Working Toward Independence

I’ve been on the go pretty solidly since I left the Educon 2.0 conference in Philadelphia yesterday.  I have to confess that I felt a bit odd, after engaging in idea building conversational sessions over the weekend, and then standing in front of several hundred classroom teachers in Long Island, and presenting about literacy.  It’s not that I am now convinced that lecturing has no value.  Quite the contrary.  But the experience of pushing and pulling at ideas with really smart people, well it’s a different experience and potent.

Talking and learning about social networking with the attendees of Glenn Moses’ session was eyeopening, though the conversations were mostly not new.  But I think that mulling over things with others who are struggling with this stuff helps to congeal our thoughts.  I’ll just say again, as I hope that I made it clear yesterday, that Konrad Glogowski rocked, with his personal conversation about blogging in his classrooms.

I was letting my computer charge-up for the train ride to Long Island during Gary Stager’s session on the importance of teaching programming.   So I didn’t blog it.  He started off with presentation, and basically reminded us of a lot of the conversations that were going on in the middle 80s with Mindstorm and other explorations into programming as an intellectually beneficial endeavor.  Several of the attendees were programmers or have been programmers, so there was much attesting to how the practice has helped us to be better thinkers and even better writers.  Unfortunately, I had to leave to catch the train before Gary’s session was over.  I’d really like to have stayed and engaged more.  I know that Gary doesn’t agree with much of what I say and write.  But I like watching him present.  He whips you around with his passion and his ironclad logic and forces you to think different.

I’d have to say that the biggest “A Ha!” moment that I had was while having a casual conversation with Karen Janowski (I think it was Karen Janowski).  We’ve met a couple of times before, but never had a chance to just talk, and doing so yesterday, I learned that she is a trained Occupational Therapist, and I revealed that I majored in OT.  It was only for a short time.  Physiology kicked my butt!  But I told here that if there is a parrallel David, somewhere, who continued with Occupational Therapy, that he would have been seduced by the potentials of “technology” to help people adapt from their various physical challenges.

Karen said that the occupational therapists job is to help people become independent.  I think that it’s our job as well, to make people independent learners.  It’s probably always been our job to do that, but we haven’t always worked that way, as classrooms sometimes seem designed to make students dependent on the textbook and on us.  It seems like a good working goal for us, as we learn and invent ways of including new information and communication technologies into our classrooms, to explicitly aim toward learning independence.  It’s to instill in our children a learning lifestyle.

Image Citation:
Richardson, Will. “EduCon TV.” Willrich’s Photostream. 26 Jan 2008. 29 Jan 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/wrichard/2221488776/>.

9 thoughts on “Working Toward Independence”

  1. That’s very interesting about becoming an independent learner. Now that more and more classrooms are beginning to incorporate blogging into their teaching I think that students will begin to be more independent learners, and although they will still rely on textbooks, the blogs will open their eyes to new ways to study and ask questions and I feel it will make them understand how much they can actually do on their own.

  2. Your comment about students as independent learners reminded me of something Arthus Erea, who is a hs student in Vermont and facilitated a conversation on student voice at Educon, talked about.

    He illustrated his point about lack of student contribution to their own learning by talking about how students receive their syllabi in the mail, “telling them what they will learn” and asked why it is that students are not invited in to discuss their own personal learning goals for each course. There was much discussion in his session about how schools indoctrinate students to be passive learners rather than independent learners committed to their own learning.

    It was fascinating to hear Arthus and Meg Peters and the other students at SLA talk about their desire to be more involved in their own learning.
    We talked about how when students say school is boring, implicit in that is the idea that they are passive recipients, not active agents in learning.

    One of the things I found most powerful about Educon was not only having conversations, but having students present for these conversations. We saw their commitment and they saw our commitment.

    I also found what Konrad talked about very powerful–stepping to the side and letting his students build their own learning.

    Nice to meet you by the way!

  3. We have been focusing on the concept of Self-directed Learning in our school district this year. It seems as if your concept of an independent learner and my definition of a self-directed learner may be similar. There is, however, a distinct difference between a student who is an independent worker in class and one who is self-directed in his learning. The independent worker is one who works quietly on his own, doing exactly what the teacher said (gotta love those kids in class!). A self-directed learner will be more goal oriented, he will be willing to take risks in his learning, and he will look much more like a life-long learner, in pursuit of knowledge without being told to “go study.” Self-directed learning is considered one of the most important of the 21st Century skills. Do you have any thoughts on this?

  4. Dave, I think that you make an important distinction when you compare self-directed learners to independent learners, and your depiction of independent learners is logical. But what I think of, when I’m talking about an independent learner is when I show some application of a technology to a group of teachers. The teacher who says, “I’ve got to teach myself how to do that,” is an independent learner. The teacher who says, “But who’s going to teach me how to do that?” is not.

    When I say independent learner, what I mean is a student who is learning to teach himself, whether it be from what on the government standards or what they want to learn themselves.

    Thanks for the comment and for continuing the conversation.

  5. Dave,
    I saw you at EduCon, but didn’t get to meet you. I found that the most powerful idea that was present at EduCon was the idea of the student voice. Students are always told what to do, how to do it, and how much time they have to do it. We shouldn’t expect students to know how to make important decisions later on in life. They never had to when they were in school. One difference I saw at EduCon… SLA students had a voice (They were the backbone to the conference). The students also kept many of the session on topic by asking questions that many of the adults were answering politically. This was a refreshing weekend. It left me with hope in our education system.

  6. I found the students of SLA to be active partipants in their own education. Don’t we all want our students to be consumers of education? These students had a commitment and expectation of their teachers and school.
    I agree with the “independent learners” and “independent learners”, but I want active learners. “Learn” is a verb and it requires students to put forth action and effort. I always hated when handing out an assignment when students responded with the “how many words, paragraphs, etc” question. Basically, they were asking to be told what to think.
    Thanks for allowing participants the opportunity to think and learn!

  7. I found the speech very interesting and informative. I am looking ofr more information from the MECA Conference in Jackson, MS.

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