Begin with the End in Mind
Take Responsibility for Your Own Learning
View Problems as Challenges
Have Confidence in Yourself as a Learner
Gather Your Toolbox
Use Technology to Your Advantage
Mentor Others
Play
At the risk of sounding immodest, most of these I do pretty well. I am, after all, a tech head who is over 50. I must have been learning something along the way. But clearly I do have favorites. And while I am sure that most people might guess that the toolbox and tech options would be easy choices for favorites, they would actually come in below most of the others. When I look with an eye to what is easiest and hardest for me, it doesn’t take long to really see this list as bracketed by my least and most favorite habits.
Let’s start with what is easy.
Play.
That’s easy and natural and it’s hard for me to think that playing isn’t the easiest most natural way for everyone to learn. When I am playing, I can learn at my own pace and I can veer off on as many tangents as I am interested in (I love the whole concept of hypertext and hyperlinks because they help speed up the way I connect things to a larger context.) I actually kind of resent that play only gets mentioned as the 1/2 of a habit. I know the author was trying to ride the coattails of Stephen Covey, but still, 8 is 8 and that habit should not have some kind of second class membership in this habit list.
What’s hard?
Begin with the end in mind.
It’s so directive. It reminds me of required reading (which I will never choose over reading whatever catches my fancy). It seems borderline fascist to me. Okay, I’m kidding. I get it that you need goals and need to make choices with the goals in mind, but still it is the hardest on this list for me. Most of my actual lifelong learning has been in areas where my goals were pretty fuzzy. Things like “I like history. I should read some popular non-fiction about history.” and “Oooo, what a cool web site with a way to edit my photos!!!” Which isn’t even really a goal at all.
My first 16 years of education were so goal directed/driven, in ways that were not necessarily positive or productive, that it has seemed like ever since then I have been extremely resistant to the “required reading” portion of my lifelong learning. So many of the best things that I learned in school during those first 16 years were incidental.
Some of what I thought was most interesting about the presentation was the list of presumptions about learning that we are being asked to let go of as life-long learners.Look at this list. How many of us are willing to cross out all or most of these things when it comes to our students here at Moreau? How many of us fear crossing out some of these things when planning for our classrooms? We are very attached to many of the things on this list. We ARE one the things on this list. And we are supposed to be preparing our students to be life-long learners. How’s that for an ESLR coming back to bite you in the butt?
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3 comments:
Very thoughtful post. It brought to mind one of my favorite quotes. "learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st Century" --J.S. Perelman. I love this quote, but when you search it in Google it brings up another issue around self directed learning. While the learning we pursue on our own is the best and longest lasting learning, the path we tread to get there can sometimes be problematic. The web has become the vehicle of choice when we look for information. The Perelman quote is attributed to three different Perelmans in the first three results. It's this environment that makes the how of learning so much more important than the what of class content. Facts are out there-- intelligent filtering isn't always.
This is very interesting. As someone who has CHOSEN to pursue REQUIRED reading throughout her academic life (which life is only 5 years younger than she is), I wonder how, exactly, the reading you had to undergo (or endure?) was required of you by the "requirer"? I think (perhaps naively) that the trick is to create a spark of curiosity in the required book (with whatever hook(s) seem appropriate) so that it might become the reading of choice. For example, when I was a student, Milton's PARADISE LOST went from required reading to choice reading within the first ten minutes of my professor's introduction to it. I wonder what other subjects I might have developed a burning interest in if they had been introduced to me with as much passion or made as relevant... As you say: It's all about creating context, I guess.
@cheryl
It's not so much that I didn't like the required reading I've done through my life. I often loved it, but I always hated being told to do it.
It's a little bit like housework, which I can genuinely enjoy when it is self-directed, but resent intensely when I am told I must do it.
It is an idiosyncrasy that persists even into the realm of books and movies that people lend me. I can almost never motivate myself to read a book someone lends to me because they think I should read it. Netflix was a terrible failure for me because those 3 movies they sent me always seemed like an assignment I could ignore with impunity. We cancelled after about 4 months, when we just didn't watch enough movies to justify the monthly fee. I'd rather just pay for cable and watch whatever moves me in the moment.
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