Group items tagged

As an ensemble the class can learn and discover together, all the while feeling part of something larger than themselves and experiencing the support of the group

By being part of this safe environment students are able to take risks, build on the strengths of others and grow in confidence, making decisions and taking actions on behalf of the group

This contrasts with the teacher centred class where the teacher has to monitor an motivate 20 –30 individuals continuously without a minute’s respite.

It's bad writing.  It's always been bad writing.  With the Common Core Standards designed to shift the way we teach students to think, read, and write, this outdated writing tradition must end.  If you're teaching it--stop it.  If your son, daughter, niece, or nephew (or a young person you care about) is learning it--prepare to engage with the teacher to end  it.

The acronym VARK stands for Visual, Aural, Read/write, and Kinesthetic sensory modalities that are used for learning information. Fleming and Mills (1992) suggested four modalities that seemed to reflect the experiences of the students and teachers. Although there is some overlap between them they are defined as follows.

The Arts

Career Development and Occupational Studies

English Language Arts

discussion online.

Finally, CMC can provide a more comfortable environment and discussion opportunities for students who do not perform well in spontaneous face-to-face discussion because they are shy or because their native language is not English (Berge & Collins, 1993; Harasim, 1990; Leasure, Davis, & Thievon, 2000).

It is useful to think of embodied learning (“M-BOD”), as Gee conceives it, as a dimension of EL since the pedagogy constructs learning as active and interactive, but it would be a mistake to conflate the concepts. M-BOD is a framework, a set of principles, for understanding how people become motivated to engage and re-engage cognitively challenging tasks--to "practice" at something--but this is not thinkable as an operation of (again in Fenwick's words) an "autonomous rational knowledge-making self, disembodied, rising above the dynamics and contingency of experience." Condensing and simplifying some of Gee's ideas, I came up with the hypothesis that practice is pleasurable when it involves people in making choices that reward them somehow--choices about who to be: (imaginative projection: some participation in story-telling or drama) what the rules are (game recognition: the mental labor of identifying problems and how to solve them) how to adapt (or improvise on) the rules to suit a particular context (game elaboration: some kind of recoding of some elements of the game)

Far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions. Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding…. Those decisions are …predicated on two modes of intellectual labor that are kept to the collateral learning of playing games. I call them probing and telescoping (41) Probing: you have to probe the depths of the game’s logic to make sense of it and like most probing expeditions, you get result by trial and error, by stumbling across things, by following hunches (42-3) Telescoping is managing…simultaneous objectives… you can’t progress far in a game if you simply deal with the puzzles you stumble across; you have to coordinate them with the ultimate objectives on the horizon...Telescoping is about constructing the proper hierarchy of tasks and moving through the tasks in the correct sequence. It’s about perceiving relationships and determining priorities (54-55).

The M-BOD scenarios sketched out above differ from those described in the EL section in that the former take seriously the role of desire in student learning. In the M-BOD scenarios, students resource their creative and dramatic selves to become their own guides in working out the meaning(s) of History, ethics, bullying, etc. This learning is “deep” because it involves the body in several ways: Sometimes bodies actually get up and move through space (i.e., the walking dance or doing field research) Students are prompted to respond to situations more than follow directions; these situations require them to “read” other people and multiple texts and contexts Students’ formal presentations (their strategic, other-directed productions) elicit actual responses from people, which (whether good or bad, or a mix) then require some expression and reflection Back to Discussion of "Situating M-BOD"       Preface One: Situating Embodied Learning Two: Case Study: Oliver Identity and Learning: “Follow What I Am Doing: Do The Rules That I’m Doing: It’s Very CoM-pli-cated” Improvisational/Feedback "1,2,3...16, 17,18, NineTEEN" Innovation: “I Can Look At Your Cards” Producelike Behavior: "Why Do The Make Queen Better Than Jack?" Conclusion: "The Bricolage, The Music, The Movement" Three: Implications for the Literacy Autobiography Assignment