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Getting your Head and Hands to pull your Heart into the Twenty First Century

7/31/2015

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People learn using three domains: Cognitive, Affective and Psychomotor or Head, Heart and Hand. Everyone needs to think, feel (connect) and do to truly learn.


This knowledge about how people learn is the foundation of Project Based Learning (PBL).


If you Google PBL the first 40 or so articles, opinions and ideas are absolutely correct. The teacher creates experiences in and hopefully out of the classroom. The students, the co-designers learn by doing, changing and making. .


One might say, "There. We are done. Problem solved!"


Not so fast. The real problem often becomes apparent when the teacher implements the project. Some teachers fall back on outdated beliefs, which may include the idea that they have to tell their students everything they need to know before students work on the project. This is often followed by an impulse to quiz or test students on what the teacher said, rather than assessing what the students have learned and demonstrated through the creation of the project.


Teachers aren’t the only ones with problematic assumptions. School principals may become anxious when they see a classroom where students are out of their seats doing, instead of sitting quietly in rows. This anxiety comes from the misguided belief that quiet and compliant individual work is synonymous with rigor.  Parents, driven by a similar misunderstanding of the nature of rigor, might ask their students,  “Where is your homework? Without homework you will not be ready for college." Even some students think, “I would rather just be told what I need to know and then take a test so I can forget everything”. Regurgitation and recitation are great fun at parties. Some of the greatest scoundrels in history had one or two poems memorized and ready to go when enchanting party guests.

However that is not really learning.


When a student chooses a topic and then researches and experiments with ideas because they are interested, and then transforms their knowledge into a project, that shows what they have learned to the community. That is rigor. If the students can teach themselves, peers, parents and their teacher about what they are interested in, that is one rigorous project.


These are reasons that we need to think about Head, Heart and Hand when planning and doing PBL in the classroom. In great PBL, all students are able to find their own hook or path into a project.  


These two animations offer guidance from two different perspectives on PBL.


Text Book Me Not, is the cognitive path. The animation outlines 21 concepts that we need to think about while planning, managing and exhibiting a project with students. The list is daunting, however it is doable.


Do Something is the psychomotor path. This animation encourages all of us to “Do Something” and then have the students “Do Something”, which they then exhibit for a public audience. It sounds simple, and it is. When we simply create situations in which student activity integrates the hands with the head and heart, the outcomes for student learning become amazingly complex in ways that are beyond what a teacher could possibly plan for. 
Andrew Gloag and I realized this simple path of “Do Something” when we started to prepare for the Get Bent project. We wanted the students to make a bentwood chair. We watched people online steaming and bending wood and tried it ourselves. After spending two weekends and $1000 we realized that steaming was not the way, we moved to laminating thin sheets of plywood. We made a proof model, promotional poster, physics concept diagram, the chair, a lamp to go with the chair and a book about the process. Then the students made our deliverables, some used bent metal chairs some chairs that bent instead of bent wood and that was ok. Everyone made something and showed their work proudly to the community on exhibition night. If we did not try it ourselves we would have not had the time for the project and exhibition. We did something and had the students do something too. The affective component, the heart part was believing that it was ok for every student to design, create, revise and control their own project. In our hearts we believed that they would and could learn everything they need by completing this project.


So, pick a path and try it. Plan for the cognitive path, or the psychomotor path. Then try using the other path to support your classroom. There are no silver bullets in education. The work we do in planning must reflect the kinds of work we want our students to engage in. Do you want them to passively listen and regurgitate what you say? Then plan a lecture. If you want them to bring their head, heart and hands to their learning, then you have to too. 
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Reclaiming Stupidity

7/30/2015

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Ken Rignall was my graduate school advisor, my friend and my mentor in art and education. I was his mentor sometimes too. Ken taught printmaking and painting for 30 years at California College of Arts and Crafts. He also taught me how to make deep fried calamari. He was a little salty, having been brought up on the Monterey docks in the 1940s. He could have been a character from a Steinbeck novel; he was great and flawed, but always himself.

Ken would prepare for his class weeks ahead of time, carefully experimenting and planning. He would know every demonstration he was going to do each week because he did the projects ahead of time. He used his examples and other examples from past classes to show the students what he expected.

When I met Ken I had been teaching middle school and high school art for about four years. I would come to the print shop early and start my work and he would be there, nervously planning and setting up his presentation. I looked at him with amazement, and I said, “Hey Ken what are you doing? What’s up with the 3x5 cards and all the preparation? You could do this in your sleep. Thirty years and you still have to plan like this?” He never gave me a hard time. He just said, “I need to be able to show and tell the students what I am expecting. I need to know my directions will point them to success. I need to prepare because I am not perfect and I know it.” That shut me up.

Later, I was teaching freshman Lithography. Ken inspired me to write up the process with pictures and have examples ready to show so that the students could see the amazing things that were possible. I worked really hard, way harder than the art school kids that were paying $4000 to take my class. Now I realize that I should have worked harder than the students. It was my job to reach my students, not just show them art, but to reach inside their heads and get them to do some cool work.

Ken was a humble guy. He was insecure that he wasn’t good enough, and that served him well. He was a great artist, but just because he knew the subject matter did not mean he stopped coming up with new ways to teach students to learn how to make art. Content knowledge is important, but on the same level is the teacher’s desire to reach and connect with the student. “Our job,” Ken said, “is to get the kids to love to learn, and to keep experimenting.”

Ken was so supportive of me in my art and in my teaching. He died in 2003 but I feel like I am teaching his way. I always do the project first, so I can see the pitfalls and variables and know when students will need help. And I never think, “I don’t need to plan because I know more than my students.”

If you’re reading this and you are a humanities teacher, math teacher or a science teacher, I hope that you see the relevance of this story. Write that ten-page paper on your personal identity. Was it fun? When you finished it, was it interesting to read? If yes, that is great. Do the project or paper you want students to do, and then share what you created with them. If it was a drag, don’t submit your students to it.

I don’t have the students make color wheels anymore. First, no matter how cool it looks they don’t want to keep it. I have stacks of old color wheels. It was my assignment, not their project. Next, it is a flat concept. It is hard to understand why it is a good exercise to the novice; it is more just a vehicle of frustration. Finally, on-the-job training, or applying something in context, is much more effective than an exercise in a vacuum.

Instead I have the students use Photoshop to re-specify an image using the color picker and the paint dump tools.




This assignment gets the students to use Photoshop, teaches them values and hues, and gives them a great image to print and take home or to make into their first painting. They are proud of their work and they have fun doing it.

When I hear people say, “Why reinvent the wheel?” I think, “Because the wheel is plain and boring.” As teachers we need to remember the bad old days of our education and endeavor not to put our students through it too.

Ken would say if your students did “shitty work” it was the teacher’s fault. I agree, mostly. Every subject area needs to be sticky, engaging and exciting. We are lucky at High Tech High that we can customize our classes for the round peg in the square classroom. That is our job, and our burden sometimes.

One of my favorite things Ken ever taught me was the value of stupidity. He would say, “That painting is stupid, I love it! I want to try that too.” I think what he meant was that some things so obviously work. You did not think. You just did it and it looks really cool. At critiques students would say, “I love your work. It is so stupid.” It was like he reclaimed a putdown into a positive. 

We had this critique with some students from UC Davis and one of the graduate students from our class commented how stupid all of their art was. The UC Davis students were very offended, and then tickled about the misunderstanding. I like to tell this story just for the hell of it, but I think it is a window into Ken’s genius. Never believe you are the best and that you are the sole oracle of information in your classroom. Always try to improve and don’t sit on your butt. Do the assignment with the students. It all seems obvious, almost stupid, to me now.



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    by Jeff Robin, Founding Staff member and Art Teacher at High Tech High. Now he coaches teachers and paints.

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