Mike, Lana, & Kym Riff on Complexity

Model for Some Improvisational Dialog

Mike's Spiffy Model

• Pooled myopia, conspiracy of convenience
• The need for the teacher to change roles

Kym's Elucidated Perspective

Every learner's interaction with a context is unique, because learners' prior representations and associations influence how they perceive and respond to the context. So what is learned is also unique. In one sense, a learner and a context are systems. Learning is the process of bringing these systems in contact, allowing the context to influence the learner. An educator is responsible for arranging learners and contexts for felicitous contacts. Many mental representations can only be built by a learner interacting with a context, not transmitted wholesale by an educator.

More Marvelous Ideas

Knowing your students

• Prior knowledge
• What are they really thinking?
• Students coming from and going to other courses and teachers; best to teach learning over big ideas over details

Language

• Discourse
  • Communication
  • Affiliation, discrimination, power dynamics
  • Legitimate peripheral participation
• To what degree are the challenges of teaching complexity a linguistic issue, or more broad? What are the roles of culture?
• Language as a tool, the trap of tools
  • Synonyms of complexity activity
• Sufficient description of properties without getting into essences

Designing instruction

• Multiple representations
• How much is sufficient to derive a general principle?
• What are the difficulties in moving across and connecting multiple representations?
• Features of multiple representations need to be linked
• How do we establish connections?

Lenses / Perspectives

• Some types
  • Essentialism
  • Nominalism
  • "Thick descriptions" (Sykes and Bird: cases trump principles, principles trump cases)
• Ways of knowing: paradigmatic, narrative
• Perceptions influenced by knowledge (an irreversible effect)
  • Perception +/- prior knowledge
• How do we lead students to recognize essential properties without defining things
• Practicing using your lenses in different contexts (e.g., 911 trip to children's museum)

Some discipline examples

• Biology: whales nurse their young
• History: observed, discovered, constructed
• English: teaching grammar doesn't help
• Calculus book with three representations: problem, symbols, graph