Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Week 1, Thing 2: 7 1/2 habits

#1 Begin with the end in mind
#2 Accept responsibility for your own learning
#3 View problems as challenges
#4 Have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner
#5 Create your own learning toolbox
#6 Use technology to your advantage
#7 Teach/mentor others
#7 1/2 Play!

The hardest, definitely, is to view problems as challenges. I like challenges, like figuring things out, but it can be stressful to have problems with patrons and other people; still, that's where I've done some of my best learning (even if I wasn't fond of the process at the time!). The easiest? Not sure, really, but possibly play, teach, use tech, or have confidence in yourself as a competent, effective learner--I am a product of my school system's gifted program, which gave me the ability to structure my own learning and be confident in making choices about my own learning process. It's really the way I think all K-12 learning (and lifelong learning) should be structured. I think that our current system of education is failing to provide students with the confidence and tools to tackle their lifelong learning. Instead, schools are often teaching to the test, as if test scores actually measured learning instead of memorization. As anyone who has seen Shift Happens knows, what students learn, especially in upper grades, will be outmoded a year and a half after they learn it. They will desperately need to have lifelong learning skills to learn the jobs that haven't been invented yet, as they will be changing jobs more often than any other generation in history. In Maryland, libraries are part of the education system by design, and libraries will have to step in to help foster those lifelong learning skills in students, because they're not necessarily learning them in school.

Shift Happens:

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