A Collection of Positive Learning Experiences
Below are some examples I've come across of positive learning experiences. I am collecting them because I enjoy reading them and they serve as inspiration when I'm thinking about how to go about creating great learning experiences.
Supporting the children's interests
A child follows his curiosity and secretly conducts an electricity experiment during English class. When he's caught, his teacher supports his interest rather than punishing him. She allocates class time so he and the other children can have time to explore their interests.
But in 4th grade the teacher, Miss Mary Quirk, was quite different from the start. And there was something very different in her classroom. There was an old dining table towards the back on the right hand side that was completely covered with various kinds of junk: tools, wires, gears, batteries, and books.
Miss Quirk never mentioned this table. Eventually, I started to poke around to see what was on it. As a confirmed book rat I first looked at the books. One of them was about electricity and looked very interesting. That afternoon during an English class I set up my English book with the smaller electricity book behind it, and the large dry cell battery, nail, wire, and paper clips behind that. I wound the bell wire around the nail as it showed in the book, connected the ends of the wire to the battery, and found that the nail would now attract and hold the paperclips!
I let out a shriek: "It works!" The class stopped. I hunched down expecting some form of punishment as had often happened to me in my previous school. But Miss Quirk did nothing of the kind. She stopped the class and asked, "How did you do that?". I explained about the electricity book and showed my electromagnet holding the paper clips. She said: "Wow, that's great! What else is in the book?" I showed her that the next project was to make a telegraph with the electromagnet! She asked if others in the class were interested in this, and some were. She said, OK later this afternoon we'll have time for projects and you all can work together to do the next things in the book. And that's just what happened!
This happened many times. Children would find stuff on the table that really interested them and made something. Miss Quirk would get the child to show it and see who else was interested to work on it. Pretty soon about half of our class time was devoted to these self chosen projects. We started showing up earlier and earlier for school in the hopes we could spend more time on them. She was always there. We could never beat her to class!
Most of my ideas about how elementary school education should be done are drawn from the way Miss Quirk ran her classroom. She took subjects that would be interesting to the children and integrated real mathematics, science and art together for her curriculum.
Still later when I lucked into a terrific grad school at the University of Utah, my first thought was that this was just like 4th grade! And then I realized that Mary Quirk had made 4th grade just like a great graduate school! This is a critical insight. Children are in the same state of not knowing as research scientists. They need to go through many of the same processes of discovery in order to make new ideas their own. Because discovery is really difficult and has taken hundreds of years, the difference is that children have to be scaffolded carefully (but not using the Socratic method, it "leads the witness" too much). Instead the scaffolding has to be set up as close encounters and careful but invisible sequencing to allow the children to make the final leaps themselves. This was the genius of Mary Quirk. It was interesting that we never found out what she knew. She was focused on what we knew and could find out.
Source: The Center of "Why?" by Alan Kay (2004)
Teaching in the context of a child's passion
A child is frustrated because he can't figure out how to track score in the video game he's creating. He's thrilled when he learns about variables because they're the key concept for solving his problem.
But the day I visited, Leo was frustrated. He felt that his game would be much more interesting to other people if the game could keep score. He wanted the score to go up every time the game's main character killed a monster, but he didn't know how to make it happen. He tried a variety of approaches, but none worked.
I showed Leo a Scratch feature that he hadn't seen before: a variable. Together, Leo and I created a variable called score. The Scratch software automatically added a small box on the screen displaying the value of score, and it also added a collection of new programming blocks for accessing and modifying the value of score. One of the blocks had this instruction: change score by 1. When Leo saw this block, he immediately knew what to do. He inserted the new block into his program, wherever he wanted the score to increase. He tried playing his game again, with the newly revised program, and he was excited to see the score increase each time he killed a monster in the game.
Leo reached out to shake my hand, exclaiming: "Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!" It made me feel good to see Leo so excited. I wondered: How many algebra teachers get thanked by their students for teaching them about variables? That doesn't happen, of course, because most algebra classes introduce variables in ways that don't connect with student interests and passions. Leo's experience at the Clubhouse was different; he cared about variables because he cared about his game.
Discovering zero
A child discovers the concept of the number zero and then excitedly shares her finding with others.
A kindergarten child, Dawn, was playing with a Logo program that allowed objects on the screen to be designed and set in motion. [...] The speed of an object was controlled by typing a number. So the child could see that speed ten was much faster than speed two, and even begin to grope toward the idea that speed two is twice as fast as speed one.
After a while, Dawn became very excited and called the teacher and a friend to see something on her screen. She typed something with one finger hidden beyond the other hand so as to hide what she was typing. Everyone looked expectantly. Dawn said, "Look!" Nothing happened. Dawn said "Look, look!" and it took time for the teacher to get the point: Nothing was happening because she had set speed 0. Slowly it became clear that zero was a speed, so that standing still is moving — moving at speed zero.
I understand what happened to Dawn as a replay of an historically important mathematical event. I remember hearing when I was in the fourth or fifth grade that Hindu mathematicians discovered zero and wondering what that meant. What did they discover? Was it using a circular symbol? What they — and Dawn — discovered was that zero could be treated as a number. I have since found out that Dawn was not the only child to have made this discovery. Nor was a computer needed. Indeed, a poll of participants at a meeting of teachers showed that perhaps as many as one in ten of those who had children of their own had noticed a moment of excited joking of the form, "Are there any snakes in the house? Yes there are, there are zero snakes."
Source: The Children's Machine: Rethinking School In The Age Of The Computer by Seymour Papert (1993)
View Comments
rigdern
rigdern