My take on this over the years has excluded labels and categories for a variety
of reasons.
But I do think thresholds are important for most areas of learning. For
example, at what level would an actually literate person consider a high school
graduate to be fluent in literate actions and thinking? At what level would a
mathematician consider a high school graduate fluent in mathematical actions
and thinking? This is very different from asking questions about the level that
a professional would need to attain. At levels below these two, we are talking
about areas of study that are neither about literacy nor about mathematics, but
something else. The something else could be useful (for example, reading street
signs and goods in stores, or adding up simple sums).
My main complaint about most schooling processes whether official or grassroots
is that for a wide variety of reasons they settle for the something else
rather than try to find ways to help the students learn the real deals.
If the real deals are chosen, then the interesting question is what kinds of
processes will work for what kinds of learners? If it is some non-trivial
percentage of direct instruction, then this is what should be done (and
depending on the learner, this percentage could range from 0% to a surprisingly
high number). However, part of the real deal is being able to *do* the
pursuits, not just know something about them, so all pedagogical approaches
will have to find ways to get learners to learn how to do what practitioners do
who above the two thresholds of fluency and pro.
Tim Gallwey is one of the best teachers I've ever observed, and he had a number
of extremely effective techniques to help his students learn the real deal very
quickly (and almost none of these were direct instruction -- partly because, as
he liked to say, The parts of the brain that you need to do the learning very
often don't understand English!). But if he could see that the student had
gotten on a track that couldn't be influenced by guided discovery, then he
would instantly tell them to do it this way. In other words, he was not
religious about his own very successful method, but instead did what his
students individually needed and that worked the best for them (which happened
to be learning by doing).
Best wishes,
Alan
From: Bill Kerr billk...@gmail.com
To: Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com
Cc: iaep i...@lists.sugarlabs.org; Sugar-dev Devel
sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org; community-n...@lists.sugarlabs.org
Sent: Monday, May 4, 2009 5:20:50 PM
Subject: [IAEP] versus, not
On Mon, May 4, 2009 at 7:43 AM, Walter Bender walter.ben...@gmail.com wrote:
===Sugar Digest===
I encourage you to join two threads on the Education List this week:
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005382.html, which
has boiled down to an instruction vs construction debate; and
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/archive/iaep/2009-April/005342.html, which
has boiled down to a debate of catering to local culture vs the
Enlightenment. I encourage you to join these discussions.
Agree that these are important discussions
Need to be careful about the use of the versus depiction of these discussions
IMO, this tempting shorthand can create the wrong impression
eg. I would see direct instruction as a must for autistic children but don't
see that it follows as a general model for all education (special needs are
special) or that we should even think it is possible to have a correct general
model. I don't think there is one and good teachers swap between multiple
models all the time.
no one on this list has argued overtly against the enlightenment or that
local culture ought not to be taken into account, eg. Ties said think
practical, the response was of the nature that our context demands we do a
certain course of action
however, I do think the roll back of enlightenment principles is not well
understood (http://learningevolves.wikispaces.com/nonUniversals) and that a
better understanding might persuade more people of the need to keep searching
and struggling for different ways to go against some of the tide of local
culture - there is a recent interesting comment thread on mark guzdial's blog
which is worth reading from this point of view
http://www.amazon.com/gp/blog/post/PLNK3F4TMBURELZZK
___
Sugar-devel mailing list
Sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org
http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/sugar-devel
