Connecting the Dots

The first line from Seth Godin's talk made me yell out "YES!". Are we truly connecting dots or collecting dots. So much about this resonated with how I feel about teaching. Sometimes I felt like I was going off of a checklist rather than truly engaging my students in what they were learning and how much they could grow as learners. A question that is being asked is why do we collect so many dots compared connecting dots? I wish I had an answer to that. I think that sometimes educators and education leaders get fixated on how the data is represented that we truly don't think of the learner. I can agree that having data readily available is a good tool to have as a way of seeing how students meet standards, but what is not available to read from the spreadsheets are how well they interpret the skills and the process of how they learned.

I consider myself as a hands on learner. I have to be able physical touch something or see it in order to truly understand something. In a discussion we had during a breakout room Tuesday night, I described how I like to breakout the math manipulatives to provide a visual example of how to solve certain problems I think that being able to do this gives students an advantage because they will be able to refer to that visual representation when solving problems and it is less intimidating than seeing a 2 digit number minus another 2 digit number. During this program I also think I have become more of an independent learner. The reason I consider myself an independent learner is because a lot of the content that we are producing seems to open to our own intepretation. I am not used to doing this as many of my college courses and classes throughout public school, we had examples of what things needed to look like. I believe this model has helped my become a better learner and think more outside of the box than I am used to.