ELP facilitator Lorraine Sands writes:
I hope that I
can capture for you the vitality of the learning I witnessed. I imagine many of
you will have heard of Beyblades as they seem to be a world wide
phenomenon. Earlier this week. I was
visiting a relatively small rural community and with a little time to spare, I
thought I’d just pop into an early childhood centre to catch up with some
teachers I hadn’t seen for a while.
Whaea Tracy and I were chatting when a little guy came up and asked if I would
like to see his Beyblade. We all know how impossible it is to resist requests
from animated, intensely interested children and so I turned to give my full
attention expecting to see him demonstrating his prowess with these toys.
Instead he disappeared momentarily and returned with some magnetic geometrically
shaped blocks. I was fully alert now as this was intriguing. Manaaki placed 5
triangles on the table and clicked the magnets into place, lifted these into a
3d model so they formed the bottom half of a diamond and finally placed a
pentagon shape on top to give it strength. He then threw his version of a
Beyblade onto the ground where it spun with considerable speed, dancing merrily
across the floor. I was stunned for I felt I had witnessed a 21st century
learner in action. All the best of that
20th century pioneering spirit we love in New Zealand, that number eight wire,
can do attitude, using whatever is around
to solve whatever problems need to be solved, with a 21st century twist!
This creative inventor had seen a
possibility. By knowing how one thing worked he had leaped a thinking chasm,
making some completely unrelated materials work in a similar way!
That kind of
divergent thinking is to be celebrated. It’s the kind of thinking that will
grow the ‘knowledge enconomy’. We’ve continually heard this rhetoric from
political parties, yet there seems less detail
about how this ‘playing around with ideas’ can be embedded into learning
throughout a child’s education. Guy
Claxton gives us some powerful notions around “Building Learning Powered Schools”.
Slit screen teaching where thinking about thinking is highly visible alongside
increasing knowledge and skills. His book is worth having in your
libraries. Manaaki then set about making
another of his Beyblades, for of course they are designed for having races with
other people and his intention was for us to work with him to see how fast we
could make them go. Collaborative and competitive in one go, happy to share his
knowledge so we could have fun together. He was clearly working as a leader and
as a team member.The attributes for a successful 21st learner just kept
stacking up.
These are the
magic moments that need documenting and so I fetched my camera. Manaaki, ever
vigilant for another learning experience wanted to take his own photos and figured
out how to use my camera in quick time. Spinning tops of course lose their
vivacity in still photos so we switched to video mode. I left promising to send
him the DVD so he could show his mum and dad at home on their TV.
What did I
come away with that day? I listened to
Alison Gopnik this morning on National radio (it will be worth getting the pod
cast of this), talking about how essential it is for children to be viewed as
scientists who make predictions about the world and test their theories. This
playing around with ideas feeds their growing intelligence. She said that
structured learning is detrimental to children in their early years. The
challenge for us is to make our environments into vibrant learning settings
where children’s curiosity can flourish with support from teachers who promote
making mistakes as a way to learn. This means children will be learning at the
cusp of their experience and skills stretching these far and wide.
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