Caves, Campfires, Mountain tops and Waterholes
I don’t believe quality instruction ever left the classroom. Successful teachers have always had a thorough understanding of how students learn and have adopted and adapted pedagogies informed by research, reflection and inquiry.
https://bluyonder.wordpress.com/tag/agile-learning-spaces/
https://bluyonder.wordpress.com/tag/agile-learning-spaces/
Caves
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Although we are social animals, we also need time alone. The cave is a place where we retire to construct meaning for ourselves. It is a place of solitude and reflection, where we go inside and synthesize the information to which we have been exposed.
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Mountain Tops
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The mountain top is where we publicly demonstrate our knowledge and understanding. This is a ‘peak experience,’ where we demonstrate mastery and teach others in the community and beyond.
Using Thornburg’s ideas of ‘learning spaces,’ it is easy to see how making some changes to the way we think about learning and how we set up environments for our kids to learn can make a difference to the quality of educational outcomes. |
Campfires
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The campfire is where we share knowledge and information with others. This is about preserving knowledge and, in the past, where technologies for encoding information (such as writing, books and, now, the Internet) were not developed, this was an essential means of ensuring that essential information was not lost to the community, that it did not, for example, die with one individual. The oral traditions – the stories – of many cultures are the embodiments of their campfires. |
Watering Holes
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The watering hole is where creative discussions take place. Information does not exist in a vacuum – we have to make sense of it, put it into a context. The same data can mean different things to different groups at different times and, in the end, the sense made of all knowledge is contingent on time and place. We are social animals and so the watering hole is a place where we explore knowledge in the context of the community.
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| smartthinking_learning_environments.pdf |