Thread by @edifiedlistener

This week on faculty of @DigPedLab has been rich. Planning and facilitating a course that participants experience as welcoming, encouraging and worthwhile has led me to some deep thinking about what we mean when we say 'teaching and learning.' #digped 1/ identity.dpl.online

Often the folks who decide to become teachers are people who enjoyed largely positive school experiences. Raise your hand, if you were 'good at school', teachers. 🙋🏾‍♀️Given that, we may see many practices (grades, exams, standardized outcomes) as necessary and/or desirable. 2/

It can be hard for us to imagine school without the rituals and habits we grew up understanding as central to being able to determine our 'readiness' for college or work life. Perhaps better said: readiness * could be determined.* 3/
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Because emphasis was not on us as students determining our progress, success or arrival. Rather, we learned that external judgment would be necessary for us to know if our educational output was good, worthy or passing. We learned that our success was hierarchy-dependent. 4/

Hierarchy-dependent. That has been my great insight of the week: recognizing all the ways that we look to hierarchy for educational orientation. What's up and what's down? It's a built-in assumption that what's/ who's up top must be *best.* Think about it. 5/

.@Jessifer's keynote addresses this tendency, offering Bloom's taxonomy as a prime example of hierarchical thinking that pervades instructional models. #digped 6/
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So much about @DigPedLab screams the need for rampant open-endedness. The experience in many ways seems more about departures from typical habits and instructional norms than about arriving at conclusions and reaching any sort of end point. 7/

And that is fundamentally disorienting, this seeking and discovering approach. The welcoming of not-knowing and invitations to lay down our academic armor - these notions can feel weird if you've not encountered them before. Potentially scary rather than freeing. 8/

Who are we when we set aside our natural tendency to rank and order ourselves and others? What if we decide for ourselves that we are neither ahead or behind but simply *in process*? What if we don't actually know when we're done? 9/

Maybe you're asking: where was she radicalized? I thought it might have been Twitter but actually it was likely my independent montessori-oriented school experience from ages 4 - 11. I was given the benefit of the doubt as a learner from the get-go. 10/

So any facilitation or "teaching" I do now is about giving learners the benefit of the doubt from the get-go, supporting their desires to learn and get better at stuff. I want folks to get familiar with their own power, not mine. #digped 11/

I can't do that if I rely on ranking, categorizing and placement for them to "know" where they belong and the quality of their work. @DigPedLab this time around has led me to think about all of this anew. Hierarchies support winners and losers. I'm not here for that. 12/

I have been planning to write my @DigPedLab wrap-up post for #DigitalIdentity. Just realized, this is the heart of it. So grateful to my fellow DI explorers this week. It was lovely and the best part is, we can keep going, each in our own time. 13/13