The Elephant (Foot) In The Room

    I currently hold a bachelor's degree in Biology, and have taken three physiology courses, two anatomy courses, and one neuroscience class.  I still know next to nothing about the brain.  I think even hardened neuroscientists would say that there are many mysteries yet to solve in the field, entire fields of neurons with no known function.  Be that as it may, when I read about the learning process at the cellular level, and about the structures and pathways of the brain that promote "learning", I feel comforted in a way.  I relate the feeling to living in a home that has doors that you have just barely cracked open, and stairs to entire floors that you've never climbed.  You don't know anything about what's behind those doors or on those other floors, but you know it's your home and that you're safe. 

    My latest reading brought about some of those feelings.  Eric Jensen's book, Teaching with the Brain in Mind, uses fundamental anatomy and physiology of the nervous system to inform best teaching practices.  Like others who speak and write well about the brain, he draws the reader in wondrous facts about the brain and comforts them with easy-to-understand language while still applying technical vocabulary.  This kind of digestible science is what I want to emulate as a teacher.

    Another crucial part of making science digestible and relatable for students is allowing for humor.  Jensen is able to get in some jokes in his chapters while still maintaining respect for the content.  I think that this aspect can be easier for an educator than for an author of scientific literature.  For one thing, our audience is younger and probably wont take science as seriously as industry professionals.  But even in graduate school and beyond, adults continue to learn, and I'm a firm believer that humor bolsters learning.  When we can laugh, we become less stressed about content.  More importantly, if we are able to laugh at a joke that connects a complex subject with something we've seen before, it indicates an understanding of that subject.  

    For example, as a way of venting about prior work experience with my co-workers in that field, I became quite enamored with memes.  Combining a pun or a quick few words of a joke with a photograph that served as context for the joke, really hits the right way sometimes, and I can go through a string of relatable memes and bust multiple proverbial "guts".  One that I made for our class, after being reminded of synapses and their structure in Chapter 2, I'm quite personally fond of.  It serves to help students visualize two vastly different things, and laugh at their similarities (at least I laugh):

    One issue that came up in class with Jensen was his assessment of differences in critical thinking skills between classes of people, specifically "male" and "female".  This is something that I didn't gather from the reading because of the edition that I read.  The second edition has this chapter on critical thinking that is absent from the first edition, so knowing little else about what he talks about, I find it strange that he includes this controversial and debatable viewpoint in a more recent edition.  Why was this chapter added, and what purpose does it serve?  How did he come to believe that it was critically important to claim that boys and girls have different critical thinking capabilities, when all of the literature that I read from the first edition stuck only with humans as a species, not categorizing (much) into different classes of people. 

Still, I learned a lot from the material, and I think much of what he encourages in practice, based on the research discusses, align with my own.  I will dig into his reasoning more and try to take it all into perspective.  

I bid you happy trails, smooth sails, and myelinated axons.

The Moral of the Story

Moral (adj): of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior

Moral (noun): the moral significance or practical lesson

The subject of our recent class, as well as the subject of my most recent reading, pertains to morality.  Right and wrong, good and evil.  The question of who (or what) decides which thoughts, behaviors, and actions belong in which column is as old as nature itself.  Nature is actually one of the first places I look to for answers on morality.  Distilling right and wrong to their origins brings us to the simple concept of survival.  What choices/actions/behaviors are most likely to help us survive and reproduce, and thus survive themselves?  Also, questions of morality regarding humanity become much more complex when put in the context of morality regarding the environment. 

To guide us into (and challenge) our thinking about morality and how it informs education, the professors assigned us to read excerpts from a book from 1984 titled In a Different Voice; Psychological Theory and Women's Development by Carol Gilligan.  

Gilligan herself is a moral psychologist, and from the excerpts we learned about her investigation into the different moral development of boys and girls using a technique developed by another moral psychologist named Lawrence Kohlberg.  Kohlberg developed six "stages of moral development", each belonging to one of three "levels": Pre-conventional, Conventional, and Post-Conventional.  The stages that Kohlberg developed, and that Gilligan used and critiqued in her own research, are most often explained using a story (I believe also created by Kohlberg) that some of you may or may not know about: The Heinz Dilemma.  I'll try and paraphrase it.

Heinz' wife is dying.  There is a drug that will cure her, and the chemist who created the drug lives in the same town.  Heinz tries to buy the drug from the chemist, but the cost of the drug is too expensive.  Heinz gets help from family and friends but can only raise half of the price of the drug.  Heinz pleads with the chemist to sell it for a cheaper price or let him pay the money back over time.  The chemist refuses.  

Here is the crux of the story, the question posed and the answers to which are graded using Kohlberg's Six Stages.  Should Heinz steal the drug?

Perhaps you can come up with your own answers and grade yourself using the stages.  But the real issues that came up in class were not about individual moral development, but about how morality is shaped by different factors: intrinsic factors like gender and personality, and extrinsic factors like media influence, parental guidance, and social norms. 

A key argument with the reading was centered around the results of two eleven-year old children who were interviewed and both asked to answer the Heinz dilemma.  The boy's answer was immediately in favor of stealing the drug.  His reasoning centered on the judicial system; the acknowledgement that morality may not correspond to the law, that laws "can have mistakes".  The girl was adamant that the woman shouldn't die, but held firm that Heinz shouldn't have to steal it. Her reasoning was more focused on the network of relationships stemming from Heinz, his wife, and the chemist.  The moral dilemma for her was not so much a question of whether or not Heinz should commit a crime in order to save his wife's life, it was a question of why the chemist refuses to provide the means to save a life when he has it.  

It seems like they both have an intelligent grasp of morality, albeit with different means of expressing their views on right and wrong.  And yet on the Kohlberg scale, the girl was graded at a lower level of moral development.  Gilligan argued that the stages themselves were male-biased and skewed, but something that I and my classmates noticed was how the examples themselves fit the traditional male/female stereotype.  

I wonder what trends we would see now in children, almost 40 years later.  I also wonder at how different personalities between girls and boys affect how they are scored, because each boy and girl will follow slightly or widely different logic than the two examples.  

Ironically, "The Moral of the Story" is also the title of a song by the artist Ashe (the first photograph), with a beautiful and eerie piano accompaniment that I'm (slowly) learning.  Her lyrics are similarly beautiful and sad.  They inspire further questions about right and wrong in the choices we make, and really pull at your heartstrings.  They're the kind of words that, when you listen to them, you immediately want to make it a mantra.  They are words that I dream of singing to my own child.

"Some mistakes get made,

that's alright, that's okay,

In the end it's better for me, 

that's the moral of the story, babe."  

The Sweet Spot: Learning from Educational Philosophy While Constructing My Own

 I have to preface this entry with an acknowledgement that, once again, it has been an embarrassingly long time since I last updated this blog.  I’ll skip the meandering explanation of why I haven’t written and should have. It will also have to be another time (if ever) that I publicly divulge any of the many blog-worthy Addy-ventures that have occurred in the last four years.  

Instead, I will share another guilty admission and explain why I am now writing again after so long; it is a required class assignment.  I know, I know.  I can almost hear your groan of disappointment.  

Nonetheless, I will do my best to hold your attention, for I can seamlessly weave together the theme of this post with the overarching theme of this blog. It is as simple as connecting two things that cannot (or at least should not) exist without the other: adventure and education.  

The class that I am taking, the one responsible for the words you now read, is Educational Psychology.  We are learning about different instructional methods and philosophies and applying them in different settings, seeing how they fit.  Utilizing various resources, one of our overarching goals of the class is to determine, and then describe, our own personal educational philosophies. 

What I want to do here is put down my swirling thoughts down in words and try to describe how the process of determining my educational philosophy is going.  To help me, I will share some of what I’ve learned from the book In Search of Understanding: The Case For Constructivist Classrooms, by Jacqueline Grennon Brooks and Marin G. Brooks.  

As you re-read that title (made you look) you might wonder, “what does constructivist classroom mean?”, and that would be a great question!  

Here's my take on a concise definition:

 “Constructivism” is an educational philosophy that operates under the assumption that knowledge is relative. In other words, each of us constructs our own understanding of the world. 

A “constructivist classroom”, therefore, is one in which the students become the main movers and shakers of their education.   The guidance from an ideal teacher in situation is more subtle and faciliatory, while the lesson structure is more fluid, varying based on each individual student’s interpretations, interests, and needs.

One of the things I enjoyed most about this book was the connections I felt to the examples and research that the authors chose when describing instructional methods.  They often refer to math and science lessons, and one of their very first examples was about the first time a young child visits the ocean, which means a lot to me personally.  One of my very first memories is of visiting the ocean.

Determining how much I agree with the constructivist methods that I’ve been reading about, it is only natural to draw from my prior experiences in educational settings, both as a student and as the educator.  The moments that I look back on as successful were experiences that did involve methods that Constructivists encourage, but they also involved methods that run against constructivist philosophy: lectures and demonstrations that the student then mimicked or practiced.

Two examples I can draw from are my experiences as a swimming instructor and as a sailing instructor.  Within these two settings lie excellent opportunities for students to have freedom and construct their own knowledge, but can also require specific, concise, and accurate instruction.  In both settings, as in all educational settings, safety is the primary concern. When students are literally learning in deep water, the number of safety concerns go up. 

Take a first-time swimming lesson with a three-year old.  In my past lessons I wouldn’t have been able to justify the idea of giving them complete power.  First of all, most would probably either bolt right for the toys or bolt for their parents.  If they didn’t do those things and instead bolted for the water, this is a paradoxical best AND worst case scenario.  If I’m already in the water, great, I can get to them, but if I’m not, then even if that kid has the innate gift of being able to keep their head out of the water on their own, I’ve just committed negligence.

This is, of course, an extreme example.  If I knowingly allow or physically put a child in deep water, I trust myself to know that the worst possible outcome is some water up the nose. My point is that I believe ground rules to be necessary in every educational setting, and the giving of those ground rules is traditionally given as precise directions. 

What I am learning in this class, and through interpreting Brooks and Brooks, that I didn’t know as a young undergrad teaching swim lessons over the summer holiday, is that I was taking progressive and constructivist approaches to traditional lessons without knowing it.  If you had asked me then why I was using those methods, I would have just answered that I was trying to make the lesson more fun. 

Some of these instructional highlights are presented in the book, especially in Chapter two.  Brooks and Brooks stress the importance of valuing student inquiry and physical action over the study of classical textbooks, both of which I have found empowers students and fosters engagement.  Thinking back to my own fifth grade classroom, I was much more engaged in learning about the subject of geology when I was on a field trip to a cave in central Oregon than I was reading about it in a book.

  

I have also learned that giving students as much power over their learning as possible does not mean there is no guidance.  The key is determining the right amount and type of guidance.  Brooks and Brooks recommend that a constructivist educator guide their students by presenting “good problem-solving situations” (p. 36).  This means that the situation: 

1.     1. Demands that the students make a testable prediction

2.     2.  Make use of inexpensive (read: accessible) equipment

3.      3. Is complex enough to elicit multiple possible approaches at solving the problem

4.      4. Benefits from group effort

Making sense of these varied and merited solutions to educational questions reminds me of trying to hit a baseball.  You can technically hit the ball with any part of the bat, but if you make contact with the ball too close to your hands, the ball has less power and your hands get stung.  Hit the ball with the far end of the bat and the same thing happens.  My Dad (and many other coaches) told me that I had to hit the ball with the "sweet spot" on the bat. 

What I am coming to believe is that there exists a "sweet spot" regarding guidance in a class setting.  It essentially lies between saying nothing at all, and giving enough guidance to stay safe and aligned with the learning goal (teacher- or student-derived).  The key is determining the right amount and what kind of guidance.  That is what I think I will continue to grapple with as a I move forward in developing my own educational philosophy.

More advances in knowledge yet to come, but in the meantime....

Happy trails, smooth sails, sunny summers, clean masks, and cheers to enjoying the process!