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Paul Grobstein's picture

reflections a week in

Very pleasing set of interactions, people learning from each other, me included. Like very much the give and take, the engagement with an interesting set of questions, about education, the brain, life. Have looked forward to seeing what each day brings, looking forward to another week of it.

What could be better? Was struck by the realization of a difference between my approach to the computer models and other peoples', by the contrast between my wanting to encourage teachers to create new things themselves and the expectation of getting things that would be useful. My neglect of existing models was an aspect of that, as was my not thinking (until after the fact) about computer use to collect observations. The whole computing/project enterprise could have been laid out better from the start, with smaller steps along the way rather than a too diffuse and open-ended assignment at the beginning.

Is that relevant in a more general education context? I think it is indeed. No matter how excited one is oneself about a particular perspective/objective, its key to share it with others in appropriately sized hunks that build on one another, and the first hunks have to be ones that make immediate sense to the people one is working with (students or otherwise I suspect).

Wondering too about the balance between preaching and offering new openings for ways of thinking. The latter is, of course, intended, but I certainly sound sometimes to myself as if i'm doing the former. On the flip side, there seem to me times when I'm too slow, when people would really like to have the answer instead of working through all the steps (where is the I-function?). Curious too about how to better keep people from getting frustrated with computers, organizing things so that frustrations are minimized, and quicly dealt with when encountered. Think we could do a better job along those lines.

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