Closest to the Synapse Wins! – More thoughts on proxies for learning

I had the opportunity to work with a primary school leadership team in Sydney today. The team at St Christopher’s in Panania are a partner school of mine and I support in a critical friend type role.

We spent some time today exploring the concepts associated with “proxies for learning” using my recent blog post about it as a starting point.

In short the concept of a proxy is that we focus on a representation of learning – we are not looking at learning itself.

Again the discussion centred on the idea of creating better proxies and what the limits are. We had a range of questions that helped to explore this topic:

  • How might we design better proxies for learning?
  • Can we describe the proxies we have been using in our own practice?
  • If we were observing learning taking place what would we actually be looking at?
  • How might we design a proxy that is closest to the location of learning?
  • What is the evidence of learning?
  • Is this evidence of performance or learning?
  • How might we recognise when learning is taking place?

An interesting challenge to me from the team was that an example I used to explain a proxy was in fact a proxy. I have heard myself say something like “We might only look at learning if we could scan the brain or have a mobile MRI or CT scanner.”

But of course the results of such scans are just proxies for the real thing. Peeling back the skull and directly observing the neuro-chemical process is the truth. Everything else is a proxy.

So when we consider that everything we do is a proxy for learning at a neuro-chemical level, we must shift our energy to the quality of the proxy.

You might also describe it in terms of the fidelity of the proxy – the quality , authenticity and standard of the representation of learning.

My friend Chris also suggested that self reflection and a learner’s self proclamation is the highest standard:

But I am not sure if greater proximity to a synapse is best? There seems to be lots of bias associated with the self-assessment of learning.

David Didau offers a reminder about the complexity of learning and a list of ideas for better proxies:

Obviously, we don’t really know how, when or why learning happens, but we do have some guides about what might make it more or less likely.

So, here I tentatively offer a list of other possible ‘good proxies’ for learning which may help teachers plan and look for opportunities to increase students’ mastery of curriculum content.

Learning may happen when students:

  • concentrate on relevant examples and non-examples
  • retrieve what they have been taught in previous lessons
  • apply concepts to new examples
  • engage in practice drills (which may involve repetition or formulas and procedures)
  • answer questions without cues or prompts

What do you think about this list? What do you consider a high quality, high fidelity or just a good proxy?

This exploration has also led me to wonder more and more about retrieval over time. Sometimes learning might not occur in the timeframe we expect it to and only after a shift in time. More to ponder.

#28daysofwriting

Photo by Hannah Tasker on Unsplash

3 Variables That Profoundly Affect the Way We Respond to Feedback

As Ken Blanchard says, “Feedback is the breakfast of champions.” But it would seem there are certain things that dictate our appetite for feedback. According to Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone, the co-authors of Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well, there are specific variables that distort the way we perceive feedback from others.

The following is taken from the BIG Think clip above.

“The first is your Baseline. In the literature this is called set point sometimes. It’s sort of a ‘how happy or unhappy are you,’ in the absence of other events in your life. Where’s that level that you come back to?”

“… the reason this matters for feedback, particularly if you have a low set point or baseline, positive feedback can be muffled for you. The volume is turned down; it’s harder for you to hear it,”

Heen explains that the second variable is Swing, or how much we are moved off of our baseline by any feedback. And the third variable for effective feedback is Recovery, or how quickly we return to our baseline.

It is useful to consider these three factors in the classroom as well, providing us some further ways to consider the impact of feedback for learners. Additionally this helps us to remain focused on how we are making this relevant to individual learners.

You can read more about this here The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback | Think Tank | Big Think