{"id":3376,"date":"2014-11-12T19:41:41","date_gmt":"2014-11-13T00:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stager.tv\/?p=3376"},"modified":"2014-11-13T03:35:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T08:35:04","slug":"___thinking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/stager.tv\/?p=3376","title":{"rendered":"___Thinking"},"content":{"rendered":"

Thinking and learning are strong proud words. When\u00a0educational publishers or\u00a0policy-makers seek to modify such\u00a0terms, (re: design thinking, discovery learning, computational thinking…), the result seems\u00a0less than the individual parts.<\/p>\n

We get “design thinking” without any design; “computational thinking” without computation; “discovery learning” where the only acceptable discoveries are the ones the teacher (or textbook) already anticipated.<\/p>\n

Increases in agency or student empowerment remain rhetorical and pedagogical progress, illusory.<\/p>\n

I am too often reminded of the Sir Joshua Reynolds quote hanging all over Thomas Edison’s laboratories, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”<\/p>\n

Piaget teaches us that “knowledge is a consequence of experience.” Schools and teachers serve students best when the emphasis is on action, not hypothetical conversations about what one might do if afforded the opportunity.<\/p>\n

Papert was\u00a0sadly correct when he said,\u00a0“When ideas go to school, they lose their power.”<\/p>\n

Let’s say that the lessons IDEO employees gleaned from designing the latest toothpaste tube\u00a0could<\/em>\u00a0actually\u00a0<\/em>be applied to education (a preposterous supposition, but let’s roll with it). By the time those ideas move from the latest blog post or conference workshop to the classroom, kids are left with an elaborate process in which brainstorming and affixing Post-It notes to walls becomes a means to solving hypothetical problems or PowerPoint reports about a topic they care little about for a non-existent audience.<\/p>\n

Actions taken by the system, like school or classroom redesign or schedule redesign may be fantastically beneficial, but are too often conflated with the benefits of learning by being designing something personally meaningful. In other words, the adults may have learned something by being designers, but are depriving youngsters of that same quality of experience. At a time when learning is too often viewed as the direct causal result of having been taught, system-level design becomes conflated with student learning. Arranging\u00a0ceiling lights in the shape of constellations to reinforce the STEM focus of the school<\/a> is hardly the same as students learning science by being scientists. Doing science leads to richer learning experiences and is profoundly different from being taught about it in a room with pictures of scientists on the wall or carpet tiles arranged in fractal patterns.<\/p>\n

\"Image<\/a>
Image credit: https:\/\/flic.kr\/p\/cL9Gi<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Teachers, and by extension students, become\u00a0consumed by hitting all of the steps in the “design process” and remembering those stages at the expense of deeper experiences in creativity, design, engineering, or computing. I am alarmed by how many schools celebrate\u00a0that they allow kids to choose a topic to write a report about (paper, blog post, or PowerPoint) and then confuse such coercive, traditional, and inauthentic experiences with remarkable feats of empowerment or school reform.<\/p>\n

It is\u00a0sad and dangerous to give folks the illusion of agency without actual power or meaningful options.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Thinking and learning are strong proud words. 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