For most of us school was about absorbing what the instructor was saying and being able to recall it for a quiz or a test. If you’re a quick learning, or have photographic memory it’s a great system. But if you take time to process things it can be a bit challenging. Let’s consider what it would be like if you had some say in the tools you used to practice your learning, or if you had some say in your learning career and the direction you wanted it to go.
What if in K-12 you had been set on a course to learn how to find your strengths and weaknesses, pinpoint what you were passionate about, incorporate your strengths, weaknesses, and passions into projects you were doing in conjunction with what you were learning about? Then, what if you were encouraged to think critically and collaborate with others, either locally or using technology? And finally what if all this included figuring out how to find the people who had the answers you were looking for, no matter where they were on the planet? And what if your instructor was the mentor who helped you accomplish all this?
Seems far-fetched? Actually it’s not, the pieces have been gathering for a number of years, and slowly they are being put into place. It’s no surprise that we learn and retain better when we are interested, passionate, and engaged. It is rather surprising that although we’ve known this for quite some time we’ve had the same teaching system in place for generations. Options for change were few, but with the dawn of Web 2.0 where discussions, collaborations, and sharing information across the world is now a reality new opportunities are realistically available. We just need to be open to and encourage the change. I had two very different children with two very different learning styles and if there had been a way to tap into their passions to engage them getting homework done would have been a much different game!
If you have younger children would this be something you would hope they get to be part of? Did you know you can help make it happen just by knowing about it, talking about it, expecting change, and supporting the change? All change done right takes time and evaluation, but I encourage you to educate yourself, collect your thoughts, then support change.
I find it interesting how the mind works, especially related to learning. We are all so different in so many ways and learning is no exception!. While preparing to write a review of a project for a class recently I was reading about learning and encoding new material into memory I came across the fact that we automatically store things in multiple categories. As Julie Dirksen explains it in her book Design for How People Learn, you can think of memory as categorizing things onto shelves you create over time through learning and experiences. The more “shelves” you have that you can use to store a word, new idea, or other learned concept on, the more likely you are to retain it. The human brain creates patterns and the more patterns you have to access the information, the more likely you are to be able to recall it when you need it!
As a music teacher my mind immediately went back to a teacher who taught me a learning concept that I’ve used regularly with my own students when helping them learn to practice. She would remind her students that looking at your music from multiple angles created different learning paths in the brain and the more paths you had, the better you knew your music, and the less likely you were to forget it or stumble under stress. First we would learn to read the music, hands apart, then put the hands together. After that we practiced by starting the piece wherever she would point on the music, then we memorized the piece, and finally we would work on playing it with our eyes closed. Once she mentioned this to me I always wondered how or why that would work, but it sure did seem to work.
When I look at the concept of shelves I can see how her method of learning music allows students to place the learned piece on different shelves. There are actually a few more they can place them on including genre, key of the piece, era, and so on. And, I can certainly say that the better I knew a piece and thought of it in different ways, the less likely I was to make a mistake or forget what I was playing. Well, it worked for me unless someone else was in the room at least. Stage fright has haunted me for a very long time and it seems that no matter how well I know a piece of music if there’s someone else in the room all the rules go out the window, but that’s a story for another time!
Tribes, a concept that stems from people gathering with groups of people that share their interests, people that they are drawn to, their tribe. I never thought of myself as being part of a tribe… However I started to list who my tribes might be: my family, the Jule Vera gang, people who knit, people who scrapbook, people who like to do things outdoors, people who like to travel, people who love to learn, people who are interested in online education, people who love music, people who teach music. And I bet I could list more if I thought on it a bit!
Tribes are an interesting concept, one I think we likely take for granted without actually putting a name to it in most cases. I think you can latch onto the concept if you ponder on it a minute. There’s the obvious ones like your family, but I get a bit stuck on finding and interacting on my “might be” tribes, there’s hardly enough time in the day as it is. I think we tend to pick who/what might be most important from both a professional and personal standpoint and they become our focus, intended or not.
Professional tribes in my world would center around education; eLearning, online education, and music. With the advent of the Web 2.0 the thought of sharing information via the concept of building a personal learning network to share information and concepts with people you would likely never meet otherwise has great potential and power. The ability to tap into teaching ideas for specific concepts, especially complex ones, is a powerful tool! With my PLN, a work in progress, I hope to see discussions and helpful hints with regard to teaching music theory shared by the “private music theory teacher’s tribe”. I look forward to seeing ideas and thoughts from others, but in all honesty it’s still a challenge to think of people I connect with as tribes, and the project of connecting with them to entice the interaction still looms in the future!
I’m an explorer and a learner at heart, I like to see what else is out there to be experienced, or to be learned. I hope this serves as a source of inspiration to others who find the page, to continue to venture out to do, to see, and to learn for there is so much in the world that we will never hope to do, see, or learn it all.
For me there is no greater gift in this world than my family and my children. When they are young that is hard to remember at times, especially as they try your last nerve during their teens. But once they are out on their own all you have left is the visits, which happen much too seldom, and memories.
