In Australia, there seems to be a contradiction at the heart of our commitment to public education. On the one hand, educators are briefed with the task of enabling disadvantaged students to transcend their background: to defy the social and economic forces of class predestination. On the other hand, the same educators (and the society that gives them their brief) are likely to believe that educational inequality will always reflect social and economic inequality: that the further down the ladder you go, the less prospect there is of encountering a school of willing students and able teachers.
Noel discussed the teaching and administrative changes being implemented in some Cape York schools on Radio National’s Big Ideas program.
I was particularly interested in the pedagogy issues under discussion including direct instruction. As a result I followed up on Siegfried Engelmann‘s work to look at the way direct instruction: was used in small groups; focused attention on the teacher; used scripts from designed instruction; encouraged individual and group response; was characterised by feedback and correction; and conducted at a high pace.
I liked the focus on high expectation, high quality education in Cape York schools and thought that notwithstanding the philosophical and political issues raised by direct instruction there were important matters to address about personal learning and differentiated support for learners.
I am hopeful that exploring these ideas will help me understand better the explicit and tacit behaviours of expert pedagogues (teachers and coaches) to support differentiated (personalised) learning and performances of understanding.
This post about attention and learning started with some ideas stimulated by Noah Charney‘s novel The Art Thief (2007).
I liked his suggestion that “logic and observation are universal tools … that no one realises they have.” In the novel he points out that students in the Yale University Medical School are required to visit the Yale Centre for British Art. This post from earlier this year provides the non-fiction account of this relationship.(This is a post from 2006. See too this article (2001) on the use of fine art to enhance visual diagnostic skills and this link to data from the study.)
All first-year students at the School of Medicine are required to take the innovative class, which was developed by Yale medical school faculty member Dr. Irwin Braverman and Linda Friedlaender, curator of education at the Yale Center for British Art, which houses the world’s largest collection of British art outside the United Kingdom.
Braverman and other experts believe that, in an age when physicians rely heavily on high-tech imaging and tests, the art of detailed, careful observation is getting short shrift. But detecting small details can make all the difference in coming up with accurate diagnoses, believes the Yale faculty member.
Braverman began trying to find a way to increase observational skills of medical school students at around the same time that Friedlaender became frustrated with the continued misdiagnosis of a close friend. They happened to meet at a gathering and began laying the groundwork for the class, which makes the most of the museum’s collection by asking medical students to “diagnose” individuals portrayed in its artworks.
Their work brought to mind Max Lucado‘s observation that “to lead the orchestra, you have to turn your back on the crowd”. The combination of Noah Charney’s fiction and the real world work going on at Yale prompted me to think about attention and learning.
You are designed to work with incomplete information.
You resolve ambiguous input data based on how you believe the world works.
He concludes that “we can provide a system that adapts to the individual minds in our care at every stage. The science leaves us no option here – ‘personalized learning,’ by whatever name, is a central design principle for a transformed education system.” Some of these issues were raised by Graham Attwell in his post about virtual learning environments and in this post about digital identities.
Just after reading John’s blog post I came across the BrainBoard visualisation from Second Life shared by Jeff Lowe on Flickr.
This led me to think about immersive learning and the possibilities created by virtual spaces. Erica and Sam Driver explore some of these ideas in their post about what makes a virtual environment immersive. They have a detailed table in that post that summarises the immersiveness continuum in which they characterise low and high immersiveness in a variety of factors including graphics, avatars, 3D environment, ability to control viewpoint, physics, size of display, haptics, voice, collaboration and interactivity.
This post about 3D video added to my interest in the attention and learning possibilities available in 3D environments.
I think this approach has enormous potential and reminded me of the Us Mob web site designed by Katalyst and their more recent Burn site. I think there are some wonderful opportunities available for attention and learning in these approaches and in the function of such innovations as Mag+ (Vimeo link).
Whilst moving across web posts, I found a post about presentation that discussed the role of storytelling. This video in the post encouraged me to think about how young you can be to understand and share a story. This is the message from the original film:
“One game. If we played ‘em ten times, they might win nine. But not this game…not tonight. Tonight, we skate with them. Tonight, we stay with them, and we shut them down because we can! Tonight, WE are the greatest hockey team in the world. You were born to be hockey players – every one of you. You were meant to be here tonight. This is your time. Their time is done. It’s over. This is your time. Now go out there and take it.”
The YouTube session set me up for an exploration of story telling and the use of narrative. By coincidence one of the Bush Telegraph programs on Radio National discussed Graham Seal‘s new book Great Australian Stories-legends, yarns and tall tales. This set me of thinking about the role storying plays in attention and learning and how many learning environments are a rich source for stories.
From stories I moved on to a post about pictures by John Medina. John points out the impact pictures have on memory (pictorial superiority effect) and he has some great points to make about text:
The inefficiency of text has received particular attention. One of the reasons that text is less capable than pictures is that the brain sees words as lots of tiny pictures. Data clearly show that a word is unreadable unless the brain can separately identify simple features in the letters. Instead of words, we see complex little art-museum masterpieces, with hundreds of features embedded in hundreds of letters. Like an art junkie, we linger at each feature, rigorously and independently verifying it before moving to the next. The finding has broad implications for reading efficiency. Reading creates a bottleneck. My text chokes you, not because my text is not enough like pictures but because my text is too much like pictures. To our cortex, unnervingly, there is no such thing as words.
Reading about the Group Brain project took me back to Carl Wieman‘s work as an educator. I listened to a Radio National program about his thoughts on teaching methodology and peer instruction. This discussion led me to Eric Mazur‘s work:
It’s the middle of a class period and two hundred students aren’t listening to the instructor. Instead, they’re engaged in over fifty simultaneous conversations with their neighbors. This probably sounds like a disaster to many teachers. But it’s actually a rousing success: the students are discussing a question which challenges them to think about the material and justify their reasoning to their classmates.
What this wayfinding approach led me to this week was an incredibly rich set of resources around attention and learning. As the week came to a close mention of journalism as effective surprise in an ABC Radio interview with Mark Scott encouraged me to think even more about the learning opportunities skilled teachers and coaches construct. J S Bruner points out that humans tend to respond with “effective surprise” to concepts and artifacts that take familiar things and rearrange them in new ways. Some observers discuss a chaordic model of change (where chaos and order overlap) and suggest that the most fertile territory for innovation is in the boundary zone, where unlike things co-mingle.
I liked Ursula Lucas‘s (2006) discussion of being pulled up short in this context. She notes in a discussion of teaching that “moments of surprise have two aspects. Firstly, they represent moments when the lecturer is “pulled up short” and recognises the unexpected impact of a learning activity and is propelled into reflection. Secondly, they represent moments when students are “pulled up short” and are propelled into questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about themselves and the subject.”
By the end of the week of exploring attention and learning I realised I still had to look at:
The aim of this blog post is to share these ideas about attention and learning and to support explorations in personalised teaching, coaching and learning. Fortunately I did not lose a lot of sleep over this post. Researching attention and learning is a wonderful way to ensure high quality of sleep. But just when it is safe to go to bed you might want to think about the attention and learning possibilities of sleep, dreams and nightmares. Richard Stickgold‘s work and Antti Revonsuo‘s research open up fascinating opportunities to explore the learning possibilities of dreams and nightmares.
There was a reprint published last month of Noel Pearson’s 2009 Quarterly Essay Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia.
