[IAEP] versus, not

[Alan Kay]

Hi,

I think we more or less agree (but I wasn't shooting for agreement). I was simply pointing out that rallying around a category is not as useful in making curriculum and applying pedagogy as always asking the question "what does this learner need?" and to try to not have a knee jerk reaction with a particular tool for helping people learn. I have nothing against "Direct instruction" (at all), and it is useful in some cases. 

Perhaps an even better example I could have given is the really worked out (over decades of experience with learners): the incredible "Drawing On The Right Side Of The Brain" curriculum of Betty Edwards (my other favorite master teacher). A categorical "direct instruction true believer" would claim this as a proof of the efficacy of DI, and a categorical "constructivist true believer" would claim this as the supreme validation of constructivism.Both elements are used heavily. 

In fact, Betty's curriculum is not drawn from either of these categories, but from other sources (including Tim Gallwey, who is a good friend of hers). Basically, she got interested in the goal of how to teach "just everybody" how to draw fluently, and spent years with her college students and then many other kinds of students perfected a method drawn from the best ideas in drawing and from what scientists had started learning about the brain, what it does to sensory inputs, its multipart structure, how to get the parts of the brain/mind that interfere to get out of the way, etc. She used and invented what works best for learning this particular set of highly developed skills and refined with many groups of students.

Her threshold (which is what makes her curriculum really interesting) is to get every student who takes her class to the average level of a 2nd year art student (with regard to portrait drawings) after 40 hours of instruction (and this is usually done in one intense and exciting week). This course is also a terrific way to get adults (especially) started on the road to real science. And this is because this course succeeds because the real problem in learning to draw is not to gain skill in hand movements, but in learning ways to see what is actually on your retina rather than what your brain and mind make of it.

It certainly does help to look at and be told what other people have done -- and the real question there (again) is "what does it take to help someone understand what someone else has done?"

Cheers,

Alan




________________________________
From: Maria Droujkova <droujkova at gmail.com>
To: Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com>
Cc: Bill Kerr <billkerr at gmail.com>; Walter Bender <walter.bender at gmail.com>; iaep <iaep at lists.sugarlabs.org>; community-news at lists.sugarlabs.org; Dmitri Droujkov <ddroujkov at phenixsolutions.com>
Sent: Wednesday, May 6, 2009 7:03:42 AM
Subject: Re: [IAEP] versus, not




On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Alan Kay <alan.nemo at yahoo.com> wrote:

If the real deals are chosen, then the interesting question is what kinds of processes will work for what kinds of learners? If it is some non-trivial percentage of direct instruction, then this is what should be done (and depending on the learner, this percentage could range from 0% to a surprisingly high number). However, part of the real deal is being able to *do* the pursuits, not just know something about them, so all pedagogical approaches will have to find ways to get learners to learn how to do what practitioners do who above the two thresholds of "fluency" and "pro".

Tim Gallwey is one of the best teachers I've ever observed, and he had a number of extremely effective techniques to help his students learn the real deal very quickly (and almost none of these were direct instruction -- partly because, as he liked to say, "The parts of the brain that you need to do the learning very often don't understand English!"). But if he could see that the student had gotten on a track that couldn't be influenced by "guided discovery", then he would instantly tell them to "do it this way". In other words, he was not religious about his own very successful method, but instead did what his students individually needed and that worked the best for them (which happened to be "learning by doing").

I think it may be useful to distinguish tracks, and destinations to which they lead. The real deal destinations are to make mathematics: coin definitions and refine them, pose problems, form conjectures, construct example spaces, create models and so on. Activities with real deal destinations invite students to make mathematics; this is the part where I get pretty "religious" and I suspect Tim does, as well. Then teachers can help students to search for tracks toward these destinations, by whatever methods work best.

Searching for fruitful tracks is a large part of the real deal, of course. But
such searching, for field practitioners, does involve referring to past
work in the field, and getting "direct instruction" from peers and more
advanced colleagues. For example, a kid I observed, trying to extend her model of division to also work on improper fractions looked at a bunch of traditional algorithms  in search of ideas. Math Club members attempting to create a definition of multiplication that makes sense to them were directly instructed on some existing definitions, to which they listened with rapt attention. When Tim "would instantly tell them to "do it this way"" it made sense, because "this way" was a track toward some real deal destination.

-- 
Cheers,
MariaD

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