What does my body say?

Can changing your body position make a difference to how other people see you, and how you see yourself? That’s the question that Amy Cuddy addresses in her TED talk recommended by Anamaria and Sasa on the course this week. I thought there were some useful applications to the classroom in terms of what Amy discusses.

• What does my body language tell students about me? What I would like it to tell them is that I am open and interested in them. Maybe I don’t want to be too powerful in my pose?
• What can I learn about my learners from their body language in class? Am going to NOTICE this more. Which is about finding time to look at students rather than preparing my next activity or finding something on the computer or… The question of course is how to deal with the different poses that you notice in students – power or weakness being demonstrated. But I liked Amy’s practical example at the end with telling students to ‘fake’ confidence – that will be helpful maybe for my learners. And also liked her suggesting that we pass on this message to others, as the people who need to hear it don’t have the resources to find it themselves.
• How does body language come across in an online environment? Perhaps in the future when we have more use of synchronous video it will be more obvious. But what about in this kind of course where we don’t really ‘see’ the other participants? So what others see of me is my writing, both here and in commenting on postings. Hmmm…. Amy mentions the use of emoticons as being potentially positive but also bad use of them being not so good. I’ve noticed that the facilitators on this course are good at using upbeat, cheerful language to get our emotions more positive. Need to think about how I present myself in a written way in the online aspects of our courses. Can I do more to encourage positive emotions?

NB. Amy talks specifically about the classroom around the 5 1/2 minute mark of the 20 min talk. And at 15 minutes has the things that are effective in interviews in showing who you are: passionate, confident, enthusiastic, enthusiastic etc. And her personal story right at the end is inspiring too. ‘Fake it until you become it’!

Are tags the answer?

As an inveterate highlighter, I was intrigued by Carla’s blog post entitled ‘Learning by Retrieval – Forget Highlighting’. But of course, it is the activitation process that is triggered by the highlighting that is important. So I have recently been highlighting in a book to allow myself to come back to particular passages more easily. Or, the next time I flick through the book, to be able to identify the ideas that I thought were seminal. So the point of the highlighting is for retrieval as well as processing which bits are important – for yourself, I hasten to add, not what you’ve been told to highlight!

Perhaps annotating is more useful than highlighting as Mary H commented on Carla’s posting. I think annotating is a powerful tool that technology allows and that I have yet to explore fully. Better than highlighting in terms of processing. BUT it is still only a thing that we do when we read to help us to process/activate those neuron pathways. It is the retrieval of those ideas that ensures that you learn something – whether for a follow up written exercise (eg. writing a journal article) or discussion (eg. telling your colleagues about what you learned on the EVO course) that is going to make you have to retrieve (remember 10-48-7!) what you noticed and revisit the content.

In the light of the concept of retrieval, it reminded me that linking is probably just as bad as highlighting. So the links that I’ve put in here are useful pointers, but they won’t actually help me learn. Maybe it is the tags that I associate with annotations or bookmarking that are going to be the most useful in terms of going back and looking at ideas. So is anyone using the tag feature in the Edmodo section of this course? And I am hopeless at tagging, because I’ve never been that sure of how it might be useful. A new skill to develop. Except that my tags are all over the place – not nicely ordered. eg. I tried tagging once on delicious.org and ended up tagging things with podcast/podcasts/podcasting rather than choosing a single word. Any clues on how best to do tags, or how tagging might support retrieval would be most welcome.

And I liked the notion of adults learning by ‘fastmapping‘ that Annie Murphy Paul describes. And the idea that doodling might be of value in remembering. And finally the learning strategies of distributed practice and practice tests. Now, are those links going to push me to retrieve the info? To remember it? Should I give more or less information here about them, I wonder? And I haven’t tagged anything!

More resources from week 2

Bertha had great suggestions on her slideshare for complex memory strategies.  To engage multiple memory pathways and strengthen memory connections, include

• changes of location
• intensity of emotion
• movement
• downtime
• art
• performance
• writing
• sketching

Bertha also described the need to give time to process – get learners to move every 15 mins and introduce new content every 45 minutes. I liked the 10-48-7 rule – new information such as vocabulary needs to be revised at increased intervals – 10 mins after first meeting, then 48 hours, then 7 days. Red, purple and blue are the most remembered colours.

Another practical reminder was Denise’s suggestion (on the Edmodo page 27th Jan) to identify students’ strengths as a positive. “Focusing on our students’ strengths, rather than on their weaknesses, is a great way to foster positive emotions and trigger learning. Moreover, we can help them improve their weaknesses by captalizing on their strengths. Focusing on weaknesses might activate the alert state of the students’ amygdalas and cause them to freeze, flee or fight, blocking learning.” So true – and something to remember as I go into a new year of teaching. I struggle not to buy into what students do, which is to consider their weaknesses foremost. Some of them canNOT identify any strengths that they have eg. in the four different skills. They always gloomily go ‘Oh, I’m hopeless at everything!’ And Denise linked to this nice blog post by Maurice Elias that comments on the need for focussing on learners’ strengths.

Mary Helen Immordino-Yang talks about the importance of emotions as part of our cognition. Once comment that I liked was that there is a  ‘place for relevant nuanced emotions in high level thinking’.

And finally I enjoyed Bob’s blog posting with mindmap of week 1 and video of creating connections and how it becomes easier over time – crossing the ravine metaphor.