making this a reality. Allowing students to play is powerful. It requires a teacher to surrender a level of control not seen in traditional education environments. But providing space, temporally and spatially, for students to have a sense of play in their own learning touches upon a powerful force, which awakens curiosity in a very fundamental and human way. Finally, when assessment is limited to the domain of the teacher a huge opportunity is missed. By including students in the assessment process in a meaningful way, students can develop an awareness of their own intellectual growth as learners.

My mind is humming with ideas. With this inertia, I see my practice as a teacher in new ways and I believe my teaching has been reinvigorated. Using assessment as a means to expand student metacognition, giving students space for play and creativity, empowering students with choice—these are just a few of the ways I see my teaching being impacted by what I have learned in CEP 811.

Assessing Creative Thinking: Assessment as Scaffolding for Metacognition

Photograph by Jean David & Anne Laure

Can creativity and creative thinking be assessed? Renowned educator Grant Wiggins observed that “educators sometimes say that they shy from assessing creative thought for fear of inhibiting students” (Wiggins, 2012). In CEP 811: Adapting Innovative Technology to Education, I have considered new thinking and research on assessing learning in the context of maker education.

As an educator charged with the assessment of student learning, I would assess creative problem solving during maker-inspired activities by developing a rubric/journal hybrid that makes creative and critical thinking the centerpiece of assessment. This rubric addresses formative assessment, summative assessment, and student self-assessment. The rubric portion of this assessment is to determine the student’s level of mastery of targeted concepts and student growth during the process. One of the aims of this assessment tool is to make a student’s thinking visible not only to the teacher but also, most importantly, to the students themselves.

The rubric features opportunities for student input. The teacher determines most of the criteria for the rubric, however, there are open slots for the class as a whole to determine criteria. This practice sets the foundation for students to play an intimate role in thinking about assessment as an inextricable part of their own learning.

Students assess their learning process daily with the rubric criteria and a brief written reflection on their own learning each day. A higher value is placed on the quality of self-reflection than any measure in the criteria of the rubric. While the rubric serves to measure student growth, its more important function is to provide a framework for students to develop skills in making their own thinking process visible to themselves. The journal portion of this assessment provides students opportunities to reflect on their learning by writing an explanation for how they assessed themselves on at least two different criteria in the rubric.

Theoretical Basis for this Approach to Assessment

This assessment device as a whole seeks to use the rubric a starting point for students to reflect on their own learning, practicing the act of making their own thinking and learning visible to their own eyes. According to Wiggins, one of the goals in a creative oriented assignment is to move a student to “self assess and self adjust on their own” and that is what my assessment attempt to do.

The other inspiration behind my focus is from research I read earlier in CEP 811. Sam Redding’s Personal Competencies has had great effect on my thinking of the emotional and cognitive facets of student learning. One of Redding’s personal competencies is metacognitive competency. In writing about metacognitive competency Redding states that:

Metacognition is commonly defined as “thinking about thinking,” but a competency that is engaged for purposeful learning requires more than introspective musing. In the context of schooling, metacognition is important to the teacher as well as the student because it is both taught and learned… Self-regulation of learning, then, is an aspect of metacognition that can be taught, learned, and practiced. In this sense, metacognition is a tool for problem solving, and new learning tasks present the student with a problem to be solved—how to achieve mastery (Redding, 2014).

This is what my assessment seeks to achieve—provide students with scaffolding to learn “self-regulation of learning.” When students acquire the skills that enable them to do so they have, by my estimation, achieved the pinnacle of intellectual empowerment. That is what I want most for my students.

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References

Wiggins, Grant. (2012, February 3). On assessing for creativity: yes you can, and yes you should. Retrieved from https://grantwiggins.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/on-assessing-for-creativity-yes-you-can-and-yes-you-should/

Redding, S. (2014). Personal Competencies in Personalized Learning. Center on Innovations in Learning, Temple University. Retrieved from http://eric.ed.gov.proxy2.cl.msu.edu/?id=ED558063

Democratize Learning!

What does it mean to democratize learning? The idea of democratizing learning is, by default, student centered since students are the learners in education. To democratize learning, then, is to provide students a discourse COMMUNITY supportive of students constructing meaning as individuals and collectively as a community of learners. Maker education gives students AGENCY by giving them a voice in their own education and learning. Maker education embraces DIVERSITY of thought and background providing an environment where all perspectives have value. I like to call this trifecta CAD (Community, Agency, Diversity). Please check out my nifty infographic on how to democratize learning through Maker Education.

 

Dreaming of a Dynamic Classroom

I currently do not have a classroom so I decided to redesign one of the classrooms in which I did my student teaching. The particular classroom I am thinking of was composed of individual student desks arranged in the conventional manner—in rows facing forward toward the white marker board that doubled as the projection screen. My supervising teacher had two desks arranged in an L shape in the corner with an additional cabinet of drawers behind the desks. It was a fortress from which a teacher could survey their students as they quietly worked on their worksheets individually.

My redesign seeks to facilitate an environment that attempts to embrace social constructivism where “learners participate in a community of learners and construct meaning from the discourse practices in that community” (O’Donnell, 2012). The design of this classroom serves as a space where collaboration between students is not constricted but enabled by the flexibility of the furniture as well offering different spaces for different types of learning activities and experiences. The students’ desks and chairs are all on locking caster wheels with the desks seating two students per desk. I have all the desks facing in another to create units of four students but the desks and chairs can be easily repositioned to match any particular class-wide learning activity.

All furniture rest on locking caster wheels allowing the classroom to be configured to the dynamic needs of a community of collaborative learners.

The teacher’s desk and chair can also be easily moved to accommodate various classroom arrangements. This mobility provides a dynamic in which the teacher can embed themselves with the students, easily moving from one group to the next or working one on one with individual students. Because the teacher’s desk and chair are mobile the teacher can easily open space in front of the white dry-erase marker board which will allow students and groups to use the whiteboard as a brainstorming medium and other student centered learning exercises.

Along the outside wall is a long counter space that can be used for various creative endeavors. For example, a group of students may elect to construct an interactive poster as an expression of their understanding, synthesis, and conclusions on a given historical research project. There is a round conference table for either impromptu student groups or teacher consultations. On the side opposite the outside wall is a library in the corner with comfortable chairs for reading. The library holds a combination of permanent books on historical thinking skills and practice and a rotation of books, which contain pertinent primary sources and essays, related to the current unit being taught.

Since this school has a one-to-one ratio of laptops per student there is no need for a classroom computer. By utilizing the Google suite of productivity tools, students will be able to collaborate virtually as well and receive timely feedback from their teacher on individual assignments and collaborative projects.

My redesign does not come cheep. In this scenario all furniture is being replaced and additional furniture is being added such as the library shelving unit and chairs. The estimated cost of this redesign is $5,370. Such a redesign would have to ride the wave of a newly approved technology bond passed by the community and be implemented during the summer break.

Adapting Makey Makey in a Social Studies Classroom

I was told by one of my professors in CEP 811, Adapting Innovative Technology in Education, that I would be challenged to think outside of the box. Her promise did not go unfulfilled. At first I was vexed as to how I would  use the Makey Makey in a History lesson. Thinking outside of the box comes easy for my wife who has been an art teacher for over a decade suggested an interactive map. I thought this was a brilliant idea but making it happen in a way that would genuinely engage students in the history and geography concepts I wanted to target seemed a bit of a stretch at first. After an online collaborative conversation with some of my peers and professors it all started to come together into this lesson which uses social constructivism as it’s foundation. This lesson aims to provide students with a learning experience in, which they construct meaning and knowledge individually and together with their peers. Any comments or feedback is not only welcomed but embraced.