Connect, Extend, Challenge

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Recommended: Impact of mass media on youngsters

There were many ideas in the first two weeks of this class that made me recall things I thought about in the past as a student, as a teacher, and as a parent. This essay uses the “Connect, Extend,
Challenge” (Ritchhart & Perkins, 2008) routine to discuss some of my reactions to the material presented so far and I begin with “Connect”. The connections were often emotional and now, as I write this, I am getting a better understanding of what is meant by the reference to work done by
Damasio that says all learning has an emotional component. I was skeptical of this claim when I first heard it. My formal teaching was as a High School Math teacher in the U.S. and emotions were not something I usually considered. The emotions from these connections ranged from positive agreement to negative frustration. Before giving a specific example of my connections I wish to explain I am currently a stay-at-home mom of two small children working to renew my teaching license in the U.S.
I studied Geology and Math in college and went to graduate school for Geology. I taught H.S. Math without any formal teacher training for a number of years and then decided to stay home when our first child was born.
The third video of the first week was titled, “The World of Childhood”. Students in a classroom are also children, siblings, peers, neighbors, and friends in many, many other settings. One slide from the lecture used the term “Nested Lives” from a work of David Berliner (2005). I felt agreement as well as frustration at the idea of looking at the whole child. Students need to be comfortable before they can open their minds to new information. A dramatic example of this comes from a radio program called “This American Life”. This show presented two, hour ...

... middle of paper ...

...xercise” It felt like I was teaching students to puzzle through problems and perhaps become more
“nimble thinkers”, at least some of the time. In the future it will be more important to create good thinkers (through practice and making thinking visible) and spend less time on how to deliver curriculum. Unfortunately, I think we are a long way from this ideal, but I believe we are heading towards it.

References
Glass, I. (Producer) (2013, Feb 15, 22) 487&488: Harper High School Parts I & II. Podcast retrieved from http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives#2013
MacBeath, John. 2012. The Future of Teaching Profession LeadershipforLearning - The Cambridge
Network. Ch 1 pp.6-14.
Perkins, David (2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7UnupF-uJk
Ritchhart, Ron and Perkins, David. (2008) "Making Thinking Visible" Educational Leadership 65, no. 5 (February
2008): 57-61.

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