Roger and I went to a spotlight lecture this morning given my Ian Jukes and Lee Crockett. The title of the talk was "Teaching the Digital Generation: A New Face For Learning". I had seen these gentlemen speak last year and was pretty impressed with them. Lee offered a fairly succinct and articulate comparison of the differences between digital learners and more traditional learners. He drew on a wide swath of current research to emphasize his points. Ian Jukes presented two different frameworks that I suspect will be useful in most if not all classrooms to present a framework for students to solve problems and for them to collect and use a variety of information. First, Ian noted that collectively, as educators we have identified "problem solving" as a skill that we want our student to have. He proposed "the 6 D's" as a framework for developing what he called "solution fluency". I've listed them in the space below.
(1) "Define" the problem.
(2) "Discover" what you already know by looking to the past, your experience, and your available resources. Bring context to understanding the problem.
(3) "Dream" up potential solutions and ideas. This is a wide open step where visualization and innovation come into play.
(4) "Design" a solution. The goal here is to close the gap between the early stages (define & discover) and the dream stage. The goal is to map out the process by which the problem will be solved.
(5) "Deliver" your solution. Put the plan into action and create something.
(6) "Debrief" the process and discuss the strengths, weaknesses, challenges, and successes that were encountered.
While it's a simple system, I believe that it's a widely applicable framework that would benefit our students and help to reinforce our desire to produce creative problem solvers.
Equally interesting to me was the framework that Jukes proposed for developing "information fluency". In this framework, he talked about "the 5 I's" which I've listed below.
(1) "Ask" a question.
(2) "Acquire" information from wherever you want being sure to keep track of where information came from. He noted that, in his opinion, it's especially important to allow students to pursue information from a variety of places and not to limit them to one or two resources that have been given to them.
(3) "Analyza" your information to determine how accurate it is. Where did it come from? Does it agree with other information that you've gathered? Is it reputable? Is it biased? What do we know about it?
(4) "Apply" the information to the question that you initially proposed.
(5) "Assess" what you learned, what was gained, and how the process went. Were you able to answer your initial question? Are you confident in the results that you arrived at?
In many ways, we are completing this fundamental process in our classes already. I may actually try to incorporate these solution and information fluency frameworks into my classes this year. If any of you are interested in talking about this stuff just let me know.
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