"How" is Important

Our JH Academic Dean asked a group of teachers to consider the following quote from Eric Jensen's book Teaching with the Brain in Mind:

If I can learn in a way that satisfies me, I will learn anything you want me to. But if I cannot learn in a way that is comfortable for me, then I will not learn anything, even if I want to learn it, let alone if you want me to learn it. The “how” of my learning governs the “what.”

I think this is the challenge for teachers. Our students come to us with such different experiences than what we have that it sometimes is difficult to understand how new approaches can actually be helping our students learn.

Before the Thanksgiving holiday, I observed in a teacher's class. Lana Garner was using a text poll set up on the Poll Everywhere site in her Spanish class. She was posing questions in Spanish and the students were working in groups to respond appropriately in Spanish using an iPod Touch or iPhone. The group that answered correctly first got a point. This little competition was very engaging for her students and gave me an idea for my 6th graders. So when I returned to school on Monday, I set up a text poll on the Poll Everywhere site. My students worked in groups to choose a vocabulary word from our word list and created an original sentence using the word appropriately. They then submitted their sentence to the poll. I was able to export the sentences using the site into an excel spreadsheet and then reset the poll to allow for more to answer.

This little activity worked great and today when we did our vocabulary work, the students told me that the activity helped them be that much more in tune with the words in the lesson.

I know for a fact that I've had students create sentences from vocabulary words in the past but never in quite this fashion. "How" we went about it seemed to make all the difference!

What I Learned Today

I am continually amazed at how much I learn from my students. Sometimes the nuggets I gain are totally by accident and sometimes it is because my students make an effort to help educate me. They have a true desire to help me understand their perspectives as well as missing information they believe I need. Today was an example of the latter.

We have iPod Touch carts at our school. Each cart has about 24 iPod Touch devices in them. These are to be used in class for the furtherance of learning. For our vocabulary program, we use Wordly Wise. Today, I decided the students would familiarize themselves with our new word list by listening to the audio file that the Wordly Wise company makes available via their website. Also, I showed the students how to download the mp3 file and pull it into their iTunes library so the file could sync on their iPhone or iPod Touch.

As we were getting out the iPod Touch devices from the cart, a couple of the devices had a passcode placed on them. This has been a particularly annoying issue. Some of the students have decided to place passcodes on the devices, even though they are shared devices. To this point, the way to deal with this has been to take the iPod Touch device to the Tech Department so they can reset the device. When you have a class of 22 and only 24 devices, it doesn't take long before it impacts what you are trying to do. The students had a couple of other solutions for me.

First, I learned that if you double-click the home button on the iPod Touch it goes to iPod mode (as the kids put it) and plays the music or in this case the audio file. This sounds so simple that I am sure I should have known that but I didn't. Second, the students told me to try using 1234 for the passcode. Believe it or not that worked on several of the passcode ridden devices and the students then took the passcode off.

Thanks Auston and Jaye for teaching me today. I am wondering what I'll learn from them tomorrow. :-)