After watching the video case highlighting pre-service teachers undertaking the process of slowmation (Learner Environment 7) as a strategy to engage learners and increase depth of understanding, I was struck by one comment in particular. When asked if she could envision using slowmation with younger students, one CITE student stated she probably would not as it was a time consuming process. This was pretty disappointing to here, but at the same time I’m sure she is not alone in that mindset.
Teachers have curricular expectations to uphold, outcomes to assess, but I am wary of putting time limits on a learning process that could be a valuable experience for students. When students become creators and teachers, they need to execute higher order thinking skills. Slowmation would provide them with opportunities to “make what they learn part of themselves” (Chickering & Gamson, 1987) increasing comprehension, retention, and connections to their learning. To dismiss this opportunity because it appears to be a lengthy process without considering options for implementation is a slippery slope. Given that the video was a small clip of the pre-service teachers’ learning experience, I hope the course instructor or other peers offered practical solutions to counter the concerns of others.
My initial thoughts on slowmation were quite the opposite. My immediate reaction to learning about it was: how can I make this happen in my class? It will require substantial time to complete, but if students are engaged in their learning I don’t mind providing the time. Plus, a project like this creates several different scenarios for integrating cross-curricular outcomes. Backmapping outcomes on a such a project also maximizes the assessment potential as emergent and inquiry-based learning often creates it’s own path towards a final representation of knowledge. Taking the time to consider the depth of learning demonstrated even if it has veered in any way off an intended path is vital to the process. Another way slowmation can be implemented successfully in a classroom is to use it as a jigsaw strategy making sure that each group of students works on a different component that the other groups can learn from in the end. Each group becomes an expert on one aspect sharing their understanding with the remaining students.
My students are also currently in Grade 7 and another aspect of the pre-service teacher’s hesitation to implement technology like slowmation was the idea that it wasn’t viable with younger children. It brought to mind a video project my class worked on 2 years ago with their little buddies in kindergarten. The kindergarten students had just finished a unit on the butterfly life cycle. To reinforce their understanding, the little buddies taught the big buddies what they knew about the process. My Grade 6 & 7 students had access to books on the life cycle to help correct any misconceptions and to help their own understanding as not all of them knew the life cycle well either. From here, the buddies created a short narrative together that described the metamorphosis. Little buddies led the process and big buddies typed making sure certain vocabulary was included in the writing. On their next visit, my students helped their buddies record their narratives in Audacity, which was a great experience in learning what to expect from students in kindergarten. The big buddies found they need to record sentence by sentence as reading skills were not well developed yet and they couldn’t hold the entire story in memory. On their own later, my class edited the recording to piece it together as one story.
As a next step, the kindergarten teacher had her students draw and colour the four main stages in the life cycle, while my students looked at the stories and created any supplemental details needed. When the kindergarten drawings were complete, my students followed through with creating the video with help from each other. They were familiar with the process because they had created their own videos on figurative language months before. It was a great process to undertake as the kindergarten teacher was eager to find ways to bring more technology into her class and others around us were skeptical of the project based on the perceived abilities of 5 year olds and the fact that there were students in that class who received significant support. Every kindergarten student ended up creating one. I’ve embedded a couple of these videos to offer a counter argument to the pre-service teacher’s claim that using slowmation with younger students wouldn’t be worth it. The process for completing the two types of videos would be very similar.
images:
Genie III – wall&clock by Cathérine released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial – Share Alike license
“HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!” by MrClean1982 released under a CC Attribution – Noncommercial license