THE POWER OF THREE-FOLD INTEGRATION

Integration is a hot word we hear all the time from our digital companies and from our businesses as they grow and keep up with the changing market.  But first, we must understand why is the market changing?  What Changed?  

 

Our children changed, they are now our customers and are having children of their own.  Their idea of learning is different than ours and it should be since the next generation of customers has been exposed to digital media since birth.  Their minds literally work and make connections in a whole new way.  

 

Animals learn by play and pretend, so it's easy to see the importance of play in a learning environment. Understanding the psychology of play will help us understand the future of learning.  My theory is that good play consists of a three-fold integration and solid learning develops from this play format.  I will show this structure actively engaging children and adults alike to teach them new skills.  Learning the art of play way will keep students engaged and integrate subjects over time.  In the same way cross-subject integration exchanges subject matter, this format will build on learning science and inject a new way of communicating across the next generation.

 

Integrating creativity, problem-solving, and modality in a single format negates the idea that one format is better for visual learners and another for audio learners or even hands-on learning.  Instead, the three-fold integration suggests of all these items is necessary and activates a play learning strategy the student is more familiar with.  In fact, having all three qualities help students put context into the material and learn faster as well as retain knowledge better overall.  Instead of drumming out the information and teaching to the test, the integration of all play actively engages them in the content and shows them how to use that knowledge during the test.  

 

Further, I want to show how important writing and language are while playing.  Often we see play and study as two different ideas, however, language unlocks an important key to learning, unlike any other tool.  Language puts meaning and context into play and creates a deeper understanding.  Language is fluid and uses multiple facets as the student struggles to make connections to the content. Instead of thinking of language arts as a subject, I challenge this idea and instead seek to understand how language forms a communicative bridge into learning.  As a tool, language offers a student another way to engage in play.  I will show you how we use language in play and how writing builds upon play to encourage composed thought and engagement crossing the subject barriers.  Thinking of composition and language arts as a tool for engagement and play offers students a more effective learning environment and develops positive reflection, goals, and images. 

 

On this site, I invite you to take a look at the structure of play in the digital world we live in and notice how the world already uses the psychology of play to motivate you to use their app, game, tool, software, device, etc.  Even marketing has noticed that modality offers an opportunity to deposit information as a force multiplier.  I also want to show how information such as language and math is a tool, not a subject to be memorized.  If students learn it as a tool then it unlocks learning. It's time to stop fighting and use play to teach a digital generation.  

CREATIVITY

We think of creativity as idea generating, but what is it exactly.  Science has only began to understand how creativity happens in the brain.

We think of creativity as idea-generating, but what is it exactly.  Science has only begun to understand how creativity happens in the brain.  However, I want to show you how creative expression plays a role in learning.  Play includes creativity and imaginative concepts, so let's take a longer look at why.

 

First let's acknowledge the three known types of creativity as explained by Margaret A. Boden, at the University of Sussex from her book The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms.  They are "combinational, exploratory, and transformational" 

 

Combinational is the type most recognized by neuroscience studies is "generalizing unfamiliar combinations of familiar ideas." Some examples of combinational are visual collage, poetic imagery, analogy, or juxtaposition.  Boden's example of seeing something relative to a familiar object includes seeing a heart as a pump or an atom as a solar system. 

 

Exploratory uses existing rules to create structures in an exploration of new possibilities.  Boden gives examples like "a new painting in the Impressionist style, a new benzene derivative, or a new fugue or sonnet" as examples of exploratory creativity.

 

Transformational creativity is reaching into the abstract and "arising out of the impossible."  Where new rules are created to bring out another view or create a new idea structure that changes the rules in a sense.  This type of creativity is regarded in the highest esteem since it is seen as rare, breaking rules and creating new definitions and concepts.

 

Finally, in an article by Yoram Solomon, he offers a fourth type of creativity he called "team-based combinational creativity"(Soloman).  Instead of focusing an effort on one individual, combined efforts collaborate in an environment that emphasizes "communication and social studies" (Soloman).

 

The science of forming an idea is not well known, however, individuals have ideas all day long and use knowledge to bridge connections of what they already know to what they are learning.  These connective fragments can be explosive in the creation of a new idea or building learning as a measurable way to form a thought.  Further by implementing community, a stronger connection can occur when creativity boosts by the power of the many.

PROBLEM SOLVING

From the beginning of mankind, the human brain used information to deduce and solve problems.  It was useful as a means for survival, we can see other species of creatures using what they know to solve more complicated problems.  The mind wants to take information and use it in new ways.  The idea that problem-solving aids in learning makes sense, this is the practical aspect of using information.  But problem-solving uses something that structures thinking, outlining, and creating parameters central to idea-generating and learning.  It can help students see spatial and structural attributes as they work through knowledge from previous and data being presented.  Information can be given context and offer new questions for the student to work through.  As the questions are answered by data and research or by apprenticeship, new knowledge factors are being created.  New questions may rise and fall and the problem-solving circle continues.  Learning structures that follow a problem-solving model offer the student the opportunity to question and answer their own questions in a natural path of curiosity and creativity.

 

There is research on how problem-solving helps subjects such as science, engineering, and math but I would offer that thinking about it as a learning strategy lengthens the reach into learning about history, social sciences, psychology, political sciences, society, language, equality, as well as physical sciences and math.  Humans want to know why? It is necessary to understand so using problem-solving attributes to answer our question helps bring connective information to our understanding. Students will make new connections to their interests and make leaps in creative research and understanding.  Dr. Barab and his colleagues understand cognitive development needs full engagement including creating decision making and solving problems as a way of understanding consequences.  In his article "Virtual Worlds, conceptual understanding and me: designing for consequential engagement," he states: 

"Engaging fully with theories of cognitive development requires using theories to support practical decision-making. As we design units, we seek to leverage students’ consequential engagement with content in order to nuance the relationship between theory and practice, and between conceptual and procedural understanding. In this way, consequential engagement serves as a bridge that connects both the tools of the trade with their meaning and rationale, whether one is focused on bringing more conceptual understanding to procedural skills or bringing procedural understanding to theoretical conceptions." (Virtual Worlds..., pg 5)

 

Further, as a community, collaborative problem solving is popular because it helps students practice problem solving and use a connection, communication, and generates multiple ideas for a solution. The idea exchange may help students see something in context as explained by another student.  The experiment or collaboration of multiple students in a community setting is more memorable and maintains retention when that student requires a recollection of the information.  Perhaps the social aspect in the community attributes to the information exchange, retention, and learning.

 

More about Problem Solving, Spatial Thinking, and the use of Representation in Science and Engineering Here!

Article on Consequential Engagement mentioned above Here!

 

MODALITY

The final key is modality, which is just a fancy way of saying put it into multiple ways of conveying material.  With Covid 19, the education world came to understand modality in a new way.  Realizing that students could easily combine modalities to create better learning came by way of using multiple platforms of technology to deliver content.  The idea that students accelerated learning as a result of the multiplicity of structures offered a lesson in learning and cognitive science.  Instead of thinking of students as having a favored modality, delivering content as multimodal offered a broader more contextual feel for the data. Applied with creative assignments and working with parents to understand problems and engage the material side by side learning over the pandemic offered a three-fold strategy of engagement.  

 

Modality takes away ideas that students have a learning preference such as visual, audio, reading/writing, hands-on or kinesthetic learners.  Additionally, most students learn with all of these but may have a greater tendency toward one than another.  Learning science indicates that using more than one modality offers more context and creates pathways to retention.  Connectively by using all these structures in a community setting as language offers discourse and problem solving, creativity is profound and complex learning emerges.  

 

Understanding that multimodality is at its heart a communication and language issue, it is the communication of an idea over many formats.  Today's learning requires that teachers reach out and engage learners in various ways to enable learning.  When you think about how you learn we have ideas like: Read about it, Write about it, Do something with it, Visualize it, Discuss it, Listen to others about it, Teach others about it.  Learning comes from all the ways someone can see, hear, do and conceptualize material, that is modality.  Engaging material in all these formats helps provide more context to the subject as the student learns.