'Stretching' and 'Pausing' (1609-11)

I was at a board workshop today, learning about and discussing Learning-focused conversations to develop myself in the role of a mentor at my school. We were discussing the process of becoming an agent of change. As I reflected on the comprehensiveness of the term, I realized how this course, CTL 1609 had served as an agent of change for me. To backtrack just a little bit, at the beginning and a little bit through the middle of the course, I found it overwhelming. I felt like I needed to learn a lot. The other students seemed to be weaving in higher levels of abstraction into the course-readings and whereas I felt in awe and found myself nodding with the analyses and interpretations, I also felt the need to reflect on my own thought-process to find out the areas of thinking that were a little bit of a stretch for me at my current stage. I felt like Clare modeled and anticipated high expectations. [Recently, a colleague had pointed out to me how the term ‘high expectations’ was not conducive to differentiated learning styles and that the nomenclature needed to be adjusted to ‘reasonable expectations’. It made a lot of sense to me, but at the same time I felt that one ‘rises’ to high expectations whereas one only ‘meets’ reasonable expectations.]

Thus, in my process of rising above, I felt that I was exercising my brain to higher-order thinking. As the ideas opened up to me, I realized how through thought-processes such as these, we develop expertise. Recently, while reading the book, ‘Surpassing Ourselves’ (by Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia), I read about ‘Expert knowledge and how it comes about’. Taken directly from the book, the following quote, I felt went well with my reflections on the experience within this course:
“Acquiring expert knowledge entails working to some extent at the edge of one’s competence, accepting the strains and the risks that go with doing so, but gaining in return progressively higher levels of competence and achievement.”
It is therefore, only through the extension of one’s comfort level and the creation of intellectual challenges, that one can create a capacity for growth.

This understanding translated into knowledge-mobilization for me in that I decided that it was time to take a bit of a pause in my input of information and take the time instead to go through some of the learnings in greater depth at my own pace, set contexts for those learnings and build authentic connections for myself. So, I decided to keep one term of my summer just for my self-regulated revisiting of the knowledge that I gained.

When discussing the downsides of computer-mediated communication in the course and even in general, a common finding that emerges is ‘information overload.’ As opposed to turning it into a burden, I think it should be tweaked into an opportunity to become an expert. Taking a necessary pause to master the positive cognitive complexity I have encountered, seems like a good personal step towards that direction.