http://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html

Diana Laufenberg teaches eleventh grade American History at the Science Academy Leadership in Philadelphia. She rocks the house with her presentation at the TEDx MidAtlantic event just a few weeks ago.

She makes many great points in her talk which you'll note as you watch/listen but the one(s) that stood out for me were these as she was describing the discussion of an assignment she had given her students (emphasis is mine):

And then we went to another one -- it didn't have great visuals, but it had great information -- and spent an hour talking about the learning process, because it wasn't about whether or not it was perfect, or whether or not it was what I could create; it asked them to create for themselves. And it allowed them to fail, process, learn from. And when we do another round of this in my class this year, they will do better this time. Because learning has to include an amount of failure, because failure is instructional in the process.

Create: the highest level on Bloom's Taxonomy. I'm certain we don't do enough of this in most classrooms. I tried to when I taught in the classroom but even then time constraints, space, etc. etc. made it easier to not give my students this type of assignment.

There are a million pictures that I could click through here, and had to choose carefully -- this is one of my favorites -- of students learning, of what learning can look like in a landscape where we let go of the idea that kids have to come to school to get the information, but instead, ask them what they can do with it. Ask them really interesting questions. They will not disappoint. Ask them to go to places, to see things for themselves, to actually experience the learning, to play, to inquire. This is one of my favorite photos, because this was taken on Tuesday, when I asked the students to go to the polls. This is Robbie, and this was his first day of voting, and he wanted to share that with everybody and do that. But this is learning too, because we asked them to go out into real spaces.

Learning. In the immortal words of Donald S. Cherry, "Ya gotta love it!"  I wish I could be a student in a classroom with a teacher like Diana Fantastic!

Image Credits: Bloom's Revised Taxonomy http://www.flickr.com/photos/dkuropatwa/2098689878/sizes/o/in/photostream/

Have a super Saturday!

PS Today marks my one month anniversary of blogging at The Continuous Learner after a long abscence from the bloggin world. 29 posts and over 3400 site views later, I think I'm hooked. Thanks for reading as I explore my own continuous learning adventure.