Learning to Think

Scott McLeod today writes at Dangerously Irrelevant: Here are two quotes from Education and Learning to Think, an interesting little research-based book published by the National Research Council way back in 1987!

Higher order thinking is nonalgorithmic. That is, the path of action is not fully specified in advance.

In other words, a curriculum isn’t going to make all your students into perfect higher-order thinkers.

Higher order thinking tends to be complex. The total path is not “visible” (mentally speaking) from any single vantage point.

In other words, you have to learn multi-step processes and think about matters from a systemic point of view, not just ‘fill in the bubble’.

Higher order thinking often yields multiple solutions, each with costs and benefits, rather than unique solutions.

Or, A, B, C, and D…. and ‘C’ is the best cost-benefit solution for our budget at the moment, unless that state grant comes in… then plan B.  How many kids do you know that find multiple solutions to the same problem? Do they do that in school?

Higher order thinking involves nuanced judgment and interpretation.

Higher order thinking involves the application of multiple criteria, which sometimes conflict with one another.

The factors that the teacher sees are not the only ones on the field of play; authentic learning requires solutions that please more than one person.

Higher order thinking often involves uncertainty. Not everything that bears on the task at hand is known.

Higher order thinking involves self-regulation of the thinking process. We do not recognize higher order thinking in an individual when someone else “calls the plays” at every step.

If I, the teacher, ‘know’ the answer, then my students are playing guessing games… not thinking.  If students don’t have a say in what they’re learning, they aren’t thinking, either.

Higher order thinking involves imposing meaning, finding structure in apparent disorder.

Higher order thinking is effortful. There is considerable mental work involved in the kinds of elaborations and judgments required. (p. 3)

Isaac Newton and Johannes Kepler sorted through thousands of pieces of apparently random data to solve the theoretical frameworks of gravity, and the motion of the planets.  It took them years.  Yet we expect kids to come to clear understandings of important processes in 40-minute classes.

Scott McLeod goes on: The seventh item on the list, self-regulation, is one that I think is particularly lacking in many K-12 schools because the teachers “call the plays” so much of the time…

The blog entry ends with what Scott thinks is the money quote:

The goals of increasing thinking and reasoning ability are old ones for educators. . . . But these goals were part of the high literacy tradition; they did not, by and large, apply to the more recent schools for the masses. Although it is not new to include thinking, problem solving, and reasoning in someone’s school curriculum, it is new to include it in everyone’s curriculum. It is new to take seriously the aspiration of making thinking and problem solving a regular part of a school program for all of the population . . . It is a new challenge to develop educational programs that assume that all individuals, not just an elite, can become competent thinkers. (p. 7)

Nearly every literate society in the world regarded reading a very short list of classic books as the key to becoming a thoughtful and rational human being… books which they were careful to separate out from a muddled stack of sacred scriptures.   Now, students read digests and abridged versions of these classics, and we call it a day.

Assume you had a school of around a hundred students, and that you had them for 5-9th grade: what books would you want them to read cover to cover, assuming they only read one great book a year?  What are the hard books, that would make them think?

Tempered Radical: False Transparency. . .

So I immediately tried to counsel my students to safety.  “Are you sure you want to try out for football?  It’s a pretty tough sport, you know.  Why not wait for the basketball, baseball or soccer season?”

Their reply blew me away:  “We’re going to be great at football, Mr. Ferriter.  We completely dominate in Madden 2008 on our PlayStations.  No one can beat us!”

These two boys who had never played an organized sport in their life—-let alone an organized sport where physicality is essential for success and where brutal hits are commonplace—-had convinced themselves that football was the right sport for them because of their video game prowess.  In their minds, mastering skills with digital players on an electronic field in their living rooms translated somehow into an belief that they would excel on a real field wearing real pads trying to tackle 200-pound kids without breaking their necks!

Wild, huh?  […]

Are middle schoolers—-who love fantasy and imagination to begin with—confused, failing to find the line between fiction and reality when determining what they “know” and “can do?”
Interesting questions, huh?

From the Tempered Radical: The Danger of False Transparency

It is an interesting question. Today was graduation at my school, and we said farewell to our ninth graders — our top grade.  The students who have just left are not so confused about the line between video fiction and reality.  But the grades after them seem to be much more fluid.

The thought occurs to me, though… GUITAR HERO and similar games are always improving.  Is there going to come a time when the student fantasy, “I am a great guitar player” is going to collide with the technological marvel of a GUITAR HERO guitar that will mimic the ability to play guitar more closely?  

Will our fantasist simulations ever be indistinguishable from reality? What will school look like when that happens?  Is it going to occur in my professional lifetime, or in some Tomorrrowland I may never see?

Increasingly, I think it will be in my professional life — medical advances and life expectancy changes mean that I may easily work another forty years before retiring.  In now’s climate of Future Shock, 40 years is an eternity — 80 machine generations, 50 medical generations, 100 biotech generations.  The horse may even learn to talk.

Dwarven Kingdom

Dwarven Kingdom
Originally uploaded by anselm23.

So, as a gamer, I’m always interested in building new locations or settings for games. Moria, the dwarven kingdom in LORD OF THE RINGS, kind of sets the standard for dwarven ways. Yet given their interactions with the surface, compared with other earth-resident races, it always seemed to me that the dwarven kingdom belonged in a cleft in the rock.

Here, I’ve used Picknik’s tools to label the map with some of the regions or territories within the Dwarven kingdom of Westcleft, a surface-dwelling dwarven princedom on the western slopes of the Fogtooth Mountains.

The original picture is of a cleft in a sand-covered snowbank in the school parking lot. I wish there’d been some greenery, but no such luck.

The photo on Flickr has roll-over notes with additional ideas for what happens in each place or region. I don’t have a good sense of scale yet, but I’m figuring it’s a day’s march between Three Road City and Black Rock Tower. So it’s really more of a city-state than a principality or kingdom.

Lovely Game!

A friend of mine introduced me to this new game: Play Auditorium. It’s delightfully addicting. I like it.

Protected: GenCon, NPS and homebody

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D&D 4e: PC Guidelines

Read the setting, then come back here.

For the last 137 years, the ancient Gold dragon called Kardossian has watched over the children and grandchildren of the Blossom — the last heiress of the once-mighty Dalriadan empire. Six times he has watched a royal heir ride out to reclaim the empire, and six times he has wept tears of pure myrrh at the news of their deaths. For most of the last ten years, he has lain coiled around the Bastion of Storms, the residence of the current heir, Prince-Royal Erendius, and his Princess-Mother Eleanora of Aquitin. Now the boy is ten, and six years, eight, or ten at the most, some ambitious general or warlord or wizard of the court will turn his head with tales of Dalriadan glory, and he will sail off with great ambitions — and likely return only as a charred hand like his father, or a severed head like his grandfather, or an urn of ashes like his great-great grandfather. The hopes for a renewed empire recede in the minds of the people.

But Kardossian has stirred from the Bastion of Storms at least once to your knowledge. For once, when you were alone, in a solitary part of the island of Karsica, you heard the rush of great wings, saw the flash of gold as the mighty tail coiled into a great circle around you, felt the heat of breath on your face like a hurricane, smelled the cinnamon and bitumen and cardamom of his breath, and heard his whisper: “I choose you as a Champion of the Dalriada. Restore the empire.” Then the noise like a thunderclap, the force of earthquake as Kardossian took to the sky, the sudden pounding of blood in your head as your legs collapsed beneath you. The dragon marked you for great things that day, and destiny has brought you opportunities for glory, fame and greatness.

Your PC is one of the Heroes. You can be a loner, a guy with a gray sense of ethics, a mysterious outsider with a complicated path. But dragons just don’t choose badly, and the oldest living good dragon in the world said that you were a good egg when no one was watching, and you recognize others from time to time who’ve also been singled out by the last emperor’s greatest champion. But just because you’ve been singled out doesn’t mean you can’t go bad somewhere along the line, either.

D&D 4e: The Isle of the Blossom

In former days, the Dalriadan Empire covered the known world, from the eastern sea to the western steppes, and from the dunelands of the southern desert, across the Inner Sea and the mountains to the plains of the north before the Ice and the northern wastes. The legions of the Dalriada marched everywhere on their well-built roads, and their ships rid the Inner Sea of pirates.

Foil Rules Changes

I note with some dismay that the FIE has instituted two rules changes, one taking effect in September 2008, immediately after the end of the Olympics, and the second taking effect in January 2009.

The first rule, taking effect in September (i.e., before the start of the new school year fencing season), is that an attack ends when the foot hits the floor, and not “or immediately thereafter” as the rule has stood for many years. Thus, I now have to teach my foilists to make their attack and land it before they complete their lunge. This should be interesting, but of course it can be implemented immediately in the CHSFA season this year.

The second rule, far more difficult, is that in January the rule change requires that the bib — that is, the padded cloth flap below the mask — is valid target area. This will involve changing a good deal of our school-owned gear, and nearly the entire team will have to change their electric gear to conform with the new rules.

I hope that CHSFA decides that they are going to implement this rule change in our own program at the start of the 2009-10 season, and not at the mid-point of this year’s season.

Clio Off

Somewhere between the two dormitories, I lost Clio today. She’s was running around campus this morning for 40 minutes or so, and I had to go work at the scout camp. She came back just as I needed to be heading out the door. Thank you gods.

I’ve misplaced my new Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide. Part of me just wants to go out and buy a new one, since I’ve now been looking for it for a week. But I’m resisting doing that. I spent some money on positive things yesterday, and I’m not really looking to replace something I already own — even if it is definitively lost. Anyone seen it?

I’ve been teaching ecology and conservation classes at the Boy Scouts camp this week. Clio’s been coming with me. For the most part it’s been fun, but a little slow. The group of kids I have are great, and I’m having fun, but part of me would prefer being out in my kayak.

Gaming: D&D 4e Worldbuilding

Two of the concepts that I rather like about the new D&D 4e world-building assumptions are “points of light” and “the world is old”.

The first assumption is that there aren’t any nation-states. Every border in the world doesn’t naturally and obviously abut the border of another nation-state. There aren’t necessarily frontier guards and passports needed everywhere, because the ‘borders’ of civilized areas just sort of fizzle out into wilderness that doesn’t really belong to anyone, and is therefore dangerous: dangerous to be in, dangerous to control, dangerous to try to hold; and dangerous to enter, visit or travel through.

Instead, we have ‘points of light’, which I take to mean city-states, independent towns, freeholds, and the like. A band of people, Big Men or leaders, and some take-charge middle-managers with some connections to the divine or the arcane, have established a zone of relative safety within that vast and howling wilderness of midnight. The leadership holds a rough circle of territory about 15 miles in radius, because that’s the distance that their pocket army can cross on foot in a day; in mountainous country, maybe they’ve got less. Could be that you have twelve or fifteen of these pockets strung together along a river or a road network, and that’s called a ‘kingdom’. Leave the road or the river’s safety, or leave your village at night, and bad things are likely to occur. You will probably be eaten by a grue.

On the other hand, we have the assumption that “the world is old.” By my count, there’s indications in the Player’s Handbook that there’s been a human empire, gone about 2-4 centuries; a dragonborn empire gone about two thousand years ago, a tiefling empire, gone about a thousand years back, and in between a dwarven empire, a Feywild empire, and maybe a multicultural shindig stuffed in there somewhere. And way back in history, there was a war between gods and Primordials (hmmmm, it’s nice to see that people have been reading thier Greek myths, and Exalted), and a time when the Giants had the dwarves as slaves, and a time when the Fey were all one race, but divided in three (Eladrin, Elves and Drow).

In essence, you have six or seven thousand years of history squeezed into this worldview, and it’s all gone to shit. The assumption in D&D4e’s basic mindset is that you’re living in the times between the civilized, successful, prosperous empires, when collapse has taken civilization down to some of its root layers.