Perception vs. Reality

The students were introduced to two concepts today – that Perception and Reality can be very different and that Western Civilization has two basic and opposing Worldviews on the nature of Reality itself (going back to Plato vs. Aristotle). Characters from the sci-fi movie, The Matrix, were used to illustrate the point.

After viewing material and discussion, questions were asked:

And now, simply for fun !:

Cognition, Perception and Worldviews Unit

The introductory unit ” Cognition, Perception and Worldviews” focuses on how people’s understanding of the world around them is affected by their culture, ideas and history; and, in turn, how their actions can create systemic changes that shape worldviews. The following are terms, concepts and individuals used for this unit of study ( If you don’t what some of these are, don’t panic – the whole point of education is to learn new things, not rehearse what you already know):

Concepts:

Perception, Perspective, Position, Philosophy, Values, Orientation, Cognition, Metacognition, Meme, Culture, Society, Rule-set, Worldview, Paradigm, Paradigm-Shift, Evolution, Cultural Evolution, Objective, Subjective, Bias, Social Contract, Empiricism, Scientific Method, Natural Law, Revolution, Humanism, Framing, Feedback, O.O.D.A

Worldviews:

Prehistoric, Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution

Thinkers:

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Montesquieu,

Charles Darwin, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Dawkins, George Lakoff, John Boyd

Moral Reasoning in Historical Arguments

For the Hiroshima Investigative Project, as part of their presentation, students will have to evaluate and explain why dropping the atomic bombs on Japan to end WWII was either the right or the wrong thing to do.

You might need an updated version of shockwave to see the following Sliderocket presentation:

The Virtue of Recess – Unstructured Play, Cognition & Child Development

Recess is a historical staple of elementary education in America and it is still not uncommon to see children granted small amounts of time for “free play” or educational games in the primary grades. Unfortunately, this practice is under fire in recent years. Some critics of public education or politicians would prefer to see that time devoted to increased amounts of formal, skill-drill exercises; but aside from the fact that test-prep activities quickly hit the point of  diminishing returns in terms raising a school district’s aggregate mean test scores ( a little is good, a lot is not) the so-called ” wasted free time”, is actually neurologically vital for the optimum cognitive development of children’s brains. It’s good for us older folks too but that’s a topic for another day.

A report from the excellent Eide Neurolearning Blog:

Remembering to Play

“Several recent articles remind us of the importance of play. From NPR, Old-fashioned play builds serious skills, and NYT, Taking Play Seriously.Also from the American Academy of Pediatrics (The Importance of Play for Health Child Development pdf : “Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength. Play is important to health brain development…Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, an to learn self-advocacy skills.” An increased in hurried lifestyles and school-based academic performance may leave a child with little unstructured time. In one survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 30% of kindergarten classes no longer had recess periods

….An additional point made in the NYT article, was the importance of play for the development of the cerebellum. For kids with sensory processing disorders, this is a big one. Sometimes the earliest indication that something isn’t “quite right” is when a child avoids the normal rough-and-tumble play on the playground. That’s why without intervention, a child may accumulate even fewer play experiences and fall even farther behind their classmates with time.”

Read the rest and find additional brain-learning resources here.

While older students do not have “recess”, time for creative, exploratory and imaginative learning activities should be a regular aspect of core academic classses! !!

 The chance to “play” with concepts, solve puzzling scenarios, smash ideas up in a synthesis, articulate new or unorthodox solutions to old problems is a teaching strategy for students to arrive at a deeper understanding of the subject at hand. It trains them to create and evaluate analogies, test the logical soundness of each other’s ideas, debate and experiment. Less structured but goal-directed time is a valuable investment as independent thinking cannot be cultivated in a classroom where every moment is direct instruction and rigidly scripted. At some point, the training wheels have to come off if we are to discover which students can ride on their own and which ones need additional guided practice.

Furthermore, in relation to “play”, music, the arts, sports and drama play a critical role in brain growth and do not represent “frills” but a central modality for integration of concepts, application of learning and generation of insight. As subjects, they are the brain’s “Right” side exercises to the ” Left” side’s analytical-logical reasoning provided by mathematics instruction and science classes.

As a society, we have gone berserk on overscheduling children into formal activities, academic as well as extracurricular, to the point where some elementary age kids show signs of anxiety, burn-out and depession or have time with their families that is not devoted to some kind of structured, formal, event. I find that many students lack any real cognitive independence, normal childhood creativity or the ability to negotiate social interactions with peers without hands-on, adult, supervision. A kind of well-meaning, suburban, shelteredness that produces a vaguely “institutional” passivity in many children.

Our students need both structured learning as well as some degree of “space” or “freedom” in order to maximize their intellectual and emotional growth, not either-or.

ADDITIONAL LINKS on RECESS:

“Time out: Is recess in danger?” - Center for Public Education

“The Importance of Play… ” – American Association of Pediatrics

“Taking Play Seriously” -  The New York Times

“Old-Fashioned Play Builds Serious Skills” – NPR

“Recess Makes Better Students” - The Washington Post

Perception vs. Reality

The students were introduced to two concepts earlier this week - that Perception and Reality can be very different and that Western Civilization has two basic and opposing Worldviews on the nature of Reality itself (going back to Plato vs. Aristotle). Characters from the sci-fi movie, The Matrix, were used to illustrate the point.

After viewing material and discussion, questions were asked:

And now, simply for fun !:

Perception, Cognition and Worldviews – Unit Vocabulary

The introductory unit ” Perception, Cognition and Worldviews” focuses on how people’s understanding of the world around them is affected by their culture, ideas and history; and, in turn, how their actions can create systemic changes that shape worldviews. The following are terms, concepts and individuals used for this unit of study ( If you don’t what some of these are, don’t panic – the whole point of education is to learn new things, not rehearse what you already know):

Concepts:

Perception, Perspective, Position, Philosophy, Values, Orientation, Cognition, Metacognition, Meme, Culture, Society, Rule-set, Worldview, Paradigm, Paradigm-Shift, Evolution, Cultural Evolution, Zero Sum, Non-Zero Sum, Schema, Objective, Subjective, Bias, Social Contract, Empiricism, Scientific Method, Natural Law, Revolution, Humanism, Framing, Feedback, O.O.D.A

Worldviews:

Prehistoric, Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution

Thinkers:

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, Montesquieu,

Charles Darwin, Thomas Kuhn, Richard Dawkins, George Lakoff, John Boyd

Thinking and Education: Two Slideshows

File these under “food for thought” as to how teachers, parents and communities should consider education for the 21st century. I liked both of them though the first really holds interest primarily for administrators and classroom instructors and the second show is broadly cultural beyond the sphere of public education.

# 1 D.M. Hallowell ” Cognitive Approaches to Learning”  

Note: This presentation is displayed on an application known as “Scribd” which may require that your computer has an up to date version of Shockwave installed.

Cognitive Approaches to Learning – Upload a doc

Read this doc on Scribd: Cognitive Approaches to Learning

 

# 2 – David Armano’s ” The Fuzzy Tail”  

| View | Upload your own

Using Analogies With Students

Metaphors and Analogies are powerful learning tools because they can be a ” bridge between the known and unknown” and act as cognitive catalysts or “spark plugs” to help generate novel insights, increase comprehension of abstract concepts and improve creativity. For neurological reasons related to brain development, teen-agers are able to think analogically but not with the same fluency, frequency or accuracy as adults, so students need to see adults model analogical thinking and have opportunities to practice, critique and create their own analogies.

The Eide Neurolearning Blog is a regular read for me and the authors, two brain researchers, had this to say on the topic of analogies in the classroom:

“In the figure, its clear that children are able to activate many brain regions to identify different relationships between information, but they are less able to integrate the information, and so the picture of a child knowing lots of information, but missing the forest for the trees, is a normal part of development, and not “ADD”.Dunbar lab: “Analogy is a basic human reasoning process used in science, literature, art, education, and politics. Analogy can be used to make predictions, provide explanations, and restructure our knowledge. Analogy is also used to influence public opinion, fight battles, win wars, start and finish relationships…”

Analogical reasoning is important for virtually all inventive or creative work:

From the the Dunbar lab: “Analogy is a basic human reasoning process used in science, literature, art, education, and politics. Analogy can be used to make predictions, provide explanations, and restructure our knowledge. Analogy is also used to influence public opinion, fight battles, win wars, start and finish relationships…”

and

“Analogy is properly the domain of higher order thought because it requires fluency – lots of ideas – and integration across multiple representations. Analogy is also more simply thought of as flexible pattern recognition, the process involved in all those good things that should be emphasized in education – critical thinking and deduction, inference, and solutions by insight”

As an example of analogical reasoning, here are two I am going to use tomorrow as a Daily Board Question with the students; the first analogy is easy and the second one is more complex:

1. ” How was the Great Depression like the depression of a person?”

2. “Why can we say that FDR’s New Deal was like an Extra-Large Pizza ?”

 

The Virtue of Recess:Play is Good for the Brain

Recess is a historical staple of elementary education in America and it is not uncommon to see children granted small amounts of time for “free play” or educational games in the primary grades. Some critics of public education or politicians would prefer to see that time devoted to increased amounts of formal, skill-drill exercises; but aside from the fact that test-prep activities quickly hit the point of diminishing returns in terms raising a school district’s aggregate mean test scores, the so-called ” wasted free time” is actually neurologically vital for the optimum cognitive development of children’s brains ( and it’s good for us older folks too!).

 A report from the excellent Eide Neurolearning Blog, run by a pair of medcal doctors and research neuroscientists:

Remembering to Play

“Several recent articles remind us of the importance of play. From NPR, Old-fashioned play builds serious skills, and NYT, Taking Play Seriously.Also from the American Academy of Pediatrics (The Importance of Play for Health Child Development pdf : “Play allows children to use their creativity while developing their imagination, dexterity, and physical, cognitive, and emotional strength. Play is important to health brain development…Undirected play allows children to learn how to work in groups, to share, to negotiate, to resolve conflicts, an to learn self-advocacy skills.” An increased in hurried lifestyles and school-based academic performance may leave a child with little unstructured time. In one survey by the National Association of Elementary School Principals, 30% of kindergarten classes no longer had recess periods

….An additional point made in the NYT article, was the importance of play for the development of the cerebellum. For kids with sensory processing disorders, this is a big one. Sometimes the earliest indication that something isn’t “quite right” is when a child avoids the normal rough-and-tumble play on the playground. That’s why without intervention, a child may accumulate even fewer play experiences and fall even farther behind their classmates with time.”

Read the rest and find additional brain-learning resources here.

While older students do not have “recess”, time for creative, exploratory and imaginative learning activities should be a regular aspect of core academic classses. Furthermore, music, the arts, sports and drama play a critical role in brain growth and do not represent “frills” but a central modality for integration of concepts, application of learning and generation of insight. As subjects, they are the brain’s ”Right” side exercises  to the ” Left” side’s analytical-logical reasoning provided by mathematics and science classes.

Our students need both, not either-or.

Sharpening the Saw – the Dreaded “Daily Board Question”

One of the practices that I frequently use in the classroom to start a lesson is the “Daily Board Question”, which each student must address individually (at times collaboratively) in their Social Studies notebook. 

Technically, the “DBQ”, which usually takes anywhere from two to ten minutes to do and discuss, isn’t every day nor is it a factual-recall question, but the activity serves a number of purposes:

• A mental prompt or ”anticipatory set”
• To foreshadow the conceptual theme of the day or week. 
• To introduce new material
• To review old material with a different analysis or perspective
• To practice making coherent, logical, arguments based upon evidence
• To challenge preconceived notions, assumptions, premises
• Orientation to the mindset of the classroom instead of the passing period
• Present a visual format (Diagram, Graphic Organizer, Taxonomy etc.)
• Novelty – to stimulate interest in what comes next
• Synthesis – to combine old concepts into new ones
• Imaginative, counterfactual, scenario thinking and analysis

For example, the daily board question for today in Social Studies was as follows:

Which terms from Column A best match terms from Column B and explain WHY:

Column A                                                                                Column B

Monopoly                                                                        Sphere of Influence

Oligopoly                                                                                 State

Corporation                                                                            Citizen

Sole Proprietorship                                                              Empire

This question was useful for two reasons: first, it served as a basic review of terms from the two sections of our unit; secondly, it led the students to connect the terms in the form of an analogy.

The more I read about scientific studies on the brain and neurolearning, the more clear it becomes that the public schools need to bring more “right -brained” thinking skills into the classroom next to the traditional analysis, application and comprehension activities. We need to integrate synthesis, metaphors, analogies, alinear exercises and visual models with traditional methods in order to maximize student learning.