Gems of Pedagogy
1. Co-construction of Understanding:
optimizes action through cooperative problem solving. Each member of a learning group brings part of the picture, part of the understanding, and the ‘hive mind’ constructs a new understanding more sophisticated and internalized knowing, and attitudes toward participation in learning, than one person could do alone.
2. Representing to Learn:
optimizes action through re-presenting ideas or partial ideas in another form than oral language. Members of the learning group can refer to a physical form to ground their attempts to communicate. Others in the learning group add to or alter the representation towards some mutually agreeable temporary envisioning of an idea. Representing to learn fosters the synthesis of multiple experiences and ideas, but it is also constrained by the affordances of the medium used; the more media, the better. These representations, when photographed, become a part of the documentation of the learning episode.
3. The Reciprocity of Documentation and Meta-cognition:
optimizes action by challenging participant’s understanding of themselves as actors with agency, who make decisions constantly in the groping process towards integrating what they know. By reviewing traces of the learning passages, from beginning to accomplishment, learners can see the interconnectedness of experiences that change oneself, the importance of social relationships for taking risks, for supporting risk-taking in others, and how other environing conditions—constraints, flow, time, and resources—have effects on what has happened. The more one understands how one learns the more intent one can be in the next groping processs to maximize each other’s strengths and willingness to risk.
Documentation
Documentation enables these processes to exist. While engaging learning groups in investigating sources or conducting research and offering challenges to represent current understandings, the facilitator records a history of what was said, made, questioned, and produced by taking notes, making recordings, archiving products, and chronicling events.
The facilitator brings forth these traces of events—which normally pass and disappear—by returning them for review to draw out what the members of the learning group recall from their experience at the time as an integral part of a formalized learning experience. Their discussions become added to the documentation record to return to view at a later time.
This reflective process not only illuminates change but also reminds participants of their bonds of care, their emotional swings, attitudes toward uncertainties, and decisions as steps taken in darkness.
In Sum
These Gems of Pedagogy become guides for the facilitator to create the conditions for learners to optimally encounter and participate in group learning. These conditions enable people to bring their abilities and dispositions to the fore and venture bravely in new learning experiences.
Those who wish to be masters at this face the challenge of understanding, inventing, and evolving provisions and allocating time for these opportunities in their area of expertise.
Want to delve into this more deeply?
I suggest the Making Learning Visible links, here and the bottom of this page.
The first article contains the documentation of a general chemistry learning group encountering the challenge of representing with Lewis structures the dissociation of sodium sulfate in water.
That Dissociation Slide Show illustrates the Gems of Pedagogy better than words can convey, but you have to go through it and look. It is not casually acquired stuff.
A long article, also present, goes on to describe the effects of really looking at learning. The students watched it and wrote reactions. The chemistry faculty watched it. Most faculty at Cascadia College watched it, and you can watch them, too. The Assessment liaisons from each college in Washington State watched this Dissociation slide show and then the Cascadia College faculty slide show. Finally the students in that year-long general chemistry course sequence discussed what the effects of this documentation upon themselves (two of that group were in the original).
“Making Learning Visible” uses the poster as a unifying image of it all. Dr. Kalyn Owens and I spent six years together investigating Gems of Pedagogy.
This is can be found nowhere else.
The second page, Listening to Students, is an explanation of our experience in an earlier capture that summarizes the transformative power of an earlier slide show on students learning to learn.
The third, Algebra Learning Group, is a guest capture for a developmental algebra class at a neighboring college.