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As I listened to Paul, Wil and the group throughout the week I came up with ideas and questions to which I plan to focus some attention.

MONDAY

Principles of Co-Constructive Dialogue:  Everyone needs to speak meaningfully, listen attentively:
Does it help to write down your thoughts (as we do as a device to remember our dreams), to help facilitate the process?
If we write it down and discuss the meaning with others can we get a better understanding of our behavior?
When I set out my expectations at the beginning of the year, I begin a process of training my students to partake in the culture to which I expect…however the culture, if I pay attention to my students needs, becomes a culture to which we all agree to participate within. I set up the boundaries initially but I can blur the lines occasionally to facilitate what may be necessary to help my students learn or at least be a little more open to new ideas.

TUESDAY

Science sometimes IS holding a rock and writing down what you notice about it, hopefully eventually stating what type of rock it is and being able to talk about the kind of environment that produced it. Rocks are boring, numbers are boring, even words are boring until you can manipulate them to deliver something powerful and that’s what education should do.

WEDNESDAY

Sudoku does not readily engage me, although I do see how it helps me to understand a student who has shut down in my class because the material just passes her/him by.

THURSDAY

Find out where my students are and then give them what they need to move.
Paul says that “they need to feel that there is a future that they can change”.

I think that teaching methods are not “tricks”; they are strategies or experimental methods used to evoke student thinking, participation and learning.

FRIDAY

Evolution is what works, not necessarily a human sense of what works.
How does the legal and educational system define “Mindful Behavior”?
I need to post Crick’s “Astonishing Hypothesis” on my bulletin board for my students to analyze.
I am fascinated by the idea of “random noise” in our brains.