Weekly Reflection: catching bubbles

Image used under creative commons licence.

On the last days of my summer vacation I had the pleasure to visit @samsherratt class in Bangkok. His class blog (and an older version) is source of inspiration for me so to see the class in action was surreally wonderful.

Among the dozens of ideas I saw during my time in class was the idea of a simple notebook being made into something awesome, a bubble catcher. In short a bubble catcher is a place to record ideas and thoughts. The story of the name behind the book is that a visiting writer had likened ideas to bubbles, they float away easily so we need to write them down before they disappear.

I immediately seized on this idea, after all I use my iphone in the same manner; snapping pictures, making reminders, recording video to capture moments I want to remember later.

But how was I going to get my students enthused?

By blowing bubbles.

Intermediate is funny age. They are not kids any more but they are also not adults. In the back of my mind I wondered if the kids might screw their noses up at being asked to do an activity popular with pre-schoolers.

As it turned out, the antidote to sitting a lengthy test was to run around in the summer sun blowing bubbles.

There was no learning intention, no success criteria.

I wanted to sell the kids on an idea, the importance of capturing our ideas.

The students then decorated one of their exercise books and that will become their bubble catcher for the year. Our shared experience, the feelings of joy, the heat of the sun, the coolness of the shade and the sounds of laughter will hopefully stay with the students long after they leave class.

To be sure, this could have been done digitally. However I want to get the students into the simple action of recording quickly recording ideas and then going back to whatever it is they are doing. By the time the kids got out the computers, logged in, waited their turn, the moment would be gone.

In the words of one of my students, the bubble would have popped.

The technology in the classroom, such as it is, just isn’t fit for the purpose.

Over the course of the year I hope that the book gets filled with writing, post its and the odd printed out pictures. It will be messy and apart from a date and some tags I hope every book looks different and, dare I say it, messy.

Because  real learning is always messy.

What motivates us? It’s not what you might think…

Since last week’s course material focused on motivation, I thought this wonderful you tube clip by author Daniel Pink would make a good transcript. The full transcript is here and I’ve also tracked down the study mentioned in the animation.

Although this talk concentrates on motivation in the context of workplaces, I can’t help but wonder what the application for this for teaching and learning might be. I suspect that schools are no different than other organizations in that it is easy to get bogged down in the demands of day-to-day stuff that it’s easy to not take the time to ask yourself the big question: What is it you are trying to achieve here?

What is your purpose?