One thing that I took away from last year, was the use of different learning types. When I first read those words, learning types, my mind immediately drove to my experience in philosophy classes. Thankfully, I don’t have to go back to epistemology. The next thing I thought about and wanted to stay away from, was learning styles. Side note; learning styles are absolutely unproven pseudoscience. In fact, when it was tested, people were completely inaccurate in judging their own style (that didn’t exist) and were found to be in a balance of each “learning style” that was dependent upon what was being taught.
Anyways, this theme about types of knowledge seems to be resonating with me lately. In the last post I talked directly about using one type, without mentioning what that was because I didn’t even think about it. In fact, most of the time we don’t think about it. And I’m talking about procedural knowledge. The how part of how we gather our information. When it comes to setting daily goals, especially when it comes to factual knowledge we need to be explicit on how we got there. One way to do that is to focus directly on how we are going to get that information (access) and how we will digest that information (organization). What we do with that factual knowledge part is often what most state standards (with a few exceptions) expect our kids to do.
It really all comes down to slowing our brains down and thinking about how we got the information we took away from a text. Not as easy as it sounds, but it’s absolutely necessary for us if we expect to raise the next generation of learners.
Links:
The Life Argotic Homepage 