What do you want to do?

Early this week, John Hunter was interviewed on the Diane Rehm Show. So this seems like the perfect time to move another exhibit from my Learning Museum blog to here. It's a short one, so take the time to watch his amazing TED Talk.

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"The work will teach you how to do it." 

Estonian Proverb

New Teacher (just hired for first job - teaching gifted children): "What do I do?"
School Administrator: "What do you want to do?"

John Hunter was that new teacher, back in 1978, and that administrator's response "set the template for the entire career [he] was to have after that." It provided him space to explore - space that he decided to pass along to his learners as they tried to create meaning of the world. To that end, he created an activity, The World Peace Game, intended to help players "explore the connectedness of the global community..." This has been documented in the film World Peace and Other 4th-Grade Achievements by Chris Farina and in the following TED Talk:

What would happen if all teachers were offered the opportunity to answer the question: "What do you want to do?" Can you imagine what people might learn?

What are the Conditions of Learning?

Note: The original version of this post was written for my other blog, The Learning Museum.

I never teach my pupils; I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.

Albert Einstein

In this post, we explore the learning theory developed by Brian Cambourne from his research on language acquisition in natural settings. His book, The Whole Story: Natural Learning and the Acquisition of Literacy, introduced the idea that certain conditions were necessary in order for us to learn language. These conditions were further explored in this article, Toward an educationally relevant theory of literacy learning: Twenty years of inquiry. In both the book and the article, Cambourne describes the eight Conditions of Learning in detail. Below is a figure from the article representing the relationships that exist between the Conditions.

From Toward an educationally relevant theory of literacy learning

Cambourne's work focused on applying these Conditions to literacy instructions. Others, have sought to consider their application in other learning environments. Edmunds and Stoessiger wrote a book and article about their efforts to apply the Conditions to mathematics. Jan Turbill's doctoral research examined the use of the Conditions in teacher inservice. ReLeah Cosset Lent wrote Engaging Adolescent Learners: A Guide for Content-Area Learners using the Conditions as a framework.

From Engaging Adolescent Learners

And I wrote a guess blog post on how I used the Condition to learn to Tweet.

How do the Conditions of Learning fit into your practice?

Why learners?

The following was originally posted on my other blog, the Learning Museum. But I noticed this week that I have not given that blog any attention in almost a year. So I considered shutting it down and moving some of the posts here. I was having a hard time deciding where to start though. An exchange on Twitter today provided me with an answer. The exchange got me thinking about why I try to use the term learner instead of student when talking about the people that I teach. Consequently, this post seemed to be a good one to move since it includes the video that first introduced me to the idea of teaching learners rather than students. 

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For those of you familiar with my TEDx Talk, it will come as no surprise that the first exhibit in the Learning Museum included the following video from the Council on 21st Century Learning (C21L). If we want to know what learning looks like, we need to identify some of its key characteristics. This Venn diagram might help us in identifying these characteristics as we consider what learners do compared to what students do in the video.

Here is the first in a series of three videos available from C21L that attempt to get at the differences between students and learners.

How are students and learners alike and how are they different? Here are some of the characteristic identified by teachers in training:

• Both students and learners produce products;
• Students seem extrinsically motivated (e.g. Grades); and
• Learners seem intrinsically motivated.

What would you add to this list?

Is there a Learning Museum?

Once again, Twitter has inspired me. This morning, I saw the following tweet from the National Math + Science Initiative:

Here's the money quote from the article: 

It also reinforces the emerging concept of “free choice” learning, which holds that people get most of their knowledge about science from someplace other than school or formal education.

What caught my attention was the phrase "free choice" learning. The idea that people take responsibility for their own learning is also found in Cambourne's work. This got me thinking about ways to change schools so that they more closely resemble museums where people learn, which led to this tweet:

The perspective that schools currently serve as "fact factories" comes from Sir Ken Robinson and Seth Godin.

I began to wonder what would be in a Learning Museum (not to be confused with Joe Bower's Museum of Education) and decided that it would have rooms dedicated to these topics:

• What does learning look like?
• How is a learner different than a student?
• When and where has learning occurred?
• Why is learning important?
• What if I want to be a learner?

A google search found a Museum of Learning but no Learning Museum. Therefore, I decided to open a virtual Learning Museum. As curator, I will gather learning artifacts, but I cannot do it without your help. If you have any exhibits related to learning that you might like to share, please include links to them in the comments. I will try to gather them into the different rooms so people can stop by and improve their ability to learn. Again, from the article:

“The holy grail of science museums is not to provide someone all the knowledge they need, but to inspire them, to become a launching point,” said John Falk, an OSU professor of science education and national leader in the free-choice learning movement. 

The Learning Museum is now open. I hope it inspires you. Please visit often.