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.