Taking Lines for a Doodle Walk (Disrupting Thinking)

Disrupting Thinking Doodle Collage

All this week, as part of CLMOOC (Connected Learning MOOC) focus on doodling and drawing for deeper understanding and creative fun, I’ve been reading Disrupting Thinking by Kylene Beers and Bob Probst.

Schools get hijacked ....

I would read some of the book, highlight salient points, and then circle back around to find a line or phrase that stood out for me about ways we can “disrupt” our schools to provide more avenues for learning for all of our students.

Gone underground ...

Beers and Probst focus primarily on reading, and press us educators to push back against the “testing climate” and find ways to spark the love of reading in our students.

Disrupting Thinking: Become More

I would then take that line or phrase for “a walk” in the Pencil app on my iPad and try to illustrate the scene.

Disrupting Thinking: sticky notes

I did this all rather quickly, so some came out better than others.

From the heart ...

But I like how the doodling and drawing forced me to not just reflect but also to internally defend why I had highlighted what I had in the first place.

Inside School/Outside School

Lots of teachers are reading Disrupting Thinking this summer in various online reading groups, I see, and my overall experience with the book itself was a positive one, although I suspect the use of the term “disrupt” is a marketing touch.

They're Reading

The two authors, whom I respect and who have have written important books about teaching, urge us educators to be more thoughtful in how we sustain rich reading lives for our students, as reading is a key to learning in all content areas (not to mention, a key to a creative life). Their emphasis on a framework they call Book-Head-Heart is a logical way to begin to get young readers to move what they are reading beyond test questions and surface knowledge, and more into connecting with their own lives and experiences (in our school, we call this “reading beyond the text”). I’ll probably write a longer review for Middleweb.

My Story

Do you doodle when you read?

Peace (think in disruptions),
Kevin

3 Comments
  1. As a student of the much maligned “whole language approach” to reading and writing, the current emphasis on testing and scores is what happens when the focus is the teaching of parts.

    I see the parts within the whole, and that “whole” includes student interests and experiences. Context and “beyond text” is as relevant as any part. Test mania leaves human interactive thought out.

    I took a common core reading class a few years ago in which the introduction included a video by the architect of CCSS, David Coleman, whose words indicated that students’ interactions with text through their personal connections was to be discounted, ignored, and not important. I was aghast. So in the first ten minutes of this class, their entire premise was faulty. “Schema” is how we make sense of the world within our own context. Our learning begins from a those connections.

    Take a look at the world of media and fake news— people are drawn to what fits their schema. Learning occurs when we think, discuss, modify, remix, change, reflect, revise, and extend what we once knew. We must take time for this.

    I wonder if that is the heart in their model.

    • I remember a similar video by Coleman (who now heads the College Board). Same response here.
      Yes, in terms of the heart: making sense of the world, inspired in part by what we have read and experienced through reading (schema) and our personal interactions with the world itself.
      Kevin

  2. I really like the way you’ve annotated the book with your graphics. I suspect if the book were on Hypothes.is I’d see these same images in the margins.

    In order to create the graphics I suspect you needed to connect more deeply with what was written than if you’d just read through the book and not tried to communicate visually what you were reading.

    It’s a good habit to encourage.

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