But Not Least...Skills for Constructive Learning

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 put blocks into piles by three colors. They can follow two step unrelated directions (sometimes 3) and construct sentences using "and." And then school enters their lives and with it the flood of technologically delivered impersonal data that will contain the core of what they have to "learn" over the next 13 years or so. What skills do they bring to this learning experience to help them trap the essential information only and not be trapped by it?

Very few. Guiding them 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.

The focus of this essay is not all learning, but those k12 learning experiences in which technology plays a central role or which can develop the specific skills that will be necessary for technology use in the future. Most teachers recognize by now that learning can be enhanced and enriched or confused and defeated by technology. It is the vision of many k12 institutions, especially those embracing portable technologies, that the Internet is a goldmine for research projects and information, yet many of these educators are retreating from 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.

This is not surprising. Asking a 9th grade student to complete a search of the Internet to support a presentation on the Pythagorean Theorem is similar to asking the same student to submit as a geometry project a double bed quilt in a pattern based upon the geometry of the rectangle. Responses to the quilt assignment would range from a purchased quilt, to creative but simplistic geometric designs using large shapes, to quilts recreating patterns found in the archives (books, online, museums), to perhaps one original bedcover with a unique and triangular pattern (done with help of grandma or nanny). "Quilting" skills would range from taping, to pinning, to painting, to large stitch basting, to quilt stitching. No teacher would, of course, make the quilt assignment without much more clarification and much experience on the part of the student with cutting, piecing and sewing skills. Most teachers would know that a quilt design is itself a valid learning task. Why then do teachers expect the 9th grader to be able to use the Internet to accomplish a complex and challenging learning task without the skill set or foundation of learning and experience necessary to accomplish the 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 primary, long range, challenge is to improve that functional learning that can accomplished via the Internet and other technologies by improving the student's independent and collaborative skill sets. 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. The secondary, and short range, challenge is to improve the teacher's contributions to the learning experience by improving her ability to construct learning activities that affirm and teach the literacy skills necessary for future technology tasks.

Learning Literacy Skills for Future Technology Tasks

I believe there is a skill set 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 begin until much later. It has three essential components: Filtering, Collaborating, and Assessing. All three can be taught and improved through guided practice in the classroom. All three require active participation of the teacher in a set of Teacher Tasks.

The Filtering Skill

Of the many prominent learning skills theorists accessible to the teacher wishing to integrate technology into the curriculum, only Jamie McKenzie identifies a skill that I feel is necessary for the use of the Internet and 21st Century media as tools for learning: Filtering - ignoring or laying aside what is unnecessary. 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, analyze or organize. A learning task that attempts to digest, order and comment on ALL information in answer to any question 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. There is no need to invent a method - Essential Questions and variations of this idea provide the path to core filtering literacy (See McKenzie and Dodge). The skill of questioning purpose, process, products is developed by practice. The confidence to filter as a response to questioning is gained by doing and reinforced by successful assessment. 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.

At all levels, the learning of other students and the "data pool" of the environment (teachers, media, surrounding culture, parents) contribute to the learning of the individual. From an early age, children gain experience at gathering information from this environment. Young children are persistent knowledge seekers and the "data pool" is culturally structured to support their learning quests. They gain confidence in their ability to float through a learning task, controlling it only in so far as they turn away from information and information sources that do not meet an immediate need.

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 questions such as "Is this it?," "Does it fit the description provided by the teacher?" and "Is it right?" It is "I" that is filtering, however, and few opportunites arise for questioning the choices and decisions of the individual child. As long as the teacher controls the data and question sets, the child will 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 the "I." Success can be measured by one's ability to construct and communicate new learning and understanding from collaboratively filtered set. It is this challenge that develops learning skills essential for future technology use.

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 and assess will be stressed. Because she knows how to gather information and rearrange, she will do the job the only ways she know - 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.

Aside: Independent Tasks and Cooperative Tasks

Cooperative tasking is just dividing a large independent task into smaller independent components. Information gathering, survey graphing, information charting or databasing, scientific measurement, counting the baskets made by a partner, creating a Sketchpad diagram to a teacher's directions - these are all independent tasks appropriate to learning. Creating a product (presentation, drawing, map, project, solving math problems) is often an independent task, too often assigned for homework. Such tasks may teach or reinforce a specific technology tool skill (or other skill, such as counting or measuring), but they contribute to the literacy needed for the future use of technology only when assessment criteria and filtering questions are applied to the task steps through a collaborative experience: When the purpose, process, and product are assessed through questioning. Without the teacher-guided collaborative process, students continue to measure success only by the answer to "Is it right?" or "Is it enough?" The implication of these questions is "more is better, all is best," leading to a combining of answers and gathered data, rather than the assessment and filtering that should precede the development of a product. The product becomes the end of the process, rather than a step on the learning journey. Learning, like its process, remains an isolated activity.

The Collaboration and Assessment Skills

What is collaboration? Cooperation is not collaboration. Cooperation is goal-directed and concrete. Collaboration is about the sharing and modification of ideas and opinions. Collaboration is driven by such questions as Why? What if? and How does? and such phrases as Tell me and Explain it to me. The goal of collaboration is the construction of new learning and new learning tasks.

Students do not learn in isolation. Opportunities for communication and collaboration enrich learning tasks by supporting optimal learning. Collaboration and peer assessment, leading to a reevaluation and filtering of learning tasks and outcomes, should be teacher-guided. They are the way out of the data trap, even a way to avoid it all together. But these steps are often omitted from a unit or assignment. Collaboration skills are not inherent in children. The self-centered nature of the early learning environment is conducive to independent investigation and parallel learning. A closed-question-driven learning task implies a single-answer-driven learning outcome; gathering and arranging answers are independent or cooperative tasks that result in predictable products. These learning "projects" are easy to design, easy to assign, and easy to assess. Because they are concrete in nature, they are often the framework for elementary school learning tasks. Too often, this also the framework for student assignments in middle school and high school. They encourage, and often force, the student to work in isolation. Collaborative tasks, especially those involving assessment and filtering, require that the student learn with and from others.

Assessment Tasks: the Permissions. Assessment does not does not deserve the "bad thing/good thing" reputation it has in most classrooms. Good assessment is not about absolutes, but about questions. Central to the assessment process are permissions: permission to hold and express ideas, permission to raise questions, permission to apply criteria to the evaluation of another's product or learning task step, permission to be assessed, and permission to change direction or content as a result of assessment (permission to filter). This is a lot of permissions in a school culture of teacher-centered learning! As is true with filtering and collaboration skills, assessment skills are not inherent. The learning culture is heavily weighted toward individual concrete comparison ("Is it right?") and away from of "I think that..." and "What do you think?" Students need from an early age to struggle with questions raised in collaborative assessments. They need to gain success at resulting filtering tasks. Assessment tasks develop from an early age a language for collaboration and the ability to adjust and value one's own ideas or product as a result of the collaborative process. These are essential skills for surviving in this technological age.

The Teacher Tasks

The teacher's task is to structure (rule-making), guide and collaborate. It is hard work to challenge students to actively seek and use the ideas of others as part of the "data pool." This means structuring the collaboration tasks (creating groups, establishing goals, systems, challenges, providing materials), structuring the filtering tasks (requiring review, requiring opinions and explanations), and structuring the assessments (providing rubrics or checklists or guiding their construction, structuring assessment time and process). How this is accomplished will be a function of the assignment and the abilities of the students. However, there are four things that must be part of the teacher component of any learning task that seeks to teach the literacy skills for technology: First, the teacher must ask questions that have more than one answer; second, the teacher must require that collaborative groups reach and communicate agreement about collaborative tasks (Why as well as What); third, the teacher must require that cooperative and independent tasks be assessed collaboratively; fourth, the teacher must model and affirm the permissions. Furthermore, she must be the penultimate collaborator, modeling a vocabulary for assessment and filtering. This dual role is difficult, but essential, for teachers are teaching not only content, but also learning literacy skills the goal of which is ultimately to create independent and confident users of future technologies. This is hard work.

How-To Develop these Skills in Learning Tasks

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 task flow in a collaborative environment at any grade level.

Where Learning Literacy Skills Set for Technology Tasks fit in: The Chart - applying literacy skills and tasks to the study of the lobster.

Applications Supporting the Development of Learning Literacy Skills for Technology Tasks

There are many commercially available, freeware and online applications that support or engage students in similar learning models. Used collaboratively and with good guiding questions, assessments and opportunities to review and revise, each can be used to support or structure a learning unit that develops learning literacy skills.

Process applications

Product creators or presenters

Process & Product - these applications involve students not only in creating a product, but also require or encourage the collaborating, assessing and filtering tasks set - the best of them allow for communication of learning along the way.

ALPS (Active Learning Practices for Schools) - site includes examples of model teaching units and a curriculum builder, using their module - Harvard Graduate School of Education Project Zero Resource

Counseling Services, University of Victoria. Learning Skills Program - Bloom's Taxonomy. adapted from Bloom, B.S. (Ed.) (1956) Taxonomy of educational objectives: The classification of educational goals: Handbook I, cognitive domain. New York ; Toronto: Longmans, Green. available online: http://www.coun.uvic.ca/learn/program/hndouts/bloom.html

Dodge, Bernie. Some Thoughts About WebQuests. May, 1997. available online: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/courses/edtec596/about_webquests.html - this article introduces WebQuests and includes some examples of how they address other High School thinking skills.

Dodge, Bernie. WebQuest Taskonomy: A Taxonomy of Tasks. May 17, 2002. available online: http://webquest.sdsu.edu/taskonomy.html - breaks WebQuest tasks into 11 subsets, explaining the thinking skills and learning outcomes of each.

Fischer, Kurt W. and Samuel P. Rose. Growth Cycles of the Brain and Mind. Educational Leadership. Vol 56 No.3 November 1998. available for download from The Dynamic Development Lab, Harvard University: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ddl/publication.htm

Fischer, Kurt W. and L. Todd Rose. Webs of Skill: How Students Learn. Educational Leadership. November 2001. available for download from The Dynamic Development Lab, Harvard University: http://www.gse.harvard.edu/~ddl/publication.htm

McKenzie, Jamie. A Questioning Toolkit. From Now On. Vol 7 No.3 November-December 1997. available online: http://www.fno.org/nov97/toolkit.html - 17 categories of questions to introduce as early as Kindergarten - necessary for filtering to happen at any level

McKenzie, Jamie. The Research Cycle. From Now On. Vol 9 No.4 December 1999. available online: http://questioning.org/rcycle.html - this article includes links to research modules and models developed by others, as well as explaining McKenzie's own strategy (in shortened version). Access this shortened version directly at: http://questioning.org/Q6/research.html

McKenzie, Jamie. Scaffolding for Success. From Now On. Vol 9 No. 4 December 1999. available online: http://www.fno.org/dec99/scaffold.html - this article stresses the importance of the teacher's role in a successful Internet project and in "scaffolding" - which is a way to ensure filtering

Prensky, Marc. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, part 1. from On the Horizon, NCB University Press, Vol.9, No.5, October 2001. available to download online: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf - in this and the following article, Prensky proposes that today's students are fundamentally different in HOW they learn and this means that how we teach must change

VanSlyke, Timothy. Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants: Some Thoughts From the Generation Gap. The Technology Source, May/June 2003. available online: http://ts.mivu.org/default.asp?show=article&id=1011 - this article rebuts Prensky's articles but makes some suggestions for reframing the role of the teacher