Sharing the Addiction

One final note about Ulearn and then I have a great tool to share. I just wanted to talk about the thinking bear idea that was mentioned by Karen Boyes in her workshop on 21st Century learners. The class she described have a toy bear that they keep next to a poster that says what thinking bear does - eg thinking bear remembers learning he has done before to help with a new problem. If a child approaches a teacher for help, the teacher first directs the child to the learning bear and the poster. The child reads what thinking bear would do, picks up the bear and tells it the problem and then the bear (ie the child) says back an answer. The bear is there to help the child to learn self-talk and to find their own solutions to problems. Eventually the children are told to think the problem to the bear and then the bear thinks it back. Finally, children are told to do this without the bear at all.

The point of this is to not let children develop ‘learned helplessness’ by constantly asking for help without having run themselves through some strategies to help themselves. I think of all the times I have said, “See 3 before me” and I realised listening to this session that I just shifting the learned helplessness from me as a teacher to other children in the class. From now on, I will be encouraging children to talk to themselves before talking to anyone else!

As for the after Ulearn workshops that I went to, I have written about these in my cluster newsletter which you can download a copy of by clicking here.

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