No, it’s not a typo for effective. Affective means something like able to affect, or touch, the soul. Some use it as a synonym for emotional or attitudinal. An affective experience can change your mood or make you have a deep feeling about a topic. Here’s what research shows us: Learners engage with topics in (at...
Pretty easy one this week – inclusion! Inclusion means making sure all learners are able to access learning equitably. Enough Said? Well, of course not. First off, what does equitably mean? Equity? Interaction Institute for Social Change, Artist: Angus Maguire. CC-BY 4.0 Most of us are familiar with the meme showing...
Many informal educators, and especially outdoor educators in regional and national parks, often call themselves interpreters. We all assume this grew from Freeman Tilden’s 1957 Interpreting Our Heritage, which became a sort of Bible for National Park Service rangers. Tilden’s title and introduction underscored how the...
Most people who study learning these days generally take an approach that could be described as constructivist. That is, knowledge isn’t just transferred from teacher to learner passively; the learner must actively fit new knowledge into their existing mental frameworks through a building process. Constructivism,...
Volunteers are essential to the missions of many informal education organizations. But unlike relatively-unskilled volunteer positions – think repairing trails or passing out food at a soup kitchen – the volunteer educator has one of the most demanding job descriptions there is: teaching. Training volunteers to be...
Several of my guests – Kady Yeomans, Claire Dobie, and many more to come – talk about the value of teaching extra cubiculum – outside the classroom, immersed in the nature about which we are teaching. Most naturalists I’ve ever met or worked with simply accept that it just works… that it’s unquestionable that getting...
On this week’s podcast, Claire Dobie and I talk about one of the first things outdoor educators learn to say: “I don’t know.” As a teacher, saying “I don’t know” positions us with our students as fellow-seekers of knowledge. One of the cardinal sins of teaching is to become the “sage on a stage,” the person with all...
On the podcast this week, music teacher Jim Cornfoot talked about connection – how, as a piano teacher, he spends part of every lesson establishing a personal rapport. And not just with new students, either – he continues to connect, at every meeting, even after knowing a student for years. What’s that about? Teachers...
How do you talk with your learners? Such a basic question – and yet as an informal educator I was never trained in it. Unfortunately, that means I started out my teaching career reproducing what I had experienced myself: lecture-style tours with a few minutes for questions at the end. But there is another way:...
In our conversation this week, Eileen Garcia-Sanchez told me all about how her preschoolers find ball moss on the oak trees. It seems dead – grey and crispy – like so much vegetation after days of scorching Texas sun. But this plant has a surprise … If you give the dried-out balls a little water, they spring back to...