Wordle

 

My Passion

As I said in the Visitor/Resident post, I am passionate about using the web and web based tools to expand and enhance my class.  I believe that my class is not just about the path we take through the material, this unidirectional walk we take through a textbook or our curriculum is not enough to truly learn and understand the material.  I believe that my students and I form a neural network of sorts.  In traditional models of education, we only focus on the left brain, the physical manifestation of the class. This is because we have never truly had the right brain, the nuanced interpretive side of the course.  We have never had technology at the level we have now.  Tools like Edmodo allow us to create the right side of the brain.  In order for the organism to fully function and succeed, we as the learners need to form the corpus callosum, the mechanism by which the two hemispheres of this brain communicate and interact.  Certain aspects of the learning are accomplished on both sides of this brain, as certain functions of human beings, such as speech, are controlled by both sides.  In human speech, the left brain can be said to control the words we say while the right brain controls how we contextualize those words.  Accordingly, the physical presence of the class controls what we learn, the material itself while the web presence adds dimension to how we the learners internalize and synthesize the material.  It allows us as learners to find resources that cater to our particular modes of learning.  Before this, learning was very one dimensional, very cookie cutter; if you couldn’t learn it the way the teacher is saying it, your best hope was to teach yourself from the text book or whatever resource the class is using.  Now, we can access myriad other resources on the web.  This can make for a very powerful thinking organism.  Notice that I included myself, the teacher, in the group of learners, in the neural network.  I am as much a learner as any of my students; I am acting as facilitator and guide more than sage on the stage.  Students these days need to be more responsible for their own learning; in order to succeed in today’s world students must be active rather than passive learners.  Students must know enough to question and be confident enough to know that they need to question rather than just accepting what is being presented as gospel.  Teachers are fallible creatures; I model for my students that it is perfectly ok to make mistakes and that we can use them to learn and find the correct answer.   

Visitors and Residents

I see myself as being on the resident end of the continuum.  I have a pretty active Facebook presence and was active last term with my sixth graders on Edmodo as well as in classes at the university.  My presence has been expanding as I have gone through this program because I have been exposed to more tools online and have found that I am able to figure out and interpret various web tools with relative ease.  I see my future expanding on the internet.  I think that I want to involve the internet in my teaching and take advantage of tools like Edmodo to extend the boundaries of my classroom.  Students have questions when they are not in the classroom.  Why can’t I make myself available through these tools and create a forum that the students themselves can use to network and help each other.  It creates another, more complex layer to the class because now the students are not just connected by physical presence in the classroom and I am not just connected to them by the same.  We have two classes really, the physical manifestation and the web presence.   The physical manifestation, to use some of Pink’s ideas, is akin to the left brain; that is, it is the literal interpretation of the class, it is the logical, sequential part of the whole.  The physical class moves through the material in an order.  The web presence is the right brain; we can examine and respond to posts and queries from any time during the course at any other time during the course; we are not confined by our physical place.  We can easily scan back through the tapestry of the presence and find particular threads in a very lateral fashion.  By combining these two halves of this metaphorical brain, we create a metaphorical organism capable of very complex accomplishments and great things.  This is my greatest hope with technology; that we create this organism and find a less linear, directed fashion to access the material.  

L-directed thinking versus R-directed thinking

L-directed thinking is thinking based on logic, sequential ideas, and very literal interpretations of situations.  R-directed thinking, on the other hand, takes into account context and is more artistic, more intuitive than its counterpart. R-directed thinking relies more in simultaneous intake of information.  It is less literal than L-directed thinking.  Abundance affects L-directed thinking because supply is outstripping demand so in order to differentiate oneself or one’s product from the panoply of other like things out there.  Thus the import of L-directed thinking is reduced in favor of R-directed thinking.  In order to make one’s product more distinct, better design is needed, more creative design.  MFAs are becoming among the most lucrative degrees because of this need for flashier product designs, for an increase in focus on aesthetics.  Asia plays a role because there are so many new L-directed thinkers who can do the same jobs as American L-directed thinkers for much less pay than the Americans.  Americans are thusly having to expand their repertoires to include more R-directed thinking.  Because Asian workers are able to do the rote logical tasks for extremely low wages, less American workers are being hired for the same jobs.  Automation is heavily impacting L-directed thinking because computers are able to do so many of the L-directed tasks far more efficiently than humans can, humans are being replaced.  Again, R-directed thinking is coming to the fore because it cannot be replicated by computers; for instance, facial recognition.   One of my sixth graders from last term had a sister in, I believe, second grade.  We met once walking to school (I parked on the street off the campus and walked a block or two to campus); several days later on the playground she recognized and correctly identified me as her brother’s student teacher; no computer today could accomplish the same task with such a fleeting initial contact; however, she cannot do complicated statistical analyses in her head with nearly the efficiency of Excel.  High Concept involves the ability to create complicated emotional mindscapes, to detect patterns and opportunities, to create meaningful context and to combine seeming disparate ideas into some novel creation.  High Touch involves analyzing and appreciating the nuances of human interaction and finding value in these interactions as well as in oneself.  As a teacher of math, I find High Concept and High Touch in contextualizing problems in the lives of my students.  For instance, one day I had a problem set situated around one of my students at a skate park in various situations involving proportions.  The students invested more and added context because they knew their fellow student and were able to fill in the subtleties of skate parks because they are able to combine L- and R-directed thinking and use both to solve the problems.  When the problems are in familiar context, the students are able to much more quickly get to the meat of the problem and solve it because they are not having to hack through foreign concepts and objects.  Systems completely dependent on and preferring IQ are deeply flawed because humans are not one dimensional thinkers.  Some humans are L-directed thinkers but still employ R-directed thinking to supplement their strengths; Some are R-directed thinkers but still employ L-directed thinking to supplement their strengths.  A system that values EQ is more important because it takes into account the value of R-directed thinking and the whole brain.  IQ is an important measure of aptitude but alone is not enough to fully evaluate humans.  It only measures have the brain.  Today’s most successful people are no longer strictly   L-directed thinkers.  Our society has evolved to prefer thinkers who find strengths on both sides of the corpus callosum.  The ability to abstract and intuit is as important nowadays as the ability to compute and analyze.    

Communities of Practice

Wenger and Lave developed this concept of communities of practice, which finds its home in myriad distinct fields.  Our focus, being teaching candidates, is on the field of education.  At the charter school where I student taught last semester, the teachers were grouped into many different communities of practice.  To name a few, they are organized into grade level teams, by subject and by level groups, that is to say, elementary and middle/high school.  The administration team is also broken into groups, the principals and the subject coaches.  The complex principal is part of a cohort of principals in the district which is another community of practice.  Because the vast majority of students in each grade have been together since their earliest years, they are tightly knit and are in themselves a community of practice. We, the Master’s Credential Cohort, are a community of practice.  I could go on and on listing the different communities of practice that I observe and have observed during my time in this program.  It is clear that these are very valuable tools for the professional development of teachers’ practice.  In constructing a community of practice it is important to have a common goal and passion that all of the members are striving toward.  This provides the motivation behind the structure and hierarchy of the community; for instance, in the math teachers’ community at my charter school, we had a professional development meeting wherein we brought samples of how we set up student work and the math coach was the central node.  The teachers were primary node, and we student teachers who were there were the peripheral nodes.  By creating a web of interactions, that being examining each other’s student samples, we learned about different ways to motivate student learning and organize information at different levels.  However, any real progress was moot because the math coach, the central node, kept engaging individual nodes rather than letting the network engage.  There were also vehement and stubborn arguments from various grade levels.  We could not come to an agreement on how to unify the notebooks across 9 grades.  This was because each segment, primary middle and high, had different requirements and variables to account for.  In the younger grades, students are more prone to losing things and so the notebooks stay in the classroom.  In the middle grades, we send the notebooks home with the students.  Also, priorities were different in terms of what at the different levels the teachers thought should be in the notebooks.  It was only after leaving the room to rejoin the larger group that the epiphany that we should be trying more to unify expectations across grades rather than the notebook itself.  That is to say, we should figure out what each grade expects students to come in from the previous grade with in terms of study skills, and agree from grade to grade and segment to segment.  All of this is to say that the structure of the group broke down because the central node, rather than facilitating thoughtful discussion among the entire web, chose to engage various nodes head on.  The epiphany would have happened in the session if we were engaging each other.  I think a fault of this system was also readily apparent in that example.  Because we in each grade level were too proud and stubborn, we couldn’t see past trying to unify the notebook across 9 grades; rather, we got stuck on our own notions of what is right.  Also, the math coach, as the central node, got dragged into the petty disputes rather than staying objectively neutral.  She allowed herself to be part of the fray and in so doing broke down the structure of the community.  We dissolved into our subcommunities rather quickly and held fast.  The failing of the community of practice model lay in the human element; the structure must be such that there are checks in place to abate any disagreements such as we had.  That said, if it can be moderated properly, this can be a very powerful tool.  I could see using this model with a tool such as Edmodo with my students to create a community of practice to further their learning, especially in a project based model.  In our class, our domain is technology and teaching, our community is us, and our practice is integrating technology into our teaching.