The Learning Principle

Learning Principle:

Good learning designs engage students in “playful” activities at the edge of their knowledge and understanding using symbolic tools to develop and internalize meaningful thought.

The Learning Principle makes me think exactly of what’s been going on in my science class this year. We’ve been learning about electricity for the last 3 weeks (static electricity, batteries, simple circuits, conductors/insulators, and now electromagnets). We’ve been lucky that this first unit is one we can do almost completely hands-on. My teammate and I attended a professional development before school started that gave us ideas for how to incorporate various levels of exploration, so we designed our unit to be mostly opposite of the traditional i do, we do, you do model. We’ve started by posing a question about a familiar phenomenon (getting shocked on the slide, light up toys, remote controls, electricity in a house, etc), discussed relevant vocabulary, and then given students the necessary materials to create something that will help them answer the question posed at the beginning of the lesson. After experimenting, we come together to generalize discoveries, and during this time, we teach a mini-lesson as needed. In all four 4th grade classes, we’ve been blown away by how engaged the students are in their learning and their ability to explain what they create in the course of their experiment. Granted, electricity is one of the easiest topics in which students can engage in playful activities, but the experience has definitely inspired me to find a way to incorporate this style of learning in other units throughout the year. I especially want to try this in math--I’m thinking adding/subtracting fractions would be a good topic to try it with if I give all students a problem to solve and fraction tiles to work with.

I think since I was a student, I’ve believed that you can’t really learn something until you can do it by yourself in a new situation. I remember being frustrated with math teachers in high school when they’d give us very similar types of practice problems during a unit followed by a very different type of application problem on a test. I came to expect this, and felt helpless each time because I wasn’t given opportunities to apply new skills in various contexts at any time before the test. To me, this is directly reflective of the learning principle/Vygotsky. I had actual knowledge of the things I was learning (derivatives, inverse functions, etc) and applying them was in my zone of proximal development, but I was never able to cross it (and that’s evidenced by the fact that I can only tell you that I learned those things today, I can’t show you). I actually think it would have been very helpful had I taken physics after calculus.

Sorry for that walk down high school lane. I’ll get back to focus. I’ve found that using symbolic tools to express the ideas we’ve read about on our own, then discussed in class has truly helped me make the most of what we’re learning. As much as I don’t want to be creative and write 5 poems at the end of a very long day, it does force us to make our own meaning of these very abstract concepts. Snaps for us, and snaps for Dr. Norton because it’s so helpful to have experience participating in the type of activities we can actually use in our classrooms.