New information enviroment and students thinking processes.

I am a teacher who enjoys bringing humour into my classroom environment. Past students often comment on how they miss a relaxed and humorous classroom. I decided that I would show some cartoons to the students as a bit of a break between classes. When I did so I realised something about the way we as educators need to be teaching students to think. This “new information environment” they are entering into is not going to do all the thinking for them. I wonder if we as educators really understand how we need to be helping our students to use different types of thinking skills. Concepts like Bloom’s taxonomy seem to me to be even more valuable now than ever before.

I showed each of these cartoons to the class one at a time and gave them a moment to work out the joke behind it all. The interesting observation for me though was how long it took for many students to understand the joke. All of these cartoons required prior learning to have taken place in order for them to understand the joke. However, I believe it was the linking of prior learning to create some sort of relevance to take place was the problem that many students had. The final observation I made that interested me more than any other was the way peers explained the joke to each other….. They were always linking the joke back to prior learning and explaining the link. I see the lack of linking prior learning constantly in the use of technologies. Students have prior learning that would help in many obstacles that they come across (engaging in relevant information online etc) but fail to make the link from basic prior learning (which may have had nothing to do with computer technologies etc) to the current learning situation.

Am I reading into this too much or is there something in this?