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...
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,...
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...
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 about how they embrace the philosophy of risky play at the San Antonio Zoo preschool. She describes an old storm-beaten tree trunk on their campus, and what she does when a child gets to the top and wants to be lifted down: I’m not going to walk up to the...
On this week’s podcast, aquarist Jim DePompei describes a dance-like call and response technique they call the do-it-do-it at Cabrillo Marine Aquarium. Language educators have hit upon a similar strategy they call total physical response, but it needn’t be limited to the language classroom – I have used it teaching...
In our first podcast, educator Kady Yeomans described her work leading groups of kids on the floor of a large science museum. And the main sense I got from Kady was that she is always thinking about her audience – there are facts to deliver, sure, but there’s no lecture. Here’s how she put it, speaking from her...
Since we’re aiming to create community among informal educators here, it seems only natural that we should start by defining our terms: What is an informal educator, exactly? To start with some eliminations, we all intuitively know that a formal educator is the one in the classroom: your Grade 3 lead teacher, high...