Post 2: Digital Age Leanring

I had never heard of The Five Mind Theory before, but I find it quite interesting. It is the belief that there are “five” different minds, The Disciplined Mind, The Synthesizing Mind, The Creating Mind, The Respectful Mind, and The Ethical Mind. This makes sense if we think about learning styles and preferences. Different minds learn in different ways. I think that this is important as educators because we need to reach as many minds in as many different ways as we can. Dr. Howard Gardner describes a time that he was in a Chinese classroom; “ I was invited to observe a college course in psychology and was dismayed to find that the class consisted entirely of students simply reciting the textbook content verbatim” (Bellanca & Brandt, 2010). Gardner then went back and forth with the teacher why he/she did not ask questions that made the students think creatively about the knowledge, eventually the teacher essentially said, “Because we have done it this way for year, it works.” If we simply asked students to memorize the material they would not really be learning it. Information needs to be taken in, digested, and comes back out in, possibly, some other form. Students need to related the material to themselves and let their minds understand it, rather than spit it back out verbatim. 

Along with considering The Five Mind Theory in teaching I think it is important to incorporate critical and creative thinking into teaching and learning. Creative thinking can be thought of as “building on one’s thoughts and ideas through imagining and inventing something new, with the optimum goal of generating new ideas out of one’s existing ideas” (Coffman, 2013), whereas critical thinking has more to do with problem solving. Critical thinking is “to sift through vast amounts of information...to determine its effectiveness and quality and then reformat that information into new and meaningful knowledge (Coffman, 2013). We need to incorporate both of these kinds of thinking into our lesson plans because students need to be creative to successfully think critically. If we force students to think both ways and practice these skills, they will start to build on each other. Designing lesson that involve both kinds of thinking prepares students to do this all the time and to understand material on a deeper level. These kinds of thinking can be prompted with the “big idea” question. The big idea question is usually a more broad question to start a discussion that students must think about. They must think creatively and build on each others ideas. 

Technology can easily help these kinds of thinking and strategies to encourage them. Technology allows us to use so many different resources, students to do their own research, and teach lessons in different ways. Therefore technology is helping to teach supporting The Five Mind Theory. Using Inquiry based learning and technology promotes the asking of questions that students must discover and think creatively and critically to come to an answer. In the Digital Age, I am expected to use technology as a means of conveying knowledge to students in creative ways and forcing them to think and create their own conclusions about the material.