learning

A Shift in Thinking

I have read a few articles over the last few days that deal with cognition and how our world is evolving in the 21st century. The articles by David Brooks of the New York Times, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Wayne Hodgins all focus on the development our cognitive abilities as a requirement for success in the 21st century. The argument all three state is that our economic struggles and potential successes are not based upon globalization and the expansion of China and India, but rather it is a matter of building and supporting our ability to think. Wayne Hodgins, a “strategic futurist” states,

The future is about putting more and more focus on leveraging and augmenting our cognitive abilities

Teaching and Cognition

Much like I mentioned in my last post about Dan Pink and Johnny Bunko, our success as a nation is dependent upon teaching our students to develop their abilities to think, solve problems and be invested in their work. It is not about memorization or regurgitation. We have computers that do that for us. Sites like Wikipedia make the lecture based classroom obsolete. The teacher is no longer the sole holder of knowledge. Whether you like this or not, the fact of the matter is that we have machines to retain information. For our students to succeed in today’s marketplace, we must prepare them for the “cognitive age”. The skills we teach and the ability to process information and develop solutions will be much more valuable than the simple memorization of dates or formulas.

Our future success as a nation, rather as a globe, is dependent upon our ability to synthesize information and focus on problem solving. Not only will we be preparing our students for a flattened marketplace but in teaching the ability to think and be creative, our teaching will become rewarding for our students. If the students can see the value of what we are teaching, they will become intrinsically invested. If our students become invested they will be motivated to do well.

It is a linear progression. If we teach cognitive skills to our students, they will be prepared to handle the problems facing businesses in today’s global economy. If the students see the relevance of their work and enjoy what they are doing, they in turn are motivated to work hard and do well.

When examining the question of teaching in this cognitive age, we must understand that we can not do justice to our students with traditional methods. Our students must be prepared and that will only come from having them become invested in learning how to solve problems to the topics they face.

With the advancement of technology and a flattened playing field, employers now require their workers to be highly skilled problem solvers. This ability will only be developed by moving away from memorization of facts and teach how to think and problem solve using those facts. If we do not address this gap in our teaching we will do a disservice to our students and our nation’s future success.

photo credit: symic and mark(s)elliot

Many educators believe that the summer months bring a halt to the learning process for our students. This doesn’t have to be the case. There are many innovative and engaging methods that will get our students involved and thinking over the summer months.

Here are a few suggestions that I found on Dangerously Irrelevant, a great blog by Dr. Scott McLeod. The following are ideas that were contributed by a variety of teachers.

Summer “Learning” Projects

• Try geocaching.
• Make a commercial for your city. Use a camcorder and post it on YouTube.
• Use Stellarium to find the view from your home. Then go outside at night to locate the sky features shown by the software.
• Do a service project using TakingITGlobal.
• Map out your summer travels on Google Earth.
• Research a topic that you may want to learn more about and create an article on Wikipedia.
• Create an oral history project. Visit your grandparents, the local VFW or nursing home. Armed with questions and a digital voice recorder, document your subject’s past. Post the oral histories as a series of podcasts.
• Create a visual tour of your city using Flickr. Using a digital camera take pictures of all the sites in your city. Once uploaded, write descriptions about each location and then create a set for all the pictures in Flickr. The set could be used as a guide to the sites the student deemed interesting.

The point of these projects is to instill in our students that learning does not only have to take place in a classroom but rather, learning is an organic process that involves inquiry and thought and can happen anywhere at any time. Whether it involves technology or not, the point of projects like these is to engage our students and make them understand that learning shouldn’t stop when their last exam is done in June.

photo credit: greg.turner