Catch and Release in Inquiry

Here is the spoiler alert – this blog has a fishing story and a several fishing metaphors. Beware.

Soon after some of my first experiences teaching, I became aware of the fact that engaged students were way easier to “manage” (a nice term related to classroom control) than disinterested ones. This is not rocket science. Finding the right hook for lessons became one of my teaching goals.

I have a story to tell about hooks. It goes far back into my childhood. I lived at two different times in the idyllic foothills of southwest Alberta. Whenever I return to that landscape, I breathe differently and all the tension leaves my shoulders. This has been a fascinating personal observation since some of those years were filled with turmoil in my family. It has often caused me to reflect on the deep sources of resiliency found in a natural environment.  

Both of my Dad’s parents liked to fish. For my grandfather, George Shenton, I am confident it came from his childhood roots in the pastoral English countryside near Bollington, although he never told me that. I went with him to the cold, stony rushing little stream near our home at Twin Butte on several occasions. I suspect, I was allowed to go to get me out of the way of the afore mentioned turmoil, but at 9 or 10 I don’t remember caring about the why.

I did learn several life lessons from fishing.

Throwing stones in a stream does not make fishermen happy.

Fishing time is not really talking time. While my grandpa could spin a tale, he never did it when he was fishing. 

If you catch it, you must clean it. Soon after my first fish gutting session, I discovered I could set-up my line with a weight and no hook and stand and cast and reel in and watch the birds and shadows and slowly walk the edge of the stream and claim bad luck for not catching a thing. I assumed (for a few years) that my Grandpa was none the wiser to my ploy. Then one year on a family visit back to Pincher Creek in my mid-teens my deception was revealed during a story telling session, much to my embarrassment.  He had known all along. Only recently, as a grandparent did I really get it – but that is a different tale.

Back to the nature of hooks. Musicians have understood the use of a good hook, something to catch a listener’s attention and bring them back time and again to the lyric or melody. I have never heard a composer apologize for using a good tonal hook. All those related ideas like bait and lures just remind me that shiny, colourful, invitingly textured, intriguingly sounding, delicious smelling and all things food related can be used to draw a student’s attention. It is best for a good hook to be multi-faceted since learners can be a diverse lot, very unlike the schools of the fish species.

The powerful part of a good hook in learning, from hockey to animals to good literature is what happens after landing that learner. Release before death by boredom, I hope. After drawing them in, using the focus and attention to go deeper and plant some seed (sorry to muddy the water by mixing the metaphor but could not resist an agriculture reference) it is throwing them back. How do I facilitate the successful, independent integration of that fact, skill, concept or idea? Often, it is just trusting that the flow of the stream will carry them on to the next bend wiser.

Just recently, I met a former student. She was 6 when I had her in Grade 1. She is a charming 30 something nurse in Vancouver, now. She told me things she remembers clearly from all those years ago. Some of them are only shadows for me. You can never tell what will actually stick. It is so gratifying to know that somethings do.

Catch and release.

Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens

Something incredibly wonderful happened to me this week. I met Frank Oppenheimer.

He said some things that spoke to my soul from years of observing kids in rich learning environments:

“The Exploratorium was conceived as a place to teach and learn, primarily because these are things we all like to do. It is the way we bring up our children, take our friends to the top of a hill to see the view, or call out, when we are walking through the woods ‘Hey, look, there’s a deer.’”

“This show of reality represents a basic honesty that is surprisingly important effect on learning.”

“No one flunks a museum.”

There is a stack of books from the library that I am working my summer way through. Summer reading was one of my all time most restorative activities during my active teaching time. I did not consider the summer break well started until I had spent at least a few days that first week nose deep in a novel from breakfast until supper or even lights out bedtime.

When I was growing up, my mom would occasionally request the removal of my nose from a book to get something done. During my university days, I reread The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings each year during my summer job bus commutes. Then I taught for 8 years before starting my family and so I had time to create a July tradition around summer reading. Family changed some aspects of this (no more dawn to dusk reading) but this summer I have reveled in it in a new way.

In late July, my husband got a total knee replacement and I had hospital and home time to spend nose deep in books again.

In the early 1990’s my husband and I enjoyed the opportunity to visit San Francisco for a conference related to his work. I checked out Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and discovered the Exploratorium. I could not believe such a wonderful learning environment existed. I tried to get there every time we went to San Francisco and have recommended it to many people as a highlight of a trip there. We planned a family holiday to San Francisco expressly so my kids could experience it. When I discovered a biography of the man who “made up” this rich world I knew I had to read it.

In the pages of Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens; Frank Oppenheimer and the World He Made Up I found a kindred spirit in Frank Oppenheimer. Biographer, K.C. Cole has communicated her “perceptions” of this physics and education genius so that I feel I truly “understand” his life and times. Perception and understanding were key to Frank’s educational approach. Cole had the advantage of working with Frank over many years and experienced the development of the Exploratorium first hand in the role of a writer. She had contact with him right up to his death from cancer in 1985.

Her description of Frank’s early life, his experiences related to work as a young physicist on the Manhattan Project with his more famous brother Robert, his eventual blacklist for his stand (with the scientists involved) on not using the bomb which included suggestions for international atomic energy oversight and his eventual high school teaching job in Colorado all lead to understanding the cosmic synergy he brought to the development of his “woods of natural phenomena”.

Frank’s science was a life philosophy, a way of looking at the world and wanting to know more. Knowing more could only lead to better people and society. In his view there were no stupid questions and ultimately with time to touch, listen and observe, patterns were revealed, connections made and looking for answers brought understanding.

Processing Speed as a Function of Time

During the two months that have passed since I have posted a blog (this long amount of time could be explained by tesseract theory a la Wrinkle in Time) I have been watching robins build nests and hatch chicks with my grand-daughter. I have been at my computer only to read and respond to email and do some work on the upcoming Beyond the Classroom Conference (which on Monday, June 25 will become real and then part of the past).
The nests are now empty and all the work the parents did to help keep the hatch-lings warm, safe and fed as well as all the time my grand-daughter and I spent observing that activity have joined the stream of some dimension that is now the past for us.

On a recent Thursday evening I enjoyed the company of some innovative educators. I only knew a handful in the room but the spirit of collaboration and celebration filled the space.
For the past 15 years (5567 days) the 2Learn.ca Education Society of Alberta have been exploring how to equip teachers and students for the power and change technology is bringing to the process we call learning. Along the way they explored the cascade professional development model and will soon have the results of a University of Alberta study posted on their website.

Imagine my delight when I strolled the room and discovered my new partner in site-based education EJ School adventures (and encourager of Tweeting), Karen Unland had written an article about the future implication for education of cellphones (way back in 2000).

We ate then, Catherine Macklam, Provincial Team Leader, took us on a stroll down memory lane. She was followed by guest speaker, George Siemens' (his book Knowing Knowledge will be my first on-line book read) whose rapid-fire delivery smash-drove me into the 21st century of learning. 

TESSERACT

I am still processing it all - several in the room were tweeting away while I was making notes in my trusty journal (yes, I am a digital immigrant by virtue of age).

Then today I get in my email Edna's new post (I love how she boils it down) reminding me that a focus on learning (not teaching) keeps the process in the right place.

One of my Beliefs about Learning

Just the other day, Edna Sackson asked me (well, not just me but anyone reading or following her blog) what my beliefs were about learning. This morning, as my husband and I learned about how a preadmission clinic works (lots of sitting and waiting for 10 minute spurts with different experts on what will happen), I wrote this blog. When I came home to type it up I went to my trusty on-line Oxford English Dictionary (I fell in love with the OED after reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman, a great example of how truth can be ever so much more fascinating than fiction) and discovered that apart from the definition of learning 1(a): “the action of receiving instruction or acquiring knowledge”; its root was in an old Germanic word that meant teaching.

I am spending a lot of time these days with my toddler grand-daughter who reminds me more than once every day about the basics of learning: touching, smelling, listening, looking at and tasting new things until you know them. I noticed in one of Edna’s old blogs she feels there is a lot to find out about learning from children.

One of my strongest beliefs about learning is that human brains are hard-wired to learn and doing just that, constantly.

I believe the sensory processes that allow the in-put of data, the exotic synapse system that lays down hundreds of connections for later reference and a complex neural network to facilitate response occur much of the time without the human actually trying to learn. I am sure I am not the only educator who often lost track of these brain facts while trying to push my particular agenda of what I wanted a child to learn.

When I was in my last year of high school, my Chemistry teacher gave us copies of the last 5 years’ worth of “Provincial Departmental” multiple choice exams. The score on a similar exam that we would write at course end would provide 80% of our final mark. Unlike my first 2 years of high school chemistry, which were full of experiments (I had filled 5 loose leaf pages with observations of a candle burning) there would be no experiments. My close-to-retirement chemistry educator could put me to sleep inside 15 minutes and after one week of 90 minute classes, I quit attending and spend the rest of the semester in the lunch room working my way through the exams. I scored 97%. Sadly, when I attended my first Chemistry 200 class at the University of Alberta in a lecture theatre with 250 other students, I discovered I had arrived in Greece – at least it sounded like the lecturers were speaking Greek. One experience in the lab made it clear we would be marked on the achievement of the “right results” and convinced me I had not learned enough or maybe any chemistry to this point and I dropped Chemistry 200.

Some might say I learned nothing.

I felt I had learned a lot from my chemistry experience. It allowed me to approach the rest of my teacher training with a new concept of what learning was all about.

So unlike Edna’s daughter, my ability to recall any of the periodic tables (which I must have been able to recall at one time) is limited to the phrase “Little Betty Boron” and yet, like Edna’s daughter, I owe one of my greatest educator insights to the teacher who tried to get that darn table into my brain. Go figure.