Making Connections: Thinking and Learning

This morning, when I was about to get into the shower, I was taking off my watch and I noticed that I'm starting to get get my typical biking-glove-tan-lines. That gave me a bit of joy, actually, because it means the weather has warmed up enough for me to be biking regularly again, and it's sunny enough that my arms are starting to brown (slightly) compared to my hands, which stay covered up by my palm-padded biking gloves.

Noticing this, reminded me of an Encyclopedia Brown story I read (probably around age 10? I was obsessed!) that revolved around the culprit being left-handed, and one of the clues was that a suspect had different colored hands--because he was a golfer, and only wore a glove on one hand.

The concept of only wearing one glove made me think of Michael Jackson, who used to famously wear only one glove, and I briefly wondered if his hands were different colors in the 1980s too.

And that idea of only wearing one glove in the 80s reminded me of a memory from when I was in the third grade, and a friend had gone to a Dodgers game on "batting glove night," and she gave me the glove she got--not because either of us were big baseball fans, but because we were friends, and she thought I would like it. She was right, I did. Because it was the 80s, and people could wear just one glove and be cool. (If we were pretending to be Michael Jackson, I guess.)

And that reminded me of an episode of 99% Invisible I just listened to on a bike ride this week that was all about the history of how the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles, and how the city displaced a Mexican-American community from the area that would become Dodger Stadium. Listening to this podcast has helped me to make all sorts of interesting and strange connections between so many aspects of contemporary life and good design (that's where the title comes from: if it's good design, it is "99% invisible"--you only notice it if the design is bad.)

I suddenly realized this weird cognitive loop, and it made me smile

And all of this happened in about 30 seconds, as I got into the shower, closed the curtain, and turned the water on.

Now, it may be--as some people have said to me before--that I have a "sticky" brain. Not everyone might remember strange details from their childhood the way I tend to. But this quick thread of thoughts that danced through my brain is just an example of how thinking works, and it has me thinking about how learning can happen.

The principle of "neurons that fire together wire together" (with thanks to Donald Hebb for that) is all about the idea of making connections, and--as I understand it, though I'm no neuroscientist--that's the basic idea of Hebb's approach for describing learning. Making an association repeatedly is the key for making neurons "fire together." The result of this ongoing association is that they will "wire together"--making for real learning.

So how can we leverage this, educators? What are you doing that gives students opportunities to make connections, and then to strengthen those connections into real learning by repeated association?

My friend, Chuck Hodges, retweeted this one this morning, which was one more piece of information for me to think through connected to this idea of making connections:

Please tell me again how using cognitive psychology in teaching and learning isn’t learner centred and how it kills motivation and creativity... pic.twitter.com/QSoRr1csTL

— Paul A. Kirschner (@P_A_Kirschner) April 22, 2019

The connection I made is to a book I've been reading and discussing with colleagues this semester, Small Teaching by James Lang. This book is all about small tweaks ("small teaching," yeah?) based on learning theory and neuroscience that can have a big impact on students' learning. It includes idea like retrieval practice, interleaving, and self-explaining, which are named (or closely described) in the tweet above.

One more connection that immediately flowed out of this for me: I'm reading the book Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide by Felder & Brent along with my students in Methods of Teaching STEM in K-12 Schools this semester. The authors of our text have emphasized several approaches for active learning and mastery learning that are also closely integrated to these ideas of emphasizing cognition for real learning to take place.

My hope is that my own (ongoing) learning is helping me to be better able to shape my students' learning as well, since so much of teacher education is a sort of cognitive apprenticeship in which they learn the knowledge, understandings, skills, and dispositions to think and act like teachers themselves. (I wish I had coined the phrase "cognitive apprenticeship," but that prize goes to Collins, Brown, & Newman back in 1988.) The big idea here being that I'm continuing to reflect on both my own learning as well as what I'm working on as a teacher--striving to keep getting better!

So, I guess the point of this post is turning out to be this: I believe I am as much a learner as a teacher, and I think this is important, and healthy, and probably necessary for me to remain effective as an educator. I hope that this is what is happening when I write posts on the ol' blog here too--I'm taking the time to activate (and re-activate) neural pathways as I work through the writing, lighting up neurons, getting them to wire together, to make new connections...and to keep learning.