Final Reflection

Sara Williams
Multimodal Learning for the 21st Century Adolescent

It's funny how much easier it is for me to read this book today than it was the first day. When you really immerse yourself in one text, it's as if you begin to "speak the language" of a particular author and fluency skyrockets. I can also attribute my focus to the context - we've been talking teaching and strategy for four days now, so I'm in the zone with it. I didn't find my mind wandering as much, and I didn't have to work as hard to recall, summarize, and process. This is a great takeaway for teaching. When you plunk kids in the middle of a reading, you shouldn't expect them to digest it perfectly and be able to critique and discuss the reading as thoughtfully as they could. Building context through activating and providing knowledge is the key, as we discussed yesterday.

Today we finished the book up and had a really thoughtful discussion using the 4 A's protocol again. This time, we were supposed to consider the book as a whole. I noted that the author's ASSUMPTION seemed to be that readers need to be convinced of the worth of providing multiple modes of learning and assessment, when he's really preaching to the converted. I would have liked to have seen more concrete examples.

I AGREE with his assertion that "curriculum decisions will start to shift toward an emphasis on problem solving abilities and away from recalling facts for high stakes assessments." As my group member Katie noted, we're headed in that direction, but we're not there yet. What do we do in the meantime? We can build all the creative, multimodal assessments we want into our curriculum, but if ACT, GRE, CSAP, LSAT, PLACE, etc. don't change, are we really preparing students? It seems like the assessments should change now - "backwards planning" and "beginning with the end in mind" and all...

I ARGUE that the few concrete activities and techniques he outlines would elicit the type of learning and engagement he advocates. (Wordle is cool, but I don't think it would create a "classroom so engaging that students experience flow in their work, where time passes unnoticed.") He is spot on with his theory, but his practice seems to be a beat or two behind the times. Another example is how he cites Facebook and YouTube as hot and new tech. These are ubiquitous. My 66-year-old mother is on Facebook. What else do you have, Bean? (As a side note, I don't have the answers either. That's what I was hoping the book would provide.)

I ASPIRE to have the type of ideal classroom Bean describes - where daily work is presented in multiple forms, the focus is on creative problem-solving across content areas, my students are engaged and in the "flow" in both individual and collaborative activities, etc. I'm all in!

My overall takeaway from the book is this: there are 4 learning conditions for creative inquiry and problem solving in a multimodal space that I need to foster as a teacher. One, students need free time to process and inquire. Two, students and teachers need to have a tolerance for ambiguity. This is a biggie. There might not be an answer to the question I'm posing, or there might be multiple answers and no way for us to determine which is "right." Three, content knowledge is still critical, or as Bean states, "the primacy of discipline-based knowledge." I took this to mean that without a solid understanding of the task at hand, all of the cool tech won't mean a thing. (Duh.) And four, an opportunity for multimodal representation to engage all students and their abilities.