I read the post that Dean Shareski posted onto the class blog a few moments ago and I thought it was an interesting read.  Sometimes people use 'interesting' as a synonym for 'bad' but that's not how I'm using it in this case.  I genuinly found it interesting.  Many of the courses I took in my third year seemed to take on this view, one in particular was Dave Gray's class...or at least in my opinion it was.  The post is titled "Why we work together - learning as cheating" by Dave Cormier.  In my third year I learned a lot about PLCs (Professional Learning Communitites) which I think is what this post is about, having people there to help you and learning from the people around you.  We are all pretty close in the middle years section and we got help from each other the entire year and definitely learned a ton from each other.  This is something that I hope I can find at whatever school I get a job at, which shouldn't be hard...us teachers are pretty helpful :) 
I really agree with what Dave said in this piece. "I could have given you a step by step process for doing that…and we would have finished faster. But i don’t consider actually just ‘getting the job done’ to be the same thing as understanding."  (Dave Cormier) when he was talking about giving the assignment of starting a new blog.  Similar to this class, we weren't given a lot of direction but I really felt that I actually learned how to set up a blog.  I looked this up on google and found tutorials on YouTube that was really helpful and I learned what I wanted to.  If I feel I don't want something in my blog I won't really look to find how to get it in but when I wanted to put in a twitter button I learned how.  I think this is an awesome way to learn because I feel like I am retaining everything whereas if I was forced to do something or do it a certain way I would just figure out how to do it but probably not remember anything.
jordan campbell
5/17/2012 03:18:22 am

I also learn best when the assignment is more open ended. I often need direction and structure in my life, or else I get frustrated with what the end product should look like. This education program in Regina has offered me the chance to do many open needed assignments. My comfort level with exploring and learning through my own ways is growing on me. I find that when there is not a step by step procedure of "how to" that I have to go the extra mile to understand. By doing this I am able to absorb and understand the content; learn to do by doing. Ultimately, what I take away form these assignments, that I often consider vague, are about the processes that we take along the way, not the final product.

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Madeline DeBolt
5/17/2012 02:50:41 pm

Hey Carly! I agree, the middle years crew was a very tightly knit community of learners (or really we were a big PLC family). I feel so grateful to have been apart of the community as I too learned so much from others and everyone seemed to always want to help each other out (I miss it already!!). Whether it was sharing resources or lessons or just simply reading over anothers work, I think all the colloboration that took place over the years together was powerful!
I always enjoy hearing others opinions as many differ from my own--I think this is when a lot of learning happens (when people question things or when someone has a different perspective). As mentioned in the article that you were talking about by Dave Cormier, there are sooo many different ways of doing and as far as assignments are concerned--I agree that just telling students what to do doesn't really get them to 'think for themselves' and I can see why this may be frustrating to some. I think that as a teacher you definitely have to train your students on the inquiry process so that eventually when you pawn your students off to the next grade that they are thinking deeper and involving themselves much more in their learning than they were at the beginning of the year :)

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