These are my notes from the 3rd annual Constructivist Celebration, hosted by Gary Stager at Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC.
Gary Stager
- 150 participants here today
- See constructivistconsortium.org/books for constructivist teaching resources
- Tags/hashtags = constructivist celebration, constructivist consortium, #ccdc09
- Good ideas are incredibly fragile, bad ideas are timeless
- Regardless of what we’re asking educators, the level of resistance is relatively constant over time (so why not ask a lot more of the rest?)
- Computers are knowledge machines that allow you to go further than you could go on your own
- Educational computing is about software, not hardware, because software ultimately determines what you can do
- The only question we should be asking about computers in schools is “what are students doing with the computers?”
- Are the students programming the computer or is the computer programming them?
- Who has agency in the learning process?
- microworlds.com – design video games, not just consume them
- Getting the computer to do something it doesn’t already do is an important life skill
- Elements of an effective project
- Purpose
- Time
- Personally meaningful
- Complex, including serendipity
- Connected
- Discipline
- Reflection
- Shareable
- Access and constructive materials
- “Can you build an amusement park for kids?” is a more authentic, meaningful question/project than “Martin Luther King had a dream. What dream do you have?”
- Questions worth asking
- Is the problem solvable?
- Is the project monumental or substantial?
- Who does the project satisfy?
- What can they do with that?
- Less is more
- A good prompt is worth 1,000 words – if these are in place, you can do lots more than you expected
- A good prompt, challenge, problem or motivation
- Appropriate materials
- Sufficient time
- Supportive culture (including expertise)
- Maybe we should be adopting an artist’s aesthetic more often – is the work beautiful, thoughtful, personally meaningful, sophisticated, whimsical, shareable with a respect for the audience, enduring? does it move you? (we should ask more: “why should anyone have to sit through that crap?”)
- Good project-based learning (PBL) has a fighting chance of being enduring
- Technology matters
- When students come back years later and say “Remember when we … ?”, they never finish the sentence with “used all of those vocabulary words in a sentence” or “studied so hard for the state assessment” – it’s invariably some enduring project that they remember
Melinda (Lindy) Kolk
- Learning happens when children make things
- If students can text message their friends to get the answers, we’re asking the wrong questions
- Let’s focus on knowledge construction, not reproduction
- More than one right answer
- Collaborative
- Student-centered
- Requires high-level thinking
Peter Reynolds (author of The Dot and Ish)
- Great teachers notice kids
- Great teachers are not about managing data, they’re about loving kids
- Great teachers have an idea first and notice it later
- It’s not a tiger, but it’s ‘tigerish’ – the ‘ish’ concept tells the world ‘back off, I’m trying to figure this out, and right now this is the way I do it’ – gives us some room to play, experiment, LEARN
- Expose kids to big ideas and encourage them to have big ideas
- We often ask ‘what do you do?’ – we should ask ‘what’s your misssion?’ – adults often have trouble answering this – the sooner we ask that of kids, the better
- The best children’s books are wisdom dipped in story – they move you somehow
- There are so many kids out there that don’t get captured by the testing camera
- Be brave about your own artwork and be nice about others’ artwork
Thank you for sharing this. Reading it was a great reminder of all the thought-provoking moments in the day today.