So, Bev, It seems I have yet to find something we disagree on! :-) LOL Lesson study was such an Ah hah to me last year because I have always believed, as you do, of the interconnectedness of learning...that real learning requires the brain to make connections and see patterns. My problem was trying to do to much of that in a single lesson--I tried to force the connections by bringing in too much to begin with. I can give you an example from lesson study that illustrates your point exactly. It was an introductory lesson---at K, the kids had never been invited to create mental images before, at least in a school setting. We used the wonderful wordless Carl books to model creating mental images. If you know the books, Carl is a dog who is left in charge of a baby for the day when mom goes shopping. The baby, riding on Carl's back gets into all kinds of shennanigans---going down a laundry shoot, getting into the refrigerator, etc. When we sent the kids to try to visualize on their own, we gave them two photocopies of two drawings from the book that followed each other immediately in the text but with a blank sheet of paper in between on which to draw what they saw in their minds in between. (Think of it like a tiny scroll as you would use for text mapping.) We got amazing pictures and amazing thinking. At our debrief, we teachers had a very rich conversation about what we really ended up teaching...mental images or INFERENCES-? Was our objective for mental images really met or did we teach something other than what we thought we were teaching. Truly, they were inferring what happened inbetween the two pictures we gave them. In the end we decided that it didn't really matter...because our overall goal for the lesson study process was to help children learn to think more deeply...and of course, these five year olds were doing a great job of that. You can see how this illustrates your points...there was some great learning here...but not exactly what we expected.
When we eventually got into modeling inferences with K, we certainly built on the thinking they had done with the Carl lesson and had a fine-tuned, discreet outcome for several lessons that our students would understand the connections between the two strategies. Keeping the objective narrow for a particular lesson helped but over an entire unit we provided opportunities for those connections to be built. Does this make sense to you? I am still wrapping my head around it all. It really seems to me that what is getting under your skin is an underlying philosophical difference about learning and teaching between you and your administrators. You are a facilitator at heart--and you believe in the partnership of teachers and students in the learning process. You seem to be offended by the thought that what is learned and taught comes only from the adults in the room. Please don't leave the classroom...maybe you need to find a school where there is a better fit for your beliefs... Jennifer <<So my current understanding about what Ellin is saying in To Understand is that we must get into something deeply in order to truly understand (and comprehension strategies are some of the key vehicles), so that we can then help learners to generalize for reapplication. I think the point of departure for me yesterday was not in knowing what we were going to teach and why, not in telling the learners that so they'd have the wide-angle lens view first and then dwelling deeply in that, it was the implication (and, to me, arrogance) of thinking that we human could learn only one thing at a time. (Of course, I may have been oversensitive to the message given.) When you look at brain-research you see that it is the findings of patterns and the having of more things to connect in more ways that is the essence of learning. So, Jennifer, I strongly agree with you that you have to focus and concentrate on what you hope the learners learn deeply, and I need to also remember that it takes the connections to be able to retain and reapply, as I think Ellin says. I think I need to better blend my background in integrated learning with what I know about lesson study, etcetera, and I don't mean to imply that they are at all mutually exclusive. Many in-depth lessons will integrate into a far-greater understanding than will dibbles and dabbles of discrete information. So I do essentially agree, Jennifer, with all you wrote. What I disagreed with yesterday is the presumption that learners can learn only one thing at a time and that we as teachers absolutely control what they learn. If we're doing our job as well as we can, they're taking their particular schema and going in directions we could never predict. And maybe we'll end up in places we'd never thought to put on the board. That doesn't mean that we haven't planned carefully and well (and multiple times, as in lesson study); it just means that while we focus carefully, we'll probably end up in wonderful and sometimes unexpected places when we dive in! I'm so glad we don't have to think in either/ors here. I learn a whole lot more that way. Bev>> **************Looking for simple solutions to your real-life financial challenges? Check out WalletPop for the latest news and information, tips and calculators. (http://www.walletpop.com/?NCID=emlcntuswall00000001) _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
