It seems to me that so much of literacy is tied to understandings. In conversations over this Christmas break, I have seen over and over again how people (including me) tend to try to fit information into their existing way of thinking. It is both exciting and dangerous to think that the students we work with (especially in middle school) tend to be relatively unformed in their thinking. They really are pretty impressionable. As educators, we have a responsibility to impress upon them the importance of thinking.
One of my biggest frustrations in trying to teach students to think is their tendency to just want to jump quickly to results. We have trained them in school to have that mentality - do these things, get it done & in, get points, move on. How do we show the value of thinking? How do we teach them to think and understand on a deeper level?
I love the Understanding by Design materials - if teachers truly start looking at what they want students to get and designing the assessments and learning experience to reflect that, we may start to see some changes. I also like the work the Design Team has done - if we truly value 21st century skills and model our schools on the ideals put forth in those documents, I think we'll see some exciting changes.
Listening to Jamie McKenzie at MEMO this fall, I really liked his emphasis on literacies plural. So often, people refer to literacy as primarily a reading "thing." In reality, we see many different types of literacies in our students and in our own lives.
I am the library media specialist at Pioneer Ridge Middle School in Chaska, MN. This started as my MILI (Metronet Information Literacy Initiative) blog, but sat dormant for a while. Now I'm doing "23 Mobile Things" and working with the iPad that I haven't fallen in love with yet. We are using this tool to communicate about what we're learning and applying in our classrooms.
2 comments:
I completely agree with your thought that kids want to jump immediately to results. There is nothing worse than kids wanting an immediate answer and complaining when they can't find it.
Part of UbD is that kids can answer a big question at the end of the unit. I have started to use the same question for every unit: What did _______ contribute to us today? So no matter what part of the world we cover (Egypt, Greece, Rome) the kids are digging for the most important stuff. Forget names, dates, specifics...I want kids to understand that we got democracy from Athens and our republic from Rome. This takes work on the kids' part and is not a simple question.
You are so right: The importance of THINKING! It's going to be the biggest step our students take in gaining information literacy skills--taking the new information they gather from sources, thinking about it and learning to reflect on their own new meaning that they've created or asking themselves deeper questions.
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