I had an amazing conversation last night, with Lynne Anderson-Inman, at the speakers reception for the TRLD (Technology, Reading, & Learning Diversities) Conference. Lynne is the Director for the Center for Advanced Technology in Education, at the University of Oregon. We started the conversation, and the evening with methods for inspiring students to want to learn.
Inman told me that they were learning that questions intended to spark learning had to be simple and basic. They had to start small. What is this (holding up a strand of barbed wire)? What is the history of that house on Karl street? What is the story with old Miss Crabgrasse, on East Main Street? These types of questions, she said, tended to lead to more questions, inquiries that take on a life of their own.
The questions I was asked in school, and that I asked as a teacer, were not simple and they started in the middle. I asked them only after I had lectured or after students had read their assignment. Then I asked them questions, not to inspire curiosity and inquiry, but to assure that the assignment had been completed and knowledge was gained. These questions were asked, answered, and then they died on vines that could have lead not only to more learning, but to self-personalized engagement.
This took me back to a conversation I’d had years ago with Jim Moulton. We concluded for the wildly gyrating logic of our discussion that we should be teaching history backwards. We should start with today and work our way back via various topic threads, that might best be determined by the students.
You’d be starting with simple questions about something you can point to. Why is everyone so excited about Barack Obama’s presidency? Why are there all these windmills all over the place? Then you work your way back asking and answering more interconnected questions.
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It was at this point, that Lynne gave me ample of opportunity to leave, that her next avenue of logic would probably not be of interest to me. Of course, that is no way to stay someone’s curiosity. So she went on, describing her new passion and the subject of her recent grant proposal. It’s Antique Samplers!
OK! before last night, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine what Antique Sampers were if mentioned. Here is the Wikipedia definition:
A (needlework) sampler is a piece of embroidery produced as a demonstration or test of skill in needlework. It often includes the alphabet, figures, motifs, decorative borders and sometimes the name of the person who embroidered it and the date.
Lynne said that this is how girls (and sometimes boys) were taught the alphabet. They decoratively stitched them on cloth. The practice, for all intents and purposes, ended in the 1860s. But she said that before that time, to be taught writing was not the same thing that we think of when planning writing instruction today. It wasn’t about learning to convey ideas with words. It was about lettering, calligraphy, PENMANSHIP.
For the most part, girls were not taught to write, they were taught to read, but not to write — and it was while learning to sew that they learned the letters. When we see paintings from the 18th and 19th centuries of a mother and daughter sitting and stitching, we may be seeing a mother teaching her daughter to read.
Inman added that there are instances of women wanting to write (in our sense) and using their leaned skills to do so, producing a letter to a relative by stitching the letters into cloth — or an entire memoir.
I wonder when we started teaching writing as a communication skill, rather than just the mechanics — and why? Just about every day I talk about how information, until recently, was a product that we merely consumed. It was a book or magazine we bought so that we could read it, a CD to listen to, or a DVD to watch. Today, we all have the ability to produce a book, music, movies, for others to enjoy — to consume.
But does the capacity to produce messages require us to teach the skills involved? No! I don’t think so. What does make the ability to express ideas compellingly so important — so BASIC — is what Daniel Pink characterizes a abundance. There is so much stuff, so many opportunities, so much information, that there is enormous competition for our attention. It is information that competes, which means that for your product, idea, message, or story to gain an audience, it must compete for the attention of that audience. You have to be able to describe it compellingly with the appropriately assembled message.
Part of doing this is asking questions that go somewhere.
I love the idea of teaching history backwards. So many kids have a hard time figuring out how these distant events have any relevance to their lives. The “aha!” moments when you find out why things are the way they are now, what happened to get to this point – those are captivating and curiosity-sparking. Tracking down all the historical threads quickly gets overwhelming, but for me at least, the overwheming-ness imparts a sense of wonder at the enormity of history. It’s those kinds of feelings that will make students love learning.
Ditto on the “history backwards” thing. Seems so obvious now.
Personally I always wanted our history department and language arts department to have themes. You would link different points in history together through a common theme and read literature. Something like “social justice.” Link all these different parts in history together and read something like to Kill a Mockingbird.
Either way, I know starting at the beginning and going forward one civilization at a time is not conducive to building any sort of meaningful connections.
What I found most compelling in this post was the idea of competition for attention in the classroom. I teach college English in a very handy computer classroom, but one of most interesting and aggravating aspects of this is how I am competing with Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, email, text messages and all the other social networking “distractions” that they have access to in class, not to mention those students with laptops and netbooks. I have found myself “censoring” their tools at times. For example, if I don’t feel the need to compete with the ‘text’ on the monitor, I ask them to turn them off, to physically hit the off button. I don’t find this very satisfactory. Now I know why. I should be able to compete with the screen, to co-opt the text they are using. I think that when this happens again I will just have them turn away from the screen and come to the center tables for good, simple, connective question. I think the model of dialogue then research is a good one and I will certainly keep this in mind as I teach this semester.
I agree that part of teaching is asking the questions that go somewhere and it is also part of the inspiration that drives the quest for learning. I have spent eighteen years of my life devoted to the education of children. I have spent sixteen of those years being devoted to the most rewarding job on earth – that of a mother. I was reading to my son the very day I brought him home from the hospital. He and I played with flash cards just like we did his Legos. When we traveled, I packed a bag of books just as devotedly as I packed toys. Vocabulary development and exposure to life experiences have always been important. My mother, who was a stay at home parent, did the same with me. The knowledge of what sort of abundance a child needed to thrive was passed down to the next generation. Just as my great-grandmother was taught by her mother to do the beautiful quilt sampler that I hang proudly on my wall, parents of today need to take the opportunity to provide learning opportunities from birth.
This is an interesting thought. I teach 7th & 8th history this past year during the elections it was easy to get the students interested in history using the elections as a connection. Even during the Constitution unit students will stay interested if the topic is connected to their everyday rights, but the details on how the Constitution came about was of no interest to them. I might try this teaching backwards method for one unit and see how it goes. Perhaps during Black History Month, start with current famous Black American and see where in the past it leads the class. I am guessing that a teacher must be willing to give up some control in order to teach backwards and let the topics take them where it will.
It is probably true that curiosity starts with questions and creativity starts with trying to find answers to questions. But questions we ask our students sometimes quench their curiosity and creativity instead of inspiring them. The question-posing model of teaching does not so much to do with how many questions we ask our students as with what kind of questions we ask them. We teachers need to learn the art of asking questions. In writing a thesis or a dissertation, it is usually the case that small topics go much deeper than bigger ones. If “small” can end up “big”, why don’t we start thinking about what kind of small and basic questions we should ask our students in our teaching?
As a student in high school, I like the idea of certain subject having themes. I think it would make education more exciting for the students. I also like the idea of teaching history backwards, I have a hard time remembering what order events go in… this method could really help some students want to learn more because they would understand and get what they are learning.
On a younger level, I teach first grade and each year when I teach my “Martin Luther King, Jr.” unit, I often separate the children based on their eye color. For half the day (because that’s pretty much all they can handle before we have tears of not being able to play with their friends “just because of their eye color”), I have the blue and green-eyed children sit together at lunch, play together at recess, sit in the back of the room during “circle-time”, and walk in the back of the lines when we travel about the school. The brown-eyed children are grouped together as well, and are not allowed to sit, play, converse, etc. with the blue and green-eyed children. They sit at the front of the room during “circle-time”, stand at the front of the lines, and are treated a little more fairly by me (just to prove a point of course).
When this little experiment has run its course, we all sit “together” and discuss how it felt to be separated “just because of their eye-color”. This further leads to HUGE discussions as to what it was like “back in the day” when Martin Luther King, Jr. had a dream to change the world! Am I teaching backwards? I suppose I am. Up until they walk in on the specific day of the experiment, they were always allowed to play with one another regardless of what color their eyes were. When I take that freedom away, I engage them in a situation that occurred years ago. It always puts a smile on my face when one of my innocent little one’s will comment, “if things were still like they were a long time ago, we wouldn’t be able to play with “so and so” just because his skin color is different.
I agree with “kekelly” when she said that: “sometimes a teacher may need to give up some control in order to teach backwards and let the topics take them where it will.” It is evident that I’ve made an impression on the children with this lesson when at six years old, they realize the ignorance of demoralizing someone’s character due to their skin tone.