Almost the end of the school year

The school year is winding down and I've been thinking a lot about new steps.  This year I've been a part of the Project Zero maker space perspective course, a change.school course and a launch book club pln here at school.  I think that next year I'm going to take my studies a little more seriously and apply to something with a little more depth.  Here's hoping anyway.

Most of my thoughts have been about the idea of learning and growing and why some people seem more open to this, what makes people this way? Can it really be fostered?  I'll try to be more diligent with learning this summer, but if not, see you in the next school year when I'm going back to the classroom.

Stages of Learning

 Some rights reserved by pgbailey

I do a lot of things in my off time, even though I really like doing nothing.  One of the things I'm doing this year is captaining/coaching a frisbee team.  We have a great coach we work with, and he was talking about stages of a great ultimate player, and I thought this applied a lot to learning too. 

I wonder how often we are stuck in the conscious incompetent stage. Without a learning coach or someone explicitly helping us become conscious and competent, how can we easily navigate our own life long learning.  

Part of the job I think I am good at is listening and helping shape consciousness and direct people towards competence.  When we can understand what we need to do to get better, I think it's much easier for us to make that progress, it's when we don't understand that we feel frustrated. 

As a beginner things can be liberating because we don't even know what we're doing wrong, everything is just kind of fun, but as we get through the process things can become more difficult. 

 Some rights reserved by tim.klapdor

I think we can apply this easily to many aspects of our learning, but I like how this image shows the disappointment.  Once we start becoming more conscious we enter into this "trough of disillusionment". 

So how can we remain optimistic about the future like we are when we are unconscious and still promote and develop consciousness?

Tadpole habitat

We've been working on getting a home set up for our tadpoles, last week students researched what tadpoles needed to survive and this week they started putting the habitats together.  This is pretty great for us because when we went back outside, the water is all gone, so no home for our little friends.

As a learning journey the students loved it, they learned a lot about tadpoles (and it's still on going) and they are totally motivated to make the most out of their habitats, pretty exciting times.

New problems

We were walking in the outdoor discovery center the other day, and it looked like a lot of our problems (litter, dying plants, chalk) had disappeared, or been taken care of.  So we started looking for new things we could solve.  

It had been raining a lot, so there were lots of puddles (it's been a really strange rainy season here in Singapore).  Anyway, the learners found tadpoles. So currently we are wondering how we can make the tadpoles environment a little more secure.  It was an interesting day.

Changes in the Garden

We've just returned from a holiday and looking out in the garden we've seen a lot of new wood covering the ground.  We're going to use this to look into how systems change when humans try to make differences in our shared world.  Should be interesting.

Touching plants

When we're outside with the little ones we're looking for ways to engage their thinking, and hopefully drive some inquiry. One of the first things we do (and then we revisit it) is walking around touching, smelling and looking at different plants.  We try to do this so we get a better understanding of where we are, as well as feel more comfortable when working with other living things. 

Second instalment

This is the second instalment of our itime with the grade 2 cca learners.  So far they have looked at some of the problems they see in the outdoor discovery center.  One of the larger problems they've recognized is the holes in the roof. Last week they were thinking about the different materials that could used for the roof. We thought of the idea of wood, and leaves.  We then looked around the garden to see if we could find anything around to fix it with.  Right now, we're not sure we can actually finish this "on time" but it's something we're working on.