Gary Stager, Ph.D., presented at NECC this past year, specifically talking about his idea around learning adventures. I like the term, and came to understand his thinking while listening to his presentation via ISTEVision. Better yet, you can get a far more focused read of what a Stager learning adventure is from his paper.

I found the following the most valuable within the read:

There are essential elements involved in an approach of learning where the process trumps the product. It’s a pedagogical method where we give kids a challenge and they go about solving it, learning from one another in the process.

His essential elements are these, but compare them to what you put into your own lessons:

• Surprise
• Product is subordinate to process
• Socratic teaching
• Distributed expertise
• Flexibility
• Reflection
• Technology as building material
• A good prompt is worth 1000 words (sufficient time, appropriate materials, a motivating problem or challenge, plus a supportive culture.

His example, given both in the video (linked above) and the paper (linked above, yet lower) is one where he provides students with copies of inexpensive music notation software and asks them to compose music.

Knowing little about this craft, the kids set about learning about “balls and sticks” (the tinker toys of standard, Western music notation), but the computer is a tool that turns those into real sounds.

Stager’s interpretation is something akin to this: “This is wonderful learning. Profound. Students composing music. Students figuring out how to use the software from going online and searching forums. Students asking one another questions, problem solving. It’s pretty cool, because everyone composes a piece of music!

I think music makes a good example because banging on pots and pans, at its core, is something innately human that some of us naturally fell in love with. We can make sounds! We can make something musical. To be musical, is in part, to be a human being. By creating, listening, and working together at making music, we explore (even at a very immature level) something crucial about being human.

But there’s where I have to step back and begin asking questions.

• What are we setting out the students to learn with this so-called adventure? How to compose music? How to work together? How to problem-solve?

Don’t get me wrong, but all those may be valid things to learn. But which is it?

• Is using more sophisticated tools (i.e., GarageBand) encouraged? Or discouraged? Why?

• What do we do in schools without sufficient time for exploring and learning in a “community of practice?” (I.e., we’re worried about preparing kids for a test in the spring.)

• How do we match the appropriate materials for the appropriate learning objectives?

I worry that this approach assumes that the teacher be a master teacher (i.e., one good, but rare among his/her peers in society) to manage the learning adventure approach consistently well. I think having great prompts, a supportive culture, and flexibility in learning are win-win approaches. But matching “this could go in a lot of directions” approach takes especial skill for the instructor.

So many other questions remain. Is this an approach to use at every juncture? How do we match learning objectives to the types of activities, or challenges, we pose to students?

While I do reserve some doubts, they are centered around the feasibility of giving learning adventures a fair shake within the teaching culture of most public schools. Perhaps the right direction is to take colleague Resnick’s lead–and instead of talking about the process from the teaching side, we ought to talk about it from the learning side. In the 1996 tome, published with Yasmin Kafai and Mitchel Resnick, they ask us what the term is for the art of learning. Pedagogy is the term for a teaching art. But what’s the art of learning to be called?

According to Gary Stager, it might be an adventure. And while I have my doubts that learning adventures will take over in schools anytime soon as a predominate method of instruction, I do believe there is real value in the ideas. It shall be my personal challenge this upcoming school year to turn to the adventure of learning in my own approaches to learning and teaching.

Unlike Dr. Stager, however, I do find some value in my own definition of a personal learning network, or PLN. The voices I follow in blogs both diverse and deep, from Twitter, and from my colleagues in my own school system and beyond in my state, are a community which certainly adds value to my thinking and reasoning. I include Dr. Stager in that company, and his call for more “learning adventures” and less “nonsense” qualifies for me my own personal learning adventure.

Stay tuned.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 11:36 pm and is filed under Reflection, Resources. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.