Experience and Learning

Bender writes that learning is based on experience. Thus as I am reading about Berge and Muilenberg’s hierarchy of types of thoughts, it brought to mind one of the initiatives that I am currently working on with Head Start programs, which serves children ages 3-5 from low-income families. Head Start programs are now being monitored using the Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS), which evaluates the quality of teacher-child interactions in the classroom, particularly how those interactions promote children’s social-emotional and academic learning (for more information about the CLASS, see http://www.teachstone.org/about-the-class/). My role is to provide training and mentoring to the Education Coordinators, who supervise the teachers, on how to improve the quality of those interactions. Having not had any formal training (until now) in andragogy, I find it curious (and at times challenging) that I am teaching adults who are teaching adults who are teaching children, where the common denominator between us all is that we have had training in child development.

 One of the dimensions that the CLASS assesses is concept development and the degree to which the teacher is supporting concept development as higher-order thinking skills, not just the development of a specific concept (e.g. seasons, letters).  Similar to Berge and Muilenberg’s notion of critical thinking and higher level thinking, the CLASS measures the extent to which the teacher uses discussions and activities that encourage analysis and reasoning from the children and provides opportunities for the children to creatively problem solve through brainstorming and planning. Moreover, the CLASS measures the degree to which the teacher intentionally integrates learning for children by linking concepts and activities to one another and by mapping previously learned knowledge onto new knowledge. This is similar to the statement by the National Research Council re: long-term memory and the roles of schema and metacognition in facilitating long-term memory. Therefore, I was happily surprised to see the parallel process of adult learning with child development and learning.

So how do I make this learning happen for the Education Coordinators so that they can make it happen for the teachers who will make it happen for the children? How might I use technology to make this learning visible—to see their thought processes, to have them see their own thought processes, and to have them see each other’s thought processes? I have appreciated this exercise of blog posting and commenting. It can be a helpful medium through which the Education Coordinators can devote time and space to reflective practice and experience Berge and Muilenberg’s notion of distributive thinking, where the sharing of personal experiences brings about collaboration and “socially constructed meaning.” The Head Start programs that I support are located all over New York State, and while there can be vast differences in the program characteristics and the communities that these programs serve (from the rural and desolate regions of the Adirondacks to the ever-changing, ever-crowded streets of NYC), there can be fresh and new thinking that emerges from the sharing of these different and multiple perspectives.

I am also fascinated with this notion of nonlinear learning. I believe that I naturally think nonlinearly, but have been trained (educated) to think linearly, so I often find myself designing and delivering my trainings in a linear fashion. Yet using blogs in an asynchronous online learning environment would encourage opportunities for nonlinear thinking. How wonderful it would be to see creative lateral leaps happening among the teachers! How wonderful it would be to see it happen among the children!