Week 2 Reflection - The Pickle
Good learning designs prepare learners to meet community needs by linking living and learning to the PICKLE (problem-solving, information using, community participation, knowledgeable, literate, ethical decision-making).
This week I contemplated the notion that good learning design requires identification of a specific problem. No one can come up with a solution before they know what problem they're trying to solve. Before an educator can even begin to address the nitty-gritty what will happen in their classroom, they have to ponder what they want the outcome to be. What will the students take away from this class? What kinds of learning are important? What will make my students better people? What kinds of things will they need to be responsible, productive members of society? This means-justified-by-the-end thinking sounds Machiavellian, but it's just what Peddiwell sought to convey in his book The Saber-tooth Curriculum. On page 25 of Peddiwell's book, he says that an educated person is one who knows how to do what the community needs doing, and has the will and energy to do it. This is the essence of teaching the kinds of student-citizens schools should produce.
Where do one-to-one laptops fit into this? And haiku poetry? The quadratic equation? The infield fly rule? Whoa there, partner. Slow down. First we've got to decide what the community needs doing! Furthermore, teachers have the rather tricky task of working out what a future graduate will need to know to be successful 5-10 years later when they enter the workforce. To answer this, some very clever teacher folks came up with the acronym PICKLE. As stated above, it stands for problem-solving, information using, community participation, knowledgeable, literate, ethical decision-making. Almost all of the skills and knowledge students need fall under one of these domains. Just how will we teach the PICKLE? Tune in to find out...
-Z-
Oh my goodness... I love the Christmas pickle image! I can't wait to read your blog.
ReplyDeleteHi !
ReplyDeleteLove this post! Just curious, how have you seen this principle play out in your classroom? Or have you yet? I also like your pickle image. :)
You ask many questions that summarize what Peddiwell conveyed in the Saber-tooth Curriculum. You touch on a few questions that teachers may be asking, but what are some ways in which it might have impacted your previous practice of teaching English/Language arts in Germany? How does it apply to your current position as an education and multimedia specialist?
ReplyDeleteHey Zach! I love the questions you ask, and that we need to ask as teachers, and I feel like we all do a fairly good job of answering them for ourselves and in our groups. The one concept I can't really get past is making students into productive, contributing members of society. We need welders, garbage men, factory workers, yet our school systems have a way of degrading manual labor careers. Those are necessary, productive people, but we feel like unless we have at least one college degree we aren't valuable.
ReplyDeleteWhere's the like button!
DeleteI agree. Blogger needs a like button!
DeleteThat got negative, my apologies! But we do need to figure out what a "productive society member" will look like 5-10 years in the future, as you pointed out. And none of the things in PICKLE require a college degree to achieve.
ReplyDeleteZack, agree that the identification of problem is the way to go as is pondering what the outcome will be. How does that translate or how do you see it in relation to your current job?
ReplyDeleteHey guys,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your awesome dialogue here! I started to respond and then my response got too long! I'm going to type it up and make it a separate post.