But Not Least...Learning and Lobstering

Anyone who has visited coastal Maine has met the lobster. This fascinating arthropod survives in the Intertidal Zone despite man's best attempts to eliminate it, aided by a growth cycle and physiology well-suited to its habitat. Just for fun, we contrast the well-suited lobster to the ill-suited child floating through or prowling the technological sea and the information flood. Can we, with a little imagination, glean from this contrast any insights into how we, as teachers, might better prepare our students for academic survival and growth in the 21st century? In exploring this question, we have drifted into Learning Theory and teaching methodology. Like all good questions, it has enriched our understanding, helped us to construct new learning, and resulted in many new questions. Join us on the adventure.

1 lobster month = 1 child year

The newly hatched lobster "bug" will float in the top meter of the intertidal zone for up to a month, barely able to direct its motion through the use of feathery hairs on its legs. "Here it is prey for seabirds and for any larger animals in the sea, which is most of them." (All About Lobsters)

Children construct meaning ceaselessly from the pool of data around them. By the time they are in kindergarten they know the meanings associated with their "family structure" and their role within this. They know the meanings of the physical world that are necessary for their comfort and survival (food, safety, shelter, clothing, sleep, transportation, touch). They are beginning to understand the meanings of the emotional world and its spoken and unspoken messages (the language of feelings). They are pretty good at memorizing short lists and names. They can mimic actions and sounds. They can sort blocks into piles by three colors. They can follow two step unrelated directions (sometimes 3) and construct sentences using "and." In the first four years, children absorb information and construct what we call "learning readiness." This can be a scary process. It is fun, but if you watch a child working to construct knowledge (visit InTime and click on the "See a Video" link - Navigator 7+ recommended), you will realize that this is hard work. It makes kids uncomfortable. It also makes adults uncomfortable. We have dealt in another essay about the concept that teacher discomfort is OK and even desirable (see Dis What?); the same applies to kids. Some will seek discomfort zones, but most, as early as Nursery, will seek comfort zones.

The postlarva lobster will purposely move down to the intertidal floor, where it will find a crevice, seaweed clump or rock cluster in which to hide. "The tiny lobster spends the next few years, until almost age four, hiding under seaweed and small rocks, catching food that drifts down to it." (All About Lobsters)

And then formal schooling enters the lives of children and with it the flood of impersonal data that will contain the core of what they have to "learn" over the next 13 years or so. Increasingly, that information is delivered in a busy, crowded classroom. Increasingly, it is delivered through a technological medium. That medium, whether it is TV, video, audio, or computer, is characterized by a ceaseless, ever-changing, unpredictable motion and population, not unlike that faced by the young lobster of the Intertidal Zone. Increasingly, students are expected to independently search for answers, assisted by a seemingly innate ability to locate and catch "the good stuff." This task is becoming increasingly difficult for the young student, who more often than not settles into a safe spot and waits for answers to come in on the information tide. She becomes very good at filtering answers by their providers: teacher-person, parent-persons, peer-persons recognized as generally right, self.

This is the state of most of our students in Lower and early-Middle School. At 5 human years of age, a child may be no better off than a hiding lobster larva. Yet she is suddenly "adult" in the technological enriched classroom and is expected to forage successfully.

A lobster is considered to be an "adult" when it weighs enough to be "a keeper"- a pound or more. Depending upon environmental factors and the individual lobster, this will take from one to five human years. At this point, the lobster will wander the floor of the Intertidal zone nocturnally in search of food. Often, this will be the bait in a lobster trap. "While the lobster has been called a scavenger, it actually prefers fresh food, though a whiff of lobster bait might belie that fact. Its diet typically consists of crabs, clams, mussels, worms, and an occasional sea urchin or slow-witted flounder. A lobster may eat up to 100 different kinds of animals, and occasionally eats some plants as well." (All About Lobsters)

As children move from elementary to middle school, the size of the "data pool" increases along with new reading skills and independent access to the Internet and other data sources. The "I" wants to control all of the data and display it properly, to do the job that will gain a good teacher assessment. Having met success at this task since kindergarten, the student arms herself with the methods in which she has confidence and climbs into the "data trap." And she is caught there. When faced with an Internet research task, the independent student without the skills, guidance or confidence to filter will be stressed. Because she knows how to gather information and rearrange, she is tempted to do the job the way she knows best - by copy/paste and by imitation. Or, like a lobster in a trap, she will get so far in that there is no way out except for adult interference.

The Middle and High school student in a technologically rich environment, and increasingly the k-3 student, wanders the information sea in search of answers. She is voracious, but not picky, as long as the "information" seems fresh. She often follows the bait and gets trapped by easy answers or misinformation. She often eats it all.

What don't they know?

What skills do our students bring to the learning experience to help them find the essential information only and not be trapped by it? What skills do they have that will enable them to select only the information that they need? Do we do anything to develop those skills?

Very few and Very little. Guiding students in this skill development is the role of the school and, specifically, of the teacher. What's more, the teacher's role is also to teach the skills necessary for communicating learning to others and for assessing the quality and validity of both the selected "data core" and the learning experience itself. It is the teacher's role to guide the student to fresh food.

The trap of technology-enhanced learning

Technology can deliver information and it can be a tool for higher order thinking about information. Learning happens both ways, often within the same project or assignment. Most teachers recognize by now that academics can be enhanced and enriched or confused and defeated by technology. For example, it is the vision of many k-12 institutions, especially those embracing portable technologies, that the Internet is a goldmine for research projects and information, yet many educators are retreating from web-driven technology projects because they find that students are not "mining" this resource effectively. Students are plagiarizing at an alarming rate, submitting vast amounts of unfiltered, and often unread, material in response to an assignment, and failing to "learn content" (or construct meaningful content) after the experience. Research projects are big traps - The Internet is a sea - and an individual student is a tiny, hungry lobster who thinks she knows what she is doing.

Many teachers expect students to be able to use the Internet to accomplish a complex and challenging learning task because they assume that using the Internet with facility is the same as using the Internet to learn. In fact, most students are without the skill set or foundation of learning and experience necessary to accomplish such a task. Clearly, the teacher does not understand or is not familiar with the skill set, and therefore can not assess the student's readiness to do the task, much less structure a task that teaches and reinforces these skills.

"The lobster molts, or sheds its shell, up to 25 times in its first 5 years of life. As an adult, it molts about once a year, until it becomes quite large, at which point it may go several years between molts. Molting is hard work." (All About Lobsters)

The primary, long range, challenge is to improve that functional learning that can be accomplished via the Internet and other technologies by improving the student's learning skill sets. As students move through developmental levels and plateaus, the ability to apply these skills sets firms up. For example, learning to use the Internet effectively is itself a skills subset that can be taught; Information Literacy education has been embraced by school librarians, who provide an important resource for the teacher. At each level, k-12, the literacy lessons taught by a knowledgeable librarian will respond to the growing cognitive abilities of the students. The fundamental skills remain the same, but the context in which students learn them, the thinking involved, and the expected outcomes will change. For learning to happen, this needs to be hard work. Here is our model for the process of any Student-Centered Learning Task, the Learning Tasks involved, our Tech Integration Model, and the Individual's Role in the Learning Task. It certainly looks like hard work!

The secondary, and short range, challenge is to improve the teacher's contributions to the learning experience by improving her ability to construct and guide learning activities that affirm and teach the skills necessary for success at future technology tasks. This relearning experience parallels that of the student: it is requires the same skills set. But whereas the outcome of student learning is a product, the outcome of teacher relearning is the ability to guide students to that product. This is hard work.

The Most Essential Skill

I believe there is one skill essential to education in the 21st Century and that teaching it must begin in Kindergarten, even though the higher order technology and thinking tasks themselves will not be tackled until much later. I call this skill Filtering - ignoring or laying aside what is unnecessary. It has two components: Feedback and Assessment. The literacy skills of Questioning, Answering and Attending are necessary for successful Feedback and Assessment, which in turn are necessary for successful Filtering. All five components can be taught and improved through guided practice in the classroom. All five require the active participation of the teacher in a set of Teacher Tasks and the acceptance of classroom Permissions. All five are best developed through collaborative projects or collaborative work, but contribute, ultimately, to the learning of the individual. To read more about collaboration and the individual's role in a group, read Who's On First? - and Why should I care?

Of the many prominent learning skills theorists accessible to the teacher wishing to integrate technology into the curriculum, only Jamie McKenzie identifies the filtering skill. He places "Sort and Sift" in two essential places on his Research Cycle (McKenzie). I feel that filtering must permeate any activity in which the student is challenged to construct, inquire, analyze or organize. A learning task that attempts to digest, order and comment on ALL information in an answer set is beyond the scope of the learner, no matter what age. Teaching ways to filter questioning and gathered information is therefore key to all learning tasks - ENCOMPASSING Questioning and higher order thinking skills. Filtering results from the application of Feedback and Assessment to all steps in a learning task. A more complete view, I believe, of the research/inquiry process is that contained in this complex diagram: Learning Task Steps.

Filtering is more easily practiced and learned in collaborative tasking, but can be learned through guided independent tasks. The confidence to filter is gained by doing and reinforced by success. What is most important is that teachers become conscious that the filtering task must be part of information gathering, analyzing, communicating, and evaluating at all learning levels and in all learning tasks, not merely at the higher levels where synthesis, prediction and inference are expected outcomes.

Once in school, children learn quickly that "more is better" and that the repetition of gathered information is "right" and wins teacher approval. They actively welcome new information sources, seeking details and accepting assessment from the teacher. An initial filtering activity is characterized by feedback-seeking questions such as "Is this it?" and "Is it right?" These "tagging" questions can be repeated until the answer is positive. Few opportunities arise for questioning the choices and decisions of the individual child when there is a 1-1 relationship between question and answer and when tagging is allowed. As long as the teacher controls the data and question sets, the child will eventually succeed.

When other children are involved in the criteria setting and question asking, however, and when the data pool contains elements contributed by other students and reexamined by a group, the individual must filter based upon criteria and questions that are beyond her own concepts and cognition. Success can be measured by one's ability to construct and communicate new learning and understanding from the collaboratively filtered set. It is this challenge that develops learning skills essential for future technology use. In order to achieve success in the group, the individual must be able to QA2 - Question, Answer and Attend effectively. In order to achieve success independently, the individual must have internalized each of these skills.

Even though lobsters live in a watery world, they have highly developed systems of both smell and taste. The first antennae, properly known as antennules (little antennae), act as the "nose" of the lobster. Hundreds of fine hairs cover the antennules and are the actual organs of smell. These hairs are incredibly sensitive to amino acids, the building blocks of all proteins, of which animal tissue is made. However, the hairs are densely packed on the antennules and this proves to be a problem in a watery environment. Water is much more viscous (sticker) than air, as oils are more viscous than water. When fine structures are densely packed together and placed in a water environment, the water between these structures is not easily moved - - in other words, a boundary of nonmoving water is formed around the structure. In order for a lobster to be able to smell something, or to be able to walk towards a smell, it has to constantly sample the chemicals in the water to determine their changing concentration. Lobsters do this in the same way that humans do - - they sniff. Sniffing is accomplished by flicking the antennule downward quickly - - this removes the old water and replaces it with new water and a new odor sample. Flicking can be easily observed by watching a lobster in a tank (at an aquarium,restaurant, supermarket, or lobster pound) for just a few moments. Because lobsters have two antennules, they can determine the direction of the smell by comparing the difference in concentrations between the two antennules. (Lobster Biology)

Do children "flick?" I think so. We do it with language, and it is called Feedback. It is essential for filtering, just as the lobster must compare collected environmental data in order to determine its next action. The constant sampling of the lobster is akin to the Questioning of children. Answers are the ever-moving chemicals in the environment. Attending is close attention to content so that comparing can happen. These three process together, in an constant chain, create a Feedback environment. When feedback fails, when its antennae are removed, the lobster is without direction, food, or protection. Similarly, the student attempting to learn without Feedback is going to be lost. As can be seen in the Learning Tasks Process, Feedback is provided at every step of the QA2 process (Question, Answer, Attend) by Teacher, Group Members, and Individual Student. When any one of these three agents is missing from the process, learning will occur less reliably and less effectively. We refer you to the Technology as Facilitator of Quality Education Model and related discussion as developed by InTime for further discussion of the importance of Feedback at all phases of the active learning process.

Mechanoreception (touch, water movements, equilibrium, motion control, and hearing) is also a very important sense for lobsters. The large antennae house the major touch receptors. Lobster antennae can detect uni- and bidirectional water movements, which would help in orientation to currents or swells. Their carapace has numerous hairs which probably serve to detect water movements similar to the lateral line system of fishes - - this is the case in crayfish, but has yet to be proven in lobsters. This sense would be particularly useful in small lobsters who are prey to many moving predators and to lobsters attempting to capture food when vision may not be possible, as it would provide much information on moving objects. The entire exoskeleton has cuticular receptors that monitor stress (pressure) on the cuticle (shell) itself. ...Lobsters also possess proprioreceptors - - sensory hairs that are internal and provide information about limb movement, posture, and equilibrium. These are generally located at joints and within muscles and are stimulated when the joint is bent or straightened and when the muscles are stretched. Proprioreception is critical to maintaining proper posture and coordination during movements. (Lobster Biology)

Assessment does not deserve the "bad thing/good thing" reputation it has in most classrooms. It is not criticism. Good Assessment is not about absolutes, but about Feedback. Like the lobster, the child learner must be not only sensitive to her environment, but she must be able to cross-evaluate information, assess importance, and set a direction based upon this Feedback. Answers, Questions and Attending are not relevant without Assessment. This is perhaps the most difficult of the student tasks. Guiding and modeling it are perhaps the most important of the Teacher Tasks. As we indicate in our Learning Tasks Process, feedback should not be reserved to a final "Official Assessment," but an on-going part of the learning process. It has all of the following components:

It is important that the Teacher play an active role in all Assessments and model both their language and their Feedback. The Permission to give Feedback to an Assessment is important to learning. This often over-looked step in the Learning Process is essential as students move toward higher order thinking skills such as evaluation and synthesis of information gathered. In all Assessments, it is important that the focus be upon the goal of the task. Lacking this focus, Filtering will not take place.

More than other areas of collaborative learning theory, Assessment has been well studied. The following point to some good background studies, concrete examples, and a pedagogical framework:

Authentic Assessment is perhaps most appropriate when long-range collaborative projects are undertaken, especially in the pre-high school classroom. Formal assessment is as essential component of the Teacher Task. In addition to the above resources (focus upon rubric and portfolio) the following resources will provide teachers with a head-start in formal Authentic Assessment:

It is important to remember that, in terms of our Filtering Tasks model, Assessment is more often casual (through QA2) rather than formal. Informal Assessment is taking place when students and teachers engage in Questioning, Answering and Attending. We continue our look at Filtering by looking at these three essential skills and by taking a clarifying look at the nature of collaboration and the role of the individual student in the collaborative process.

Examples: How-To Develop the Filtering Skill

To provide focus, I am going to place filtering, collaboration and assessment tasks within a learning skills structure that is a combination of Bloom's Taxonomy of learning stages, Piaget's developmental stages, and specific learning skills identified by Jamie McKenzie. Some of the concepts, such as "spinning" and "virtualizing," are my own. I have attempted to make this concrete by providing sample tasks for sample learning skills that will occur at various stages of k12 education, focusing upon the study of Lobsters... (We are a Maine company, after all). My chart is longest at the Elementary level, where technology may play little or no role in learning about the lobster. But it is here that students must learn three essential literacy permissions: it is OK to filter out what is not needed for the learning task; it is OK to redesign the task after every assessment, and it is OK to collaborate in important learning tasks and in assessment of learning tasks. Lobsters and lobstering can be replaced by any appropriate curricular content. The process is more important than the product.

Learning Literacy Process - an Inspiration model demonstrating the filtering task flow in a collaborative environment at any grade level. Students working individually will "collaborate" with themselves, a process that I believe is dependent upon higher order thinking skills and therefore not valid for solving difficult problems in the pre-high school classroom.