hear and forget (a talk), see and remember (a visual), do and understand (an activity)
Goal is a categorization of activities from the perspective of the learners designed to make explicit the requirements for success. I'm focusing on activities since I am a proponent of doing (being in the driver's seat) for understanding. Goal's foundation is to label an activity's aim to better help direct learners' energy to get the most out of a range of activities. By explicitly stating a perspective to view an activity, different success criterions can better be isolated and promoted. Goal's perspectives are: endure, speed, explore, focus, bridge, and show. Each perspective focuses on developing foundation skills of learning as well as providing learners clarity for successful completion.
| Endure deals with building up stamina for extended engagement with material. Endure activities should be transparently easy to understand with no ambiguity but require time and energy to complete. Although learners may want to complete them with haste, the goal is simply to finish the activity. These would work for homework since there would be no issues of getting stuck with no help. (done?) | |
| Output | completed activity |
| Learning Outcome | stamina for keeping to an activity, extending concentration time, |
| Examples | reading long passages, pages of math computational exercises, |
| Speed deals with streamlining cognitive and physical work so that the activities in the activity are completed in a minimal amount of time. Similar to Endure, Speed activities should be transparently easy to understand with no ambiguity. Perhaps if computerised, these activities may be good for honing skills at home since times will would give a clear feedback on improvement. (fast?) | |
| Output | Time for completed activity (or %compete for a fixed time) |
| Learning Outcome | Automaticity-- a change in the perception of the learner. potentially a transformation in the understanding of the material. Depending on the activity, a time constraint may also promote reflection and analysis on elements in the activity. |
| Examples | Flash cards, timed quizzes, hunt for an item in a passage... |
| Explore deals with ambiguity allowing for creative and flexible pursuits. Explore activities can relate to personal experience or combinations of not normally combined things. Novelty and whimsy trump pragmatism in explore activities (cool?) | |
| Output | Interesting and novel ideas and/or products, |
| Learning Outcome | Flexibility, actively trying to innovate |
| Examples | Open-ended questions, find uses for X, what-ifs, brainstorms, sketches, play with a new medium (computer, clay, ...) |
| Focus deals with critical thinking and often reductionist ideas. As a counterpoint to Explore, Focus eliminates differences and reduces the space of thought. Focus activities often revolve around finding similarities, differences, or simplified perspectives. (fit?) | |
| Output | summary, model, classification, property, metric/perspective |
| Learning Outcome | critical thinking, practice in eliminating superfluous details to focus on the important content |
| Examples | classify/grouping items, creating typical cases, |
| Bridge deals with finding connections and parallels between material. A Bridge activity would involve finding similarities between separate things and exposing correspondences.(link?) | |
| Output | well thought out link between two concepts or artifacts, metaphor |
| Learning Outcome | link knowledge, creating conceptual connections, abstract thinking, seeking conceptual parallels , |
| Examples | creating/examining metaphors, illustrating parallels between connections like adding is to multiplying as multiplying is to exponentiating, |
| Show deals with creating explanations or instances of some idea or pattern. The show activities require the construction of some artifact using representations to aid in comunication. In some sense, this activity is related to "show and tell." (clear?) | |
| Output | Some product or artifact (embodying a story) |
| Learning Outcome | externalizing knowledge, creating objects of reflection, creating landmarks in learning, deepening more experience with content |
| Examples | creating tables, graphs, physical math pattern, ... |