I have to say book clubs are one of those things I've never thought about much, because they're largely the domain of public libraries, which are outside my area of interest. So it was nice to read a couple articles on where book clubs are at these days and how they've changed. Nothing in Dempsey's or Hoffert's articles really surprised me; I'd fully expect that today's libraries are the source of the latest and greatest innovation in the book club world. It particularly struck me personally that public libraries are using book clubs geared toward young childless adults as an attempt to draw in patrons who don't interact much with them, because that's a demographic that includes me. As someone who doesn't do much recreational reading, especially not of fiction, but would like to do more, a book club geared toward things I'm interested in would probably be quite a good way to draw me into a public library.
What really intrigued me, though, were the Socratic seminar articles. I was really interested to see what exactly these articles said a Socratic seminar was and how to do them, because my standing impression of "Socratic" was just "learning by asking questions," which isn't very helpful in terms of actual implementation. What I kept thinking in reading Tredway's article, though, was, "This is just using fancy language to describe good group discussion!" The classes I have enjoyed the most as undergraduate and a graduate student are those that are based heavily on intentional, focused, well-facilitated group discussion that analyzes a text everyone in the group has read beforehand. As a history major/English minor, I just really loved being in classes like this and felt like I always learned so much more than I did from lectures or other activities. To me, this "Socratic seminar" method wasn't any new or crazy idea, then, it was just an explication of how to do good group discussion, which I thought was a pretty basic educational tool. But the ubiquity of such a teaching method is probably something that's been skewed by my liberal-arts background.
Metzger's article threw me for a bit of a loop. I mean, she does a really job laying out how she implemented this teaching method and made it really successful her context. I appreciated how she showed the ways it could be used to teach the specific learning objectives related to reading comprehension that she wanted to get across. But... I kept thinking it all sounded a little too good to be true. I've never taught high school freshman, so I guess I really can't judge, but I felt like I've been in groups of undergraduates who would not show anything near the results that Metzger describes her class showing after two months of using this approach.
I think the solution here is that Metzger is probably a really, really good teacher, and she (obviously, who would?) doesn't give herself enough credit for how much of a role she played a role in making this a successful teaching practice. At one point, she even makes it sound easy, implying that once you get started, the students will just take over and the learning will happen. But clearly this isn't what she was doing at all. You can see throughout the whole article how Metzger was guiding the process, checking to see what students were learning, making adjustments when things didn't go well, and overall being very aware of how things were going. (She videotaped the first class period and re-watched it so she could see what she was doing well! How many teachers would do that? Clearly she really cared about making this work.) We've all been in classes where group discussion just didn't work and just didn't go well. My contention is that this usually happens because the teacher doesn't really know how to facilitate discussion, which includes doing all the things, on both a micro- and macro-level, that Metzger did here. In general, there probably needs to be more emphasis on the really important role the teacher plays in making Socratic seminars work as a teaching tool.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the high school where Metzger taught as noted at the end of the article. It's in suburban Boston and is consistently ranked as one of the best public high schools in the state of Massachusetts. (It's also the alma mater of Michael Dukakis, Conan O'Brien, and Mike Wallace. Thank you, Wikipedia.) It's obviously the sort of place where students are used to high standards and high-quality critical thinking. In a different school, with different students and different expectations, this teaching method would probably be considerably more complicated to implement. I'd be curious to see how implementing this would go for someone who teaching in a rather different environment.
The other overall observation I have is that Socratic seminars are really conducive to the type of learning that's about building really complex skills that can transfer to lots of other environments. It's really not as helpful when the focus is on covering as much content as possible, because that's what students are going to be tested on. Unfortunately, this might be the biggest hindrance to wider implementation in today's public-school settings.
ETA: Not saying anything here about the Prensky article because I assume the whole point is to have a rather detailed discussion of it in class.
Sunday, February 19, 2012
Class in Review: Week 5
Gaming and blogs, oh my oh my!
That's pretty much my reaction to last week's class. I know we talked about transfer in there somewhere, but everything I remember was our discussion of gaming and blogs. And on both issues, I'm really not sure "what I think" at all.
When it comes to gaming, I'm just really skeptical at the whole paradigm that suggests people will be more motivated to do things that encourage learning or solve problems if we turn everything into a game, or cast real-world situations in the form of games. In formal educational settings, attempts at "gamifying" probably still usually come across as "Oh, they're trying to turn this into a 'game' so that it's 'fun' to learn. But this is nothing like [insert favorite video game here]." I suppose the issue of motivation is really what gets to me. We talked about how educators don't understand why students don't display skills in the classroom or in their academic work that they clearly display when gaming. My answer is that it's simply because they're in the classroom/doing academic work and they know it. That alone is a motivation-killer. I don't really know how to deal with this, but to me it's the biggest hurdle to getting "gaming" approaches to work in formal educational settings. I don't know about other gaming that aims to solve "real-world" problems; this is probably a little more complicated.
And oh, the blogs. One of the things I really wanted to learn in this class was how to do a professional blog and not come off as narcissistic or obsessed with your own ideas. I read a lot of blogs, some more regularly than others, and I always find them illuminating. But I'm not the kind of person who feels the need to broadcast my ideas about particular topics to the Internet at large, because I think it gives off the attitude that I'm a super-special snowflake who everyone should listen to. This is the same reason I don't post Facebook statuses or links very much (though I spend hours on Facebook every day); why would so many people be interested in mundane things I have to say?
But at the same time I know that in our profession and many others, blogs have come to play a vital and important role in professional discourse. And I know that when you're blogging as part of your job, the potential for the impression of narcissism is going to go down quite a bit. Nevertheless, given all this the part of our discussion on blogs I found most interesting was the discussion at the end of class on blogging culture and "blogging superstars" and such. That's exactly the kind of behavior that annoys me and turns me off of some blogs. I have no desire to be involved in petty professional drama that arises from who's "famous" on the Internet, though I guess some of that is inevitable these days.
But the thing that I learned from looking at so many professional blogs (and I looked at several others from the list than the ones I'd been following, though not in as much depth) was that the most significant thing a blog post can do is try to be part of a larger conversation. The best professional blog posts were those that took something personal and tied it in to larger trends, and then asked questions that generated further thought. The best bloggers don't just throw out random ideas and "here's what I'm doing" sort of moments-- they think about how to connect things to the larger context of the profession and really want to get feedback and provide more in return. Whether that actually happens is another question, because not all the blogs I looked at had a lot of comments, though that's not a great measure of how widely they were read. Overall, I guess the point is that blogs should be part of a larger conversation, not voices that dominate a conversation. Given the ubiquity and power of the Internet, though, this can be a tough line to walk sometimes, and it's something I think bloggers should keep in mind.
(Hope I haven't said anything that's offended all the blog-lovers out there! I like blogs too, I promise!)
That's pretty much my reaction to last week's class. I know we talked about transfer in there somewhere, but everything I remember was our discussion of gaming and blogs. And on both issues, I'm really not sure "what I think" at all.
When it comes to gaming, I'm just really skeptical at the whole paradigm that suggests people will be more motivated to do things that encourage learning or solve problems if we turn everything into a game, or cast real-world situations in the form of games. In formal educational settings, attempts at "gamifying" probably still usually come across as "Oh, they're trying to turn this into a 'game' so that it's 'fun' to learn. But this is nothing like [insert favorite video game here]." I suppose the issue of motivation is really what gets to me. We talked about how educators don't understand why students don't display skills in the classroom or in their academic work that they clearly display when gaming. My answer is that it's simply because they're in the classroom/doing academic work and they know it. That alone is a motivation-killer. I don't really know how to deal with this, but to me it's the biggest hurdle to getting "gaming" approaches to work in formal educational settings. I don't know about other gaming that aims to solve "real-world" problems; this is probably a little more complicated.
And oh, the blogs. One of the things I really wanted to learn in this class was how to do a professional blog and not come off as narcissistic or obsessed with your own ideas. I read a lot of blogs, some more regularly than others, and I always find them illuminating. But I'm not the kind of person who feels the need to broadcast my ideas about particular topics to the Internet at large, because I think it gives off the attitude that I'm a super-special snowflake who everyone should listen to. This is the same reason I don't post Facebook statuses or links very much (though I spend hours on Facebook every day); why would so many people be interested in mundane things I have to say?
But at the same time I know that in our profession and many others, blogs have come to play a vital and important role in professional discourse. And I know that when you're blogging as part of your job, the potential for the impression of narcissism is going to go down quite a bit. Nevertheless, given all this the part of our discussion on blogs I found most interesting was the discussion at the end of class on blogging culture and "blogging superstars" and such. That's exactly the kind of behavior that annoys me and turns me off of some blogs. I have no desire to be involved in petty professional drama that arises from who's "famous" on the Internet, though I guess some of that is inevitable these days.
But the thing that I learned from looking at so many professional blogs (and I looked at several others from the list than the ones I'd been following, though not in as much depth) was that the most significant thing a blog post can do is try to be part of a larger conversation. The best professional blog posts were those that took something personal and tied it in to larger trends, and then asked questions that generated further thought. The best bloggers don't just throw out random ideas and "here's what I'm doing" sort of moments-- they think about how to connect things to the larger context of the profession and really want to get feedback and provide more in return. Whether that actually happens is another question, because not all the blogs I looked at had a lot of comments, though that's not a great measure of how widely they were read. Overall, I guess the point is that blogs should be part of a larger conversation, not voices that dominate a conversation. Given the ubiquity and power of the Internet, though, this can be a tough line to walk sometimes, and it's something I think bloggers should keep in mind.
(Hope I haven't said anything that's offended all the blog-lovers out there! I like blogs too, I promise!)
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