Education 3.0 and the Pedagogy (Andragogy, Heutagogy) of Mobile Learning

The evolution of the web from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 and now to Web 3.0 can be used a metaphor of how education should also be evolving, as a movement based on the evolution from Education 1.0 to Education 3.0.  I discussed this in Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning and implementing Education 3.0.

Many educators are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning and implementing Education 3.0. This post compares the developments of the Internet-Web to those of education.  The Internet has become an integral thread of the tapestries of most societies throughout the globe.  The web influences people’s way of thinking, doing and being; and people influence the development and content of the web.  The Internet of today has become a huge picture window and portal into human perceptions, thinking, and behavior.  Logically, then, it would seem that schools would follow suit in mimicking what is happening via the Internet to assist children and youth to function, learn, work, and play in a healthy, interactive, and pro-social manner in their societies-at-large.

Most schools are still living within and functioning through an Education 1.0 model.  They are focusing on an essentialist-based curriculum with related ways of teaching and testing.

Similar to Web 2.0, Education 2.0 includes more interaction between the teacher and student; student to student; and student to content/expert.  Some educators have moved into a more connected, creative Education 2.0 through using cooperative learning, global learning projects, shared wikis, blogs and other social networking in the classroom.

Education 3.0 is a connectivist, heutagogical approach to teaching and learning.  The teachers, learners, networks, connections, media, resources, tools create a a unique entity that has the potential to meet individual learners’, educators’, and even societal needs.  Many resources for Education 3.0 are literally freely available for the taking.

Source: http://www.slideshare.net/moravec/toward-society-30-a-new-paradigm-for-21st-century-education-presentation?type=powerpoint

Taking this one step further or from another angle, moving from Education 1.0 to Education 3.0 can be compared to moving from Pedagogy/Essentialism/Instructivism to Heutagogy/Constructivism/Connectivism.  This can be looked at as a continuum going from Pedagogy to Andragogy to Heutagogy (PAH).  The following graphic describes these three approaches to teaching. (I understand that educators may differ in the descriptions and definitions especially that of pedagogy).

http://www.blog.lindymckeown.com/?p=52

This translates into moving from an education approach driven by essentialism or instructivism to one that is based on constructivism and connectivism.

Essentialism is defined as:

Essentialism tries to instill all students with the most essential or basic academic knowledge and skills and character development. In the essentialist system, students are required to master a set body of information and basic techniques for their grade level before they are promoted to the next higher grade.  Essentialists argue that classrooms should be teacher-oriented. The teachers or administrators decide what is most important for the students to learn with little regard to the student interests. The teachers also focus on achievement test scores as a means of evaluating progress. Source: http://www.siue.edu/~ptheodo/foundations/essentialism.html

Instructivism can be described as:

In the instructivist learning theory, knowledge exists independently of the learner, and is transferred to the student by the teacher. As a teacher-centered model, the instructivist view is exhibited by the dispensing of information to the student through the lecture format. This theory requires the student to passively accept information and knowledge as presented by the instructor. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1857834

These descriptions fit the characteristics of an Education 1.0 or a traditional pedagogical teaching framework.

The andragogical, more constructivist orientation takes on the characteristics of Education or Web 2.0 where the principles of active, experiential, authentic, relevant, socially-networked learning experiences are built into the class or course structure.

The heutagogical, connectivist orientation is closely aligned with Education 3.0.

In a heutagogical approach to teaching and learning, learners are highly autonomous and self-determined and emphasis is placed on development of learner capacity and capability. The renewed interest in heutagogy is partially due to the ubiquitousness of Web 2.0, and the affordances provided by the technology. With its learner-centered design, Web 2.0 offers an environment that supports a heutagogical approach, most importantly by supporting development of learner-generated content and learner self-directedness in information discovery and in defining the learning path.  Source: http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1076

Even though heutagogy is usually defined and described for adult learners, given these times where we are living with open education resources and information abundance, learners as young as the elementary level have the potential to engage in educational experiences based on heutagogy.   In other words, they can engage in self-determined and self-driven learning where they are not only deciding the direction of their learning journey but they can also produce content that adds value and worth to the related content area or field of study.

Choosing the Teaching Orientation

It should not be as simple as stating that one, as an educator, uses one teaching orientation over another.  Educators need to examine what they are teaching and the population to whom they are teaching.  For example, procedural knowledge such as how to do first aid or fix a car; or a fixed body of knowledge such as human anatomy (for the medical field) or the study of law is typically best taught through a more teacher directed, “pedagogical” style. It becomes teaching with intentionality and strategically using the teaching and learning philosophies and approaches to reach desired outcomes.

Applications to Mobile Learning

The Pedagogy of Mobile Learning

With the idea that pedagogy is in line with a instructivist-essentialism method of teaching-learning, mobile learning in this category typically falls into the dissemination of content knowledge via apps.  [In my opinion, there are way too many apps developed for education fall into this category, with start-ups trying to take advantage of the use of iDevices in educational settings.]  Their goal is to directly teach students content knowledge or a skill whereby they can repeat and/or be tested on the content provided to them through interacting with the apps.  I have classified these apps as worksheets on steroids.  Typical examples include flash card types of apps like Netter’s Musculoskeletal Flash Cards. The U.S. Constitution – Flash Card Trivia, and Math Drills. I use a simple criteria to determine their efficacy, “Would the learner choose to use the app if given the choice or use it during his/her free time?”

As stated above, though, there are cases in which a body of knowledge needs to be learned by the students.  Some more engaging, interactive apps are available (and probably more interesting) to the learner.  Examples include:  Solar Walk™ – 3D Solar System model, Frog Dissection, and highly interactive eBooks.

The Andragogy of Mobile Learning

Again, although Andragogy has been described for teaching adult learning, we can extract his basic principles and apply them to the Andragogy of Mobile Learning for most age groups. Many project-based learning characteristics (authentic, real world problems; networked learning; use of collaborative digital tools) would fit under the category of the andragogy of mobile learning. Here are some resources and examples:

• Project Based Learning In Hand
• 15 Tools For Better Project-Based Learning
• Mobilizing Creativity: Celllphones for Project-Based Learning

The following presentation demonstrates project-based learning with mobile devices in a High School Science class.

The Heutagogy of Mobile Learning

Creating a heutagogical-based mobile learning environment is in line with some of the recommendations from the ECAR National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2011 report:

Use technology in more transformative ways, such as participatory and collaborative interactions and for higher-level teaching and learning that is engaging and relevant to students’ lives and future plans. Use technology more to extend learning beyond the classroom.

The learners in a heutagogy of mobile learning environment:

• Determine what they want to learn and develop their own learning objectives for their learning, based on a broad range of desired course outcomes.
• Use their own mobile learning devices and technologies to decide how they will learn.
• Form their own learning communities possibly using social networking tools suggested and/or set up by the educator.  Possible networks, many with corresponding apps, include: Facebook, Twitter, Edmodo, Instagram, Bloggin sites, Youtube, etc.
• Utilize the expertise of the educator and other members of their learning communities to suggest and introduce content-related resources.
• Utilize the expertise of the educator and other members of their learning communities to suggest Web 2.0 and other online tools for that the students could possibly use to demonstrate and produce learning artifacts.
• Demonstrate their learning through methods and means that work best for them.  It could include using their mobile devices to Blog, create Photo Essays, do Screencasts, make Videos or Podcasts, draw, sing, dance, etc.
• Take the initiative to seek feedback from the instructor and their peers.  It is their choice to utilize that feedback or not.

Some general learning activities that have the potential to be introduced by the education using a heutagogical approach include:

• Forming their Own Interest-Driven Personal Learning Networks (PLNs)
• Curating Online Resources
• Designing Apps or Games
• Developing a broad array of possible course assignments from which a learner can choose.  See the DS106 Assignment Bank as an example.
• Additional suggestions can be found in 20 strategies for learner interactions in mobile #MOOC.

Here is a slide deck that I prepared to present the concepts and ideas I presented above.

It’s All About Connection

A good amount of education-related social media in the past few months has focused in being a connected educator.  The context of these discussions is about the educator being connected to other educators via social networks and developing their personal learning networks.

But the primary, most important aspect of a connected educator is one who connects deeply and authentically with each and every student in his/her class.  As Rita Pierson notes in her powerful Ted Talk, Every Child Needs a Champion:

Kids don’t learn from people they don’t like.  Teachers should leave legacies of relationships that can’t disappear.

Sir Ken Robinson also discusses the importance of the student-teacher relationship in Why We Need to Reform Education Now.

To improve our schools, we have to humanize them and make education personal to every student and teacher in the system. Education is always about relationships. Great teachers are not just instructors and test administrators. They are mentors, coaches, motivators, and lifelong sources of inspiration to their students.

All young people have unique talents and interests. In his moving poem, Malcolm London argues that education has to connect with the real lives of young people and not stifle their hopes and dreams.

To do so, teachers need to become a type of ethnographer of their students, which I discuss in more detail in Teaching as a Human – Humane Process.

As teachers know, every class they teach is different, every student in each of these classes is different and unique.  Good teaching entails seeing (really seeing) every student in the classroom, getting to know each of them as the individuals they really are and deserve to be. (Disclaimer:  I know this is difficult, if not impossible, for educator who work with hundreds of students at any given time.)

The teacher as an ethnography gets to know individual students as individuals, being able to assess what the student needs when.  Teaching as a human-humane process translates to knowing when to push, when to pull back, when to ignore, when to encourage, when to praise, when to critique, when to challenge, when to nurture, when to cheer, when to show love.

Being fair with students is not about providing all students with equal treatment at all times.  This actually leads to unfair treatment of students as they are individuals and are not like widgets – equal in all respects.  It also acknowledges and honors that individual students differ from day to day, sometimes minute to minute as they continue to learn, grasp concepts, change moods, change relationships, and to grow.  This translates into continually assessing individual learner needs and offering them what you think they need to grow and learn at any given moment.

The result are those light bulb moments, when a learner “gets it” – understands something that s/he has struggled to understand, when his or her self-efficacy rises, when a learner realizes s/he is smarter than previously believed – it is these moments that are the most meaningful for me as an educator.

Chapter in Handbook of Mobile Learning: Team and Community Building Using Mobile Devices

The Handbook of Mobile Learning has just been published through Routledge: Taylor and Francis – see http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415503693/.  I am excited to have a chapter in this edited book, Team and Community Building Using Mobile Devices.  Here is the introduction to my chapter:

People in the 21^st Century are using their own mobile devices – iPads, netbooks, laptops, and smart phones – to be consumers and producers of digital content, and to be active participants in online communities.  They are connecting with one another through mobile technologies in unprecedented ways. Computers, Wi-Fi networks, and smart phones allow young people 24/7 access to technology and to one another.   They are familiar and comfortable with social networking and using a variety of apps via their devices.  Nielson (2010), in a survey of teen mobile device use, reported that 94% percent of teen users identified themselves as advanced data users, turning to their mobile devices for messaging, Internet, multimedia, gaming, and other activities like downloads.

When educators leverage these types of informal learning by giving agency to the students to use their mobile technologies and by providing the structure and skills for their use within more formal educational settings, motivation and learning are increased.  Using mobile devices in educational settings as learning and community building tools can promote interpersonal communication, encourage young people to positively express their individuality and build their student-to-student, and student-to-educator relationships. The strategic and intentional use of cell phones, social networking sites, laptops, blogs, and digital cameras can build diversity and cultural sensitivity, teamwork and problem solving, self-reflection and self-exploration, and communication and self-expression.

This chapter introduces the use of mobile devices as a means to build community and teamwork within a variety of classroom settings: face-to-face, blended, and virtually.  This discussion has four components: research that supports the use of student-owned mobile devices for building community in the classroom, evidence to support the importance of promoting community in the classroom, team-building activities using mobile devices, and the results of a end-of-course student survey about using mobile devices for community building,

. . . and an excerpt:

MOBILE DEVICES USE PATTERNS SUPPORT COMMUNITY BUILDING

People of all ages, almost from all parts of the world, are using their mobile devices to communicate, connect, and share personal experiences.  They are building their own informal learning and social communities via their mobile devices and social networking sites.  This section discusses the research about mobile device use patterns.  It becomes the foundation not only for providing a rationale for the use of mobile devices in the classroom, but also serves as a guide for the types of technologies and activities that are best suited for mobile-driven community building activities.

Mobile Phone Ownership and Use Patterns Among United States Teens

A Pew Research report entitled, Teens and Mobile Phones, released April, 2010, noted that as of September 2009, 75% of American teens ages 12-17 own cell phone.  This number has steadily increased from 45% of teens in November 2004. Cell phones have become ubiquitous in the lives of teens today, with ownership cutting across demographic groups and geographical locations.

As expected, texting was the top activity of cell phone using teens with taking and sharing pictures, playing music, and recording and exchanging videos also being popular uses.

Worldwide Use of Cell Phones

Mobile device use has become a world-wide phenomenon allowing informal learning and social networking to cross over geographical divides.  Pew Research (2011) released a report entitled, Texting, Social Networking Popular Worldwide.  The three key findings from this report that support mobile-driven community-building activities are:

1. Cell phones are owned and used throughout the world.
2. Cell phones are being used for texting, taking photos, and using the Internet. Cell phones are owned by large majorities of people in most major countries around the world.  They are used for much more than just phone calls. In particular, text messaging is a global phenomenon – across the 21 countries surveyed, a median of 75% of cell phone owners say they text.
3. Young people worldwide are likely to use their cell phones for social networking (Pew Research, 2011).

The usage is similar to that seen with United States teens.  Text messaging is prevalent in 19 of 21 countries with a majority of mobile phone owners regularly sending text messages.  Many also use their mobile phones to take pictures and record video (Pew Research, 2011).

Mobile device use crosses across socio-economic boundaries and geographic locations.  People are using them for texting, photo-sharing, and other forms of social networking.  In other words, people are already using mobile devices to build their own informal learning and sharing communities, so it becomes a natural progression and extension to bring this type of learning into the educational environment.

Finally, here is a slidedeck that I use when presenting on this topic:

What Are You Doing to Inspire Your Learners’ Moonshot Thinking?

Your art is what you do when no one can tell you exactly how to do it. Your art is the act of taking personal responsibility, challenging the status quo, and changing people. — Seth Godin

From the video:

We are a species of moonshot thinking – People can set their minds to magical, seemingly impossible ideas and bring them to reality through innovation, science, and technology.  This sets others on fire.

Human progress has been a series of amazing, audacious things, Our ambitions are a glass ceiling in what we can accomplish. When you find your passion you are unstoppable. You can make amazing things happen. It has been true through history. I believe in the human spirit.

If we become afraid to take these risks, we stop inspiring people, we stop achieving things. The biggest nightmare scenario is that we won’t have what it takes to solve the really big challenges.

Moonshot thinking is actually an “invention” of Google’s Solve for X project. It’s general ideas and concepts, though, have application to being an educator and encouraging learners to engage in moonshot thinking.  Here are some of the general concepts and principles that have application across disciplines.

Moonshots live in the gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction; they are 10x improvement, not 10%. That’s partly what makes them so exciting.

Moonshots can come from anywhere—people of all ages and places, companies, academia, inspired experts, enthusiastic newcomers, and often from accidental discoveries. (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/02/whats-your-x-amplifying-technology.html)

Our society has many ways of telling us to play it safe: We say “walk before you run,” “slow and steady wins the race,” “under-promise and over-deliver.” In repeating these mantras we’re not training ourselves to think big. I’m a father to four kids, so it bothers me that even though our children think big naturally, our society systematically trains them out of thinking that way.

Not all moonshots have to be about technology. Gandhi’s Salt March or the struggle for civil rights in the United States are examples of social moonshots.

Why focus on moonshot thinking? Isn’t it enough to work harder to collectively solve problems to make the progress we need?  Actually, no, not really. Because we might be solving the wrong problems.  These moonshots aren’t just for the few experts in some moonshot inner circle.

What if we could replace all that effort on the wrong problem with the bravery to change the very question itself? (Also see Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions). Often, if you step back and apply enough audacity and creativity, the new perspective you get makes doing the impossible, possible

These moonshots aren’t just for the few experts in some moonshot inner circle. All of us can come up with solutions for society’s most intractable issues. We can train ourselves to make moonshot thinking not an occasional thing but a habit of mind. No one really knew how to build an airplane when they decided to build the first airplane — but they kept going and achieved it. We can ask the same hard, slightly crazy questions of our own and declare our own moonshots as individuals and as groups. (http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/02/moonshots-matter-heres-how-to-make-them-happen/)

Being Epic

In my presentations, I always state that learning should be filled with epic wins.  The idea of moonshot thinking is directly related to epic learning, doing, and being.

Epic doesn’t rely upon a prefabricated blueprint (although it soaks up as much learning as it can from whatever blueprints are out there). Epic understands that it has to go someplace new, feeling its way through uncharted territory by the light of its own intuition.

Epic is an artist, bringing all of its values to work, pushing the extremes of personality, slapping a soulprint on the world.

Epic is about bringing it.

Epic is about showing unique value.

Epic is about provoking and illuminating and being insanely useful and reaching people emotionally and shifting the paradigm a lot or a little.

Epic is scary. It moves you outside your comfort zone. Instead of following a leader, you are the leader, and the only thing to follow is the voice at your core, your actions and mistakes and triumphs and feedback. http://justinemusk.com/2013/04/19/6-observations-about-writing-epic-shit/

Marsha Ratzel, a National Board-certified teacher in the Blue Valley School District in Kansas, discusses the results of transforming her classroom into an epic learning journey.

My students are willing to take on hard tasks and don’t always want the easy way out. I just told one of my kids the other day: we are the kind of people who do the hard stuff now, and if we wanted it easy we would have looked it up in a book. Instead we have developed confidence in each other, and we want to discover the answers for ourselves. My students “get” that learning is a process. And while they may encounter moments where something doesn’t turn out the way they expected, they know how to change that into something positive. If students have a better idea than the one I present, they ask me to change things up. We co-create and co-learn with each other.

I feel that I’m a totally different teacher. This style of coaching learners allows me to find the Zone. You know — that place where you just “do” teaching. It’s probably not something I can explain very well if you haven’t experienced it. But maybe it’s happened to you in some situation where you took on a challenge — a sport, a hobby, even having a child. When you start out, just like in mountain biking, it’s all a technical undertaking. Small problems are magnified. Now, instead of being confounded by a narrow trail, rocks and too much sand, I have developed a natural sense of just how to take those trails. More importantly, my students know how to avoid spinouts as well. They’ve learned along with me.

Once you’ve tasted this kind of teaching — seen students learn so much more in your classes than they ever have learned before — then the fun of it, the reward of it, is so great that you strive to get back into this kind of flow every time you walk into the classroom. It changes the way you do lesson design. You look for the same content, but you’re imagining different approaches that make it student centered. Now it’s less about the teacher talking or showing how and more of the kiddos doing.

In the Classroom

Living is this time and age, we all have the potential, voice, and tools to create a world based our own ideas, dreams, and passions . . .  to be audacious and epic.

How do educators convey this message, promote this way of thinking, and teach learning how to learn skills to facilitate this way of being?  What follows are the beginnings of some questions I developed to initiate and encourage a dialogue (internally and/or with colleagues) about moonshot thinking and being epic.

• Can you, as the educator, approach teaching open-ended, not with the end in mind, but open to all kinds of possibilities and outcomes?
• How is innovation and disruption described and discussed with your learners?
• What examples do you show learners about innovators and innovation?
• Do you assist your learners in finding, seeking, exploring, and developing their passions?
• Do you permit, encourage, and celebrate authentic efforts even when they fail?
• How do you facilitate epic learning and wins in the classroom?
• Finally (maybe most important) – what amazing and audacious ideas do you, as the educator, have to change the lives of your learners and education?  What actions have you taken to try out those ideas?

Taking the Learners and Technology Outdoors

I began my career as an educator as an outdoor educator.  Now I teach educational technology.  Given both the ever increasing sedentary and indoor lives of kids and the advancement of technology, the time is ripe to combine the two.

Current and recurring themes that guide my ideas about what constitutes a “good” education include:

• Learning should extend beyond the classroom walls.
• Outdoor education is good for students and adults.
• Mobile technology is engaging and interesting; and can create authentic and relevant learning experiences.
• Mobile learning should be just that – mobile.

Moving Learning Beyond the Classroom Walls

“[In traditional education]…the school environment of desks, blackboards, a small school yard was supposed to suffice…There was no demand that the teacher should become intimately acquainted with the conditions of the local community, physical, historical, economic, occupational etc. in order to utilize them as educational resources.” 

- John Dewey, Experience and Education, 1938

The Council for Learning Outside of the Classroom provides the following rationale for taking learning beyond the classroom walls:

Learning outside the classroom is about raising young people’s achievement through an organized, powerful approach to learning in which direct experience is of prime importance.

This is not only about what we learn, but most importantly, how and where we learn. It is about improving young people’s understanding, skills, values, personal and social development and can act as a vehicle to develop young people’s capacity and motivation to learn.

Real-world learning brings the benefits of formal and informal education together and reinforces what good educationalist have always known: that the most meaningful learning occurs through acquiring knowledge and skills through real-life, practical or hands-on activities.

There is a wealth of evidence which clearly demonstrates the benefits for young people’s learning and personal development outside the classroom. In summary, learning outside the classroom:

• tackles social mobility, giving children new and exciting experiences that inspire them to reach their true potential. These real world experiences raise aspirations, equipping young people with the skills they need to become active and responsible citizens and shape a fit and motivated workforce.

• addresses educational inequality, re-motivating children who do not thrive in the traditional classroom environment, such as those from disadvantaged backgrounds or with Special Educational Needs. Young people who experience learning outside the classroom as a regular part of their school life benefit from increased self esteem, and become more engaged in their education both inside and outside the classroom walls.

• supports improved standards back INSIDE the classroom, raising attainment, reducing truancy and improving discipline. Learning outside the classroom is known to contribute significantly to raising standards & improving pupils’ personal, social & emotional development.

Find out more about research studies which reinforce and illustrate the wide-ranging benefits for young people on our research pages.

The Benefits of Outdoor Education

A report from the National Wildlife Federation, Back to School: Back Outside, shows how outdoor education and time is connected with wide-ranging academic benefits including:

• Improved classroom behavior
• Increased student motivation and enthusiasm to learn
• Better performance in math, science, reading and social studies
• Reduced Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)
• Higher scores on standardized tests (including college entrance exams)
• Help under-resourced, low-income students perform measurably better in school

(http://blog.childrenandnature.org/2010/10/07/outdoor-education-and-play-benefit-all-education/)

Mobile Learning in the Outdoors = Authentic, Engaging Learning

Mobile Learning in the Outdoors Benefits, Apps and Examples

From Expanding the Classroom with Mobile Learning:

Mobile devices can form an engaging platform for teaching and learning, with the potential to expand the realm of the classroom. Functionality and context are key considerations when selecting from the myriad of mobile-enabled web sites and applications.

Like a Swiss army knife, mobile devices and their apps can provide utility and flexibility in a compact, portable package. Among the options available are:

• GPS and other location-based functionality
• Video, audio, and still image capture
• Mobile networking and collaboration
• The ability to bridge to other tools and data
• Scanning and data logging in the field
• Visual and audio recognition
• Screen readers, slow keys, text to speak, and other accessibility features

The portability and convenience provided by mobile devices enables instantaneous, contextual observations in the field or whenever spontaneous learning opportunities arise. Collecting information outside the classroom can help students hone observation and collaboration skills, reinforce topic relevancy, or provide opportunities to emulate an expert system through use of the apps.

GPS-based apps for mapping, geo-blogging, and geo-tagging are especially powerful in this regard, because they enable direct linking of observations to specific times and locations. The ability to capture, reference, and share data, multimedia, and ideas within a spatial or temporal context helps students identify broader trends and relationships, foster discussion, and develop conceptual thinking.

5 Ways to Take Technology Outdoors:

• Mobile Devices

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets are powerful tools for outdoor study. Access to the Internet, a camera and geospatial data (e.g. GPS) make it easy to gather, organize and submit data from observations. Applications (apps) can be downloaded to engage students in citizen science activities, like identifying wildlife.

• GPS Units

GPS (Global Positioning Systems) is a technology that communicates with satellites to pinpoint specific locations on Earth. GPS units are great tools for getting students outside and engaged in environmental field research and service-learning projects.

At Wisconsin’s Augusta Area School District, teacher Paul Tweed engaged his students in several projects that used GPS and GIS (Geographic Information Systems), one of which helped the Wisconsin Department of Nature Resources (DNR) track orphaned black bear cubs released into the wild.

• Digital Cameras

Students can use digital cameras to document their local environment, track their progress on science projects, collect evidence and present their findings in the classroom.

Students at Monroe City Schools in Louisiana use tech tools like digital cameras to enhance environmental education programs at Black Bayou Lake National Wildlife Refuge.  Learn more at: fws.gov/northlouisiana/blackbayoulake/environmental_education.html.

• Digital Weather Stations

Digital weather stations are small monitoring devices put in place to collect real-time weather data. They can be installed near home, school or in nearby parks, enabling students to add weather conditions to their study of the local environment.

Students participating in outdoor education programs with NatureBridge check digital weather stations at Olympic, Yosemite and Golden Gate National Parks for weather data to add to their field research.  Learn more at: naturebridge.org/your-naturebridge-program-olympic.

Here is a list of apps and websites that can assist learners in becoming citizen scientists:

Links to these websites:

• Project Noah – http://www.projectnoah.org/
• Journey North – http://www.learner.org/jnorth/
• Weatherbug – http://weather.weatherbug.com/
• Creekwatch – http://creekwatch.researchlabs.ibm.com/
• What’s Invasive – http://whatsinvasive.com/
• Nature’s Notebook – https://www.usanpn.org/natures_notebook
• Nature’s Find – http://www.naturefind.com/
• iNaturalist – http://www.inaturalist.org/
• Google Earth – http://www.google.com/earth/index.html
• Marine Debris Tracker – http://www.marinedebris.engr.uga.edu/

Outdoor activities with mobile devices: A slidedeck by Shelly Terrell

Mobile Learning in Outdoors Viewed with the SAMR Model

The SAMR model (http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/) is being used to discuss technology integration.  The SAMR model, developed by Dr Ruben Puentedura, aims to support teachers as they design, develop and integrate learning technologies to support high levels of learning achievement and student engagement.

The guiding questions for the SAMR Ladder include:

It becomes apparent that these outdoor-based mobile learning activities can be categorized in the transformational levels of modification and redefinition as learners engage in tasks that are uniquely possible given the mobile technologies.

Teaching as a Human – Humane Process

I often mention that one of the roles of the educator is that of an ethnographer.  Loosely defined, . . .

An ethnographer is a person who gathers and records data about human culture and societies. An ethnographer often needs to be able to find patterns in and understand issues faced by a wide sample of people with diverse backgrounds.  The information ethnographers collect can be used not only for providing a better understanding of societies, but also for improving quality of life. (http://www.wisegeek.com/what-does-an-ethnographer-do.htm)

As teachers know, every class they teach is different, every student in each of these classes is different and unique.  Good teaching entails seeing (really seeing) every student in the classroom, getting to know each of them as the individuals they really are and deserve to be. (Disclaimer:  I know this is difficult, if not impossible, for educator who work with hundreds of students at any given time.)

The teacher as an ethnography gets to know individual students as individuals, being able to assess what the student needs when.  Teaching as a human-humane process translates to knowing when to push, when to pull back, when to ignore, when to encourage, when to praise, when to critique, when to challenge, when to nurture, when to cheer, when to show love.

Monica took a teaching methods with me where the class project was to develop a curriculum unit.  I believe and practice mastery learning.  This means students can make revisions and resubmissions when their work does not meet project expectations and criteria.  She worked on the changes I suggested.  Upon a second review, it was still B work, but I knew how hard she worked.  I basically said to myself, “She worked quite hard, to the best of her ability,” so I granted her an A for this winter intersession course.  It was the beginning of Winter term.  I was walking past the dorms.  Monica came out into the second floor balcony with a paper, her grades, in hand.  She exuberantly yelled to me, “Jackie, I got an A in class.  It is the first A I have gotten in college.”  The look of joy on her face was priceless.

Don’t get me wrong.  It is not about giving students A’s to raise their self-esteem.  Sometimes the human-humane process is to push a student to his or her limits.

Andrew, a 25 year-old, was a Teach for America student in the Master’s of Education program where I was teaching.  He received a Bachelor’s degree from an Ivy league school, and came to New Mexico for the programs.  For the curriculum class I was teaching, students were asked to create artifacts for their classroom – no paper nor tests.  Andrew handed in his first project.  It was sloppy and lacked a professional presentation.  He received the equivalent to a C.  He came up to me after class to talk about his grade.  I provided additional feedback the problems with his work.  He began to cry explaining that he always earned A’s for his work but also emphasized that his education, thus far, consisted of taking tests and writing papers.  To this I responded that I understood, but that I would continue to push him to improve the quality of his projects.  His work got better and at the end of the course he told me that as difficult as it was, he appreciated how I challenged him.

Being fair with students is not about providing all students with equal treatment at all times.  This actually leads to unfair treatment of students as they are individuals and are not like widgets – equal in all respects.  It also acknowledges and honors that individual students differ from day to day, sometimes minute to minute as they continue to learn, grasp concepts, change moods, change relationships, and to grow.  This translates into continually assessing individual learner needs and offering them what you think they need to grow and learn at any given moment.

The result are those light bulb moments, when a learner “gets it” – understands something that s/he has struggled to understand, when his or her self-efficacy rises, when a learner realizes s/he is smarter than previously believed – it is these moments that are the most meaningful for me as an educator.

A Little More on the Flipped Classroom

Crossed posted at http://teach.com/education-technology/educator-connection-flipped-classroom-resources-from-the-teach-100-by-jackie-gerstein

The Flipped Classroom has jumped onto the education radar in recent years as a way to potentially alter pedagogical and instructional practices by utilizing emerging technologies. In its simplest form, the flipped classroom is a model of learning where students watch content-related videos on their own time, freeing up classroom time for questions and discussion, group work, experiments, and hands-on and other experiential activities.

A lot of discussions have occurred, presentations have been made, and blog posts have been written about the flipped classroom: how to implement it; its potential to change educational outcomes and/or why it may not; it’s “fad” status; how it favors students of privilege; and so on. A broad range of ideas regarding the flipped classroom can be viewed through our list of selected articles (see below) from the Teach 100 ranking of educational blogs.

If the flipped classroom is to become more than the educational flavor of the month, the following things should be considered:

• The flipped classroom takes advantage of modern technologies. Technology, including content-focused video, is providing educators with the opportunity to change and enhance their instructional practices.
• Administrators, curriculum developers, instructional designers, and educators should examine, reflect upon, and discuss how technology has and is changing the nature of teaching, learning, work, and play. This, in turn, should lead to evolutionary and revolutionary changes in the way instruction is provided, and in which learning occurs and is demonstrated in the classroom setting.
• The flipped classroom gives teachers and students opportunities for their face-to-face time to be engaging, enriching, and exciting. The content that, in the past, was provided via lecture during class time can now be reviewed by students on their own time and at their own pace. Watching video lectures doesn’t necessarily have to take place at home; it can also be done during class time, study periods, or during after school programs.
• The terminology related to the flipped classroom needs to fade as educators begin to transform their classrooms to be student-focused and cognitively sound (based on what we know about the brain and learning), with differentiated curricula based on student interests, learning preferences, and ability levels. Technological advancements can enable these processes to occur, and should eventually be looked on as just good pedagogy.

If you’re looking to learn more about the flipped classroom approach, check out these selected articles from Teach 100 bloggers:

• “The Flipped Classroom: The Full Picture“ by User-Generated Education
• “Top Ed-Tech Trends of 2012: The Flipped Classroom“ by Inside Higher Education
• “Five Ways to Flip Your Classroom With The New York Times“ by The Learning Network
• “What Is A Flipped Classroom?” by Edudemic
• “The Flipped Classroom: Pro and Con“ by Edutopia
• “Flipping Your Classroom With Free Web Tools“ by Free Technology for Teachers
• “Can the Flipped Classroom Benefit Low-Income Students?” by Mindshift
• “Understanding the Flipped Classroom” by Faculty Focus
• “‘Flipping’ classrooms: Does it make sense?“ by The Answer Sheet
• “A New Approach to Teaching? The Flipped Classroom“ by Finding Common Ground
• “We need to produce learners, not just students“ by The Chronicle of Higher Education
• “Flipped Learning Continues to Change Classrooms Nationwide“ by Education News
• “The Ultimate Guide to the Flipped Classroom” byTeachThought
• “The ‘flipped classroom’ [WEBINAR]” by Dangerously Irrelevant
• “TED-Ed: Lessons (videos) worth sharing“ by iLearn Technology
• “The Best Posts On The “Flipped Classroom” Idea“ by Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites Of The Day
• “Flipping the Classroom“ by Tech & Learning
• “The “Flipped” Classroom and Transforming Education“ by The Principal of Change
• “Gathering Evidence that Flipping the Classroom can Enhance Learning Outcomes“ by Emerging EdTech
• “The Flipped Classroom: Students Assessing Teachers“ by Teachers’ Leader Network
• “Flipped Classroom: Students Assessing Teachers“ by SmartBlog on Education
• “Five Questions to Ask Before Flipping a Lesson” by edSurge
• “Foundations of Flipping“ by Kleinspiration
• “Promise of the ‘flipped classroom’ eludes poorer school district“ by The Hechinger Report
• “Why The Flipped Classroom Is More Than Just Video“ by Fractus Learning
• “How the Flipped Classroom Turned Me into a Better Student“ by Getting Smart
• “Still MORE on Flipping the Faculty Meeting“ by The Tempered Radical
• “The Truly Flipped Classroom“ by A Principal’s Reflection
• “Flipped Classroom: Beyond the Videos” by Catlin Tucker, Blended Learning & Technology in the Classroom
• “Educators Answer Questions About the Flipped“ by The Quick & the Ed
• “How to Reach Struggling Students: Once You Flip, You’ll never go Back“ by Flipped Learning
• “Flipping out? What you need to know about the Flipped Classroom“ by GradHacker
• “Flipping The Classroom… A Goldmine of Research and Resources To Keep You On Your Feet“ by 21st Century Educational Technology and Learning
• “Flipped Classroom — my thoughts on it, some other ideas, & infographic“ by Educational Technology Guy
• “Flipping For Your Faculty…It’s Easier Than Videos“ by Blogging About the Web 2.0 Connected Classroom
• “Does Flipping Your Classroom Increase Homework Time?” by ASCD In-Service
• “Changing Gears 2012: rejecting the “flip“ by SpeEdChange
• “Flipping for the Flipped Classroom Seems To Be the Trend but Not for Me“ by Blogging through the Fourth Dimension
• “The Flipped Classroom: Getting Started” by Copy/Paste

For the complete daily ranking of the best educational blogs on the web, visit the Teach 100. To learn more about the Teach 100, or to work with Teach.com, email Teach100@teach.com.

Learners Should Be Developing Their Own Essential Questions

Having essential questions drive curriculum and learning has become core to many educators’ instructional practices.  Grant Wiggins, in his work on Understanding By Design, describes an essential question as:

A meaning of “essential” involves important questions that recur throughout one’s life. Such questions are broad in scope and timeless by nature. They are perpetually arguable – What is justice?  Is art a matter of taste or principles? How far should we tamper with our own biology and chemistry?  Is science compatible with religion? Is an author’s view privileged in determining the meaning of a text? We may arrive at or be helped to grasp understandings for these questions, but we soon learn that answers to them are invariably provisional. In other words, we are liable to change our minds in response to reflection and experience concerning such questions as we go through life, and that such changes of mind are not only expected but beneficial. A good education is grounded in such life-long questions, even if we sometimes lose sight of them while focusing on content mastery. The big-idea questions signal that education is not just about learning “the answer” but about learning how to learn. (http://www.authenticeducation.org/ae_bigideas/article.lasso?artid=53)

Although essential questions are powerful advance organizers and curriculum drivers, the problem is that the essential questions are typically developed by the educator not the learners.  The educator may find these questions interesting and engaging, but that does not insure that students will find them as such.

Jamie McKenzie describes what actually happens in most schools and classrooms in terms of questioning.

There have always been plenty of questions in schools, but most of them have come from the teacher, often at the rate of one question every 2-3 seconds. Unfortunately, these rapid fire questions are not the questions we need to encourage because they tend to be recall questions rather than questions requiring higher level thought. The most important questions of all are those asked by students as they try to make sense out of data and information. These are the questions which enable students to make up their own minds. Powerful questions – smart questions, if you will – are the foundation for information power, engaged learning and information literacy. Sadly, most studies of classroom exchanges in the past few decades report that student questions have been an endangered species for quite some time. (Goodlad, Sizer, Hyman, etc.) (http://fno.org/oct97/question.html)

Steve Denning in a Forbes article, Learning To Ask The Right Question, stated:

In education, there is often more emphasis on teaching than learning. The current test-driven system, which views teaching as imparting the right answers to the students, often does a poor job of equipping students to find the right question. If as I suggest the true goal of education is inspiring students with a lifelong capacity and passion for learning, it is at least as important that students be able to ask the right question as it is to know the right answer.

McKenzie (in 1997!) further discusses how the art of learner questioning by is especially relevant in this age of information abundance:

As long as schools are primarily about teaching rather than learning, there is little need for expanded information capabilities. Considering the reality that schools and publishers have spent decades compressing and compacting human knowledge into efficient packages and delivery systems like textbooks and lectures, they may not be prepared for this New Information Landscape which calls for independent thinking, exploration, invention and intuitive navigation. (http://fno.org/oct97/question.html)

Questioning comes naturally to children and seems to become a lost art and skill as people age.

Paul Harris, a developmental psychologist at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that questions occupy a more central role than we realize in childhood cognitive development. Young children, he says, learn a great deal about the world simply by asking questions and listening to others.  When Harris thinks of children asking questions, he sees them performing a series of complex mental maneuvers. “The child has to first realize that they don’t know something…and that other people are information-bearing agents,” Harris said. “Then the child has to be able to, somehow or other, realize that language is a tool for shifting stuff from that person to them.”

Adults tend to rush through those steps, perhaps because they seem like second nature. But figuring out what makes a good question—or rather, what kind of question will get us the information we want—isn’t such a simple thing, even for grownups. It requires stopping to think about what we’re trying to find out, what the person we’re talking to might know, and what words we should use to coax them into helping us. Being good at asking questions is the art of identifying those gaps, sorting them, and figuring out how to fill them. Considered that way, it is a strange skill: “the ability to organize your thinking around something you know nothing about,” said Rothstein.

That can get harder as we get older, in large part because we grow more confident that we understand the world around us, and lose the capacity to see past our own beliefs. Business consultant and former Hewlett-Packard chief technology officer Phil McKinney in his book “Beyond the Obvious,” argues that crafting good questions is precisely what allows people to make imaginative leaps. “The challenge is that, as adults, we lose our curiosity over time. We get into ruts, we become experts in our fields or endeavors,” (http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/05/19/just-ask/k9PATXFdpL6ZmkreSiRYGP/story.html?camp=pm)

I believe most educators would agree that learning to compose a good question is a skill students should possess.  There is evidence that the art of asking a good questioning is a skill that most adults do not possess and that schools are not doing a good job teaching.  There are some classroom activities educators can do to teach questioning techniques.

Jamie McKenzie, Ed.D. and Hilarie Bryce Davis, Ed.D. propose in Classroom Strategies to Engender Student Questioning some of the following activities to have students generate their own questions.

• Begin a New Unit with Students Developing Questions: Try starting a new unit by asking your class to think of questions that could be asked about the topic.
• Create a Taxonomy of Questions: When students begin to label the different kinds of questions, they learn to select different kinds of questions to perform different kinds of thinking. No matter what the level of schooling, some kind of label can work effectively.
• Ask Students to Create Questions as Homework (this would work with the Flipped Classroom): Put your classroom questioning typology to work with your homework assignments. If students read an assignment, let them form questions for the next day’s discussion. Ask them to:
  • write three comparison questions about the story they are reading;
  • identify the question the author was trying to answer;
  • find a question which has no answer, or two thousand answers or an infinite number of answers;
  • ask a question that is the child of a bigger question that they can then ask the rest of the class to identify.

Although, I am not big on formulaic learning, the folks at the Right Question Institute proposed process for students to learn to formulate their own questions.  This can be a good start to having students learn to compose questions. The QFT has six key steps:

Step 1: Teachers Design a Question Focus. The Question Focus, or QFocus, is a prompt that can be presented in the form of a statement or a visual or aural aid to focus and attract student attention and quickly stimulate the formation of questions. The QFocus is different from many traditional prompts because it is not a teacher’s question. It serves, instead, as the focus for student questions so students can, on their own, identify and explore a wide range of themes and ideas.

Step 2: Students Produce Questions. Students use a set of rules that provide a clear protocol for producing questions without assistance from the teacher. The four rules are: ask as many questions as you can; do not stop to discuss, judge, or answer any of the questions; write down every question exactly as it was stated; and change any statements into questions.

Step 3: Students Improve Their Questions. Students then improve their questions by analyzing the differences between open- and closed-ended questions and by practicing changing one type to the other.

Step 4: Students Prioritize Their Questions. The teacher, with the lesson plan in mind, offers criteria or guidelines for the selection of priority questions.

Step 5: Students and Teachers Decide on Next Steps. At this stage, students and teachers work together to decide how to use the questions.

Step 6: Students Reflect on What They Have Learned. The teacher reviews the steps and provides students with an opportunity to review what they have learned by producing, improving, and prioritizing their questions. Making the QFT completely transparent helps students see what they have done and how it contributed to their thinking and learning. They can internalize the process and then apply it in many other settings. http://www.hepg.org/hel/article/507#home

A case study of this process in action can be found at Educators Want Students To Ask The Questions and the following Prezi does a great job describing the need for student-generated questions and the QFT process:

Wielded with purpose and care, a question can become a sophisticated and potent tool to expand minds, inspire new ideas, and give us surprising power at moments when we might not believe we have any.

Leon Neyfakh

Isn’t this a skill we want our learners to develop?

Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning Education 3.0

Schools are doing Education 1.0; talking about doing Education 2.0; when they should be planning and implementing Education 3.0.

This post seeks to compare the developments of the Internet-Web to those of education.  The Internet has become an integral thread of the tapestries of most societies throughout the globe.  The web influences people’s way of thinking, doing and being; and people influence the development and content of the web.  The Internet of today has become a huge picture window and portal into human perceptions, thinking, and behavior.  Logically, then, it would seem that schools would follow suit in mimicking what is happening via the Internet to assist children and youth to function, learn, work, and play in a healthy, interactive, and pro-social manner in their societies-at-large.

Education 1.0

Most schools are still living within and functioning through an Education 1.0 model.  Although many would deny this, they are focusing on an essentialist-based curriculum with related ways of teaching and testing.

The foundation of essentialist curriculum is based on traditional disciplines such as math, natural science, history, foreign language, and literature. Essentialists argue that classrooms should be teacher-oriented. The teachers or administrators decide what is most important for the students to learn with little regard to the student interests. The teachers also focus on achievement test scores as a means of evaluating progress. Students in this system would sit in rows and be taught in masses. The students would learn passively by sitting in their desks and listening to the teacher.  (http://www.siue.edu/~ptheodo/foundations/essentialism.html)

This description (1) rings true with a lot of schools in this age of standardization, accountability, NCLB, Race-to-the-Top, Common Core Curriculum Standards, and (2) has a lot of similarity to Web 1.0 . . .

Web 1.0 was an early stage of the conceptual evolution of the World Wide Web, centered around a top-down approach to the use of the web and its user interface. Content creators were few in Web 1.0 with the vast majority of users simply acting as consumers of content.  Web 1.0 webpage’s information is closed to external editing. Thus, information is not dynamic, being updated only by the webmaster.Technologically, Web 1.0 concentrated on presenting, not creating so that user-generated content was not available. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_1.0)

Web 1.0 came out of our existing mindsets of how information is transferred, and very much reflected the 100+ year history of industrialism, with experts/businesses dispensing identical knowledge/products to mass consumers. http://www.stevehargadon.com/2007/04/web-20-and-school-20-connection.html

Derek W. Keats and J. Philipp Schmidt provide an excellent comparison of how Education 1.0 is similar to Web 1.0.

Education 1.0 is, like the first generation of the Web, a largely one-way process. Students go to [school] to get education from [teachers], who supply them with information in the form of a stand up routine that may include the use of class notes, handouts, textbooks, videos, and in recent times the World Wide Web. Students are largely consumers of information resources that are delivered to them, and although they may engage in activities based around those resources, those activities are for the most part undertaken in isolation or in isolated local groups. Rarely do the results of those activities contribute back to the information resources that students consume in carrying them out. (http://p2pfoundation.net/Education_3.0)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8cj6Gu0irhU/Ri76D5F4PsI/AAAAAAAAABk/0P3W67iAh28/s1600-h/WebSchool10.jpg

Education 2.0

Steve Hardigan noted the following in 2007:

Web 2.0 has really been the flowering of new relationships between individuals and businesses, and reflects new ways of thinking that the technology has facilitated or created. It’s about engaged conversations that take place directly, and don’t rely on top-down management, but peer feedback and mentoring. It’s an incredibly effective restructuring of how learning takes place, and somehow we have to figure out how to bring this experience into our learning institutions–or they will become obsolete. (http://www.stevehargadon.com/2007/04/web-20-and-school-20-connection.html)

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_8cj6Gu0irhU/Ri77o5F4PtI/AAAAAAAAABs/LZ-cvsP8aQ4/s1600-h/WebSchool20.jpg

Similar to Web 2.0, Education 2.0 includes more interaction between the teacher and student; student to student; and student to content/expert.  Some school administrators and educators seem to have taken some steps and moved into a more connected, creative Education 2.0 through using cooperative learning, global learning projects, Skype in the classroom, and shared wikis, blogs and other social networking in the classroom.  But in 2013, this should be the norm not the exception.

Education 3.0

Education 3.0 is based on the belief that content is freely and readily available. It is self-directed, interest-based learning where problem-solving, innovation and creativity drive education.

Education 3.0 is characterized by rich, cross-institutional, cross-cultural educational opportunities within which the learners themselves play a key role as creators of knowledge artifacts that are shared, and where social networking and social benefits outside the immediate scope of activity play a strong role. The distinction between artifacts, people and process becomes blurred, as do distinctions of space and time. Institutional arrangements, including policies and strategies, change to meet the challenges of opportunities presented. There is an emphasis on learning and teaching processes with a focus on institutional changes that accompany the breakdown of boundaries (between teachers and students, higher education institutions, and disciplines) (http://p2pfoundation.net/Education_3.0).

Education 3.0 is a constructivist, heutagogical approach to teaching and learning.  The teachers, learners, networks, connections, media, resources, tools create a a unique entity that has the potential to meet individual learners’, educators’, and even societal needs.

Derek W. Keats and J. Philipp Schmidt further describe the individual components of Education 3.0:

Education

• Wide diffusion of of e-learning
• Growing interest in alternatives to teacher-centred approaches such as constructivism (Dewey, 1998), resource based learning, etc.
• Local, regional, and international collaboration to create repositories of educational content
• Awareness for the need of recognition of prior learning
• Increasing use of the Internet to find information and just in time learning

Social

• Increasing use of information technologies in daily life and for social purposes
• Increasing social use of online virtual spaces
• A new definition of self and society that includes computer mediated social structures, and people outside of one’s immediate physical environment

Technology

• The widespread adoption of personal computers and the Internet (especially e-mail and the World Wide Web)
• The emergence of Web 2.0, including blogs, podcasts, social interaction tools, etc.
• E-Learning platforms or learning management systems that incorporate features of Web 2.0
• Free and open source software

Legal

• The development of alternative licensing mechanisms to traditional copyright, which promote the use and reuse of (educational) content without requiring further explicit permission by the author or copyright holder or payment of royalties (http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/1625/1540)

The one “organized” proactive movement that I know of that is promoting a model of Education 3.0 is Connected Learning: An Agenda for Research and Design:

Connected learning taps the opportunities provided by digital media to more easily link home, school, community and peer contexts of learning; support peer and intergenerational connections based on shared interests; and create more connections with non-dominant youth, drawing from capacities of diverse communities.

http://dmlhub.net/publications/connected-learning-agenda-research-and-design

All of the pieces of an Education 3.0 are literally freely available for the taking, why aren’t those involved in the planning and implementing of schools integrating these ideas, tools and strategies into their systems?  The time for planning for Education 3.0 was actual yesterday, but doing it now is okay, too.

Storytelling Is Not Lecturing; Lecturing is Not Storytelling

I sit in the lecture hall with 10,000 others waiting for my new teacher to speak. I look at my cell phone and silently groan that this in going to be a long hour; as long an hour as an hour can be as is typically the case when I listen to a lecture.   She begins, “Let me tell you about Uncle Willie.“  I take a deep breath of relief and settle in to hear her story.

I came at the age of three to Grandma and my Uncle Willie in this little town in Arkansas. Uncle Willie was paralyzed on the right side. My grandmother and Uncle Willie owned a little store in town, and they needed me and my brother to work in the store. So Momma taught me to read and write, and my Uncle Willie taught me to do my times tables. He used to grab me by my clothes and hold me in front of a potbelly stove, and with a slur attendant to his condition, he’d say, “Now, Sister, I want you to do your foursies, your sevensies, your ninesies.” I learned my times tables so exquisitely even now, 60 years later, if I’m awakened after an evening of copious libation and told, “Do your twelvsies,” I’ve got my twelvsies.

I was so sure that if I didn’t learn, my Uncle Willie would grab me, open the potbelly stove, throw me in, and close the door. Of course, I found that he was so tenderhearted he wouldn’t kill a fly. One day my Uncle Willie died, and I went to Little Rock where I was met by one of America’s great rainbows in the clouds, the black lady who led the children into the high school in the late fifties in Little Rock.

She met me and said, “There is somebody who is dying to meet you.” She introduced me to this handsome black man in a three-piece suit.

When I met him, he said, “I don’t want to shake your hand. I want to hug you.”

He then said, “You know, Maya, the State of Arkansas has lost a great man in losing Willie. In the 1920s, I was the only child of a blind mother. Your Uncle Willie gave me a job in his store, paid me 10 cents a week, and taught me to do my times tables.”

I asked him, “How would he do it?”

He said, “He used to grab me like this…”

Then I knew he was talking about Uncle Willie.

He said, “Because of him, I am who I am today, the mayor of Little Rock, Arkansas, first black mayor in the South.”

I look back at Uncle Willie, that crippled, black man in the South where lynching was the disorder of the day, I have no idea the range of his influence. But I know that when it looked for me like the sun wasn’t going to shine anymore, God put “a rainbow in the clouds” in the form of Uncle Willie.

I tell you my stories not to brag but to tell you about all of rainbows in my clouds.  You are the rainbows in somebody’s cloud.

. . . Maya Angelou tells the 10,000 educators who sat at her feet at the recent ASCD conference.  I exaggerated at the beginning about the expected boredom.  This would have been the case if the speaker started to lecture to me.  I knew Dr, Angelou would tell us stories and read us poetry.  She is a master of storytelling, poetry, speaking, and teaching; and the energy in the room was palatable as she spoke to us.

I am a strong advocate against the use of lecturing for teaching which I discuss in detail in Who Would Choose a Lecture as Their Primary Mode of Learning? This does not mean I am against an educator standing in front of a group of learners to give procedural directions or to tell a story to teach a concept.  I have been challenged by colleagues because I really like TED talks but many of the best TED talks tell a story.  One of the most popular Ted talks of all time was Jill Bolte Taylor’s stroke of insight who told the story of her stroke and insights about the brain due to her her stroke.

So what is it that makes stories such powerful teaching?

Stories are different. Stories have everything that facts wish they had but never will: color, action, characters, sights, smells, sounds, emotions–stuff that we can easily relate to. We can imagine ourselves doing, or not doing, or having already done, what the story describes. Stories put facts into a meaningful, and therefore memorable, context.  (http://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasmerrill/2013/03/08/a-story-about-stories/)

Brain Activity: Lecture versus Storytelling

It’s in fact quite simple. If we listen to a powerpoint presentation with boring bullet points, a certain part in the brain gets activated. Scientists call this Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. Overall, it hits our language processing parts in the brain, where we decode words into meaning. And that’s it, nothing else happens.

When we are being told a story, things change dramatically. Not only are the language processing parts in our brain activated, but any other area in our brain that we would use when experiencing the events of the story are too.  (http://lifehacker.com/5965703/the-science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains)

What follows is a graph of a student’s brain activity during a given week.  The student’s brain activity, the electrodermal activity, is nearly flat-lined during classes.  Note that the activity is higher during sleep than during class.

http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2012/04/30/a-week-of-a-stu.html

So what happens to the brain when being told a story?

We think in narratives all day long, no matter if it is about buying groceries, whether we think about work or our spouse at home. We make up (short) stories in our heads for every action and conversation. In fact, Jeremy Hsu found [that] “personal stories and gossip make up 65% of our conversations.”

Now, whenever we hear a story, we want to relate it to one of our exiting experiences.  That’s why metaphors work so well with us. While we are busy searching for a similar experience in our brains, we activate, a part called insula, which helps us relate to that same experience of pain, joy, or disgust. (http://lifehacker.com/5965703/the-science-of-storytelling-why-telling-a-story-is-the-most-powerful-way-to-activate-our-brains)

So my advice for teachers is that next time you feel the need to convey information via a lecture, create or find a story that illustrates those concepts and tell learners that story.  All will benefit.

Storytelling is the most powerful way to put ideas into the world today.

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. — Robert McKee