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Changing one's behavior is one thing; it's keeping it changed that's often the real challenge, particularly when it's something we "know" we have to do. Using principles of Constructive-Developmental Theory, Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey developed a personal development process that allows individuals and teams to overcome their "immunities to change" and achieve the personal goals that are most important to them. The heart of this immunity to change™ process is constructing a four-column "change map" that not only outlines your personal development goal but also reveals the hidden commitments that have been getting in the way of you achieving your goal.

strengthfinder

Welcome to the companion website to our ELI presentation on Assessing Learning Spaces. We have made many of our instruments and resources available for your reference. However, since we have worked in cooperation with several institutions and modified their instruments for our use, we'd ask that you contact them directly to get permission to do the same. The San José State University Academic Success Center opened in October 2006 with a goal to increase student success by providing 21st-century technology, informal and formal learning spaces, and the services and support. The objective was to build an integrative center that provides students with an innovative space and technology tools for collaboration and promotes faculty pedagogical innovation through the use of our Incubator Classroom, winner of the 2007 Campus Technology Innovators Award. By combining physical space, technology tools, and an intensive professional development program, the ASC exemplifies a new synergistic model for the campus.

Universal Design for Learning is a set of principles for curriculum development that give all individuals equal opportunities to learn. UDL provides a blueprint for creating instructional goals, methods, materials, and assessments that work for everyone--not a single, one-size-fits-all solution but rather flexible approaches that can be customized and adjusted for individual needs.

Bereiter and Scardamalia (1996) argue that there is a difference between learning and knowledge building. Learning is activity directed towards improving personal knowledge. Knowledge building is trying to improve knowledge itself by considering ideas in regard to their strengths, weaknesses, applications, limitations, and potential for further development. Both learning and knowledge building are needed in schools. This paper traces the development of both in a Grade 5/6 classroom studying physical science. Knowledge transforming discourse is central to knowledge building because it is the means through which knowledge is formed, criticized, and amended (Scardamalia, Bereiter & Lamon, 1994). In this knowledge building classroom, the capacity for transformative discourse was afforded by Knowledge Forum® and classroom processes. Our paper deals with how this class engaged in the process of articulating and changing their learning goals as they reflected on and evaluated their class' knowledge building progress. Our sources of data come from discourse in the Knowledge Forum® database and videotapes of classroom discussion. A second set of analyses designed to capture students' activity in the database used data from the Analytic Toolkit, a suite of tools designed to track each student's use of Knowledge Forum. A third set of measures came from a pretest and post-test of students' knowledge of physical science. Our results showed that students who engaged in knowledge building discourse around central features of physical science also improved their learning.