The learning through games session went very well.
Participants enjoyed themselves and gave some good feedback on what they had learnt in the session as well as ways to improve it in the future.
Some of the games invented in the session are going on to be used in the participants own work - what a great result!
And here is an interesting artifact from the event. Everyone had 9 stickers to distribute as they thought fit. The results show what people thought were important values for learning or for playing games. It suggests that challenge, fun and engagement are key areas to address when creating games for learning.
I’ve also added another resource for this session.
I’ve just completed a set of great graffiti workshops with young people in Peckham and Southwark. We had fun, learnt a lot and developed some good relationships.
Spraypainting is very difficult, but for some reason people think they’ll be really good straight away! This gives me a great opportunity to help them work through fears of failure and realise that the only way to get good at difficult things is practice.
I was pleased to read in my feedback that the young people thought that with more practice they would get better.
One of the key workers helping out said “I liked the facilitation and the fact that you let the young people learn from their mistakes. Good relationships built with the young people as well”.
And some comments from the young people: “It was very good I liked everything about it”, “It was fun, good and lots of practice for when I’m older”.
How we give praise to children can have a significant effect on their beliefs about learning, their resilience and their test scores.
Carol Dweck has done a lot of research in this field, and published a series of studies in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1998, Vol. 75, No. 1, 33-52.
128 children (10-12 years old) were given a set of moderately difficult puzzles and were then told they had done very well. A third were praised for their effort (”you must have worked really hard”), a third for their ability (”you must be smart at this”) and a third were given no additional feedback.
The children were then asked if they wanted to take a harder or easier test (performance or learning goal). 67% of children who had been praised for ability chose the easier test. 92% of those who had been praised for effort chose the harder test.
A harder test was given to all children to examine how they responded to failure. Those praised for effort enjoyed the harder task and wanted to persist in the test more than those praised for ability.
Finally all the children took a test equal in difficulty to the first test. Children receiving ability feedback solved 0.92 fewer problems than they did on the first test. Children praised for effort solved 1.21 more.
By being aware of our communication in the classroom, we can encourage children to choose learning goals over performance goals. We can help them to persist longer and to enjoy overcoming challenges. And we can increase their performance in tests.
How can we get these results into our schools? I offer 2 ways:
- a INSET workshop in mindset, read more here.
- one on one coaching with teachers.
Education is so important because it is the children in schools today and in the future who will be dealing with our accelerating world! Self knowledge, confidence, resilience, curiosity, creativity, passion, teamwork, communication. These are what we need to be fostered and rewarded at school.
How will education change in the next 20 years? If we keep trying to catch up with change we’ll always be behind. Somehow we need to turn things around - unleash children’s incredible learning ability on the exponential changes and support, facilitate and guide the learning that occurs.
An interesting quote I heard while speaking to a friend the other day. We were talking about learning, and what he felt was the most important parts of his personal learning process.
Focus. Yaz says that the greatest skill is knowing how to block unnecessary information. This is where the seemingly paradoxical quote “knowledge is the loss of information” comes from. With the huge amount of information available to us every day, how do we filter out the valuable stuff? All information has its value when it is needed, otherwise it is just a distraction.
Motivation. Yaz has to know why he is doing something. Then when he hits a problem or gets stuck, he can easily jump up and keep coming back to it. He knows why this is important to him, and can justify it. This is how he can spend 12 hours a day learning new material.
I’m pleased to announce I’ve finished a new article on coaching and learning! Please download and read how coaching can support learning.
Alan Morrish is a great teacher of improvisation. His teaching style is to introduce simple games and gradually complicate them. At all times he asks us to find our enjoyment, and to follow it. I began to use this idea in my life to see why it so powerful.
After some time playing with the idea, I can present some ideas that I’ve found useful:
- Regularly asking myself where my enjoyment was after doing something has helped me to keep present during the activity. Practicing presence cultivates self awareness, which leads to a greater understanding of who we are and what we want.
- Looking for my enjoyment keeps me focussed on what I want, rather than what I don’t want. This is a common idea that is really helpful in self change. By keeping our intention on finding what we want, we problem solve and move towards our goals.
- When I’m enjoying myself, I’m more likely to be learning and performing better than if I was sad or angry. A great reason to keep focussed on what we enjoy!
One understanding of teaching is the blend of expert knowledge with the facilitation of learning. We need people who know what they’re talking about, and that knowledge is useless unless it’s actually being absorbed! Depending on the teaching environment I think a good mix would be at least 50% facilitation. In more student directed learning environments then this could be much higher.
Facilitation means “the act of making easier”, it is not tied to any subject or area of knowledge. It is more of a set of values. In my experience of coaching and learning, important values are respect, listening, awareness, focus, authenticity, humour.
Life coaching is very close to facilitation. If I had to guess then I’d say that in my practice of coaching, the facilitation to expert mix is around 80:20. The expertise that I bring to the mix is based on experience and the tools I’ve learnt in my study of communication. Life coaching is about making it easier for people to get what they want.