When we talk about “Visible Learning” and “Visible Thinking”, can we now focus more on the Thinking and Learning than on the Visible?
This post is part of a 10 day posting challenge issued by Tina Zita. You can’t be a connected educator if you don’t contribute. Sometimes we need a nudge to remember that if nobody shares, nobody learns. Thanks Tina!
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Recently, I was sharing some learning on Twitter with a colleague from the Early Years Division. I did my homework, and decided to show her my favourite hashtag – #FDK (full day kindergarten). This demonstration never fails to bring smiles to peoples’ faces, as it is filled with young children doing activities in kindergarten.
But this time, my colleague said, “I see lots of activities. What about learning, how do I find that?”
It made me think, once again, about that word value.
There is lots of “noise” on Twitter. How do we help educators find the value through all the “noise”?
How do we ensure that we are not looking at flashy “busywork”, but that we are engaging in online examples of visible student and educator learning?
This book excerpt from Eric Sheninger caught my eye:
Just because we see pictures of kids doing cool stuff in blogs and on Twitter, doesn’t mean learning is happening.
Last spring, Andy Hargreaves performed an experiment with the audience at #uLead15. He showed portions of images to the audience, and asked whether the students appeared to be engaged or not. The demonstration showed us that we need to question our understanding of the word “engagement”.
The appearance of student engagement does not necessarily mean that learning is happening.
Seeing “engaged students” on social media prompts questions about whether we are looking at real engagement, and whether or not learning is actually occurring.
Perhaps when we are viewing “visible thinking”, we need to focus more on the thinking than the visible.
Not all that is visible on social media is learning.
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Featured image by Dean Shareski, shared under CC-BY-NC-2.0: https://www.flickr.com/photos/shareski/3537232931/
After writing this post, I noticed that George Couros is thinking along similar lines.
… and that David Truss is looking at learning here: How Do You Know When Students Are Learning?
Hey good post! It’s the stupid soundbites like the AgencyMatters pic above (which is not visual thinking. It’s text. It’s an image of text. Duh.) that cause teachers to role their eyes about engagement. Which is too bad because it is a throwing the baby out of the bathwater thing. Especially when all technology is dismissed as “faddish” as a consequence.