Motivation: Bookmarks

Keeping Agreements
Sometimes holding that agreement with ourselves is difficult. Don Miguel Ruiz reminds us in The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (1997) that our self-agreements are the most meaningful and crucial as well as the easiest to slough off.

Even when we make commitments in front of a group, we can easily not follow through. We all know that what we say and what we do may be two different things. When we set goals with ourselves, do we really want that to happen?

Setting Goals
In adult literacy programs, we set goals. Learners & tutors set goals. We help each other make goals that are meaningful, actionable, and time-bound. We set one month goals. These goals often include learning a new skill, exploring a topic, completing a task, or finishing a book. 

Most of us, especially when the goals are not written down, forget the goals we make. We all need reminders. But, who wants someone nagging us to focus on the goal we set for ourselves?

Bookmarks
This past summer, we turned our goals into bookmarks - skinny pieces of card stock to mark a page in a book. Some of us put these bookmarks in the books we were reading daily. Some of us slipped them into the front vinyl cover of our 3-ring binder. Some of us posted them on our fridges or mirrors at home. And, we posted a set of them on our classroom bulletin board under our calendar. You get the picture - we put them where we'd see them to remind us. 

The bookmarks became the nagging voice that reminded us to focus - what's one thing I can do right now to move this goal forward.

As you can see from the bookmark at the top of this screen, each one had three parts. The top listed the person's name, career goal, and target dates. The middle section described the goal - the specific, measurable actions to be completed. The bottom section listed the way the person would celebrate. 

Did this strategy work? 
It worked for us. We had our highest rate of completion yet.

What are some things you do to hold 

your feet to the fire to get things done?

Speaker Jitters?!?

Photo by Robert A. Young

Remember the first time you had to officially "speak" in front of others?

Most of us are not comfortable, at least not in the beginning. Yet, presenting ideas in a group setting where everyone's eyes are on you is very much a necessary skill for work, home, politics, and society at large. The more comfortable you become, then the more likely people will listen and hear your points.

How do you prepare?

Tell us how you prepare for speeches in the comment section below.

Reflection

A quiet place to think about your day.

Reflection is an activity often ignored in our busy world. The closest many of us come to reflecting on our lives is in the minutes before we fall asleep. You know, those moments when we review our day, pulling up all of the negative conversations, happenstances, and images of our immediate past. Not a good idea.

If we listen to Carmen Simon in Impossible to Ignore, reflection supports long-term memory. Do we really need to remember all the insignificant, but emotionally-charged,pains of the day? Just to kick ourselves again for our behavior. Absolutely not. Unless, perhaps, we are working on ways to re/act differently next time.

We'd be better off if we use reflection to encode strategies and processes into our long-term memory. For example, over the weekend I made a blueberry pie with a new recipe. The pie was flavorful but far too juicy. The cooked blueberries tumbled out of the pie along with all of the juice. As I reflected on the process of making the pie. I realized that the recipe didn't include any thickener. Rather than lament on how poorly the pie held together, I reflected on the process and what to do in the future. I made notes in the recipe for future reference.

This same reflective process can be used for any action that we want to make accessible in our long-term memory. How does this work? Reflection is abut elaboration - connecting to the past, adding features, and identifying examples. The point is to build bridges and links in the brain so that we have more hooks in our brain to more easily retrieve or get information out of our brain. 

Reflection--thinking deeply about things--allows us the opportunity to build these synapses and strengthen retrieval. So, we need to take the time to think about the things we really want to remember, those things that will truly impact our future, rather than the negative moments.

Just before you fall asleep tonight, celebrate your successes and enhance the processes and strategies you want saved into your long-term memory.

Questions Facilitate Learning

Exemplary learning tasks engage
curiosities and foster growth.

Learning tasks guided by open questions posed after extensive resource building do not have singular answers. Engaged learners are expected to reflect on the question and bring to bear a combination of their experiences, problem-solving and reasoning skills, and specific content knowledge, strategies, and tools. These learners must sort through the language of the open question to find the essence of the question from which to explore their available resources and build their responses.

Exemplary learning tasks or open questions do just that - allow learners to explore, experiment, and explain their decisions based on their newly acquired as well as long-term knowledge, skills, and abilities.

What learning tasks stimulated and nurtured

 your knowledge, skills, and abilities? 

Consumption is not enough

"You go outside without clothes, you get arrested," Karl stated emphatically. To clarify Karl's point, Jesse added, "Arrested for not following social norms."

These summary comments were delivered after a brief discussion about three key ideas posed in Douglas Rushkoff's book Present Shock (2013): restlessness with anything that isn't "right now," balancing between virtual and physical worlds simultaneously, and skimming surfaces to make inaccurate connections.

Our conversation continued with the idea that society has many expectations. Most recently, this expectation seems to include that all of us must be effective and efficient users of technology. 

The question: "Can you use a computer?" takes on a completely new meaning these days. Being a passive consumer, like checking email or reading online news, is no longer enough.

We are expected to be producers. On the one end, we must pull together other people's ideas and share it with our "social set." On the other end, we must actively seek out information, share it with others, and add new and original thought that, even if for only a moment, grabs and engages the attention of other people. 

What have you produced today that will engage my attention?

"Milkshake" Theory of Literacy

What role does adult literacy
education play in learners' lives?

Clay Shirky in Cognitive Surplus (2010) states that we shouldn't set up a media campaign to promote "milkshake" purchases by just focusing on the qualities of the milkshake - sweetness, coldness, etc. If we do, he says we will be misled.

Why? We'd be looking at the milkshake in isolation. Instead, we need to look at the bigger picture. What role does the milkshake fill for the people buying the milkshakes - alone at 8 AM, never consuming them in the store, or buying anything else.

Shirky suggests that these milkshakes are purchased as sources of sustenance and amusement for morning commutes. This insight produces an extremely different basis for any potential media campaign.

How does this idea of consumption of milkshakes play out in the delivery - or consumption - of adult literacy instruction? What role does literacy instruction play in our learners' lives? Is the role different depending on the time of day? What's the impact of the person's perceived support system (inside and outside of our center)?

What other questions should we be exploring to get a more complete picture?

What we do is what we learn?!?

If learners spend their time sounding out words, then learners learn how to sound out specific sets of words. If learners spend their time answering questions to specific stories, then learners learn the answers to the specific questions asked. But if learners spend their time learning a process for understanding text and then apply this process to examine other texts, learners gain a valuable skill for interpreting texts. This learning then sparks the beginning of developing a lifelong skill that can become a part of them and be used at any appropriate time.

This scenario strongly suggests that what learners do is what learners learn. Therefore, as teachers (and tutors), we are responsible for creating authentic communities in which learning is shared, supported, and cognitively challenged. In these communities, learners engage in activities that build knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Learners are invited to use creativity, analyses, syntheses, reflection, and argumentative discovery to construct meaning. Participation engrosses their cognitive, emotional, and physical beings. In other words, the learners are doing the "work" - the thinking, the talking, the manipulating of the ideas, both tangible and intangible.

In this learning environment, our role then is as guides. We watch, encourage, and sometimes prod as learners make inquiries. Learners explore, experiment, and even make mistakes. We help them sort out ways to learn from and re-direct their energies. And, we question and challenge learners' decisions and responses while seeking evidence of appropriate reasoning and conviction.

How do you weigh in on this view of learning?