January 4th News

Online Learning & Teaching Practices

Each week, Brave Virtual Academy teachers and I discuss our core principles at the heart of BVA.

• Personalization: providing unique learning pathways for individual students
• Agency: giving learners opportunities to participate in key decisions in their learning experience
• Authentic Audience: giving learners the opportunity to create for a real audience both locally and globally
• Connectivity: giving learners opportunities to experience learning in collaboration with peers and experts locally and globally
• Creativity: providing learners individual and collaborative opportunities to make things that matter while building skills for their future.

As a part of our BVA Community Book Club, participants learned from the Distance Learning Playbook for Parents about "mindframes". Student mindframes highlight the skills of self-regulation or "the ability to control one's behavior, emotions, and thoughts - in pursuit of long term goals" (p. 100).

This week's mindframe is "Select tools to guide your learning" (p. 107). My favorite part of this frame is the emphasis on the agency of the student to purposefully select the right tool. This implies an understanding of the tool and of the task. Too often, learners can get stuck in applying the same strategy to all situations. Teaching an awareness that the tool or strategy used should be part of the thinking needed to find solutions or communicate thinking is at the heart of building cognitive flexibility.

Cognitive flexibility is an executive brain function and entails switching between thinking about different concepts or ideas, recognizing relationships between them, and generating multiple ways to solve a problem or complete a task. "People with higher levels of cognitive flexibility tend to be more entrepreneurial, creative, and innovative" (p. 108).

How can parents help learners with
the role of choice of tools in learning?

Help children to see there are often many paths to finding an answer

Give children an opportunity to select tools to accomplish tasks in natural settings; the kitchen, household repairs, packing for an outing, etc.

Support children in studying through different tools and pathways. Underlining and highlighting or annotation can be helpful for reading new content, but flashcards may be better for studying/practicing.

When introducing or supporting learning tools, be mindful of the number based on age of the the child and complexity of the task. Too many choices can be as problematic as only learning one pathway.

Make sure to support learners as they make mistakes in tool choice or realize they have chosen a tool that is not effective for the task. Help them talk through their selections and decisions and know when it might be time to change course. This is a part of the learning process and it is important children see and understand this as progress in understanding rather than as failure.

From The Distance Learning Playbook for Parents; Wiseman, Fisher, Frey, & Hattie, 2021