If you look at the how, how much of your teaching, and how much of learning
is passive consumption, simply remembering, repeating, and even
regurgitating what's been learned or if the other extreme of the spectrum,
multiple avenues of inquiry, thinking, exploring, finding out, learning in
different ways through a whole range of different intelligences.
And then if you look at the who on that dimension, at one end,
the individual pupil learning on your own, inside your own head, at the other end of
that a community of learners. To what extent did your teaching
encourage children not just to be individual learners, but to be part of
that whole community of learners? And as a teacher, how does that apply to
you? So look at those six dimensions again.
Take a little time to think about how this relates to your own learning, and
your own teaching. What is the difference in learning in
school and out of school? Carol Dweck is an American
researcher, has four different qualities she talks about when she compares school
and not-school. She talks about the individual cognition
in school, that is individual thinking that takes place in a school context,
as opposed to the shared thinking, the shared cognition that takes place in
family and community, and among friends when they're in a different kind of
context. She talks about pure mentation, that is
pure thinking, mental thinking in school as against the use of tools often
outside of school, where we do our thinking with, whether it's writing, or
filming, or talking, or using other kinds of tools to help us to get better at what
we do. And she talks about symbol manipulation
in school as against contextualized reasoning outside.
So a lot of, for example, in mathematics children are introduced to symbols, very
early, and a lot of our learning in school is at the symbolic level, and if
you go back and you think about, we talked about earlier about Jerome Bruner,
and the enactive, the iconic, and the symbolic,