Towards Passion-Based Conversations (Via blog of proximal development.) As I was catching up on reading my feeds (down to 900 unread posts from 2800 yesterday), the title of Konrad Glogowski’s post caught my eye. I read through it and discovered this sentiment, which was exactly what I hoped to find:
I enjoy reading the School 2.0 manifestos. They offer a glimpse into a world where teachers are free to be passionate and engaging, where students really want to learn, and where the restrictive policies of our current world do not exist.
This is certainly what I am working toward.
Some time ago I linked to a post by Will Richardson about passionate learning that caught my eye. The concept eventually found it’s way into my thoughts on passion and professional development. Konrad apparently heard Will mention the idea in a presentation, and he blogged about it, too. Now, he’s introduced the importance of passionate conversations in the learning process:
We need to learn how to sustain conversations that are initiated by the students themselves, not conversations that emerge from the official Ministry documents or our own interests and beliefs. I think that passion-based learning will help, but I also know that there is much more that I can do. It seems to me that this new approach will require that we revisit Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. Perhaps we could refine the notion of “instructional conversation” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991) where the teacher is involved in “assisted performance.” This approach is not perfect but I think it gives us a good place to start: “To truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach” (Tharp & Gallimore, 1991).
I love that last quote… and to boot, Konrad cites Dewey several times in his (rather rich) discussion.
I’m not writing much about this topic right now, but I know it’s found it’s place in my own schema… I’ve long known that what draws me to people and what energizes me most is passionate conversation, though I may not have called it that. Now Konrad has helped build an explicit link between this and my work as an educator.
Now how on earth do I categorize this post?