Saturday, January 23, 2010
Friday, January 8, 2010
Margaret Maxwell's Brainy Professional Development Experience
Greetings, All,
Margaret Maxwell attended a conference on Learning and the Brain in November 2009, funded at least in part by the Faculty Professional Development Fund--here is a reflection she prepared to share some of her learning experience. If you have questions for her, please feel free to write to her a mmaxwell@coloradomtn.edu.
Learning and the Brain Reflection by Margaret Maxwell:
Please use the following link to get started.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQtmGcdSDAI
Now answer the following question: What techniques does the teacher use to “teach for long term retention?” If you answered “the teacher tapped into a combination of semantic and episodic memory to increase retention,” you would be right, according to Willy Wood, one of many presenters at this year’s Learning and the Brain conference. By this he means that educators have the ability to improve student memory retention by combining necessary but no-so-effective “lecture” or semantic memory with “movement or environment” (episodic memory).
Wood argues that another key element that educators by instinct know about but don’t always find time to exercise is accessing students’ prior knowledge. Notice how Robin Williams states, “you’ve walked past them many times (the photos of “lads” just like themselves).” He personalizes and accesses prior knowledge again in the lesson by comparing the pictures with their own characteristics: haircuts, hormones, invincibility. He shocks them with what they know already (prior knowledge) that one day the students will be dead, just as the lads they are looking at are “fertilizing daffodils.”
By having you watch the video first, I am actually attempting to mimic another of Wood’s key lessons: teaching by inference. By providing the film segment, I have given you a context for learning that taps into what you already know about teaching (your prior knowledge). If this were a discussion, which I hope it turns out to be in some other venue, then the lesson might turn to lecture (no more than 10 minutes and I really have, inadvertently, already lectured you), and then some sort of exercise in which the concept of teaching to maximize learning retention would be solidified or “initially encoded” (check in with your neighbor, short writing exercise, journaling).
But I have more to cover in looking at Wood’s work. A typical lesson plan in a Social Science class? Access prior knowledge of what students DO know at least 10 days before the lesson itself by way of some type of assessment. The topic? McCarthyism. Lesson is broken into what Wood calls “chunks,” and each student, to begin, is given a card that is either blank or has a dot. The rules? Some students have dots and others, no dots. The purpose of the game is to find people without dots to enter your group, and deny access to dots. But dots are told to lie, to tell the dotless that they are dotless as well, so as to be accepted and included. The result? The bigger the group, the more likely it is that there is an imposter in that group. On the other hand, to win the game you need a group with the most people who legitimately have no dots. This simple although wordy example represents a lesson plan that begins with episodic memory, which research tells us is much more powerful than semantic memory. Instructor then asks students how students feel when they are forced to lie (the dots) and the dotless are forced to be suspicious in order to win the game. This gives a context for the lecture on McCarthyism that follows (10 minutes) and the final pause or reflection on relevance for the last part of this lesson which Wood calls “Initial Encoding.” As Wood writes, “While simply having an engaging experience places the event in episodic memory, reflecting on the experience puts it into words and it becomes part of our story of how the world works, our mental maps. The experience, and our description of the experience, thus becomes part of long-term memory” (Wood 349).
Learning, as you know, is greatly influenced by relevance and relevance is greatly influenced by framing. Try this: recount to a colleague or friend an experience that happened that made you very angry. Be vocal. Now reframe to find the positive. Ask yourself: which version of this is true? If you answer a little of both, that is because, according to Wood, both are most probably a bit wrong. We lose information and fill in the blanks by inference, by what we know to be true. The brain’s instinct to infer means that our brains can’t always be trusted. A study including Harvard professors and graduates subject to the question why do we have seasons, revealed that 1 out of 10 of these “educated” people could not answer correctly. Most answered that seasons were directly related to when the earth is closest to the sun when the correct answer actually is the angle and tilt of the earth. All were taught the correct answer and tested fine. Six months later they retested and got it wrong again. Why did they get the answer wrong again? Because their prior knowledge from childhood formed their impressions: the closer you are to the sun the warmer, and the farther from the sun the colder. What the brain didn’t know, it filled in with inference rather than fact. Wood argues that looping back to the correct information or to any learning event again and again is essential since the human brain or Hippocampus is subject to changing and revising information for up to ten years before the learning moves to permanency.
Wood quotes John Medina who writes, “one of the most depressing facts in all of education: people usually forget about 90 of what they learn in a class within 30 days…The majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours of class”(Wood 347). However, Wood answers that depressing claim with many solutions, many of which I have mentioned here. I will point out his 3 P’s principal, most important of which, I find, is the “prime.” Lecturing, the necessary evil, is most productive when the instructor primes the lecture by pointing out 1,2, or 3 concepts to be discussed. This he calls “scaffolding” the lecture. Pause and process, the other P’s have been discussed previously, especially when I discuss the value of “initial encoding.” Pausing, as defined by breaking lesson plans into “chunks” also seems obvious to the practiced teacher.
But consider the elephant in the room: what about all that material we have to cover—the objectives, the curriculum? This is the question we pondered at the conference and the reality for every teacher reading this. But more content does not translate into more learning, Wood argues, and the research supports this fact. Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to make careful and responsible choices about curriculum and trust that in covering less “content” we have made a positive choice, as long as we employ practices that maximize memory retention such as those I have discussed here.
Margaret Maxwell attended a conference on Learning and the Brain in November 2009, funded at least in part by the Faculty Professional Development Fund--here is a reflection she prepared to share some of her learning experience. If you have questions for her, please feel free to write to her a mmaxwell@coloradomtn.edu.
Learning and the Brain Reflection by Margaret Maxwell:
Please use the following link to get started.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQtmGcdSDAI
Now answer the following question: What techniques does the teacher use to “teach for long term retention?” If you answered “the teacher tapped into a combination of semantic and episodic memory to increase retention,” you would be right, according to Willy Wood, one of many presenters at this year’s Learning and the Brain conference. By this he means that educators have the ability to improve student memory retention by combining necessary but no-so-effective “lecture” or semantic memory with “movement or environment” (episodic memory).
Wood argues that another key element that educators by instinct know about but don’t always find time to exercise is accessing students’ prior knowledge. Notice how Robin Williams states, “you’ve walked past them many times (the photos of “lads” just like themselves).” He personalizes and accesses prior knowledge again in the lesson by comparing the pictures with their own characteristics: haircuts, hormones, invincibility. He shocks them with what they know already (prior knowledge) that one day the students will be dead, just as the lads they are looking at are “fertilizing daffodils.”
By having you watch the video first, I am actually attempting to mimic another of Wood’s key lessons: teaching by inference. By providing the film segment, I have given you a context for learning that taps into what you already know about teaching (your prior knowledge). If this were a discussion, which I hope it turns out to be in some other venue, then the lesson might turn to lecture (no more than 10 minutes and I really have, inadvertently, already lectured you), and then some sort of exercise in which the concept of teaching to maximize learning retention would be solidified or “initially encoded” (check in with your neighbor, short writing exercise, journaling).
But I have more to cover in looking at Wood’s work. A typical lesson plan in a Social Science class? Access prior knowledge of what students DO know at least 10 days before the lesson itself by way of some type of assessment. The topic? McCarthyism. Lesson is broken into what Wood calls “chunks,” and each student, to begin, is given a card that is either blank or has a dot. The rules? Some students have dots and others, no dots. The purpose of the game is to find people without dots to enter your group, and deny access to dots. But dots are told to lie, to tell the dotless that they are dotless as well, so as to be accepted and included. The result? The bigger the group, the more likely it is that there is an imposter in that group. On the other hand, to win the game you need a group with the most people who legitimately have no dots. This simple although wordy example represents a lesson plan that begins with episodic memory, which research tells us is much more powerful than semantic memory. Instructor then asks students how students feel when they are forced to lie (the dots) and the dotless are forced to be suspicious in order to win the game. This gives a context for the lecture on McCarthyism that follows (10 minutes) and the final pause or reflection on relevance for the last part of this lesson which Wood calls “Initial Encoding.” As Wood writes, “While simply having an engaging experience places the event in episodic memory, reflecting on the experience puts it into words and it becomes part of our story of how the world works, our mental maps. The experience, and our description of the experience, thus becomes part of long-term memory” (Wood 349).
Learning, as you know, is greatly influenced by relevance and relevance is greatly influenced by framing. Try this: recount to a colleague or friend an experience that happened that made you very angry. Be vocal. Now reframe to find the positive. Ask yourself: which version of this is true? If you answer a little of both, that is because, according to Wood, both are most probably a bit wrong. We lose information and fill in the blanks by inference, by what we know to be true. The brain’s instinct to infer means that our brains can’t always be trusted. A study including Harvard professors and graduates subject to the question why do we have seasons, revealed that 1 out of 10 of these “educated” people could not answer correctly. Most answered that seasons were directly related to when the earth is closest to the sun when the correct answer actually is the angle and tilt of the earth. All were taught the correct answer and tested fine. Six months later they retested and got it wrong again. Why did they get the answer wrong again? Because their prior knowledge from childhood formed their impressions: the closer you are to the sun the warmer, and the farther from the sun the colder. What the brain didn’t know, it filled in with inference rather than fact. Wood argues that looping back to the correct information or to any learning event again and again is essential since the human brain or Hippocampus is subject to changing and revising information for up to ten years before the learning moves to permanency.
Wood quotes John Medina who writes, “one of the most depressing facts in all of education: people usually forget about 90 of what they learn in a class within 30 days…The majority of this forgetting occurs within the first few hours of class”(Wood 347). However, Wood answers that depressing claim with many solutions, many of which I have mentioned here. I will point out his 3 P’s principal, most important of which, I find, is the “prime.” Lecturing, the necessary evil, is most productive when the instructor primes the lecture by pointing out 1,2, or 3 concepts to be discussed. This he calls “scaffolding” the lecture. Pause and process, the other P’s have been discussed previously, especially when I discuss the value of “initial encoding.” Pausing, as defined by breaking lesson plans into “chunks” also seems obvious to the practiced teacher.
But consider the elephant in the room: what about all that material we have to cover—the objectives, the curriculum? This is the question we pondered at the conference and the reality for every teacher reading this. But more content does not translate into more learning, Wood argues, and the research supports this fact. Therefore, it is imperative for teachers to make careful and responsible choices about curriculum and trust that in covering less “content” we have made a positive choice, as long as we employ practices that maximize memory retention such as those I have discussed here.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Crossing the Miles on a Snowy Work Day
Yes, it snowed today. And the roads were slick. And I worked all day today from home due to the technology that brought me here in the belief that this college had invested in ways to connect CMC across the miles:
So I met with colleagues form across the state in Second Life, and we talked about how Intercambio has a place in Second Life and how we could share that with Intercambio classes at CMC and another Colorado CC.
So I met with colleagues form across the state in Second Life, and we talked about how Intercambio has a place in Second Life and how we could share that with Intercambio classes at CMC and another Colorado CC.
I met with teammate Yuliya who is one hundred or so miles away. We discussed upcoming workshops and what we’ve learned since Webadvisor can now be used to register for professional development workshops.
I discussed Web2.0 class activity options for an online course with Nicole also one hundred miles away.
And created two Blackboard working spaces for training and the Common Reader 10 Committee.
And I took a shoveling break (Picture, Round 1).
With the arrival of the true winter snow, I am once again reminded of Robert Frost’s, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I love his work because he is known to have captured American speech rhythms with unrhymed, iambic pentameter.
And I can also appreciate the parody of the greats. Garrison Keillor informed us of the songs we can sing this poem to. I personally like singing it to Hernando’s Hideaway. (It reminds me of a Christmas party at a former college…)
This post documents Keillor’s options for singing Frost’s Poem:
That said, safe travels, good skiing, and, “Be well, do good work,” as my fellow Minnesotan says. Last, thank you for all you are doing for CMC learning.
Monday, December 7, 2009
Adjunct Faculty News!
Attached please find the most recent edition of the Adjunct Faculty News. This will be included in print form in the upcoming December 15 paychecks.
If you would like to submit a contribution to future editions, they are most welcome, please contact
Jan Dean at jdean@coloradomtn.edu
Thank you and Happy Holidays!
/AdjFacNews6%21.pdf
If you would like to submit a contribution to future editions, they are most welcome, please contact
Jan Dean at jdean@coloradomtn.edu
Thank you and Happy Holidays!
/AdjFacNews6%21.pdf
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
HUM 123: Live Music Critique in Second Life
Second Life Live Music Critique
Choose one live performance that you attended in SL and critique.
1. Describe the location and type of music performed. Please use details as to the event, venue and attendance by other avatars.
2. Describe the avatar- musician. Comment on appearance. What type of music was played? Did you view their profile? Did they interact with the audience? Do they play in real life and if so where?
3. Critique the reaction to the music by other avatars. Were there dance animations? Did you interact with others? If so, how did you communicate? Local chat, IM?
4. Rate the musician- avatar on their ability to perform in SL. The quality of the music, interaction with the audience, interpretation of music.
5. Overall, rate the experience
Last term, students in a theater course chose to enact their performance in Second Life. The rubric there was identical to all categories of live performance but for one category (avatar movement). The real-life category might have been "stage movement."
If this has piqued your interest, join Suzanne Thompson for Second Life basics.
CMC is a member of Colorado EduIsland in Second Life. This is a collaborative of community colleges in Colorado who are exploring instructional opportunities.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Dec. 3rd Online ED Tech Conference and 8 - 4 MDT
Hi All,
This is a late-breaking item, but if you would like to attend virtually, sign up today!
Campus Technology
This is a late-breaking item, but if you would like to attend virtually, sign up today!
Campus Technology
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