#when the artwork comes ill just have a meltdown | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

theadmiringbog · 3 years

Photo

It was clear to me, watching her work, that she was teaching her students something more than chess knowledge; she was also conveying to them a sense of belonging and self-confidence and purpose.

Beginning in infancy, children rely on responses from their parents to make sense of the world.

Researchers at the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University have labeled these “serve and return” interactions. Infants make a sound or look at an object—that’s the serve—and parents return the serve by sharing the child’s attention and responding to his babbles and cries with gestures, facial expressions, and speech: “Yes, that’s your doggy!” “Do you see the fan?” “Oh dear, are you sad?”

These rudimentary interactions between parents and babies, which can often feel to parents nonsensical and repetitive, are for the infants full of valuable information about what the world is going to be like. More than any other experiences infants have, they trigger the development and strengthening of neural connections in the brain between the regions that control emotion, cognition, language, and memory.

Research has shown that when parents behave harshly or unpredictably—especially at moments when their children are upset—the children are less likely over time to develop the ability to manage strong emotions and more likely to respond ineffectively to stressful situations.

Infancy and early childhood are naturally full of crying jags and meltdowns, and each one is, for the child, a learning opportunity (even if that’s hard to believe, in the moment, for the child’s parents).

Children don’t experience parental divorce or mental illness or neglect on a specific day; they experience them every day.

Just as early stress sends signals to the developing nervous system to maintain constant vigilance and prepare for a lifetime of trouble, early warmth and responsiveness send the opposite message: You’re safe. Life is going to be fine. Let down your guard; the people around you will protect you and provide for you. Be curious about the world; it’s full of fascinating surprises.

Behaviorism: The basic idea behind the behaviorist approach to education is that humans respond to incentives and reinforcement. If we get positive reinforcement for a certain behavior, we’re more likely to do more of it; if we get negative reinforcement, we’re more likely to do less.

Researchers are increasingly coming to understand that there are limits to the effectiveness of rewards and punishments in education, and that for young people whose neurological and psychological development has been shaped by intense stress, straightforward reward systems are often especially ineffective.

Deci and Ryan, by contrast, argued that we are mostly motivated not by the material consequences of our actions, but by the inherent enjoyment and meaning that those actions bring us, a phenomenon they labeled intrinsic motivation.

They identified three key human needs—

1. our need for competence

2. our need for autonomy

3. our need for relatedness, meaning personal connection.

And they contended that intrinsic motivation can be sustained only when we feel that those needs are being satisfied.

... three basic human needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When teachers are able to create an environment that promotes those three feelings, they say, students exhibit much higher levels of motivation.

Students experience autonomy in the classroom, Deci and Ryan explain, when their teachers “maximize a sense of choice and volitional engagement” while minimizing students’ feelings of coercion and control.

Students feel competent, they say, when their teachers give them tasks that they can succeed at but that aren’t too easy—challenges just a bit beyond their current abilities.

And they feel a sense of relatedness when they perceive that their teachers like and value and respect them.

First he calculated whether and how being a student in a particular teacher’s class affected that student’s standardized-test score. This is the basic measure of value-added assessment in use today; teachers in many states across the country are evaluated (and sometimes compensated or fired) based on similar measures.

But Jackson went one step further.

He calculated the effect that teachers had on their students’ noncognitive proxy measure: on their attendance, suspensions, timely progression from one grade to the next, and overall GPA. What he found was that some teachers were reliably able to raise their students’ standardized-test scores year after year.

But Jackson also found that there was another distinct cohort of teachers who were reliably able to raise their students’ performance on his noncognitive measure.

They know that what matters, in general, is warm, responsive, face-to-face, serve-and-return parenting, which can be delivered in many different flavors. That parenting approach, however it is carried out, conveys to infants some deep, even transcendent messages about belonging, security, stability, and their place in the world.

Teachers convey to their students deep messages—often implicitly or even subliminally—about belonging, connection, ability, and opportunity. Those messages may not have the same measurable neurochemical effects on a ten-year-old brain as they do on a ten-month-old brain, but they do have a profound impact on students’ psychology and thus on their behavior. When kids feel a sense of belonging at school, when they receive the right kind of messages from an adult who believes they can succeed and who is attending to them with some degree of compassion and respect, they are then more likely to show up to class, to persevere longer at difficult tasks, and to deal more resiliently with the countless small-scale setbacks and frustrations that make up the typical student’s school day.

Farrington distilled the voluminous research on student mindset into four key beliefs that contribute most significantly to students’ tendency to persevere in the classroom:

I belong in this academic community

My ability and competence grow with my effort

I can succeed at this

This work has value for me

There are two toolboxes that are most effective to turn to when you’re trying to create an environment conducive to positive student mindsets. The first toolbox has to do with relationships: how you treat students, how you talk to them, how you reward and discipline them. The second has to do with pedagogy: what you teach, how you teach it, and how you assess whether your students have learned it.

A pedagogical approach that promoted student engagement in the learning process: less lecture time; fewer repetitive worksheets; more time spent working in small groups, solving problems, engaging in discussions, and collaborating on longer-term creative projects.

Kurt Hahn, the founder of Outward Bound, is famous for his slogan

“We are crew, not passengers”

and it is from this maxim that EL’s tradition takes its name. Each EL student is assigned to a crew, which meets every day for half an hour or so to discuss matters important to the students, both academic and personal. In middle school and high school, the groups are relatively intimate—10 or 15 kids—and students generally stay in the same crew for two years or longer, with the same teacher leading the group year after year. As a result, many EL students will tell you that their crew is the place at school where they most feel a sense of belonging; for some of them, it’s the place where they most feel a sense of belonging, period.

Expeditionary Learning schools have been shown, in independent studies, to have a significant positive effect on academic progress.

And while it’s certainly true that those students need the sense of belonging and connection that comes from feeling embedded in school within a web of deep and close relationships, the critical insight of Expeditionary Learning is that belonging alone isn’t enough. In order for a student to truly feel motivated by and about school, he also has to perceive that he is doing important work—work that is challenging, rigorous, and deep.

The experience of persisting through an intellectual challenge and succeeding despite the struggle is a profound one for schoolchildren—as profound, it seems, as serve-and-return is for the infant brain. It produces feelings of both competence and autonomy—two of Deci and Ryan’s three big intrinsic motivations.

... a larger trend in education today, known colloquially as deeper learning. This relatively new movement, which is also sometimes called student-centered learning.

In this century, deeper-learning proponents argue, the job market requires a very different set of skills, one that our current educational system is not configured to help students develop: the ability to work in teams, to present ideas to a group, to write effectively, to think deeply and analytically about problems, to take information and techniques learned in one context and adapt them to a new and unfamiliar problem or situation.

Deeper-learning proponents promote inquiry-based instruction, which means that in the classroom, teachers tend to engage students in discussions rather than just lecturing to them; project-based learning, in which students spend much of their time working, often in groups, on elaborate projects that might take weeks or months to complete; and performance-based assessments, in which students are judged not primarily by their scores on end-of-semester exams, but by the portfolios, presentations, artwork, and written work they produce throughout the year.

#Helping Children Succeed #books

0 notes

madoka-magica-rebirth · 5 years

Text

:: I told myself that I wouldn’t reblog any Madoka Art that wasn’t mine and try to keep my blog, “focused”- But I guess stuff like that doesn’t exactly interfere with the purpose of this blog, especially since I plan to one day transfer everything to a proper website where Rebirth can be more easily viewed and read. But yeah, I hated Homucifer for a long time, and while I may say/have said I was under the influence of the fandom, I can’t blame everyone else for the stuff I’ve said/done in the past and pretend I’m an innocent in all this. For a long, long time I relied SOLELY on the fandom to teach me about Madoka, even up to the point where I began the early versions of Rebirth, and because I never put in the effort to learn the truth, I allowed myself to begin viewing fandom ideas and interpretations as the truth, instead of going out and viewing the anime myself and doing research to form my own views and opinions for petty reasons, most likely laziness and jealousy of how beautiful I see the anime and Madoka works in general to be- I even allowed myself to begin viewing NSFW content as if it somehow had a grain of truth to it and this is what often lead to my emotional outbursts and hateful, antagonistic view of Madoka, Madokami, and Homucifer to name a few things- And that was very, very wrong of me! Especially with how I’ve treated Madoka material in sneaky, hypocritcal ways! I was wrong to hate on artists with NSFW Madoka content or focusing on ships or interpretations of Madoka/Madokami and Homucifer that were more than likely just made for fun, and instead I got offended as if some random RP blogs roleplayers made with (usually) no ill intent was suddenly fact-!

I can’t believe it’s taken me SIX years of work on Rebirth and all the horrible, horrible things I’ve said and done for me to arrive at this point where I no longer hate Madoka or any of the characters for stupid, petty reasons, and stop treating everything the fandom says/does as if it comes from Shaft itself-! No one’s out to ruin Madoka, and no one is disrespecting it or soiling it for just doing what they enjoy and having fun with the series like Shaft intended and even outright SAID that they wanted the fans to take and play with to their hearts content.

So, this isn’t a plea for people to forgive me, or an attempt to win anyone back that I offended or angered, because I know I was wrong, and I have to own up to the fact that I’ve been just as bad as all the people/works that I’ve made out to be “cancer” to the Madoka fandom- As if a random fan like me suddenly has the authority to decide such things!!! I still have a LOT to learn, and there’s still problems behind the scenes that aren’t anyone’s fault but mine for being so stubborn and hateful for six whole years while claiming to be one of the good members of a fandom I wrongly accused as a whole of being “bad”. For those of you who have had the patience to tolerate me while I’ve kicked, screamed, cried, threatened, and made a complete jackass out of myself for all this time while sniffing my own farts in the process of creating Rebirth, bless you, you have the patience of a saint and I couldn’t be more lucky to have you as a follower. I’m not going to directly point out all the friends who have stuck with me and helped me to learn these lessons and change my unfair views into something more acceptable and, more importantly much more helpful and pleasant than what it was when I began. Like, really guys- Even if you think I’m a terrible liar and are just waiting for my next meltdown to laugh at me (and I don’t blame you) I can’t thank you enough. I treat Rebirth as if I’m creating a canon work, and trying to output the same quality of work that SHAFT or the Magica Quartet good, simply because I respect this series so much, and the people I’ve met through it have helped me to grow and understand so much despite what an awful person I am sometimes. I know I’m not perfect, and I’m certainly no master of art- It’s going to still take me a long time to start producing a product I’m completely happy with and proud to call my own, but the fact that I’ve persisted with Madoka and Rebirth for so long, when in the past my interest with things and story/project ideas usually lasted about... A day at most- I want to see this through to the end, or at LEAST as far as I can take it. So, sorry for cluttering your dash with my inane, silly ramblings, but I just wanted to get off my chest how much I feel that Madoka has affected my life for the better, and acknowldege I am NOT better than the artists I’ve bashed such as Homura-Chu, Sparklenaut, etc. just because I don’t (actively) produce NSFW artwork or content- Even if people hate me for admitting that, or I lose followers, I feel it’s better that that be said and I just be honest with you guys instead of continuing to pretend like I’m somehow superior or better than any other fan just looking to have a good time. So yeah... I appreciate it, and I’m really happy I’ve come to accept and love Madoka and Homura and everything about Madoka, both it’s good and it’s bad and improved in work quality and attitude so much instead of just refusing to change and continuing to be an asshole all the time just because another user did something I didn’t like. After saying all that, I’m pretty sure I’ll stay on this path for a while now- And even if I wander off the path again due to stress or depression or whatever, I’ve still accomplished a bit, and I’m happy I can admit I’m not the best or have behaved the best either- Hopefully without being self-centered or patting myself undeservedly on the back. Thanks guys, look forward to more content soon- I’ll be taking my time from now on until I find a groove and can actively produce the highest quality content I possibly can instead of just shoving it out the door as quickly as I can, so apologies for the continued wait, and I love you guys <3 - Quake. (Peridoxicon)

#ooc #mun #mun ramblings #long post #read more #not content

0 notes